Pretty Birds (2 page)

         

IRENA RARELY SAW
Serb soldiers. They were sealed into tanks, armored cars, and blockhouses across the way. They parked their tanks in blind alleys between garages. She knew their snipers were obscured in the opposing cityscape and the mountains beyond. She had been told to look for threads of cigarette smoke during this last morning hour, curling from behind a half-smashed wall or a dangling beam. Smoking for snipers was presumably proscribed. But telling Sarajevans on any side that smoking could get them shot was as convincing as telling them that smoking could give them cancer.

Irena saw no smoke. She could not see any black sweaters, truck headlights, or burly men with somebody else's shirt pulled improbably tight across their shoulders to cloak bulletproof vests. The bird had ceased its two-step.

Irena saw a glint of yellow gleaming against a gray street. At first she thought it was a tennis ball, fallen away from a child's game, abandoned in an alley. But when she sharpened her gaze through her scope she could see that it was a lemon, then another, then a whole crate of fifty, opened like a pirate's hoard of doubloons. Lemons from Crete, she guessed. Lemons that used to be so plentifully and casually squeezed into drinks and dressings, sliced and strewn to wreathe lamb roasts. She guessed that a black-market trader had bought them in Montenegro, and trucked them up to be sold to Serb soldiers in their posts who had not seen lemons for months.

Irena would not want to shoot at a man standing in line to buy a lemon. But she would not mind trying to hit a man who would sell lemons for the price of beefsteak. If she hit the man trying to buy a lemon, she could live with the consequences; he had more money than was suitable. Lemons were for seasoning and adornment, not nourishment. If he was standing in line to buy a lemon, it was probably because he didn't need to stand in line to buy milk or meat. If he didn't need to stand in line for food, it must be because he was a bully who was eating off the plates of Muslims who used to be his neighbors.

So if a shoulder should come into Irena's scope, a pair of flashing hands, she would not worry too much about who was selling lemons and who was buying them. She would pull in her breath and let it out slowly. When the air in her lungs had rolled out, she would squeeze the trigger just under her chin and wait for the jolt against her shoulder.

For long minutes, though, she saw only lemons. She raised herself a couple of inches, carefully, by squeezing her buttocks against the floor, trying to sight more. But the man selling lemons had opened the crate in an alley behind Dinarska Street that was guarded from view by a two-story garage. She could fire through the wire-screen sides of the structure. But her bullet would likely strike only an abandoned, burned-out car, or smash against an unseen wall or floor.

The sun was beginning to get higher and brighter. The lemons seemed almost to hiss with the morning's first low light. Irena trained her sight on the top of the mound, then counted one, two, three lemons to the right, because she felt a mild wind blowing down from the mountains in the east. She stopped breathing. The Knight was playing
The further on I go, the less I know, friend or foe, there's only us. . . .

She squeezed her breath out gently, as if she wanted to make a candle flame tremble. She tickled the trigger almost tenderly, as if she were rubbing the underside of a kitten's chin, and then squeezed it just as gently, until there was a jerk against her jaw that jolted clear into her shoulder. She kept her gaze focused through her sight, as if she could guide the shot. Within a second, she saw lemons jumping and quaking in their crate like minced garlic on a scalding skillet. They tumbled as the overturned trash can on which they had been set whined and tipped over into the alley. Lemons spilled past people scrambling over the street for a place to hide.

Irena's pigeon skipped a step and strutted with involuntary alarm. But over the past few months pigeons, too, had learned to snap back quickly on alert.

“Pretty bird,” Irena said softly. “I'm sorry to disturb you.”

         

TEDIC WAS WAITING
in the back of the truck on Mount Igman Street. Irena had pocketed her last brass shell and made a final notation in her small orange notebook before clambering down a shattered stairwell and walking a block into a covered alley. Tedic's truck was as large as a tram, and tented in an unwashed white canvas top. The sides bore an old green-and-gold crest: sarajevo beer, then in smaller letters below, since 1864. Irena scratched her short nails against the back flap of the canvas. The flap began to fall back as the zipper that held it in place rose, disclosing a small bald man in a black leather coat.

