Free Girl at War by Sara Novic

properties—the imperfect curvature of trunks, the knots and whorls of unfinished planks. The gravel lot was completely empty.
    Inside was a single room with high-beamed ceilings and picnic tables. We approached the cafeteria-style counter andcollected orange trays and rolls of tin silverware. There was no menu, just a few steaming pots on the line. A woman in a dirty apron appeared from the back and eyed us cagily.
    “How’d you get down this way?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?” my father said. “Aren’t you open?”
    “This place is always full at supper. The roads must be closed.”
    “We came down from Zagreb to Sarajevo, now back. They were clear.”
    “They must be closed,” she said, beckoning at our trays. We handed them to her and she slopped down bowls of dense bean soup and hunks of bread. Next to the cash register, thick glass mugs of soured milk perspired, leaving wet patches on an adjacent napkin pile.
    “And three of those,” my father said, gesturing to the drinks.
    “I don’t want any. It’s bitter,” I said.
    “It’s good for you,” he said, taking my mug onto his tray.
    At home my mother always cooked, and it was the first time I could remember going to a restaurant. I ate greedily, sopping up the beans with my bread, even downing the tangy milk in the end. My mother ate nothing.
    “Do you think the roads are really closed?” my mother asked as we returned to the car.
    “We were just there a few hours ago,” my father said, though I noticed him glance at his watch. “It’ll be okay.”
    —
    We drove for an hour, then two, passed signs for Knin and Ervenik. A pickup truck in the opposite lane flashed his headlights at us.
    “Slow down. There must be cops,” my mother said. My father braked and another car appeared, this one driving much faster, laying on his horn as he went by. “Maybe we should turn around.”
    “There’s no space for a U-turn,” my father said, looking around. But as we rounded the corner the roadblock came into view. “Shit.
Shit
.” I pulled myself up and rested my head atop the driver’s seat to get a better look. A cluster of bearded men stood talking and laughing in the road. They wore mismatched fatigues, shoulder-slung ammo belts, and black sword-and-skull arm patches. They had cut down a large tree, which prevented passage on our side of the road. The other side was blockaded with sandbags.
    “Can’t we get around?” my mother said. “Tell them we just want to get home.”
    Two men stood apart from the group, motioning disjointedly at us.
    “Shit.”
    “Okay, just pull over!”
    “What’s happening, Mama?” I said.
    “Nothing, honey, we just have to stop for a minute.”
    “Mama—”
    “Just sit down, Ana.” My father cranked open the window as one of the soldiers staggered toward the car. The glimmer in his eye matched the reflection of the sunlight off the vodka bottle he held. In his other hand was an AK-47. A Soviet stamp covered the butt of the weapon, and the paths where the ink had dripped and dried looked like tear tracks.
    “Is there a problem?” my father asked.
    “Need your ID,” the soldier slurred. My parents’ faces grayed as my mother searched the glove compartment for our passports. Giving up our IDs would provide the soldier with the greatest weapon against us: the knowledge of our names. Our last name specifically, the one that carried the weight of ancestry, ethnicity.
    “We have a child,” my father said. “We’re just going home.”
    “Jurić?” the soldier read aloud. My parents were silent. The soldier readjusted his gun, looked away.
“Imamo Hrvate!”
he called over his shoulder.
Hrvati
. Croatians. Despite his drunkenness, he still managed a clear inflection of disgust. Another soldier approached and pressed his gun against the soft skin of my father’s neck. “Everybody out,” he said, then, turning to the rest of the men, “Get the others.”
    “Mama, where are we—”
    “I don’t