Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  When a new snow began to fall that morning, Tedic decided that the storm would drape a veil over the building. He sent Irena up to the sixth floor of the south tower. Irena, per Molly’s more persuasive instruction, climbed to the seventh floor. She turned the corner and got thrown back—got frightened, really—by the intense wind and light. The brightness seemed to swell in the snow. But the staircase ran up the center of the tower. If Irena got down on her knees in the ash and grit, no one across the way would be able to see her. But she might also not be able to find a shot. She needed to inch forward.

  Irena took the newspaper pages from under her smock and crumpled the sheets and rolled them over the slick, smoky floor until they looked like game balls. She then slipped out the blue shirt, the gray slacks, and the ski mask, tucking the balls of newspaper into the legs and sleeves. She pressed two broad sheets together and rolled them into the size of a soccer ball, which she stuffed into the ski mask.

  “I have kissed worse-looking boys than you,” she said to her news-stuffed doll. She began to edge the figure toward the southern edge of the seventh floor. She took the tip of her rifle, poked it into the dummy’s back, and pressed the figure forward slowly. Irena had once run a fifty-meter dash in six seconds. She could make that kind of sprint in thirty explosive steps, time after time, in a basketball game. But crawling twenty-five meters across the floor as slowly as a cockroach was harder by miles. Her ankles and toes ached from driving her weight across the floor so slowly. The floor bit into her elbows. Every inch stung her bones and stirred debris into her eyes.

  The slow advance was meant to be undetectable to anyone across the way who might be training his field glasses over the vacant windows of the south tower. Irena crept. She slept for several minutes each hour. She wet herself after two hours, as she nosed through the snow that had sluiced in. Three hours of crawling brought her within three feet of the window frames, bordered at the bottom by low-rise platforms, no taller than her old athletic bag, which had covered the grilles of the building’s heat and air-conditioning, and had now been rendered so spectacularly superfluous.

  When Irena turned her head sideways, she saw a note that Molly had left two days ago, held fast against the grate—it was too good a joke to miss—by a refrigerator magnet from “Adamovic Undertakers. Putting Sarajevo to Rest Since 1955.” Molly’s writing was small and spidery.

  Long way from the Cape. Look down to yr right and you’ll see the holy stones. Call when in the neighbourhood. Cheers.

  THE SERBS HAD make a fine shooting perch of the Old Jewish Cemetery, on a hill just above Grbavica. It had location, elevation, and afforded snipers and mortar teams the shelter of scores of stone grave markers, from which they could choose their shots in almost leisurely security. Tedic, who had put the space under observation from Momo and Uzeir, had been told that Serb artillery crews could be seen unrolling blankets behind the stones for winter picnics.

  There was a large stone shard directly ahead of Irena, gray like the ash and rubble falling and blowing all around her, although this stone had come from the remains of a mortar blast on Marshal Tito Boulevard and had been hauled up by Molly. Irena pulled the glove off her right hand to feel for the rags, cut from grain sacks, that she knew were wound around the stone.

  She tapped the top of the wrapping until she felt something harder, colder than the stone, and more perfect. Oh my, she thought, it’s there, and more beautiful than anything any other boyfriend has ever shown me. Master craftsmen at the Sarajevo Brewery had gouged a hole in the stone. They’d cemented an old .38 Browning police revolver—carried by Interpol forces across the continent, and by Serb gangs who needed a light, reliable weapon to shoot people when they rousted them from their homes—into the base of the rock. A chain trailed from the rags and across the stone—the kind of chain you might see rusting inside the flush mechanism of a toilet, which is exactly where Tedic had gotten it.

  Irena tucked the paper-muscled shirt into the waist of the trousers and tied it with a rope. She moved the dummy behind the heating grille and balanced the paper-stuffed ski mask atop the torso. When she was certain that her sniper doll would hold his position in the wind and snow, she pushed the snout of her M-14 into the back of the ski mask, gently nudged her gun muzzle from left to right, and back again. The stuffed ski mask turned the way a searching head might turn behind a rifle. She took the end of the chain in her right hand and softly called out to Molly, who should have installed his thin shoulders behind the grille on the floor below by now.