“What was that last one?” he asked as he helped her into the truck.

“I saw someone selling lemons,” she said. “Behind Dinarska Street. But I couldn't see a man. So before it got too light, I put it in the lemons.”

“Mist?” asked Tedic.

“Yellow,” she said with a smile. “Just lemons.”

         

“
WE HEARD SOME
commotion,” Tedic said. He shook a cigarette rolled in old telephone-book paper (a local factory still turned out cigarettes; it had tobacco, but had run out of paper) from a fold of his coat. He pressed it into her hand and took the rifle from over her shoulder. Irena noticed that the names on her cigarette were
G
's from the directory. She wondered if she was about to smoke through Svjetlana Garasanin's family.

“We're out of Marlboros?” she asked.

“You are developing expensive tastes,” said Tedic. “These are supposed to be getting better. The factory proposed a trade and we couldn't say no.”

“But do we actually have to smoke them?” Irena had a red plastic lighter zipped into the chest pocket of her gray garage mechanic's smock, next to the embroidered Dragan. She lit her cigarette.

“Not Marlboro for sure,” she said through a cloak of smoke.

“Apparently the bastards have been forced to use the Bulgarian tobacco that they used to export,” said Tedic.

“Export. Are they in the same business we're in?” Irena asked.

“Everyone in town,” said Tedic, “is caught up in the same business right now.”

         

IRENA HAD ALREADY
rolled her ski mask into her pocket. She took down her gray smock and stepped out of it, leaving her red basketball jersey over a black T-shirt and her old yellow schoolgirl's athletic shorts. She unlaced her boots while Tedic continued to talk, consulting the notepad that she kept against the crinkles of a map folded into a black vinyl book.

“You put a couple into Spomen Park shortly after two? By the monument?”

“I saw a couple of uniforms around a truck. But they were unloading something and moving in and out of the shot.”

“You slowed them down.”

“I moved down a floor about five minutes later and just threw a round into the back of the truck. I could see a tear in the canvas. But no mist, no scrambling.”

“A nice little ping to wake up the boys sleeping off their slivovitz,” Tedic noted. “Five-eighteen—the clock in the coffee bar?”

“On Lenin Street. A light snapped on. Mr. Popovic, the man who used to catch us sneaking looks at dirty magazines, was probably just setting up. I waited until the red second hand went by and tried to put the shot down in the center of the clock face. But I couldn't follow it.”

A pause fell between them while Irena pulled on the jeans she had taken off six hours ago. They sat on the slats of empty beer bins. Nine crates near the front of the truck were kept conspicuously filled at all times, on the chance that a U.N. inspector might demand proof that the truck actually delivered beer.

Irena unscrewed the flash suppressor on the front of her rifle. It was still warm from her last bullet; she liked to roll it in her hands. She laid it out to cool. She put a scrap of tatty burgundy cloth (Irena suspected it had been cut from the napkin of an old Chinese restaurant in town) over a bottle of canola cooking oil. She turned the bottle over until it had soaked through the scrap. She then wrapped the patch around a slim steel rod and clipped it into place. She raised the metal rod, as she imagined a cellist picks up a bow, and rammed it in one deliberate motion clear to the end of the barrel, back and forth, counting off ten times.

By the time she extracted the rod, Tedic had another scrap of the old napkin in his fingers. She pulled the blackened burgundy patch away and put it into Tedic's palm. She fixed the new, dry patch onto the end of the rod and then put that one through, one, three, five times, before pulling it out and seeing, with some satisfaction, a rusty light residue.

Tedic held out a plastic canister of squares saturated with rose-scented lotion. People in the West used them to wipe babies' bottoms. She rubbed a sheet in her hands until it was smudged with the same rusty residue and peppery flecks of grime.

“Full breakdown and cleaning this Saturday,” said Tedic. “You don't want me to do it all by myself.”

“Oh God, oh shit, Tedic,” said Irena. “I hate it when I'm all wet with tushy wipes and you make it sound like we're some old married couple.”

