Pretty Birds Read online

  “Go back!” he added. “Don’t make me shoot!”

  “We are friends!” yelled Amela.

  “I’m not your friend,” the soldier shouted. “My orders—keep people away.”

  Amela was on her knees, right hand stretched out to hold her up in the blast blowing back over their shoulders, left hand still locked onto the handle of Pretty Bird’s case. Irena rolled over onto her stomach to see his pearly crown and black pebbly eyes, set in yellow, blinking back.

  “This bird belongs to my friend,” Amela shouted. “I must give him to her.”

  The soldier hesitated. He could embarrass himself trying to round up two teenage girls who were determined to outrun him. He could shoot them, of course. His standing orders were to open fire on anyone who refused to stop and return. But shoot two young girls for laughing and dancing in tearful reunion over a parrot? That could put his service photo into Paris Match. It could get him permanently posted to Chad.

  “Give her the bird,” he ordered. “Then both run back.”

  The German plane had pulled farther away, and the whimper of its engines trailed off. Amela pleaded from her knees. “S’il vous plaît, mon capitaine. Let us talk.”

  “This is not a café,” said the soldier.

  “It’s been almost a year,” said Irena. “We are sisters.”

  “Merde,” he replied. “Merde.”

  “We are like sisters.”

  Irena heard the field boots of two more Blue Helmets stamping across the tarmac. But she didn’t break away from the Frenchman’s gaze. He looked from girl to girl, then held up his right arm to wave the other soldiers away. Cradling his rifle in the crook of his other arm, he flashed two fingers—pointedly, thought Irena—across the trigger guard.

  “Two minutes. Two minutes. Then, run.”

  IRENA AND AMELA stayed on their knees, their fingers plaited together.

  “We’ve packed his cage with seed,” said Amela. “Enough for four months. This will all be over by then. If not, we’ll get more.”

  “I can’t—I can’t think of the words to thank you,” said Irena, squeezing Amela’s hand until her fingertips were reddened like rows of candles.

  “Don’t. It will waste our two minutes. Pretty Bird has missed you.”

  “There’s been a hollow space on my shoulder,” said Irena. “That’s for sure.”

  Amela took back a hand to draw two magazines from her right pocket. She had the April 1992 VOX, with Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner sharing the cover in separate squares.

  “Look at these,” said Amela. “Bruce is back. Tina says she never wants to be young again.”

  “Me too,” said Irena.

  Amela tapped a British Vogue—from just last August. Geena Davis was on the cover in something black, lacy, and flimsy.

  “Oooh, she is so long and beautiful,” said Irena.

  “It is a wonderful magazine,” said Amela. “Tom and Nicole’s new movie. A study says smoking gives you cancer but keeps you from losing your mind. There’s a picture story on women shooters.”

  Irena hesitated, hoping to appear confused.

  “Women photographers,” Amela went on, unconcerned. “Fashion, war. They can do anything as well as any man. Better.”

  “They sure can. We can.”

  “Nermina,” said Amela, shaking her head. “I can’t get over it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “It’s too much,” she said. “Too many people. It is good to see you. Your brother?”

  “We don’t know,” said Irena. “He went to London, he went to Chicago.”

  “Chicago!” Amela practically sang. “Michael Jordan and Toni Kukoc!”

  “Tomaslav said he would tie up Toni for me,” said Irena.

  “I want Scottie Pippen.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell Toni to tell Scottie.”

  The girls laughed, and rubbed their hands over each other’s shoulders as they talked.

  “Have you seen Jagoda?” asked Irena.

  “No. I don’t know what side of the city she’s on.”

  “Coach Dino?”

  “No. You hear of him,” Amela explained. “He’s a champion shooter.”

  “He’s the best,” Irena said with unconvincing disinterest. Then she slumped back to the ground and squeezed her eyes shut. When she spoke, her words came in little rushes of breath. “There’s something. I haven’t been able to tell anyone. Coach Dino. We had—something.”

  Irena heard Amela exclaim something in a small voice before she had the nerve to open her eyes.

  “Oh, God,” Amela repeated.

