Pretty Birds Read online

  “Is that possible?”

  “No.”

  “They just made it up? If they made it up, they would have said that we shot a busload of legless orphans.”

  “They just acknowledged what suits their story,” he replied. “Medical supplies and food must have been all mixed in with bullets and mortar shells. Believe me, no truck—no truck—is going to risk a journey now just to deliver food and medical supplies on that side of the city. Imagine braving bullets only to throw back the tarp and find Tuborg and Spam, but no mortar rounds.”

  “Maybe the facts are so damning, all they have to do is tell the truth,” said Irena.

  “If just two was the truth,” Tedic avowed, “they’d say that twenty had died. Take it from an accomplished prevaricator. Two means one. Maybe none. Maybe just a couple of Serbs with complexion problems that will heal.”

  “It’s hard to keep score in this twisted little game,” Irena said quietly.

  STILL, IRENA DIDN’T walk out the open door.

  “It was them or you,” Tedic told her. “If not yesterday, then today. Or a week from today.”

  “Soldiers are honorable,” Irena said. “They face each other, even from a long way away. Soldiers have uniforms and manners. But what’s the difference between doing this and being an assassin?”

  Tedic paused again. “Perhaps none,” he finally offered. “But what’s the difference between doing this and doing nothing? You might run that play in your mind, too. In this place, conscience is not a virtue. It is a self-inflicted wound.

  “You cannot expect to feel easy about any of it. But how much anguish do you want to expend when each and every day they are coming for us? When they march in to sweep away our bones, I don’t want my hands to be empty. I want them to find my fingers clenched around a sword, a slingshot, or at least a rock.”

  Irena let Tedic’s words settle between them. There was no longer any question—really, there never had been—that she would do the job he had set out for her. But she wanted to remind him that she wasn’t one of his hired assassins, working for Marlboros, deutsche marks, and beer.

  “How are we different from them?” she asked finally.

  Tedic seemed to stagger backward. Then he laughed, a sharp, astonished, nearly giggly laugh that both bewildered and elated Irena. Something she said to Tedic had finally pierced his scales. “Kids. Kids,” he said, shaking his head. “Bless your heart. Bless my soul.”

  Irena found his response so out of character that she wondered if he was speaking in a kind of code.

  “Of all the times and places to be reminded,” he said.

  “Of what?” asked Irena.

  “Of why I became a teacher.” Tedic fished inside his vast leather pockets and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He stood the box on a flour sack between them.

  “Take one,” he offered. “Take the pack. Take them all. I could give you lots of reasons,” he said. “Maybe we lose a few each day.” Tedic had become so utterly still that when he spoke his words seemed to launch from the dead center of his two blistering brown eyes. “In the end, I’ll settle for just one. We will survive.”

  21.

  “ANY JOB IS like high school,” Aleksandra Julianovic told Irena. “Hospital, bank, brewery, factory. I imagine a lingerie store, too. From the moment you arrive, you’re told—you see for yourself—that some people are pretty, some are smart, some are good at sports. Some people are popular, some are lonely. They might as well loop signs around everyone’s neck. Or one of those simple, clever Hindu dots.”

  “Caste marks,” Irena suggested.

  “Precisely. High school imprints a mark you bear for life. A few people get put into several groups. I’ll bet you did.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Irena, fidgeting.

  “A, pretty; B, good at sports; and C, popular?” asked Aleksandra.

  “That may have been the general impression,” Irena finally allowed.

  “But you don’t get equal points in every category,” Aleksandra continued. “Pretty tops smart. Pretty tops everything. Girls and boys—there’s no use pretending otherwise. If Marie Curie and Princess Diana had gone to the same high school, which one do you think everyone would remember?”

  “Marie Curie?” asked Irena with a show of innocence. It took a moment for the joke to impress Aleksandra.

  “You are sooo shrewd,” she crowed. “Smart is next in points. And sometimes there’s a special category. The Plain Girl Who Plays Beautiful Piano. The Boy with a Withered Leg Who Still Carries On. Nice is far down on most lists. It’s usually ‘Nice, but . . .’ ”

  “Nice but dumb, nice but ugly. Nice but dull,” Irena said, finishing the thought.

