Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “I didn’t know which to root for,” said Irena, whose short chestnut hair had already dried in place.

  “Danica is sinking her free throws,” said Amela, who smiled and turned back to her locker before she caught herself. “But I wouldn’t, you know, choose her for any other reason.”

  IRENA AND AMELA were partners on the court, and lived in the same housing block in Grbavica. They had played together for two years, after Amela’s family had moved from the older area of Skenderija. Amela could pick out the top of Irena’s head above a thicket of players, and loft a pass at just the best height for Irena to pluck it away from those around her. Irena could see Amela’s long whip of yellow hair lash between two players’ shoulders, and she would bounce the ball where Amela could jab out with an arm and take it in her stride. They were comrades, to be sure, and friends in most of the important ways: the foremost was basketball. Their camaraderie was rarely tested by envy.

  Irena was a better shooter, that was for sure. This didn’t bother Amela, who was shorter and prettier, at least in the swelling assessment of teenage boys. Yet the older boys in their housing block who had gone off to the army or university regarded Irena as sexier.

  When the boys came home on weekend passes, they played basketball with Irena, Amela, and sometimes another teammate, Nermina Suljevic. Irena’s pet parrot, Pretty Bird, was the game’s unofficial official-in-charge; the gray bird said, “Bbb-oing!” in imitation of the sound a ball would make ringing against the court’s orange iron hoop. The young men liked to play just under that hoop, hoping for Amela to leap up for a rebound and come down jiggling. They liked to watch Irena from behind as she dribbled the ball downcourt. They would try to press against her backside when they faced the basket. Irena had come close to slapping a couple of boys for their brazenness. Instead, she exploited their distraction to steal the ball.

  Both girls had been stamped as athletes from an early age. They had won badges, ribbons, and medallions, which their parents had long ago piled in drawers as so much clutter. Both girls were used to being watched by strangers, and used to looking at each other as competitors and teammates.

  Amela was smart—the more serious student of the two—but she wasn’t an intellectual. Away from class, she mostly read captions under the pictures in Western fashion and pop magazines.

  Irena was blasé about schoolwork. She would wait until the morning of a test to learn what she needed and nothing more, which was hardly the way she trained for basketball. Yet few of Irena’s teachers were disappointed. Her mind had depth. She would give herself over completely to a book, a song, or a magazine, absorbing a sports or music monthly from the letters in front to the personal ads on the last pages.

  Irena and Amela knew they were the best two players on their team, and two of the three prettiest (the third, Jagoda Marinkovic-Cerovic, was a redhead, and beyond comparison—some boys were simply fools about redheads). Amela wore lipstick. Irena tended not to. Both sprayed jots of cologne on the soft undersides of their forearms after showering, tucking small gift spritzers back into their gym bags.

  SOME LESBIANS ASSUMED that Irena, with her Martina Navratilova bearing, was gay, but loath to accept it. In fact, Irena had no dread of being gay. She just wasn’t. Amela, who had more of the blond, billowy look of a girl in a Coca-Cola ad, was never taken to be gay. But she had enjoyed a couple of gentle kissing and hand-holding encounters with other women. She thought her sexual register was still settling.

  Irena could seethe and flash. Amela was considered almost tiresomely sweet. Yet Irena remembered the time Anica Dordic, the center for their rivals at Veterans, was throwing elbows at Miriam Isakovic’s nose when she came down the court. The referees were watching the ball, not Miriam; or, at any rate, they weren’t inclined to call a foul committed against a player of no particular consequence. Irena didn’t whimper to the officials. She challenged Anica for a rebound and launched a jab into her chin while ostensibly stretching for the ball. Anica, who’d played her ruse enough to know her next move, staggered back, looking confused and wounded. Irena was ejected. She was slipping the orange Number Three jersey over her head in the locker room when Amela took a pass from Nermina Suljevic and took a layup, hard, into the wincing chin of Anica Dordic. Anica got flagged for the foul when she called Amela a bleach-haired whore.

  AMELA WAS KNOWN as a Serb, Irena as a Muslim. It would be sentimental to say that the difference was undetectable or insignificant. Insults and nasty jokes about the differences were traded. Bar fights broke out. People could hear the difference in names; some were convinced they could see it in a person’s nose, eyes, or jawline. Some neighborhoods in the city were considered Serb, others Muslim. But family trees, flecked with intermarriage and conversions, had been entwining in Sarajevo for most of the century.

