Pretty Birds Read online

  “Here,” she said, holding out her hand with a tone of triumph. It was a small, old, crumpled sample box of Geisler birdseed from Germany.

  Irena’s eyes welled. “You have saved Pretty Bird’s life,” she said.

  “It’s not so simple,” the doctor said with a sigh. “This will last Pretty Bird one meal. Two, at most. He will assume there is more on the way. Which none of us can these days.”

  Irena thought she could detect where the doctor was trying to lead her. “I won’t do anything to harm him. Nothing!” she said fiercely.

  Dr. Pekar put out her hand. “I don’t want that, either. You have to help him. Have snipers been firing into your building?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Of course. Every building. What I’m going to tell you is distasteful. But you want to do what’s best for Pretty Bird, don’t you?”

  “More than anything,” Irena said. “Anything in the world.”

  “Then you must do something for his own good,” the doctor said simply.

  “I know what you’re trying to get me to do,” said Irena angrily. “One hears it all the time now. That dying is kind. That it spares pain. There is nothing kind about dying, I swear. Milosevic, Arkan, and Karadzic—those are the only deaths that would be kind.”

  “Hear what I mean,” the doctor responded with almost equal force. “What I mean is, you must give him a better chance than what we have here.”

  Only Irena’s puzzlement kept her silent.

  “Take this seed. Go home to Pretty Bird. Wait until you feel there is a lull in the sniper fire—even they take breaks—and bring Pretty Bird up to the roof. Sprinkle some seeds in the palm of your hand. Not too many—you may need to try this more than once. Let Pretty Bird eat; he will be famished. Soon there will be no more, and he will look up. You must show him your empty palm. Wipe it clean in front of him. Then—this is the hard part—you must push him off your arm or hand and make him fly away. Whatever it takes—a stern tone, flapping your arm until he falls away, whatever. Whatever. You must make him leave you.”

  Irena was sobbing now. She curled her right hand up into the sleeve of her grandmother’s old ivory shirt so that she could use the cuff to daub her eyes and mop her nose.

  “It’s his only chance,” the doctor insisted, sitting down. “That he’ll land over on the other side, where they still have trees and grass. Then we hope that someone over there sees him and says, ‘What a beautiful bird.’ ”

  Irena had sunk to the doctor’s lap and thrown her arms around her waist.

  Doctor Pekar stroked her head gently. “Maybe when the war is over, in a month, a year, you can put an ad in the paper, ask around, and find Pretty Bird,” she said. “We are all being asked to make some unspeakable choices, aren’t we? At least yours can keep him alive.” When at last Irena sat up, the doctor tried to blot a few of her tears with the palm of her hand. “This is a rotten thing we’re going through,” she said.

  Irena wiped her wet face with her fingers, then looked at the doctor uncertainly. “I almost forgot,” she said. “How do we pay? Would you be insulted by cigarettes? My father makes candles.”

  Dr. Pekar smiled as she looped a tawny ringlet around an ear. “It’s not necessary,” she said. “But I have an idea. Do you have any free time?”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Irena. “I pick up food and water. Sometimes someone asks me to deliver a letter.”

  “Could you come here tomorrow morning?” asked Dr. Pekar. “I’m trying to stay open now and then. Word has gotten around. There are people trying to keep their pets alive. Dogs, cats, hamsters—there’s not always much I can do for them. Do you like animals?”

  “Very much,” said Irena.

  “Much experience with them?”

  “We had a cat when I was a child, Puddy. She died when we were both twelve. Then we got Pretty Bird.”

  “Well, I could use some help,” the doctor continued. “To hold the animals while they’re examined or treated. Clean up when they’re gone. Sometimes just to hold them. I had a nurse—Svjetlana—you may remember. I imagine she’s on the other side. I hope so. I could also use some water. A little fuel for the burner in here. And I’ve been told there are even some hypodermic needles on the black market.”

  “Everything but birdseed,” said Irena.

  “Eight in the morning? If you aren’t here, I will assume you’ve been delayed by shooting.” Dr. Pekar rested her hands on Irena’s shoulders, her ringlets jiggling. “I am sorry for what you have to do,” she said. Then she added automatically, “Be careful of the snipers on your way home.”

