Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Or he’s waiting.”

  “Or bored. I am.”

  Within ten minutes, they heard the sound of shots ringing elsewhere.

  “Oh, that’s downtown,” said Mr. Zaric. “Blocks away.”

  “They have more than one gun, I’m sure,” said Father Chuck. “Let’s get up at the same time,” he suggested. “Confuse the bastard.”

  “Count to three. One.”

  “Two.”

  “Two and a half?”

  “Yes, keep going.”

  “Three!”

  The two men scampered under the eaves of an old lunch shop that was known for its cevapcici, the small lamb-sausage sandwich of Sarajevo, and shook hands.

  “You must come to our church for a meal sometime,” said Father Chuck. “During a lull or a cease-fire. Better yet, when this nonsense is over. We don’t want a family of three running through these streets for the canned soup we’re going through at the rectory.”

  Later, Mr. Zaric didn’t tell his family about his ten minutes behind the trash can on General Stepa Stepanovic Quay. He simply said, “I met the most delightful young man in Old Town today.”

  WHEN MR. ZARIC turned the corner onto Vase Miskina Street, there was a gaunt gray dog eating a carcass. Looters got greedy. They would run off with their arms overstuffed, and shed a trail of running shoes, cigarettes, soap bars, and cologne bottles. Mr. Zaric supposed that the looter of a cevapcici shop probably took more carcasses than he could carry. Then he saw that there were bits of blue cloth clinging to the underside of the lamb’s hulk. There was nothing to do except to keep walking, which is what Mr. Zaric did. “I have seen more sickening things,” he told himself. “I’m almost glad that the man and the dog could be useful to each other.”

  THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY store was now a shell. The windows had been smashed, and all the goods on the shelves had been stolen, down to the last pair of ankle socks. Someone had even ripped the toilet bowl away from the bathroom wall, leaving a bare pipe and angry black letters on the tile: MUSLIMS EAT SHIT.

  “Like, ‘Katarina Witt Drinks Pepsi,’ ” Mr. Zaric told his family. But there was no concealing the depression behind his rueful jokes. “No work means no money,” he told his wife and daughter. “Our savings are locked up in Greater Serbia. I don’t know how we’re going to live. Did I just say that?” he asked them. “ ‘I don’t know how we’re going to live’?”

  IRENA WAS BEWILDERED when her father told her that he didn’t want her going into the streets to pick up some of the aid supplies that U.N. troops had begun to hand out in the city. She had begun to feel cramped in the confinement. Spring was usually a pivotal time for her in basketball. She missed the challenge of being useful.

  “I can carry more than anyone,” she argued. “And run faster besides.”

  “That’s just the point,” said Mr. Zaric. “You can run faster than your mother or me. You might even run faster than a bloody gazelle. But not faster than a bullet.”

  “You were fine,” she pointed out.

  “I was fortunate,” he said. “That’s different. Michael Jordan couldn’t move fast enough to avoid a sniper if his aim is good. His or her, I suppose you have to say for everything nowadays.”

  Mrs. Zaric, who thought that her husband had seemed blithe about his afternoon out, said, “I’ll go with her. We’ll be together.”

  “So you both get in trouble?”

  “You can’t expect us to stay cooped up in here forever.”

  “No. Only as long as necessary,” he said.

  “Like what?” asked Mrs. Zaric. “The Frank family?”

  “I was hoping for a happier ending,” said Mr. Zaric.

  “Look, we could use the food,” Mrs. Zaric said in the low tone of voice she had always used to keep Irena from hearing them (Irena heard them anyway). “If she doesn’t get out, Milan, she will be intolerable company in here. Besides, she’s right: she can be useful. And,” she added more urgently, “Milan, Irena has a right to see.”

  THE RADIO SAID that a water tap had been opened on a small street off General Radomir Putnik Boulevard. They rinsed out a large plastic soft-drink bottle and an old roasting pan.

  Irena sang, “Good, good, good, good vibrations!” as she drummed her fingers over the bottom of the pan she was carrying under her arm. Her mother carried the empty soft-drink bottle under one arm and a yellow pail in the other.

