He was one of the first. They didn’t have to summon him. While the others all went over to the other side of the street whenever they saw the postman coming, he went straight down to the town hall to sign up. His parents egged him on, maybe that was a lot of why he did it. The Old Woman began coming by our place though she never had before. She’d drop in on Sundays after mass, take a seat at the table, her fingers linked. She’d search for any sign of dust on the shelves, and then she’d start in. “Son, there’s none of us who have ever shirked our duties, except for that uncle of mine, but he did it because of Belgrade. It would be a disgrace for them to come after you and march you off to jail. This is your country.” He just looked at her, fingered his cigarette lighter, and said nothing. “Cut it out, what are you saying, where should he be going? This will simmer down.” I tried to shut her up, I tried to be reasonable and calm, I couldn’t understand how a mother could encourage her son to take up arms.
During the other war, as she used to say, when they were living on raw eggs and rakija, when the children were raised on fried flour and water, she lost two of her elder brothers, they never came home. Before that she’d broken one brother’s tooth when he scooped up too much corn mush; her turn came and she saw the dish was empty, she tried to wrest the spoon from him and as they struggled, she let go of it and he knocked half his tooth off when he whacked himself. A young girl—the middle child between her two older brothers and two younger sisters—she always used to say, “Once the boys left, I had to put the pants on, there was nobody else.” Her father died young, shriveled right up, and her mother fed them as best she could. They sent one sister to Dalmatia when she was old enough to work as a maid, it’s not easy getting rid of girl children, and the youngest, Katarina, stayed with her, their mother and grandfather. She smuggled tobacco across the border. This was a time when the state had introduced a monopoly, they didn’t allow you to plant as much tobacco as you wanted, the Old Woman repeated bitterly, and all of it went to Belgrade, so they lived more from the smuggling than from sales. They’d hide part of their harvest and then sneak it over the border. This was dangerous, she had to evade both the financial inspectors and the gendarmes, she’d be sent to prison if they found out, because nobody had the one thousand dinars to pay the fine. Her uncle was jailed in Mostar for one hundred and thirty-four days because they found twenty kilos of broad-cut tobacco on him, and nine men from Čapljina drowned in the Neretva River while fleeing from the gendarmes. So she borrowed clothes from her brother, dressed up like a slip of a boy, took Katarina by the hand, and off they went on foot across the rocky terrain. Before she put on Katarina’s clothes and cinched them with a leather belt, she stripped her down to the bare skin and lined her little body with the tobacco leaves. Five-year-old Katarina giggled and shrieked, and this sister-brother quieted her, explaining she had to stand still, that they were doing something really important, something to save them from starving. So it was that they set out one morning, without their mother, at the break of dawn. First they counted, then they sang, then they learned the birds and the trees, and then they walked a long, long way. Katarina slogged along slower and slower, holding her sister’s hand in a sweaty grip, moving the whole time in the direction their grandfather had told them to go. The sun had risen high in the sky, exhaustion took hold, but nowhere ahead could they see the dirt road she remembered when she’d gone so many times with her mother and grandfather. When they finally arrived at the canyon, there along the rim where the trees began, she could see men in uniform. She was scared to keep going, to show herself to them, so she took cover behind a stone wall and drew her little sister to her. This was August and the heat was still fierce. She put the little girl under a stunted fig tree, gave her what little water there was left, but then she felt Katarina going cold. Amid all the heat, like a little icicle, she was going stiff, icy, her eyes glazing over. She coughed every so often until she threw up all over her sister’s pants. Katarina just needed to catch her breath, she thought, she’s small and this is rough going. Green tobacco sickness, that’s what it was called. The leaves of the tobacco, damp from her sweat, released their poison into her tiny frame. She died in her sister’s lap. Then the older sister had to step out from where they’d hidden to call the gendarmes to help her, she couldn’t carry Katarina herself. When they brought them back to her mother the next day, one dressed in a boy’s clothing and the other wrapped in a burlap sack, in a casket, with the threat that they’d give them prison time, a fine, that they’d take away her daughter, if they planted so much as one more tobacco plant, she swore she’d never have a girl child. “Let them go to war, it will be no worse for them than it is for us.”
She wore pants until the day she married. When the Old Man proposed to her, she paced up and down the room and counted her steps: I will, I won’t, I will, I won’t; the room was small, five paces and “I will” came at the end. And so, she and the Old Man married and came here. With two little boys, one who went off to live in another country and the other who stayed behind to defend this one. One of the first, a volunteer.