Pretty Birds (4 page)

Somebody got a brave and absurd idea: surge over the Vrbanja Bridge into Grbavica, and dare the snipers to lay down their guns. Chants rose from the streets. “Stop the war! Peace for Bosnia! Put down your guns!” In their high roosts, the snipers paused for a moment, disbelieving the marchers' audacity. Two young women, Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic, ran ahead of the rest, cheering, waving, and skipping into a squall of bullets.

4.

THE ZARICS STARED
at the television screen, and kept staring as it blinked and went blank. Pretty Bird gurgled like the bubbling from the kitchen sink. Mr. Zaric crossed over to the telephone, and Irena waited for him to sum up to someone what they had seen and heard. But he slammed the receiver down angrily. “Dead,” he said. “Dead, fucking dead!”

He opened the closet and reached for a blue windbreaker hanging on a peg. “I've got to go find her,” he said. His car keys clanged on the wooden floor.

Mrs. Zaric stiffened as if she had heard glass being shattered. “We're going with you,” she announced simply. And as Irena began to lace up her Air Jordans, her mother called out, “We're bringing our bags. I'll get Pretty Bird.”

Cabinet doors squeaked, dresser drawers squealed, feet stamped up and down hallways, and within ten minutes the Zarics had turned the lock on ten years in Grbavica.

“I'll keep the keys,” said Mrs. Zaric as she bolted the door.

“I have the ones to the car,” her husband said. They stood for a moment to look at each other in the murk and gray of the hallway.

         

IRENA HAD GROWN
up seeing pictures of people being expelled from the ghettos of Europe. Many of them looked fat, her grandmother had explained, because they had put as many coats and shirts on their backs as possible. By then they knew they would not be back, although most had not figured—or refused to accept—that they were going to die. Irena remembered pictures she had glimpsed while flipping through newspapers to get to the sports—Salvadorans, Ethiopians, Koreans, carrying only what they could squeeze into a wicker hamper, a paper box, or a length of cloth. Now she was carrying the contents of her life, so incompletely accounted for, in a gym bag. Her father, so careful about his appearance, hadn't shaved that morning and wore the brown tweed jacket that her mother was always trying to hide. Her mother hadn't made up her face for the day; her hair had been pulled back from her forehead with a green scarf. She would rather die, Irena imagined her mother saying, than be seen that way outside the apartment. A poor choice of words today.

         

OUT IN THE
hallway, the Zarics saw that some of their neighbors had the same idea. Mr. Hadrovic had his hands in the pockets of the worn burgundy sweater he pulled on in any weather to watch television.

“There are Serbs in black sweaters headed this way,” he reported breathlessly. “With rifles and those long tubes.”

Mr. Zaric was puzzled. “Bows and arrows?” he asked.

“Oh, for Christ's sake, no,” snapped Mr. Hadrovic. “You know, the things we used to see in World War Two movies.”

“We're going to see my mother,” Mr. Zaric told him as they walked to the elevator. “We will see you in a couple of days.” Then he stopped. Mr. Hadrovic, he remembered, was a widower who was alone in his apartment, his son at school in Sweden. “Can we do anything for you before we leave?” he asked. More grave offers seemed to form in each sentence, with the rising din of emergency car alarms and pistol pops outside. “Leave you with food, so you don't have to go out? Would you like to come with us?”

“Oh, good Christ, no,” Mr. Hadrovic said. “There are enough idiots out there already. They will have to come get me right here.”

Irena had already pressed the button for the elevator, and it was like pressing the knob on a tree trunk. “I don't even hear the car moving,” she told her father. Her mother had been tapping one of the bare lightbulbs in the hall. “I think maybe the power is off,” she said glumly. “Too many people doing their wash on Sunday afternoon.” Sunlight still swept through the hallway from the slatted windows, but when the Zarics opened the steel door into the stairwell, they stepped into darkness.

         

OUTSIDE, THE HOUSING
block looked empty and still. Irena's friends were not perched on the flower boxes and benches, sneaking smokes and gossiping. No one had gotten up a game on the basketball court. There were a couple of cars in parking spaces—Mr. Rusmir's saucy new red Volkswagen, and the Aljics' old blue matchbox Lada—but they seemed abandoned. The Lada listed from a tire that had been blown so far off the wheelbase that the orange iron inner ring scraped against the pavement at a slant. The Volkswagen's windshield had been shattered, and it looked as if the car's paint had somehow been smeared across the Lada's hood. Irena looked to see if the car was still serviceable. She leaned in to open the door and saw that Mr. Aljic's hair, brains, and a wedge of his head had been spilled above the steering wheel.