  Mr. Zaric’s eyes softened as he saw them to the door. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You two look as if you were going to spend the day at the beach in Dubrovnik.”

  MRS. ZARIC AND IRENA walked down Proletariat Brigade Boulevard without incident. But the silence of the main street was unnerving. Irena loved losing herself in the hum of the city—the clink of coffee cups and human commotion, the purposeful clatter of heels along the boulevard. She loved stepping in and out of knots of people and absorbing their conversations. Now she could hear only her voice against the stones. It sounded lonely when it came back to her.

  “The temperature is better than I expected” was all she could think to say to her mother.

  They joined a line of about twenty people, standing behind a bus that had been overturned in the street so that its undercarriage could block sniper fire. A Bosnian policeman in a blue shirt had opened a water spigot on the side of a red-brick building, and people took turns holding their soda bottles under the stream. The crowd was conspicuously quiet. People kept their eyes down. No one said, “How happy I am to run into you, hungry, unwashed, wearing borrowed clothes, and standing in line for water.”

  Mrs. Zaric and Irena had been waiting for perhaps five minutes when a man came up behind them. He had three young children in tow, two boys and a girl, barely old enough to manage the jugs each carried.

  A woman wrapped in a brown blanket turned around. “Those kids won’t get you any extra water,” she told him. “It’s two bottles for everyone, no more.”

  “But I have three children,” he explained.

  “It’s a rule. You shouldn’t drag those children out here anyway.”

  “Their mother is dead,” said the man.

  “So will they be if you don’t get them out of here.” Now she was upset, red-faced, and sputtering.

  “I’m to leave them alone in our apartment, where they can crawl up to a window and be shot?” the father asked.

  Mrs. Zaric moved closer to the woman in the blanket.

  “I think everyone has made a good point,” she said.

  When Mrs. Zaric and Irena got to the spigot, the policeman confirmed that they could fill only two containers—any two.

  “So we can fill this old roasting pan?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And the pail?”

  “Yes,” he said. “No matter.”

  “But we could also fill just the bottle and the pail. Or two roasting pans? I’m not sure I understand the sense of this limit.”

  People behind Irena and her mother were beginning to stir and snort as as if to say that they didn’t have all day. But although Irena wasn’t about to remind them, all of them probably did.

  “Filling two containers—or ten—is not the problem,” said the policeman. He motioned them to place the first of their containers below the spigot.

  Mrs. Zaric felt the pail get heavier as it filled with water, and enjoyed the cold splash over her knuckles. As she braced the full pail against her hip, Irena positioned the roasting pan below the spigot.

  “That’s too much!” someone complained, but the policeman held up a hand. “We are fed by a spring here,” he told them. “Plenty for everyone.” The spigot made a rusty screech as he turned it open again to fill the pan.

  Irena bent over to lift it and realized that it wouldn’t budge.

  “Serves you right for being greedy,” someone called out.

  With the pail in her left hand, Mrs. Zaric used her right hand to take hold of a handle on the roasting pan while Irena lifted it with both arms. Water splas
hed out of both the pail and the pan with their first steps. The more they walked, the more water splashed. Small waves rolled in the roasting pan and crested over the sides, spilling water over Irena’s chest. They had not taken ten steps before they had to stop and set down the pail and the pan heavily. They were losing the water, and losing strength from their laughter.

  “I’m glad we didn’t bring a bathtub,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We’ll have empty pans and wet shoes.”

  They waddled past the overturned bus and back down Proletariat Brigade, looking a little like tottering ducks to anyone who might have been watching.

  MR. ZARIC HAD found a sheaf of postcards in his store that he used to send out to customers; he put them in his jacket pocket. He was a methodical man who believed in orderliness. He could see using the cards to prepare lists of things the family should bear in mind: the bottles they had available to bring to public taps, the number of cans of beans and meatballs that were still in the kitchen, the number of bandages they had left. He put the cards aside when his wife reached across the kitchen table for one and wrote “Tuesday: Stay Alive” in the center.