  They were sitting on the two bottom stairs of the building, smoking and hunching their shoulders against the cold.

  “Can you begin to identify the brewery people that way?” asked Aleksandra.

  “It’s a little harder,” said Irena. “I work such odd hours, I don’t see everyone. In our group in school, Amela was the prettiest. I was the best athlete. Nermina was the smartest. But Amela was also smart, for someone so pretty, and a good athlete. I was pretty for someone who was a good athlete, and most people knew I was also pretty smart. Nermina—you know, who died—was so smart, you were surprised she was a good athlete.”

  Aleksandra detected the omission instantly.

  “She had very beautiful eyes,” Irena said after a pause. “Brown, with flecks of green.”

  Aleksandra had spent enough time with the family to tell that Mr. Zaric was vexing Irena. The days he spent out of the apartment, digging trenches and latrines for the army, seemed the most satisfying for him. Irena reasoned that it was because while her father was getting calluses and scrapes on his hands, all that was expected of him was another shovelful of dirt. When he dug in the woods and scrub, he couldn’t be held accountable for his own survival, much less anyone else’s.

  The government gave the diggers a meager food ration. The diggers, who often had to chip and chisel into flinty soil while ducking rifle shots, knew the price of each mouthful. But Mr. Zaric was guilty and embarrassed that his daughter’s work alone brought them the food, water, and batteries they had at home. The beer and cigarettes were welcome, but awkward for him to enjoy.

  Irena thought that her father was trying to recover a sense of importance with increasingly preposterous contrivances. He spent several days folding the tiny tin wrappers from Marlboro packs into a slide. He then pressed them carefully against the frame of the frosted bathroom window so that they could catch water that would run into a plastic bucket next to the toilet. But the foils were more paper than metal. They fell apart in the first rain and dropped on the floor and into the bucket in small white clumps, like smashed baby ducks.

  “Perhaps if I wait until they dry,” he told Mrs. Zaric. “This mishap may merely be disguised opportunity. Isn’t that how penicillin was invented?”

  “I wouldn’t count on the same momentous result, dear.”

  “I will press the unfortunate puffs flat,” he rallied. “Squeeze out the water and mold them into a kind of pipeline.” Mr. Zaric’s amber eyes flickered with wildfire, which amused his wife and appalled his daughter. “Then, the foils will be reconstituted,” he concluded, his voice rising. “They will dry out and possess the pliability of paper and the tensile strength of metal.” He acted out a kind of ballet of basic osmosis.

  “We can attach them to large horns that will trap snow in the winter,” he enthused. “The snows will thaw in direct sunlight. Water will be created! Fresh rainwater that sluices into the pipelines and directly into the bathroom. Water to drink and bathe—nothing makes your hair softer than rainwater. Standing in water lines, begging Frenchies or Ukes for another couple of bottles—all of that will be part of a bygone age when the Zaric pipeline is completed!”

  Irena shot out from the hallway behind them. “Those foils will have the tensile strength of toilet paper and the pliabili
ty of shit!” she railed. She was becoming accustomed to the grim competence that Molly, Jackie, and even Tedic personified. Her father, absorbed in his nonsensical schemes, seemed ridiculous and useless. Or, as she complained to Aleksandra, “My father is sooo boring.”

  Worse, Irena found herself condescending to be protective of her father. One afternoon she delivered an impassioned and gratuitous speech to Tedic in which she bewailed “this twisted, sick fuck of a world you so-called grown-ups have given us.”

  Tedic clapped the heel of a hand against his forehead. “Omigod, of course!” he exclaimed. “This war. All wars. Cruelty, hate, and ruin. It’s your parents’ fault! What a totally original idea!”

  This wrung an involuntary laugh from Irena. But she went on. “Not my father’s fault,” she said more quietly. “He spends whole days just sleeping and staring. He has nothing to wear but a tweed jacket he had on the day this all began. So much weight has melted off him—he looks like a bum dressed in a stranger’s clothes. He melts down the butts of candles to make more candles so I can read my magazines. Occasionally, he goes off and digs trenches. He comes back filthy and can’t even take a bath. I . . . I blame him for nothing.”

