Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  29.

  AS THE BOASTS about a Viper seemed to increase over the weeks that followed, Irena saw Tedic showing a visitor through the brewery. She caught sight of Tedic gesturing and speaking to the man as they stood on a catwalk above the brewing floor. (“As if,” she told Tedic later, “you know something about making beer.”) She even heard Tedic raising his voice over the rumpus of churning and sloshing in a brewing vat to recite statistics to the poor man about drainage capacity. (“As if,” she added later, “you know anything about drainage capacity.”)

  Mel volunteered to Irena that the visitor ran a brewery in Mexico. The United Nations had permitted him passage on a supply flight so that he could advise the Sarajevo Brewery on how certain aspects of production might be streamlined to compensate for the inevitable demands and shortages caused by war. (Especially, Irena thought, when half the cans in the production line are used to make hand grenades.)

  Irena had never seen a Mexican. She had a vague impression of sun, prickly plants, and fiery spices. The Mexican visitor seemed to carry the sun with him. It had seeped into his smile, blackened his hair, and crisped his skin. He seemed to dispense winks when he knew that eyes were upon him.

  On the second afternoon of his round of inspections and appraisals, Tedic took the visitor into one of the dirt-floored basement rooms and unrolled a map under a bright, buzzing light. He took care to secure each corner against the floor with a full can from the production line.

  “I think I understand your drainage problems,” said the visitor in English with a tight smile. “Please show me what you’re talking about here.”

  Tedic crushed the end of a Marlboro into the dirt and pointed into nine circles on the map, from Mount Hum in the north to Novo Sarajevo in the south.

  THE VISITOR WAS Jacobo Leyva, who had a family-run brewery in Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, producing Cerveza Moctezuma, which was popularized on billboards throughout west-central Mexico as “the beer of emperors.” In fact, it was a brew of refugees. Jacob Levy had created Der Schwarzwald beer just after the Great War in the Black Forest town of Baden. It was considered to have a distinctive taste of caramel. The beer won a widening following through the 1920s and ‘30s, and Jacob Levy grew prosperous (though German Jews, eager to avoid the taint of ostentation, preferred to say “comfortable”).

  But the Nuremberg Laws, known explicitly at the time as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, were handed down in 1935. Jacob Levy had married a young Catholic woman, Maria Fenzel. They had two children, whom the new laws deemed as outlaw as their Jewish father and crossbreeding mother.

  A committee of brown shirts in hobnailed boots strutted noisily into Jacob Levy’s brewery to announce that they were taking over his business and home for the state. Jacob Levy himself took a prideful stride outside and wrenched down the German flag that had flapped over the brewery’s entrance.

  While many other German Jews debated how long the hopelessly hooligan Nazis could keep a grip on power, Jacob Levy and his family booked passage on a ship from Bremerhaven to Havana.

  “We got out,” he told his grandson years later, “just before they would have measured our noses and pinned yellow stars on our breasts.”

  In Havana, the Levys hired a boat to Veracruz. They purchased Mexican citizenship there with the last scraps of cash with which they had escaped. The family brew was lightened to tempt the local tastes of Jalisco, where the Levys settled, and renamed for the Aztec emperor who died defending his city from conquistadores in hobnailed boots.

  Jacob Levy’s grandson inherited his name, which was also modified to fit the local culture. Jacobo Leyva was resigned to finding a place in the family business. But first he spent a summer on the Kibbutz Gvulot in Israel’s Negev, digging up peanuts, potatoes, and carrots. It was the early 1970s. Eight Arab armies encircled Israel and threatened to storm over the border on any given dawn.

  Jacobo Leyva dug up legumes and tubers in the hot, dry daylight. He could see his smooth student’s hands toughening and the muscles in his arms tightening into lean cords. At nightfall, he applied those same muscles in the embrace of willing young kibbutznik daughters who considered him exotic. “A jolt of tequila for little girls raised on dairy milk,” said one.

  But shortly before midnight Jacobo would slip back into his American blue jeans and substitute an Uzi in his arms. Until dawn, he and other slightly spoiled sons and daughters from Westchester and Winnetka would stand guard along Gvulot’s barbed fences, scouring the dark-violet desert horizon.

