Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  Irena pushed herself back from the table when Tedic finished. The chair legs scraped like a small howl. “Why don’t you tell me what you have on your mind,” she said.

  WITH PANACHE, TEDIC offered Irena his right arm. They stepped down a flight of concrete stairs, past a blasé security guard in a quilted gray coat, and onto the subbasement landing. Long gray pipes, intermittently swathed in rolls of adhesive, traced the length of the room. Steam pipes, Irena guessed, but they were dry and silent now.

  Near one end of the long room there was a cinder-block wall. Several mattresses had been upended and propped against the bricks; tufts of white stuffing blossomed out. She could see two, three concentric-ringed targets taped over the mattresses, at about shoulder height. Above them, someone had strung up posters of Milosevic, Karadzic, and a movie card of Isabelle Adjani. Milosevic’s eyes had been shot out. The front teeth in Karadzic’s smile had been blasted away, and a smattering of shots had been spattered over the dunes of his platinum pompadour. Isabelle Adjani’s blue eyes, however, remained intact.

  “The beautiful blue of the Adriatic,” Tedic explained as he swallowed a small smile. “Times are hard enough without having to spend all day looking only at the faces of villains.”

  Irena sat down atop a hard bag of grain that announced in blue and gold letters across its plump chest that it was the gift of the people of Sweden. “I kind of thought that you didn’t want me here just to shuffle papers and sweep floors,” she said.

  TEDIC LET THE silence build between them. He licked his lips. He flattened the top of an adjacent grain bag and sat down. He swung his heels from left to right, like a pendulum, and rocked his head to keep time. A slick of moisture on his turtle-smooth scalp made Irena aware that the bedding, thrumming, and yeasty aromas in the brewery had made the basement warm. But Tedic kept his leather coat cinched around his shoulders; it was his cloak of command.

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

  This time Tedic calculated that he had to speak before the silence between them burst. “I want you to be a spear for us.”

  “From the look of this,” she said, waving her hands at the targets, “you want me to be a bullet.”

  “A few bullets are all we have. I want you to go up into places where you can’t be seen. Into the buildings they have bombed, burned, and left for dead. I want you to hide in those bones and strike a small blow for our city against the big guns that are trying to blow us apart. I want you to turn the corpses they have strewn across our cityscape into ghouls that will haunt their sleep.”

  “I don’t know how to fire a gun,” Irena told him. But Tedic had anticipated that.

  “You’re an exceptional athlete,” he said. “Eyes, reflexes, cool. The shooting part—it’s appallingly easy. Gavrilo Princip could shoot a gun. Lee Harvey Oswald. The executioners who rained shells down on Dubrovnik can shoot really big guns. Thugs all over the world can shoot guns.”

  For the first time, Tedic leaned forward and touched Irena’s wrist. It was a token of confidence, the coach telling his star player, “Only you . . .” When Irena didn’t stiffen or draw back, he went on.

  “We need someone who can climb up and down into inaccessible but opportune places,” he said. “We need someone who can learn new moves quickly, and perform under pressure. We need someone who can kick ass. Whether your shots hit or not scarcely matters. This game we score differently. Each time you shoot, the blare off the bricks lets people know that those who are trying to kill us cannot rest comfortably in the apartments they have stolen. We will not just shrivel inside these hovels, burning chairs and going hungry.”

  “I’m kind of a pacifist,” Irena said.

  “So am I,” said Tedic. “When the world permits.”

  TEDIC DID NOT have to tell Irena not to speak of their conversation with her family that night. Irena understood—for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Zaric would probably understand—that her life would take her through trials and events that were most agreeably kept from her parents. It was unawareness by mutual consent. Irena wouldn’t discuss her emerging duties at the brewery any more than she would talk to her parents about smoking a joint or letting a boy slide a hand into her blue jeans.

  Over a dinner of crumbled leaves and powdered cheese over rice, Irena did tell them about the ad in VOX offering Smutty Jokes, Loud Moans, or Saucy Confessions.

  “I’m not sure about the difference,” she said. “I notice they’re all the same price.”

