Body Surfing

should’ve rushed out to greet her by now. She must be sleeping, Ileana told herself, or chasing a rabbit in the woods. That’s what it must be.
    She paused a moment before entering the small clearing. The yard was crisscrossed with tire tracks and her mother’s marigolds had been crushed, but that was all the damage she saw. No smoke, no broken windows or, God forbid, corpses in the yard. Her grandmother told stories about the last war, bodies left to rot where theyfell because people were too scared to touch them. Maybe they’ve gone, Ileana thought. Maybe they just drove over the marigolds and left.
    Just as she was about to lean her bicycle against the barn, however, a soldier with a rifle slung over his back stepped out of the kitchen door. Even from this distance Ileana recognized the patch on his shoulder, the double-headed eagle beneath the large golden crown.
    A Serb.
    The soldier didn’t bother to find a tree, just stood in the middle of the driveway and pissed on the gravel like a dog marking his territory. Ileana couldn’t help but see that the front of his uniform was dusted with white powder. Her grandmother had been baking bread when Ileana had gone out an hour ago, her gnarled hands kneading flour and water with a patience that defied the passage of time. Her grandmother, who had survived Nazis and Communists and everything in between. It didn’t seem right that she should fall to such an insignificant boy.
    Ileana heard the bicycle whine only after the fact—only when the young soldier looked up sharply, straight at her, his spouting penis still dangling from one hand. He didn’t appear embarrassed. Just finished, shook off, tucked himself away. Only then did he swing his rifle off his back.
    “Zdravo sestra ,” he called. Hello sister . “Why don’t you come over here?” The rifle hung innocently under his arm even as he fished a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and began to walk in her direction.
    Ileana didn’t say anything. Didn’t move as the soldier walked through the gravel he’d just pissed in. She could see that the flour was especially thick on the knees of his pants, the boots.
    “Don’t be afraid, sestra . We won’t hurt you.” He laughed quietly. There were handprints on his shirt, Ileana saw, several long white smudges on the left side of his face like a slap.
    She thought about making a break for it. There were plenty of trees on both sides of the driveway and he would have a hard timeshooting her. But something held her. The flour on his face, his pants. The thought of her grandmother in the kitchen, trying to beat him off. Her mother, her brother and father. She couldn’t leave them.
    The tip of the soldier’s rifle butted her ribs. The metal barrel was cold through the thin fabric of her dress. Ileana told herself that was a good sign. It would have been hot if he’d fired it, right?
    The soldier stared into her eyes, yet Ileana didn’t feel that he was looking at her.
    “Da . You want it, don’t you, sestra ? Don’t you, you Croatian whore?”
    Suddenly his hand was in her hair. Her legs tangled in her bicycle and she stumbled. There was a rip, and the part of her that still believed everything would be okay tried to see where, to see if her favorite yellow dress could be mended, but the soldier yanked her hair again. She cried out, scrambled to her feet. Lost her sandals, lurched barefoot behind him as he dragged her toward the house. There was a warm squelch when she stepped in the place where he’d pissed, and then he was pulling the screen door open and tossing her inside.
    Ileana cried out again as she stumbled into the room. Her grandmother lay stretched across the worn tiles, flour everywhere, the old woman a white ghost on a white background, save for a dark viscid roux beside her ear.
    She heard footsteps upstairs, the sound of wood splintering, plaster breaking, soldiers ransacking the family’s possessions, perhaps in search of valuables, perhaps just to destroy things.
    “Iljana!”
    For the first time she noticed her father and mother and brother huddled in a corner. She wanted to run to them but the soldier still held her hair.
    A man came down the narrow staircase. He was dressed not in combat fatigues like the soldier who held her, but in a colorless uniform with three chevrons beneath the Serbian eagle. A crewcut U of rusty hair sat on his otherwise bald head like a dingy laurel, a fistful of silver chains dangled from one