Pretty Birds Page 4

  “I am thinking that it is not good to leave her alone. Under the circumstances. Especially at night.”

  Irena was baffled. Her grandmother lived about ten blocks away. Visits to her flat were casual and unceremonious. “Shouldn’t Grandma come here?” she asked. “Our place is larger. She likes Pretty Bird, too.”

  Mrs. Zaric’s eyes began to brim with water once again.

  Irena’s father clenched his right hand tightly on his daughter’s forearm, then loosened his grasp as he felt her shrink back. “The idea is for us to stay with Grandma,” he said. He let the idea stare at his daughter for a moment. “If we stay here—I don’t know. Mr. Kemal downstairs—their car was burned. He said the phone rang, and someone said, ‘Your wife and son and dog are in the trunk.’ They weren’t, thank God. But now they’ve all left for Vitez. There’s something spray-painted on a side of your basketball court now—”

  “Kids,” said Irena.

  “—about ‘This is Serb country.’ ”

  “Kids, kids, kids,” Irena insisted. “Kids and their crayons.”

  “I don’t recognize this planet,” Mr. Zaric said with slow ferocity. “I can’t walk across the bridge to get the tram, because thugs in black sweaters want to see my identity card. They warn me that I’m living in ‘stolen Serb territory.’ I should say, ‘Listen, you goons, we are both living in Bosnia, a free country where everyone is equal. I will go where I like.’ But they have guns. They make their point. I went into the bank on Friday. Mr. Djordic said he hoped I wouldn’t mind a sign he had to put up on instructions from Belgrade. You know what it said? ‘No money handled by Muslims.’ Can you imagine? Signs like South Africa. Mr. Djordic got all flustered. ‘Oh, Mr. Zaric,’ he said, ‘I just have to humor the assholes.’ Some fucking sense of humor. I should have said, ‘Why don’t you show them a Woody Allen movie?’ But some people have guns, and the bank has our money. One day it’s a rude call, a lewd note, something lurid scrawled in the parking lot. The next? What do you think you’ve been hearing at night—champagne corks?”

  “Jerks shooting guns into the sky,” said Irena. “Coach said that last night. They don’t want to hurt anyone. They’re worried about being outnumbered.”

  “Well, they are changing the numbers,” said Mr. Zaric evenly. “Sending Muslims and Croats packing from Vukovar, Nadin, and Skabrinj, with only what they could carry on their shoulders. Bombing those beautiful old stones of Dubrovnik back into biblical dust. ‘Ethnic cleansing,’ they call it. A little light housekeeping. You know what happened, don’t you, when the people in Vukovar had to give in after all that shelling and shooting? While you’ve been listening to Madonna, I’ve been tuned to the BBC. But late, to keep it from you and your mother. But I can’t anymore. They hauled all the non-Serbs out of their houses. Marched them out into the cold streets and bare fields. Then they’d pick a man here, a woman there. Who knows on what whim? They’d line them up and shoot them. The rest took the hint. They were ‘deported for their protection.’ Like ‘sanitized for your protection’ across the strip of a toilet seat.”

  Mrs. Zaric stirred now, and rose as if to protest.

  Mr. Zaric raised his voice to stop her. “She has to hear this!” he shouted. “In Bijeljina, a Serb leader named Arkan set fleeing Muslims on fire. They treat him like Napoleon.”

  “For fucking Christ’s sake, Daddy!” Irena exploded in fear and fury. “Who is they? We are half Serb! At least, I am!”

  “Half isn’t half enough for them,” her father bellowed back. “Yes, them. Or too much. Don’t you see? They want ‘purity.’ My father was a Serb married to a Jew. I married a Muslim whose mother was a Croat. Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew—what does that make you and your brother? We have no name. And now we have no place.”

  “Those weren’t our Serbs,” Irena insisted. “They’re peasants. The kind of people who squat in fields, for fuck’s sake.”

  “And those weren’t our Muslims in Vukovar or Bijeljina?” asked Mrs. Zaric softly. She had tried to shrink into the wall behind her husband and daughter, keeping pointedly unaligned. “Just country people in black dresses and rag scarves—not city folks like us? Maybe we should see Grandma today, anyway. Have her tell you about when the Nazis came here, and dragged away the Jews and the Gypsies. Has your life been so kind,” she asked her daughter, “that you thought Nazis were only in the movies? Like Godzilla and the Terminator?”

