Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “I cannot believe you brought that fucking bird,” Mr. Filipovic said, but then softened. “I guess he’s a member of your family.”

  Nenad Hadzic, a willowy blond woman from the second floor who had shown Irena how to apply lipstick on her way to school so that her mother wouldn’t see it, called out encouragingly. “Pretty Bird is a delightful neighbor—I’m glad he’s here,” she said. She wondered if she ought to go back for her cat. “I left Pedro upstairs because I thought it would be just a few minutes. Now I’m thinking maybe he shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Muris and the children?” Mrs. Zaric began.

  “In Srebrenica, to see his mother,” said Mrs. Hadzic. “I would be there myself, except I have a presentation at the school this week.”

  “My basketball coach said there is no school,” Irena volunteered.

  “Really?” another voice called out.

  “I wonder if they will have trouble getting back,” said Mrs. Hadzic cautiously. “Holiday traffic. And now . . .”

  “Mr. Hadrovic is still upstairs,” Irena pointed out.

  “Should we go get him?” asked her mother.

  “Wait,” said Mr. Zaric.

  “Men are coming,” Mr. Filipovic announced suddenly. Mr. Kasic bounced up for a better look.

  “Yes. A few.” He jumped once more. “Shit, maybe a dozen.”

  “And more behind,” said Mr. Filipovic after another bound up toward the slim window.

  “Who are they?” Several voices rang out at the same time.

  “Not a girls’ football club,” said Mr. Kasic.

  Mr. Zaric motioned for Branko Filipovic to boost him up to the ledge of the window. He clutched the window frame for a few seconds, then dropped down heavily. “They’re walking by that first soccer goal when you come out of the trees across the way,” he said. “Black sweaters, black jackets. Black guns. Each of them has a gun.”

  “Serbs?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Do they have beards?”

  “Lots of Muslims have beards.”

  “I don’t mean like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Blunt, black beards. Serb beards.”

  “They swagger like policemen,” said Mr. Zaric. “They are wearing what look like policemen’s boots.”

  “Do all policemen have boots?”

  “You know what the radio said.”

  “Did anyone think to bring a radio?” asked Mr. Kasic. “Shit, I forgot. And there’s a big game, too,” he added. “Between Mostar Central and Vitez.” The laughter in the laundry room sounded like the cracking of glass. Voices skidded off the cinder-block walls, as people bounced up and down for a look through the window.

  “Are they shooting?”

  “Not that I see.” The sound of gunfire ended further speculation.

  “The radio was saying that Serb police—”

  “I heard that.” It was Voja Bobic, who ran the La Terrasse café along the Miljacka. He worked long hours, Mrs. Zaric was convinced, trying to keep company with two or more girlfriends on opposite sides of the river.

  “Mr. Zaric,” he suggested, “why don’t you and I go out and say something to them.”

  “Because we are part Serb?”

  “Because we are sensible, diplomatic persons who happen to have a little Serb, yes.”

  Mr. Zaric stood up, the blood rushing back into his legs as he stamped his feet in the dark and damp. “I think you may be right, Mr. Bobic,” he said. “At least we should try.”

  Mrs. Zaric looked up from the floor, opening her mouth like a fish gasping, only to say, “Milan!”

  IRENA COULD NOT easily imagine her parents when they were her age. She had seen pictures, of course. A young man with flaxen hair piled on his head like hay, a red corduroy jacket with lapels like the wings of a comic-strip space rocket, and John Lennon glasses. A young woman with hair curly as copper rings, who wore tube tops as tight as sausage casing, and sunglasses that she had to slip down onto her nose in order to actually see.

  Mrs. Zaric—whose first name was Dalila—sang in a rock band at Number Four High School. They called themselves Band Sixty-nine. They told school officials that their name was to venerate the worldwide student revolution led by the likes of Daniel Cohn-Bendit. When a skeptical assistant principal pointed out that 1968 was generally considered the year of upheaval, they dropped their voices. “We are trying,” they said, “to avoid all mention of Prague.” The assistant principal did not believe them, but he thought that, at any rate, their trick reasoning had reached the safest conclusion.

