Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  Aleksandra got to her feet, to give added weight to her conclusion. “My point, dear,” she said with intensity, “is that our statistical chances of being shot go down just because we are out here. Isn’t it better that ten out of a thousand people are hit in a day than four out of fifty? Wouldn’t you rather take your chances with a thousand other people crawling the streets than with fifty? The more of us who have the nerve to stay out here, the fewer of us are likely to be shot.”

  Irena had been holding the cigarette Aleksandra had given her in the palm of her hand. Now she held it upright, like a teacher with a piece of chalk at the blackboard. “That sounds like the logic of a smoker,” she said.

  “Upstairs with you then,” said Aleksandra. The two cackled like schoolgirls as Irena turned to go.

  14.

  TEDIC BURST INTO Irena’s life the very next day, his smooth bald head snapping out of the folds of a glossy leather overcoat. “You are Zaric, the great basketball player,” he said with a mock bow, as if Irena were the Duchess of York, and had trundled out with her empty bottles solely to see how commoners got by.

  “I am Zaric, that’s for sure,” said Irena.

  “Your game against Number Four last year,” he said. “Brilliant.”

  “I had a good night.” She remembered sixteen points, sixteen rebounds—but Irena remembered every play, score, and second of every game she had ever played.

  “Much better than good,” said the man. “Of course, you would not remember me.” Tedic had shaved his head two years ago. He hoped it would give him a hint of predatory elegance—an intimation of Yul Brynner or Michael Jordan. But even shorn he still looked—it was the joke he had learned to tell on himself—like a man who could walk down Vase Miskina Street in a lilac tutu and people would turn only to ask, “Did a bald man just go by?”

  “I am one of the gnomes who sit in the stands and acclaim the likes of you,” he told Irena.

  It had been months since Irena had been recognized as an athlete; she was flattered. She squinted her eyes and fixed the man with a smile that was calculated to elicit his name.

  “Tedic,” he offered.

  “Dr. Tedic?” Irena guessed. Hearing the name had restored the face to a more familiar place in her mind.

  “The assistant principal at Number Four,” he reminded her. “At least, before all this. Alas, no doctor. I was also the assistant basketball coach. The man who sits at the end of the bench, hollering the utterly obvious.”

  “Now I remember you,” said Irena, laughing. “The man on the bench shouting, ‘Way to go! That’s the way!’ ”

  “Whatever it is gnomes say,” Tedic agreed, laughing, too.

  SHE HAD BEEN standing in line at a water tap that had been opened on a wall of the Sarajevo Brewery when a hawk-faced man in a billowing gray-checked coat approached, flashing a piece of plastic up and down the line like a talisman. The man demanded that the teenagers standing in line with rinsed milk and detergent bottles produce some scrap of identification. Most of the young people slumped, shifted, fumbled, and finally pulled out an old Yugoslav national identity card.

  Irena had none, and didn’t take kindly to being asked for one. “Everything was taken from our family in Grbavica,” she blandly informed the man as he reached her. “Do you need to know our names before we can get water? Do you suspect that there are Serbs sneaking over the line to lap up all this water? The taps run on their side. Maybe ours tastes better.”

  “Take as much fucking water as you can carry,” said the man wearily. “Just tell us who you are.”

  “I never talk to strangers,” Irena said. “Particularly now.”

  The man had left a grain of whatever patience he had that morning with each previous teenager. He had almost none left for Irena.

  “Then just tell us how fucking old you are.”

  “Almost eighteen.”

  “Are you sure?” said the man. “You have a lot of nerve for seventeen.”

  “And you have a lot of nerve for a man of”—she paused as she added ten years to her interrogator’s appearance—“forty.”

  The number smacked him like an epithet, and she saw him wince. “Just tell us when you turn eighteen,” he said.

  “Did you want to send a present? How sweet. But, really, I need nothing.”

  Irena’s cheek earned her a walk over to a small white van in which there were men wearing short black leather coats. They were looking down at sheaves of paper that seemed to be a printout of names.

