Pretty Birds (20 page)

21.

“
ANY JOB IS
like high school,”
Aleksandra Julianovic told
Irena. “Hospital, bank, brewery, factory. I imagine a lingerie store, too. From the moment you arrive, you're told—you see for yourself—that some people are pretty, some are smart, some are good at sports. Some people are popular, some are lonely. They might as well loop signs around everyone's neck. Or one of those simple, clever Hindu dots.”

“Caste marks,” Irena suggested.

“Precisely. High school imprints a mark you bear for life. A few people get put into several groups. I'll bet you did.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Irena, fidgeting.

“A, pretty; B, good at sports; and C, popular?” asked Aleksandra.

“That may have been the general impression,” Irena finally allowed.

“But you don't get equal points in every category,” Aleksandra continued. “Pretty tops smart. Pretty tops everything. Girls and boys—there's no use pretending otherwise. If Marie Curie and Princess Diana had gone to the same high school, which one do you think everyone would remember?”

“Marie Curie?” asked Irena with a show of innocence. It took a moment for the joke to impress Aleksandra.

“You are
sooo
shrewd,” she crowed. “Smart is next in points. And sometimes there's a special category. The Plain Girl Who Plays Beautiful Piano. The Boy with a Withered Leg Who Still Carries On. Nice is far down on most lists. It's usually ‘Nice, but . . .' ”

“Nice but dumb, nice but ugly. Nice but dull,” Irena said, finishing the thought.

They were sitting on the two bottom stairs of the building, smoking and hunching their shoulders against the cold.

“Can you begin to identify the brewery people that way?” asked Aleksandra.

“It's a little harder,” said Irena. “I work such odd hours, I don't see everyone. In our group in school, Amela was the prettiest. I was the best athlete. Nermina was the smartest. But Amela was also smart, for someone so pretty, and a good athlete. I was pretty for someone who was a good athlete, and most people knew I was also pretty smart. Nermina—you know, who died—was so smart, you were surprised she was a good athlete.”

Aleksandra detected the omission instantly.

“She had very beautiful eyes,” Irena said after a pause. “Brown, with flecks of green.”

Aleksandra had spent enough time with the family to tell that Mr. Zaric was vexing Irena. The days he spent out of the apartment, digging trenches and latrines for the army, seemed the most satisfying for him. Irena reasoned that it was because while her father was getting calluses and scrapes on his hands, all that was expected of him was another shovelful of dirt. When he dug in the woods and scrub, he couldn't be held accountable for his own survival, much less anyone else's.

The government gave the diggers a meager food ration. The diggers, who often had to chip and chisel into flinty soil while ducking rifle shots, knew the price of each mouthful. But Mr. Zaric was guilty and embarrassed that his daughter's work alone brought them the food, water, and batteries they had at home. The beer and cigarettes were welcome, but awkward for him to enjoy.

Irena thought that her father was trying to recover a sense of importance with increasingly preposterous contrivances. He spent several days folding the tiny tin wrappers from Marlboro packs into a slide. He then pressed them carefully against the frame of the frosted bathroom window so that they could catch water that would run into a plastic bucket next to the toilet. But the foils were more paper than metal. They fell apart in the first rain and dropped on the floor and into the bucket in small white clumps, like smashed baby ducks.

“Perhaps if I wait until they dry,” he told Mrs. Zaric. “This mishap may merely be disguised opportunity. Isn't that how penicillin was invented?”

“I wouldn't count on the same momentous result, dear.”

“I will press the unfortunate puffs flat,” he rallied. “Squeeze out the water and mold them into a kind of pipeline.” Mr. Zaric's amber eyes flickered with wildfire, which amused his wife and appalled his daughter. “Then, the foils will be reconstituted,” he concluded, his voice rising. “They will dry out and possess the pliability of paper and the tensile strength of metal.” He acted out a kind of ballet of basic osmosis.

“We can attach them to large horns that will trap snow in the winter,” he enthused. “The snows will thaw in direct sunlight. Water will be created! Fresh rainwater that sluices into the pipelines and directly into the bathroom. Water to drink and bathe—nothing makes your hair softer than rainwater. Standing in water lines, begging Frenchies or Ukes for another couple of bottles—all of that will be part of a bygone age when the Zaric pipeline is completed!”

Irena shot out from the hallway behind them. “Those foils will have the tensile strength of toilet paper and the pliability of shit!” she railed. She was becoming accustomed to the grim competence that Molly, Jackie, and even Tedic personified. Her father, absorbed in his nonsensical schemes, seemed ridiculous and useless. Or, as she complained to Aleksandra, “My father is
sooo
boring.”