  MR. ZARIC HAD worked every day of his life since the age of eighteen, including most Saturday afternoons. This had occasionally conflicted with Irena’s basketball games, and he had asked for his daughter’s understanding: they both served the public. She couldn’t play a league game on, say, Wednesday at ten in the morning, when it would not conflict with social plans for her and her teammates. Games were scheduled for fans. Games had to be played when their work was done, dinner was done, and the dishes had been put away. So it was in selling, he said. What they did served others; that made it worth doing.

  Mr. Zaric had no job to go to now. Mrs. Zaric asked Irena to understand that this was another loss for her father, like the sudden disappearance of a longtime friend. Mr. Zaric missed the companionship and sense of purpose that his work had afforded him.

  They were running short on candles. The electricity had flickered and then died when Serb paramilitaries severed the power lines. Stores selling candles had stocked only enough for birthdays and romantic dinners, and had already been looted, in any case. So Mr. Zaric went to work. He took the residue of wax left by each candle that burned down and put it into an empty bean can. While his wife was heating water for tea over a fire in the kitchen one morning, Mr. Zaric lowered the bottom of the can into the water. In time, the water began to sputter. So did Mr. Zaric.

  “It—it—look! I’m on to something!”

  Irena and her mother sat bleary-eyed, wanting only their tea.

  “Look!” he cried, brandishing the bean can in an oven mitt like one of Irena’s basketball trophies. “Do you see? Do you see?” They didn’t, quite.

  “Look here,” he said, presenting the can for consideration as if it were a prop in a magic act. “Observe that the wax has begun to melt. Had we heated a little more water,” he went on with obvious excitement, “more of the wax would have melted.”

  Irena and her mother smiled—amenable, if still uncomprehending.

  “So. A candle burns out. But, as philosopher John Lennon once observed, we all shine on. The candle merely waits—and under the circumstances I don’t avoid the spiritual connotation—for resurrection. Voilà!” he said, irresistibly. “When we heat water for tea or coffee, for washing, we remember to add the previous day’s candle droppings into the bean can. I’ll make out a schedule. No, I’ll take charge of it myself. I have laid a length of string vertically inside the can. We suspend the bean can in the simmering liquid. The old wax melts into the bottom. Each day, another inch or so accumulates. Until—” He motioned for Irena to give him a match, and she slipped one into his hand.

  “Until,” he intoned while striking a match and lighting the string, “a new candle is born. This spent bean canister becomes a cauldron for new light.” A small flame burned over the lip of the can.

  “We won’t be able to see the flame in a few minutes,” Mrs. Zaric pointed out. “It will dip below the side of the can as your precious candle burns down.”

  “I thought of that,” her husband said, pinching out the flame with his fingers. “We cut away the can and let the candle stand free.”

  “Cut with what?” she asked. “I didn’t see a steel cutter among Grandma’s kitchen things. She didn’t build cars in here.”

  “With my teeth, if need be,” said her husband, undaunted and somewhat touchy.

  “Let me point out,” he went on, “how this system renews resources. I truly think—I am being serious here—we should tell the United Nations Earth Summit. Sarajevo shows the world! We do not build an extra fire to melt the wax. No extra precious kindling. We use heat from water that is already boiling. All candles burn. Ours will burn over and over. We have invented the self-perpetuating taper!” he said.

  Irena had never seen her father in such a state, and thought he had gone mad. Mrs. Zaric, standing with her hands on her hips, said, “Sometimes catastrophes unveil the true geniuses among us.”

  ONE MORNING, POLICEMEN from the new Bosnian government came to the apartment building on Volunteer Street and announced that all men over the age of eighteen had to report for army duty. Irena’s father received them grandly.

  “I have been expecting you,” he said. “I would have enlisted myself, except that I hadn’t heard where to go. I have Serb heritage, you know, and I am proud to defend Bosnia. I am ready now.”

  The police were a bit taken aback by his ardor, but they didn’t want to dampen it. “Noncombat duties are important, too,” they said in Mrs. Zaric’s direction.

