Pretty Birds (32 page)

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 Tedic.

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?”

“Of course!” Irena exploded. “Who doesn't? If
you
had
any
friends, you'd have some there, too.” It was an insult to make Tedic smile and retreat, and it allowed Irena to sit back more easily. “He would only try to reach me,” she said more softly, “if he could reach me with his dick. He's on to new conquests, I'm sure.”

Tedic handed Irena another Italian candy and made certain to take the crackling blue wrapper from her hand, so that she wouldn't let it flutter down from the perch on Omer Maslic Street, where she would spend the next few hours of the night, and shoot a man's shoulder while he was pumping fuel into a truck off Duro Salaj Street.

         

IRENA'S PARENTS HAD
the BBC playing at low volume, like a sauce simmering, when she arrived home in the early morning. She got batteries easily at the brewery. Tedic had them pitched out of flashlights and radios before they could run out in the course of duty. Mel kept the discards in a box near his desk for the taking. Irena would bring them home, where they would work for a few hours—give voice to the radio, or light to a torch—then flicker and die.

Mrs. Zaric had put a fistful of twigs into the tin cookstove to try to heat water for tea while Peter Gabriel sang over the night's disheveled sheets on the floor.

Mr. Zaric was indisposed. Aleksandra Julianovic was rolling and pressing tea leaves out on a cloth.

“Busy night, dear?” Mrs. Zaric asked.

“Dreary and cold.” She brought her lips against her mother's cheek.

“It's getting warmer,” her mother observed, as she had for more than a week.

“Not fast enough,” said Irena.

She could hear the water trill inside the kettle. Pretty Bird joined along. Irena reached for an opened pack of Marlboros and thumped it against her forearm to release a cigarette. She had matches in her shirt, and drew one out. She watched the flame plume before she spoke. “I was screwing Coach Dino,” she announced. “Before all this.”

Mrs. Zaric turned around from the kettle on the cookstove and knelt down across from her daughter.

“Screwing.
Screwing.
” Mrs. Zaric kept her voice quiet, but it betrayed a quaver. “Screwing. How do you mean?”

“All ways,” said Irena.

“I don't mean all the ways. I mean—
you
mean—
sex
?”

“Of course.”

Aleksandra crawled over on her knees to take the kettle down from the cookstove.

Mrs. Zaric picked up the cigarette that Irena had put down on a plate. “Of course,” she said. Then, more sharply, “Of course, most of us get through school without screwing our teachers.”

“He was my basketball coach.”

“He was a
teacher,
” Mrs. Zaric repeated. “
An adult.
Twice your age.”

“Seventeen plus seventeen,” said Irena. “That's just a math problem.”

“I'm glad he helped you with your homework.”

“It was a joke between us. Seventeen years—almost the same as Charles and Diana.”

“You see how that worked out,” said Mrs. Zaric.

“She was inexperienced,” Irena retorted. “She needed to be—the royal family insisted that she be—a virgin.”

Aleksandra Julianovic turned around from the cookstove, holding the kettle delicately by its handle.

“She even had to have a doctor's exam,” Aleksandra attested. “To certify that she was virtuous.”

Mrs. Zaric looked over at her daughter and aimed the shot she knew would close the argument with no retort, and no victor. “That's not one of
your
problems, is it?”

Mr. Zaric pushed against the bathroom door and shuffled out in his mother's old pale jade robe, waving a
Q
magazine with a cherry-haired Cher on the cover. “Give it some time in there,” he announced. He joined them, sitting cross-legged on the tangle of blankets.

Pretty Bird waddled over to the cigarette that Mrs. Zaric had dropped into the crags of a sheet, rolling it over like a log with his beak.

“Our daughter was having sex with Coach Dino,” Mrs. Zaric announced. “She just revealed it. Like Kissinger going to China.”

“Her basketball coach?” asked Mr. Zaric.

Irena watched her father incline his head with interest, but saw that he had his eyes on the cup of tea that Aleksandra had poured out.

“He's very hairy,” said Mr. Zaric.

Aleksandra had reached out with one of the brownstone cups.

“I used to see him,” Mr. Zaric recalled. “At the games. Wearing those shirts with no sleeves. To show off his muscles and that mermaid tattoo.” He blew across the surface of his tea, then drew back. “I thought he was very hairy,” he said. He then slipped the tip of his tongue out speculatively into the tea. “Whooo,” he said. “That must have been interesting.”