  “If you’re from Grbavica,” said an expressionless man in a rear seat, “did you go to Number Three?”

  “Are you really some kind of officials,” Irena shot back at them, “or just horny bastards trying to get young girls to give you their names?”

  It was then that Tedic stepped forward.

  “To spare my men,” he joked later. “They were clearly overmatched.”

  TEDIC WALKED IRENA over to a side of the building where Bosnian police officers had driven a bus, emptied it of gas, and then overturned it to catch sniper shots. He shook out a Marlboro for her, unmistakably fragrant in its unmistakable red-and-white pack.

  “I don’t usually get American cigarettes from assistant principals,” she said.

  “For your troubles,” he explained. “These men work under my direction. In theory. They should mind their manners. They should know with whom they are dealing. That was quite a team you had. Cosovic, Dino Cosovic, the coach. Strapping guy. ‘You are a lucky man,’ I used to tell him. ‘Your girls could beat the Detroit Pistons.’ I would give up my left”—he offered a quick revision—“earlobe to have any one of those girls, much less five. And where is the coach?”

  Irena waved her right hand in the direction of the Vrbanja Bridge. “Over there,” she said. “Back in the army.”

  “Of course,” said Tedic. “An old biathlon champ.”

  “He came by to tell me the night before he left,” said Irena. “The night before the march.”

  “In person? How thoughtful, given all that was going on.”

  Irena regretted her choice of words, and then regretted what she said to recover. “He tried to tell all of us on the team,” she said, perhaps too eager to explain. “Phones were out. My mother and father were home, of course.”

  “Dino has always enjoyed close relationships with his players,” Tedic went on smoothly. “And some of the mothers. The dark-haired girl on the team with glasses,” he continued. “She set a good pick.”

  “Nermina,” said Irena. “She was in the bread line on Vase Miskina.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tedic. “I have tried to find so many other ways to say that. I’m sorry now sounds like a hiccup. But at least its sincerity is unassailable. What are any of us, if not sorry? The blonde—terrific passer,” Tedic continued in the same cadence. “Sweet-looking, like a milkmaid. I used to see her around in a Magic Johnson jersey.”

  “Amela Divacs. I don’t know,” said Irena. “Still in Grbavica, I assume.”

  Two misses. Tedic decided to forgo any further recitation of names. “I’ve heard it got ugly in Grbavica,” he said.

  “It did.” Irena volunteered nothing.

  “You are—?” he asked solicitously.

  “All right.” She volunteered nothing more, and shrugged as if she were shaking off a hamstring injury.

  “Family? Mother, father?” It was a teacher’s trick: leave the student to finish the thought. To fill the silence, she may reach for the last thing she wanted to say.

  “We’re here,” Irena said finally. Tedic marked her coolness. “We are living in my grandmother’s apartment near Old Town, behind the synagogue. Grandmother died that first day,” she added. “My brother is in London. Happily for all of us.”

  “Yes, happily for all,” said Tedic. “But we need every young Bosnian to serve his country now.”

  “Until there are no more left?”

  “We hope it won’t come to that. But yes,” he added evenly. “If
need be.”

  “IF NEED BE,” Tedic repeated after a silence between them.

  “My father has already been taken for the army,” said Irena. She mentioned nothing of the plans that her brother had confided, and certainly nothing of her own resistance. “He is sometimes taken away to dig trenches. I would be a better digger, don’t you think? Better than a man in his forties who throws his back out when he tries to imitate Keith Richards.”

  “There are other ways of serving,” Tedic said. “For both of you.”

  “I scrounge food for our apartment block,” said Irena. “I run around sniper fire and stand in water lines so that mothers, fathers, old ladies, and children don’t have to.”

  Tedic reverted to the manner of a man practiced in assuring adolescents that he was their co-conspirator. “Such work is precious,” he told Irena. “Irreplaceable, quite possibly. Besides, as I have told our people, ‘Don’t put too many girls in the army. How can you build a brave new society if your best breeding units are in the line of fire?’ I apologize for my frankness.”

