Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  Mr. Zaric was a moment realizing that it was his turn. “Still,” he said. “Milosevic, Karadzic. They seem explicit about wanting this Greater Serbia. There wouldn’t seem to be room for good old mixed-up Bosnia in there.”

  “Ah, the bastards,” Mrs. Julianovic said. “Please pardon my French. Slobodan Milosevic’s game is Kosovo. I suppose he has promised it to his teenage Russian mistress. She would probably prefer another platinum Cartier, although I am told there is display room remaining only on her right ankle. The Holy Grail of the Serb nation resides in Kosovo. He who reverses the disgrace of that defeat, so many centuries ago, lays claim to the Serb kingdom. Milosevic is content to keep Bosnia in his basement. But he doesn’t want Karadzic’s self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb kingdom in his gut. Karadzic, that overweight silver worm, wants to brandish the jewel of Sarajevo in his navel, to rival Milosevic. How can Slobo sit easy on his throne if Karadzic is looking for a chance to steal his velvet slippers? So in the end,” said Aleksandra Julianovic, as if presenting the final course of a holiday dinner, “we won’t have to lift a finger. I am old and have seen a lot here, as did Gita. The Blue Helmets and the Iron Chump will shut this mess down and we can pick up our lives. I am wondering,” she said, “if I want to chance it downstairs in the dark to see if I can find some candy.”

  GRANDMA’S APARTMENT HAD two bedrooms. But the Zarics chose to spend the night on the floor of the living room. Each took a space along the wall, just below the front windows. They reasoned, on the basis of recent experience that was incomplete but compelling, that any sniper shots or mortars fired through the glass would zing past their heads. Irena lay under her German army jacket, her spine flat against the floor, Pretty Bird quiet by her head. They said good night. Whatever they said to one another, it was at least one thing more than what Irena could remember of the day.

  AND SHE SLEPT. Irena was an athlete. Just as she knew that she could rely on her training to bestow speed and strength on demand, she knew that she could now count on her body to grant her sleep.

  7.

  IT WAS SEVERAL weeks before most of the rest of the city decided that the war had begun. It seemed safer to believe that some kind of madness was moving through, like a sudden, blinding snowstorm. No one could stop it; no one could be blamed for it. But at some point it would melt away. You could come up out of the cellar and find all the comforting artifacts of your life set up in your living room.

  Yet within just a few days Irena and her family had made critical adjustments. Some of them were more or less instantaneous and, once done, more obvious than amazing. Irena was surprised to hear that Bruce Springsteen had left Julianne Phillips, or that Mick Jones had left the Clash to begin BAD II, or that Magic Johnson had gotten sick and could no longer play basketball. But sleeping through the pops of mortars and the rattle of machine guns; taking care not to sit above the line of the windowsill; opening old canned goods and dividing a few ounces of waxed beans into four cold meals; keeping all spigots open so that when the Serbs teasingly turned on the water for an hour they could spring up to capture it in tubs, cups, and bottles—all of that became their daily custom.

  “Hell must also have its routines,” Aleksandra Julianovic said to Irena.

  THE SERBS WOULD turn on the water only to keep Bosnians up all night, anxious and itchy, hoping to hear a splash. Turning on the water in a Sarajevo apartment building was like strewing bread crumbs around trees to attract famished pigeons. Serb snipers knew that if they turned on the water briefly, they could shoot into almost any bathroom window and hit or scare a Bosnian concentrating on an old milk jug under the bathtub spigot.

  THE ZARICS HAD to decide what to do about the windows. The windows in each bedroom of Grandma’s apartment faced the mountains and the snipers. They could leave those windows alone, and go into the rooms only when they had to forage for possessions to sell or burn.

  The window in the bathroom also faced the mountains. It was small, high, frosted, and risky. They could only hope that it would not be noticed across the way. To compress any profile he might offer a sniper through that window, Mr. Zaric decided always to sit on the toilet when relieving himself.

