Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “That’s why Molly taught me to fire and roll away.”

  “Fundamental,” said Tedic. “But remember, if it’s that basic, they know it, too.”

  MOLLY CONSIDERED THE moments just before dawn to be the most opportune. People left in apartments on the Serb side were likely to be tired, twitching, and restless from the sounds of a night of their own shelling. Serb snipers, mortar, and artillery crews were tired, hungover, and reckless. They might dare to stretch their legs, get some air, take their coffee, or find a piece of fruit; that could bring them out of their concealed lairs and into the growing light. The first sparks of sun would help obscure any flash from Irena’s gun.

  Early one morning Irena was concealed behind a yellow vinyl couch that had been upended over a window in a fourth-floor apartment on Linden Street. She saw three gray figures scurry across a rooftop on Julijo Vares Street, carrying what she thought looked like a long pipe. But after a hard blink in the dim light she decided it must be a mortar tube. She rushed three quick shots into the midst of the shapes—she was surprised at how quickly she had developed reflexes for this new game—which missed and skipped, but scattered them. One of them stumbled. Irena saw a flickering of pink fingers in the dimness. She thought that the tube must have been valuable for the man to try to hold on to it under fire. A mortar must surely be more important than a length of plumbing. But then there were probably more mortar tubes on the Serb side of Sarajevo—they would be easier to replace—than pipes. The man dropped whatever it was and ran out of view before Irena could decide if she wanted to devote her last two shots to stopping him from carrying a mortar—or risk revealing her hiding place just to prevent him from hauling a length of water pipe.

  “Don’t twist yourself into weaver’s knots agonizing,” Tedic affected to scold her when they reviewed her night’s work. “Life or death, Serb or Muslim, sewage pipe or mortar? Men carrying a pipe tonight can carry a cannon tomorrow. Did you figure that the bastards trying to kill us have stopped eating, drinking, and shitting? ‘If you prick them, will they not bleed?’ But another shot from that spot would have lit up your hiding place like Hong Kong.”

  A FEW MORNINGS later, Irena perched on the blackened rim of an old toilet seat and rested her head against the white-tiled wall in a bombed-out third-floor apartment on Drina Street. Tedic had told her that three trucks would be threading over Branka Surbata Road at first light (they, too, wanted to avoid the burst of brightness from their headlights).

  Irena could feel the dawn begin to creep up around her shortly after six in the morning. Rooftops and trees began to hum with a mild light. She could see a glimmer around her hands from the chutes of light that seeped in through bullet holes. Molly had shown her how to squeeze her eyes shut, count to ten, and open them wide; this widened her pupils to let in more light. The three trucks were open-backed pickups, probably delivering planks to shore up gun emplacements. Irena had told Tedic that she would wait to see the three in a line before firing.

  “I figure that I try to hit the first truck,” she told Tedic. “But not until I can see all three in a line. Or at least two. If I hit the first, the other two have to stop. I have a chance at all of them then. Down the line—one, two, three.”

  Tedic beamed. “From the mouths of babes,” he said.

  When Irena saw the first truck begin to slip past a building and nose down Drina Street, she stayed still. As the second pulled in slowly behind, she lifted the far end of the rifle barrel into the jagged crook of her chosen mortar hole. She was looking through her sight when the third truck began to pull into view from behind a building, and the first one began to slip behind another building. She fired.

  She hit the first truck just behind the driver’s cab. The shot fell uselessly somewhere under the brown tenting. But she put her second shot into the driver’s window of the cab of the second truck, and she could see the truck begin to veer out of her line of sight. The third truck stopped, like a mouse that has run into a wall and tries to see if it can climb over it. Irena squeezed a third, a fourth, and then her last shot into the cab. She could see the glass smash, hear the horn begin to scream. She kept the gun in her slot for a moment, so that she could look down the sight into the cab of the truck. She saw no one slumped against the seat. They would be down on the floor, she figured, hiding or bleeding. She kept her eye there for just a moment to see if the rising light would show her that a slick of pink mist had painted the seats. She was squeezing her eyes and straining to see when rifle shots began to spray around her like hail.