  At some point, as Mrs. Zaric spoke, they had all sat back down in individual surrender. Irena’s chair thumped, and Pretty Bird began to whir again like Mrs. Zaric’s mixer. They all fought a smile, then gave in.

  Mrs. Zaric went on in her softest voice. “We’ve seen the bonfires in the streets. Someone threw a bomb into the synagogue. Somebody threw a match into the library. Someone set a fire in the post office, and snipers shot at the firemen. You run out of accidents. This is how it starts.”

  “How will we be safer just a few blocks away?” asked Irena. She began to cry into her mother’s shoulder as her father hovered, speaking gently.

  “Safer across the river. We’ll each pack a bag. A week’s worth of clothes. No, three days—Grandma has a washing machine. Let’s bring a little cheese, some coffee, the things Grandma forgets.” Mr. Zaric smiled down at his daughter. “And, of course, Pretty Bird. I’ll carry his cage. We’ll stay here today. There’s a march headed from Dobrinja. The streets are crazy. Tomorrow is a holiday. We’ll lock up and leave, like we’re going to the mountains.”

  Irena fixed a hopeful look on her father. “And if it’s quiet tonight?”

  “I’ll go anyway, to check on Grandma, if the phones are still out. If it’s calm outside, I’ll come right back.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to go?”

  Mr. Zaric hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe. But get packed. Start now. If something breaks out at that march, we might leave earlier.”

  Irena wiped her eyes and stood up. “This is fucking insane,” she said.

  “Yes,” said her father. He spoke gently, and laid a palm against his daughter’s cheek. “It sure fucking is.”

  Pretty Bird made a boiling noise, like the rumble of Mrs. Zaric’s electric kettle.

  “Get packed,” Mr. Zaric reminded Irena from the hallway. “No more scenes. I don’t want to give another history lesson to someone who’s so young she thinks Yuri Gagarin was one of the Beatles before Ringo.”

  “That was Pete Best, you clod. You clod, dear,” Mrs. Zaric called out from the kitchen.

  “You taught me that,” said Irena. “Who in the hell is Yuri Gagarin?”

  IRENA ZIPPED OPEN the shiny black nylon Adidas bag she had gotten when the team went to Zagreb for a tournament. It seemed to yawn. She laid out three American polo shirts (red, blue, and black, each of them HECHO EN HONDURAS—perhaps Pretty Bird had flown over the factory on his way to find their family), two pairs of Esprit jeans (one blue and one black), three pairs of white socks, three panties (two pink, one white), two white cotton bras, and a pair of scuffed brown loafers. Irena lowered each bundle into the bag and pressed down. Then she laid out the clothes she had decided she should wear to walk over to her grandmother’s apartment: her favorite black cotton shell with the lacy neck, a short Esprit denim dress, her gray West German army jacket, and the red-and-black Air Jordan shoes Aunt Senada had sent from Cleveland. She rooted around in the box under her bed for some of her favorite magazines. Grandma didn’t have a television set, and Irena doubted that her parents would let her walk into Old Town.

  Irena had Q magazine from June 1991, with Madonna on the cover in a snug white swimsuit, saying, “Everyone thinks I’m a nymphomaniac, but I’d rather read a book.” (Mr. Zaric had brought that one home from the news kiosk, saying to his daughter, “If she can read a book, so can you.”) She chose The Face from July ‘91, with Johnny Depp on the cover. Inside, Irena recalled, he insisted that he and Winona did the dishes together, at least once. She found another Face from May ‘91 with a sensational shot of Wendy James on t
he cover: she had strung strands of white beads around her breasts and nipples, turning them into Christmas trees. She selected a Sky from August ‘91. Vanessa Paradis was on the cover, but Irena had saved it for the interview with Madonna (“Her Again!” it squealed on the front) and a feature on teenage sex kittens through movie history, including old pictures of Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, Milla Jovovich, and really old shots of Brigitte Bardot that Irena had been meaning to show to her grandmother. She thumbed through the article briefly before packing the magazine away, and thought she rather resembled the shot of Nastassja Kinski wearing a man’s shirt. It reminded her to pack her Michael Jordan jersey, but to squeeze it below the magazines, into a corner.

