Pretty Birds

by Scott Simon

  “Hello. Excuse me” was all she could think to say. A strawberry-haired woman in blue jeans sprang down the hallway and into the small puddle of light.

  “Hi,” she announced. “I’m Zule Rasulavic. We’ve met. With your friend. I’m sure you don’t remember.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Let’s slip back inside.” The woman draped her arm around the girl’s waist.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve had an injury. You’ll be fine, but we can’t rush.”

  “Is this a hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I go outside?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Nowhere is.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I have to throw up,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  The woman held the girl’s head against her hip as she emptied her stomach onto the floor—of blood, phlegm, and, she was certain, unsuccessfully digested little brown clumps of Olga Finci cheese.

  ZULE RASULAVIC BLOTTED the girl’s mouth and stretched a cool cloth across her forehead when she helped her back into bed. She brought her a small carton of apple juice—her first in more than a year; it tasted luxurious—a small stack of McVitie’s biscuits, softening with age, and three foil packets of German peanut butter. Zule showed her how to squeeze the packet to expel the peanut butter into small, sticky logs across the biscuit.

  There was the muffled rap of a knuckle against the door before it opened. A russet-haired woman in a trim black dress pushed in with her right shoulder, which was swathed in a bright red shawl.

  “Hi,” she said softly. “You may not remember me.”

  She paused. “Of course. Jackie.”

  Jackie smiled and flicked her shawl with her left arm until it reached her chin. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Beautiful Jackie,” she added after a pause and the phrase had snapped back into her mind.

  “Good as new,” Jackie said with a smile, and placed her hand gently on her blanketed knees.

  “Let me try to tell you what’s happened,” she said. She paused before going on, like the false start of a race. “Damn,” she said, “but I promised not to smoke in here.” She let the edge of the shawl slip back from her shoulder.

  “THE FRENCHIES STOOD back and let us take you both away,” she said at last. “We got you here to Franko Hospital. Your wound was not so great, but you had lost a lot of blood. The surgeons and nurses worked hard. They were moved—two young girls shot trying to save each other. For Irena—it was already too late. We never told them that you were a girl who might have used a surgeon for target practice in their parking lot. While you were drugged out, we clipped your hair and dyed it. If someone thought they saw the blonde—this ridiculousness about the Viper—you might not be safe. I didn’t care. But we needed to speak with you.”

  “I’ll tell you anything,” said Amela after a while. She spoke in a small voice that was strained through her fingers, which were splayed like bony branches over her eyes. With the tube in her groin, she couldn’t turn her back to Jackie. But she also didn’t want to give Jackie’s blunt, cold, large-caliber brown eyes a chance to bore into her.

  “What secrets could you possibly reveal?” Through the thicket of her fingers, Amela could see Jackie’s face hardening. “That people are trying to kill us? That there is some confidential plan to encircle and destroy us? Thanks, but we figured that out on our own. Your bullets were—most expressive.”

  “I want to be useful,” said Amela. She was just beginning to grasp that she was still alive.

  “You have been. To all the worst people.”

  “I can change that.”

  “By running across a field? We had to carry you for the last half, anyway. Don’t think we all didn’t feel that we should have just—”

  Jackie had to stop and turn her face away. Amela sank back against the pillow. But, carefully, she moved her left hand over Jackie’s, close enough to touch, but not touching.

  JACKIE GAVE THREE short raps with her knuckles over her mouth, into the place where a cigarette might be. “Not that anything you say could impress me,” she said. “But just for the exercise—why did you do it?”

  “Come over?”

  “No. Some of us have always thought this is the right side to put our asses, win or lose. Life or death. Muslim and Serb. Why were you on the other one?”

  Amela’s voice suddenly toughened. “I’m an athlete,” she said simply, even strongly. “I play for whom I’m told.”

  Jackie turned her face toward one of the butter-colored walls. “And your conscience—” She threw the words at Amela.

  “My stomach,” said Amela. “Conscience, principles, politics—not my game. But after a while my insides couldn’t play along.”

