“In the basement. By the ?upe.”
The basement of our building had only two notable characteristics: filth and ?upe. Every family had a ?upe, a padlocked wooden storage unit. I loved to press my face against the gap between the door and the hinges to see inside, a private viewing of a family’s lowliest possessions. We kept potatoes in ours, and they fared well in the darkness. The basement didn’t seem very safe; there wasn’t a big metal door or bunk beds or a generator. But my mother seemed sad when I asked about it later. “It’s just as good a place as any,” she said.
That night my father came home with a shoe box full of brown packing tape he’d pilfered from the tram office, where he worked some days. He pulled big sticky Xs diagonally across the windows and I followed behind him pressing the tape down, smoothing out the air bubbles. We put a double layer on the French doors that led to the little balcony off the living room. The balcony was my favorite part of our flat. If I ever felt a twinge of disappointment after coming home from Luka’s house, where his mother did not have to work and he slept in a real bed, I would step outside and lie on my back, letting my feet swing over the ledge, and reason that no one who lived in a house could have a high-up balcony like mine.
Now, though, I worried that my father would tape the doors shut. “We’ll still be able to go outside, right?”
“Of course, Ana. We’re just shoring up the glass.” The tape was supposed to hold the windows together if there was an explosion. “And anyway,” my father said, sounding tired, “a little packing tape’s not good for much.”
2
“Which color are we again?” I stood behind my father, resting my chin on his shoulder as he read the newspaper, and pointed to a map of Croatia splashed with red and blue dots indicating the opposing armies. He’d already told me once but I couldn’t keep it straight.
“Blue,” my father said. “The Croatian National Guard. The police.”
“And the red ones?”
“Jugoslavenska Narodna Armija. The JNA.”
I didn’t understand why the Yugoslav National Army would want to attack Croatia, which was full of Yugoslavian people, but when I asked my father he just sighed and closed the paper. In the process I glimpsed the front page, a photo of men waving chain saws and skull-emblazoned flags. They had felled a tree across a road, blocking passage in both directions; the headline TREE TRUNK REVOLUTION! ran across the bottom of the page in fat black type.
“Who are they?” I asked my father. The men were bearded and wearing mismatched uniforms. In all the military parades, I had never seen JNA soldiers carrying pirate flags.
“?etniks,” he said, folding the paper and tucking it on a shelf above the television, out of my reach.
“What are they doing with the trees? And why do they have beards if they’re in the army?”
I knew the beards were important because I’d noticed all the shaving. Across the city, men with more than two days’ stubble were eyed suspiciously by their clean-shaven counterparts. The week before, Luka’s father had shaved off the beard he’d worn since before Luka and I were born. Unable to part with it completely, he’d left his mustache, but the effect was mostly comical; the bushy whiskers atop his upper lip were a specter of the face we’d known, and left him looking perpetually forlorn.
“They’re Orthodox. In their church men grow beards when they’re in mourning.”
“What are they sad about?”
“They’re waiting for the Serb king to be returned to his throne.”
“We don’t even have a king.”
“That’s enough, Ana,” my father said.
I wanted to know more—what a beard had to do with being sad, why the Serbs had both the JNA and the ?etniks on their side and we only had the old police force, but my mother set a knife and a bowl of unpeeled potatoes in front of me before I could bring it up.
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