  The girls and their friends were more intense about basketball than about any of the city’s array of religions. No one on their team wore a religious medallion. Almost every day, Amela Divacs wore a yellow No. 32 Los Angeles Lakers jersey that an unnamed older boy had gotten for her. Amela tucked the jersey over blouses when she went to class, and often pulled it over a T-shirt at practice. The jersey was an amulet for Amela. It announced that she was both an outstanding basketball player and unavailable to the boys in her school. They were kids, not like the man who had given her a Magic Johnson jersey.

  Irena was not certain that she knew anyone who went to a church, mosque, or synagogue regularly. Whenever her friends became briefly fascinated by a faith, it would be Baha’i or Buddhism, in the same way they were captivated by vegetarianism or yoga.

  “THAT’S IT, YOU’RE home for the night. We all are,” Irena’s father told her when she arrived at their apartment after practice. Before she could object, he raised a hand and tipped his head toward the television set. “You’ve been at school. The march today. Some people opened fire from inside the Holiday Inn. People were hurt.”

  Names of friends who might have been there flashed into Irena’s mind: Azra, Dina, Jelena, Eddy, Hamel, Morana.

  “Do you know who?”

  “Serbs, of course. That’s Serb headquarters. They dragged a couple of gunmen out of their offices.”

  “No. No!” said Irena. She could hear her voice hardening. “Who was hurt.”

  “No,” her father said quietly. “I know they didn’t have enough ambulances. Twenty people are in the hospital.”

  Irena had her keys in her hand, and conspicuously began to stuff them into the pocket of her jeans. “I’m going to check on my friends,” she announced.

  Before her father could respond, Mrs. Zaric stepped into the hallway. “It’s getting worse,” she said. “We’ve heard a few shots today.”

  “They were just from the television set,” said Irena.

  “Some Serbs have put burning barrels in the streets in Ilidza,” Mrs. Zaric went on. “Serb army officers are staying at home. Serbs on the police force aren’t showing up for work. They’re staying at home—with their weapons.”

  “Like they were forming their own army,” said her father.

  IRENA COULD CALL no one. The panic in the city—that’s how people on television were beginning to put it—had overwhelmed the system: people dialed, there were clicks, then a thunk. Irena didn’t join her parents before the drone of the television. She looked down from the dining-room window to the small park below and saw no one, not even the grade-school kids who usually flocked there on Saturday nights. On Saturdays, the high-school girls would pull on tight jeans and stretchy Western tops to prowl and parade past the snack shacks and coffee bars in the narrow streets of Old Town. Irena and Amela liked to stop by the park’s basketball court on their way out. They would take off their weekend rings and give their hoop earrings to a little girl to hold while they showed the kids how to change hands on a dribble, then turn away with a hook shot and walk off to their tiny-handed applause.

  Irena stayed in her room, listening to Madonna: Tears on my pillow, what k
ind of life is this, if God exists . . . The lyrics bounced through her head amid the sounds of the city, as cars backfired—or guns were shot—and sirens yowled. She took Pretty Bird out of his cage and perched him on her stomach, his rust-red tail feathers splayed out on her hips.

  “Do you like this music, Pretty Bird?” she asked in the small, child’s voice she used for conversations with her parrot. “Does it remind you of home?”

  Pretty Bird was a Timneh African gray. But Irena and her family had invented a storybook life for their bird: he had flapped into Sarajevo from Copacabana Beach across the ocean, because he was tired of rubbing suntan lotion into his feathers. Pretty Bird could not manage to speak much more than his name. Congo Grays were considered better orators, and were commensurately more costly. But Pretty Bird’s bargain price did not account for his outstanding talents as a mimic. Sometimes he trilled like their telephone, jingled like their doorbell, or creaked like the chipped yellow-steel kitchen cabinet next to his cage. Their veterinarian said Irena ought to write up Pretty Bird’s talents for a professional journal. His vocabulary of sounds made him a particularly amusing companion, sending the Zarics scampering to answer phantom phone calls, or wake up wondering who was vacuuming in the middle of the night.