  “And who the hell are our people?” asked Irena. “And, if I may apologize for my frankness, who the hell are you?”

  Tedic sorted through the folds of his coat for a business card. He wanted to assure Irena that he wasn’t a horny bastard poring over a roster of names in a van. The card was thin and cheap—ashy black ink peeled off on Irena’s thumb when she held it out to be read.

  SARAJEVO BEER

  SINCE 1864

  ONE COUNTRY—ONE BEER

  MIROSLAV TEDIC

  PERSONNEL DIRECTOR

  SARAJEVO BREWERY

  “I thought you were an assistant principal,” said Irena.

  “I thought I was, too,” Tedic said with a shrug. “Fourteen years from retirement. I had accepted that I would never be a principal. I had planned to serve my time at one or two other schools, rousting the odd student caught with marijuana or dangling his dick over the boiled cauliflower in the lunchroom. I was going to summer in Spain, and romance English schoolmarms along the Costa del Sol. I would finally check into one of the blockhouse retirement bins our socialist forebears planted so plentifully behind the Adriatic coast, play mah-jongg for cigarette money, and hope to worm my way into the affections of lonely old widows. The Serbs saved me from such suffocation,” he said with a wry smile.

  Tedic shook out two more Marlboros. It was a calculated gesture of fellowship. Contrary to the testaments of his three former wives, Tedic did have a conscience. It was just that he rarely made demands on it. But he had learned that the artful confession—inconsequential, self-effacing, and amusing—could insinuate him into someone’s trust.

  “I remember the night you mention,” he said, pacing off puffs from his Marlboro. “That Friday before the march—such exhilaration! The halls in Number Four buzzed with youngsters making posters, flyers, and flags for the demonstration. What a weekend they had planned—give peace a chance and get laid. My principal sent me down to one of the boys’ bathrooms. ‘It’s awful,’ he said. ‘Appalling.’ Of course. That’s why Lord Shiva made boys’ bathrooms—cisterns that flush straight into hell. Boogers, boners, pranks, and turds—that’s what little boys’ bathrooms are made of. They are lairs for the sort of petty infractions that an experienced tutor wisely ignores. But I was bidden. So I arrived just in time to see some young Victor Hugo put the last streaks of paint on a screed across the mirror: ‘Muslim girls have smelly pussies.’ ”

  Tedic hesitated for a moment. “I apologize for my frankness again,” he said.

  Irena just drew on her Marlboro.

  “I stood there, in front of the basins and urinals,” Tedic recollected, “my head turned away, so that the authors of this lyricism might take the chance to run away behind my back. I afforded them a strategic retreat. I afforded myself a strategic retreat. But one of them, Ranko, stood shamelessly in front of me. Brazen, even, I would say, as if he had been waiting his chance. He had pulled on a black sweater, of course, as if it were a Bulls jersey. To look like his paragons. ‘Mr. Tedic,’ he said, ‘you’ve always been okay to me. Don’t stop us. Don’t be here on Monday, okay? Monday, everything is different.’ I wished he’d called me an asshole,” said Tedic. “I wished he had told me to fuck off. Instead, he told me that the world was going to change. What was he, seventeen? The worst of all combinations. He knew nothing, and he was so certain.

  “So that night I got into my car,” Tedic went on. “I put two suits, six books, and another pair of shoes in the backseat. A lifetime as a teacher—and, really, only six books are important to me. That night I drove away from my mistress’s apartment in Vraca. That night I came across to the police station downtown. That night I said, ‘A hell’s storm is coming.’ Someone got the idea to take me to the Home Ministry. Someone got the idea that an assistant principal might have something to offer in parlous times. I know nothing about beer. Maybe I know a little something about people.

  “Perhaps we could walk as we speak before a sniper takes an interest?” Tedic said lightly. Irena clasped the necks of the empty plastic bottles in the crooks of her fingers and they walked around the white car, into the courtyard of the brewery.

