Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Work here,” he said, looking for the simplest beginning. “Hang around. Stamp paperwork. Help with a few deliveries. ‘Other duties as assigned’ is the phrase.”

  In the absence of something more solid, Irena guessed something wild. “You want me to be a spy.”

  Tedic bit back a smile. “Not really necessary,” he said. “We’ve been one country, remember, and know each other pretty well. We hardly need to plant a Muslim girl on the Serbs when we can employ Serb girls for the same services. Unless, of course, a Serb in question plainly prefers Muslim girls. I suppose we have the occasional Ma-ta Ha-ri,” he said with a low flourish. “But I gather that we contract with women who may have a larger field of experience than teenage boys and the coaches of girls’ squads. Once again, I apologize for my frankness,” Tedic said.

  When Irena stopped at this, his eyes softened. “No shame, dear,” he said. “It’s just that you’ve been on better all-star teams than that one.”

  “WE ARE ALSO a brewery, you know,” he said after a short time-out. “There are deliveries, papers to fill out, floors to sweep. ‘Other duties as assigned’ are impossible to predict.”

  “I would be paid?” Irena asked. “We are—I’m sure everyone is—running low right now.”

  “Of course,” said Tedic. “Cigarettes. Cans of beer, all legal tender that can be traded.” Then he walked a few steps to a spigot low on a wall. He turned on the tap ostentatiously. The sound of the water splashing echoed like laughter in the large brick room.

  “And this, too,” said Tedic above the din. “Right under our noses. Like in the old days, just a few months ago. Enough to drink, wash, and even spill. Enough for coffee, tea, brushing your teeth, and soaking your feet. We are Muslims, after all,” Tedic said, laughing. “Not Bedouins.”

  THAT NIGHT IRENA told her parents that Dr. Tedic (she had decided that although Tedic had corrected her on this point the honorific was a useful misapprehension to pass on to her parents) had offered her the job because of her basketball career and overall promise.

  “He says he’s trying to give some opportunities to students he remembers,” she explained.

  “I’m glad you girls kicked their asses at Number Four,” her father said. “Dr. Tedic sounds like he doesn’t want to hire losers.”

  “It’s a little work,” Irena explained. “We get water, cigarettes, and beer. When there are overnight hours at the brewery they send a truck, so I don’t have to walk. And, by taking the job before I’m eighteen, I’m less likely to wind up digging ditches on the front lines. Not that”—she glanced at her father—“that isn’t honorable work.”

  “It is,” Mr. Zaric agreed vigorously. “And better I do it than my daughter.”

  His daughter did not add that when Tedic had taken her bottles and run them under the splashing spigot he had put them back into her hands one by one, and loaded his words as carefully as her shoulders.

  Nothing is more necessary now, he’d said. But it would be daft to keep your talents buried in a ditch. Even an old assistant coach can see that. What we may ask you to do one day may be plenty dangerous. Don’t assume that the only way to dirty your hands is with a shovel.

  MRS. ZARIC DECIDED to prepare a congratulatory dinner to mark her daughter’s entry into the beer business. Tedic had given Irena four cans to take home as a kind of bonus. Mrs. Zaric had saved the water in which she had cooked some beans. If it had some flavor, she reasoned, it should have some nutrition, so she poured it into a pot.

  Aleksandra Julianovic had torn off some grass from a patch outside after a rain, and had even managed to catch a couple of small snails. She drove them from their shells by holding a lighted match against their backsides. “Serb style,” she called it.

  Mrs. Zaric snipped the snails into halves and stirred them into the broth, along with the grass. She had a half can of tomatoes, and this she also plopped into the pot. She had stored a small burlap sack of macaroni from a humanitarian shipment in her mother-in-law’s small washing machine. (Rats were becoming a problem. The Zarics could hear them scuttling behind the walls at night. The war had made them hungry, too. So Mrs. Zaric had taken to storing dry goods inside the spindle of the washing machine because no one had ever heard a rat rooting around there. “There’s no need for the little bastards to eat better than we do,” she had declared.) She then put the pot over a fire that she had kindled in the kitchen sink from the wooden soles of one her mother-in-law’s old clogs.

  Irena opened the beers. For the first time in months, they heard the liquid “Ahh” of cans being pierced. She set them on the living-room floor.

