Pretty Birds Read online

  “Step carefully,” said Sergeant Lemarchand. “This is what they call a contested area.”

  “Unlike the rest of our city,” said Dr. Pekar.

  SERGEANT LEMARCHAND STOPPED suddenly.

  “The girl,” he said, whirling around toward Irena. “You, mademoiselle”—he deployed a phrase in French to make his point—“I do not wish to bring a young girl into a contested area.”

  “Oh, that’s très ridiculous,” said Irena. “It’s not like I’m, you know, a virgin.”

  As they stepped carefully up to Kolo’s cage, Dr. Pekar turned to her and murmured, “Odd choice of words.”

  Kolo did not look like an animal who had recently eaten two bears. His brown coat was dry and gray; it hung over his spine and ribs like a sagging old rug. His penis was a small, lank worm. He had beached himself onto his side, gasping for breath through a slender, battered muzzle. He kicked his legs slowly, like a tired baby falling asleep. A Canadian doctor, a captain with a medical shield over the breastplate of his bulletproof vest, offered Dr. Pekar a reflexive salute. Irena sawed off a salute in return.

  “I am not a veterinarian,” said Captain Pierre Enright. “But I do not think there is much more diagnosis to be done here.”

  Dr. Pekar stood back from Kolo’s cage. She bent down, as if trying to peer through a keyhole, to look into the bear’s eyes. Mostly, they were closed. She watched for a long minute, in which Kolo finally batted them to wince away the pain. Sergeant Lemarchand wrenched open the iron gate for Dr. Pekar; it was quite pointlessly locked. The soldier knelt to steady the bear against his shoulder. Dr. Pekar passed her hand over Kolo’s eyes; they did not follow her hand. She had no fear of kneeling down to place her nose against his muzzle. She held her left hand against the bear’s chest; she could just about feel his heart squeeze lightly into her hand.

  “He is dying for sure,” said Dr. Pekar from inside the cage. “Starving to death and mad with hunger and pain.”

  “How much food would he need?” asked Captain Enright.

  “I usually deal with house cats. But, say, six to eight pounds a day.”

  “Meat?” asked the captain. The two doctors circled Kolo’s cage slowly.

  “A little. Vegetables and fruit, mostly. And grains. But a lot.”

  “Is there any way we can get six pounds of food a day for this bear?” asked Captain Enright.

  Sergeant Lemarchand was already shaking his head. “Captain, we can’t count on six spoonfuls for the whole city.”

  “Perhaps an article in Paris Match or The New York Times would help,” mused Captain Enright. “I’m thinking out loud. Or a television story. People love animals. Brigitte Bardot might see it.”

  “There isn’t time,” said Dr. Pekar. “This boy is already eating himself up inside. It’s in his breath. Look at him. Look at him!” she said with sudden urgency. “And all you can do is hope that Brigitte Bardot sees him.” Dr. Pekar snorted.

  Derision seemed to spur Captain Enright to marshal his thinking. “I understand,” he said without resentment. “How would you ordinarily end the suffering of a patient with no hope of survival? It is not a question I confront with mine,” he added.

  “Pentobarbital,” said Dr. Pekar. “But you would need a lot for a brown bear. Even desiccated as he is. Do you have any?” she continued.

  “Not a jot,” said Captain Enright. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we try to keep our soldiers alive.”

  “The right dose of morphine could work,” said Dr. Pekar from behind Kolo in the cage. Sergeant Lemarchand was still holding Kolo against his shoulder. Indeed, he had put a hand behind the bear’s ear, as if to protect him from the conversation. “I could never get that approved,” he said. “We need it for people.”

  “You have another course of treatment,” Dr. Pekar observed. “On your hip.”

  Sergeant Lemarchand’s left hand dropped softly onto the handle of his service revolver, as if he had just been reminded to feel for an old sore.

  “The traditional prescription for suffering creatures,” the doctor went on. “One bullet applied directly to the brain. Effective and even humane. They are dead before they can hear the shot, much less feel it.”

  Sergeant Lemarchand tipped back onto his buttocks on the cage’s cold, chipped floor. His knees had suddenly given way, and he slapped his ankles to bring them feeling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I cannot fire my weapon. Those are orders.”