  WHEN IRENA ARRIVED HOME, she told her mother what the doctor had said. Her mother sat down in the kitchen and cried. Mr. Zaric was in the basement, she said, cleaning it up, setting out chairs, and trying to make the space comfortable during bombings. Aleksandra Julianovic was his interior designer.

  “I think that this is something you and I must do together,” said Mrs. Zaric. Mother and daughter listened for gunfire, and heard several shots ringing in the distance. “Shh,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Listen for a minute more.” Soon there was another shot, but nothing more. Wordlessly, Mrs. Zaric took Pretty Bird from where he was crumpled against the side of his cage and cradled him in her hands. “Come on, little one,” she said.

  They walked to a small door that opened onto the roof, all the while listening for gunfire, and moving slowly, Irena knew, to postpone their arrival. At the top, they pressed on the rail that unlatched the steel door. They had not really seen—or, at any rate, noticed—the clouds for months. Today, the sky seemed angry, gray, and boiling.

  Irena took a plastic bag out of the pocket of her blue jeans and shook a small sprinkle of seeds into her right hand. Pretty Bird looked over from his perch in Mrs. Zaric’s hands, ventured an exploratory sniff, and then plunged his beak into the pile of seeds.

  “Good boy, Pretty Bird,” Mrs. Zaric said.

  Irena added, “But eat slowly, because there is no more.”

  Irena and her mother had not cried together since they’d left Grbavica—no, since the night before. They had howled and beaten their hands against walls. But they hadn’t shed any tears. It was as if weeping might drain away the wrath that kept them going. Blood and sobs just dried. But now they cried. They shuddered; they gasped as if they had run to the top of a hill. Then, as they doubled over to catch their breath, they began to laugh. Laughing seemed to give them back breath. Irena straightened, struggling to hold the seed for Pretty Bird as he gnawed at her palm. He left small red bites that she would study for days.

  Irena said, “You love that damn bird more than you love me.”

  “It’s close,” Mrs. Zaric agreed.

  Pretty Bird looked up as he finished the seeds, and began to hop, foot by foot, between Mrs. Zaric’s palms. “Bo-oing!” he said, resounding like the basketball hoop in Grbavica. “Bo-oing!”

  “Listen,” Irena said lightly, “we have had a pretty bad time, haven’t we? But we can do you a favor and get you out of here. You know what? I guess you have always been able to fly away. We are thankful that you have wanted to stay with us so long. These days would have been much worse without you.” Her voice snagged. “Now here’s what we want you to do,” she said, brushing her mouth against the gray and green feathers on Pretty Bird’s head. “You take off and fly on over to where we used to live. You look around for the prettiest spot, and then you just settle down. Make your noises. Make that sound ’Bo-oing!’ Someone will see you and say, ‘What an amazing bird!’ And they will ask you to come home with them. Just hop a ride on their shoulder and go home with them. Eat and rest and let them love you.”

  Mrs. Zaric spoke hoarsely from the other side of Pretty Bird’s head. “And when this madness is over we will come find you. Even if it is just to say hello. We will walk up and down the streets and ask, ‘Do you know a bird who can sing like a telephone rings and who flew here from Brazil because he didn’t like all that sand? Th
at’s Pretty Bird. We have come to say hello.’ ”

  Irena had worried that she would have to lift Pretty Bird from her mother’s hands and throw him into the sky. She had steeled herself to be stern. Dire images singed her mind. She would clasp her arms behind her back, as if handcuffed, so that Pretty Bird couldn’t fly back to her. He might wonder what he had done to be treated with such callousness. He might fly off only to dart back to beat his wings against Grandma’s kitchen window, as if to say, “Whatever I did, I’m sorry. Let me in. I just want to be with you.” But, instead, Pretty Bird cocked his head slightly to the side and took two last steps between Mrs. Zaric’s palms. She lifted her hands up toward the gray sky, and Pretty Bird took a small leap from her outstretched fingers, let the wind fill his wings, and flapped once, twice, three times rapidly, then soared into the wind and circled around the back of the building. Irena and her mother stood motionless, looking up, as the fringe of Pretty Bird’s red tail seemed to glow in the grayness. He took another bite of the air with his wings and flew over the tired river toward the jumbled cluster of cinder-block buildings that used to be their home.