  Tedic looked down.

  Irena was encouraged by his deferential silence. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she cried out. “All my friends and I ever wanted was to smoke, drink, stay up late, listen to the Clash, and screw!”

  Tedic kept his head down, like a front-row mourner, but he raised it as he said, in a slow tone of discovery, “So, that’s our incandescent mixed culture I keep hearing about on the BBC!”

  Which won another laugh from Irena. “I’ll thank you to respect that” was all she could manage in return.

  IRENA HAD HAD little time to see Dr. Pekar. Her office hours were shrinking, in any case. Her supplies were running short, and fewer people sought out help for their pets—so many dogs, cats, hamsters, and rabbits had disappeared and died.

  Irena would walk over the bridge from the brewery to the veterinarian’s office, ring the bell, and shout up her name. Once, Dr. Pekar came down bleary-eyed from sleep, and they made coffee and talked—mostly about how sad and soundless her office had become without the animals. Dr. Pekar said she knew that many people had pets in their homes that they were afraid to bring out. Irena said that she would put up a notice at the synagogue announcing that the doctor was eager to see them.

  “In fact,” said Dr. Pekar, “I’m willing to go and see them, if the snipers so allow.”

  “I’ll help you,” said Irena. “Let me come along someday after work.”

  But when Irena came by in the gloom of a late afternoon two days later, Dr. Pekar was not to be found in her office or in her home. Irena crept under a tree, now bare-branched and clattering in winter, around to the back, where Cesar had been cremated. A wooden door slapped against its frame. Irena entered the kitchen, saying the doctor’s name softly, so as not to startle her. When there was no response, she called out more urgently.

  “Kee! Kee! It’s Irena! I want to show you the note for the synagogue!”

  She walked around quietly. The wind rattled the branches outdoors and whisked in to stir up grains of grit and yellowing papers. Irena reached out to touch a tin oil stove, hammered out of old bean cans, that the doctor had set up in the sink to heat water in a pan. The stove was charred, empty, and cold. Moving to the small adjacent examination room, she could make out a single sheet of Dr. Pekar’s stationery on the steel-topped table, weighted down by a Serbo-Croatian-German dictionary. The paper shuddered every few seconds with a draft of wind. Irena drew close enough to read the note, written in thick black pencil in Dr. Pekar’s hand.

  It said, “Take whatever. Love.”

  Irena did not explore farther from where she stood. Through a closet door, she saw the flaps of a blue skirt dangling, and she realized that she had never seen Dr. Pekar in a skirt. She would help her choose a top sometimes. On her way out, she stopped to take a small bottle of olive oil that she noticed on the edge of the sink, and slipped it into her coat. She kept the note for the synagogue flattened and warm against her chest. She told herself that Dr. Pekar had ventured elsewhere in the city to look for an apartment that was warmer and not so isolated. She would find Irena when she had the chance.

  IRENA HIKED BACK home but stepped off on Aleksandra’s floor, where she found her neighbor in the hallway, squishing old, used tea leaves with the bottom of a glass. Aleksandra had decided that shredding tea leaves might expose fresh sides to boiling water—when they had water to boil, that is. It had been nearly a month since they had had any fresh tea.

  Aleksandra told Irena that she had heard distressing news about Arnaud, her favorite Frenchie, who slipped her cigarettes and posted her letters. She hadn’t seen him for more than a week, and asked another Frenchie at a checkpoint about his whereabouts. The other Frenchie told her that he thought Arnaud had been sent back home. He was happy, said the Frenchie, because he would be home in Marseilles for Christmas.

  “Imagine!” Aleksandra exclaimed. “Back home in the bosom, as it were. Roast goose, chestnut pie, local wine, Gitanes spilling from your pockets. There is some willowy, dark-eyed slattern waiting for him. He’s known her since grade school. While Arnaud has been off civilizing the masses in Africa and Bosnia, the tart has been cultivating his parents. I don’t object to young love. It’s as necessary as measles to proper development. But winter is falling like a vase rolling off a table, and I’m left here without Gitanes or Arnaud’s wonderfully shy smile. He doesn’t want to marry that girl,” she added. “He said she was simply the best lover he ever had. Men confide in me. But at the age of twenty his experience could scarcely be profound.”