  The group’s specialty was slipping unsanctioned English lyrics into Beatles songs. “Lovely Tito” was inevitably the best remembered, though hardly the cleverest. (Lovely Tito, Brezhnev’s maid, may I ask the Marshal discreetly. Will we be free to take a pee on thee?) Mrs. Zaric naturally favored her own featured song, in which she got to vocalize: So we sail up to the sun, till we hit the sea at night. ‘Cause we live behind the Wall, in our Russian satellite! A crowd of any size joining in with her on the refrain—We all live in a Russian satellite! A Russian satellite!—had given her a feeling of elation that she could still summon. She might not always understand her daughter’s devotion to sports, but she recognized—and remembered—the allure of an audience.

  Milan was a fan of Band Sixty-nine. Dalila began to recognize his Lennon-lensed face peering up from the crowds. When the band performed at the class graduation party, he was there. “Does this mean that we won’t see you again?” she asked. She had included the we pointedly—to afford him, if he chose, an escape. He was astonished, and stammered. He patted a big flapped pocket on the right side of his corduroy jacket. He wrote poems himself, he explained, and had often tried to send a few to her. But they felt light once they were in the envelope. And, as for any accompanying letter—what would he say?

  “I don’t demand Shakespeare,” she told him, and on that note, more or less, they had grown up together ever since.

  A BOLT OF light darted through the room as Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic unlatched the door leading up to the stairs that opened into the parking lot.

  “If this is our last whiff of life,” said Mr. Bobic, “it smells like laundry soap.”

  A CLUSTER OF four men in black sweaters moved into their path, holding rifles across their chests. Mr. Zaric hailed them with a good show of friendliness. “Hello. How are you?” he said. “We are Serb brothers. Welcome to Grbavica.”

  The men muttered and halted. One man, who had red-rimmed eyes and prominent incisors, appeared to be in command. “Are there Muslims here?” he asked with agitation.

  “There are Muslim neighbors here,” Mr. Bobic said a little tensely. “With whom we live side by side in peace.”

  “Oh, crap,” said the leader sharply. “You are fucking rag-heads. I can see that now.” His men lifted their rifles. “Hit your knees for Allah, assholes.” The instant of shock that froze Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic on their feet, the men chose to take as defiance. They began to poke at their chins with the rifle barrels.

  “Lie down. Put your fucking faces on the ground!”

  The people in the basement couldn’t see, but Irena could hear a rasp of small stones as her father and Mr. Bobic scrambled onto the pavement, headfirst. Mr. Zaric spread his palms and fingers under his chin over the pitted concrete. One of the men slammed the butt of a rifle into the nape of his neck. Mr. Zaric’s head snapped up like a hooked fish before it thudded back onto the pavement. The man kicked his head into the ground. His glasses broke and pebbles ground against his forehead. Mr. Zaric could hear the toes of Mr. Bobic’s feet thrashing the ground, tapping terribly, as another man banged the back of his head with a rifle and cracked his chin against the concrete.

  “Down, rag-head, fucking keep down.”

  Mr. Bobic blubbered. “My mouth. It’s gone.”

  “Do you think I fucking care? Stay down.”

  Mr. Zaric felt the spiny steel nose of a rifle barrel being forced into the crack of his buttocks.r />
  “Stay down and answer my questions or I’ll fire a bullet up your ass. Where are your families?”

  “Gone!”

  Irena had leaped up to the window on her own. The old stone ledge ground into the palms of her hands. When she peered outside, she could see that her father’s glasses had been smashed against his eyes. Blood bubbled in his eye sockets. She tasted blood herself at the back of her throat, and let her fingers slip from the ledge so that she could fall back down. No one asked what she had seen.

  Mrs. Zaric held her daughter’s head against her breast as Irena began to gag, dribbling a sour sap of that morning’s coffee and tomato juice on her mother’s pale blue top. “Just turn away,” she said softly into Irena’s hair. “Stay down and pray. Hope and think.”

  Outside, other men in black sweaters had rushed up and now stood around Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic. “Where is your family, Mustafa? Your fucking family?”

  Incredibly, Mr. Zaric answered. “All of our families are hidden away,” he said. “No trouble to you, sir.”