“Maybe we should get out of here and down to the basement,” Mr. Zaric said.

         

THERE WAS A
small window high on the wall of the basement laundry room that looked out on the parking lot, four swings, and the basketball court. The Zarics and people from several other apartments (the Zarics were embarrassed again to realize how few of their neighbors they knew) sat or knelt along the baseboard of the cinder-block wall, jostling for comfort on a grit of old soap powder and dust.

Franjo Kasic, a waiter at the Bristol Hotel, and Branko Filipovic, an automotive teacher whom Irena couldn't recall seeing before, stood on their toes for a few seconds at a time to report on what they could glimpse: flashes of white whizzing through the sky, and shadows streaking against the dingy yellow panels of the building across the way. Every minute, it seemed, they heard the sound of glass cracking and falling. Mr. Kasic said that he saw a whole sheet of concrete peel away from the side of the ten-story building across the street. They waited for a thud, but Mr. Kasic said it broke apart on the way down.

He and Mr. Filipovic went back and forth.

“That's a mortar.”

“Thank you, Mr. BBC.”

“Well, some kind of fucking bomb.”

“Very perceptive.”

Pretty Bird began to pick up the sounds. His red tail flared out behind him like the flame on a rocket:
“Shhh-ruumph! Shh-ruumph!”

“I cannot believe you brought that fucking bird,” Mr. Filipovic said, but then softened. “I guess he's a member of your family.”

Nenad Hadzic, a willowy blond woman from the second floor who had shown Irena how to apply lipstick on her way to school so that her mother wouldn't see it, called out encouragingly. “Pretty Bird is a delightful neighbor—I'm glad he's here,” she said. She wondered if she ought to go back for her cat. “I left Pedro upstairs because I thought it would be just a few minutes. Now I'm thinking maybe he shouldn't be alone.”

“Muris and the children?” Mrs. Zaric began.

“In Srebrenica, to see his mother,” said Mrs. Hadzic. “I would be there myself, except I have a presentation at the school this week.”

“My basketball coach said there is no school,” Irena volunteered.

“Really?” another voice called out.

“I wonder if they will have trouble getting back,” said Mrs. Hadzic cautiously. “Holiday traffic. And now . . .”

“Mr. Hadrovic is still upstairs,” Irena pointed out.

“Should we go get him?” asked her mother.

“Wait,” said Mr. Zaric.

“Men are coming,” Mr. Filipovic announced suddenly. Mr. Kasic bounced up for a better look.

“Yes. A few.” He jumped once more. “Shit, maybe a dozen.”

“And more behind,” said Mr. Filipovic after another bound up toward the slim window.

“Who are they?” Several voices rang out at the same time.

“Not a girls' football club,” said Mr. Kasic.

Mr. Zaric motioned for Branko Filipovic to boost him up to the ledge of the window. He clutched the window frame for a few seconds, then dropped down heavily. “They're walking by that first soccer goal when you come out of the trees across the way,” he said. “Black sweaters, black jackets. Black guns. Each of them has a gun.”

“Serbs?”

“How do I know?”

“Do they have beards?”

“Lots of Muslims have beards.”

“I don't mean like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Blunt, black beards. Serb beards.”

“They swagger like policemen,” said Mr. Zaric. “They are wearing what look like policemen's boots.”

“Do all policemen have boots?”

“You know what the radio said.”

“Did anyone think to bring a radio?” asked Mr. Kasic. “Shit, I forgot. And there's a big game, too,” he added. “Between Mostar Central and Vitez.” The laughter in the laundry room sounded like the cracking of glass. Voices skidded off the cinder-block walls, as people bounced up and down for a look through the window.

“Are they shooting?”

“Not that I see.” The sound of gunfire ended further speculation.

“The radio was saying that Serb police—”

“I heard that.” It was Voja Bobic, who ran the La Terrasse café along the Miljacka. He worked long hours, Mrs. Zaric was convinced, trying to keep company with two or more girlfriends on opposite sides of the river.