  Irena placed a copy of The Little Prince on top of the magazines (that, at least, was a book she had read and enjoyed), and a copy of SportNews from Zagreb, with Toni Kukoc on the cover, his jazzman’s goatee glistening. Finally, she reached back to her bed table and plucked up a bottle of Honey Almond makeup, a roll of Fire & Ice lipstick, and a small glass bottle of Deeply Purple nail polish. As she pressed down these last, small items, she remembered one more. She rolled back the drawer of her bedside table and picked up a row of three foil-wrapped condoms, which she pressed a little more carefully into the crinkles of the magazine. She had begun to zip the bag closed when she caught sight of the threadbare old brown Pokey Bear who had shared her bed since she was three. She zipped the bag as far as it would go before nipping the red bow on Pokey’s neck. He would be borne like a pasha to her grandmother’s house. Irena used a toe to push her bag into the hallway, under the Degas blue dancer print hanging by the front door.

  “Done,” she called out, and Pretty Bird began to trill like an unanswered telephone.

  THE ZARICS WERE packing when the noontime march began from Dobrinja. Legions of short-haired students and long-haired academics, a delegation of hard-hatted coal miners and woolly-shirted farmworkers linked arms and surged down Proletariat Brigade Boulevard, chanting, “Bosnia! We are Bosnia!”

  Perhaps a third of the marchers were Serbs. They did not want to live in some Greater Serbia, pruned and purged of all other peoples. Many of them hoisted peace symbols, an emblem pointedly imported from the West. They wanted the Bosnia they had just invented to be an unarmed Lennonist state, blameless and beloved.

  Just before one in the afternoon, marchers began to stream into the flat plaza surrounding the Bosnian Parliament building. Some people thought they heard lightning crackle overhead; then hornets zapping around their shoulders and feet, smacking off the concrete, and biting into legs and foreheads. Two or three seconds later, almost timidly, pops of blood plumed. Men and women began to flop down hard, like birds that had flown over a hunter’s blind. The Zarics could hear something like paper bags being popped overhead, knew they were not, and turned on their television. Some of the marchers in the square stayed down, as if they could hide. Some got up on their knees and lurched, then staggered, and tried to run for the shelter of trees in the plaza. Bullets clipped the leaves and gouged the tree trunks, then smacked into the bones of men and women. There were screams, screeches, sirens, and sobs. But the sounds that stayed with people in the plaza were the thuds of steel spanking flesh, and the splash of blood against the hard pavement. In the fantastic silence that survivors remember more clearly than a noise, the splash sounded like water spilling from a hose into the street.

  Somebody got a brave and absurd idea: surge over the Vrbanja Bridge into Grbavica, and dare the snipers to lay down their guns. Chants rose from the streets. “Stop the war! Peace for Bosnia! Put down your guns!” In their high roosts, the snipers paused for a moment, disbelieving the marchers’ audacity. Two young women, Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic, ran ahead of the rest, cheering, waving, and skipping into a squall of bullets.

  4.

  THE ZARICS STARED at the television screen, and kept staring as it blinked and went blank. Pretty Bird gurgled like the bubbling from the kitchen sink. Mr. Zaric crossed over to the telephone, and Irena waited for him to sum up to someone what they had seen and heard. But he slammed the receiver down angrily. “Dead,” he said. “Dead, fucking dead!”

  He opened the closet and reached for a blue windbreaker hanging on a peg. “I’ve got to go find her,” he said. His car keys clanged on the wooden floor.

  Mrs. Zaric stiffened as if she had heard glass being shattered. “We’re going with you,” she announced simply. And as Irena began to lace up her Air Jordans, her mother called out, “We’re bringing our bags. I’ll get Pretty Bird.”

  Cabinet doors squeaked, dresser drawers squealed, feet stamped up and down hallways, and within ten minutes the Zarics had turned the lock on ten years in Grbavica.

  “I’ll keep the keys,” said Mrs. Zaric as she bolted the door.

  “I have the ones to the car,” her husband said. They stood for a moment to look at each other in the murk and gray of the hallway.

