Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “I get a gun in the army, yes. I wouldn’t miss at that distance, I’m sure.”

  “Sweet little Amela!” said Irena.

  “Hairy bastards, sometimes,” Amela said, laughing.

  Irena joined in when she grasped that they were remembering the same hairy bastard. “My mother threatened to cut someone’s balls off,” she said. “One of the bastards who dragged us out of Grbavica. She swore at him and stabbed him in the nuts with her house keys.”

  “Dalila?” said Amela, expecting a funny story to follow.

  “I’d already kicked him in the nuts,” Irena explained. She looked down at her Air Jordans and jiggled their black toes up and down. “Fabulous shoes,” she added.

  “You must meet soldiers,” said Amela.

  “All the boys are headed to the front,” said Irena. “Except for people like my father.”

  “Mild Milan, always singing ‘All You Need Is Love’?”

  “A regular Marshal Tito,” teased Irena. “He digs trenches and shit holes. The U.N. soldiers are around, of course. They’re not hard to run into.”

  “We can see a few sometimes,” said Amela. “Hard bodies.”

  “They wear armored vests.”

  “I didn’t mean their chests,” said Amela with an impish grin.

  “You can tell?”

  “Don’t you think every girl can?”

  Irena’s voice softened. As the little spokes of sunrise licked in from the end of the hallway, she remembered that her parents were behind the door. “There was this one French soldier—I’ve told this to no one.” She looked up at the apartment door, then at Pretty Bird, and rolled over a Marlboro for the bird to nose and clutch.

  “He did me a favor. Then he—we—went around a corner. He unzipped his pants. Didn’t even unhitch his belt. Didn’t even drop his pants. Just popped it out. As if he were taking a piss. That’s all it meant. It meant nothing. He was as scared as I was. I might as well have been milking a cow. He might as well have been licked by a dog. I scarcely touched him. It was like a sneeze.”

  Amela fumbled in her pockets for her own pack of Camels. She had to dig her fingers under the cellophane wrap for matches. “Sometimes that’s the way to do it. Sometimes it can take forever.” She handed a cigarette to Irena, and waited until she had taken the light from her match. “Did you see him again?” she asked.

  “Just to nod in the street. I don’t think he was—neither of us was—pleased with himself. He was Senegalese, I think.”

  Amela let a haze of smoke fill the space between them before she asked, “What they say—is it true?”

  Irena smiled as demurely as an old Dutch portrait. “In this respect, he was a loyal Frenchman,” she said.

  The cigarette smoke floated away.

  “One more illusion,” said Amela. “I haven’t touched anyone for a favor. Yet. Who knows? I’ve blown boys just for fun. Usually it wasn’t—just something to do.”

  “That’s a favor,” Irena pointed out, and as the girls began to snigger and gasp, she motioned her arms, as if trying to tamp down a fire. “A big favor.”

  They paused to catch their breath. Amela leaned over to lend a hand to Pretty Bird, who had inadvertently skewered the Marlboro onto the end of a claw. She gently removed the impaled cigarette and rubbed a finger over his claw.

  “Girls?” asked Irena softly.

  Amela raised her head slowly. “That may be another matter.”

  The girls glanced at each other, taking care to keep their faces blank.

  “You’re quite safe,” Amela said finally.

  “So are you,” Irena said after a hush.

  Pretty Bird had the Marlboro back in his beak, and waddled toward the wall like a robed emperor carrying a declaration.

  “War is so stupid, isn’t it?” asked Amela. But she wasn’t really asking. “Two friends have to brave bullets just to have a little fun and a talk. People call war brutal. Sure, it is. That doesn’t scare anyone away, does it? It becomes some kind of spell. Utterly stupid. Brainless as a fire. It makes trees into torches, scalds little dogs and children, turns cathedrals into cigarette ash. How many centuries has it been since the dinosaurs? Such small brains, but they still left behind bones. After us, they’ll find only cinders.”

  Irena shifted her weight once more and felt her voice rising higher, but she didn’t know at first whether it was anger or irritation. “And who do you think lights those fires?” she asked. “Do you remember that blizzard last summer? The strange moths that melted in our hands? Those were the ashes of the National Library. Your Serbs must have feared that we would take all those books, in so many languages, into our hands and hurl them against your tanks. Fat gray flakes of novels, poems, and plays floated down on our heads while corpses floated in the river.”

