Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Yes,” said the dishwasher. “Intelligence. They should have. Intelligence. That tank.”

  “Intelligence?” the old prisoner said. Their breathing was beginning to return. “The tank is across the street. You don’t need James Bond to tell you there’s a tank across the street.”

  “That young captain is no Rommel,” said the schoolteacher.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Zaric. “He lacks our experience.”

  THE MEN’S LAUGHTER was cut short by their breathlessness. The prisoner—who, Mr. Zaric thought, ought to be the most at ease behind a gray stone wall—began to squirm. “Oh, shit,” he said. “We left our shovels. Back in that damn van.”

  “They’re gone now,” said Mr. Zaric. “From the sound of it, I think the Serbs have taken back a few feet of ground.”

  “Not that they need another van and a bunch of shovels,” said the schoolteacher. “What with guns and tanks.”

  “Tomorrow young Napoleon will order us to break into a gun warehouse,” said the schoolteacher. “To get back some shovels.”

  The men hunched behind the wall for more than an hour, even as the battle sounds subsided. They didn’t know where else to go. In time their young captain pulled up in an old red matchbox Lada and they all squeezed in. Mr. Zaric thought of high-school science films showing packs of zebras standing head to rump, head to rump.

  “I was wondering, Captain,” said Mr. Zaric, “as we were all thrown into this rather suddenly. Where would you like us to stay tonight? Are we assigned to specific units? I was also wondering if, at some point, we might qualify for a small amount of food.”

  Captain Kesic—his name was visible for the first time on a creased plastic identity card snapped to his shirt—turned to fix Mr. Zaric with a look that could have shot down a bird.

  “Do you think this is the American army? Air-conditioned barracks, beefsteak on the table, and cold beer in the dining hall? Do you want red tunics and bearskin hats like the Buckingham Palace guards? You will stay at home. You will feed your own faces at home. The Bosnian Army will not spend one worthless red Russian ruble on you. Until, God forbid, we have to call on you again. Maybe to dig a shit hole.”

  His sense of accomplishment restored, the captain had the men back to their families within the hour.

  WHAT HAD BEEN Grandmother Zaric’s telephone would twitch and twitter with a shrill, unbroken ring every few nights when Serb militia, tapping into some of the lines they had cut, wanted to chat. The calls commonly came in the middle of the night. Daylight would have dispelled much of the intended effect. Mrs. Zaric would leap for the phone, hoping it was Tomaslav, who might think to call his grandmother when their old number did not ring.

  “Yes, please, who is this?”

  “Who is this?” a male voice echoed back. “Lady, we are your worst nightmare.”

  “Oh, please,” said Mrs. Zaric. Or sometimes, “Oh, fuck off. Call someone who cares. Just let us get some sleep.”

  “Sleep? We’re coming over to kill you.”

  “Then let us sleep until you do,” she said.

  “What’s your name? You sound cute.”

  “I am. What’s your name? You sound pretty pathetic if you have to call women you don’t know in the middle of the night.”

  Then the line went dead.

  “I think the boys are passing out our number over there,” Mr. Zaric whispered heavily.

  “They call to scare us, and I scold them,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We’re even.”

  “Not so,” said her husband. “Not close.”

  MRS. ZARIC LOOKED over in the dark to see if Irena, who had stirred at the sound of the phone, had fallen back to sleep. She was breathing deeply. But the curve of her backside was tense.

  “Pimply, horny boys, that’s all,” he continued hoarsely. “Calling to hear a cute girl say dirty words.”

  “One of those boys . . .” Mrs. Zaric’s voice trailed off. She and her husband looked over at their daughter and saw that her toes were clenched, almost like Pretty Bird’s. It was as if Irena, too, were asleep on a slender perch.

  8.

  IRENA HEARD AN insistent knock on their door one afternoon and called out to the other side, “Yes, please. Who is it?”

  “Someone who thinks it’s charming that you still observe social conventions,” answered a woman’s husky voice.

  “Aleksandra.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Zaric looked up with a smile as Irena opened the door.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Aleksandra. “Some of the old social niceties have taken a terrific cuffing these days. Like not shooting your neighbor.” She was carrying a rolled-up magazine under one arm, and appeared to be wearing Mr. Kovac’s green rain slicker as a housecoat.