  Mrs. Zaric took the pot of macaroni, grass, and snail stew in bean broth into the living room. It was the first time in several weeks that she had cooked something that was hot enough to give off steam. “Please,” she said to Irena, Mr. Zaric, and Aleksandra. “While it’s hot. It’s hard to get things hot these days.” She hoisted a Sarajevo Beer above her head, even above the windowsill, and said, “To Irena, who does so much for everyone!”

  “Including be a pain in the ass!” Mr. Zaric proclaimed with a smile.

  The group plinked their cans together and took long sips of the warm beer. Tedic was right; it seemed watery. The bubbles and taste were welcome, but Irena’s head stayed clear. They spooned the stew into their mouths. Irena watched her father chew doggedly on a clump of grass. He kept chewing, but the grass was stubborn.

  “I’m not sure nature gave us the incisors for this,” he said.

  “I believe that cows swallow whole shoots of grass,” said Aleksandra. “But it’s their stomachs that do the chewing.”

  Dark green leaves twitched over Mr. Zaric’s lips. “Mmm-ooo,” he finally said through a full mouth.

  “Baa,” Mrs. Zaric brayed like a sheep. “Baa!”

  “Nnn-eigh!” Irena whinnied like a horse. “Nnn-eigh!”

  “Mmm-ooo! Baa! Nnn-eigh!” they all bleated together. “Mmm-ooo! Baa! Nnn-eigh! Mmm-ooo! Baa! Nnn-eigh!”

  The braying and laughter of the Zaric menagerie stopped abruptly when Aleksandra plucked a macaroni from her bowl and tested it. The noodle had turned gray and rubbery. When she stretched it between her fingers, it reddened at the point of strain and finally snapped apart.

  “Worms!” Irena said in the sudden silence.

  No one mooed or neighed. It was Aleksandra who finally resumed the meal with a melodramatic slurp. She smacked her lips, blew a cooling breath on her spoon, and blotted her mouth with the back of her hand. “How thoughtful of the Americans to mix a few vermicelli with our macaroni,” she said. She took a sip of her beer and daintily swirled her spoon through the stew, searching for vermicelli.

  15.

  IRENA’S FIRST DUTIES at the brewery were not demanding. She was given a blue plastic pass that seemed to confine her to the first floor. Tedic would bustle past with a greeting and a sallow smile, then bound up to the second floor. Sometimes she encountered him in a stairwell as he descended into the basement. Once he was with a gray-suited bald man—authentically bald, not shaved, like Tedic—whose face brightened when Tedic introduced her as “Zaric, the great basketball star.”

  “You are a household name in Grbavica,” he told her. “We are lucky to be working with you.”

  After the man had passed by, Tedic turned around and mouthed to Irena, “The Home Minister. Very important.”

  There was a brooding, milky-faced man in a smudged red woolen shirt who always sat by himself behind a window off the loading dock. Irena heard Tedic call him Mel. She had gathered that the man’s profoundly undetectable resemblance to Mel Gibson was a standing joke. Occasionally, Mel would hold up a broom for Irena and point to a litter of dirt and wood splinters left by the boots of delivery people. Irena would make five minutes’ labor last thirty, for lack of other work. “Other duties as assigned” were not yet forthcoming.

  Irena was hanging a broom back on a rack near the docks one day when she saw the blue eyes of a beautiful blond
woman staring up from the top of a crate. One of the woman’s breasts was bared—her lacy black vest had been artfully parted. She picked up the magazine and waved it through the dispatch window at Mel.

  “Can I look at this?” she mouthed.

  “What the fuck?”

  It had taken Irena a couple of days to decipher Mel’s phrasing. He seemed to pull out of his sentences two or three words from the end, so that “What the fuck?” could mean “What the fuck is that?” or “What the fuck are you doing with that?”

  Mel stayed seated in his swivel chair, so Irena guessed it was the former. “It’s Kim Basinger,” she told him. “Sky, June ‘92. Maybe one of the U.N. people left it.”

  “What the fuck?” said Mel. “What the fuck?”

  Irena translated this as “What the fuck do I care?” and so sat down with the magazine on the steps of the loading dock.

