Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Call the police!” someone cried out. “Call Butter-Ass Butter-Ass Ghali!” someone else shouted in English.

  “I don’t need the police,” said Mrs. Zaric in a cold, jagged dagger of a voice. “I don’t need the United Nations. And I certainly don’t need your crumbs of favors. All I need is this anger”—she positioned her fist above her heart and bellowed the word in his face—“to stay alive to track you down.”

  IRENA FOUND THAT she could not place the face of the man who had forced himself on her. She remembered that he had a beard. But then so did most of them, and she had used all of her strength to shut her eyes. She remembered more clearly the faces of cute boys who had smiled at her on the tram.

  She could feel a sore spot on her right cheek where the man must have scorched her with his chin. She could feel wetness in her panties. As she walked on, she felt sore.

  But Irena knew that she healed quickly. She didn’t nurse an injury. She played on the old jammed ankle or broken toe as hard as before. God, Allah, or the stars assigned us our talents to be used, not doubted or denied. The game needs every player. Irena, who believed in nothing absolutely, believed in that. She had just seen people killed, and walked away with a limp. She told herself—consoled was not a word that occurred to her—that she could make any memory disappear, along with the sore spot on her cheek.

  6.

  THE ZARICS HAD been hearing bombs all day: thuds, pops, and crackling. Now, as they moved along Lenin Street and onto the riverbank, they saw them. There was a hiss above their heads, something that looked like a tin pail with a fiery tail. Then it became a harebrained hawk that smacked straight into somebody’s third-floor window. An orange bloom burst out of the window, blistering into black gashes and boiling gray clouds.

  The Zarics’ sense of personal geography had changed with unexpected speed. That morning, a bomb striking just a block away would have seemed like the peril of a lifetime. This afternoon, a bomb a block away may as well have exploded on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. The Zarics kept moving.

  They did not break stride when another group of men in black sweaters with rifles asked where they were going.

  “To our grandmother’s house,” Mrs. Zaric said forcefully. “Commander Raskovic told us we could go.”

  Amazingly, the men accepted that, and let the family go on. Mr. Zaric kept blinking blood from his eyes. Finally, he unbuttoned his shirt and pressed a shirttail over his sockets to stanch the bleeding. Within a few blocks, his staggering grew worse. Another group of men approached them and demanded of Mr. Zaric, “Your watch! Give us your watch!” They stopped for only a moment as Mr. Zaric carefully took his arms from around the shoulders of his wife and daughter to undo his Swiss army watch. He glanced at the time—6:04 p.m.—before tossing it over to the men as mechanically as someone flinging a coin to a porter. One of the men flaunted his rifle in the direction of Irena’s feet.

  “Air Jordans?”

  “Yes,” Irena told him boldly, “and I need them to walk.”

  The Zarics walked on, and the men in black sweaters continued picking through their collection of sweaters, slacks, Adidas, Nikes, and amber-beaded necklaces. TV sets, brass coffee mills, and ice-white German juicers were arrayed on the sidewalk, almost like a marketplace.

  Flashes sizzled through the air. Their noses clenched at the stinging smell of fire. A ginger-haired woman in a flowered pink skirt lay on her back, as if sunning herself. She had no face. It must have been eaten by one of the plundered irons or radios whose unplugged cords gave them the look of sated rats. Beside the woman was a small sandy-haired girl in cute blue jeans with kittens on the cuffs. She was either napping or dead; the Zarics chose to leave her in peace. The ground around them sometimes opened up as they walked, spouting rows of flame and sprays of mortar rounds. The Zarics said nothing to one another as they went on. Why would they want to reassure one another that they had seen this?

  MR. ZARIC’S MOTHER lived on Volunteer Street in a gray cement apartment building with small balconies and—a curious design feature, given Sarajevo’s harsh winters—an outdoor wooden staircase that did not quite disguise the six-story building as some kind of chalet. As the Zarics approached, they could see a man curled up next to a trash bin on the ground floor; perhaps he had been trying to hide. In any case, a bullet had found him—a neat, purpling hole above his right ear. His unblinking eyes were two blue mosaic stones. Mrs. Zaric remembered him.

  “Mr. Kovac,” she said softly. Then, rather uselessly, “He was a Serb.”

  “It’s hard to tell at the moment,” said Irena. Or maybe what she said was “Not that it did him any good,” or “I guess they didn’t notice.” She meant to say all that, but she wasn’t listening to herself.