  Irena clambered up once more to see that Mr. Bobic was trying to lift himself to his knees, so that he would not choke on the blood filling his throat. Several of the men with rifles began to laugh.

  “He moves like a wounded bird.”

  “He squirms like a burning worm.”

  One of the men swung his black-booted right foot into Mr. Bobic’s crotch. The force of the blow turned him over, like a speared fish. “Oh, this one cannot even fucking talk with those teeth,” the man said.

  “Rag-heads who cannot talk,” scoffed another, “cannot venerate Allah.” He jabbed the barrel of his rifle into the raw sore of Mr. Bobic’s face. The sound of the shot was almost swallowed: a disarmingly flat, final splat of brains against the ground.

  Irena let go of the ledge and fell forward on her knees. “Mr. Bobic. Dead. I’m sure.” She mouthed the words; her breath was trapped in her ribs.

  Mrs. Zaric raised her right hand to rest it on her daughter’s shoulder and stood up slowly. “I’m going to tell them we’re in here,” she said. Irena couldn’t hear a budge of protest. Mrs. Zaric was not nearly as tall as her daughter. She stood back toward the rear of the darkened room and shouted, “Stop! Stop! We are the families who live here, and we’re coming out.” She paused while her neighbors stirred slowly around her. “Please. We are coming out.”

  5.

  THEY STAGGERED AND blinked under a preposterously bright sky. Irena had taken charge of Pretty Bird, who had stopped pacing in his cage and crumpled to a posture on his claws. About twenty people came up from the basement, wearing spotted old slacks, scuffed shoes, and rumpled shirts, the casual clothing of an afternoon at home. The man who seemed to be in charge left Mr. Zaric twisting on the ground and waved his rifle like a ringmaster as he motioned for the basement-dwellers to stand together.

  “I am Commander Raskovic,” he announced. “We are taking control of this area so that it can be made safe for Serb people. We cannot let you leave until we have recovered what you have stolen. Open your bags, please. Open them now!”

  But before the group could unzip their scuffed athletic bags and scratched luggage, the men in black sweaters bent down and helped themselves. They pulled out American blue jeans and rolled them under their arms, holding them like logs. They threw down men’s underwear with a laugh, and stamped on the crotch pouches; they put women’s panties over their heads, licking and breathing through them as if they were pink and red surgical masks.

  One man found a burgundy-bound family album. He moved through the statuary ranks of stunned people, asking, “Yours? Yours?” When no one answered, he tried to wrench the book apart with his hands, but it held: superior German bookbinding technology. So he flung it down in loathing, unzipped his pants, waved his penis over the book, and began to piss on it. Another man ran over and kicked the book open with the edge of his boot, lowered his pants to his thighs, and began to piss on the book, too. Irena could see the black pages fizzing and turning maroon. She could see the edges of pictures curling, like bugs dying on their backs.

  The men turned around and saw Irena watching. She could hear Pretty Bird flapping against the wires of his cage. One of them charged into her face. “Bitch! You’re smiling.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are!”

  “Why would I smile?” said Irena, with more wrath than she wanted to display. “What the fuck is there to smile about?”

  “I will make you smile.”

  The man walked over to Irena with his pants sliding down his thighs, his gun and the head of his penis snapping up. She tried to move, but her feet felt like a statue’s. She heard bullets crackling and, just as she looked up to see pigeons winging, the man pinched her buttocks and pushed up her small bleached-denim skirt. He wrenched her panties down to her thighs, put his heel between her legs, and dragged them down to her ankles. Then he forced himself into her—hard—once, twice, several times before slipping out limply. Irena did not fall. Crazily—the man had a gun, after all—she took a step in his direction. She raised her arms, as if to wring his neck. He staggered back in stunted little-boy steps, his pants sagging around his knees. Irena saw an opening. She kicked him hard with the toe of her shoe.