  KIM TOLD SKY that she liked a man with good lips who had clean, bracing breath and didn’t slobber when he kissed. “You have to think it’s as good as what’s coming later,” she said, and Irena thought briefly of Coach Dino. His breath often smelled of cigarettes and beer. Sometimes he pushed his tongue so far into her mouth that his top lip would begin to slip over her nose.

  She couldn’t quite follow an article in English about IRA terrorists in Belfast. It showed photographs of young Catholic schoolkids hiding behind a burnt car during a shoot-out, and young IRA men in running shoes, dark sweaters, and ski masks, holding rifles. I guess that’s the universal uniform for their team, Irena mused. She blinked a few times on learning that Eamonn, the young IRA terrorist who had been quoted extensively, was seventeen years old. That can’t be, Irena thought for a moment. That’s my age. Well, she thought after a pause, that’s old enough for anything, I suppose. The author asked Eamonn why the IRA had killed more Irish Catholics than British soldiers, and Eamonn said, “Killing is the only way to get their attention.” Well, Irena thought, we seventeen-year-olds are not always good at math, are we?

  A few pages on was the sex-advice feature called “Confidential” (despite, obviously, appearing in a mass magazine). Susan in Birmingham worried that her vagina was too small. Sky told her that there was no such thing. Algie from London said his girlfriend had told him that his penis was too smooth. The magazine suggested that he take a day trip to Birmingham to meet Susan. Kim in Kent said her boyfriend insisted that she lather his cock with Nutella before they had sex. Sky said that seemed like an awful waste of chocolate spread, and Irena agreed. Especially here, she thought. Gobble the spread and forget the cock.

  There was a gorgeous photograph of a swimmer’s back in a Seiko watch ad. The young man’s muscles seemed to swell and ripple like an ocean current. “He’s spent 21 years getting here,” said the ad. “But all that matters is the next 48.62 seconds.” Seventeen years getting here, Irena said to herself, thinking of Nermina. And it’s over one morning for a loaf of bread. South Korea banned Right Said Fred’s song “I’m Too Sexy.” But in America Sharon Stone was unveiling her crotch, like a new car design, in her latest movie. The director was a Dutchman who said, “People always criticize violence. But we humans have evolved from savage apes.” Teenage gangs in New York housing projects were slicing off their legs and arms trying to ride the roofs of moving elevators; they called it elevator surfing. Well, that’s one worry we don’t have here, thought Irena.

  Irena was immersed in the personal ads (“Handsome gay male, 17, N. Ireland. Very straight-acting. Write soon, sinking fast.” Is that you, Eamonn? she thought. Better not let your brothers under their ski masks know) when Tedic turned a corner onto the dock.

  “I’m glad to see you improving your mind away from the classroom,” he announced.

  Irena closed the magazine, but only over her thumb, so that she could keep her place.

  “Do you have a jacket?” he asked. “Never mind. We’ll get something. We have a ‘duty as assigned.’ ”

  Irena’s Air Jordans smacked and squeaked on the loading dock as they scuttled out into a beer truck that Tedic had kept running.

  “DO YOU KNOW Dobrinja?” he asked.

  “We played Veterans High a couple of times.”

  Tedic nodded in recollection.

  “That big, slow girl who couldn’t be moved from the key.”

  “Radmila,” Irena remembered. They had held her to four points.

  “Out near the airport, you know, this has been the bloodiest ground. We can’t even count. All those Olympic-era housing blocks out there—shooting people in their apartments has been like shooting bean cans off shelves for the valiant Serbs. But the folks in Dobrinja have been brave. They dig out of their rubble and come to greet the tanks with bricks and rocks. They hold them back. They lost three men—women, too—for every one that they killed. But they’ve held the bullies back. Now, we have the smallest chance to return the favor.”

  DOBRINJA’S OLYMPIAN PANORAMA of ten-story apartment buildings looked almost intact as they approached from behind. Only the accustomed old Soviet satellite corrosion was visible: shattered windows left to decompose like chipped teeth, burgundy paint peeling and retouched with the gray that alone was available.

  But the faces of buildings overlooking Serb territory had been razed. The buildings just refused to accept their demolition. Artillery shells had slammed into the apartments at intimate range. They had screamed in through the windows, blazed through rooms, torn off heads and arms, and soaked the ash and powder of the burned-out walls and floors with blood. Most apartments had been turned into dark pits clinging to sheer rubble.