  Jacobo Leyva thought about staying. He had found a fresh and precious sense of identity away from Mexico and his family’s business. His grandfather had been stripped of citizenship and sent into exile. The grandson could help build a national homeland for the children of the Holocaust.

  One day three visitors drove down from Tel Aviv to explore geological sites nearby and stopped for lunch in the flowery garden restaurant that the kibbutz stocked from its own farms. Jacobo Leyva had finished that morning’s excavation of carrots. He was hurrying back to his communal quarters for a scrub and a nap when he heard visitors calling his name.

  “Jacobo?”

  Small world, small world, imagine that, the guests said in confident European Spanish. “You must be Jacobo.” They had met his mother and father in Athens on vacation. Mrs. Leyva had gushed, “You are Israelis. My son is in Israel, discovering his roots—digging potatoes like an Irishman.” The visitors recalled that she had trawled through the deep of her vast tooled Oaxacan purse and dredged up recent photographs. “See here? My Jacobo holding up an enormous potato like an Olympic trophy. My Jacobo holding another potato with Mickey Mouse ears. Jacobo holding an Uzi in one arm, a fawn-haired girl from West Los Angeles in the other. My son, the warrior-lover,” said Eva Leyva.

  “Why not join us for lunch, Jacobo?” said the visitors.

  Jacobo was intrigued. He had learned that intrigue sprinkled savor into the everyday anxieties of Israelis. The breadth of particular detail the visitors possessed about him was striking. They knew the specific poses of people in the pictures he had sent back home. They deftly mimicked the way his mother, a Mexican Catholic, seemed to italicize her son’s name each time she spoke it.

  A falcon-faced man named Avi made conversation while his two companions, a man and a woman, moved their eyes back and forth over the six spare selections on the menu. Chicken, beef, or lamb, baked or broiled. Hummus all around.

  “Your mother says—she says a mother can tell—that you might want to make a life here in Eretz Yisroel.”

  “The thought occurs,” Jacobo answered without expression. He had confided no such thought to his mother.

  “Would you take up the beer business?” asked Avi. “Most beers have to be imported. Even now, sometimes there is no escape from German technology.”

  “I’m content here in these fields,” Jacobo Leyva assured them. If they were intelligence agents, he wanted to see how they worked for their points. “Digging root vegetables here—it’s blissful.” He took a sip of the kibbutz’s ice tea, sweetened with the kibbutz’s own beet sugar. “Delith-ee-oso,” Jacobo enthused, slyly stressing a Castilian c, which his generation of Mexicans found pretentious. “We build a homeland with a hoe in one hand and an Uzi in the other. I wouldn’t recommend the chicken here,” he advised the men. “I know them personally.”

  Avi beamed so widely that he had to push himself back slightly from the table. His companions slapped down their menus as if they were the last cards in a hand. “There are many ways you might be able to assist Israel in her many trials,” Avi said finally when he had wrestled down his smile. “And many places in which you might assist her. Because those who would destroy us are spread all over the world.”

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, Jacobo Leyva, thickened, wizened, with wrinkles in the corners of his black eyes, had come to Sarajevo to counsel the city’s brewery on techniques for emergency operations, as he had previously advised b
eer makers in war-ravaged El Salvador, Guatemala, and Eritrea. Jacobo told Tedic that the firm he represented believed they owed a debt to the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats of his city. Their forebears had hidden two thousand of Sarajevo’s Jews in pantries, attics, and drainpipes in 1941, as the thugs of Prime Minister Milan Nedic tried to appease their Nazi overseers by storming up the stairs of apartment blocks—“in hobnailed boots, you can be sure”—to drag out Jews, faggots, and Gypsies.

  “Eight thousand died in the camps,” Jacobo told Tedic. “It might have been ten thousand. Sometimes that’s the math of salvation.”

  If Sarajevo should fall now, said Jacobo Levya, Jews would be extinguished from one more place on earth. His firm could not permit that. Nor could they allow the only volunteers to be armed gangs from the Arab world, or else there would be no place for Jews in any Sarajevo that survived.