  “Smutty jokes,” Aleksandra explained in a forcibly scholarly tone, “have endings that make you laugh and blush because they talk about something that polite people aren’t supposed to comment on. Such as”—here Aleksandra raised her fork thoughtfully, like a mathematician’s pencil—“the sailor who goes to the whore but doesn’t get his money’s worth, per se. ‘I’m sorry,’ says the sailor to the whore, ‘but your whats-it is too large for my whose-it.’ ”

  “I think I can fill that in,” said Irena. “Loud Moans?”

  “Let me try that,” said Mr. Zaric. He carefully removed the vein of a leaf from his lower lip.

  “Loud Moans jokes are funny, as when someone moans because they feel something they didn’t expect. The ending of a Loud Moans joke goes, ‘Yeeeow,’ the sailor shouted at the whore. ‘Your whats-it is too small for my whose-it.’ ”

  Mrs. Zaric figured that Saucy Confessions fell to her. “The whore confesses to something she wants to boast about, anyway. Saucy. She blushes just so you can see her better. The whore says, ‘You’ll never believe what I once did with a sailor.’ Or ‘what I did to a sailor.’ That’s how it goes for a whore, I think. At least the ones in jokes.”

  “How much do the calls to this joke place cost?” Mr. Zaric asked.

  “Three pounds fifty,” said Irena. “More for long distance, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve lost track of what that is,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Maybe a carton of Drina cigarettes. Marlboros or Winstons—you could probably buy only three jokes.”

  Mr. Zaric picked at another leaf vein that clung to the tip of his tongue. “Look at all the money we’re saving by making up our own jokes,” he said.

  The Zarics laughed so hard and so long that they were too tired to press that night’s candle scraps into the can Mr. Zaric kept for that purpose. They simply crawled down to sleep on the floor below where they had been sitting, like dogs or cats that eat and then nap next to their bowls.

  17.

  THE NEXT MORNING Tedic took Irena down into the basement, back to the faces of Milosevic, Karadzic, and Isabelle Adjani looking down on the mattresses, pocked cinder blocks, and a lone black-snouted rifle that Tedic touched with the tip of a finger.

  “You’ve never fired a gun,” he remembered. “Father never hunted? Brother?”

  “Never,” said Irena. “My father has only held an electric guitar.”

  “Guns are beguiling, you know. All that power. Simply put your hands on it in the right way, and people scatter.”

  “I’ve never been interested.”

  “Not even recently?”

  “Especially,” Irena asserted. “I’ve wanted to squeeze the life out of particular people with my bare hands. But shooting someone you can barely see—someone you don’t know—just because they’re there? It sickens me.”

  “Me, too,” said Tedic. “So does murder. Do me a favor, my Material Girl. Hold this for a moment. I guarantee you, it’s unloaded.”

  Tedic was still her boss, and Irena still wanted to play. He lifted the gun as clumsily as he would a basketball and presented the weapon to her.

  “No special way,” he said. “Just like in American movies.”

  Irena was surprised by the weight, but she caught the stock of the rifle in her left arm as it began to slide toward the floor.

  “How does it feel?” Tedic asked.

  “Ugly. Heavy.” Irena turned the rifle over so that she could see the curl of the trigger and the underside of the barrel, burned blac
k like dried blood. She realized that she could handle the rifle’s weight and held it out to Tedic.

  “Ugly,” she repeated.

  “We’ll paint one pink for you,” said Tedic. “Posies on the barrel, if you like, and ribbons on the stock.” He took a step back so that Irena couldn’t hand the gun back to him without stepping forward.

  “You see some fine old ones,” he continued, like the keeper of an antique-jewelry shop. “Rich woods, superior metals, delicately engraved. That was before people could customize cars. Or athletic shoes. Their gun was an extension of themselves. The same as your Air Jordans,” Tedic added with a smile and a gesture at Irena’s feet. “And just about as hard to come by in Sarajevo right now.”

  Irena’s arms were beginning to flag, but she didn’t want Tedic to notice. She balanced the stock of the barrel on her left toe, as if she might actually twirl it. Tedic finally stepped forward and took the rifle from her. She gave it back without hesitation.