  The Zarics skidded on a slick of blood that had gushed from the hole in Mr. Kovac’s head. Irena’s grandmother was on the landing between the second floor and her apartment on the third, as if she had been headed downstairs. The blood on her blue smock was already hardening into burgundy spatters, like chocolate or strawberry cream.

  Mrs. Zaric bent down. Irena and her father could not see her face. “You go on up,” she said gently. “I will take care of Grandma.”

  Mr. Zaric opened his mother’s apartment door into the first silence they had heard for hours. A shade flapped lightly at a window. Moving into the kitchen by instinct, he sat in a straight-backed chair. Irena followed and picked up a kitchen towel, held it under hot water, wrung it out, and placed it carefully against her father’s eyes. He pressed his forehead against her hand. Mrs. Zaric came in quietly.

  “I have taken care of Grandma,” she said. “With that pretty Irish throw we gave her. Later, we will take better care of her. But now, I think we need a cup of tea.”

  Irena ran water into her grandmother’s electric kettle and plugged it in while her mother poked in a cabinet for some tea.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Mrs. Zaric said. “I cannot figure out where Grandma keeps her tea things.”

  Mr. Zaric looked up suddenly with a new concern.

  “You took care of Grandma with that fluffy green blanket we brought her back from England?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Zaric.

  “Take care how?”

  “I wrapped her in it. It’s soft and warm.”

  “We may need that blanket,” said Mr. Zaric. “Let’s be practical.”

  “Soft and warm may mean more to us,” Irena agreed.

  When they had finished their tea and rinsed out the cups, they took two tattered old sheets to where Mrs. Zaric had wrapped her mother-in-law. Irena thought the blanket did look a little pointlessly luxurious for a shroud. They whisked the blanket off Grandma, without paying much attention to her face, tucking the sheets under her head and over the plastic flip-flops she was wearing. Mrs. Zaric motioned for Mr. Zaric and Irena to stop, uncovered her mother-in-law’s feet, and took off the flip-flops.

  “Stupid shoes,” said Mr. Zaric. “Not the way to spend eternity.”

  Irena left her parents alone with her grandmother and took another sheet down to Mr. Kovac by the trash bin. The blood around him had thickened into a kind of burgundy mud. His shoes were the old black Soviet kind, bought before Italian and Spanish shoes could be so freely imported. Soviet shoes were laughably flimsy. The leather was about as durable as paper and the stitching unraveled like string. Many Yugoslavians had lost faith in Communism because of Soviet shoes. How could you believe in a workers’ paradise if the workers made shoddy shoes? And had to wear them? Mr. Zaric told Irena that he always knew America would reach the moon before Russia, because any cosmonaut would be scared to step onto the moon in a Soviet shoe.

  Irena was certain that her father would never wear Mr. Kovac’s shoes. But someone might. Or might trade them for something else. Even old Soviet shoes shouldn’t be wasted on the feet of a man who would no longer be going anywhere. She pulled on the laces and slipped the shoes off carefully, then stretched the sheet above him.


  “Thank you, Mr. Kovac,” she said out loud. Carrying the shoes in her right hand as she went back up the stairs, Irena had to step over her grandmother.

  “When Grandma Melic died we called a funeral home,” her father was saying. “Funeral homes handle all aspects.”

  “Even tea cakes,” his wife remembered. “But that would be expecting a lot on a day like this.”

  Irena took charge of the directory and the telephone. After several calls went blank, she got a response from a man at a Muslim funeral home on Sandzacka Street.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re really too busy to take any more bodies,” he told Irena. “Our hearse is getting shot at, and for what? Picking up dead people.”

  Irena’s father motioned her to hand over the telephone.

  “We can pay,” Mr. Zaric assured the undertaker, one businessman to another.

  “Money?” The man laughed as if he had never heard anything so ludicrous. Irena and her mother could hear him chortle clearly through the earpiece until the line went dead.

  “We just can’t leave Grandma and Mr. Kovac like this,” said Mr. Zaric. “It’s not right. They deserve to rest.”

  So as darkness fell on the blackening city, blinking with fires but no light, and booming with explosions and cries, Irena Zaric and her father inched carefully downstairs, smashed the window of the shed in the backyard, and took a shovel. Irena lay down for her father in the small backyard so that he could mark the dimensions around her. For about ten minutes, Mr. Zaric struggled with the shovel, wrenching up loads of soil.

