Pretty Birds (5 page)

“Down, rag-head, fucking keep down.”

Mr. Bobic blubbered. “My mouth. It's gone.”

“Do you think I fucking care? Stay down.”

Mr. Zaric felt the spiny steel nose of a rifle barrel being forced into the crack of his buttocks.

“Stay down and answer my questions or I'll fire a bullet up your ass. Where are your families?”

“Gone!”

Irena had leaped up to the window on her own. The old stone ledge ground into the palms of her hands. When she peered outside, she could see that her father's glasses had been smashed against his eyes. Blood bubbled in his eye sockets. She tasted blood herself at the back of her throat, and let her fingers slip from the ledge so that she could fall back down. No one asked what she had seen.

Mrs. Zaric held her daughter's head against her breast as Irena began to gag, dribbling a sour sap of that morning's coffee and tomato juice on her mother's pale blue top. “Just turn away,” she said softly into Irena's hair. “Stay down and pray. Hope and think.”

Outside, other men in black sweaters had rushed up and now stood around Mr. Zaric and Mr. Bobic. “Where is your family, Mustafa? Your fucking family?”

Incredibly, Mr. Zaric answered. “All of our families are hidden away,” he said. “No trouble to you, sir.”

Irena clambered up once more to see that Mr. Bobic was trying to lift himself to his knees, so that he would not choke on the blood filling his throat. Several of the men with rifles began to laugh.

“He moves like a wounded bird.”

“He squirms like a burning worm.”

One of the men swung his black-booted right foot into Mr. Bobic's crotch. The force of the blow turned him over, like a speared fish. “Oh, this one cannot even fucking talk with those teeth,” the man said.

“Rag-heads who cannot talk,” scoffed another, “cannot venerate Allah.” He jabbed the barrel of his rifle into the raw sore of Mr. Bobic's face. The sound of the shot was almost swallowed: a disarmingly flat, final splat of brains against the ground.

Irena let go of the ledge and fell forward on her knees. “Mr. Bobic. Dead. I'm sure.” She mouthed the words; her breath was trapped in her ribs.

Mrs. Zaric raised her right hand to rest it on her daughter's shoulder and stood up slowly. “I'm going to tell them we're in here,” she said. Irena couldn't hear a budge of protest. Mrs. Zaric was not nearly as tall as her daughter. She stood back toward the rear of the darkened room and shouted, “
Stop! Stop!
We are the families who live here, and we're coming out.” She paused while her neighbors stirred slowly around her. “Please. We are coming out.”

5.

THEY STAGGERED AND
blinked under a preposterously bright sky. Irena had taken charge of Pretty Bird, who had stopped pacing in his cage and crumpled to a posture on his claws. About twenty people came up from the basement, wearing spotted old slacks, scuffed shoes, and rumpled shirts, the casual clothing of an afternoon at home. The man who seemed to be in charge left Mr. Zaric twisting on the ground and waved his rifle like a ringmaster as he motioned for the basement-dwellers to stand together.

“I am Commander Raskovic,” he announced. “We are taking control of this area so that it can be made safe for Serb people. We cannot let you leave until we have recovered what you have stolen. Open your bags, please. Open them now!”

But before the group could unzip their scuffed athletic bags and scratched luggage, the men in black sweaters bent down and helped themselves. They pulled out American blue jeans and rolled them under their arms, holding them like logs. They threw down men's underwear with a laugh, and stamped on the crotch pouches; they put women's panties over their heads, licking and breathing through them as if they were pink and red surgical masks.

One man found a burgundy-bound family album. He moved through the statuary ranks of stunned people, asking, “Yours? Yours?” When no one answered, he tried to wrench the book apart with his hands, but it held: superior German bookbinding technology. So he flung it down in loathing, unzipped his pants, waved his penis over the book, and began to piss on it. Another man ran over and kicked the book open with the edge of his boot, lowered his pants to his thighs, and began to piss on the book, too. Irena could see the black pages fizzing and turning maroon. She could see the edges of pictures curling, like bugs dying on their backs.

