Pretty Birds (3 page)

“They were just from the television set,” said Irena.

“Some Serbs have put burning barrels in the streets in Ilidza,” Mrs. Zaric went on. “Serb army officers are staying at home. Serbs on the police force aren't showing up for work. They're staying at home—with their weapons.”

“Like they were forming their own army,” said her father.

         

IRENA COULD CALL
no one. The panic in the city—that's how people on television were beginning to put it—had overwhelmed the system: people dialed, there were clicks, then a thunk. Irena didn't join her parents before the drone of the television. She looked down from the dining-room window to the small park below and saw no one, not even the grade-school kids who usually flocked there on Saturday nights. On Saturdays, the high-school girls would pull on tight jeans and stretchy Western tops to prowl and parade past the snack shacks and coffee bars in the narrow streets of Old Town. Irena and Amela liked to stop by the park's basketball court on their way out. They would take off their weekend rings and give their hoop earrings to a little girl to hold while they showed the kids how to change hands on a dribble, then turn away with a hook shot and walk off to their tiny-handed applause.

Irena stayed in her room, listening to Madonna:
Tears on my pillow, what kind of life is this, if God exists . . .
The lyrics bounced through her head amid the sounds of the city, as cars backfired—or guns were shot—and sirens yowled. She took Pretty Bird out of his cage and perched him on her stomach, his rust-red tail feathers splayed out on her hips.

“Do you like this music, Pretty Bird?” she asked in the small, child's voice she used for conversations with her parrot. “Does it remind you of home?”

Pretty Bird was a Timneh African gray. But Irena and her family had invented a storybook life for their bird: he had flapped into Sarajevo from Copacabana Beach across the ocean, because he was tired of rubbing suntan lotion into his feathers. Pretty Bird could not manage to speak much more than his name. Congo Grays were considered better orators, and were commensurately more costly. But Pretty Bird's bargain price did not account for his outstanding talents as a mimic. Sometimes he trilled like their telephone, jingled like their doorbell, or creaked like the chipped yellow-steel kitchen cabinet next to his cage. Their veterinarian said Irena ought to write up Pretty Bird's talents for a professional journal. His vocabulary of sounds made him a particularly amusing companion, sending the Zarics scampering to answer phantom phone calls, or wake up wondering who was vacuuming in the middle of the night.

Shortly after nine o'clock, Pretty Bird began to chirrup like their new Danish telephone and do a kind of rumba—one step forward, two steps back—along the belt line of Irena's blue jeans. Her mother rapped quietly on her closed door. “It's Coach, dear,” she called.

Irena took Pretty Bird onto her shoulder and sat up with some alarm as the doorknob turned and she saw Coach Dino standing beside her mother.

“Hi, chickie,” he said lightly. “I told your mother, the phones seem to be out, and this was important. Sorry to interrupt your fun.”

Irena had begun to notice that even at their games Mrs. Zaric often seemed flustered and shy around Coach Dino; she couldn't seem to say three words without taking one back. The coach was a rangy, rugged man in his early thirties, with stabbing dark eyes and wiry muscles, which were often exposed by sleeveless shirts.

“Tea? Coffee?” asked her mother. “Oh, I'm sorry. Perhaps a beer? Wait, no, we have some nice Danish vodka. Well, actually not vodka, but something made from seeds. Well, not birdseed, of course, but like rye-bread seed. . . .” Mrs. Zaric's voice trailed off as the coach shook his head.

“Thank you, no. I am always in training.”

After Mrs. Zaric had closed the door, Coach Dino sat on the cedar trunk at the end of Irena's bed. Pretty Bird waddled down her right arm and settled himself on the bedstead. Coach Dino smiled tentatively.

“Hey, chickie,” he said with exaggerated lightness. “Look, I'm sure this is no big thing. But there will be no practice tomorrow. Or Monday. If you and your family wanted to go off for the holiday”—Monday was the anniversary of the victory of Tito's Partisans over the Germans—“there's no reason not to.”

“That's not going to get us ready for the tournament,” Irena said. “Why don't a few of us just shoot around in the gym?” Back on her shoulder, Pretty Bird whirred like her mother's bread mixer.

“They have to close the school,” said Coach Dino. “All the schools, in fact. Under the circumstances.” His voice dropped. “Maybe for a while.”

“What's ‘for a while'?” Irena could hear her voice flutter with anxiety.

“That's not up to us,” the coach said gently. “There's a lot of people acting stupid right now.”

“The championships begin in two weeks.”

“I'm sure this will all be over soon,” he said. “People just have to get it out of their systems. Listen,” the coach continued, “this other thing I had to tell you. I've been called back into the army.”

Irena felt a prickling in her scalp. When she reached up for Pretty Bird, she noticed that her fingers didn't respond immediately, as if the signal she had sent to them had to go around a barricade.

“There's no war,” she said finally. “You said it: just stupid people.”

“But there is an emergency,” said Coach Dino. “They're calling everyone. I'm sure they just want me for another competition.” He had been a biathlon champion his first time around in the national army, and still won occasional local tournaments, firing rifle shots while skiing.

“There won't be snow for months,” Irena pointed out.

“There are shooting matches all the time.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” said Irena, “you could hold those in our parking lot this weekend.”