         

THE DRIVE TO
the Zarics' apartment block was brief and clear. Sarajevans joked that, while their city was starving and bleeding, local traffic congestion had been greatly relieved. Before Irena turned to lower herself out of the delivery door, Tedic waved two cans of beer at her. “For your mother and father,” he said. She took them into her hands like small barbells.

Irena walked heavily up the three flights of stairs to her grandmother's apartment and joggled the smashed lock of the door. Her mother could not take herself away from the two cups of water she was bringing to a boil in one of her mother-in-law's kettles. She had kindled a tiny fire in a tin stove out of one of the stubby wooden feet of the Mandos' living-room sofa and the edge of the frame of their wedding portrait (Mr. Mando had smashed the glass before they left, and rolled the photo over his shin, like a bandage). Mrs. Zaric called out to her daughter. “You're home.”

“Tedic dropped me off behind the barrier on Irbina.”

“It sounded bad last night over in Dobrinja,” said Mrs. Zaric.

Sometime during the summer Irena had helped her mother clip her hair close to her skull, closer even than Irena's. She'd then scoured the remains with kitchen bleach. It had the effect of an electric charge, making Mrs. Zaric's hair bright, spiky, and a little shocking.

Many Sarajevans were dismayed at how the war had spoiled their appearance: matted hair and mottled skin, whitening gums and graying teeth. But nothing about the past few months made Mrs. Zaric want to hold on to the way she had looked. She was delighted to turn her hair into something pug and purposeful.

“I'm trying to save the batteries,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Haven't heard the news.”

“I think I can get more at work,” said Irena. “I heard the Knight say it was Novo Sarajevo and Bistrik. Tedic has the BBC in the truck. They said maybe six people made it to the hospital. There's some kind of trial making people angry in Los Angeles. The radio says a hundred-some men in Prijedor were locked up in a tire factory and forced to sing Serbian songs before they were shot and thrown into a dump.”

She set the two beer cans down on the floor by her mother.

“Tedic sent these.”

“I'm trying to make tea. We can use that beer later to buy coffee,” said Mrs. Zaric. She remembered to smile at her daughter. “Oh, forgive me. And you are all right, my darling?”

“Fine,” said Irena. “I worked a little in the basement.”

The voice of Irena's father jangled against the tiles from the bathroom.

“Is the match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky going on yet?”

“Didn't hear,” Irena answered.

Mr. Zaric now spent most of his time in the apartment, wearing a pale jade robe he had brought out of his mother's closet the morning after she died. He had taken to beholding his reflection in a tin cooking sheet propped over a hole where a piece of shell had crashed into the kitchen.

“Okay,” he'd say, squaring his shoulders and pointing at his own bleary likeness. “Ziggy Stardust, right? Raves in London.”

“There was a new
Q
magazine in the basement,” said Irena. “From May. Cher is on the cover. She's a redhead with blue eyes now, and says she likes it. Annie Lennox is going to give up her music to help the homeless. They say she's going to give hope ‘to those who sleep tonight in a home made of cardboard.' The Troggs—remember how you used to sing ‘Wild Thing' at us?—made an album with R.E.M. Bruce Springsteen says, ‘It's a sad man who's living in his own skin and can't stand the company.' Isn't that an amazing line? Somebody tore out the k. d. lang interview, but there's still a picture. She has hair like mine. Michael Jackson is crazy about EuroDisney. They have a quiz—twenty-five questions about American southern music. I only knew one. Didn't Eric Clapton learn guitar from Muddy Waters? But if we can answer the questions and figure out a way to send them in,
Q
will fly the winner and his family to Tennessee and give them six hundred pounds.”

“Muddy Waters or B. B. King,” said Mrs. Zaric from over the first spits from her small fire. “Nadira Sotra says everybody in town is pretending to be Jewish so they can get out of town on the bus the Serbs are letting leave from the synagogue.”

“It's about bloody time that somebody got a break for being a Jew,” Mr. Zaric declared.