  11.

  IRENA MADE HER way to Dr. Pekar’s early the next morning, and then the next. She liked being outside on the walk over. She liked the doctor, who seemed as if she might have been a little lonely for company even before the war. She liked the disarray of the office, which was still steeped in dog breath and deodorizer. She liked holding dogs and cats against her chest to brace them as Dr. Pekar sewed up cuts and gashes. She liked feeling useful.

  One morning an elderly woman brought in a little dog who seemed sluggish to the point of stupor. Dr. Pekar knew her well. Marilyn was a little blond mop of a Pekingese, turning gray, who could no longer evacuate her bowels.

  “This is going to be ugly,” she muttered to Irena. Irena and the dog’s owner steadied the little dog in place while Dr. Pekar inserted a rubber-tipped tube into her backside. Marilyn reared slightly, then settled down wearily. As Dr. Pekar sluiced water into her small body, Irena thought she could see it brim in Marilyn’s eyes. She was a small dog; results were immediate. There was a cartoon splat from Marilyn’s backside, and a small pudding dribbled out.

  The woman wept with gratitude. She kissed Marilyn’s small coconut shell of a head and took the dog onto her shoulder. Then she kissed Dr. Pekar and leaned down to kiss Irena, who had begun to swab down the steel examination table.

  “Will they be back?” Irena asked.

  “Three or four days, probably,” said Dr. Pekar, “Ordinarily, I’d say, ‘Your dog—your friend—is in pain. You have to do the one thing that would help.’ But, under the circumstances . . .” The doctor’s voice trailed off. “She can’t last long, though.”

  “Marilyn or her owner?” asked Irena.

  Doctor Pekar let the remark drift away as she went out to their next patient.

  ANOTHER WOMAN BROUGHT in an old blue hound who was exhausted and hoarse from barking. The poor dog had been driven crazy by bombs. It was a quiet morning. But Cesar whimpered, bucked, and cringed in a corner, hearing whines from mortars and bombs that were above human register.

  Mrs. Tankosic, Cesar’s owner, wore a dark brown scarf over her head and kept tugging it forward just above her eyes; her eyebrows had fallen away. “None of us is getting any sleep up on the hill,” she said. “They have this man, the Sniper from Slatina they call him, shooting all the time. He never takes a break, and we never sleep.”

  “It’s probably more than one man,” suggested Irena. Cesar lay crumpled in the corner like discarded wrapping paper.

  Dr. Pekar laid her head against Cesar’s chest. She could feel his heart shudder. She could hear his stomach slosh and churn. “I have nothing to give Cesar,” she announced finally. “In places like London and Hollywood, they have tranquilizers for dogs. They have dog psychiatrists. I think what you must understand,” she continued quietly, “is that life has become just hours of hurts for Cesar. He is almost—I have never seen the likes of it—barking his heart out. It may be the only way he knows to try to take himself away from here.”

  Mrs. Tankosic touched Cesar’s back gently. His spine looked like a thin stick that was about to burst through a worn gray bag.

  “You have something for that, though, don’t you?”

  Dr. Pekar left the room for a moment and returned with her right hand jammed into the pocket of her lab coat. “Let us all put our arms around Cesar,” the doctor suggested. Irena laced one of her arms around the dog’s chest. Mrs. Tankosic pressed her chest against Cesar’s back, and her face against the side of his head; she cried into one of his drooping ears. “I’ll see you soon, my big boy,” she said. Irena heard her own breathing, Dr. Pekar’s, and Mrs. Tankosic’s. She grasped that Cesar’s panting had stopped.

  “Nothing can hurt him now,” the doctor whispered. Irena had seen the bodies of friends, family, and strangers over the past few months. But she had not seen a body pass bloodlessly from life to death in a breath. The same blood and bones, the same teeth and hair, added up to life in one instant and death in the next. Irena no longer thought of the living and the dead as occupying separate provinces, merely separate timetables.

  DR. PEKAR LOOKED at Cesar’s stiff body in the corner of the room. A medical dilemma had become a disposal predicament. “I have an incinerator out back,” she told Irena. Dr. Pekar tried to shake a cigarette out of an old pack of Drina—she had been hiding that in her pocket, too—and tapped two into Irena’s hand. “I hope I’m not encouraging bad habits,” she said.