  “Shit,” he said to Irena. “Now I remember why I work in a store.”

  Mr. Zaric had just handed the shovel to his daughter when a middle-aged woman with blond hair caught their attention by leaning out of her first-floor window.

  “Excuse me—what are you doing here?”

  “We are the Zaric family,” said Irena’s father. “I am Milan. My daughter, Irena. My wife is upstairs. Perhaps you know my mother, Gita?”

  “Of course. I am Aleksandra Julianovic.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard your name. Well, my mother is dead.”

  “I am sorry. A lot of people are. We might be soon.”

  “Yes. Well, Mother is dead already. And Mr. Kovac too.”

  “Him I didn’t know.”

  “Second floor, I think. Well, we are digging graves to get them into the ground quickly.”

  “Omigod, are you religious fanatics?” Aleksandra Julianovic said. “We are European in this neighborhood.”

  “Not at all,” said Mr. Zaric.

  “They are already dead,” Aleksandra Julianovic pointed out. “What more can happen to them?”

  Irena stepped in, because she sensed that Mrs. Julianovic was trying her father’s civility. “Things can get messy. Think of a piece of fruit.”

  But Mrs. Julianovic still directed her inquiries to Mr. Zaric. “Are you an undertaker?” she asked.

  “No. I sell clothes in a men’s store.”

  “Which one?”

  “The International Playboy clothing store on Vase Miskina Street.”

  “I don’t know it. I have never had to buy clothes for a man.”

  “We have a small women’s section,” said Mr. Zaric. Irena thought that while the conversation might grate, her father welcomed the respite from digging. “You have to, now that men and women are equal.”

  “If they are equal,” asked Mrs. Julianovic, “why is the women’s section smaller?”

  “You are too smart for me,” said Mr. Zaric. “I just manage the store and sell shirts.”

  “Do shirt sellers dig graves these days?” she asked.

  “We all have to do different things right now. The funeral homes are busy.”

  “I go to Number Three High School,” said Irena. “We learned that Muslims, Jews, and Hindus bury their dead within twenty-four hours. It’s a ritual. But holy men made it a ritual because it was a necessity.”

  “Well, I live here,” said Mrs. Julianovic. “It’s been a rough day. I liked your mother, and I have nothing against Mr. Kovac. But they’re not rosebushes.”

  Mrs. Julianovic had a request. “One hole, please,” she said.

  “There are two bodies,” said Mr. Zaric.

  “I know that,” she said. “But if you dig a separate hole for each person we might have to bury here, we won’t have room to plant flowers. Or tomatoes or squash. Why not the same space?”

  “It sounds like something Grandma might think of herself,” said Irena. Mr. Zaric’s face broke into a small smile.

  Together, Mr. Zaric and his daughter dug out a space that was a little over six feet long and three feet deep, so that when Irena stood up in it the sides of the hole almost reached her elbows.

  Mr. Zaric carried his mother alone, in his arms. “Grandma is heavier than I thought” was all he said.

  “We can help,” said Mrs. Zaric.

  “Mama carried me,” said her husband.

  They carefully laid Mr. Kovac in first and smoothed the yellow sheet over his body. Then they lifted Mr. Zaric’s mother and lowered her down over Mr. Kovac and stood back.

  “I’m going to go up and get Pretty Bird,” Irena said.

  Mr. Zaric waited for his daughter to return with his wrist held over his eyes. When she did, he said, “We are sorry, Mama, for what happened and that we have to leave you here like this. Put you here like this,” he amended. “In some ways, we are closer than ever.”

  “And she is closer yet to Mr. Kovac,” said Irena, which made Mr. Zaric smile again.

  “Wait,” said Irena. “The blond lady. I think we should invite her.”

  Irena rapped on the window just above their shoulders. Aleksandra Julianovic, it seemed, was never far from there.

  “Of course, I will be out,” she said, and in a moment she was. “We should be quick and careful,” she hissed. “Shit is blowing up all around.”

  They waited for Mr. Zaric to speak. “Thank you, Mama,” he said after a moment. “For . . . so much.”

  It was hard for them to see Mr. Zaric’s face in the dark, but they could hear Mr. Zaric holding his mouth open to breathe, and as if to speak.