  “Our boyfriend is ready, Molls.”

  There was an anxious moment before she heard his voice chiming back through the ash and snow. “Lovely to hear you, dear,” he said softly. “The play begins with you. Take your time.”

  The cheetah always looks for the abandoned baby wildebeest, Molly had told her the day before. He doesn’t pick on someone his own size.

  For fuck’s sake, she had pleaded, speak a language I understand, Molls. No parables. No tribal elder mumbo jumbo.

  I mean, said Molly, that when we look weak, they attack. That’s the law of this jungle, too.

  Irena took a breath. She counted to three, for no particular reason except that it came up more quickly than five. She feared she might not reach five. One, two, another breath. One, two, and then on this three she jerked on the chain. The chain tugged on the trigger of the gun, which was soldered into the stone. The Browning burst inside the rags. A wild shot went off. The gun muzzle flamed. The rags smoldered.

  Across the way, Serb snipers behind the old stones in the cemetery saw Molly’s abandoned wildebeest—a lone gunman, a scared kid—fire a wild, foolish shot. They saw their chance to slip their bullets into the shooter’s brain while he was still frozen by the shock of the retort.

  The first Serb shot clapped the air around Irena’s ears. While she rolled over and away from her effigy just behind the heating grate, another bullet bloodlessly clipped the top of the dark blue ski mask she had left behind. It pinged into the ceiling above her, rattling emptily against the concrete like a thunderclap.

  “Got them, love,” Molly called up softly into the settling ash. “Hold tight.”

  Molly had seen a slim inch of ski mask and a glint from a glass scope on the other side rise above a stone. Irena tensed her bones, from her toes to her shoulders. She counted one, two, and then the sound of Molly’s shot slapped her around the chest and made her ears quiver. By the time the thud died, she could hear Molly cooing from his perch below.

  “Got one on the carpet, love.”

  Irena sprang to her feet. Through her scope she saw a gray shape lying facedown in the snow over a grave. A pink shroud blossomed—a peculiar word, but it’s what came to her—around his shoulders. But the Angel of Death had friends. Irena saw another form come into sight against the snow.

  Another sniper, she guessed, or a man on a mortar crew, had seen his comrade shot and sprang out to try to save his life. The figure slipped and fell down. He had pluck. He had valor. He groped, got up, and kept running. Irena saw his head and shoulders behind the snowy branches of a tree (she was a city kid, she reminded Tedic later, and didn’t know the difference between an oak, a linden, and a palm). As he ran, he shook off snow, and his body stood out against the sprinkling whiteness drifting all around. She raised her rifle and flattened her feet against the floor. She placed her gun sight over the dead center of the broad black back and pulled the trigger against her chin until she felt the smack against her shoulder.

  Irena fell to her knees. The shape plunged like a felled bird and flattened against the snow. She crept carefully toward the edge of the floor, and through the soft gauze of fat snowflakes she saw two pink shadows oozing. Angels in the snow, she thought.

  TEDIC REWARDED MOLLY and Irena with hot baths. He had Mel fill old tin washtubs with scalding water heated in one of the brewing vats. Molly and Irena oohed and inched down into their respective tubs. The floor and walls of the basement were frigid. Steam roi
led up from the washtubs, reddening and veiling their chalky bodies.

  “The steam is delicious,” said Molly. “Rather like hellfire, I imagine.” He made a show of patting his cheeks.

  Tedic wandered in to apologize. He had no bubble bath, he said. He did have a potent cognac, though, and they toasted the day’s work. Irena exulted in feeling her toes again—she had almost given them up for dead—and the cognac braising her brain. But she and Molly didn’t tell Tedic about the rag doll she had taken up to the girders. They might find the chance to use the ploy again. And besides—Irena’s mother had taught her—it was good to have a few secrets sewn into your pockets, like spare coins.

  Tedic said he had gone to see the rabbi at the central synagogue to explain that they had had to fire a few shots into the cemetery. Someone—two people, actually—had been killed, he said. He didn’t want the rabbi to hear the news from the Knight, who might say that the snipers had merely been laying wreaths on the graves.