  Jackie let Amela’s hand linger above hers. She rearranged her knees to draw herself another inch away from her. “Tell me,” she said. “Was it the tenth or the twentieth massacre that rumbled your intestines? Or did you just begin to miss all of your old Muslim pals whose cries you affected not to hear when they were being rousted and robbed in the apartments next door?”

  Jackie smiled—she could feel her mouth widening, and made no effort to call it back—as Amela turned her face away and couldn’t turn quite enough to submerge it in her pillow.

  “DO YOU KNOW anything about my parents?” she asked after a silence.

  Jackie’s tone softened. “Zoran tried,” she said. “He radioed someone. They tried. Your parents are probably—we cannot be fools about this—gone.”

  “The Zarics?”

  “I spoke with them myself,” said Jackie. “I—I loved her too, remember. They have always suspected more than they let on. I told them that if Sarajevo survives, their daughter’s name will be inscribed in plaques, stones, and folk songs.”

  “That must have been a comfort,” said Amela, who had turned her face around.

  “Of course not. But they seemed . . . touched.”

  “God, I hate war,” Amela declared. She put her hands below her shoulders and brought herself up against her pillow. “Hate it, hate it, hate it. What a waste of lives. A waste of the world. The West can afford war. They add it to the cost of gas. But for us—it’s throwing diamonds into a ditch. It’s throwing babies into a ditch, for all the good it’s ever done.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it,” said Jackie slowly. She plainly missed her cigarettes. She cinched the ends of her shawl around her neck again, and let them drop back. She drummed her fingers discordantly against one thigh.

  “That’s the poet’s way,” she added, with apparent admiration. Then her voice hardened. “The poet’s way out.”

  Jackie flicked her legs and stood up from the edge of bed, as if it had been suddenly electrified. “War is savage—say that. You’ll always have a poem. Say it’s repulsive. You’ll never be wrong. But do you really think the world would be sweeter today if the Greeks had decided that their civilization was too refined to defend by blood and had surrendered Athens? Do you figure the world would be more just if Joan had stayed in her father’s fields and never drawn her sword at Orléans? Maybe Tito should have let Hitler’s gray wolves feast on Yugoslavia—instead of fighting them cave by cave. Maybe the British should have said, ‘Sorry, our pluck’s run out,’ and lain back to let Hitler dance his giggling little goose step round Piccadilly. That’s how the Frenchies spared their lovely Paris, you know. They gave storm troopers the keys to the city, then served up their Jews.”

  Jackie bent down until the splayed ends of her hair almost lashed against Amela’s cheeks, and her whisper blew fiercely across her eyes. “And do you really think,” she asked, “that Eichmann wouldn’t have made room for our kind in Auschwitz after he had swept aside the ashes of all the kikes, Polacks, cripples, and fairies?”

  Jackie stood back on her heels. But for the first time she let her hand stray over Amela’s knees, and pressed down lightly. “You and I have grown up free to try on any idea
we please,” she said in a level tone. “Like hats in a store mirror. Ban the bomb! Viva Che! Smash the state! Save the planet! Peace, love, rock, rasta, techno, macro, Jimi Hendrix, and rap. But don’t think our freedom wasn’t bought by bloodshed. Ask the people of Prijedor or Vukovar about the kind of peace they parleyed with bullies. Or can you hear them from under the dirt of their mass graves? War is no good. Of course. War is cruel and wasteful. But sometimes—it’s better than letting brutes keep their grip on the world.”

  Jackie turned around so that—quite deliberately and dramatically, Amela was sure—her stump showed when she tugged her shawl back around her shoulders.

  “Your war is over,” she announced. “We will let you heal. We’ll give you the chance to make a confession, if that’s what you want, and hear out your self-pity. Maybe there’s some small something that you can tell us that we don’t already know. After you’ve unburdened yourself, we’ll keep you in the brewery. Under our eyes. Under our thumbs. Cloistered as a nun. These days, more cloistered than most nuns. Days might come when we need to ask you this and that. But not many. The kind of information you have has a short life. Our only desire—our plan—is that you be forgotten.”