  The center of their puzzle was the three large windows in the living room on a side of the building that faced away from the mountains at an angle. Mr. Zaric made a drawing on the inside flap of one of his mother’s old romance novels. He sketched out lines and arrows, and concluded that the plane was still broad enough to tempt a sniper. People in surrounding buildings, and in apartments on other floors, could be heard hammering doors, crates, and tabletops across their windows.

  “Ah, but that must be so gloomy inside,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Like living in a cave.”

  Mr. Zaric agreed. “So unlike our glamorous present surroundings.” This earned him the laugh he had sought from his wife.

  “Snipers have a city full of targets to choose from,” said Irena. “Why would our windows be looked at in particular?”

  “Because they’re there,” said Mr. Zaric. “Still there.”

  “Pretty Bird would always be asleep,” said Irena. “I think darkness turns on some kind of sleep channel in his brain.”

  “Well, if we don’t cover the windows,” said Mr. Zaric, “I don’t know how long I can scuttle over the floors like a crab.” He hunched up his shoulders and let his arms dangle to make his point.

  “That’s a baboon,” said Irena. “They go from tree to tree.” Pretty Bird obliged with a trill.

  “We can stand up in the hallways when we need to,” said Mrs. Zaric. “In shifts. You love schedules.” It was her turn to win a laugh. “Sing. Dance. There’s room enough for Toni Kukoc to stand up in our hallways.”

  Mr. Zaric began to rock back on his heels in the hallway, as if he were about to deliver a judgment from on high. “You’ve convinced me,” he said finally. “In the end, it all pivots on advertising. Covering the windows with a door is like putting up a billboard for those bastards across the way. We might as well install a bloody blinking sign that says, ‘Hello, mate! Someone is living in here. Fire away!’ I think,” he went on, “that the windows ought to stay. At least for as long as they last.”

  “I give you my word,” said Mrs. Zaric. “You will never catch me cleaning them.”

  GRANDMA’S BUILDING WAS six stories tall, and each floor had six apartments—basic, boxy, late-Tito-era housing crates, with cold concrete floors and painted white cinder-block walls. The Zarics had been pleased when Grandma moved in. The building was well situated for an elderly person who was energetic and wanted to be independent. The apartments were just below Old Town’s picturesque twisting streets, coffee bars, and kebab stands, a block away from the central synagogue, which offered many cultural programs (Tuesday Night Rabbi Zemel will show full-color slides of his spring trip to historic Orlando USA) and served hot lunches at noon (although Mr. Zaric’s mother had preferred to have her lunch at a kebab stand, where she could have a beer).

  War depreciated these assets. Mountain and river views now meant exposure to mortar and sniper shots. Early on, a mortar round had pierced one of the yellow panels, one of the building’s few gestures toward charm. The explosion gouged deep into a fourth-floor hallway, where people were snoozing in rows.

  The Zarics heard crashing and screaming above them. They sprang out of their own sleep to rush upstairs. But, just as quickly, they heard snipers shooting through the hole. The Serbs had fired a mortar to shed blood that would draw more people to be killed.

  “Wait,” said Mr. Zaric, holding up his arms. “Not just yet. Wait.”

  “We have to do something,” said Irena.

  “What?” snapped Mrs. Zaric. “Hurry just to fill their gun sights? Give them more targets?”

  For a few long minutes, the Zarics faced one another across a dark room again, trading words heavily.

  “Maybe it’s stopped.”

  “Maybe. Wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For it to stop.”


  “Stop? When?”

  “Oh, fuck, it’s a war,” said Mrs. Zaric finally. “It never stops.”

  They went upstairs and found that three people had died. A man flashed a beam of light from a torch over each set of eyes.

  “Recognize them?” he asked Mr. Zaric.

  “We’re new here ourselves,” Mr. Zaric answered, a touch defensively. “From Grbavica. We had to move into my mother’s apartment.”