  “It doesn’t seem shocking now. So much else has happened.”

  “I mean, I’m down on my knees, I want to take you there.”

  Irena used up two seconds of their two minutes just looking into Amela’s mild and amused blue eyes.

  “Coach was screwing you?” Amela asked.

  “Yes.” Irena felt Amela’s hands reach back for her own and wind even deeper around her fingers.

  “Me, too,” said Amela. The German plane had rolled to a stop and cut its engines to a low whistle.

  All Irena could say was, “The Magic Johnson jersey?”

  “He gave it to me.”

  “He gave me a Michael Jordan.”

  The girls laughed and rocked back and forth on their knees in each other’s arms on the cold field as the French soldier looked on from a distance.

  “Do you remember Anica?” asked Amela.

  “The center from Veterans. Dark hair, blue eyes. Snow White.”

  “Snow White.” Amela snickered. “She’s in the army, too. Not long ago, I saw her at a fruit stand. She was wearing a Patrick Ewing jersey.”

  “I guess Coach Dino is doing okay,” said Irena.

  The soldier had clomped back above them. His rifle was slung down, but he waved two fingers into their faces. “Two minutes gone,” he said. “Get going. Get out.”

  AMELA TURNED AS she ran back into the Serb woods.

  “Tell your brother hello,” she called out. “He’s cute.”

  Irena looked around from her own sprint toward the hedges on the Bosnian side of the field. “I didn’t know you’d noticed,” she said.

  Amela turned around and gripped her hands to her chest, as if she were launching a last shot from half-court. “Maybe there’s one boy I can screw that you won’t!” she yelled across the runway.

  THE ZARICS OPENED a can of small German frankfurters in celebration of Pretty Bird’s return. They wiped down his cage with a discarded sock and installed him in the living-room corner near where Irena bedded down. He was quiet through the preparations for dinner—no fizzes or whirrs—but apparently unperturbed at his relocation. Irena abandoned herself to the feeling that Pretty Bird was at ease and happy.

  Mrs. Zaric brought Pretty Bird up to her mouth and kissed his black beak. She let him press his pearly crown into her chin. “Pretty Bird,” she cooed with deliberate elegance. “Pret-tee Bird, we are glad to see you.”

  Mr. Zaric seemed to be revived by Pretty Bird’s return. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and clipped back the dead skin on his toes. “It is so amazing,” he told Irena. “All that has happened, and he is back with us. So amazing what Amela risked to bring him.”

  The account of the reunion that Irena had given her parents had been thoughtfully incomplete.

  “When you speak to Amela again,” he said, “as I hope you will—”

  “I will.”

  “—tell her we are grateful. And that she is so brave,” her father said, putting his hand out so that Pretty Bird could nip it with his beak. “As we are thankful to you.” Irena’s silence—she had absorbed the tactic from Tedic—forced her father to go on. “The way you go back and forth—I know, it’s dangerous. Sweeping mud floors at the brewery so we can have a little more.”

  “The drudgery must be killing,” said her mother.

  Alek
sandra interrupted by holding a Vogue up to the light of Mrs. Zaric’s cooking fire. “There are beautiful models in here who look like frogs because they cover themselves with sludge from seaweed,” she announced.

  Irena turned to her with an air of authority. “It draws out the toxins,” she explained.

  “Vogue models are so toxic? Look,” she said, nudging Irena.

  It was a recruitment ad for the Royal Navy. There were small, full-color murals of thatched beach huts in some unspecified West Indian port, sapphire blue waves lapping the beaches of Rio, and the gull wings of the Opera House against the glitter of Sydney’s skyline.

  “Look at this,” Alexandra said again, tracing over the words with the burning end of her cigarette. “ ‘The sport, the social life, the comradeship, the travel.’ I think I’ve figured out why the West won’t help us,” she said. “War is messy. The beaches close. How do we get help when all we can advertise is ‘The snipers. The cold. Getting shot in a place you don’t know or care about.’ Why should we expect anyone in the world to come and save us?”

  The small gray franks began to sputter and pop in the pan.