“Well,
sha-lom
!” said Irena, speaking into the babble of laughter that followed. “Work was”—she drew out the word in English—
“oh-kay.”

2.

SPRING

1992

MOST PEOPLE IN
town didn't have a September 1st or a December 7th in their minds—a day they could say the war began. Sarajevo had a plaque at the spot where, on a June 28th, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had lit the fuse to world war. Grotesque men, strutting in jackboots and gingerbread uniforms, struck up wars. Wars weren't begun by people who wore soft French jeans and stylish running shoes.

There were blood wars in the hinterlands—feuds, really, among country people who clung to their father's work, their grandfather's lands, and the primitive bigotry of their forebears. But Sarajevans considered themselves refined. They didn't live in the woods but along a crossroads. People intermingled, intertwined, and intermarried. Few families couldn't trace at least a drop of all bloodlines into their own. People might be Muslims or Serbs (or even Catholics or Jews) at birth. They became city people by custom. They found more faith in coffeehouses and movie theaters than in churches or mosques. They were obeisant to Billie Holiday, Beckett, and basketball, not ministers or imams. The rest of what had been Yugoslavia might be broken up by blood grudges. But Sarajevans were convinced that they could find sly ways to maneuver around tribalism, as they had around Communism. Sarajevans could be stupid, brutish, and blinkered between the river and the valley. They could be irrational, indolent, and self-indulgent in their cafés; they joked about it themselves. But the sheer, blunt dumbness of war—it didn't fit. (The plaque marking the shooting of the Archduke extolled the assassination as a blow for Serbian nationalism. But Sarajevans usually strolled past the brass tablet without giving it as much notice as a soft-drink ad.)

So each Sarajevan had a different date for the start of the war. It began in that moment they said to themselves, “This will not be over by morning.”

         

FOR IRENA ZARIC,
the war began on a greening weekend in early April. Young Sarajevans who wanted Bosnia to stay peacefully together were marching downtown; many people at her school were going. Eddy Vrdoljak had asked her to go. But Irena knew that Eddy's interest in the endurance of a multiethnic democracy was his hope to impress girls of varied backgrounds with old myths.

“You know what they say about Croat men, don't you?” he would say with a toss of his dark, disheveled head. “You know why, all kinds, all over the world, they're crazy for us, don't you? I could help you find out.”

Eddy was harmless in small doses, and dependably amusing. But Irena had basketball practice at eleven in the morning. She couldn't miss a workout so close to their sectional championships.

Irena and her teammates were often teased about being jocks; mocked for having no concern for history, culture, or politics. But they knew that basketball now competed with political assemblies on Friday nights. The city bristled with national fronts, liberation movements, and people's assemblies, all making raucous vows in smoky basements. It could even be risky to drive across the river for a basketball game—or to buy a string of sausage.

They knew that some Serb police had taken off their uniforms and badges and overturned a garden-store delivery truck along the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge. The defrocked police (now anointed “paramilitaries”) swept aside the tulips and sunflowers and set up a barrier. No other police would dare to remove it. Men in black sweaters with rifles on their hips barked at people to show identity cards before passing into what they called Serb Sarajevo.

Just a week earlier, the school principal, Miss Ferenc, had introduced the men's and women's basketball teams at a school assembly in the gym. She presented the players by position and declared, “There you hear it—Serb names, Croat names, Muslim names.” She turned slightly toward Miriam Isakovic, but kept her lips above the microphone, so her stage whisper would not be lost. “Even a Jewish name,” she said to a satisfying chime of laughter. Miriam blushed at being singled out—she was a sweet, studious girl who rarely made it into games of consequence.

The principal continued in a soft tone. “Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews—they are all
our
family names here in Number Three High School in Grbavica. Different names, different histories. Today,” Miss Ferenc fairly thundered, “we all play for the same team.
Our
team.
Just like every citizen of Sarajevo!
”

The students rose to their feet, folding chairs scraping, clapping their hands above their heads. The speech gave them a new stake in winning. Grbavica couldn't lose to a team like Number One High School, over in Bistrik, where only Muslims lived; it would let down all Sarajevo.