  “Maybe we could sing something,” said Mrs. Zaric finally.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing ‘Penny Lane,’ ” said Mr. Zaric. “It makes me happy.”

  “Shouldn’t we sing something religious?” asked Aleksandra Julianovic. “It’s kind of that occasion.”

  “What about this?” said Mrs. Zaric, placing her right hand at her throat and gently singing: “Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo. Here comes the sun, and I say— Oh wait, I’m not sure how the rest of the lyrics go. Let’s just do the chorus.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Zaric, Irena, and Aleksandra Julianovic all sang, softly and slowly. Irena was close enough to see her father’s face straining. She worried that if he cried the cuts around his eyes would open and blood would wash into his tears. Then he sank to his knees so abruptly that she thought he had been shot. Mrs. Zaric rushed to him. She held the palm of her hand over his ear and cradled his head against her hip.

  “Shh, darling, shh, baby,” she said. “Be strong, baby, I’m here.”

  Mr. Zaric fell forward onto the heels of his hands and began to rock back and forth on his head—not so much crying as bleeding with tears. Mrs. Zaric sank to her knees in the coarse ground around her husband, and as he rocked she held her face against the small of his back.

  “Give it to me, baby,” she said gently. “Give it all to me, baby. I can take it, baby. Give me everything, everything, baby.”

  A mortar wrinkled across the sky, leaving a crease of light. Something crashed seconds later, clapping against concrete several blocks away. Pretty Bird was silent. Gunfire kept up a low boil.

  Irena knew that there was no place for her in this embrace of her parents. Certainly they would have opened their arms for her. But she sensed that what she had seen ran deeper than any experience she had ever had, even after today. She p
ermitted herself a brief flash of jealousy—not because her mother loved her father more, or had loved him longer or differently than she loved her. Irena just couldn’t imagine that she would ever love anyone so much.

  AGAINST THEIR EXPECTATION, the Zarics managed to eat and sleep. The electricity had been cut off, and there was no water. Aleksandra Julianovic joined them for food, bringing six slices of soft white bread on which to spread the liver sausage they had found in the refrigerator. But it had already hardened too much to eat—or so it seemed on that first night of the war.

  So they sat in Grandma’s lightless living room, below the windows, and tried to make a meal of small pickles rolled into bread. The Zarics told Aleksandra Julianovic only that they had been expelled from Grbavica. They shared no particulars. Details about that day, and the fine points of their concerns for the future, were unnecessary in any case.

  Mrs. Julianovic (she accepted the honorific but had made no mention of a husband, present, former, or deceased) had already analyzed the calamity. “I am sorry for your troubles,” she said, tamping her Coca-Cola lighter against a knee. “But, believe me, this is the worst day. You’ll be back home in Grbavica soon. I can’t promise that your car will still be there. A four-year-old Honda? Pray they go for Volvos first. You took your jewelry? When I traveled through France—I am a retired art teacher—they warned me about thieves in railway stations. So I turned round the stones in my rings and stored my pearl necklace inside my brassiere. I recommend the sensation, incidentally, especially if you’re traveling alone. And perspiration and skin oils are supposed to be good for pearls, although they gradually deteriorate lingerie fabric. As no doubt you have observed, Mr. Zaric.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said.

  “The West won’t permit a war to last more than a few weeks these days,” she continued without an audible change of direction. “They put a stop to wars these days before bankers and brokers start hurling themselves through windows. The United Nations already has soldiers here. For Croatia, of course. But they will have to get their hands dirty in Sarajevo, too. Vietnam, Afghanistan. Capitalism, Communism—the big isms learned their lessons in those petite shit holes. They’ll let the little brats of the world make their point, then clean up their mess. That’s why Kuwait, Panama, Haiti were short wars. War burns money. For each bomb you see, imagine a million dollars in cinders. For each body you see—and, I beg your pardon, I am thinking of your mother, too—imagine someone who can’t buy a thousand more Cokes. Losses add up. The West might let killing creep on in Ethiopia or Somalia. People there don’t have two rubles to rub together for a Coke.” Mrs. Julianovic slapped her hands against her wrists for emphasis. “But they’re in the Dark Ages. We are in Europe. We have Benettons here on Vase Miskina Street. Richard Branson sells music next door. Forget that human life is priceless. Consumers’ lives have market value. In the end, it’s a better guarantee. My motto: you can’t sell Volvos to dead people.”