  28.

  TEDIC RELIEVED THE drudgery of Irena’s daily duties by asking her to assist the crew from an Arabic-language television service that had been slipped into Sarajevo to interview the Home Minister. Some delicacy was involved. Arab groups had been generous in their support for Bosnia’s besieged Muslims. Bosnians were grateful. And yet many Arabs sensed something chilly in their expressions of appreciation—the cold, merely correct formality of a printed thank-you card.

  Bosnian officials eloquently told the world that they were European and ecumenical. Some Arabs heard a sniff of disdain in these boasts of secularism.

  “As if,” the Home Minister had explained to Tedic, “we do not see ourselves as Muslims. As if Bosnians do not see our plight as being at one with the beleaguered Palestinians.”

  “And you have been selected to reassure Arab viewers otherwise?” Tedic inquired with comically arched brows.

  The Home Minister was married to a woman who had been educated in convent schools. Their religious life was nominal, sundry, and ceremonial. They observed Ramadan by attending parties to break the fast, and offered similar devotions on Yom Kippur. When their children were growing up, the Home Minister and his wife decorated Easter eggs and opened presents on Christmas morning. They did not want their children to feel as if Islam had cheated them of some seasonal reward. But the Home Minister tended to venture into actual houses of worship only for funerals and weddings. He shifted from foot to foot during the most solemn intonations, rushing through the text of a prayer as if it were the fine print on a car-rental contract.

  “I hope to God, Kemal, they don’t ask you when you were last in a mosque,” said Tedic.

  “I can answer that,” replied the Home Minister smoothly. “Eid ul-Adha.”

  “Nineteen seventy-five?”

  “The year escapes me. Yoko Ono had just broken up the Beatles. I was bereft. But I will assure our guests from the Kingdom of Saud that I look forward to making my pilgrimage someday.”

  “To the four-star restaurants of Rome,” said Tedic.

  Yet the Home Minister was a faithful man. He believed in Sarajevo.

  TEDIC TOLD IRENA that she should accompany the television crew to their interview in the Home Minister’s basement office in the Presidency Building.

  “Smile. Laugh at their sly witticisms and marvel at the brilliance of their Muhammadan parables. Lug their equipment, flatter them, make them at home,” he told her. “Then, listen carefully to what they say and repeat it to me, word for word.”

  “And if they don’t say a thing?”

  “They will,” Tedic asserted. “They will. To a young Muslim girl they are trying to impress.”

  “These people are trying to help us,” said Irena. “Why don’t you trust them?”

  “I’ll need a better reason than that,” Tedic told her. “In the country—some of the villages—they sneak in guns and fighters to save the place for Islam. Which means they drive out everyone else. Officially, we don’t notice. Moral reservations are an expensive indulgence. As long as Uncle Sam stays away, we need the ayatollahs. That’s why the Home Minister is participating in such a farce. But we watch the bastards,” said Tedic. “Just as closely as they watch us.”

  The delegation from the television syndicate consisted of four men, all dangling U.N. media credentials stamped the day before in Zagreb. The Home Ministry had given them rooms at a former Holiday Inn along the front lines in which certain diplomats, soldiers, U.N. officials, and Bosnian functionaries were staying, as well as most of the international press covering the siege. The hotel was no safer than the rest of the city, and only marginally more comfortable. The water pipes were dry. The rooms were dark and powerless. Some groups brought in generators. But because of the lack of gas they were useful only for the sporadic operation of computers and satellite television and telephones.

  Freebooters in the employ of the hotel brought in black-market food and old Slovenian wines, which they sold at the hotel at magnified prices. The Americans, British, and Canadians bought and enjoyed the wines, which the French and Italians pronounced “Barely drinkable” before draining their glasses.

  The hotel’s mountain-side rooms had once been the most prestigious. But now direct views onto snow-clad peaks were dangerous, as so many shattered windows attested. Tedic had dispatched Jackie, rosy Jackie, to be his liaison for the Arab delegation, and to explain why they had to be housed in such dark, grim, common quarters. Irena did not see any of the Arabs in the hotel’s dining area—they may have felt uncomfortable around such public drinking—and so walked up seven flights to find their fleet of rooms. She was pleased not to feel winded; the coil in her legs was still tight and strong.