“Mr. Zaric,” he suggested, “why don't you and I go out and say something to them.”

“Because we are part Serb?”

“Because we are sensible, diplomatic persons who happen to have a little Serb, yes.”

Mr. Zaric stood up, the blood rushing back into his legs as he stamped his feet in the dark and damp. “I think you may be right, Mr. Bobic,” he said. “At least we should try.”

Mrs. Zaric looked up from the floor, opening her mouth like a fish gasping, only to say, “Milan!”

         

IRENA COULD NOT
easily imagine her parents when they were her age. She had seen pictures, of course. A young man with flaxen hair piled on his head like hay, a red corduroy jacket with lapels like the wings of a comic-strip space rocket, and John Lennon glasses. A young woman with hair curly as copper rings, who wore tube tops as tight as sausage casing, and sunglasses that she had to slip down onto her nose in order to actually see.

Mrs. Zaric—whose first name was Dalila—sang in a rock band at Number Four High School. They called themselves Band Sixty-nine. They told school officials that their name was to venerate the worldwide student revolution led by the likes of Daniel Cohn-Bendit. When a skeptical assistant principal pointed out that 1968 was generally considered the year of upheaval, they dropped their voices. “We are trying,” they said, “to avoid all mention of Prague.” The assistant principal did not believe them, but he thought that, at any rate, their trick reasoning had reached the safest conclusion.

The group's specialty was slipping unsanctioned English lyrics into Beatles songs. “Lovely Tito” was inevitably the best remembered, though hardly the cleverest. (
Lovely Tito, Brezhnev's maid, may I ask the Marshal discreetly. Will we be free to take a pee on thee?
) Mrs. Zaric naturally favored her own featured song, in which she got to vocalize:
So we sail up to the sun, till we hit the sea at night. ‘Cause we live behind the Wall, in our Russian satellite!
A crowd of any size joining in with her on the refrain—
We all live in a Russian satellite! A Russian satellite!
—had given her a feeling of elation that she could still summon. She might not always understand her daughter's devotion to sports, but she recognized—and remembered—the allure of an audience.

Milan was a fan of Band Sixty-nine. Dalila began to recognize his Lennon-lensed face peering up from the crowds. When the band performed at the class graduation party, he was there. “Does this mean that we won't see you again?” she asked. She had included the
we
pointedly—to afford him, if he chose, an escape. He was astonished, and stammered. He patted a big flapped pocket on the right side of his corduroy jacket. He wrote poems himself, he explained, and had often tried to send a few to her. But they felt light once they were in the envelope. And, as for any accompanying letter—what would he say?

“I don't demand Shakespeare,” she told him, and on that note, more or less, they had grown up together ever since.

         

A BOLT OF
light darted through the room as Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic unlatched the door leading up to the stairs that opened into the parking lot.

“If this is our last whiff of life,” said Mr. Bobic, “it smells like laundry soap.”

         

A CLUSTER OF
four men in black sweaters moved into their path, holding rifles across their chests. Mr. Zaric hailed them with a good show of friendliness. “Hello. How are you?” he said. “We are Serb brothers. Welcome to Grbavica.”

The men muttered and halted. One man, who had red-rimmed eyes and prominent incisors, appeared to be in command. “Are there Muslims here?” he asked with agitation.

“There are Muslim neighbors here,” Mr. Bobic said a little tensely. “With whom we live side by side in peace.”

“Oh, crap,” said the leader sharply. “You are fucking rag-heads. I can see that now.” His men lifted their rifles. “Hit your knees for Allah, assholes.” The instant of shock that froze Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic on their feet, the men chose to take as defiance. They began to poke at their chins with the rifle barrels.

“Lie down. Put your fucking faces on the ground!”

The people in the basement couldn't see, but Irena could hear a rasp of small stones as her father and Mr. Bobic scrambled onto the pavement, headfirst. Mr. Zaric spread his palms and fingers under his chin over the pitted concrete. One of the men slammed the butt of a rifle into the nape of his neck. Mr. Zaric's head snapped up like a hooked fish before it thudded back onto the pavement. The man kicked his head into the ground. His glasses broke and pebbles ground against his forehead. Mr. Zaric could hear the toes of Mr. Bobic's feet thrashing the ground, tapping terribly, as another man banged the back of his head with a rifle and cracked his chin against the concrete.