The men turned around and saw Irena watching. She could hear Pretty Bird flapping against the wires of his cage. One of them charged into her face. “Bitch! You're smiling.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You are!”

“Why would I smile?” said Irena, with more wrath than she wanted to display. “What the fuck is there to smile about?”

“I will make you smile.”

The man walked over to Irena with his pants sliding down his thighs, his gun and the head of his penis snapping up. She tried to move, but her feet felt like a statue's. She heard bullets crackling and, just as she looked up to see pigeons winging, the man pinched her buttocks and pushed up her small bleached-denim skirt. He wrenched her panties down to her thighs, put his heel between her legs, and dragged them down to her ankles. Then he forced himself into her—hard—once, twice, several times before slipping out limply. Irena did not fall. Crazily—the man had a gun, after all—she took a step in his direction. She raised her arms, as if to wring his neck. He staggered back in stunted little-boy steps, his pants sagging around his knees. Irena saw an opening. She kicked him hard with the toe of her shoe.

The man crashed back onto his bare ass in a rubble of shattered glass. The sling on his rifle rose around his neck. His accomplices began to laugh—he had been kicked in the nuts by a girl, and choked with his own rifle sling. For an instant, they seemed to cheer Irena. One of them laughed, and pointed at her feet. “American basketball shoes.” The downed man scrambled up with lunatic quickness, aghast at the blood cascading down his legs. He tried to aim his rifle in Irena's direction, but some of the others stepped in front of him; one actually took his gun out of his arms. Irena's mother took a quick step toward her daughter, but the men stopped her. They let the wounded man run at Mrs. Zaric and try to ram himself inside her skirt. He bellowed, “Bitch! Bitch!” into her face. But then his own face began to crumple. His jaw plunged, his top teeth cut into his tongue, his eyes rolled about in his head, and he tottered before flopping to the ground. Mrs. Zaric had slipped a hand into her dress to find her house keys and stabbed them into the man's testicles.

“You are not a man, cocksucker,” she shouted from inside a circle of restraining arms. “You have to grab ass from baby girls like my daughter because you can't get your cock up for a real woman. My son had bigger balls when I bathed him in the sink as a baby.”

The thugs restrained her, but they didn't try to keep her quiet. She had become the crazy lady in the story they would tell later.

“I've seen bigger balls on French poodles,” she went on. “Get up. Come back here. I'll still slice your balls off and feed them to a goat. Nobody else would have the stomach to swallow—”

The man who called himself Commander Raskovic loomed over Mrs. Zaric, holding his left arm out toward Irena, as if he were about to ask the mother for permission to dance with her child.

“This is your daughter?”

Mrs. Zaric was silent.

“Okay, yes? Is your husband with you?”

Mrs. Zaric managed to point toward the ground, where Mr. Zaric was still stretched out, his feet twitching.

“Okay, anyone else in your family? A son?” She shook her head. “No young sons?” She shook her head again. “I'll take your word.”

“Our bird,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Pretty Bird.”

“Okay. You take your daughter and you help your husband up and pick up your bird. The four of you can leave, okay? Leave your luggage and run off to wherever you were going.”

Mrs. Zaric and Irena moved wordlessly over to where Mr. Zaric lay smashed on the ground. They lifted his shoulders lightly. Mr. Zaric pressed his hands against the ground and lifted himself to his knees, blood dripping from his eyes and mouth. He carefully touched the red wounds around his eyes, as if trying them on for size. He stiffened slightly as his wife and daughter took him by his elbows and helped him to his feet. He began to speak—he wanted to. But only blood ran out of his mouth.

They walked toward the riverside. Mrs. Zaric figured that Commander Raskovic's remarkable act—it couldn't be called kind, but surely it had saved their lives for a moment—would not give them more than a few minutes of opportunity.