         

THE COACH SAID
he had to go. He had to find Amela and Nermina to tell them, too, that school was closed and he was leaving. As Coach Dino got up, Irena reached up and put her arms clumsily around his shoulders. For the first time in the confusion of the past few weeks, she began to cry. She blotted her tears against the coach's right biceps, just above his mermaid tattoo.

“I am sorry,” she said in a small, choked voice, “to rain on your mermaid.”

“Shh,” he said gently. “Shh. Shh. Shh. It will be over.”

“This is so much worse than I thought,” said Irena.

“The mermaid is waterproof.”

Irena nestled her nose and chin into the coach's shoulder. She stood nimbly on her toes to turn her lips against his ear. “She is an ignorant, titty blonde,” she whispered, and then licked the inside of his ear softly, as she knew he liked.

“Oh, shit,” said Coach Dino. He ran his right hand slowly down Irena's back, squeezing gently every few inches. “Your parents.”

“Watching television,” she whispered slow and deep into his ear. Irena went on slowly, so that each syllable would be a small, boiling breath playing over the small hairs in his ears. “I won't talk if you won't.”

The coach lowered his hand to the crack in Irena's ass, pressing his palm across her buttocks and squeezing. Irena shivered against his neck; it smelled of smoke, coffee, and his lavender splash. She felt Coach Dino swell and press against her. (Irena loved the obviousness of boners. They were one of the few ways in which boys were utterly reliable.)

The Madonna tape had stopped and rewound. Irena breathed into the coach's ear,
“I'm down on my knees, I want to take you there.”
She felt for the drawstring of Coach Dino's blue warm-up pants and tugged out the knot. She put both of her hands on his thighs and pulled down his pants with her thumbs. Because she was an athlete, and knew about the fragility of ligaments, Irena sank into a crouch instead of getting on her knees. She kissed him through his white cotton shorts. The top of his cock looked like a purple serpent. He held Irena lightly behind her ears as she licked once, twice, five times, until she tasted several salty, soapy drops. She made a comic smacking sound. Her joke panicked the coach. She could taste it. He stopped churning his hips. Gently, Coach Dino pushed back her chin and tugged up his pants. He brought her face against his and began to kiss her wet brown eyes. He ran a thumb down over her crotch until he found the top button of her jeans and unlatched it, then slipped his thumb between her legs.

Irena sang under her breath,
“I close my eyes. . . .”

Pretty Bird clacked his pink feet a few inches over on the bedstead and buzzed like Mr. Zaric's electric shaver. “
Zzz-zzha, zzz-zzha,
Pretty Bird,” he said. “Pretty Bird!”

3.

AS COACH DINO
left, he drew a red basketball jersey from the front pocket of his gym jacket and laid it across Irena's bedstead. “Guard this while I'm gone,” he said. “Sleep in it. Keep it in your bed. That's the place”—he ducked his chin toward her—“where I want to be.”

In fact, Irena and Coach Dino had never been to bed. Their couplings were staged in stairwells, equipment closets, and—most challengingly—in a crawl space between the gymnasium bleachers and a wall of the women's shower room. The verticality of their sex was a joke between them. Fucking on her feet, he counseled, was good for her quadriceps. “You can run fifty laps around the gym,” he would say, raising his eyebrows like exclamation points. “Or—”

“Anything,” Irena would say, “to avoid running laps.”

It wasn't until Irena had opened up the shirt that she saw
JORDAN
across the back,
CHICAGO
on the front. The gift, along with the gunshots and emptiness outside, alarmed her. Irena was cunning. She knew that Coach Dino enjoyed having sex with her, but she assumed that one day he would approach her with his sad hound's face and announce that he was returning to his wife (or, at least, to their bedroom from the couch on which he professed to sleep) or moving in with Julija Mitric, the hazel-eyed women's soccer coach. Irena enjoyed her moments with Coach Dino, but she spent more time dreaming about Toni Kukoc, the great Croatian player, or Johnny Depp than about the coach. She hid their relationship like a shoplifted lipstick.

Irena would never wear the red jersey to school or practice. But her parents would see it on the bed, in her closet, under her pillow. No lie would be convincing; accepted, perhaps, for the sake of peace, but never believed. The red jersey was like an indiscreet letter left in a drawer. Coach Dino must have known that the jersey would lead Irena to proclaim her adulthood by flinging his name into her parents' astonished faces. He must have known that he wouldn't be coming back to Sarajevo anytime soon.

         

MR. ZARIC CLEARED
his throat, smoothed his hair, and told his small family that he had to declare what he had been thinking. It was shortly after eight o'clock on a Sunday, and coffee was dripping down into the electric glass pot. Pretty Bird made bubbling, popping, and sizzling sounds as the coffee crackled against the hot plate. Mrs. Zaric sat next to the bird, at the far corner of the kitchen table, her eyes shining and rimmed in pink.

“I've been thinking,” he began. “All night, really. Your brother even mentioned this a few days ago. When our phone was working.” Irena's brother, Tomaslav, was traveling with friends in Vienna, and would call every couple of days as he heard increasingly harrowing news from home. “I'm thinking it's maybe a good time to visit your grandmother.” Irena's only living grandmother, her father's mother, lived in the apartment she had shared with her husband near the synagogue in Old Town.

“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 the 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.