  “A little something I found under Mr. Kovac’s bathroom sink,” she said, offering the magazine to Irena. It was British Vogue, June 1991, the magazine’s seventy-fifth-anniversary issue. There were three bare-shouldered women on the cover—blond, auburn, and brunette. “Special Collector’s Edition,” it said across the cover.

  “Linda Evangelista is the blonde,” said Irena. “I didn’t know she was so tall.”

  “Cindy Crawford is on the right, I think,” said Mrs. Zaric. “The beauty mark over her mouth—it’s like the stamp on gold.”

  “I have such a mark,” said Aleksandra. “But it takes some work to find.” She sat down at the kitchen table and opened the magazine while Mr. Zaric crawled over to the living-room windowsill to fetch the old pickle jar in which he was steeping a tea bag in water warmed by the sun.

  He poured the brew into three small glasses and clinked the jar against one as they gathered around the magazine. There was a model with hair as short as Irena’s. Her shoulders were bare and, Mrs. Zaric thought, bonier and less appealing than her daughter’s. She said so.

  “Ah, but that girl is beautiful,” said Irena.

  “She’s not much older than you,” said Aleksandra. “Perhaps not even.”

  Mrs. Zaric had found a page of society pictures. Women in jeweled dresses had organized an event at the Café Pelican that raised thirty thousand pounds for homeless people. “The cost of just one of their necklaces, I’m sure,” tut-tutted Mrs. Zaric. A few pages on, there was a whole spread showing a dark-haired woman in a red raincoat leaning dreamily against an old Greek column, her lips made creamily red by a new lipstick. “Your lips are continuously protected from damage,” the ad said.

  “We should cover ourselves with this lip gloss,” said Aleksandra.

  Irena lingered over the picture of a red-haired woman in a series of yellow velvet dresses, hugging a wolfhound on a snowy estate. The caption said, “Keep trim this summer by eschewing the elevator and bounding up stairs.”

  “We will be soooo trim,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We are soooo Vogue!”

  They were not even halfway through the magazine before they came upon a picture of the Princess of Wales in blue jeans, holding her two boys by the hand.

  “She is so beautiful,” said Irena. “A princess in blue jeans.”

  “She is famously unhappy,” said Aleksandra Julianovic. “You marry a prince who’s really a frog. With all she has, I still feel sorry for her.”

  Irena was awarded possession of the Vogue, on condition that she keep it available. But she did tear out the page with Princess Diana and her two boys, and smoothed it into a corner of Pretty Bird’s cage, where she hoped she might be charmed by his clowning.

  IRENA WANTED TO go out and bring back food and water for her family and Aleksandra, and maybe others in the building, too. Her parents were adamantly opposed, but she was persuasive. She could see that she had grown thinner and weaker over the weeks—they all felt more frail. She would stand in the hallway and pull at the slack skin over her stomach and hips, convincing her parents that she needed the exercise and challenge as much as they all needed the food and water.

  Irena was also impatient to get out and see the streets on her own. She blamed only the Serbs in the surround
ing hills. But she was beginning to resent her parents for keeping her curbed in the apartment like a disobedient eight-year-old. She was burning up inside. She wanted to run, find friends, and see people she didn’t know. She wanted to be alone.

  Mr. Zaric invented a harness that would make it easier for Irena to carry bottles of water. He laced together four belts from Mr. Kovac’s closet, tongue to buckle, in two sets that Irena could sling over her shoulders. He cut four lengths from his mother’s plastic clothesline and looped them through the belts to hold four water bottles, leaving her hands free for more bottles, or bags of rice, flour, and beans.

  “This rig minimizes the carrying apparatus to maximize the weight that can be toted,” said Mr. Zaric. “So simple, if I may say so. A few belts and a few strings. Perhaps we can even help others make them.” He moved a buckle up one notch so that it came up more comfortably under Irena’s arm.

  “Or sell them,” suggested Aleksandra Julianovic.