Mum and Dad . . . you know I'm growing up sad,
Irena could pick out from Peter Gabriel through the clatter of the kettle and the tapping of Pretty Bird's claws.
I shoot into the light.

Mrs. Zaric took two more cups from Aleksandra and handed one to Irena, who held it against her cheek. Then she broke into slow laughter. “Your father doesn't know what he's saying,” she said. Her laughter clanged and roiled like the kettle. “All the trauma has made him forget that he agrees with me.”

         

ON THE NIGHTS
when Irena wasn't working, she had little difficulty falling asleep at home. She was tired and often hungry. The snap and pop of gunfire—even whimpers and screams—were like snores and stomach growls to her now. But almost every night she would awake in the middle of the night—two, three, who could say?—and drag herself over to Pretty Bird's cage. Usually his gray head was cocked slightly to the left. His eyes would be shut, baring small, pearly lids, his small clawed toes, pink and precious as veins, clasping his perch. His red-fringed tail would droop and rustle slightly, lightly, breezily. Irena would marvel. Such a small, soft thing to survive bombs and vipers' bullets. He was just breath, blood, matchstick bones, and feathers. She would put her right hand up to Pretty Bird's tender black beak and wait a second or more until she felt a small puff of his breath brush against her knuckles, then creep back under her blankets and fall asleep.

30.

IRENA AND AMELA
hatched a plan—the way, they told each other, they did every spring, when they would devise some new feat or trick as the play-offs began and they prepared to play Number One High School. Amela was going to come over for a party.

A British comedian, Sasha Marx (no relation to Karl, Groucho, or Chico, though he encouraged all such speculation; Sanford Moore was his birth name), received U.N. authorization to mount a production of
Hair
in Sarajevo. Much of
Hair
's music was already familiar to Bosnians of a certain age. The story—peace, free love, and long-haired outcasts who find community—was considered newly pertinent and appealing to younger Sarajevans. The play was a piece of nostalgia that managed to maintain, in a recovering old socialist society, a more intriguing reputation for being slightly naughty.

“How can we not wish to ‘let the sun shine' on Sarajevo?” the Home Minister responded even as he was having shrapnel picked out of his leg in the hospital. “How can Sarajevans not wish for the Age of Aquarius to reign?”

But the Home Minister's functionaries immediately tamped his enthusiasm with practical considerations. They said it would not be possible for Sir Sasha (for Marx had recently received the Order of the British Empire) to present the play in any of the city's theaters. The danger of drawing a crowd to a prominent location was too great. Serb gunners could pick off playgoers as they arrived—or wait until they were seated to obliterate the audience with a mortar shell. Stage lights were also out of the question. Moore had offered to bring them in on a U.N. relief flight, along with generators to power them. But such prominent generators would set off a hum that would illuminate the stage—and guide snipers to their targets.

The Home Minister's subordinates informed him that the play was a significant cultural opportunity. But it would have to be presented in secret, they said. No advance notice. Only a small, incidental audience. And in the dark.

“At least costumes aren't a problem,” the Home Minister advised Tedic. “As I recall, much of
Hair
is done nude.”

Tedic regarded each caution as an opportunity to outwit the mentality of the old socialist bureaucracy. He suggested that the ministry appropriate one of the ample basement conference centers of one of the bank buildings on Branilaca Sarajeva Street, which was lined with a long and apparently effective sniper barrier. The building was secure enough to keep deutsche marks, dollars, and diamond brooches safe from attack. People should have the same benefit. They could sit on the floor of the conference center, to maximize seating. Tickets could be handed out at water and food lines—arrival times staggered—to deliver a wide and delighted audience for, say, three performances. Sir Sasha and his fellow actors, both Bosnians and West Enders, could meanwhile rehearse in a subterranean room of the brewery, where comings and goings could be efficiently disguised.

Tedic had even heard of a simple trick to compensate for the loss of stage lights. A couple of satirical troupes that performed from time to time in basements around town had devised the idea of using electric torches. Half a dozen would be set up on the floor, and each actor issued one to shine a light on his or her face.

“Or elsewhere, I suppose,” Tedic said drolly.

“As the play dictates,” the Home Minister agreed. He had seen a production of
Hair
years ago, when he'd attended a transportation conference in Stockholm. He raised his eyebrows in recollection of pink flesh and lank, pale hair. “That is an artistic decision that under this free government is left solely to the discretion of the director.”

Tedic suggested to the Home Minister that a few Western news organizations be cautiously apprised of the production and invited to report on it. The world seemed to turn away from stories about massacres and mortar shells. But a story about
Hair
playing besieged Sarajevo offered more enthralling elements: music, danger, Western movie stars, and sensitively illuminated nudity.