  “I’m not a virgin,” Irena volunteered. “About smoking,” she added with a snort.

  “I almost am,” Dr. Pekar offered. “Thirty years old and I haven’t had three men.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Irena. “You’re beautiful. You’re fascinating.”

  “I’m covered in cat puke,” said the doctor. “I stick my hands into dogs’ assholes.” Dr. Pekar swished out a cloud of smoke and watched it scatter. “I’m running out of pentobarbital. It’s not something you stock up on for emergencies, like beans or plum jelly.”

  “Come with me to a soldier’s checkpoint or water line,” said Irena. “We’ll get pentobarbital and get you Man Number Three. Dr. Oooh-lah-lah.” They laughed, girl to girl, but as Irena began to help Dr. Pekar trim Cesar with twine to take him out to the incinerator, she mentioned Mrs. Tankosic. “She sounds like she wants to kill herself,” said Irena. “We should tell someone and stop her.”

  “Why?” asked Dr. Pekar.

  12.

  THE VERY NEXT morning, a Sergeant Oooh-lah-lah, at any rate, came roaring up to the concrete landing just under Dr. Pekar’s office in a white U.N. vehicle. Irena and Dr. Pekar could hear the engine cut off, and the sound of booted steps. There was a knock, and a slightly breathless voice.

  Sergeant Colin Lemarchand was with the U.N. forces of the French army. His pale blue beret in hand and his neat blond mustache twitching in animation, the sergeant explained that he had been cruising the streets of Kosevo just below the Sarajevo Zoo, looking for a veterinarian’s sign. A Dr. Djukic had been the zoo’s veterinarian, but he had not been seen since the first days of the war.

  “He’s a good man, I know him a little,” Dr. Pekar told Sergeant Lemarchand. “You can’t find him?”

  “He’s in Pale,” said the sergeant. “He can’t—they won’t let him across.”

  “I’m a doctor for house cats, hamsters, and lap dogs,” said Dr. Pekar.

  “That will do,” said Sergeant Lemarchand. “Until a few months ago, I was an assistant pastry chef.”

  THE ZOO WAS spread out on a hill in Poljine, above the Olympic Stadium and just beyond the Kosevo neighborhood. The U.N.’s field maps called it a contested zone. But there really was no contest between Serb paramilitaries and Bosnian zookeepers. Serbs had wheeled large guns into Poljine, at the top of the hill, to churn shells into the zoo. The park became a free-fire zone inhabited by trapped animals.
/>   The lions and bears reared up at the alien roars and crashes, as if to challenge their invaders. But they were ensnared in their steel cages. Then the wolves, foxes, and monkeys began to starve. Zookeepers couldn’t sprint through sniper and mortar fire to feed them, though a few tried, and died next to the animals they often had reared from the time they were young.

  The pumas and jaguars went wild with hunger. The shooting and shelling made them crazy with fear. Then hungry people coming in from all over did the same. Gangs attacked cages and seized peacocks, ostriches, and alpine goats for food. Serb snipers fired into the cages, slaughtering the animals—they wanted to see their bullets draw blood, like kids smashing bugs with their shoes. People in the streets nearby swore that they saw the zoo’s two lions stand on their hind legs and try to bat down bullets with their paws. They said that the lions, unlike the Blue Helmets, didn’t just stand aside.

  SERGEANT LEMARCHAND TOLD Dr. Pekar and Irena on the short ride over that Kolo was sick. Kolo was one of three brown bears that had sat, swatted flies, and shaken off water in a cage on a raised stone platform overlooking a slender creek. When the food ran out, the bears had turned to each other for mutual protection—and then for nourishment. Kolo was the strongest or, at least, the meanest. When a company of Canadian soldiers got to the zoo, they found a clutter of bones scattered across the cage floor. Kolo had eaten his cage mates. When he realized that he no longer had company, he played with their bones.

  The sergeant left his little white truck in the parking lot, where small family cars had been smashed by shells in the first days of the war. The wind, rain, and bullets of the past few months had rusted and riddled the cars, and shattered their windows; they looked like so many flattened soup cans.