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Saying Anya’s name out loud brought the past rushing back. I left Olivia staring after me and walked slowly back to my cabin. I made a cup of coffee, sat at the small kitchen table, and gave my thoughts over to the past.
I had continued to train hard and made the Olympic team for the second time, the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. I loved traveling the world with my team. I was in top form and when the day of competition arrived, I blasted off with the starting gun and shot out in the lead. It all happened so fast. No one came close to me, just like my first win when I was seventeen. I took gold in the 500-meter sprint. The 1,000-meter was held later that same day. I still felt great but wasn’t quite as explosive as the sprint. I was elated with the bronze. All the working out, lifting weights, running, and paddling had paid off again.
I returned home a hero. They interviewed me on TV, radio, and for newspapers. The president of Croatia honored me at a dinner in Zagreb. The mayor of Split held a dinner in my honor. Anya was by my side during all the celebrations. It was the best time in my life.
At the same time the republics were infighting. Yugoslavia was breaking apart. The people wanted independent republics. But Serbia wanted to take over. The Yugoslav National Army, the YNA, had become exclusively Serbian, and the Serbs wanted to take leadership of the country. Serbia had become increasingly aggressive. The Serbs declared Serb autonomous regions throughout Croatia, Bosnia, and other republics, but the republics, including Croatia and later, Bosnia and Herzegovina, voted for independence. Chaos reigned.
The last time I visited Anya, the journey to Bihać was difficult. Military checkpoints had sprung up everywhere, and the Serbian and Croatian soldiers who manned them were edgy. Plodding through one military checkpoint after another, the three-hour drive stretched into eight hours that felt like eternity. But I made it.
Anya cracked open the door to her apartment when I knocked. When she saw me, she flung the door wide open and threw herself into my arms while Nik looked on.
“How did you get here?” Nik asked. “They’re saying travel is impossible.”
“Backroads and bribes,” I said. “The same way I’m going to get you two back to Croatia with me.”
Both Nik and Anya were reluctant to go. They didn’t want to leave their parents behind, and their parents refused to leave the only home they’d ever known.
“Give me some time,” Nik said. “I don’t think things are that bad yet. I’m going to work to see what’s going on there. I’ll be back before dark.”
After Nik left, Anya wanted to go to the market. “We’ll need food to travel and we have to go while it’s daytime,” she said.
I wanted to get Nik and Anya out of Bosnia, but they seemed oblivious to the danger. “Grocery shopping, Anya? Really? There are checkpoints everywhere.”
“On Radio Bihać, they said that people could move about normally,” Anya insisted, clutching her purse. “They said the downtown market area was safe for people to shop.”
We should have known better. We were quick to believe the radio when it said that everything was returning to normal. We wanted to believe it.
We left the apartment and walked past the field where the army bivouacked. No soldiers glanced our way. The route to the market seemed unusually quiet as we walked the same way Anya had walked a hundred times, past houses and businesses. But every business was closed tight. Curtains were drawn. Nobody else was out, and it was almost noon.
I grew increasingly uneasy as we neared the city center, because still there were no other people. No one at all. I wanted to avoid the police station, which had become manned primarily by Serb policemen, so instead of heading directly into the marketplace, we took a circuitous route. I wanted to look things over from a distance, to see if the market truly was open for business. We had just rounded a corner near the river, about to circle back toward the market, when a burst of gunfire shattered the air, loud and close. We froze, panic-stricken.
An older woman waved at us from the doorway of an old brick building across the street, motioning frantically for us to come.
“I know her,” Anya whispered, and we ran to the woman and followed her through the door, which I closed firmly behind us, and trailed the woman up a narrow stairway to her apartment. Once inside, she locked the door and turned to us, agitated.
“Anya,” she said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you. What are you two doing here? Are you crazy?”
“Mrs. Hodzic,” Anya said in amazement.
Mrs. Hodzic was a retired schoolteacher. Anya had been in her fourth-grade class.
“The radio said it was okay,” Anya stammered. “They said we could go shopping.”
“Didn’t I teach you to think for yourself?” Mrs. Hodzic said. “Don’t you know they’re killing people here?”
Killing people?
We stared at her, speechless. More gunshots erupted outside. We had entered the northeast side of the building, and the opposite side of her apartment faced the market. There were two windows with heavy draperies tightly closed. I stepped over to a window.
“Be careful.” Mrs. Hodzic sounded terrified.
I nudged the curtain to the side. Across the street below were small shops, all closed. Behind the shops, the public market stalls were empty.
As I peeked out from behind the curtain, several soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms with black stocking caps covering their heads and faces, marched into the street, pushing seven civilian men ahead of them. They shoved the men into a line against the front of a shop across the street. The soldiers stepped back, raised their weapons, and fired. The men crumpled to the ground in a spray of blood.