  “Our friends,” he told Tedic, “must be as sure of us as our enemies.”

  “Your firm?” Tedic said simply. But Jacobo went on blandly. He trained his gaze over Tedic’s map before lowering himself back onto the hard floor. Jacobo was a fastidious man. He slipped a palm beneath his worsted buttocks to avoid sitting on muck in his Swiss slacks.

  “It doesn’t matter if these are all the work of one man or several,” he said heavily. “One viper or a whole nest of vipers. They have at least one superlative shooter over there. If you can find him—or one of them—stop him.”

  It was the answer Tedic expected, if not the one that he had hoped to hear.

  “Let’s suppose we can find him,” he suggested. “Or, at least, one such him.”

  “Bait a trap. But that would be taking a chance. He might slip the trap and leave you nothing. A better plan is to figure out who he is, then find out where he sleeps. Kill him,” Jacobo said softly, “between breaths.”

  The barefaced gravity of the phrase made Tedic squirm and smile. “If we can find out who he is,” he said finally. “But Sarajevo is not Gaza. Unlike your firm, we hardly have the means to go house to house on the other side of the river.”

  “You have no one over there?”

  “A few people passing information. Selling it, I should say. No one to send on that kind of operation.”

  Jacobo shifted to slide his left hand beneath his backside. With his right hand, he rubbed a thumbnail over a stray thread creeping out of a buttonhole of his soft blue shirt. “It doesn’t take a team of commandos,” he said. “A pretty girl with a rope or a razor. Or a pretty boy. A grandmother who can tuck a bomb under a pillow could get the job done.”

  Tedic lifted the beer can that held down the north of Sarajevo and let the map snap back between them over the line of the Miljacka.

  Jacobo offered his next question as quietly as if there were a stranger in the room. “What about the Prince?” he asked.

  Tedic lifted the eastward can. Most of Sarajevo rolled up beneath them. Only the streets and lots south and west of the river, marked by thick red pen strokes showing artillery emplacements and snipers roosts, were visible. “We don’t do business with him,” he answered. He thought a moment before adding, “His firm. Not anymore.”

  “Sometimes,” Jacobo admonished, “you have to go to the one man who sells just the right nail you need to finish the whole barn. What you think of him doesn’t matter.”

  “Arabs playing Day of the Jackal on the Serb side of Sarajevo? Arabs swinging through the evergreens on Mount Igman?” said Tedic. “That’s too hilarious. They’d have no chance.”

  Jacobo Leyva was no longer a lion-legged young kibbutznik. His knees ached like an old dog’s. He had to stand before he fell over. Tedic noticed caramel-brown Italian loafers, their prosciutto-thin soles squishing in the muck, as Jacobo’s knees snapped back into place. “You mean it could be a suicide mission?” he asked.

  Whatever else Jacobo knew, he left unsaid, on the floor. His hands smacked as he rubbed flecks of dirt from his palms and discreetly tapped the tips of his fingers against his worsted thighs.

  Tedic stood up, too. He was a head shorter than the Mexican, and had some trouble catching his eye. “You’d be amazed,” he told Jacobo, “at some of the people we have to work with.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” said Jacobo.

  TEDIC TOOK JACOBO upstairs, where he had another room prepared for a further conference. But first, near the loading dock Mel had heated some water on one of the small wood cookstoves that leather and silver craftsmen in the Old City hammered out for two hundred deutsche marks. He poured the water over the grounds of some dark Italian coffee their visitor had brought along in a waxed bag.

  Tedic smelled the fresh coffee brewing. His nose flared with the quivering alertness of a foxhound. Jacobo had also brought along Perugina candies, chocolate-coated hazelnuts in shiny blue wrappers. Mel plopped them into a small pile next to three ironstone brewery mugs. Jacobo gratefully sipped the coffee. He left his candies on the plate, respectful of the difference between the midday craving of an overstuffed middle-aged man for something sweet and the relentless ache and faintness that was real hunger, diverted only by lethargy and cigarettes.

  With the brewery’s supply of electricity, Mel was able to keep a radio buzzing in the loading dock for most of the day. The Knight was on—an extra shift—and he was reciting poetry.

