Pretty Birds Read online

  “Diana? Over.”

  “Diana.” Irena forgot to depress the trigger, but Amela’s voice came back regardless. And it was Amela, Irena realized; they knew each other’s timing.

  “She looks very sad. Her picture—you can imagine the news here—is all over. Over.”

  “Where are you?” asked Irena. “Over.”

  “We had to move out of Grbavica,” said Amela. “Things got rough. We are now on Alexander I Street. Are you at your grandmother’s? Over.”

  Mrs. Zaric had turned her back and was walking in small circles away from the cab to give her daughter at least a semblance of privacy. But Zoran motioned her back.

  “Not that far,” he said. “Snipers can see over there.”

  “Yes,” said Irena. “Her old apartment. She’s dead. Over.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amela said. “Was she old? Over.”

  “Yes. But she was shot,” said Irena. The microphone trigger slipped once under her finger. “Just before we got here. Over.”

  “Mr. Dragoslav is dead,” said Amela. He was a small man with a plum-shaped beard who taught physics. “He was in the army and got shot. Over.”

  “Nermina is dead,” Irena told her softly. “Over.” It was a moment before Amela responded, and her voice was so quiet that it threatened to fade out.

  “Was she a soldier? Over.”

  “She was waiting for bread. Over,” said Irena. But she went on—that sounded so stupid. “People have to wait outside for bread and water now. We put up a note for her parents, and it’s still up. They must be dead, too. Over,” she said.

  Excitement—unexpected, with a tinge of elation that Irena realized she had not heard for months—came into Amela’s voice. “But I’m calling with good news,” she said. “Pretty Bird. We have Pretty Bird. Pretty Bird is fine.” Her voice disappeared into the static. When it came back, Irena heard trembling. “I’m sorry,” said Amela. “I forgot to pass off to you. Penalty, penalty. Pretty Bird is fine. Over.”

  Irena had to lower the arm with the microphone. She slumped against the taxi.

  Mrs. Zaric, arms clasped around her own shoulders, crept back into her daughter’s conversation. “Pretty Bird? She said Pretty Bird?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  Mrs. Zaric mouthed to the driver, “Our bird.”

  Amela came back. “We figured he was gone with everyone else. But a few months ago someone came running. They said Pretty Bird was back at the basketball court. I couldn’t believe it. I said, no, couldn’t be. But it was. He was perched on the hoop. He must have flown back. Over.”

  “We tried to keep him,” said Irena. “But we ran out of food. We had to let him go.” Irena knew that she had let up the trigger of the microphone before finishing that thought. “Is he there now?” she was finally able to ask. “Over.”

  “At home,” said Amela. “Our apartment. We thought—you weren’t here—he is safe with us. We will keep him for you. Until all this is over. Over.”

  “Does he make his sounds? Over.”

  “For sure,” said Amela. “Washing machine, coffeemaker, phone.”

  All sounds he can’t hear here, thought Irena.

  “I think—it’s sad, but he’s so smart—we hear him going p-kow, p-kow, boom, like the shells, at night,” Amela said. “Over.”

  That’s how they sound going out, Irena thought to herself. “Take care of him” was all she could manage. “Please. Over.”

  “Until you can,” said Amela, and after a couple of clicks and pops she added, “How are you? Over.”

  “We are”—she clicked the trigger up and down—“fine,” Irena said finally. “There are problems.”

  “Here, too.”

  “Our team?”

  “All gone somewhere.”

  “Emina? Danica? Miss Ferenc?” Then Irena remembered. “Over.”

  “Can’t find them. Lucky we don’t play Number One tonight. Over.”

  “Coach Dino?” Irena had deliberately saved his name to attach casually after a roster of old teammates.

  “You hear about him,” said Amela. “He wins rifle matches in the army. Over.”

  Mrs. Zaric was motioning with her hands.

  “Your parents?” asked Irena. “Over.”

  “Good. Father is in the army, but he doesn’t do much. Thank God. Over.”

  “Mine too! Digs trenches!”

  “With those elegant hands!”

  Irena didn’t know that Amela had noticed her father’s hands.

  “I have to be in the army, too,” Amela added. “Over.”

