Pretty Birds Page 25

  “We all live in a yellow submarine!” they sang.

  Clang!

  “A yellow submarine!”

  Clang!

  “A yellow submarine!”

  Clang!

  Dr. Despres offered to take down names and phone numbers of loved ones he could call when he returned to France. But the men said they could think of no one who was eager to hear of them.

  “I am gone,” said one of the Kazakhs. He laughed joylessly through a three-toothed smile. “Happy here dead.”

  WHEN DR. DESPRES reached his destination up on a hill in the north of the city, Franko Hospital doctors expressed gratitude, but also bewilderment.

  “We haven’t had power for several months,” they said, shaking their heads.

  A German army truck drove a generator at the hospital that could power surgical lights, a sterilizer, and a water pump, but not at the same time. The doctors and nurses had learned how to conduct surgeries by lantern light, sluicing away blood and slime by squeezing clumps of soaked paper towels carefully over the wounds as they probed and stitched. The staff squinted at a large block of type on the underside of Dr. Despres’s Swiss skin-shearing machine and deduced that it would draw more power than they could deliver.

  “You would need at least the lights and the water pump working at the same time,” said Dr. Despres. “This is not a procedure for dim light. Or no water pressure.”

  The hospital director was more put out than apologetic. “I know it must seem like we are living in caves,” Alma Ademovic said. “But, honestly, I don’t know why the U.N. sent you here. Our limitations cannot surprise them. Of all people,” she added almost into her chin.

  Dr. Despres tried to reply lightly. “Oh, that alphabet soup of U.N. agencies often gets things jumbled,” he said. “I learned that in Somalia and Ethiopia.”

  “Well,” the hospital director sniffed, “we are surely better off than that. We are Europeans.”

  The director clipped away quickly. Dr. Despres was standing rather forlornly in the hall when the hospital’s chief surgical nurse introduced herself. “We had a message telling us that you were coming, Doctor,” she said in English. “But nothing about preparations for a skin-graft machine. Perhaps we can get in to see the U.N. official who approves our equipment to find about getting another generator. Perhaps you can get in to see him.”

  Zule Rasulavic was fortyish, with a redhead’s sprinkling of freckles over her nose. When Dr. Despres took her right hand and unexpectedly brushed it with his lips, she regretted the blue jeans that she had been left with to wear through the war. No matter how much weight had melted away over the months, she was sure that the jeans thickened the look of her hips.

  “I am certainly willing,” said Dr. Despres. “I didn’t come here just for the mountain view. It is lovely,” he added quickly, having been alerted to local sensitivities. “But I want to help.”

  This brought Alma Ademovic back from halfway down the corridor. “What kind of help do you think we need?” she said. “We are taking care of our patients in a modern, educated way. We are Europeans,” she fairly hissed at him. “Do you think we are witch doctors?”

  The nurses took Dr. Despres by the shoulders and steered him into one of the hospital’s waiting rooms, where they told him that he might want to rest and restore himself after a rough journey. After a few minutes, Dr. Despres closed his eyes in the dim midmorning light strained, like weak tea, through the hospital’s soiled windows, and fell asleep in a chair that had only one arm.

  SHORTLY BEFORE NOON, Dr. Despres towed a heavy brown box that the legionnaires had delivered with him against a wall just across from Alma Ademovic’s open office door. The open door did not signal Miss Ademovic’s manner of administration. It was an operational necessity, to allow daylight from her window to filter into the murky hallway.

  Dr. Despres approached her door cautiously, and pointedly took up a position just outside. “Excuse me, Miss Ademovic,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask about lunch.”

  The hospital director’s reply was brisk. “Of course. There are no restaurants to speak of. We will serve you in our kitchen.”

  “I was advised to provide for myself.”

  “That is ridiculous,” she said. “You are our guest. I am sure that we can find something.” In fact, the United Nations administration made certain that the hospital was well provisioned. They did not want any stories arising from Sarajevo that the U.N. had failed to provide food for war victims in their hospital beds. The monotony of rice, beans, saltines, and an occasional frozen cutlet was more of a problem than scarcity. But Alma Ademovic had discovered that giving foreign visitors a few pangs of hunger gratified their guests; it sent them back to the West with a vivid story for after-dinner speeches.