  Shortly after nine o’clock, Pretty Bird began to chirrup like their new Danish telephone and do a kind of rumba—one step forward, two steps back—along the belt line of Irena’s blue jeans. Her mother rapped quietly on her closed door. “It’s Coach, dear,” she called.

  Irena took Pretty Bird onto her shoulder and sat up with some alarm as the doorknob turned and she saw Coach Dino standing beside her mother.

  “Hi, chickie,” he said lightly. “I told your mother, the phones seem to be out, and this was important. Sorry to interrupt your fun.”

  Irena had begun to notice that even at their games Mrs. Zaric often seemed flustered and shy around Coach Dino; she couldn’t seem to say three words without taking one back. The coach was a rangy, rugged man in his early thirties, with stabbing dark eyes and wiry muscles, which were often exposed by sleeveless shirts.

  “Tea? Coffee?” asked her mother. “Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps a beer? Wait, no, we have some nice Danish vodka. Well, actually not vodka, but something made from seeds. Well, not birdseed, of course, but like rye-bread seed. . . .” Mrs. Zaric’s voice trailed off as the coach shook his head.

  “Thank you, no. I am always in training.”

  After Mrs. Zaric had closed the door, Coach Dino sat on the cedar trunk at the end of Irena’s bed. Pretty Bird waddled down her right arm and settled himself on the bedstead. Coach Dino smiled tentatively.

  “Hey, chickie,” he said with exaggerated lightness. “Look, I’m sure this is no big thing. But there will be no practice tomorrow. Or Monday. If you and your family wanted to go off for the holiday”—Monday was the anniversary of the victory of Tito’s Partisans over the Germans—“there’s no reason not to.”

  “That’s not going to get us ready for the tournament,” Irena said. “Why don’t a few of us just shoot around in the gym?” Back on her shoulder, Pretty Bird whirred like her mother’s bread mixer.

  “They have to close the school,” said Coach Dino. “All the schools, in fact. Under the circumstances.” His voice dropped. “Maybe for a while.”

  “What’s ‘for a while’?” Irena could hear her voice flutter with anxiety.

  “That’s not up to us,” the coach said gently. “There’s a lot of people acting stupid right now.”

  “The championships begin in two weeks.”

  “I’m sure this will all be over soon,” he said. “People just have to get it out of their systems. Listen,” the coach continued, “this other thing I had to tell you. I’ve been called back into the army.”

  Irena felt a prickling in her scalp. When she reached up for Pretty Bird, she noticed that her fingers didn’t respond immediately, as if the signal she had sent to them had to go around a barricade.

  “There’s no war,” she said finally. “You said it: just stupid people.”

  “But there is an emergency,” said Coach Dino. “They’re calling everyone. I’m sure they just want me for another competition.” He had been a biathlon champion his first time around in the national army, and still won occasional local tournaments, firing rifle shots while skiing.

  “There won’t be snow for months,” Irena pointed out.

  “There are shooting matches all the time.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Irena, “you could hold those in our parking lot this weekend.”

  THE COACH SAID he had to go. He had to find Amela and Nermina to tell them, too, that school was closed and he was leaving. As Coach Dino got up, Irena reached up and put her arms clumsily around his shoulders. For the first time in the confusion of the past few weeks, she began to cry. She blotted her tears against the coach’s right biceps, just above his mermaid tattoo.

  “I am sorry,” she said in a small, choked voice, “to rain on your mermaid.”

  “Shh,” he said gently. “Shh. Shh. Shh. It will be over.”

  “This is so much worse than I thought,” said Irena.

  “The mermaid is waterproof.”

  Irena nestled her nose and chin into the coach’s shoulder. She stood nimbly on her toes to turn her lips against his ear. “She is an ignorant, titty blonde,” she whispered, and then licked the inside of his ear softly, as she knew he liked.

  “Oh, shit,” said Coach Dino. He ran his right hand slowly down Irena’s back, squeezing gently every few inches. “Your parents.”

  “Watching television,” she whispered slow and deep into his ear. Irena went on slowly, so that each syllable would be a small, boiling breath playing over the small hairs in his ears. “I won’t talk if you won’t.”