  Two or three bullets whistled through the hole so close to Irena’s head that she could feel clapping in her ears. Another shot smacked just below the old mortar hole in which she had rested her rifle, and burst into a powder that dashed into her eyes and nose. Irena fell back, gagging on the grit. Her eyes burned with gravel. Her gun leaped to the floor. The force of the blast threw her back and head against a wall. She rolled left just to breathe, and saw that she was in the hallway. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes to blot out dust. When she looked at her hand she saw blood.

  She crawled onto her elbows and tucked a hand into her chest to feel for a wound; her chest was fine. She could feel bruises squishing on her knees as she scuttled down the dark hallway into a black corridor, rolled onto her back, and rubbed her hands over her head, feeling for a gash. She found nothing, but she began to feel something leaching into her left eye. She had her hands over her eyes when a shell banged into the bathroom she had just left and shook down the wall above her head. The hall got suddenly bright as the wall fell away. A gale of plaster, paper, tile, glass, glue, soot, and shit rolled into her. She made herself lunge through the shit and bright light.

  She found the first step and went down, leading with her head until she thought better of that and rose in a crouch to crawl up. She was halfway up the flight to the fourth floor when another shell thudded in a room below. The stairs under her hands and knees shuddered. Irena clambered into the hallway of the fourth floor, and realized it was the top. She couldn’t run down, because mortar crews across the way had decided—she would have—that if the sniper whose muzzle flash they had seen was still alive, he would be trying to dash downstairs and out of the building.

  “A TRICK MOLLY gave me,” Irena told Tedic after she had napped for an hour against the rubble of a door before picking her way down the back of the littered staircase, where Tedic was waiting in his truck. “ ‘Go up where they won’t think you’ll be,’ he said. ‘Take a nap, and go down when they think you’re dead.’ It’s good. Until they figure it out the next time.”

  Irena had half a dozen small cuts along her eyebrows and forehead, almost like cat’s scratches, from the debris that fell from the bathroom. Tedic had Mel heat a tub of water so that she could bathe before he drove her home. He winked at her from the snugness of his vulture’s perch at the steel desk near the loading dock. “Tell your parents that you got the scratches from slipping on the stairs when you went outside to smoke,” he said. “It will make them feel richly justified. And deeply incurious.”

  “You don’t have to explain to anyone these days why someone dies,” Irena reminded him. “Why is anyone still alive? That’s tricky.”

  TEDIC DECIDED THAT Irena had earned a couple of daytime assignments. She spent the next day firing four shots spaced over six hours at shades in the windows of an apartment building on Avala Street in which mortar teams were trying to obscure themselves, or so Tedic was convinced. If Irena thought she saw a shade sagging against the sill, or pinned against the window, she assumed that someone had tugged it down for extra concealment, or even emotional security.

  “Fools,” she muttered to herself while aiming and firing. “Bloody, bloody fools.”

  IT WAS EARLY, not much before ten in the morning. The Knight was signing off with Peter Tosh. Oh, your majesty, can’t you rescue me from war, war, war. He chuckled there—the very idea seemed made for the Knight’s amusement. Irena was looking for
sagging shades from a gash in the bricks on the third floor of a flour warehouse that had been looted long ago. A few sacks were still strewn on the floor, deflating more each day as rats darted inside their folds, then out again with whitened snouts. Irena was no longer afraid of rats, at least in daylight, but she wasn’t going to compete with them for a sack of flour.

  A flash of pink flesh winked at her through a bristle of bare tree branches, from the roof of a garage in an alleyway just beyond Lenin Street in Grbavica. It was six inches of a stomach, a stomach so still that Irena assumed its owner must be dead. Or wounded, she decided when she saw it shudder slightly. Irena raised her rifle carefully and squinted through her sight. It was a girl’s stomach, for sure, tapering into a pair of high-boned hips, and now it seemed to jiggle with laughter. A boy’s hands, Irena guessed, pushed and patted the hips.