  “Yes, Gita,” said the man with the torch. “I heard. Aleksandra brings the word. She is our Columbus these days, sailing between worlds. Each floor is a continent.”

  “Can we . . .” Mr. Zaric’s thought drifted off.

  “Oh, hell,” said the man. “I don’t know these people. I know the Ciganovic family was living up here. But they may have gone across the other way. I don’t know if it’s forever or just for a while, though I can’t see that they have much reason to return. These folks might have come in from the country.” He flashed the light along their shoes, which were heavy-toed and mud-brown. “Bijeljina and Zvornik. Walked here with what they had on their backs and just kept turning doorknobs until they found a place left open. Made themselves at home. Even this place might seem like bloody Paris after Vukovar. And then, poor devils, they run into the same damn bastards here.”

  The man scoured the cold faces with his torch: two men and a boy. Their blood had spilled out quickly, leaving their skin white and glistening under the light, almost like ice. God forgive me, Irena thought to herself, for seeing anything beautiful right now. She imagined the two men and the boy sleeping for centuries in some arctic gorge, safely awakened long after the men who killed them had gone.

  SHE WALKED OVER to the hole in the wall and reached out to touch the rough bottom where concrete and plaster had been punched through. It was still a little warm, and gritty under her fingers. More of the wall gave way at her touch. It was the middle of the night, and the sides of the hole felt like stones and sand in a hot sun.

  “That’s a stupid thing to do,” Mr. Zaric said from behind.

  “It’s dark,” she said. “They can’t see me.”

  “Infrared sights,” said Mr. Zaric. “Night goggles. Star Trek glasses. Even the old Yugoslav Army has them.”

  “They’d have to be looking,” said Irena, as she drew back.

  “You can see all these lights out there, you know,” she said. “The other side, I mean. Over here, it’s like someone just rolled a blanket over everything. Over there, in the hills, back home, close enough to touch. You can see porch lights, car lights, streetlights. You can see the little lights between floors in staircases, and fizzing little yellow display lights in windows for beer. I can see the light on the orange roof of the old Serb church, and the light over the loading dock at school. It’s amazing. It’s normal. I’m sure they even have ice cream.”

  “Don’t they know that there’s a war going on?” Mr. Zaric took his daughter smoothly by the shoulders to steer her away from the hole.

  “I could kill them,” said Irena softly.

  “Don’t say that,” said her father.

  “All right,” said Irena. “I won’t. All the same”—she turned toward the hole again, and saw another maddening sprinkle of pretty lights—“I could.”

  JUST BEFORE DAWN, a dozen more families from Grandma’s building took their own ten minutes to fill gym bags and garbage sacks with as much of their lives as they could carry on their backs. A few had places in mind, and were welcomed into the apartments of relatives or friends. Others begged shelter from strangers, and a few, they heard, simply threw out other people at gunpoint.

  The city was being reshuffled. The relocations began as a temporary inconvenience that each party vowed to bear cheerfully, as a human and a patriotic duty. As the weeks went by, though, cheerfulness and courtesy began to wear thin. Inside the apartments, people who had been relative strangers suddenly had to share the same small supply of food, water, and breathing space.

  THE ZARICS FORCED open Mr. Kovac’s door to find anything he might have to help them get by. There was a little money and jewelry. They kept the money and hid a gray-stoned ring and a silver money clip in one of Grandma’s market bags.

  “To save them from thieves,” said Mr. Zaric. He had ventured into Mr. Kovac’s closet and found that he could fit into the other man’s coats, shirts, and sweaters. The slacks pinched somewhat—he had to strain to button them. But the scarcity of food in the city was already working to tailor his waist to the garment. A green felt vest, a couple of pink oxford shirts, and four pairs of red Dutch socks were unexpectedly jaunty, and Mr. Zaric quickly got over his initial discomfort with wearing the undershorts of a dead man whom he had barely known.