  “You’re a soldier,” said Dr. Pekar. “Is your gun just for decoration? Like a bracelet and earrings?”

  “I know how to use it, madame,” said Sergeant Lemarchand, stressing his courtesy. “But I cannot. Those orders are the specific policy of the United Nations. They are handed down from New York. You can read them in English, French, and Russian.”

  “Those pompous asses are a long way off,” Dr. Pekar retorted with growing vehemence.

  “Still, I cannot fire my gun. I must account for every bullet. Please. I love animals, too. That is why I brought you and the doctor here—I’d hoped you could do something for Kolo that I could not.”

  “This bear snapped at us,” Dr. Pekar suggested. Kolo, meanwhile, seemed to be simmering in pain, his murmurs growing louder.

  “He was mad. He was hungry. He was going to eat us. What lie isn’t more believable than the truth right now?” she asked.

  “I’ll attest to whatever you say,” Captain Enright volunteered.

  But Sergeant Lemarchand saw instantly that the plot would have to begin with him, and he wanted no part of it. “My orders are clear,” he said. “In fact, nothing is clearer. Sometimes I wonder what we are supposed to do here. Relieve the siege, but help the Serbs keep it. Assist civilians, but don’t fire back at their assailants. They’ve sent me out here to help a sick bear. I can do everything but actually help him. One order holds firm: I cannot fire my gun.”

  Dr. Pekar sprang forward. “Give me your gun, then,” she said.

  “That’s also against orders,” said Sergeant Lemarchand. “Guns are not corkscrews or can openers that you lend out for chores.”

  “What’s your problem?” Dr. Pekar shrieked at the sergeant. “I mean, what is your problem? Is the U.N. afraid that shooting a sick bear will infringe on the sovereignty of Serb bears? Are you really proud to stay neutral in the middle of a massacre? What kind of sick bastards are you Blue Helmets to leave your snug homes just to stand around and watch us bleed? I would rather have a spot on my conscience than nothing, like yours.” Her voice was hard and cold.

  Kolo’s eyes seemed suddenly to lock shut. A loud crack split the sky, and reverberated through the cage; the bars buzzed softly. Kolo deflated swiftly. There was a last gasp from the big brown bear’s chest as Irena watched him flatten against the floor, falling with astounding softness into a spreading, slippery red pond.

  SARAJEVO CIVILIANS KNEW how to get down at the sound of a sniper shot. The soldiers were surprised and baffled, Irena noticed. Sergeant Lemarchand and Captain Enright flinched and ducked, but they turned their faces up toward the trees, looking for the shot.

  “Get down!” Dr. Pekar shouted at them. “Stay down!”

  A voice screamed at them through the trees from the other side. “That—animal—” he shouted in bursts, “did not—deserve—to suffer. You—do.”

  Another shot split the air; Irena could hear it clipping branches and leaves. “Run!” the voice shouted. “Get out! Run! Or I will give you”—he squeezed off another shot—“my autograph.”

  The little group in the cage stood up slowly. Sergeant Lemarchand raised his arms above his head, to show that he had no intention of reaching for his revolver; the sniper might not have heard that he couldn’t fire it anyway. Captain Enright, who was a doctor and had no gun, did the same. Dr. Pekar and Irena followed, moving slowly back down the hill. Their arms felt heavy and weary after just a few feet.

  “Wait,” Sergeant Lemarchand said to Irena. He turned around to face the trees, keeping his arm
s flamboyantly upraised. With slow, exaggerated movements, the sergeant unzipped his bulletproof vest and slid his arms out of it until he held the jacket almost daintily in his hands. He motioned Irena to hold still and slipped the vest almost grandly over her shoulders. “This way, mademoiselle,” he said.

  As they walked back down the hill, Irena thought that she could feel a hole burning in the back of her head. When they reached flat terrain, she was both relieved and excited. She turned around, jumping on her toes, and called back through the trees, “Are you the Sniper from Slatina?” Sergeant Lemarchand helped her out of the vest, and she jumped up again, higher, shouting the question more loudly yet. “Are you the Sniper from Slatina?”

  There was no response, and they headed for the sergeant’s vehicle. It was a couple of blocks before they could hear one another breathing naturally, trusting that another breath would follow.

  “He would have shot us by now if he was going to,” Captain Enright pointed out.