  “There are victims on both sides,” Amela said quietly and considerately.

  “That’s not how we add it up,” Irena shot back. “The piles of the dead can be just as high—they’re not equal. We were hiding in our beds and basements when your brutes in black sweaters came in, swinging their cocks and declaring that Grbavica would be ‘cleansed.’ As if Muslims had become pests in your drainpipes. Which they purified by ramming their dicks into Muslim girls.”

  Amela stretched her legs and leaned back on her arms. But she was not at rest. In the spokes of light, Irena could see her face quivering like an exposed muscle. She opened her mouth once; nothing came of it. Her chin snapped back soundlessly. Finally she said, “No one I know has done that.”

  “Are you sure?” Irena challenged her. “Are you quite, quite bloody sure? Where were you that weekend last spring when we had to run for our lives?”

  “I would have come running if I had known.”

  “How could you not know?” Irena throttled her own cry in the darkness. “All the gunfire and shelling. All the screaming.” She clapped her hands over her ears. “How could you sleep through that?”

  Amela rolled onto her knees. She brought her head closer to Irena’s shoulders, but turned her face away.

  “We weren’t sleeping,” she said. “We were hiding. Same as you. We were scared.”

  “I was scared.” Irena bit off the affirmation so she could spit it back. “I still kicked a bully in his balls. My father still went out to try to talk the monsters out of killing us. They dragged his face over the parking lot and jammed a rifle in his ass. They laughed at us and picked us clean, like chickens, fucked and plucked. My mother was scared. But she still made that brute bleed. You’d be surprised—amazed, terrified—at what you can do when you’re scared.”

  “I am,” said Amela.

  AMELA’S PACK OF Camels lay between them, but with the faint, unfussy motion of old teammates, she signaled Irena for a Marlboro. When Irena lit it, she kept her right hand softly on the back of Amela’s. Irena turned around until they were sitting side by side in the same screen of smoke.

  “I don’t know if you remember the Zajkos,” said Amela.

  “Maybe if I saw them,” Irena said wearily.

  “They lived across the way,” Amela explained. “One day—I think that Saturday of the march—Mr. Zajko comes to my father and says, ‘Mr. Divacs, we are going through terrifying times. Who can say what will happen? I have a proposal.’

  “He said, ‘If Muslim bands come here, we will let you into our place. We will protect you as we would our family. If Serb bands come here, you let us hide in your closets or bathroom. No food, no water—we will be fine. Just let us hide until the madness passes. What do you say? Whatever happens, we both live.’ ”

  Pretty Bird had lost interest in his cigarette and had wobbled onto Irena’s right foot.

  “What did your father say?” she asked.

  “That his scheme wasn’t real. It sounded nice. It would make a fine fairy tale for the BBC. But it wasn’t real. My father told him that Serbs were going to take over our building—rough boys from the country. They would hurt any Serbs who harbored Muslims. So wh
at Mr. Zajko proposed wasn’t a fair offer. It couldn’t save them, and it could get us killed. My father said that in these times he could only worry about us.”

  “Do you know what happened to the Zajkos?”

  Amela shrugged. She put her Marlboro to her lips, flipped her fingers over her eyes like a bird’s claw, and shrugged again. “They got out. Of the building, at least. We’re keeping their television and microwave oven for them until the madness passes.”

  Irena rolled forward slightly and stretched her arms out to her toes. When she felt a muscle snag in her ribs, she began to laugh. “I guess if you can’t save their lives,” she said, “save their microwave.”

  Amela, who was uncertain whether Irena was being kind or snide, smiled faintly.

  “It’s something,” she said.

  Irena herself wasn’t certain if she was being considerate or scornful. “I’m sure if they survive,” she told Amela, “those are the first things they’ll look for.”