My legs turned to water, and I dropped to my knees. It was madness. Craziness. I couldn’t move. A policeman walked onto the scene with three more civilian men in front of him at gunpoint. He walked them past the bodies to an alley that ran into the marketplace and yelled at the men to turn and face the wall. Hands up, the men turned toward the wall in jerky motions. The policeman raised his gun and shot each of them in the back of the head at close range. The men dropped.
The walls and windows of the building were old, and sound carried easily.
“Motherfuckers!” one of the soldiers screamed. “I want to kill thirty of them for one of mine!”
I let the curtain fall and stayed on my knees, in shock.
“Luka, come away from the window,” Anya whispered. She placed a hand on my shoulder. “Please.”
I stood, breathing hard, as if I’d just finished a sprint. The shouting stopped and the gunfire quieted. Silence slid through the apartment.
The three of us stumbled into the kitchen, away from the windows. Mrs. Hodzic made a pot of coffee. She poured with trembling hands.
I dropped in a sugar cube and drank.
The sound of voices resumed in the street, but I stayed put. I wouldn’t make the mistake of witnessing the horrors outside the window again. The three of sat in shocked silence, steeped in disbelief.
As the day crept by, we didn’t know what to do. We talked it over in hushed voices. Anya and I were afraid to go outside, but we also didn’t want to wait too long to try to get home because of martial law—they could kill anyone they caught after dark, no matter who they might be or what they were doing. Late afternoon shadows crept in, and Anya finally called a friend of hers, a guy who drove a mobile medical van. She told him our location and asked if he could pick her up and take her home.
He arrived about five o’clock. When he came into the apartment and spotted me, he turned to Anya, frowning. “What’s he doing here?”
“It’s a long story,” she said, “but he’s with me.”
The man glared at me but agreed to drive us both home.
Anya turned to Mrs. Hodzic. “Thank you for helping us. You’re a life saver. Come with us. You shouldn’t be here alone.”
“I’m not alone, Anya. This building is full of friends. We look out for each other. Besides, I don’t think it’s women they’re after.” Her eyes flicked to me. “Especially old, retired schoolteachers. You two be careful out there.”
Anya hugged her, then we followed the driver down the stairs. When we got to the first floor, he opened the door a crack and peeked outside. Other than his van, the street was empty. Anya whispered her address to our driver, and I added that the YNA was bivouacked across the street in a neighborhood field. He glared at me. We hurried to the van, and he made Anya and me ride in back. The drive was short, and our nervous driver stopped about a block away from Anya’s apartment building after taking a route that avoided the army field entirely, so we arrived from the opposite direction. We climbed out and thanked him. Anya gave him a quick hug then grabbed my hand, and we hurried across the narrow street into Anya’s building. We climbed the stairs to the apartment and closed the door behind us. I leaned my back against the door, finally daring to breathe. The apartment was eerily quiet.
“Nik?” Anya called, peeking into his bedroom, then into every other room in the house. She came back to where I stood rooted by the front door. “He’s not here.”
Our eyes met. I realized how damn stupid we had been to go out, how stupid Nik had been to go to work. None of us had realized how seriously the situation had deteriorated. I knew without a doubt Nik, Anya, and I had to get out of Bosnia,
Anya and I lay in bed that night, wrapped in one another’s arms trying to recover from what we had seen and listening with a fool’s hope for the sound of Nik coming home.
The Yugoslavia we had known had vanished. We were all in grave danger.
***
Nik didn’t come home that night, or the night after. I hadn’t planned on staying long in Bosnia, but we couldn’t leave without Nik. Anya called her parents every day. They said they were fine. She spoke to her father, who told her to stay put. He seemed angry when she told him that Nik had gone missing. “I’ll go find him,” he had said gruffly.
“Tata, I’m going with Luka to Croatia,” Anya said. “He says he can take me to a safe place there.”
Anya heard her parents talking, arguing. Her mother got on the phone. “I love you, Anya,” she said. “You be careful. Very careful. These are dangerous times.”
“I love you, too, Mati,” Anya choked out. “I’ll stay in touch.”
She hung up the phone and began to throw some clothes into the suitcase when a knock sounded at the apartment door.
“Nik,” she said, flying to the door.
“Wait,” I whispered, trying to stop her.
She ignored me and pulled the door open, but instead of Nik, four Yugoslav army soldiers filled the doorway. They pushed past her and walked straight to me. “Identification.”
Fear replaced the oxygen in the room, and I fumbled for my wallet and handed it over. One of the soldiers took it and rifled through its contents. He held up my Elektrodalmacija identification card.
“You work at Elektrodalmacija?”
“Yes,” I answered. “In the Split region. Croatia.”
The soldiers glanced at one another. “What is your job there?”
“Lineman. High-voltage work.”
The soldier put the ID card back in my wallet and tucked the wallet in his own pocket. “Come with us.”
Anya made a strangled sound. I pulled her close and held her, then took her by the shoulders and leaned down to look into her eyes. “I’ll be back. Be strong.”
She nodded, tears welling in her eyes.
And they took me away.