  A man named Charif answered the door of Room 706. He wore a white shirt, buttoned to the neck, and smooth black pants. He had a black beard and small, dark, merry eyes.

  “Hi, Ingrid, yes. Tedic said you would be making contact. We have some other guests here, too.”

  The visitors had opened the door between two adjoining rooms and had arrayed small plastic drums of raisins and nuts on one of the beds. There were easily twenty people between the two rooms, standing and talking. But it was the first time in months that Irena had been in a room with more than two people that wasn’t suffused with smoke. Some of the men wore black or white turbans, which Irena had not seen outside of textbooks or movies, or variations in Western women’s fashion magazines. Many also wore expensive-looking woolen winter coats over black vests and high-collared white shirts.

  Jackie stood near the curtained windows, caught in conversation, and met Irena’s eye with a wink. Jackie had a soft black silk head scarf with gold embroidery clasped at her coltish throat. Irena flushed with embarrassment and thrust a hand up to her own head.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Charif. “No one warned me.”

  “No problem, Ingrid,” he said. “We know most women here want to look European.”

  He led her toward the nuts and raisins, and offered her tea and coffee from brass pots they had set over a small camp stove in another corner of the room.

  “Are you a Muslim, Ingrid?” he asked in English as he handed her a small glass of dark coffee.

  “Yes.”

  “Aha,” said Charif, as if he had just removed the wrapping of an unexpected present. “You say ‘Yes,’ not ‘Of course.’ ”

  Irena hesitated but smiled. “I say ‘Yes’ because we can be a great many things here in Sarajevo.”

  “I understand,” said Charif. “I am Egyptian. Those who say ‘Yes, I am a Muslim’ leave open the chance of other choices. But those of us who know the word of God and His Prophet say ‘Of course.’ Once we have heard His word, there is no other choice to make.”

  Charif delivered his speech with utter cheerfulness. If he admitted of no other spiritual choice, his graciousness
seemed to invite Irena to respond with a question, or perhaps even a contrary opinion. Instead, she said, “I see.”

  “You will see more,” said Charif. “You have come at just the right moment. The Prince is visiting. We are going to hear from the Prince.”

  “I was not told about any prince,” Irena said carefully. “Only about you and your crew.”

  “The Prince is amazing,” Charif said in a quieter voice. “The Prince carries the message of the Prophet. He wanted no official notice of his visit. He did not want to inconvenience anyone. He is that modest. A prince, truly, a man of great wealth. A prominent Saudi family that built the great modern structures of Mecca. But the Prince lives among refugees and outcasts. His presence will be an immense gift to all he meets here. You do not know who I mean?”

  Irena shook her head.

  “Take my hand here, Ingrid,” Charif said. “Let’s see if we can get across this busy room before he begins.”

  Charif took Irena’s hand and she clasped her glass of coffee to her chest as he led her to the far side of the room. The men in turbans and high-collared shirts had turned toward a tall man with a long beard, who was wearing an immaculate long white gown underneath a soiled green American army-surplus jacket. At last, Irena thought to herself, the U.S. Army comes to Sarajevo. Charif lifted Irena’s free hand as he held both of his palms up humbly to the Prince. It took a moment for the Prince to see this.

  “May I present a new friend,” said Charif with his head bowed. Irena reflexively turned her face down toward the floor in time to hear the Prince respond simply, “If it pleases you.”

  “This is Ingrid, my Prince. Ingrid, who lives here. Ingrid, who is helping us.”

  Irena lifted her head in time to see the Prince raise a hand to his heart. His fingers were long and lean, his nails so polished and glassy that his hands reminded Irena of long branches on a tree, glistening with ice.

  Irena opened her mouth. But she had nothing—she found it hard to know what—to say. She picked up Jackie in the corner of her eye, and noticed that she had tugged her head scarf more tightly over the crown of her head as the Prince faced the room to speak.