  The man crashed back onto his bare ass in a rubble of shattered glass. The sling on his rifle rose around his neck. His accomplices began to laugh—he had been kicked in the nuts by a girl, and choked with his own rifle sling. For an instant, they seemed to cheer Irena. One of them laughed, and pointed at her feet. “American basketball shoes.” The downed man scrambled up with lunatic quickness, aghast at the blood cascading down his legs. He tried to aim his rifle in Irena’s direction, but some of the others stepped in front of him; one actually took his gun out of his arms. Irena’s mother took a quick step toward her daughter, but the men stopped her. They let the wounded man run at Mrs. Zaric and try to ram himself inside her skirt. He bellowed, “Bitch! Bitch!” into her face. But then his own face began to crumple. His jaw plunged, his top teeth cut into his tongue, his eyes rolled about in his head, and he tottered before flopping to the ground. Mrs. Zaric had slipped a hand into her dress to find her house keys and stabbed them into the man’s testicles.

  “You are not a man, cocksucker,” she shouted from inside a circle of restraining arms. “You have to grab ass from baby girls like my daughter because you can’t get your cock up for a real woman. My son had bigger balls when I bathed him in the sink as a baby.”

  The thugs restrained her, but they didn’t try to keep her quiet. She had become the crazy lady in the story they would tell later.

  “I’ve seen bigger balls on French poodles,” she went on. “Get up. Come back here. I’ll still slice your balls off and feed them to a goat. Nobody else would have the stomach to swallow—”

  The man who called himself Commander Raskovic loomed over Mrs. Zaric, holding his left arm out toward Irena, as if he were about to ask the mother for permission to dance with her child.

  “This is your daughter?”

  Mrs. Zaric was silent.

  “Okay, yes? Is your husband with you?”

  Mrs. Zaric managed to point toward the ground, where Mr. Zaric was still stretched out, his feet twitching.

  “Okay, anyone else in your family? A son?” She shook her head. “No young sons?” She shook her head again. “I’ll take your word.”

  “Our bird,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Pretty Bird.”

  “Okay. You take your daughter and you help your husband up and pick up your bird. The four of you can leave, okay? Leave your luggage and run off to wherever you were going.”

  Mrs. Zaric and Irena moved wordlessly over to where Mr. Zaric lay smashed on the ground. They lifted his shoulders lightly. Mr. Zaric pressed his hands against the ground and lifted himself to his knees, blood dripping from his eyes and mouth. He carefully touched the red wounds around his eyes, as if trying them on for size. He stiffened slightly as his wife and daughter took h
im by his elbows and helped him to his feet. He began to speak—he wanted to. But only blood ran out of his mouth.

  They walked toward the riverside. Mrs. Zaric figured that Commander Raskovic’s remarkable act—it couldn’t be called kind, but surely it had saved their lives for a moment—would not give them more than a few minutes of opportunity.

  “Don’t worry, my darlings,” she said, speaking softly into her husband’s shoulder. “We will never, ever talk about this.”

  But Mr. Zaric had swallowed the blood in his mouth and was determined to say something. “Leave it,” he gurgled in the direction of his wife, “for Shakespeare.”

  COMMANDER RASKOVIC CAUGHT their eyes—and waved. A big, bearded man in a dark sweater toting a gun waved. Waved! God dammit to hell. Where have you been? Glad you could join us! Be back soon! Mrs. Zaric stopped and steadied her husband’s left leg before turning and walking back toward Commander Raskovic. Worse than waving—he was smiling.

  “Do you think this makes everything all right?” she roared.

  Commander Raskovic stared at her in disbelief. He thought they had become friends through troublesome times. “Please, go on,” he said. “Get out of here. I am sorry to be friendly. You have this one chance I am giving you.”

  “You’re giving us? Like you’re Mother Teresa?”

  “I don’t think I’m Mother Teresa. Please, don’t shout at me in front of my men. You may regret it.”

  “Regret shouting at you?” she screeched. “You fuck-face! What’s one more regret? Your gangsters have just raped, beaten, and pissed on my family.”

  “Don’t use such words. Just get going,” Commander Raskovic said almost plaintively. “Please. Please. My men will obey me for only a moment more.” But Mrs. Zaric only moved closer, so close that she imagined plugging the barrel of his rifle with her finger to turn back the bullets so they would blow up into his bearded face.

  “We’re going to meet again, you son of a bitch,” said Mrs. Zaric. “All of you!” she shouted.