  “Okay, what you have here,” he began after a studied pause, “is an M-14 bolt-action Remington. American. Remington made the gun that tamed the West. Gary Cooper, John Wayne never used Czech or Chinese guns. Over on the other side, they use AKs. Best piece of engineering we Reds ever did. Much sturdier than our shoes or plumbing. But Communist engineering always lacked imagination. All the sick little lies that we used to hold things together instead of know-how. I say we—I was a Party man myself, of course. You don’t become an assistant principal by being some kind of Sakharov. We were brilliant primitives, really. Tell us to get to the moon and we invented a flying oxcart. Too young to remember? The Commies got to space first. We made the Yanks look like gutless fools. But then, the Yanks beat our asses because the Russkies built these big mother ships. You can’t just bonk the moon with a spaceship. You have to coax the ship down, softly. All guts and sweat, no fucking finesse. So whose gun would you want in your hands? The folks who gave us John Glenn, Al Capone, Coca-Cola, and color television? Or the folks who couldn’t get to the moon, or out of Afghanistan? So what we have here is a Remington.”

  “How do you get them?” asked Irena.

  “Little birdies from America,” he told her. “Muslim brethren from Saudi Arabia. Jewish brethren from the Mossad. Anywhere we can, including greedy bastards on the other side who’ll sell out their own kind for a price, Allah be praised. You know what the important part of shooting a gun is?”

  “Of course not. Aiming it, I suppose.”

  “Partly. Calmness. Stillness. If your hands quaver by a nose hair, a shot can get thrown by ten yards. To stay calm, you need to be coordinated. Handle the sequence the way a river handles waves. Eye, hand, breathing. Coordination, anticipation. A shot from a gun like this gives your shoulder a hell of a kick. You’ve got to roll with it, or you’ll fall over.”

  Tedic turned the rifle over like a mewling child and slapped a cartridge that he’d drawn from his pocket into the stock.

  “Want to try? Go ahead, put one into Slobo’s nose.”

  “No!” Irena said emphatically. But even as she spoke she took the rifle into her arms.

  “A pack of cigarettes.”

  “I’ll be rotten,” said Irena, who already could see no reason why she should miss a shot. “I can’t afford a pack of cigarettes.”

  “You won’t lose,” Tedic assured her. “Keep your cheek against the stock like that, but softly.”

  “Kiss it. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “In the movies. They mean a passionless kiss. Brush your cheek against the butt as you would a lover’s. Or”—Tedic revised this quickly—“maybe the cheek of a small niece.”

  Irena tucked the butt of the rifle against her left shoulder and brought her left eye against the viewing lens.

  “Blink your right eye,” Tedic instructed. “Find Milosevic’s head, why don’t you, then squeeze your right eye shut. Look hard at Slobo.”

  “Got it,” said Irena almost instantly. She saw small gray circles—eyes and pouches—above Milosevic’s nose.

  “That ugly pig’s ass of a face, grinning while Vukovar bleeds,” Tedic said. “Put that small circle over his nose. See it? The nose of a pig. But none of the charm.”

  Milosevic’s nose bobbed about in the viewfinder. “It jumps around,” Irena said. “I can’t keep it still.”

  “It doesn’t move. It is your breathing,” suggested Tedic. “Put the barrel down a moment. Take a breath. Exhale slightly, evenly, so you aren’t holding a nervous bubble in your chest. Just when the air is done sliding out of your lungs, lift up the rifle. Tighten your finger against the trigger. As soon as you see your shot, squeeze. Waving the rifle around won’t make your shot any better, and it will tire your arms.”

  Tedic paused for a measure, then repeated softly, “Squeeze.”

  Irena squeezed. For an instant, the trigger seemed to resist. But she pulled it deeper toward her chin and an abrupt clap of thunder rang down and sizzled inside her head. She felt a thump against the palms of her hands, as if a ghost were pushing back. The barrel punched her left shoulder, making her shiver. The rifle came to life like the staff turning into a serpent. The barrel rose and bucked in her hands, as if the gun wanted to dance. Irena fought the reflex to bring it down, and instead tried to coax it, point it at the wall, if not at Milosevic’s nose. But the bullet had already gone. Air exploded against her ears. Spikes of wind and sound brushed back her hair and scratched the back of her head. And then the instant was over. The sound was spent; it crashed like the noise of a huge hornet landing.