  Tedic had said that alleyway was a place where Serbs rolled their field artillery pieces at night. The garages concealed the artillery from the U.N. monitors, who did not, at any rate, seem to be searching for the big guns as if their lives depended on it; and theirs did not.

  Irena guessed that the stomach belonged to a girl no older than herself, a sturdy birch of a girl soldier, she imagined, from one of the outlying Serb hamlets, who had taken a joyride into Sarajevo with a soldier boyfriend. Irena pictured them rolling their cannon into the garage to cool it down from the night’s firings into Bistrik and Stup, and locking it away for the day. It was a bright day, after a few that had been overcast. The high midmorning sun was warm enough to make you doff your coat, loosen your shirt, or, in the case of this girl, shuck it aside to boast to your friends that although it was December in Sarajevo, you were going to get a tawny Monte Carlo tan.

  Irena imagined the boys on the crew clapping as the girl swayed her hips and slipped out of her black sweater, perhaps draping it around the neck and shoulders of a shy lieutenant. She imagined a black brassiere beneath, with a shocking red ribbon. Oh, you bitch, you. Perhaps the Knight, if they could hear him, had goaded them along with the Clash: We’re a garage band, we come from garageland, things hotting up. . . .

  Someone placed a beer can over the girl’s belly button. She laughed at the cold, laughed at the can, and tried to balance it along the ridges of her muscles without laughing. But she kept laughing, giddy after a night’s work sending black steel shells and fire into the pale flesh of hiding people, and drunk after just a sip. The can was the particular leaf-green of a Heineken, with a white medallion declaring it was the official beer of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands, whoever she was, dead center in Irena’s sights when she squeezed out her last shot. For queen and country. She felt the thump of the shot clap her shoulder like the fist of an old teammate, as if to say, “Way to go.”

  “Mist and foam” was all Irena told Tedic later.

  23.

  ONE MORNING IRENA heard someone calling her name outside on the staircase, and Aleksandra shouting back, “Careful out there, whoever you are! You could get shot looking for her!” Then, after a moment, she shouted again. “Third floor! If she’s home, she’s heard you. Now, off the damn staircase!”

  A man’s right to endanger his own life stamping up their building’s staircase was circumscribed—Irena and Aleksandra had talked it over, and established the principle firmly—by the fact that his appearance might attract the attention of snipers and mortar crews across the way.

  Irena was home; she opened the door speculatively. A short man with an eggshell head and an unclipped mustache that bobbed above his mouth in time with each word walked carefully down the hallway toward her until his words could reach her.

  “Scary lady down there,” he said.

  “You have to know her,” said Irena.

  “No, I don’t,” said the man. He had stopped in front of the door and was close enough for Irena to smell the wet dirt on his shoes.

  “Are you Irena?” he asked. She nodded.

  “Zaric?” Irena nodded again.

  “Number Three High School basketball team?”

  “Are you scouting for the Bulls?” she asked.

  The man hesitated for a moment, then, realizing the joke, slapped a palm against his baggy pants.

  “I’m a cabdriver,” he said. “A friend wants to talk to you.”

  “Where?”

  The man threw his right hand over his left shoulder, two, then three times.

  “Over there somewhere,” he said. “Across the way. I’m Zoran Vikic, by the way.”

  “Who?”

  “Zoran Vikic.”

  “No. Who wants to talk to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you are,” asked Irena, “related?”

  Mrs. Zaric had been napping against a wall, but by now she had awakened and was standing behind her daughter.

  “I told you. I’m a cabdriver,” he repeated testily.

  Mrs. Zaric stepped in front of her daughter. “I’m afraid I don’t quite—” she began.

  “Cabdrivers have radios,” Zoran said. “It’s the only way both sides of Sarajevo can talk. Some friend of yours over there has something to tell you. The friend found a cabdriver over there that radioed your name. Correction: your friend paid a cabdriver. That’s how we make a living now. That driver put out a call, and I heard it. Your friend said you had probably left Grbavica and that you had a grandmother over here near the synagogue. So I asked at the synagogue.”