  IRENA HAD GROWN up seeing pictures of people being expelled from the ghettos of Europe. Many of them looked fat, her grandmother had explained, because they had put as many coats and shirts on their backs as possible. By then they knew they would not be back, although most had not figured—or refused to accept—that they were going to die. Irena remembered pictures she had glimpsed while flipping through newspapers to get to the sports—Salvadorans, Ethiopians, Koreans, carrying only what they could squeeze into a wicker hamper, a paper box, or a length of cloth. Now she was carrying the contents of her life, so incompletely accounted for, in a gym bag. Her father, so careful about his appearance, hadn’t shaved that morning and wore the brown tweed jacket that her mother was always trying to hide. Her mother hadn’t made up her face for the day; her hair had been pulled back from her forehead with a green scarf. She would rather die, Irena imagined her mother saying, than be seen that way outside the apartment. A poor choice of words today.

  OUT IN THE hallway, the Zarics saw that some of their neighbors had the same idea. Mr. Hadrovic had his hands in the pockets of the worn burgundy sweater he pulled on in any weather to watch television.

  “There are Serbs in black sweaters headed this way,” he reported breathlessly. “With rifles and those long tubes.”

  Mr. Zaric was puzzled. “Bows and arrows?” he asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, no,” snapped Mr. Hadrovic. “You know, the things we used to see in World War Two movies.”

  “We’re going to see my mother,” Mr. Zaric told him as they walked to the elevator. “We will see you in a couple of days.” Then he stopped. Mr. Hadrovic, he remembered, was a widower who was alone in his apartment, his son at school in Sweden. “Can we do anything for you before we leave?” he asked. More grave offers seemed to form in each sentence, with the rising din of emergency car alarms and pistol pops outside. “Leave you with food, so you don’t have to go out? Would you like to come with us?”

  “Oh, good Christ, no,” Mr. Hadrovic said. “There are enough idiots out there already. They will have to come get me right here.”

  Irena had already pressed the button for the elevator, and it was like pressing the knob on a tree trunk. “I don’t even hear the car moving,” she told her father. Her mother had been tapping one of the bare lightbulbs in the hall. “I think maybe the power is off,” she said glumly. “Too many people doing their wash on Sunday afternoon.” Sunlight still swept through the hallway from the slatted windows, but when the Zarics opened the steel door into the stairwell, they stepped into darkness.

  OUTSIDE, THE HOUSING block looked empty and still. Irena’s friends were not perched on the flower boxes and benches, sneaking smokes and gossiping. No one had gotten up a game on the basketball court. There were a couple of cars in parking spaces—Mr. Rusmir’s saucy new red Volkswagen, and the Aljics’ old blue matchbox Lada—but they seemed abandoned. The Lada listed from a tire that had been blown so far off the wheelbase that the orange iron inner ring scraped against the pavement at a slant. The Volkswagen’s windshield had been
shattered, and it looked as if the car’s paint had somehow been smeared across the Lada’s hood. Irena looked to see if the car was still serviceable. She leaned in to open the door and saw that Mr. Aljic’s hair, brains, and a wedge of his head had been spilled above the steering wheel.

  “Maybe we should get out of here and down to the basement,” Mr. Zaric said.

  THERE WAS A small window high on the wall of the basement laundry room that looked out on the parking lot, four swings, and the basketball court. The Zarics and people from several other apartments (the Zarics were embarrassed again to realize how few of their neighbors they knew) sat or knelt along the baseboard of the cinder-block wall, jostling for comfort on a grit of old soap powder and dust.

  Franjo Kasic, a waiter at the Bristol Hotel, and Branko Filipovic, an automotive teacher whom Irena couldn’t recall seeing before, stood on their toes for a few seconds at a time to report on what they could glimpse: flashes of white whizzing through the sky, and shadows streaking against the dingy yellow panels of the building across the way. Every minute, it seemed, they heard the sound of glass cracking and falling. Mr. Kasic said that he saw a whole sheet of concrete peel away from the side of the ten-story building across the street. They waited for a thud, but Mr. Kasic said it broke apart on the way down.

  He and Mr. Filipovic went back and forth.

  “That’s a mortar.”

  “Thank you, Mr. BBC.”

  “Well, some kind of fucking bomb.”

  “Very perceptive.”

  Pretty Bird began to pick up the sounds. His red tail flared out behind him like the flame on a rocket: “Shhh-ruumph! Shh-ruumph!”