“Let's show all Bosnia!” Miss Ferenc churned her right arm above her head, as if she were ringing a bell. Her glasses slipped down her nose. “Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews! Rastas, Hindus, Buddhists! Jains, Shintoists, Scientologists!” Miss Ferenc ran out of religions just in time for the laughter to overtake her.

         

THERE WAS AN
awkward moment at that Saturday's practice; at the time, it seemed only that. Emina Sefic, the team's center, and Danica Tomic, a guard, had fallen to the floor in a scramble for the basketball. The girls heard squeaks, shouts, and swearing of no particular affront among athletes—“Bitch!” “Idiot!” “Whore!” Then they heard Emina snarl, “Greasy Serb slut!” Danica's face reddened like an electric coil. She barked back, “Rag-head whore!” Irena could remember other times when the girls would shout such insults at one another for laughs. But when Coach Dino sensed that the two girls seemed more intent on slapping each other than on grabbing the basketball, he lowered his shoulders into the snarl of legs and arms, shoving them aside with his tattooed arms.

“You are teammates, dammit,” he hollered for all in the gym to hear. “You are
teammates
!”

Conversation in the locker room was muted and brittle. No one knew what to say; no one wanted to say the wrong thing. Even playful conversations could turn a dangerous corner. All the girls had heard terrifying stories over the past few days. A man in Kovacici had come home after a round of beer and schnapps and thrown a stone wrapped in a burning towel into his neighbor's bedroom. A woman had been found dead on the Ali Pasha Bridge, her tongue cut out (actually, a newspaper noted drily, cut
in half
). Such butchery was clearly the work of amateurs and, therefore, more worrying.

         

IRENA CAME TO
the mirror at the same time as Amela Divacs, the team's other forward. They did not know what to say, but they did not swerve away from each other. Amela smiled slightly as she combed through her long, pale, damp hair, and finally said, “They are both stupid sows.”

“I didn't know which to root for,” said Irena, whose short chestnut hair had already dried in place.

“Danica is sinking her free throws,” said Amela, who smiled and turned back to her locker before she caught herself. “But I wouldn't, you know, choose her for any other reason.”

         

IRENA AND AMELA
were partners on the court, and lived in the same housing block in Grbavica. They had played together for two years, after Amela's family had moved from the older area of Skenderija. Amela could pick out the top of Irena's head above a thicket of players, and loft a pass at just the best height for Irena to pluck it away from those around her. Irena could see Amela's long whip of yellow hair lash between two players' shoulders, and she would bounce the ball where Amela could jab out with an arm and take it in her stride. They were comrades, to be sure, and friends in most of the important ways: the foremost was basketball. Their camaraderie was rarely tested by envy.

Irena was a better shooter, that was for sure. This didn't bother Amela, who was shorter and prettier, at least in the swelling assessment of teenage boys. Yet the older boys in their housing block who had gone off to the army or university regarded Irena as sexier.

When the boys came home on weekend passes, they played basketball with Irena, Amela, and sometimes another teammate, Nermina Suljevic. Irena's pet parrot, Pretty Bird, was the game's unofficial official-in-charge; the gray bird said, “Bbb-oing!” in imitation of the sound a ball would make ringing against the court's orange iron hoop. The young men liked to play just under that hoop, hoping for Amela to leap up for a rebound and come down jiggling. They liked to watch Irena from behind as she dribbled the ball downcourt. They would try to press against her backside when they faced the basket. Irena had come close to slapping a couple of boys for their brazenness. Instead, she exploited their distraction to steal the ball.

Both girls had been stamped as athletes from an early age. They had won badges, ribbons, and medallions, which their parents had long ago piled in drawers as so much clutter. Both girls were used to being watched by strangers, and used to looking at each other as competitors and teammates.

Amela was smart—the more serious student of the two—but she wasn't an intellectual. Away from class, she mostly read captions under the pictures in Western fashion and pop magazines.