  “What do you do? Over.”

  “Office stuff. Not much. No school. Over.”

  “I work in a brewery,” said Irena. “Office work. The U.N. keeps it open. Over.”

  “Fantastic! The U.N. Cute French soldiers? Over.” Irena and her mother flashed smiles at each other.

  “A few.”

  “Get to drink what you make? Over.”

  “We’re paid in beer and cigarettes,” Irena said, laughing. “Over.”

  “Sounds great! We’re paid money. Worth shit. Over.”

  Mrs. Zaric had to turn away from Irena when she heard her daughter’s laugh chiming alongside Amela’s from the radio speaker.

  “I have to go,” said Amela. “Driver has to go. Did you hear? Madonna wrote a book called just Sex.” She used the English word. “Over.”

  “She is so wild!”

  “She is fantastic!”

  “I love her!”

  “Fucking incredible!”

  “Have a few old VOX and Q’s here,” said Irena, “That’s all. Over.”

  “Me, too,” said Amela. “Sometimes old stuff comes in. We will take care of Pretty Bird. Can you talk again?”

  “Yes! Yes, over.”

  “Maybe,” said Amela, “I can get him to talk into the microphone! Can you talk Thursday? Same time? Over.”

  Irena calculated that she would either be home after a night in her roost or waiting to boost herself up in the afternoon.

  “Yes,” she said, casting a glance at Zoran, who shrugged and nodded. “Yes, fine. Over!”

  “Take care, then,” Amela said. “Driver says to say ‘Over and out.’ Pretty Bird makes a refrigerator sound. Over, out!” she shouted through the pops and bubbles.

  “Over, out, love to Pretty Bird!” said Irena. She dropped the microphone to her chest and reached for her mother’s hands. “Pretty Bird” was all she could say.

  Mrs. Zaric just squeezed her daughter’s fingers. “Pretty Bird” was all she could manage, too.

  ZORAN REMINDED THEM that he was not with one of the humanitarian agencies in town—he had to be paid. He said the price was a carton of cigarettes. Mrs. Zaric said he was being ridiculous. She had heard that some of the French soldiers in town were selling short calls on the satellite telephones some units carried for one hundred U.S. dollars. “To places like London and Chicago,” she said. “This was just to the other side of town.”

  “If you want a bargain, call London and Chicago,” Zoran answered. “A call to the other side of Sarajevo costs.”

  “Five packs, then.”

  “The carton.”

  “The carton, then,” Mrs. Zaric said with a sigh of annoyance. “But the Thursday phone call, too.”

  “A carton and five packs.”

  “The carton,” Mrs. Zaric said evenly, and glanced at her daughter. “Did I mention they were Marlboros?”

  Zoran began to smile as he scuffed his feet against the taxi’s tires.

  “A pretty girl has ways to convince me,” he said, and Mrs. Zaric stiffened as her hand tightened on her daughter’s arm. Before she could shout—or slap—him down, Zoran spoke in the voice of a faded French movie star. “I don’t mean your girl, ma’am. I’m a man who values experience.”

  Irena was dispatched upstairs to bring back half a carton of cigarettes.

  AFTERWARD, IRENA AND her mother sat on the stairs and opened a spare pack pl
ucked from their cache of Marlboros.

  “I felt safe about him being in London,” Mrs. Zaric said of her son. “I even thought he was safe in Chicago.”

  “Al Capone is dead,” Irena pointed out.

  “There are Serbs in Chicago,” Mrs. Zaric reminded her. “Lots. But they’re Americans. They all have cars, CD players, computers. Most of them want another Bulls championship, not a Greater Serbia.”

  “So do I,” said Irena.

  “It was the rabbi who told me. I wandered in to look at the board while you were at work one day, and he said, ‘The girl picked one up. I think she has a boyfriend or something who is going to Chicago to join one of our fighting units. Praise be, they will be here in good time.’ Praise be,” Mrs. Zaric continued. “Those boys and girls will never get farther than Cleveland. If Tomaslav and the rest manage to sneak into Bosnia, he’ll only wind up in the haystacks of Zenica, sharing mud and bugs, and risking his life for peasants.”