  Mrs. Zaric stood back to appraise Irena, the belts crossed like bandoliers across her chest. “Our Rambo,” she said. “I do see one deficiency, Milan. When the bottles are slung over her shoulders, she can’t just drop them and run.”

  Mr. Zaric began to pace around his daughter; he put his hands lightly on her shoulders. “She would have to slip the belts with the bottles over her neck and shoulders,” he said finally. “Or try to run with them. Either would slow her down. She could even fall over.”

  “I’m pretty fast, remember,” said Irena, who thought it was wrong for a player to envision even the chance of ever falling. “If I could carry more, maybe I wouldn’t have to go out so much.”

  But Mr. Zaric was already unhooking the belt under her left shoulder. “Stupid fucking idea,” he said.

  THERE WERE ALREADY a few hundred blue-helmeted soldiers in town as part of a small U.N. mission. There were Canadians, many with French names, French soldiers, and French Foreign Legionnaires, most of whom seemed to be from anywhere but France—they were Cambodians, South Africans, and Ukrainians. Britons, Indians, Egyptians, and other troops set up their own checkpoints.

  At first, Sarajevans were flattered by their presence. It seemed to signify that the world had heard of their troubles. But they were soon baffled. The U.N. soldiers were armed, but they did not—and could not, they said—draw their weapons. They traveled in armored personnel carriers and small tanks, but if a group of Serb soldiers raised their rifles and shouted, “Fuck you, prepare to die!” they would turn back.

  Many U.N. soldiers were embarrassed. They didn’t want to die in what they considered to be somebody else’s war, in a place of which they had scarcely heard. But they hadn’t become soldiers to be played for fools by bullies, either. They were doing a job for which unarmed Benedictine monks might have been better prepared. When French and Canadian soldiers tried to escort two aid convoys into the city, Serb units let them pass, then shot rockets into the sides of the trucks and ran off with the food and medicine inside. When a U.N. commander told Bosnian Serb officials that he sternly disapproved, they blandly replied that the aid convoy had been ferrying weapons. Since the Serbs possessed almost all such weapons, they had enough to prove any claim.

  Some U.N. soldiers would park their armored cars, white with U.N. emblazoned in blue on the sides, on certain corners to impart an impression of protection. They hoped that more Sarajevans would be emboldened to leave their apartments in search of food and water. But Aleksandra Julianovic was neither reassured nor impressed.

  “They have sent an Egyptian commander and French troops to protect Sarajevo,” she sniffed. “When was the last time the Egyptians or the French won a battle? Ancient history. When the U.N. sends Israeli troops,” she said, “I’ll know they mean business.”

  MOST OF THE soldiers were just a few years older than Irena. Those sitting on sandbags or gun turrets looked more bored or sullen than scared, with gauzy kittenish hair on the backs of their necks and jaws raw from shaving with cold water. If their commanders weren’t watchful, they would delay Irena’s rounds, bantering in a kind of North Atlantic patois:

  “Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?”

  “Yes. Days of Thunder. Vroom-vroom!”

  “Tom Cruise, Maverick! Kelly McGillis. Vroom?”

  “Top Gun!”

  “Where the eagles fly!” Irena and the soldiers would sing together.

  “Kelly McGillis. Amish lady. Witness.”

  “Harrison Ford?”

  “Oh, yes. Indiana Jones!”

  “Indiana Jones. Michael Jordan!”

  “Toni Kukoc?” asked Irena. This usually drew less enthusiasm.

  As she struggled back with water bottles in each hand, and rice, beans, and small boxes of powdered eggs in Grandma’s bag, soldiers would sometimes help adjust her load and sneak a couple of cigarettes into her pack, or a candy bar.

  One afternoon a Canadian soldier sitting on an armored personnel carrier held up a pack of Players cigarettes, pointed to his groin, then opened his mouth and moved his head up and down. The gesture was impossible to misconstrue as some subtle cultural difference, but Irena wasn’t tempted, frightened, or appalled. The boy was coarse, not dangerous. If he had pointed to fresh apples or pears, he might have won at least the start of a conversation. He even had a vaguely cute smile. Irena just laughed and walked on.

  “We’re not that desperate,” she shouted. “Girls like flowers and candy!” The soldier looked astonished.