  Throughout his years in emergency medicine, Dr. Despres had uncomplainingly consumed rather a lot of relief agency–issue beans and rice. But he had another plan.

  “You know we French—we take such pleasure in our own foods,” he said. “So I have brought enough for everyone here, if you will permit.” He stepped back to pat the big brown box and lug it several inches into view. “I brought a few saucissons, some of our flavorful dried sausages. Also some lovely cured ham from Bayonne. It has the most amazing velvet feel as you carve it away from the bone. We are very proud of our patés in Normandy. I have some tins of very nice duck and goose patés. The goose liver is studded with pistachios. I have also added some small rounds of toasts and a jar of cornichons. I thought a good, tangy Gruyère would compliment all. I have included a couple of pounds of ground coffee—I haven’t seen the hospital yet that isn’t fueled by coffee—and some Côte d’Or chocolate. I also thought that some of our tasty crisp Brittany butter cookies might be welcome, although,” he added, “I left several with the Norwegian soldiers at the airport who examined my equipment. I thought it might make them more amenable about weight restrictions.”

  Alma Ademovic looked up from her desk with unblinking blue eyes, as hard as tile.

  “The food is all packaged very soundly,” added the doctor. “Anything left will keep.”

  When the administrator remained expressionless, Dr. Despres made an instant diagnosis: he would have to extract any insinuation of charity.

  “When I consult in Paris, I frequently bring a ripe Neufchâtel cheese,” he said.

  “I’m sure the girls will appreciate your snacks,” Alma Ademovic said finally. “I do without lunch. But help yourself.”

  Dr. Despres pushed the brown box back around the corner of the administrator’s office. He thought about the saucissons and Gruyère as his stomach growled and churned over the rest of the afternoon. But he left the box, untouched, on the worn green alga carpet just outside Alma Ademovic’s office. He hoped the administrator would observe that he had not helped himself to so much as a cornichon.

  DR. DESPRES SPENT the first part of the afternoon removing stitches from the wounds of an elderly woman who had been hiding in her bathroom when a bullet pierced her closed wooden door and smashed the mirror over her head. He tried to play a card game with a thin girl who had forgotten her name and had been found sleeping against the steps of an empty housing block. But only the girl knew the rules, and she soon tired of easy triumphs.

  A nurse brought the doctor to the bedside of a small boy with a shaved head who said that his name was Zijo. The boy lay on his stomach, a strap cinched over his waist, so that a large bandage plastered over a wound in his left shoulder blade would not be disturbed.

  “Shrapnel,” the nurse explained in a low voice. “It came through the window. Thank God he was turned away.”

  Zijo had twisted his head on the pillow to face Dr. Despres, who knelt down beside the boy’s left shoulder. “Zijo?” he said gently. “I’m Dr. Despres.” A hospital orderly, wearing blue jeans under his white coat, stood over the doctor as he translated. The boy blinked once. Dr. Despres motioned to the orderly to kneel with him on the floor. Years of talking to wound
ed children in field hospitals had taught him that children usually attended to the translator, not the physician.

  “I would like to take a little look at your back,” said Dr. Despres.

  He waited for the orderly to finish before putting the palm of his right hand lightly on the small of Zijo’s back. He then ran his index finger gently below the surgical tape to lift up the bottom edge of the boy’s bandage.

  Zijo began to twitch and shudder. He squeezed his bony shoulders toward his ears, as if the sting were a sound he could shut out.

  “I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I am sorry that it hurts.”

  The orderly didn’t translate; he felt sure that Zijo understood as much from the doctor’s tone. A nurse shined a flashlight under the flap of the bandage so that Dr. Despres could see the boy’s wound. It was as wide as the doctor’s palm and still glistening.

  “You are a brave young man,” he continued. The orderly translated that. Dr. Despres saw white threads of nerves shimmering in the wound, and red ribbons of ragged, unmended muscle.

  “It’s been three days since he came, and they cut out the steel,” said the orderly quietly.