  Amela felt Jackie’s hand press more conspicuously down on her knee. She wondered—she couldn’t tell from the force of her fingers—if she meant to reassure or warn her.

  “You will become the one person in Sarajevo,” she said finally, “with the chance to die from boredom.”

  When Jackie lifted up her hand, Amela risked a smile. “Isn’t that a waste of my talent?” she asked.

  “War is,” Jackie answered.

  36.

  AMELA LAY AROUND the hospital for about six weeks. But it was hard to figure the toll of time. Entire days were spent drowsing, between painkillers and the tedium that Jackie had prescribed. She read old magazines. She had no radio. She played cards, both solitaire and hands of rummy with Nurse Rasulavic and the tall, horse-maned man she had met at the brewery. On orders, they spoke only of cards. Amela found their determination odd, and a little hard to accept. But Jackie had instructed Irena’s old friends that this hornet from the nest was not to be confronted until her head, heart, bones, bowels, and guts had been squeezed of every iota and grain of knowledge she might ever have possessed.

  The man named Jacobo came by almost every day. Nurse Rasulavic had told her that he was the one who had carried her away from the runway, and that some of her blood had dripped over his hands and onto the buttery leather of his shoes. She told him what she could recall of the Hornet’s Nest. He cast questions casually back, as if he were encouraging her to recollect an old basketball game, which Amela knew she was good at doing. Jacobo’s questions grew detailed and precise. But Jackie was right. With each week—probably each day—whatever information Amela possessed became dated, difficult to recognize, much less apply.

  One day Amela took pains to stop him as he left the room.

  “I have to thank you,” she said.

  Jacobo made a show of ignorance.

  “You carried me,” she explained. “They told me. I ruined your shoes.”

  Jacobo smiled, and ran a smooth thumb over one of his blazer’s lustrous brass buttons. “Oh, that. Well. Blood wipes away,” he said, and let the door close behind him. Amela crawled from her bed and sat with her back in the corner by the small window. She hugged her knees to her face and cried herself out in about half an hour. (All the crying left a dampness in the knee of her jeans. She thought to herself, And tears dry, too.)

  JACKIE CAME BY three times. She brought magazines, she brought beer and cigarettes, and she brought clothes. Amela thought there were times when Jackie seemed almost to like her, and times when she seemed to just barely abide her. It was Jackie who told Amela that Michael Jordan’s father had been killed, slain somewhere in the southern United States in the expensive car that his son had bought for him.

  “It doesn’t matter if you have all the money in the world,” Amela observed. “And he does. You can’t buy your way out of death.” Amela beamed the kind of mild, wistful smile over at Jackie that invited her to join in.

  But Jackie—Jackie snapped back, “Don’t be ridiculous. People buy lives all the time. Someone like you should know that.”

  “I was just . . .” Amela let her thought die.

  Her door was not locked. She couldn’t see any locks on the front and side doors. One afternoon she carefully tried to extract a sign from Jackie to see if they had counted on her to stay without defiance—or hoped that she would try to break away.

  “Some people thought you should be locked in,” Jackie told her. “Even chained to this bed. But men with guns—we can’t spare them just to sit around. Besides, where would you go? What would you do? The whole city is a jail cell. Run, if you like. It doesn’t matter. Really, how long would you last?”

  EARLY ONE EVENING Jackie came bustling into Amela’s room unexpectedly—silent and unsmiling but bearing a roll of clothing under her arm. Amela sat up. Jackie shook out her bundle. Blue jeans rolled out. A roll of dark blue socks bounced to the floor. Atop all was a yellow T-shirt, streaked with violet. Jackie lifted the shirt by the collar and turned it toward Amela.

  “Omigod,” she said, recognizing the number on the back: “Vlade Divac.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Jackie. “A Los Angeles Lakers shirt you could probably sell on the black market here for a month of razor blades or toothpaste. It arrived as a rag in a charity bundle from someplace like Pasadena or Brooklyn. As you said, the West’s rubbish becomes spoils of our war. I have appropriated this item in the larger interests of the state.”

  Amela and Jackie smiled at the same time, and laughed as they realized it.