  “Come back tomorrow!” he called down. “I’ll get them! At least the candy!”

  “No! Flowers, too!” She kept walking.

  “Where did you learn English?” he wanted to know, hoping she would turn back. “In school?”

  “In songs. In movies.”

  “Wait! Please, wait!” The soldier was standing now. “I’m a nice guy. I don’t usually do that to girls. I’m just going a little crazy here. I am Yves from Lachine! Who are you?”

  Irena kept walking away from the small tank, aware that the soldiers inside would be watching her backside. She didn’t return that way the next day. Sniper fire had peppered the route. She imagined that while Sarajevans scrambled over the streets from the hail of bullets, Yves and his fellow soldiers were battened down in the steel tub of their tank. Keeping safe—and holding their fire. Besides, Irena could already tell that it wasn’t difficult to meet soldiers.

  MR. ZARIC REMEMBERED the names and addresses of three of his old customers (they lived on the other side of the car park from their building in Grbavica) and decided to write notes to them. There was no mail delivery on the Bosnian side of Sarajevo. Mail carriers would not be sent into sniper fire, especially when so many Sarajevans, like the Zarics, were living in unexpected and untraceable places.

  But some of the U.N. soldiers could be persuaded to put a letter in their pocket and post it. Aleksandra Julianovic had pressed six letters into a soldier’s hand, including one from the Zarics to a cousin in London, who might be able to find Tomaslav. “He took the letters and gave me a cigarette for each one. I might,” she added, “write out a few more envelopes to total strangers, just to be treated so considerately.”

  So Mr. Zaric wrote out three postcards:

  Dearest Friend:

  I regret that the recent emergency in our city has prevented me from offering you the traditional fine service for which I trust our store has earned your patronage. Please know that as soon as this crisis is resolved it will be my pleasure to serve you again. Please present this card for a 25% discount on a new suit. It will be my pleasure to personally tailor our fine garment for you and to stick straight pins into your balls.

  Sincerely,

  Milan Zaric

  General Manager

  “I DON’T WANT you to get in trouble,” Irena told a young African French soldier who was guarding a water line. “They are just messages from my father to friends on the other side. It is the only way they have of knowing we are alive.”

  The soldier seemed touched. �
�Well, they are but postcards,” he said in slow, thoughtful English. Irena saw her chance to cinch her play.

  “See here,” she said, pointing to some words. “I’ll translate. It says, ‘It would be my pleasure to see you again.’ And here, ‘We must stick with each other in this madness.’ Cards like these could promote peace and reconciliation in Sarajevo,” she said earnestly.

  The young man tucked the three cards into his breast pocket and smiled. “I can get them out tomorrow. So how does a smart young woman like you manage here?” he asked.

  “Some days are better than others,” Irena said. “Say, have you ever seen Eric Cantona play? I mean, in person?”

  THE ZARICS NO longer flinched at the sound of bombs or bullets, Pretty Bird included. One morning Irena flinched on waking up—because it was quiet. Like the clack of the General Radomir Putnik Boulevard tram pulling past, shooting and shelling had become Sarajevo’s pulse and heartbeat.

  They were still scared, but they had found that it was impossible to keep fear always boiling inside them. A person doesn’t have the strength to stay scared all the time, any more than he can endlessly keep up the first giddiness of love. Pretty Bird mimicked the sizzle of a mortar just before it fell, and the sound no longer made the Zarics laugh, much less flinch.

  But one day the Zarics heard a terrific bang. It was just after ten in the morning, the hour that Irena usually went out, since it was believed, on no particular authority, that the Serb snipers on the night shift had gone to sleep while the ones coming on duty had yet to settle in. They felt a thud in their ears, throats, and bones, then a dull thump bouncing back from the street. Mr. Zaric shook his head as if a bug had flown inside his ear. Irena was holding the plastic soft-drink bottle in which they kept water; the water sloshed and shivered.

  Mrs. Zaric gasped and said softly, “Close by.”

  The Zarics sank to the floor. They heard a second boom, and then a roar from a scattering of human voices. They could hear rifle shots crackling like fire, followed by sirens and shouts.