Irena was blasé about schoolwork. She would wait until the morning of a test to learn what she needed and nothing more, which was hardly the way she trained for basketball. Yet few of Irena's teachers were disappointed. Her mind had depth. She would give herself over completely to a book, a song, or a magazine, absorbing a sports or music monthly from the letters in front to the personal ads on the last pages.

Irena and Amela knew they were the best two players on their team, and two of the three prettiest (the third, Jagoda Marinkovic-Cerovic, was a redhead, and beyond comparison—some boys were simply fools about redheads). Amela wore lipstick. Irena tended not to. Both sprayed jots of cologne on the soft undersides of their forearms after showering, tucking small gift spritzers back into their gym bags.

         

SOME LESBIANS ASSUMED
that Irena, with her Martina Navratilova bearing, was gay, but loath to accept it. In fact, Irena had no dread of being gay. She just wasn't. Amela, who had more of the blond, billowy look of a girl in a Coca-Cola ad, was never taken to be gay. But she had enjoyed a couple of gentle kissing and hand-holding encounters with other women. She thought her sexual register was still settling.

Irena could seethe and flash. Amela was considered almost tiresomely sweet. Yet Irena remembered the time Anica Dordic, the center for their rivals at Veterans, was throwing elbows at Miriam Isakovic's nose when she came down the court. The referees were watching the ball, not Miriam; or, at any rate, they weren't inclined to call a foul committed against a player of no particular consequence. Irena didn't whimper to the officials. She challenged Anica for a rebound and launched a jab into her chin while ostensibly stretching for the ball. Anica, who'd played her ruse enough to know her next move, staggered back, looking confused and wounded. Irena was ejected. She was slipping the orange Number Three jersey over her head in the locker room when Amela took a pass from Nermina Suljevic and took a layup, hard, into the wincing chin of Anica Dordic. Anica got flagged for the foul when she called Amela a bleach-haired whore.

         

AMELA WAS KNOWN
as a Serb, Irena as a Muslim. It would be sentimental to say that the difference was undetectable or insignificant. Insults and nasty jokes about the differences were traded. Bar fights broke out. People could hear the difference in names; some were convinced they could see it in a person's nose, eyes, or jawline. Some neighborhoods in the city were considered Serb, others Muslim. But family trees, flecked with intermarriage and conversions, had been entwining in Sarajevo for most of the century.

The girls and their friends were more intense about basketball than about any of the city's array of religions. No one on their team wore a religious medallion. Almost every day, Amela Divacs wore a yellow No. 32 Los Angeles Lakers jersey that an unnamed older boy had gotten for her. Amela tucked the jersey over blouses when she went to class, and often pulled it over a T-shirt at practice. The jersey was an amulet for Amela. It announced that she was both an outstanding basketball player and unavailable to the boys in her school. They were kids, not like the man who had given her a Magic Johnson jersey.

Irena was not certain that she knew anyone who went to a church, mosque, or synagogue regularly. Whenever her friends became briefly fascinated by a faith, it would be Baha'i or Buddhism, in the same way they were captivated by vegetarianism or yoga.

         

“
THAT'S IT, YOU'RE
home for the night. We all are,” Irena's father told her when she arrived at their apartment after practice. Before she could object, he raised a hand and tipped his head toward the television set. “You've been at school. The march today. Some people opened fire from inside the Holiday Inn. People were hurt.”

Names of friends who might have been there flashed into Irena's mind: Azra, Dina, Jelena, Eddy, Hamel, Morana.

“Do you know who?”

“Serbs, of course. That's Serb headquarters. They dragged a couple of gunmen out of their offices.”

“No.
No!
” said Irena. She could hear her voice hardening. “Who was
hurt.
”

“No,” her father said quietly. “I know they didn't have enough ambulances. Twenty people are in the hospital.”

Irena had her keys in her hand, and conspicuously began to stuff them into the pocket of her jeans. “I'm going to check on my friends,” she announced.

Before her father could respond, Mrs. Zaric stepped into the hallway. “It's getting worse,” she said. “We've heard a few shots today.”