  “Country people in black dresses and plain scarves?” Irena asked. “Not city folks like us?”

  Mrs. Zaric’s eyes narrowed comically. She tilted her head back, peered down the barrel of her nose, and blew a ring of smoke between them. “I’ve told Milan a hundred times,” she said. “We should have had dim-witted children, like everyone else. They are more grateful. They don’t remember everything you ever told them and serve it back to you, cold, in your face.”

  Mrs. Zaric studied the tip of her cigarette as it darkened and scattered. “We’ve had our misfortunes,” she said carefully. “The first day in Grbavica. Your grandmother. Nermina I count, too. But how remarkable it is that you, your father, and I, even Tommy, are still alive. We’ve been so lucky. So favored. If I knew whom to thank—if I believed—I’d give them the rest of my life. But your father digging in the dirt—Tomaslav maybe crawling around some bloody wood, for all we know—you going back and forth doing whatever at the brewery . . . Aleksandra sitting on the stoop and signaling snipers with her cigarettes. I worry about our luck lasting. And now we have to be grateful that Pretty Bird has made it so far, too.”

  The two women sat with their hands knotted in their laps and listened to the winter wind scratch over the empty streets.

  “Pretty Bird,” said Irena.

  “Amazing,” said her mother.

  “Pretty Bird.”

  AMELA WAS SAFE, and Pretty Bird had survived—Irena wanted to bring the news to Tedic. But Tedic had been called out to Franko Hospital, where good fortune had just run out.

  24.

  FRANKO HOSPITAL HAD windows. After just a few months of war, windowpanes looked like extravagant embellishments in the wracked gray cityscape. It was like finding a teacup intact in the wreckage of a tornado.

  The hospital still had whole windows that looked north, into the curve of Mount Zuc, and windows that stared south into the smashed and forsaken towers downtown. Nearly all of the city’s other windows had been shattered. Almost every block looked like a gallery of blinded heads.

  “We are the only building left that has eyes,” said Alma Ademovic, the hospital director.

  The hospital had been finished against a deadline in 1984 to welcome the Olympic Games (and thereby named for Jure Franko, the first Yugoslav slalom skier to win an Olympic medal). The new building was meant to impress the West with a show of modernity. It was an Eastern bloc hospital in which the interior walls were not gray concrete blocks but chest-high panels in lemon, mauve, and peach—pastel socialism, topped with transparent plastic leaves that displayed the latest imported medical machinery, like glossy cars in a California parking lot.

  Marxism that let the sunshine in.

  The windows remained luxuriously whole because there was a whalebacked little flip of the mountain that prevented snipers from firing from the north, and the hospital was too far from the lines to be struck by shots from any snipers roosting in the trees east and west of the city. The south was close, just across the Miljacka River and Serb lines, but the thicket of scarred steel buildings downtown protected that side.

  Bosnians were wary about advertising the hospital’s seclusion. Officials did not want a community of refugees pitching tents there. But they used the hospital for meetings, battening down participants into the back of ambulances for delivery at the appointed times, and kept the state’s reserves of deutsche marks, dollars, and Swiss francs in the basement, as well as rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, and silver coffee servers that several old Sarajevo Serb families had donated, with unwitting generosity, after taking flight across the river. The basement also held boxes of bullets.

  Alma Ademovic considered the provisions to be unwarranted incursions into her domain. She complained to the Home Minister as he was conveyed to a conference one afternoon.

  “You are violating the Geneva convention,” she said, stamping her right foot in her fury. “I’m sure of it.”

  The Home Minister considered the Geneva convention as unenforceable in Sarajevo—and as unaffordable—as the Ten Commandments. Camouflaged in an ambulance attendant’s smock, the Home Minister looked like an especially insolent underling.

  But Alma Ademovic was adamant. “Your pirate’s booty and bombs are taking space that could store neomycin, lidocaine, or sulfonamide,” she said heatedly. “That’s what’s supposed to be in this hospital.”

  “I was not aware that our shelves are short of space to hold such an excess,” the Home Minister called back as he turned. “But if I had to choose between antibiotics and ammunition . . .” He let the thought hang as he stamped away.