“Don't worry, my darlings,” she said, speaking softly into her husband's shoulder. “We will never, ever talk about this.”

But Mr. Zaric had swallowed the blood in his mouth and was determined to say something. “Leave it,” he gurgled in the direction of his wife, “for Shakespeare.”

         

COMMANDER RASKOVIC CAUGHT
their eyes—and waved. A big, bearded man in a dark sweater toting a gun waved.
Waved!
God dammit to hell.
Where have you been? Glad you could join us! Be back soon!
Mrs. Zaric stopped and steadied her husband's left leg before turning and walking back toward Commander Raskovic. Worse than waving—he was smiling.

“Do you think this makes everything all right?” she roared.

Commander Raskovic stared at her in disbelief. He thought they had become friends through troublesome times. “Please, go on,” he said. “Get out of here. I am sorry to be friendly. You have this one chance I am giving you.”

“You're giving us? Like you're Mother Teresa?”

“I don't think I'm Mother Teresa. Please, don't shout at me in front of my men. You may regret it.”

“Regret shouting at you?” she screeched. “You
fuck-face
! What's one more regret? Your gangsters have just raped, beaten, and pissed on my family.”

“Don't use such words. Just get going,” Commander Raskovic said almost plaintively. “Please.
Please.
My men will obey me for only a moment more.” But Mrs. Zaric only moved closer, so close that she imagined plugging the barrel of his rifle with her finger to turn back the bullets so they would blow up into his bearded face.

“We're going to meet again, you son of a bitch,” said Mrs. Zaric. “All of you!” she shouted.

“Call the police!” someone cried out. “Call Butter-Ass Butter-Ass Ghali!” someone else shouted in English.

“I don't need the police,” said Mrs. Zaric in a cold, jagged dagger of a voice. “I don't need the United Nations. And I certainly don't need your crumbs of favors. All I need is this
anger
”—she positioned her fist above her heart and bellowed the word in his face—“to stay alive to track you down.”

         

IRENA FOUND THAT
she could not place the face of the man who had forced himself on her. She remembered that he had a beard. But then so did most of them, and she had used all of her strength to shut her eyes. She remembered more clearly the faces of cute boys who had smiled at her on the tram.

She could feel a sore spot on her right cheek where the man must have scorched her with his chin. She could feel wetness in her panties. As she walked on, she felt sore.

But Irena knew that she healed quickly. She didn't nurse an injury. She played on the old jammed ankle or broken toe as hard as before. God, Allah, or the stars assigned us our talents to be used, not doubted or denied. The game needs every player. Irena, who believed in nothing absolutely, believed in that. She had just seen people killed, and walked away with a limp. She told herself—
consoled
was not a word that occurred to her—that she could make any memory disappear, along with the sore spot on her cheek.

6.

THE ZARICS HAD
been hearing bombs all day: thuds, pops, and crackling. Now, as they moved along Lenin Street and onto the riverbank, they saw them. There was a hiss above their heads, something that looked like a tin pail with a fiery tail. Then it became a harebrained hawk that smacked straight into somebody's third-floor window. An orange bloom burst out of the window, blistering into black gashes and boiling gray clouds.

The Zarics' sense of personal geography had changed with unexpected speed. That morning, a bomb striking just a block away would have seemed like the peril of a lifetime. This afternoon, a bomb a block away may as well have exploded on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. The Zarics kept moving.

They did not break stride when another group of men in black sweaters with rifles asked where they were going.

“To our grandmother's house,” Mrs. Zaric said forcefully. “Commander Raskovic told us we could go.”

Amazingly, the men accepted that, and let the family go on. Mr. Zaric kept blinking blood from his eyes. Finally, he unbuttoned his shirt and pressed a shirttail over his sockets to stanch the bleeding. Within a few blocks, his staggering grew worse. Another group of men approached them and demanded of Mr. Zaric, “Your watch! Give us your watch!” They stopped for only a moment as Mr. Zaric carefully took his arms from around the shoulders of his wife and daughter to undo his Swiss army watch. He glanced at the time—6:04 p.m.—before tossing it over to the men as mechanically as someone flinging a coin to a porter. One of the men flaunted his rifle in the direction of Irena's feet.