  Irena was still standing. On her heels, but standing, and still peering down the rifle’s sight. Her shot had pulled right and punctured the pouch under Milosevic’s eye. “Missed,” she said finally—a little breathlessly. “Rushed it. Lifted my head too early to check and missed it.”

  “It would have been enough,” said Tedic. “A pack of cigarettes to you. We’ll show you how to get better.”

  Irena sat down on a pair of old flour bags—Danish, this time—overstuffed with sand and dirt. She could feel her face redden and her breath run short. She couldn’t tell—she would need more experience for that—if it was the weight of the rifle or the exhilaration of getting off a shot. “What the hell do the people upstairs think we’re doing down here?” she asked. She shook her head, as if trying to get a bug to fall out. “The U.N.—the beer people—don’t they hear the noise?”

  Tedic was already thumbing out a Marlboro for her, and acting with elaborate unconcern. “Not a problem so far,” he said. “The sound of a child laughing would stand out more in Sarajevo right now, don’t you think?”

  MOLLY FOUND IRENA in the basement the next morning. Tedic would be there later, he explained. In the meantime, he was there. Molly was a tall, slender, pale man with a gauzy red beard that stippled his chin almost like a spill. He had a wispy reddish ponytail that he had grown, he volunteered, to confound all previous passport photos; he suggested that there had been a few other changes besides. Molly had the component parts of an M-14 laid out across the top of a trunk. He clacked improbable chunks together to show Irena that when you understood your weapon there was only one way it could fit together.

  “Like your own body,” he said shyly.

  Molly’s manner with Irena was bashful. His proficiency was visible in the lively assurance of his hands, which reminded Irena of old school films she had seen of robotic arms on a Japanese assembly line. But his speech was hesitant, as if he were measuring the words for a good fit. Irena, who thought she was good at identifying accents, couldn’t place Molly’s. They spoke in English. His l’s and r’s rolled like a Scotsman’s. His a’s vaulted from his first to his last word like a German’s. As gun parts clacked, she asked, “Are you from Scotland?”

  “South Africa, ma’am. This is the gas port, by the way. It can be hot.” Molly ran three lissome fingertips over a vented opening in the barrel.

  “South African!” she said. She had grown up hearing her parents and teachers
speak approvingly of the struggle against apartheid there. When students sounded as if they had discovered a correlation between capitalism and freedom, their socialist teachers usually reminded them to look at South Africa, where Communists had been in the vanguard of the struggle. Irena didn’t want to assume the worst.

  “Were you an antiapartheid activist?” she asked.

  “This is the clip guide,” Molly answered first. “Make sure there are no obstructions. No, ma’am, on all counts. I was on the other side.”

  Molly stood the M-14 on the back side of the stock, so that the hammer and spring, rear sight, and windage knob were all level with their eyes.

  Irena tried to catch his eye through the trigger guard. “So you were one of the ones who kept Nelson Mandela in prison all those years?”

  “I want you to see the bolt here, ma’am. You must be able to find it just by feeling for it, but not jam it. Never saw Mandela, ma’am. Only on the tube when he got out. Splendid presence, I thought. He could wear a candy wrapper like Armani.”

  “What if you had been told to shoot him?”

  Molly seemed to grasp that no conversation was going to be possible until they had finished this one, so he turned the trigger guard against his wispy beard and asked his own question.

  “By whom?”

  “Whomever,” said Irena. “Army, security, whatever your KGB was. Your boss.”

  Molly shrugged and almost smiled. “It’s my business, ma’am,” he said. “Usually, I don’t miss.”

  Molly went back to clacking. He tried to show Irena where to pinch and turn the windage knob. But she interrupted at each sentence. Impudence was her way of exercising her independence. Molly was clever enough to throw back unapologetic answers, blunted only slightly.