  “Another three hundred before this heals without a skin graft. Don’t—there is no need—to tell him that,” he added in an even tone. Dr. Despres patted the flap of the dressing in place and rested his hand just above the boy’s waist.

  “Zijo, I am sorry that it feels the way it does.” The doctor looked into the little boy’s face. “It itches, yes?”

  Zijo shook his head slightly and mumbled into his pillow.

  “A little, he says,” said the orderly.

  Dr. Despres laid the hand that had lifted up the bandage and caused so much hurt on the boy’s small, bald, bony head. It was slightly damp, and cold. Above his pillow was a stuffed bear with a stitched smile wearing a worn red T-shirt with gold lettering across the front. It said CONGRATULATIONS!

  “The bear was just around here,” the orderly explained.

  “Maternity ward, I would think,” said the doctor with a mild laugh.

  “We give it to children.”

  Dr. Despres kept his manicured right hand on Zijo’s back, below the wound, pressing lightly on his spine. “Where was this boy when he was hit?” he asked.

  “In an apartment,” said the orderly. “Alone.”

  “Were his parents killed?”

  “Or lost. Or he’s lost.”

  “Why would anyone”—Dr. Despres could not prevent his voice from rising—“leave a little boy alone in the middle of a war?”

  “Perhaps to save his life,” said the orderly.

  “His parents could have been running away,” a nurse who had come in added. “They could have left him behind and hoped he would be found.”

  “Or Serbs could have taken his parents and spared the boy,” said the orderly. “Even demons make exceptions.”

  “Paramilitaries sometimes kill little boys but let go of little girls, because they won’t grow up to be soldiers,” said the nurse. “Sometimes they kill the little girls because they will grow up to bear soldiers. But they pass over the little boys because they remind them of themselves.”

  “People are killed for no reason and for any reason,” the orderly added. “We will be dead before we can figure out the difference.”

  Dr. Despres rose slightly from his crouch to pick up the CONGRATULATIONS! bear. Then he bent back down to hold the bear in front of Zijo’s small, pebble-gray eyes.

  “Have you given your friend a name?” asked the doctor.

  Zijo nodded once on his pillow.

  “Zarko,” explained the nurse. “I think it is the name of someone he knows.”

  “Well, that’s great,” said Dr. Despres slowly. “Zarko. It is almost like your name.”

  While the orderly passed on his words, the doctor sat on the edge of Zijo’s cot and took a roll of white surgical tape from the nurse’s cart. The nurse pulled out sheets of cotton wadding to replace Zijo’s bandage. But Dr. Despres took the wadding from her hand and folded it into a small square, which he pressed against the bear’s worn back. With the nurse’s help, he pulled a length of tape over one side of the bandage, then another.

  “Here is what we have done for Zarko,” he said, bringing the bear closer for Zijo to see. “You are hurt, Zarko is hurt. We will take care of you both.”

  The little boy looked on dully as Dr. Despres tucked the bear against his pillow.

  THE FIRST WHITE stick candles were being lit in the wards when Dr. Despres excused himself and found Nurse Rasulavic standing in a weak wash of light near a window at the end of a darkened hallway. The doctor’s stomach was rumbling, and he thought that his hands were beginning to shake.

  “I am sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but I’m not used to going so long without a cigarette. Is there somewhere I can smoke?” When Nurse Rasulavic looked up, he could see that her eyes were smoky gray.

  “This hospital is a no-smoking zone,” she said. “A few years ago, Miss Ademovic came back from a conference in California.”

  Dr. Despres smiled. “We have a new law in France, too,” he said.

  Nurse Rasulavic returned the doctor’s smile and widened it. “Let me show you a place that is lawless,” she said.

  NURSE RASULAVIC LED the doctor to a pair of steel doors in a hallway loading dock. The space was far from any windows and darkened quickly in the late afternoon. “There is a small area out here,” she said, pressing her shoulder against one of the doors. The door rocked open with an iron groan. The sky was dimming, and the last gold light of the day grazed against their hands as they took them out of the pockets of their white hospital smocks. Dr. Despres shook a pack of Gauloises, and held it out to Nurse Rasulavic.