  “Who among us in Sarajevo has a noncombat life right now?” he replied. The officers chuckled into their buttons and said that if Mr. Zaric came with them they would find something for him to do; he could return for home leave in a few days.

  At an officer’s suggestion, Mrs. Zaric packed a change of Mr. Kovac’s clothes for her husband, wrapping them inside a pair of slacks that he could carry under his arm.

  “It’s a new army,” a policeman had explained with some embarrassment. “We have no uniforms per se. Everyone kind of wears what he can find.”

  Mr. Zaric kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. They held themselves back a bit, so as not to spoil Mr. Zaric’s delight in his new sense of purpose. He pressed his face against Pretty Bird’s cage to blow a kiss. “Keep our family laughing, Pretty Bird,” he said. “I will keep the nation safe and be back before you know!”

  Mr. Zaric was back in the apartment that night.

  “THEY DIDN’T QUITE know what to do with a forty-four-year-old nearsighted clothes salesman,” he said. “I volunteered to be a general. They said they didn’t need to dip that far down into the barrel yet.

  “They asked me if I had ever done anything besides sell shirts. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wrote poems in school. I know about a hundred words of Chinese. I know every lyric ever written by the Beatles and Leonard Cohen.’ The captain in charge—a capable young man from the country, I think—just rolled his eyes and said, ‘Fucking Sarajevo.’ I told him that I’ve been digging graves recently. He said, ‘Well, maybe you’re not totally useless.’ ”

  THE ARMY WANTED to dig up some graves along the front lines on Kosevo Hill. The captain said that some Serbs in the Yugoslav National Army had stolen weapons from their arsenals and buried them in coffins in the Bare Cemetery. They were heard to declare, as they turned the earth, “Serb history is no longer in the grave. These coffins hold the Serbs’ future!”

  The captain said that a strike team from the Bosnian Army (a phrase that still rang so strangely—so foreign—as to sound hilarious to Mr. Zaric) was going to make a sudden thrust into no-man’s-land that would draw fire. Mr. Zaric and three other men would run in with shovels to dig up the freshest grave there, and bring out weapons for Bosnia’s new army.

  “The Blue Helmets are here to enforce an arms embargo,” said the young captain. “Which means that Serbs keep the weapons they have from the old n
ational army. We have to have old men dig our guns out of graves.”

  “I’m not offended,” said Mr. Zaric, who was, a bit.

  “And I’m not incorrect,” said the captain. “I hope you understand: I am not going to risk soldiers to do a grave digger’s job.”

  SO THREE HOURS after his morning coffee Mr. Zaric met three other men of his approximate vintage: a schoolteacher, a dishwasher, and a prisoner who had just been released to lend a hand to Bosnia’s war effort.

  The prisoner said he had been arrested with hashish in his pocket, and avowed that he had no violent traits. The schoolteacher told Mr. Zaric that he had heard of Irena. The dishwasher said that he used to work at Fontana restaurant, and would sometimes see Mr. Zaric behind the counter of his store.

  “Don’t get to be best pals,” the captain barked. “You may have to see one another die today!”

  The captain had parked his four grave digger-uppers in a blue van partway up the hill along Jukic Street. They heard someone shout; rifle shots crackling from somewhere not far ahead of them; and then the slap of feet in front of them, to the side of the van, and finally, behind them. The captain leaped into the driver’s seat.

  “We opened up with guns,” he gasped, “and they’ve just rolled out a tank.”

  “Maybe we should leave the van and just run down the hill,” said Mr. Zaric.

  The captain grunted. “No time. I’m trying to save this fucking van.” He drove it down into a small dip in the road, below the tank’s line of fire—or so they all fervently hoped. He ordered the others out of the van and into a sprint while shots from the Serb lines snapped in the air over their heads. Mr. Zaric felt a hot orange ball growing in his lungs as he ran. Four sets of running shoes made desperate little rubber yelps until they reached an embankment at one end of the cemetery. They rolled to a stop against one another, panting like tired dogs behind a chiseled stone wall.

  “I think,” said the schoolteacher, panting. “Our little raid. A mistake.”