  The coach lowered his hand to the crack in Irena’s ass, pressing his palm across her buttocks and squeezing. Irena shivered against his neck; it smelled of smoke, coffee, and his lavender splash. She felt Coach Dino swell and press against her. (Irena loved the obviousness of boners. They were one of the few ways in which boys were utterly reliable.)

  The Madonna tape had stopped and rewound. Irena breathed into the coach’s ear, “I’m down on my knees, I want to take you there.” She felt for the drawstring of Coach Dino’s blue warm-up pants and tugged out the knot. She put both of her hands on his thighs and pulled down his pants with her thumbs. Because she was an athlete, and knew about the fragility of ligaments, Irena sank into a crouch instead of getting on her knees. She kissed him through his white cotton shorts. The top of his cock looked like a purple serpent. He held Irena lightly behind her ears as she licked once, twice, five times, until she tasted several salty, soapy drops. She made a comic smacking sound. Her joke panicked the coach. She could taste it. He stopped churning his hips. Gently, Coach Dino pushed back her chin and tugged up his pants. He brought her face against his and began to kiss her wet brown eyes. He ran a thumb down over her crotch until he found the top button of her jeans and unlatched it, then slipped his thumb between her legs.

  Irena sang under her breath, “I close my eyes. . . .”

  Pretty Bird clacked his pink feet a few inches over on the bedstead and buzzed like Mr. Zaric’s electric shaver. “Zzz-zzha, zzz-zzha, Pretty Bird,” he said. “Pretty Bird!”

  3.

  AS COACH DINO left, he drew a red basketball jersey from the front pocket of his gym jacket and laid it across Irena’s bedstead. “Guard this while I’m gone,” he said. “Sleep in it. Keep it in your bed. That’s the place”—he ducked his chin toward her—“where I want to be.”

  In fact, Irena and Coach Dino had never been to bed. Their couplings were staged in stairwells, equipment closets, and—most challengingly—in a crawl space between the gymnasium bleachers and a wall of the women’s shower room. The verticality of their sex was a joke between them. Fucking on her feet, he counseled, was good for her quadriceps. “You can run fifty laps around the gym,” he would
say, raising his eyebrows like exclamation points. “Or—”

  “Anything,” Irena would say, “to avoid running laps.”

  It wasn’t until Irena had opened up the shirt that she saw JORDAN across the back, CHICAGO on the front. The gift, along with the gunshots and emptiness outside, alarmed her. Irena was cunning. She knew that Coach Dino enjoyed having sex with her, but she assumed that one day he would approach her with his sad hound’s face and announce that he was returning to his wife (or, at least, to their bedroom from the couch on which he professed to sleep) or moving in with Julija Mitric, the hazel-eyed women’s soccer coach. Irena enjoyed her moments with Coach Dino, but she spent more time dreaming about Toni Kukoc, the great Croatian player, or Johnny Depp than about the coach. She hid their relationship like a shoplifted lipstick.

  Irena would never wear the red jersey to school or practice. But her parents would see it on the bed, in her closet, under her pillow. No lie would be convincing; accepted, perhaps, for the sake of peace, but never believed. The red jersey was like an indiscreet letter left in a drawer. Coach Dino must have known that the jersey would lead Irena to proclaim her adulthood by flinging his name into her parents’ astonished faces. He must have known that he wouldn’t be coming back to Sarajevo anytime soon.

  MR. ZARIC CLEARED his throat, smoothed his hair, and told his small family that he had to declare what he had been thinking. It was shortly after eight o’clock on a Sunday, and coffee was dripping down into the electric glass pot. Pretty Bird made bubbling, popping, and sizzling sounds as the coffee crackled against the hot plate. Mrs. Zaric sat next to the bird, at the far corner of the kitchen table, her eyes shining and rimmed in pink.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “All night, really. Your brother even mentioned this a few days ago. When our phone was working.” Irena’s brother, Tomaslav, was traveling with friends in Vienna, and would call every couple of days as he heard increasingly harrowing news from home. “I’m thinking it’s maybe a good time to visit your grandmother.” Irena’s only living grandmother, her father’s mother, lived in the apartment she had shared with her husband near the synagogue in Old Town.