  “Perhaps we should have said thank you,” said Dr. Pekar.

  “That would have seemed—odd,” said the captain.

  “He might have let us come back,” said the doctor.

  “There is nothing left in that zoo to care for,” Sergeant Lemarchand said. “Someone even shot the squirrels from their trees. Madame, am I really a sick bastard?” he asked Dr. Pekar.

  MUSTAFA ABADZIC, THE zoo’s director, had taken to sleeping in an old equipment shed on the grounds. It was exposed to more sniper fire than was generally desired in a residential property, but Mr. Abadzic had been turned out of his three-bedroom apartment in Grbavica. Black-whiskered men were stuffing the small carved olive-wood elephants and zebras he had brought back from Tanzania under their black sweaters when they beat him away from his own door.

  “My children will love these,” they said.

  Mr. Abadzic had seen Kolo gorge himself on Slino and Guza, his old cage mates. “It’s the law of the jungle,” he told Mr. Suman, the zoo’s chief custodian, who was camped in an unshattered corner of the old chimp house. “Our jungle, this city we have now.”

  The director enlisted Mr. Suman’s help in digging a grave for Kolo, in the soft ground outside the bear cage. “We shouldn’t just leave him there to draw flies,” he said. “That would be shameful.” That afternoon, the director had used a piece of burned wood to etch a message across a plank he had wrenched off a smashed storage door:

  KOLO

  1981–1992

  WHO SAW EACH SARAJEVAN AS THE SAME

  “That should stay until we can get a proper marker chiseled,” he said.

  “Perhaps it should stay like that,” said Mr. Suman.

  The men got shovels and dug a hole for Kolo. They waited until ten at night to begin, when it was seamlessly dark; they did not finish before midnight. They discovered that it was hard to dig a hole in pitch blackness. The moon shone no more than the rim of a coin in the sky. It was hard to see where to stick their shovels, and as the hole got deeper it became harder to find the ground. A couple of times, Mr. Abadzic missed and fell over into Kolo’s grave. They caught their breath and had a smoke sitting on their backsides on the bottom of the hole, glad to have a place to smoke where the embers of their cigarettes could glow unseen above ground.

  The men climbed out of the grave and clambered into Kolo’s cage. Mr. Abadzic squinted in the darkness and found Kolo’s front feet. Mr. Suman found the bear’s hind legs. The men had not been friends before the war. They had done no more than nod at each other on any given day. Mr. Abadzic was a scholar and an executive who took yearly trips to Africa. He brought back slide photographs and delighted school groups and club dinners with his pictures of cheetahs lounging lazily in the Serengeti, baby chimps looking as if they were budding from tree branches in the Masai Mara. Mr. Suman had traveled only as far as some of the small beach towns of Montenegro. He had never married. Collecting restaurant menus and matches was his only pastime. But the men had been storm-tossed into a close association over the past few months, sleeping in adjacent battered buildings and struggling to help their charges. Sometimes they could only open a cage and hope that a red fox or some other survivor might spring across the creek into a home on the Serb side.

  Mr. Suman learned that Mr. Abadzic worked hard. He dug holes and ran around sniper fire. Mr. Abadzic had discovered that Mr. Suman cared deeply about the zoo. He hadn’t barricaded himself inside when the war began but had run to the zoo out of concern for the animals. He stayed there now, in the front line of fire, to be near them even as they perished.

  Mr. Abadzic and Mr. Suman tried to lift Kolo by his legs, but the bear’s great dumb brown belly left them wheezing from the strain. The men had just budged Kolo a few inches along the floor of the cage when the first bullet struck Mr. Suman in his throat. The second shot pealed through the trees and pierced Mr. Abadzic’s chest.

  People nearby awakened the next day to catch sight of two new bodies alongside Kolo’s. They must have been humans—they were wearing shoes. Many wondered what two human beings might have been trying to do with a dead bear in the middle of the night that was worth risking death. When they saw the shovels beside the grave, they asked again.

  Sergeant Lemarchand got a call to return to the zoo. He could see the bodies of Mr. Abadzic and Mr. Suman, but he was determined not to risk three or four soldiers’ lives to pick up corpses—whether of men or bears. The sergeant thought that it was unavailing to override the law of the jungle, or the Sniper from Slatina, in the zoo.