  “I said to the rabbi, ‘I beg you to understand, Rebbe, that turning the resting place of our ancestors—and for Sarajevans, they are our ancestors, too—into a sniper’s nest offends all abiding Muslims.’ ” Tedic made a mock bow of prayer toward Molly and Irena, luxuriating in their tubs.

  “ ‘But murderers are hiding behind those gravestones to rain death upon our city.’ And the rabbi,” said Tedic, “the rabbi shuffles over to a pillow on the floor, reaches behind, and picks up this bottle of cognac. And he thunders at me, like God himself. ‘It is better that the stones and bones of our dead be burned to powder,’ he says, ‘than to see another living child shot down in our streets.’ Then the rabbi unplugs the bottle and holds it out to me. He says, ‘Give the bastards back ten times what they have given us! Allah be praised.’ Now there is a religion I can believe in,” said Tedic above Molly and Irena’s laughter.

  Tedic had an old teacher’s intuition of when he was being left out, and the sense to accept it. He left the cognac on the brick ledge next to Molly and said hearty, brief goodbyes. The water in their tubs was cooling, the steam falling, flattening. Molly flung water from his fingers to grasp the cognac bottle—something Hungarian and unrecognizable—by the neck and pass it to Irena.

  “The two people,” she began. “You figure they were anyone you know? Old friends from the bush?”

  “Oh, Christ, I never think of that. Vice versa for them, I’m sure. Could have been one of your old mates too, I suppose. Leave it out, love.”

  Molly splashed as he turned in his tub and peered over the side for the towels they had folded over their shoes.

  “Even you, Molls?” said Irena. “There are things even you can’t bear to wonder about?”

  Molly cupped his hands, his exquisite nails steamed and gleaming, to hold some of the last hot water against his face.

  “I try to think about what will keep me alive,” he said.

  “He was running to help his friend, Molls. It’s what I’d do for you and the other way round.” Irena was beginning to shiver as the sides of the tub cooled. “For fuck’s sake, I got him in the back.”

  “They were trying to shoot us,” Molly reminded her. “They would have shot at ten or twenty others who couldn’t shoot back. They weren’t in the cemetery just for a little groping and dry-humping, love.”

  “Still, still,” said Irena. “Do you think—do you ever wonder—will we go to hell for it?”

  “I’ll get there way before you,” Molly told her.

  “Don’t fend me off, Molls,” said Irena. “We can be girls together. Pour it straight up. Don’t save it till I’m older. I may not get much older. Hell may be something I need to know about. Like squeezing your eyes in the dark.”

  Molly motioned Irena to lift the cognac bottle up from her tub so that he could get hold of it. Her fingers were pink and pretty but trembled slightly in the creeping chill.

  Molly sank his bony shoulders into the last layer of heat before popping back up. “When I was a young shoot—Dutch church and all—hell was the place we got sent for being bad,” he said. “Now? I think She made hell so that folks in places like Sarajevo would know there’s someplace worse.”

  They reached out for their towels, kidding each other like old teammates about their bruises and scars.

  27.

  A COUPLE OF weeks later, when Zoran drove Irena out to the airport next to Dobrinja, the snows had hardened and the ice had turned a grimy gray. Zoran parked behind a block of bombed-out apartment buildings and stayed in his cab. Irena walked over the cold courtyards toward a row of hedges that Bosnian smugglers had claimed as a bastion. The Bosnian Army didn’t try to displace them. A barrier of hardened professional criminals, ready to die for their plunder, was more dismaying to Serb marauders than Bosnia’s army of conscripted clerks and nearsighted students.

  A cluster of men in glossy leather jackets stood smoking behind one hedge. They carried their rifles over their shoulders as casually as if they were knapsacks. Irena almost stopped to admonish them: “Don’t hold your gun that way if you’re serious. You won’t be able to find it to point it.” But she understood—the roughnecks weren’t interested in aiming their rifles.

  A man in a smart fur cap snarled at her, “Whore, what are you doing here?”

  Irena answered in an even tone. “Meeting a friend.”

  “Good. We can all use friends. Is your friend as pretty as you?”

  “Prettier,” Irena answered, with a willing smile.