Worse, Irena found herself condescending to be protective of her father. One afternoon she delivered an impassioned and gratuitous speech to Tedic in which she bewailed “this twisted, sick fuck of a world you so-called grown-ups have given us.”

Tedic clapped the heel of a hand against his forehead. “Omigod, of course!” he exclaimed. “This war. All wars. Cruelty, hate, and ruin.
It's your parents' fault!
What a totally original idea!”

This wrung an involuntary laugh from Irena. But she went on. “Not my father's fault,” she said more quietly. “He spends whole days just sleeping and staring. He has nothing to wear but a tweed jacket he had on the day this all began. So much weight has melted off him—he looks like a bum dressed in a stranger's clothes. He melts down the butts of candles to make more candles so I can read my magazines. Occasionally, he goes off and digs trenches. He comes back filthy and can't even take a bath. I . . . I blame him for nothing.”

Tedic looked down.

Irena was encouraged by his deferential silence. “Oh, for fuck's sake!” she cried out. “All my friends and I ever wanted was to smoke, drink, stay up late, listen to the Clash, and screw!”

Tedic kept his head down, like a front-row mourner, but he raised it as he said, in a slow tone of discovery, “So,
that's
our incandescent mixed culture I keep hearing about on the BBC!”

Which won another laugh from Irena. “I'll thank you to respect that” was all she could manage in return.

         

IRENA HAD HAD
little time to see Dr. Pekar. Her office hours were shrinking, in any case. Her supplies were running short, and fewer people sought out help for their pets—so many dogs, cats, hamsters, and rabbits had disappeared and died.

Irena would walk over the bridge from the brewery to the veterinarian's office, ring the bell, and shout up her name. Once, Dr. Pekar came down bleary-eyed from sleep, and they made coffee and talked—mostly about how sad and soundless her office had become without the animals. Dr. Pekar said she knew that many people had pets in their homes that they were afraid to bring out. Irena said that she would put up a notice at the synagogue announcing that the doctor was eager to see them.

“In fact,” said Dr. Pekar, “I'm willing to go and see them, if the snipers so allow.”

“I'll help you,” said Irena. “Let me come along someday after work.”

But when Irena came by in the gloom of a late afternoon two days later, Dr. Pekar was not to be found in her office or in her home. Irena crept under a tree, now bare-branched and clattering in winter, around to the back, where Cesar had been cremated. A wooden door slapped against its frame. Irena entered the kitchen, saying the doctor's name softly, so as not to startle her. When there was no response, she called out more urgently.

“Kee! Kee! It's Irena! I want to show you the note for the synagogue!”

She walked around quietly. The wind rattled the branches outdoors and whisked in to stir up grains of grit and yellowing papers. Irena reached out to touch a tin oil stove, hammered out of old bean cans, that the doctor had set up in the sink to heat water in a pan. The stove was charred, empty, and cold. Moving to the small adjacent examination room, she could make out a single sheet of Dr. Pekar's stationery on the steel-topped table, weighted down by a Serbo-Croatian-German dictionary. The paper shuddered every few seconds with a draft of wind. Irena drew close enough to read the note, written in thick black pencil in Dr. Pekar's hand.

It said, “Take whatever. Love.”

Irena did not explore farther from where she stood. Through a closet door, she saw the flaps of a blue skirt dangling, and she realized that she had never seen Dr. Pekar in a skirt. She would help her choose a top sometimes. On her way out, she stopped to take a small bottle of olive oil that she noticed on the edge of the sink, and slipped it into her coat. She kept the note for the synagogue flattened and warm against her chest. She told herself that Dr. Pekar had ventured elsewhere in the city to look for an apartment that was warmer and not so isolated. She would find Irena when she had the chance.

         

IRENA HIKED BACK
home but stepped off on Aleksandra's floor, where she found her neighbor in the hallway, squishing old, used tea leaves with the bottom of a glass. Aleksandra had decided that shredding tea leaves might expose fresh sides to boiling water—when they had water to boil, that is. It had been nearly a month since they had had any fresh tea.

Aleksandra told Irena that she had heard distressing news about Arnaud, her favorite Frenchie, who slipped her cigarettes and posted her letters. She hadn't seen him for more than a week, and asked another Frenchie at a checkpoint about his whereabouts. The other Frenchie told her that he thought Arnaud had been sent back home. He was happy, said the Frenchie, because he would be home in Marseilles for Christmas.