“Air Jordans?”

“Yes,” Irena told him boldly, “and I need them to walk.”

The Zarics walked on, and the men in black sweaters continued picking through their collection of sweaters, slacks, Adidas, Nikes, and amber-beaded necklaces. TV sets, brass coffee mills, and ice-white German juicers were arrayed on the sidewalk, almost like a marketplace.

Flashes sizzled through the air. Their noses clenched at the stinging smell of fire. A ginger-haired woman in a flowered pink skirt lay on her back, as if sunning herself. She had no face. It must have been eaten by one of the plundered irons or radios whose unplugged cords gave them the look of sated rats. Beside the woman was a small sandy-haired girl in cute blue jeans with kittens on the cuffs. She was either napping or dead; the Zarics chose to leave her in peace. The ground around them sometimes opened up as they walked, spouting rows of flame and sprays of mortar rounds. The Zarics said nothing to one another as they went on. Why would they want to reassure one another that they had seen this?

         

MR. ZARIC'S MOTHER
lived on Volunteer Street in a gray cement apartment building with small balconies and—a curious design feature, given Sarajevo's harsh winters—an outdoor wooden staircase that did not quite disguise the six-story building as some kind of chalet. As the Zarics approached, they could see a man curled up next to a trash bin on the ground floor; perhaps he had been trying to hide. In any case, a bullet had found him—a neat, purpling hole above his right ear. His unblinking eyes were two blue mosaic stones. Mrs. Zaric remembered him.

“Mr. Kovac,” she said softly. Then, rather uselessly, “He was a Serb.”

“It's hard to tell at the moment,” said Irena. Or maybe what she said was “Not that it did him any good,” or “I guess they didn't notice.” She meant to say all that, but she wasn't listening to herself.

The Zarics skidded on a slick of blood that had gushed from the hole in Mr. Kovac's head. Irena's grandmother was on the landing between the second floor and her apartment on the third, as if she had been headed downstairs. The blood on her blue smock was already hardening into burgundy spatters, like chocolate or strawberry cream.

Mrs. Zaric bent down. Irena and her father could not see her face. “You go on up,” she said gently. “I will take care of Grandma.”

Mr. Zaric opened his mother's apartment door into the first silence they had heard for hours. A shade flapped lightly at a window. Moving into the kitchen by instinct, he sat in a straight-backed chair. Irena followed and picked up a kitchen towel, held it under hot water, wrung it out, and placed it carefully against her father's eyes. He pressed his forehead against her hand. Mrs. Zaric came in quietly.

“I have taken care of Grandma,” she said. “With that pretty Irish throw we gave her. Later, we will take better care of her. But now, I think we need a cup of tea.”

Irena ran water into her grandmother's electric kettle and plugged it in while her mother poked in a cabinet for some tea.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Mrs. Zaric said. “I cannot figure out where Grandma keeps her tea things.”

Mr. Zaric looked up suddenly with a new concern.

“You took care of Grandma with that fluffy green blanket we brought her back from England?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Zaric.

“Take care how?”

“I wrapped her in it. It's soft and warm.”

“We may need that blanket,” said Mr. Zaric. “Let's be practical.”

“Soft and warm may mean more to us,” Irena agreed.

When they had finished their tea and rinsed out the cups, they took two tattered old sheets to where Mrs. Zaric had wrapped her mother-in-law. Irena thought the blanket did look a little pointlessly luxurious for a shroud. They whisked the blanket off Grandma, without paying much attention to her face, tucking the sheets under her head and over the plastic flip-flops she was wearing. Mrs. Zaric motioned for Mr. Zaric and Irena to stop, uncovered her mother-in-law's feet, and took off the flip-flops.