  “We have a bag packed and waiting for you, dear. Have a pee and put on your new shirt. We have places to go.”

  ZORAN WAS WAITING with his taxi in the parking lot. Amela held back a bit—Jackie could see her cringing—at seeing Zoran in the lot that was customarily kept empty since Dr. Despres’s death.

  “The last time I saw you,” Zoran said with theatrical, great-uncle grouchiness, “you had a gun at my head and were stuffing me into the trunk of my car. My own fucking car.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Amela said softly.

  “So you said. And so I believed. Once I got out and could fucking breathe.”

  Amela had a pack slung over her left shoulder. It hung over the wound in her back, which was no longer dressed and bandaged. She rapped the trunk with her right hand. “In here with me, then?” she said. “I have it coming.”

  She sat in the front with Zoran. He told her how Tedic had paid the thieves who rescued him from his own trunk with cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes. “Six cases of Sarajevo Beer,” he said wonderingly. “Twenty cartons of Drina cigarettes. Old ones, even. Not the new ones they fill with stinkweed they were going to foist off on the Bulgarians and roll up in pages from our old phone books, which are fit only to be toilet paper, anyway. And ten cartons of Marlboros. I said, ‘Miro, you must value me, to let go of ten cartons of Marlboros in exchange for my life.’ And Tedic said, ‘We need your car.’ ”

  They came to a flat stretch along the hedges near the runway, and then Zoran drove on another minute and pulled up to what looked like an old airport equipment shed. The walls were made of thin tin, and were stippled with holes. Rifle shots and mortar spatters, to be sure, but also age and rust.

  They went into the shed. Half a dozen soldiers in authentic Bosnian Army–issue moss-green uniforms were smoking, standing at ease but alert, around a hole in the ground. A single gas lantern hissed in the corner, spilling light over the hole. The room smelled of coffee, sweat, earth, rain, cigarettes, and grease.

  Jackie took Amela’s hand into her own and led her into a corner with three overturned washtubs. They sat on two of them. Jackie kept a grip on Amela’s hand. “Jacobo has given you a name,” she began. “Personally. For our purposes. Amie. It means “friend” in Fren
ch. You were a friend—a good friend, if I never said that. But Jacobo says it also means something in his language. Ami means “our people.” He says—and I think he is right—that this is a good name for you.”

  Amela heard the lantern popping and sizzling. She had to blink a mist of smoke and cinders from her eyes. Jackie relaxed her hand on Amela’s, then laced her fingers through the girl’s.

  “Perhaps you heard rumors,” Jackie said. “Well, it’s true. We have built a tunnel under the airport. From besieged Sarajevo into a small speck of free Bosnian territory. That’s the tunnel right in front of us. It took miners, plumbers, and engineering professors six months to claw it out of the ground with shovels, kitchen spoons, and hand axes—and their bare hands. People digging toward us from the forests used planks and tree branches to hold back the earth. People digging from the city had to use old car doors and hoods because we’ve chopped down all the trees here. I don’t think anyone has ever had to build a tunnel quite like this: blind, in the dark, two ends scratching and bumbling toward each other. Men and women died running across the runway to tell the other team that they had dug a few more inches. Sometimes two, three people died just to say, ‘Another two feet today—here’s where we stopped.’ I can’t tell you how many times the tunnel flooded . . . the oil lights went out . . . people . . .”

  Jackie’s voice ran out. She had to turn away.

  “But today,” she went on, “it’s the London Underground down there. We run a twenty-four-hour transport service. We bring out some of the sick and wounded in small wooden carts on narrow steel rails. We bring in bandages, bullets, onions, and antibiotics. Smugglers bring in meat, cheese, rubbers, hash—God knows, we don’t ask. We’re all happy capitalists now.”

  Jackie sat up on the washtub and held Amela’s hand between them, against their chests.

  “Amie, we have opened a vein into the heart of the city. The Serbs can’t bomb it, and the Blue Helmets can’t shut it down. Many more people will suffer and die here, I’m sure. But, for the first time, I think Sarajevo has a chance to live. To live.”