  “Good. We should all have a party.” The man wiped the back of his hand against a three-day stubble.

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  “You don’t understand,” he said more harshly.

  “My friend,” said Irena. “She is not just a friend. We are special friends. We are in love.”

  The man’s gang snickered behind him and stamped their feet as they flicked ashes from their cigarettes.

  “That’s disgusting,” he said. “That is sick.” Irena contrived to look earnest.

  “Allah made us so,” she said.

  “Allah has nothing to do with it,” said the man. “Allah disapproves. American movies, American music, Sinéad O’Connor, and Elton John have turned you into a bull dyke.”

  “Then I’ll pray for Allah to save me.” Irena pressed on around the man and knelt down near the edge of one of the farther hedges to look across the landing strip.

  “Allah is far away,” he called after her. “I am here and now!” But he stayed on his side of the thicket.

  U.N. SOLDIERS PATROLLED the airport. They were Frenchies during most shifts, spelled by Ukrainians and occasional Egyptians, posted to prevent Sarajevans from braving a salvo of Serb bullets to flee a hundred yards across the runway into unbesieged Bosnian territory. The Serbs said the Muslims could slip out from there to take up arms against Serbs. The Bosnians said that anyone who was rash enough to run through gunfire was probably more desperate to eat than to fight, but they had to accept the prohibition. (And, in any case, no one wanted to open a channel for evacuation that could empty the city and drop it, like a deflated football, into Serb hands.)

  Smugglers and people wild or desperate enough to try looked forward to Ukrainians or Egyptians relieving the French. A wad of deutsche marks, a plastic flask of Dewar’s, or a carton of Camels could induce a Ukrainian or Egyptian soldier to turn his back. Apprehending brave, desperate people gave the best of them no satisfaction anyway. Some Bosnian gangs had successfully bought off Serb units—bribed them to shoot their guns into the sky while gangsters ran across the runway with sacks of cocaine strapped to their waists and saddles of lamb across their backs. But the French didn’t lack for money, meat, cigarettes, or alcohol; they were therefore depressingly incorruptible.

  As the light flattened into a gold stream that flowed across the landing strip, Irena glimpsed the shoulder patches on three blue-helmeted soldiers: the blue, white, and red of France.

  SHE SAW AMELA waving from under a tree that was ju
st above the Serb side of the runway. Blond hair bouncing against her shoulders, still long, slightly curly, like corn silk at the ends, and a fine-boned hand waving at the end of a slender wrist. She wore a dark green coat. She was smiling. Her mouth was open. Irena caught a glimpse of white teeth, a pink flash of tongue, as if Amela were calling to her. Irena called back. “Hello! Hello!” Amela was holding a satchel in her left hand, her ball-handling hand. Perhaps she had been shopping. Irena imagined apples, oranges, walnuts, and bananas. “Hello! Hello!” she called.

  Her words seemed to fall halfway across the field before her voice was swallowed by a larger sound. An aircraft had just landed on the western end of the runway, a dark gray-green transport, probably the last flight in the last light of the day. The whine of its engines overwhelmed Irena. It rolled slowly in between the two sides of the runway—snub nose, vast belly, beady windows, obese, dawdling wheels, and finally the stout tail with the yellow, red, and black patch of the German Air Force.

  Craning around a wheel, Irena saw Amela galloping across the runway. Her blond curls, which she always wore pinned up in a game, flounced like a horse’s mane with each stride. With no Frenchie to stop her on the Serb side of the field—why would any Serb risk a bullet to escape into beleaguered Sarajevo?—Amela was drawing near to the plane’s rear wheels. Irena leaped into her own run. She had taken three, four strides when she saw that Amela’s satchel had a mesh screen. A gray bird with a black beak and a sweet red feather-fluff of a tail was inside.

  THE GIRLS RAN into each other’s arms under the back end of the aircraft. They swung each other around in a dance step, locking arms, skipping, giggling, laughing, and crying too much to draw enough breath to speak. A Blue Helmet surprised them. He had the stock of his rifle against his chin, and was shouting in English into the scream of the engines.

  “Get down!” he yelled.

  They did.