         

TEDIC ALSO PROPOSED
that the Home Minister put on a small party for Sasha Marx and his company the evening before the play. The Home Minister instantly agreed. Everyone could use a party. Bosnians were famously hospitable. A troupe of British actors might not be as useful to Sarajevo's survival as, say, a company of British paratroopers. But the graciousness and even the nerve of the artists were appreciated.

Irena, Sigourney, Arnold, Jean-Claude, Nicki, Kevin, Ken, Emma, and other attractive young people whom Tedic employed would be included in the party. The visitors would be charmed; they would want to identify with their hosts, and their real-life roles.

And Jackie should be sufficiently healed to attend. Jackie would astound them even more than usual. “Imagine,” said Tedic. “The most alluring woman in the room will be a russet-haired, snake-hipped Sarajevan whom the war has visibly robbed of the means to give each visitor a full embrace.”

“But she cannot tell them how she came to lose her arm,” the Home Minister interjected. “She has to say, ‘I'd rather not elaborate. I am but one of so many who have suffered.' ”

“Show people will find such modesty incomprehensible,” Tedic assured him. “They will be overwhelmed.”

Obviously beer would be on tap. Other traditional party victuals could be brought in with the visitors—the Home Minister moistened his lips on remembering the tin of smoked oysters that had come with a recent U.N. guest.

But Tedic suggested that it would more neatly serve their interests to have the folks at the brewery prepare a repast of humanitarian relief delicacies. “Beans and rice, replete with the occasional worm,” he said. “Peanut butter and Spam, with toenail curls of neon cheese food sprinkled over all. Our guests have grown up hearing heroic tales from their parents about plucky Londoners eating cold beans in Tube tunnels while the Luftwaffe booms overhead. They feel they have missed out on their own heroic period. They will feel privileged to eat cold beans in a darkened brewery with plucky Sarajevans shaking their fists under the guns of the Serbs.”

The Home Minister sat back for a moment before a smile broke slowly across his face and he shook his head. “And if any press coverage resulting should venture the same plucky comparison?”

“As you say, it's a free country.”

“Just prompt me when to start humming ‘White Cliffs of Dover,' ” the Home Minister said.

         

THE GIRLS HAD
arranged their rendezvous for five, when the bronze light of early spring that still flowed across the field might make a crossing unexpected. They enlisted Zoran and his taxi, with an up-front payment of two cartons of Marlboros from Irena and two pouches of Balkan Sobranie tobacco on promise from Amela; she would bring them across under her blouse.

For almost an hour, the girls discreetly waved across the field every four or five minutes, Irena flashing a hand from the hedges on her side, Amela replying with a hand peeking out of the trees on hers. Shortly after six, the whine of a transport plane began to whir in their ears. Irena and Amela had guessed correctly; at least one flight would come in just before dusk. They saw soldiers tramp away from the center of the runway. The hedges around Irena began to clatter slightly from the breeze of the plane's props. Irena could see the red leaf of Canada on the front of the plane's gray whale of a belly, and the horizontal blue and yellow bars on the soldiers' right shoulders. Skies of blue, fields of grain, the flag of Ukraine.

Amela darted out. Three, five seconds passed with no soldier taking notice; they tended to watch the Bosnian side of the runway more closely, in any case. She had her hair down, long and full. How shrewd, Irena thought with admiration. How cunning of her to recall that referees overlook the penalties of curly-haired blondes. Irena heard Russian-accented shouts under the blast of the plane. But Amela ducked to run in the shadow of the plane's wheels. No soldier would chance a shot that might strike a tire on the transport plane—it could disable the aircraft and close the airport for days.

Just as Amela reached the hedges, two soldiers caught her by the shoulders. They turned her around and stood back, their guns pressed tactfully against their chests.

“You go back!” shouted one in English. “Please! Now!”

Irena and Zoran stood back, hoping to leave an impression of deference.

“Run back there?” said Amela, throwing a thumb across to the Serb side of the runway. “That's
dangerous
!”

“You not supposed to be here,” said the other, breathing heavily; he had chased her most of the way.

“I'm not supposed to run across,” Amela pointed out. “I could get shot.”

Irena stepped forward. “You're here to keep people from running across the runway,” she reminded them. “Not order them to run across. What if she got run over? Or, God forbid, shot.”