  RADOVAN KARADZIC, THE Bosnian Serb leader, had once been a consulting psychiatrist at Franko. Staffers asked about their recollections either had to acknowledge that they had no clear memories of him—which awarded them no prestige—or pass on anecdotes that would prompt the question, “Didn’t you know he was a lunatic?”

  Karadzic would bustle in, the lapels of his Burberry trench coat flapping expensively, great Waikiki swells of silver hair breaking over his forehead. “Close your eyes with me a moment,” he would command some dimpled and appealing nurse, and take her hands at the wrists, as if the recitation that followed was a human response test.

  “The gentlefolks’ aortas will gush without me,” he would begin, eyes half closed, like the hired singer at a wedding party.

  The last chance to get stained with blood

  I let go by.

  Ever more often I answer ancient calls

  And watch the mountains turn green.

  The doctor was moved, manifestly. He usually peeked at his ensnared audience. The nurses tended to be considerate in their reactions. The doctor had them by the wrist. He was also the consulting psychiatrist for Sarajevo’s soccer team, and sometimes doled out tickets.

  “Those lines are beautiful, are they not? Images mix over centuries. I like to think that I am perhaps the third-best living poet in our language. And I cannot remember the names of the other two!”

  The woman he had detained for his recitation would be stuck for an accolade commensurate with Karadzic’s.

  “It reminds me of that song about what a cat sees at night,” said one lab technician. “You know: ‘Midnight, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, the moon has no memory. . . .’ You know, that Englishman.”

  The doctor’s eyes bulged at the affront. “Andrew Lloyd Webber writes—pop tunes,” he sputtered. “Cheap, flimsy”—he was the poet struggling for just the right words here—“Coca-Cola-flavored words cannot be compared to my poetry.”

  Most of the hospital’s psychiatric staff had become scarce since the start of the war, feeling useless or absurd. Anxiety, paranoia, and doom are not disorders when snipers are trying to shoot you through your bathroom window. How could a psychiatrist tell any Sarajevan that he was suffering from depression? Feeling safe and free from terror—that would be a clinical disturbance.

  IN THE FALL, the U.N. officials overseeing the siege of the city permitted the hospital to receive a skin-graft
machine donated by the Charles Nicolle Medical Center of Normandy. The equipment had been packed into a grave-looking silvered valise, heavy as a casket, that came attached to a fifty-three-year-old emergency surgeon, Dr. Olivier Despres, a lean, graying man with the agreeably long face of a pedigreed hound. He was wearing smart field khakis that bore the wrinkles of previous deployment.

  He was delivered to Franko Hospital in a French Foreign Legion armored personnel carrier that smelled of other men’s boots, breath, and sweat. The young Foreign Legion captain overseeing his delivery was Cambodian; he was the one legionnaire who spoke French. The two enlisted men who turned the slings of their rifles around onto their backs in order to haul the doctor’s bags and boxes into the carrier were Kazakh—Russian army refugees who had signed on to the Legion because it paid its troops. The driver was an Egyptian army sergeant whose head could not be seen in the roost in which he sat, above their shoulders. He had to call down in English over the toes of his shoes.

  “Franko Hospital, yes?”

  The legionnaires yelled back up the sergeant’s muddy pant legs.

  “Franko Hospital, yes!” They clanged the butts of their rifles twice against the muddy floor. “Franko! Franko!”

  There were six small open slits on the khaki-painted steel walls of the carrier. Dr. Despres steeled himself over the bumps and tried to steady his head against a window to glimpse something of the wreckage that had moved him to come to the city. But the slits were so small—no larger than the space under a door—that the doctor could see nothing. One of the Kazakh soldiers waved his hand as Dr. Despres tried to peer through one of the minute openings.

  “No,” the soldier called over. “Dangerous.” He held his hands out, as if holding a rifle, and trained his two index fingers toward the doctor’s chin. “P-eee-owww! P-eee-owww!” he said, then shut his eyes and slumped forward. “Dead, bye-bye. P-eee-owww!” Dr. Despres joined in the laughter, and pulled back from the slit with comic haste, as if the wall were electrified. The carrier bounced up and down over rubble and clutter as the soldiers banged their rifle butts against the floor.