“Stupid shoes,” said Mr. Zaric. “Not the way to spend eternity.”

Irena left her parents alone with her grandmother and took another sheet down to Mr. Kovac by the trash bin. The blood around him had thickened into a kind of burgundy mud. His shoes were the old black Soviet kind, bought before Italian and Spanish shoes could be so freely imported. Soviet shoes were laughably flimsy. The leather was about as durable as paper and the stitching unraveled like string. Many Yugoslavians had lost faith in Communism because of Soviet shoes. How could you believe in a workers' paradise if the workers made shoddy shoes? And
had
to wear them? Mr. Zaric told Irena that he always knew America would reach the moon before Russia, because any cosmonaut would be scared to step onto the moon in a Soviet shoe.

Irena was certain that her father would never wear Mr. Kovac's shoes. But someone might. Or might trade them for something else. Even old Soviet shoes shouldn't be wasted on the feet of a man who would no longer be going anywhere. She pulled on the laces and slipped the shoes off carefully, then stretched the sheet above him.

“Thank you, Mr. Kovac,” she said out loud. Carrying the shoes in her right hand as she went back up the stairs, Irena had to step over her grandmother.

“When Grandma Melic died we called a funeral home,” her father was saying. “Funeral homes handle all aspects.”

“Even tea cakes,” his wife remembered. “But that would be expecting a lot on a day like this.”

Irena took charge of the directory and the telephone. After several calls went blank, she got a response from a man at a Muslim funeral home on Sandzacka Street.

“I'm sorry, but we're really too busy to take any more bodies,” he told Irena. “Our hearse is getting shot at, and for what? Picking up dead people.”

Irena's father motioned her to hand over the telephone.

“We can pay,” Mr. Zaric assured the undertaker, one businessman to another.

“Money?” The man laughed as if he had never heard anything so ludicrous. Irena and her mother could hear him chortle clearly through the earpiece until the line went dead.

“We just can't leave Grandma and Mr. Kovac like this,” said Mr. Zaric. “It's not right. They deserve to rest.”

So as darkness fell on the blackening city, blinking with fires but no light, and booming with explosions and cries, Irena Zaric and her father inched carefully downstairs, smashed the window of the shed in the backyard, and took a shovel. Irena lay down for her father in the small backyard so that he could mark the dimensions around her. For about ten minutes, Mr. Zaric struggled with the shovel, wrenching up loads of soil.

“Shit,” he said to Irena. “Now I remember why I work in a store.”

Mr. Zaric had just handed the shovel to his daughter when a middle-aged woman with blond hair caught their attention by leaning out of her first-floor window.

“Excuse me—what are you doing here?”

“We are the Zaric family,” said Irena's father. “I am Milan. My daughter, Irena. My wife is upstairs. Perhaps you know my mother, Gita?”

“Of course. I am Aleksandra Julianovic.”

“Yes, I've heard your name. Well, my mother is dead.”

“I am sorry. A lot of people are. We might be soon.”

“Yes. Well, Mother is dead already. And Mr. Kovac too.”

“Him I didn't know.”

“Second floor, I think. Well, we are digging graves to get them into the ground quickly.”

“Omigod, are you religious fanatics?” Aleksandra Julianovic said. “We are European in this neighborhood.”

“Not at all,” said Mr. Zaric.

“They are already dead,” Aleksandra Julianovic pointed out. “What more can happen to them?”

Irena stepped in, because she sensed that Mrs. Julianovic was trying her father's civility. “Things can get messy. Think of a piece of fruit.”

But Mrs. Julianovic still directed her inquiries to Mr. Zaric. “Are you an undertaker?” she asked.

“No. I sell clothes in a men's store.”

“Which one?”

“The International Playboy clothing store on Vase Miskina Street.”

“I don't know it. I have never had to buy clothes for a man.”