  “You might find this worth hearing,” Tedic told Jacobo.

  THE KNIGHT WAS rolling into his full cadence. Jacobo couldn’t understand the national language. But he could hear phrases rising and falling, flaring and cracking, like the fire in a forge.

  “What is it?” asked Jacobo.

  “A long story,” said Tedic, staring up at the radio’s speaker. “An old one, at any rate. Serb Genesis.”

  Jacobo inclined his head with curiosity.

  “The Battle of Kosovo,” Tedic told him. “In 1389,” he emphasized. “In the Field of Blackbirds. It’s read every week here. The story of the great Serb nation strangled in its womb. By Muslims, it may be gratuitous to add.”

  Tedic lowered his head to listen for a point at which to latch onto the narrative for his guest. After half a minute, he raised a hand next to his mouth, as if he were announcing a basketball game. “Here. Sultan Murad is preparing to lead his hairy Muslim hordes against the noble Tsar Lazar.”

  “A poem?” asked Jacobo.

  “An epic,” Tedic assured him. “Nothing less than The Rape of Lucrece. Here.” He motioned Jacobo to stand closer while he interpreted from Serbo-Croatian into English:

  From Jerusalem, O from that holy place

  A great gray bird, a falcon flew!

  And in his beak he held a swallow

  With a letter

  Lazar! Lazar! Tsar of noble family

  Which Kingdom is it that you long for most?

  Will you choose a heavenly crown today?

  Or will you choose an earthly crown?

  For all shall perish utterly,

  And you, O Tsar, shall perish with them.

  “This is not headed for a happy ending,” Jacobo observed.

  Tedic held back further comment with his hand. “Please. One of my favorite parts.” He recited:

  Though the Turkish army is not small,

  We can easily battle them

  And defeat them. . . . They are

  Not an army of knights and warriors

  But of weary pilgrims, the old and crippled,

  Artisans and skinny adolescents

  Who have never tasted blood. . . .

  They shit upon the earth

  In fear of us.

  “No knights or warriors,” said Tedic when he finally turned back to his guest. “That’s us. An army of artisans and skinny adolescents. Serb Shakespeare got that right.”

  “What year?” asked Jacobo.

  “It was 1389. Well before Shakespeare.”

  “The emperor Montezuma was killed in 1520,” said Jacobo. “Probably stoned to death by his own people.”

  “Practically last week,” said T
edic.

  The men turned their heads back up toward the radio’s speaker. The Knight had rolled in Peter Tosh just as he had the Turkish army shitting in fear: Dem mus get a beaten, dem ha fe get a beaten, Lord, and dem can’t get away.

  The Knight returned, husky, heartsick, and unswerving, with a verse that rang bones and roused blood over six centuries. Tedic thundered in imitation:

  Whoever is a Serb,

  Whoever shares this heritage,

  And does not come to fight,

  May he never have the sons

  His heart desires;

  Let nothing decent grow beneath his hand—

  Neither purple grapes nor healthy wheat;

  Let him rust away like dripping iron

  Until his name shall be extinguished!

  Tedic thrust his hands back into the pockets of his black leather coat to grip his cigarettes and quiet his trembling. He lifted an eye to Jacobo. “Makes all that Shakespearean For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother sound rather fainthearted, doesn’t it?”

  IRENA HAD ARRIVED after Tedic’s last meeting with Jacobo. Tedic took a couple of the Peruginas from the pile next to the emptied coffee cups and placed them beside her as she sat in a basement room, zipping herself into her gray jumpsuit.

  “Your personal business is your own,” he said when she looked over. “This is not personal. Have you heard from Coach Dino?”

  “Of course not,” she said instantly. “Have you?”

  “I’m not trying to fence with you.” Tedic sounded weary.

  “No,” Irena said decisively. “No letters, no phone calls, no roses. How would we talk anyway?”

  “People get messages through. Do you ever talk to someone who’s heard from Coach Dino?”

  “Who would that be?” Irena sat back on her stool and thumped her fists on her knees. “You? My mother? Molly? Ratfucker Mladic?”

  “Maybe without even realizing it. Do you have any friends on the other side?”