  “We can fill these for you inside. We’re keeping the brewery open, you know,” he explained. He extended his arm as if welcoming Irena to his manor. “The United Nations is encouraging us. They know that we Sarajevans are devoted to our beer. They are convinced that the brewery is important to the preservation of our rich culture. The U.N. seems to find that more precious right now than preserving”—Tedic paused for effect here—“our mere lives.”

  He went on in a confidential tone. “The brewery is built over the one spring of drinking water on our side of the city. I have a few jobs open for people who might help us keep alive a vital civic resource. Would you like to take a look?”

  Of course, it was not really a question. Tedic led Irena a half block down to where a brewery truck was parked, and motioned for her to open the passenger side of the cab.

  “Rather uselessly grand to ferry people just a few meters, isn’t it?” he observed. “But we have to drive into the garage entrance.”

  Irena enjoyed watching the diminutive Tedic strain to reach the truck’s pedals, and wrest two hands on the stick to put the truck into reverse, then forward, like a small dog trying to push a soccer ball with its nose.

  “You’re not with the army or security forces?” she asked.

  “Our army is an amorphous institution right now,” he said. “Remember, we Bosnians declared that we wanted to be an unarmed and high-minded little state, striving to earn the plaudits of Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama. I’m sure they plan to drape the ribbons of their Nobel nominations graciously over our graves.”

  THEY PULLED INTO the ocher-brick back side of the Tito-era part of the brewery complex. The modern building had been the object of successive five-year plans; it had not quite been finished before being dented by destruction. Much of the brewery’s glass siding had already shattered. The older Hapsburgian-edifice parts with gables and cupolas had never been restored. Tedic parked the truck alongside three others, and stepped like an apologetic host over a rubble of glass and scorched paper. “I’m sorry for the mess,” he said. “The Serbs are finally moving along our renovations.”

  The brewery must have had a generator, powered by babbling springs underneath. The building buzzed with the electricity circulating in its bones. There were three old copper tubs set up on stilts in the central room. Old copper tubing nestled thickly overhead, sprouting a mossy green coating.

  “Canning goes on upstairs,” said Tedic as they walked across the white-tiled floor. He held up a single, empty discard from the floor, probably dented in packing. “Have you ever noticed that the diameter of a beer can suggests a hand grenade?”

  Irena stopped walking and turned to look at him. “Something is going on here,” she said. “You want me to see it.”

  “Something,” said Tedic. �
��We make one of the best beers in middle Europe here. Or used to. They tell me that it’s weaker now. I am a devout Muslim myself, and therefore drink only a good, smoky scotch.” Tedic fairly strutted, hands clasped behind his back.

  “This brewery sits on its own water supply,” he said. “It has all manner of manufacturing machinery that talented engineers can adjust for current necessities. It receives U.N.-sanctioned shipments of ingredients, grains and syrups from Africa and Austria that friends from America and Israel can enhance with special additives,” he noted with a glint in his eye. “And, just outside, there are stout-sided trucks lined up that the U.N. thoughtfully furnishes with fuel. The U.N. insists on seeing delivery manifests, of course. Orders and production figures. But, happily, the Nigerian accountant the U.N. has installed to certify our operations is more interested in seeing five American hundred-dollar bills each month, and a Ziploc bag of cocaine.”

  IRENA GRINNED WITH the sheer exuberance of being let in on a secret. “Do I get to hear something more?” she asked.

  “Okay,” said Tedic. “They’re brewing beer here, on this floor. But in the brewmaster’s own special cauldron they’re cooking up explosives. Above us, they’re canning the beer. And on another part of the same assembly they’re rolling out hand grenades in exactly the same gauge. The trucks are lined up to receive the supplies of water and beer they must deliver, and stocks of other products as directed. There are also some other enterprises engaged here, a few I don’t know about. A few more I do.”

  Tedic stopped. Irena understood—he loved that he didn’t have to wink or signal to make this known—that it was her play.

  “What do you want me to do?” she finally asked.