  “Even a Frenchman?” Irena teased. Aleksandra wouldn’t dignify the jape with more than a nod. “All our relationships these days are intense and ephemeral,” she told her. “But that doesn’t make them any less worthwhile. Someone who gives you a smile and a cigarette at the right time gives you another day, doesn’t he? You don’t say that a person who pulled you out of the Miljacka is no longer important to you if you never see him again.”

  Aleksandra leaned down on the rim of the glass and twisted it, and the water that she squeezed out was as transparent as tears.

  22.

  IRENA STILL SPENT many days sweeping floors and counting crates. Bullets could be scarce. So were targets, Tedic explained. Firing aimlessly into the other side would look inept and desperate. Worse, the shots might go unnoticed, and even the power they had to alarm would be wasted.

  One day Irena put three shots into the right fender of a Serb staff car that had been clumsily parked behind a barrier on Dinarska Street. The car was visibly empty. Irena wondered why it was a target even as she leveled her rifle. But Tedic was gratified. He savored the scene of three Serb officers coming out of their meeting at night, fumbling with their keys in the gloom of darkness, bumping and scraping their way into their seats—and discovering that they were sitting against fresh bullet holes. “They will hop up like they’d just sat on a dog turd!” he predicted. “They will crawl out of their car, and creep away on hands and knees in the dark, worrying whether we have them in our sights. ‘Dear Mr. Serb,’ ” Tedic mouthed as he wrote in the air with his finger. “ ‘While you were gone, Bosnian bullets paid a call. They left a message: We will find you later.’ ”

  IRENA BEGAN TO work overnight. Tedic advised her to tell her parents that it was because of increased production at the brewery. Against all expectation, Milan and Dalila were delighted. They reasoned that the basement of the brewery would be safer for their daughter than her place near them on the living-room floor. But once, Irena was rash enough to mention how quiet and still the city seemed at night, with no sounds of traffic, soccer matches on television, loud banter in bars and cafés, pots clanging, or the Clash blaring over the radio.

  “Sometimes,” said Irena, “I look up into the silent sky and I think I can practically hear the moon move th
rough the clouds.”

  Her parents were appalled by her poetic reflection. “What in the hell are you doing going outside to look up at the moon?” her father shouted. “The fucking moon! Are you some kind of wolf?”

  “I go out for a smoke,” Irena said quickly, but her improvisation was swiftly found to be foolish.

  “You mean you light a match and hold it to your lips?” Mrs. Zaric shrieked. “Why don’t you just train a torch on your skull and shout, ’Shoot here!’ across the bridge.”

  Irena tried to regain her footing. “I stay kind of in the loading-dock area,” she said.

  “You can’t smoke in the basement?” Mr. Zaric asked with growing astonishment. “It’s a brewery, not a hospital.”

  “Doctors smoke in hospitals,” Mrs. Zaric asserted. “In surgery! Remember when we were in for your mother, Milan?”

  “I don’t know about the old days,” said Irena. “But these days there are health codes.” She held her gaze steady. “Even in breweries,” she added.

  Mrs. Zaric glared back at her daughter, and finally turned away. “Well, they should have some small room with a small window that people can crawl into and smoke,” she said.

  “Does Dr. Tedic know you’re going outside?” asked her father. “It’s stupid.”

  “I suppose,” said Irena. But she could tell that the topic had been closed.

  TEDIC HAD TOLD Irena that she would be fractionally safer climbing up to her roost in the dusk than in daylight, but that staying there until she had an opportunity to fire would be colder and gloomier. He said she must take care not to rush a shot just to get it done.

  And there was the fact of the flash to consider, too.

  “We tell you to take pains to conceal yourself,” Tedic explained. “But you’ve probably figured out that when you fire at night the flash from your muzzle becomes visible. Positively dazzling, in fact.”