  “Excuse me.” Mrs. Zaric stepped in. “He asked for my daughter? I am Dalila. My husband is Milan Zaric. Not us?”

  Zoran Vikic shook his head a little too proudly. “First time I heard of you. The Serb driver over there says his guy asked for Irena. Said she is pretty. Come on down now, he’s waiting.”

  Mrs. Zaric turned to murmur something to Irena. “Tomaslav,” she said softly. “He got over there somehow, and no one knows who he is.”

  The driver tapped his wrist impatiently, even though he had no watch. “Come on, he’s waiting.”

  “Tomaslav is in Chicago,” Irena finally answered. “Remember Aunt Senada’s letter from Cleveland.”

  “How long do you think you can fool me?” Mrs. Zaric lashed out suddenly. “I know that my son and my sister are keeping something from me. And you, too. Tomaslav couldn’t hide his jerking off and he can’t hide that he’s coming here. Don’t think you kids are the only ones with secrets,” hissed Mrs. Zaric.

  “I’ll remember that,” Irena shot back. She took heavy, hesitant steps down the staircase, as if she were walking on a sprain. With each step, she wondered what she would say over the cabdriver’s radio to Coach Dino.

  IT WAS A Sarajevo Taxi, a Marlboro-red Lada, practically as small as the flip-top box. Zoran reached in for the radio above the dashboard. “Talk standing,” he commanded. “If shooting breaks out, we can run better.

  “This is thirty-four over here,” he announced. “Eighteen, this is thirty-four, near the synagogue. I found the package, and have it here.”

  Thirty-four then paused and clicked the microphone twice. “Eighteen, thirty-four, do you read? Over.”

  Mrs. Zaric had an arm around her daughter. The radio squealed once more before a coarse voice sizzled from the speaker.

  “Thirty-four, eighteen here,” he said. “Good, good. I have shipper here. Shipper is here and wants to say hello. Over.”

  Zoran held the microphone out to Irena, like a small revolver. “Squeeze the trigger on the microphone to talk,” he explained. “Let it go to listen. When you’re done saying something, say ‘Over,’ so they know you’re done, and let up on the trigger.”

  “Perhaps I should speak first,” said Irena.

  It was her best hope to alert Coach Dino to her mother’s presence. She wanted to stop him from declaring through the fizz and pops that he longed to squeeze her ass in his hands, which is what Irena was expecting—and hoping—to hear.

  But when the voice hissed out of the radio, it belonged to a girl.

  “HELLO
?”

  It was a young voice. Maybe Coach Dino had taken the precaution of bringing along a friend. Maybe—the possibility was so likely that Irena was seething as the mere suggestion burned in her brain—Coach Dino had made a new friend. Or perhaps it really was Tomaslav. He might have found an old friend on the other side of town who would do the speaking to protect his identity.

  “Hello?” the girl said again. Then, after some audible coaching, she said, “Over?”

  “Hello, yes,” said Irena. “Over.”

  “Irena? Hello, Irena? Over.”

  “Yes, over. I mean, yes, this is me. Who is this, please? Over.”

  The voice might have said something, but it was blocked. Irena kept forgetting to release the trigger after saying “Over.” She held it down and repeated herself.

  “This is Irena, yes, Irena. I am Irena. Over, over.”

  “Irena! Irena, this is Amela. Amela Divacs. Something has happened! Princess Diana and Prince Charles are separated!”

  Seconds passed as Irena wheeled around to look at her mother. The muscles in Mrs. Zaric’s face had tightened into the look of a frightened cat.

  “Over.” It was Amela’s voice, or someone pretending to be Amela.

  The driver dipped his head to signal that Irena should squeeze to respond.

  “Princess Diana and Prince Charles are what?” And then she remembered: “Over.”

  “Separated,” said Amela. “The first step of divorce. It’s all in the news here. Over.”

  “What about her two boys?” asked Irena. “Over.”

  “They’ll live with her and see Prince Charles on weekends,” Amela answered. “Over. Wait. But some of her friends worry that the Queen might try to keep them. Over.”

  “How does she look?” asked Irena.