  A Bosnian who led a defense committee from his building had once waved a handgun truculently late at night and shouted across the indiscernible line. “Why don’t you just finish us off? Come on over, right now, you pussy-faces, give us your best, and get it over with.”

  The Serb general Ratko Mladic had bellowed back, “We have a big army, you goat-fucking fairy. If my men don’t have something to do tomorrow, they’ll all get the clap.”

  THE PARKING LOT of the apartment block had been declared no-man’s-land. No Bosnian could safely inhabit it, yet the Serbs had been unable to take it for their own: fifty yards of concrete scarred with bullets and pitted with shells, some still smoldering. Six cars stranded there when the war began now looked like flattened ladybugs. There were shoes, shirts, and slats of fractured wood scattered over the old parking spaces, decaying under the autumn sun. Up close, Irena realized that they were the bones, ribs, shirts, shins, and shoes of people who had been shot and left along the front lines. A doorframe incongruously left standing in the parking lot led down to what a sign said was a bomb shelter.

  Tedic remembered when the buildings had been finished for athletes’ housing just before the 1984 Olympic Games. The bomb shelters had been conspicuously included to impress Western athletes with the resolve of the socialist alliance to withstand imperialist assault. But the young American skiers and sledders had grown up after Dr. Strangelove and were simply bemused. The bomb shelter became a rendezvous for gay men before the Olympics had even left town.

  Some of the people who were putrefying into the asphalt of the parking lot may have been racing for the bomb shelter. Socialism had built bastions to survive nuclear holocaust, but not the small-arms pops and mortar bangs of ethnic cleansing.

  TEDIC STOPPED THE beer truck at the side of an apartment building and took Irena by the arm over to a basement window that had been wrenched open. She backed in, feet first, a line of hands taking hold of her legs, sides, and finally shoulders before her shoes came down. None of the men or women introduced themselves. Tedic followed, slipping in with surprising agility.

  “Our sewer rats,” he called out to the circle of men and women.

  They answered with subdued cheers, moans, and a couple of handclaps. “And we have baited the trap,” said a slender, mahogany-haired woman in tight blue jeans and a baggy sweater, who seemed to be in charge of everyone but Tedic.

  “I
have brought you an authentic member of the Pepsi generation,” Tedic said with a mock bow toward Irena.

  Irena had a quick impression of young, smart people whose bodies were tapering with each week of war. Many wore glasses that looked outsized and owlish on tightening faces. A couple of flashlights shone up from the floor, cans of light splashed against the ceiling, so that the wires in various colors that had been pulled across the gray space could be traced.

  “We are ready?” asked Tedic.

  “Anytime,” said the girl in charge. Her wrists twitched like branches from the sleeves of her baggy gray sweater. “But soon is advisable. We don’t know when Romeo will be calling.”

  “Or coming,” Tedic added.

  He called the girl Jackie, and hailed a fig-shaped man in the basement as Gerry. Irena guessed it was because of their resemblance to Jacqueline Bisset and Gérard Depardieu. She had a new curiosity about Mel.

  “YOU ARE A twelve-year-old girl,” Tedic said to Irena. “Can you be that?”

  “I was once twelve,” she pointed out. “Do I have a name?”

  Gerry stepped forward, and looked down at the notes he had inked on his hands and wrists.

  “Vanja Draskovic,” Gerry said. “Thirty-nine Hamo Cimic Street in Dobrinja.”

  “Parents?”

  “You’re a step ahead. Milica and Branimir.”

  “Are they real?

  “They were.”

  “Who were they?” Irena demanded.

  “Names from around here,” he said.

  “Where are they now?” Irena wanted to know.

  “Killed when the house was taken,” Tedic explained flatly. When Irena didn’t register horror or disdain, he went on. He was holding a beige telephone handset of the kind repairmen hooked on their belts.

  “We will put a call through to the rectory of the Orthodox Church in Dobrinja,” he said. “They have installed a mortar squad on the roof of the church, so their soldiers can rain holy hot shells on the children and old people of Dobrinja who may one day advance on them with their menacing empty hands. Your parents were not members of this church. You have scarcely been there. Your parents were sophisticated urbanites who considered themselves agnostics. But everyone on the street knows the Orthodox Church.”