  “How lovely to see that. Thank you. You know, you could get a lot for these here now,” she said.

  “Money?” The doctor affected an expression of mock surprise.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “What could you do with money? Sardines, olive paste, beans.” In the pause that followed, Dr. Despres counted the sound of three rifle shots popping in the distance. “Drugs. Sex. Anchovy paste. We are fine down here,” she added.

  “Bullets?”

  “Of course. But blocks away.”

  Dr. Despres produced a black-and-gold enameled Dupont lighter from his right pocket, and flipped the roller three times before he got it to fire. He held the flame under Nurse Rasulavic’s cigarette and cupped his left hand just below her chin.

  “That lighter would also get you a lot of nice something. Until you ran out of fluid. Then matches would bring more. How long are you staying?”

  “It’s not determined,” said Dr. Despres with a shrug. “I have clothes for a week. I want to get the skin-graft machine running. Then the U.N. is supposed to take me out on a cargo flight back to Zagreb or Italy. I don’t want to leave until we know if the machine can be used. Until then, maybe you can use an extra set of hands.”

  Nurse Rasulavic took a long pull on her cigarette. “We used to come out here for peace and quiet,” she said. “Now the quiet is frightening. You used to hear the sizzle and click of streetcars, the clop of feet in the street. That there are still a few of us here worth shooting is almost the only sign of life. Are you from Paris?”

  “Actually, a town called Rouen,” he said. “In Normandy, along the Seine.”

  “It is beautiful?”

  “It has many beauties. Monet painted the famous cathedral in the center of town. But it got damaged in the war. The Germans rolled in with tanks. When it came time, the Americans and British tried to blast them out, and in spite the Germans burned the heart of town on their way out. The Allies were pink-skinned boys from Texas and Scotland who threw oranges and chocolate bars to children and young girls. I was a child, and my mother was a pretty young girl. Those were some of the best days of my life.” Dr. Despres paused and smiled.

  Nurse Rasulavic could see a kind of fashion clinging to the doctor, even as his
fatigues were rumpled by travel, sweat, and sleep. He still smelled of strong cigarettes and sharp cologne. He was the first man she had seen for months whose face was still softened by cheeks. Sarajevo was beginning to look like a city of hawks.

  “Did it take your town long to recover?” she asked.

  “It’s quite prosperous now,” said the doctor. “It drizzles almost every day. That’s good for the apples and grows grass for the cows. Tourists come to see where Jeanne d’Arc was burned at the stake. They close the center streets so tourists can walk about, as if they were in the sixteenth century.”

  “We are rather sixteenth-century ourselves at the moment,” said Nurse Rasulavic.

  This won a long, low laugh from Dr. Despres. He coughed small clouds of smoke, and Nurse Rasulavic cleared her own throat noisily to put him at ease. It was flattering to make a man laugh until he exploded with smoke.

  “Do you have a family?” she asked. She smoothed a thicket of hair that had got bunched behind her right ear.

  “Two children,” said the doctor. “Teenagers, a girl and a boy. They live with their mother. Our girl wants to be a doctor. But not a surgeon. All her life, she has heard that surgeons are lousy husbands.”

  Nurse Rasulavic fought back a smile, but not too hard. “I know.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  “No,” she said. “I know. I’ve married a couple of surgeons.”

  Their laughter mingled as they leaned back on a parking rail, each waiting for the other to take the next step. It was the doctor. He stepped down delicately onto the butt of his cigarette. Zule Rasulavic saw his soft brown loafer slide away and heard his shin snap like a branch breaking off a tree in an ice storm. When she looked up, bewildered by the sound, she saw Dr. Despres reaching up to try to keep his head from blowing away. She thought she could see the mist around him darken from pink to ruby.

  THE SHOOTING OF Dr. Despres at dusk outside the hospital in which he was helping to heal the victims of war was reported as a death that signified the hopelessness of the conflict. The outside world could send some of its most conscientious citizens to try to ease the suffering; they would only die in cross fire. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats—people with a scarcity of vowels in their names, and a surplus of hatred in their hearts.