One of the soldiers put a hand on his comrade's arm before speaking. The two young Ukrainians were confused and a little afraid. No smuggler would run across the field carrying nothing. No husband, father, or romantic love would expose a girl to so much danger. So the soldiers conferred in Russian and decided that she must be a rich man's mistress or, anyhow, a trifle that might have a price.

One turned to Amela and said in English, “We take you back. We walk with you. No worry. We protect you.” He flashed his finger back and forth between his chest and her shoulders. “No one will shoot. We go now.”

Zoran inched into view, waving a hand like a small boy at a parade. “Excuse me, sirs,” he said with elaborate deference. Zoran patted the edge of something inside his jacket. Irena heard a small, hollow thump at which the soldiers tightened their fingers around the stocks of their rifles and ground their boots into the gravel.

“I am sure this is the kind of situation,” Zoran said, “that can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.”

“We get cigarettes,” one soldier said with a sly smile. “No problem.”

“American?” asked Zoran.

The soldiers waited while Zoran unzipped his jacket.

         

TWO CARTONS OF
Marlboros—one for each girl, or one for each Ukrainian soldier—put Irena and Amela in the back of Zoran's taxicab. With the back windows rolled down, their cries and giggles echoed in the cracked, abandoned streets and the prickled ears of lost, wandering dogs.

“You owe me
five
cartons for that one,” Zoran called back to them. “And an invitation to that party besides.”

         

THEY TURNED DOWN
May 1st Street. Amela squirmed around in the backseat, looking from side to side, and reached over for Irena's hand. She counted shattered windows as they sped past the smashed housing blocks of Dobrinja. She stopped after reaching twelve. “The people who lived there,” she asked quietly. “Where did they go?”

“Look closely,” Zoran advised her.

Then Amela saw gray shapes shivering, rags moving, and even the flames of cooking fires. Hands flickered in the overcast licks of gray smoke.

In silence, they crossed over the Otoka Bridge and turned right to face Grbavica. Night was falling, and lights in the hills and towers on the Serb side of town blinked out as shades were drawn, doors shut, and switches turned down.

“So close,” was all Amela said.

“Very,” was all Irena could manage in return. Their fingers tightened against each other's palms.

“Over there,” said Zoran, inclining his head to the right. “Your school.”

The cab clipped over the bare, darkening streets, howling when Zoran ground it into another gear. Amela was surprised that she could see stars in the sky as they pulled onto Marshal Tito Boulevard. Most of the trees had been pruned by shells or felled where they stood. “I have heard about this,” she said.

“People had to chop them down for heat,” Irena explained. “To cook food, make tea, keep out the cold. Soon we'll have to burn one book to have enough light to read another.”

Amela craned out the window for a better look.

“That's not smart,” Zoran told her.

“I will be okay,” she said. “It's too dark to see your car, or my head. I know the missing trees make it easier for snipers. That's what we've been told across the way.”

“Over here, snipers may or may not hit us,” Irena reasoned. They could have been discussing Descartes, the Chaldean Empire, or any number of half-remembered things from their classes. “Cold hits us all. So we play our chance of getting shot against the certainty of getting cold.”

Amela settled back in the seat and rolled the window up halfway. “We've been getting a little cold, too,” she said softly. “There's an embargo. Fuel can be hard to come by.”

Irena squeezed her friend's hand more tightly. They waved their fused fists back and forth playfully, from their chests to their chins.

“I'm sorry, I didn't know,” said Irena.

“Hard to come by,” said Amela. “Not impossible. We're fine.”

Zoran turned the taxi into Sarajevska Pivo Street, along the west side of the brewery. Every few weeks, the brewery set out bins of all the trash that couldn't be burned. Trash collection in Sarajevo had become as unthinkable as postal delivery. Swarms of rats had taken over entire buildings for the spreading empire they now claimed along with flies, worms, moths, and fleas.

A small boy scuttled over a mound of cans. There were bean cans, cooking-oil cans, powdered-milk cans, Spam cans, and yeast cans, their lids curled back, gasping.

“Even the cans look hungry,” Irena joked.

The boy was five or six years old, discernibly sandy-haired even in the dying light, wearing grubby green pants cinched around the waist with somebody's old burgundy tie, and a man's blue nylon shirt wound around him like a sheet. He picked up a can and peered through it as if it were field glasses, looking for bits of beans or Spam crusting along the seams. He was young enough to fit his whole hand into the can and, every few cans, he brought out his hand with great excitement, and licked oil or powder off his wrist, knuckles, and fingers.