“We have a small women's section,” said Mr. Zaric. Irena thought that while the conversation might grate, her father welcomed the respite from digging. “You have to, now that men and women are equal.”

“If they are equal,” asked Mrs. Julianovic, “why is the women's section smaller?”

“You are too smart for me,” said Mr. Zaric. “I just manage the store and sell shirts.”

“Do shirt sellers dig graves these days?” she asked.

“We all have to do different things right now. The funeral homes are busy.”

“I go to Number Three High School,” said Irena. “We learned that Muslims, Jews, and Hindus bury their dead within twenty-four hours. It's a ritual. But holy men made it a ritual because it was a necessity.”

“Well, I live here,” said Mrs. Julianovic. “It's been a rough day. I liked your mother, and I have nothing against Mr. Kovac. But they're not rosebushes.”

Mrs. Julianovic had a request. “One hole, please,” she said.

“There are two bodies,” said Mr. Zaric.

“I know that,” she said. “But if you dig a separate hole for each person we might have to bury here, we won't have room to plant flowers. Or tomatoes or squash. Why not the same space?”

“It sounds like something Grandma might think of herself,” said Irena. Mr. Zaric's face broke into a small smile.

Together, Mr. Zaric and his daughter dug out a space that was a little over six feet long and three feet deep, so that when Irena stood up in it the sides of the hole almost reached her elbows.

Mr. Zaric carried his mother alone, in his arms. “Grandma is heavier than I thought” was all he said.

“We can help,” said Mrs. Zaric.

“Mama carried me,” said her husband.

They carefully laid Mr. Kovac in first and smoothed the yellow sheet over his body. Then they lifted Mr. Zaric's mother and lowered her down over Mr. Kovac and stood back.

“I'm going to go up and get Pretty Bird,” Irena said.

Mr. Zaric waited for his daughter to return with his wrist held over his eyes. When she did, he said, “We are sorry, Mama, for what happened and that we have to leave you here like this.
Put
you here like this,” he amended. “In some ways, we are closer than ever.”

“And she is closer yet to Mr. Kovac,” said Irena, which made Mr. Zaric smile again.

“Wait,” said Irena. “The blond lady. I think we should invite her.”

Irena rapped on the window just above their shoulders. Aleksandra Julianovic, it seemed, was never far from there.

“Of course, I will be out,” she said, and in a moment she was. “We should be quick and careful,” she hissed. “Shit is blowing up all around.”

They waited for Mr. Zaric to speak. “Thank you, Mama,” he said after a moment. “For . . . so much.”

It was hard for them to see Mr. Zaric's face in the dark, but they could hear Mr. Zaric holding his mouth open to breathe, and as if to speak.

“Maybe we could sing something,” said Mrs. Zaric finally.

“I wouldn't mind hearing ‘Penny Lane,' ” said Mr. Zaric. “It makes me happy.”

“Shouldn't we sing something religious?” asked Aleksandra Julianovic. “It's kind of that occasion.”

“What about this?” said Mrs. Zaric, placing her right hand at her throat and gently singing: “
Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo. Here comes the sun, and I say
— Oh wait, I'm not sure how the rest of the lyrics go. Let's just do the chorus.”

Mr. and Mrs. Zaric, Irena, and Aleksandra Julianovic all sang, softly and slowly. Irena was close enough to see her father's face straining. She worried that if he cried the cuts around his eyes would open and blood would wash into his tears. Then he sank to his knees so abruptly that she thought he had been shot. Mrs. Zaric rushed to him. She held the palm of her hand over his ear and cradled his head against her hip.

“Shh, darling, shh, baby,” she said. “Be strong, baby, I'm here.”

Mr. Zaric fell forward onto the heels of his hands and began to rock back and forth on his head—not so much crying as bleeding with tears. Mrs. Zaric sank to her knees in the coarse ground around her husband, and as he rocked she held her face against the small of his back.