  “Plain white briefs,” he emphasized to Aleksandra Julianovic. “No pink silk panties, per your suspicions.”

  Irena and her mother helped themselves to Grandma’s clothes. They hung loosely, but Irena found two pairs of blue jeans—one left by her, another apparently by her brother—that were a better fit.

  THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY clothing store (“No relation to Playboy International Inc. claimed or implied” had to run below the title ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall had given copyright lawyers more standing in local courts), which Mr. Zaric managed, was closed.

  Mr. Zaric himself glumly brought back the news one morning after walking over to Vase Miskina Street in Old Town. He had promised to stay near people who looked as if they were streetwise and shrewd. He had been following a vigorous young man in a leather motorcycle jacket when a bullet snipped between them and slammed into the bricks of a water fountain.

  The young man rolled into a drainage channel. Someone must have taught him that maneuver, thought Mr. Zaric admiringly. He could only scramble behind a green trash bin. There was a tinny sound as he thumped it gently, and he realized that the bin probably afforded him as much fortification as an olive oil can.

  “I wouldn’t grip the thing with my fingers like that,” the young man called out.

  “Oh, shit, you’re right,” said Mr. Zaric. “Fingers showing.” He drew in his hands and tucked his elbows into his sides. Knees, ankles, and now his elbows—every joint was straining to keep Mr. Zaric tucked behind his olive oil can. “A real Houdini pose I’m holding here,” he called back.

  “Now would be the time to make yourself disappear!” said the man.

  They heard their laughs falling on the empty streets.

  “You seem to know how to handle yourself out here,” said Mr. Zaric. “Are you a soldier?”

  “Oh, shit no!” the man called up from the drainage ditch. “A priest at St. Francis.”

  “You seem streetwise,” said Mr. Zaric.

  “I am Irish,” said the priest.

  “Belfast?” asked Mr. Zaric.

  “Sorry to disappoint. Donegal.”

  “Where did you learn to duck like that?”

  “Where does anybody learn anything? Television.”

  “I wish we were having this conversation in a pub,” said Mr. Zaric. He could hold that posture comfortably for only about three minutes, and painfully for only another two. “I’ve got to turn round,” he shouted over to the priest. “Can’t do this anymore. I’ll just tumble over and look like a goose on a platter to him.”

  “Turn carefully,” said the priest.

  “My name’s Milan Zaric, and we used to live in Grbavica,” he said without moving. “My wife’s name is Dalila. I have a son, Tomaslav, who is in Vienna now, and a daughter, Irena.”

  “She plays basketball,” said the priest.

  “You know her?”

  “She’s good. Number Three beat our girls’ asses at St. Francis in the Tito youth group games.”

  “Well, if this turn isn’t so triumphant,” said Mr. Zaric, “we’re living on the third floor of a building right over on Volunteer Street. With an outdoor staircase.”

  “The chalet, I’ll find them,” said the man. “I’m Father Chuck. I’ll pra
y for you to turn like Katarina Witt.”

  And, indeed, the mere intonation of the name seemed to inspire Mr. Zaric to spin his shoulders and knees around to bring his back against the trash bin. He settled in more easily.

  “Bra-vo!” Father Chuck called over. “I heard that. Nine-point-eight, say the judges.”

  Mr. Zaric could feel a crease from the bin pressing into his forehead, and kept his right elbow in at his waist as he raised his arm to touch it; he felt no blood. He had not been able to read well since his glasses were smashed in Grbavica. But he could make out a message that a hand had scored in large black letters on the side of the fountain: FUAD IS OK TELL HIS MOTHER. Mr. Zaric didn’t know the name.

  “How long do we wait here, Padre?”

  “Until dark wouldn’t be bad. But I have to go to the bathroom, and I’m sure we both wouldn’t be out here if we didn’t have things to do.”

  “Maybe our friend in the hills figures he’s got us pinned down and has turned his attentions elsewhere,” suggested Mr. Zaric.