  GIRLISH GIGGLING IN the hallway had seeped into Mr. Zaric’s mind. When he opened his eyes, he heard it distinctly outside the door. He looked over at Dalila. She was still sleeping; sleep and grime had mussed her hair into playful platinum thorns. He didn’t see Irena, and her blankets hadn’t been unrolled. He didn’t see Pretty Bird snoozing in his cage, or shuffling across the sheets. Fighting down alarm, Mr. Zaric reached for his mother’s old pale jade robe and had opened the apartment door before he could quite close the flaps over his grimy gray boxer shorts.

  “Omigod,” said Mr. Zaric when he saw Amela, and he fell almost to his knees, as if he’d seen an apparition in a cave. Amela crawled forward to reach for his hand.

  “What the hell . . . what the devil . . .” he stammered.

  “Just a visit. A quick visit. I’m going back now.”

  “Are you . . . on this side now?”

  “Just visiting.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Zaric. His voice seemed to roll through the hallway as he knotted his robe. “Of course. Has Irena offered you coffee? Tea? I think we have a little orange marmalade. This is amazing. The marmalade is good in tea when you don’t have bread. Anything is yours.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Zaric.”

  “I didn’t know visits were possible.”

  “I snuck over.”

  It was gracious and good—Irena was glad—that Amela had been oblique in describing that course of action.

  “Snuck over. Snuck over.” Mr. Zaric kept pacing and shaking his head, as if it might put something new into place. Amela had gotten up off the floor and was shaking her feet, as if she were about to begin stretching for a game.

  “I’m fine. I’ve got to go. Irena and I . . . I think we both have work today. I have to slip back before it gets too light. We’ve had a fine time. I’ve gotten to see Pretty Bird. I’ve gotten to see my friend. And now I’ve gotten to see you.”

  Irena could tell that her father wondered if he were still asleep. He held up one of his hands and brushed it through the spears of light that had begun to seep in from the window at the end of the hallway. He looked down at Pretty Bird, who was now doing a stutter-step back into the apartment. He looked over at his daughter, who had risen to stand beside Amela as they looked down at their strutting bird.

  “The little emperor,” said Irena.

  Mr. Zaric took hold of Amela’s arms gently. “I’m sorry. No man looks good in his mother’s robe.”

  “You look fine,” she assured him.

  “It’s been—maybe Irena has told you—hard to keep up appearances.”

  “You are all still handsome and lovely,” said Amela. “I don’t know how . . . you’re all amazing.”

  “You are welcome anytime,” said Mr. Zaric. “I would say, ‘No call is necessary,’ except no call is possible. What you have done . . . Pretty Bird,” he said. His voice seemed to be smothered someplace in the bottom of his throat. “The seed. Not just that. I just want you to know. So much can’t be known these days. Always—you are family.”

  Amela’s eyes shone, and Irena thought she could see her wrists quavering slightly after the long night of little food and strong cigarettes. She could see her own fingers trembling faintly, like branches in a breeze. “Pretty Bird’s family,” she added.

  32.

  IRENA WASN’T DRUNK. But she was sleepy, fuzzy, and had a queasystomach from socializing with good wine, weak beer, Amela Divacs, Sir Sasha Marx, and Olga Finci cheese. She told her parents that she needed to sleep because she had to work that night. Mr. Zaric would tell her mother about Amela. Irena would go to bed. For the first time in months, she took her sheets into her grandmother’s old bedroom and spread them on the floor. She did not bring Pretty Bird with her, because there were gashes and breaks in the windows. She worried that a wind might take him away, back into the street.

  It was nearly three in the afternoon when Irena awoke. The sun had gotten bright, and the bedroom was almost stuffy. She twitched in the sheets for a few minutes, then got up to see if there was any water. Pretty Bird had been sleeping, too, and flapped his head, as if he were shucking water. But when he shook his head he made a sound like the opening of the Zarics’ old refrigerator door.

  “Phhhffft!” Pretty Bird said, and wagged his wings. “Phhhffft!”

  Mrs. Zaric was reading a book about Panama. Mr. Zaric was dozing. Irena saw the edge of a small blue envelope under the door and went over to pick it up.

  “What is that?” called her mother.

  “It says Irena on the front,” she told Mrs. Zaric. “Looks like Aleksandra’s handwriting.”