“Imagine!” Aleksandra exclaimed. “Back home in the bosom, as it were. Roast goose, chestnut pie, local wine, Gitanes spilling from your pockets. There is some willowy, dark-eyed slattern waiting for him. He's known her since grade school. While Arnaud has been off civilizing the masses in Africa and Bosnia, the tart has been cultivating his parents. I don't object to young love. It's as necessary as measles to proper development. But winter is falling like a vase rolling off a table, and I'm left here without Gitanes or Arnaud's wonderfully shy smile. He doesn't want to marry that girl,” she added. “He said she was simply the best lover he ever had. Men confide in me. But at the age of twenty his experience could scarcely be profound.”

“Even a Frenchman?” Irena teased. Aleksandra wouldn't dignify the jape with more than a nod. “All our relationships these days are intense and ephemeral,” she told her. “But that doesn't make them any less worthwhile. Someone who gives you a smile and a cigarette at the right time gives you another day, doesn't he? You don't say that a person who pulled you out of the Miljacka is no longer important to you if you never see him again.”

Aleksandra leaned down on the rim of the glass and twisted it, and the water that she squeezed out was as transparent as tears.

22.

IRENA STILL SPENT
many days sweeping floors and counting crates. Bullets could be scarce. So were targets, Tedic explained. Firing aimlessly into the other side would look inept and desperate. Worse, the shots might go unnoticed, and even the power they had to alarm would be wasted.

One day Irena put three shots into the right fender of a Serb staff car that had been clumsily parked behind a barrier on Dinarska Street. The car was visibly empty. Irena wondered why it was a target even as she leveled her rifle. But Tedic was gratified. He savored the scene of three Serb officers coming out of their meeting at night, fumbling with their keys in the gloom of darkness, bumping and scraping their way into their seats—and discovering that they were sitting against fresh bullet holes. “They will hop up like they'd just sat on a dog turd!” he predicted. “They will crawl out of their car, and creep away on hands and knees in the dark, worrying whether we have them in our sights. ‘Dear Mr. Serb,' ” Tedic mouthed as he wrote in the air with his finger. “ ‘While you were gone, Bosnian bullets paid a call. They left a message:
We will find you later.
' ”

         

IRENA BEGAN TO
work overnight. Tedic advised her to tell her parents that it was because of increased production at the brewery. Against all expectation, Milan and Dalila were delighted. They reasoned that the basement of the brewery would be safer for their daughter than her place near them on the living-room floor. But once, Irena was rash enough to mention how quiet and still the city seemed at night, with no sounds of traffic, soccer matches on television, loud banter in bars and cafés, pots clanging, or the Clash blaring over the radio.

“Sometimes,” said Irena, “I look up into the silent sky and I think I can practically hear the moon move through the clouds.”

Her parents were appalled by her poetic reflection. “What in the hell are you doing going outside to look up at the moon?” her father shouted. “
The fucking moon!
Are you some kind of wolf?”

“I go out for a smoke,” Irena said quickly, but her improvisation was swiftly found to be foolish.

“You mean you light a
match
and hold it to your
lips
?” Mrs. Zaric shrieked. “Why don't you just train a torch on your skull and shout,
'Shoot here!'
across the bridge.”

Irena tried to regain her footing. “I stay kind of in the loading-dock area,” she said.

“You can't smoke in the
basement
?” Mr. Zaric asked with growing astonishment. “It's a brewery, not a hospital.”

“Doctors smoke in hospitals,” Mrs. Zaric asserted. “In surgery! Remember when we were in for your mother, Milan?”

“I don't know about
the old days,
” said Irena. “But
these days
there are health codes.” She held her gaze steady. “Even in breweries,” she added.

Mrs. Zaric glared back at her daughter, and finally turned away. “Well, they should have some small room with a small window that people can crawl into and smoke,” she said.

“Does Dr. Tedic know you're going outside?” asked her father. “It's stupid.”

“I suppose,” said Irena. But she could tell that the topic had been closed.

         

TEDIC HAD TOLD
Irena that she would be fractionally safer climbing up to her roost in the dusk than in daylight, but that staying there until she had an opportunity to fire would be colder and gloomier. He said she must take care not to rush a shot just to get it done.

And there was the fact of the flash to consider, too.

“We tell you to take pains to conceal yourself,” Tedic explained. “But you've probably figured out that when you fire at night the flash from your muzzle becomes visible. Positively dazzling, in fact.”

“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.