  13.

  SERGEANT LEMARCHAND LEFT Irena at the entrance to her building. She looked up to see Aleksandra Julianovic sitting on the outdoor staircase between the first and second floors, smoking one of her last Canadian cigarettes. Irena clumped up the stairs to sit beside her.

  “You shouldn’t be up here,” Irena said.

  “Then it is foolish of you to join me,” Aleksandra pointed out.

  “I’m here to save your life,” Irena answered, smiling.

  “Then take away my cigarettes,” said Aleksandra, rolling out a Players for Irena. “But take this upstairs so your parents will only see you smoking, not endangering your life out here in the fresh air.”

  Irena thought that the hand Aleksandra had thrust into the pocket of her pink housecoat was fumbling for matches. But it proved to be a piece of notepaper. “I’ve been trying to work something out,” Aleksandra said, casting her eyes over a sequence of arrows and numbers. “How many people would you guess are sitting out here like this right now in Sarajevo? Such fools as we.”

  “Not many,” said Irena. “Aside from you and me, anyone else would be accidental.”

  “Can we say fifty people?”

  Irena nodded her assent.

  “A few scurrying across the street for water, a few caught dozing in alleys,” said Aleksandra. She had plainly been preparing her case.

  “There are a few people like me, just sneaking out for no larger purpose than to inhale fresh air and smoke a cigarette in the sunlight,” she continued. “After a while, of course, it’s the loss of such small luxuries that exasperates. It’s like an irritation in your little toe that throbs. Soon you feel nothing else. You breathe, you swallow, you eat onions. You can even have sex. But all you feel is the pain in your little piggy. So here in this city we are still alive, against all odds. Still eating and breathing, if not a lot. But we are shut up in our gloomy rooms, with closet doors nailed over the windows. We are more desperate to get out than grateful to be alive.” Aleksandra smiled through tinged teeth—everyone had taken to brushing with cold, unfinished tea, or stale orange soda and grains of salt—and spirals of smoke.

  “So let’s guess that fifty people are showing their faces and arses right now,” she said. “How many snipers would you say are dug in across the way?”

  “Too many.”

  “Let’s say ten,” said Aleksandra. “Let’s say twenty, it doesn’t matter. What are the odds that they will hit someone?”

>   “Who knows? Three, five, six people every day,” said Irena. “When we listen to the radio, that’s the number we hear. Until the next mortar, of course. Then add fifty.”

  “Let’s say four,” said Aleksandra. “It may be three one day, seven the next. But at the end of a week, sniper deaths usually add up in the high twenties. I love what you can discover in statistics,” she said. “Even these. Statistics is the science of choosing the right numbers to say anything you want.”

  “You are surely leaving out a few factors,” said Irena. “Some snipers must be better shots than others. Some people must be harder to bring down than others. Some of us are quite stealthy—we may be kidding ourselves, of course. And other people can’t even hobble. There are old and injured people who fall down. Rain, wind, politics—it all must make a difference.”

  “The supreme, blinding beauty of statistics,” Aleksandra said with a triumphal smile. “Any fifty people, and you still have more or less the same number of hobblers and speeders. Any ten snipers, and you still have better ones and worse ones. All those variables—and it still averages out that four-point-something people get shot here every day. In the universe, math prevails,” she announced. “Even here.”

  “Nothing else does,” said Irena with a grim smile.

  “So, I have been figuring,” Aleksandra continued. “Let’s say that instead of just fifty foolish, careless, or stupid people sitting outside, that number becomes five hundred. Let’s say that two weeks or two months from now people get tired of always being cooped up and cringing.”

  “We are tired already,” Irena said.

  “So let’s say a thousand people just begin to spread out,” said Aleksandra, painting the scene with the cigarette in her right hand. “No plan or reason. We sit on staircases, we sit on tree stumps, we stroll down Marshal Tito Boulevard. No particular purpose except to stretch our legs, fill our lungs, clear our minds. Suddenly you have snipers firing at a thousand people. The bastards won’t know where to look! After the first shot, everybody scurries anyway. We are like cockroaches in the light. It will be like trying to track ants in a pile. So let’s even say the figures go up slightly, because there are more of us to shoot before we scurry. Let’s say it’s even ten a day.”