  The letter was written in a crabbed hand, on old blue-ruled school paper:

  My dear young friend:

  When the sun broke through today, I decided—damn it all—to venture out of this block that has become my small shrunken universe. I walked down Saloma Albaharija Street. People would tell me to get down, to crawl, to turn back. But I needed to see.

  I walked by my old tea shop, my old cevapcici shop, the old magazine shop on Marshal Tito. All gone, as your father told me, just rats and rubble. I looked for my old friend Azra in the green-and-yellow building—an old art teacher, too. She is dead, many months. Muris, too, an old admirer, a civil engineer, lived on the floor below. He was in line on Vase Miskina Street. Rats and rubble happen to us, too.

  The library, the theater, this whole side of the city now—it’s like being on the moon. I have lived too long. I was never meant to see this.

  Irena could feel a stinging on the very top of her head. As she flipped the sheet of paper over, the words seemed to slide away. She had to reach out with her hands to keep them close. Aleksandra’s lettering seemed to grow lighter with each line. The last few letters fairly floated out of their lines and off the page:

  We call this madness, to make it seem like a mirage. Just hold on, our heads will clear, everything will be back. The world I saw today—it’s not worth waking up for.

  Please do not be hurt by this! It is just not right that you—your mother, your father—should put yourselves in peril to bring a little food, water, or cigarettes to a feeble old bird like me.

  It was not for me to know what you do—really—at the brewery. The long hours—so few particulars. I assume it has been secret, scary. We were lazy, sweet-natured children here who lived by our wits. We had to drive steel into our veins. But Sarajevo has a chance to live.

  I am not religious (even now, when I should try). But if devout people are right, know that I will reach down whenever I can to try to make life kind for you. My impression of heaven is a place where I can see you. I am not sad. I am going on a voyage. The thought of you is my companion. Like Pretty Bird, I soar.

  Aleksandra

  Irena said nothing. She leaped from the room—she thought she had been sitting; she couldn’t remember getting up—and raced through the Zarics’ door, leaving it to whack against the wall like a clap of thunder. She took the interior staircase three steps at a time, and when she rea
ched Aleksandra’s door it wrenched open without resistance.

  Aleksandra lay across a mossy green sofa trimmed with shriveling brown fringe. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were folded over her waist, as she might hold them in a reception line. She was wearing one of Irena’s grandmother’s old flowered blouses, her own long black skirt, and, Irena noticed, black nylon stockings and white men’s socks for her voyage. Irena drew in her breath. She walked to the sofa to put her hand softly against Aleksandra’s forehead. She smelled the drugstore vetiver splash-on that Aleksandra had found last year in Mr. Kovac’s bathroom cabinet.

  “Oh shit, dear, I’m fine.”

  Irena leaped back. She dug her thumb into her thigh and quite literally pinched herself.

  “I left the door open, so I didn’t hear you come in,” said Aleksandra. “I was just stretched out here, dreaming of Eduard Shevardnadze.”

  Irena heard her parents stamp anxiously into the apartment, but she laughed so hard that her head lit up with tears, like a blaze at the end of a match. Mr. Zaric waved Aleksandra’s letter as if it were a visa that could get his family into Switzerland.

  “That,” said Aleksandra with a frown. “I was going to come up and get it from under the door, but I was embarrassed. I got up to the roof and decided it was a long way down. The soaring part would be nice. The crashing part—ugh! It would only make more work for you. Pick up the pieces, dig a hole. Besides, you wouldn’t like any of my clothes.”

  The Zarics surrounded Aleksandra on the sofa. Mr. Zaric kissed the top of her head. Mrs. Zaric put her head across her bosom. Irena took hold of her left foot and began to pull on it.

  “I worked so hard on that note,” Aleksandra protested. “I can see you didn’t find it convincing.”

  IRENA REPORTED FOR work at the brewery and Tedic had her driven to sit behind a trash bin on Ilija Engel Street to look for flares of muzzle fire should they sprout from any of the small hills overlooking Otoka. She saw none. She was deeply tired and dulled. “Life and death,” she mumbled. “And I can’t keep my eyes open.” She was exhausted, emotional, and sure that Tedic had deliberately stored her away for a night—out of sight, and in no position to harm herself, if also no Serb.