Pretty Birds (35 page)

“I hope we don't hit a fucking tank.”

31.

THE GIRLS HAD
a few hours before dawn seeped across the city and Amela would have to make her way back home. Zoran drove them to Irena's building and said he would sleep off the party in his taxi, below the windows, until Amela was ready to leave. There was moonlight enough to see their way up the outdoor staircase to the Zarics' apartment on the third floor. Their rubber-soled shoes squished softly on the worn wooden stairs.

“It's nice out after all the smoke,” Amela said in a whisper. “It's fresh and warm. Can we sit out here?”

“Bad idea,” Irena said. “Just about here is where we found my grandmother.”

“They can hit people here?”

“Anywhere. Haven't you heard of the Viper?”

“Everyone has,” said Amela.
“Every move you make, every step you take . . .”

“He's not just a song.”

“I wonder,” said Amela.

         

THE THIRD-FLOOR HALLWAY
was dark. Irena patted a wall so that Amela could hear it and position herself against it to slip down to the floor.

“Besides,” said Irena, “we can smoke in this hallway. Give me a second.”

Amela heard the sound of a lock turning, and quiet shuffling. When Irena returned, she had two cans of Sarajevo Beer under an arm, and her head was cocked to the side so that she could balance something on her shoulder.

“Pretty Bird,” said Amela.

“He was so eager to see you.”

Irena leaned forward for Pretty Bird to bump his beak against Amela's nose. He was sleepy, and made only a slight burbling.

Amela put his head into the well of her shoulder and blew gently across the top of his head. “I've missed him,” she said.

“He gets that Amela look,” said Irena. “I can see it.” The hall blushed with light briefly as she lit their Marlboros off a single match.

Amela lifted the tab on each beer with a
pffft
and handed one to Irena. “What is this shit?” she asked. “No Sancerre?”

“I'll check the cellar,” said Irena.
“Madame.”

They clanged beer cans together softly.

“Amazing.”

“Fucking amazing.”

Pretty Bird was coming to. He took a stutter step and began to waddle in a small circle between them.

“Living like this. Day to day. All day. I don't know how you do it.” Amela had locked her arms around her knees and sat back against the wall.

“You get used to it,” said Irena. “I suppose you can get used to anything. I bet people in Paris ride the bus past the Eiffel Tower twice a day and never look up from their crossword puzzles.”

“Those jokes,” said Amela. “I couldn't believe those jokes.”

“We laugh at strange things now,” Irena explained. “Or else we wouldn't laugh at all.”

“Do the Blue Helmets help?”

“Tedic—the bald guy. The old assistant coach. Tedic says that hell is a place where French and Egyptian soldiers are the army, the British are in charge of food, the Ukrainians are the police, and the United Nations is the government.”

Amela tapped a gray ash into the palm of her left hand.

Irena told her, “Flick it on the floor if you like. We're the only ones on this floor, and it just blends in with the rest of the rubble.”

Amela delicately overturned her palm full of ashes next to her on the floor. “I'll get them later,” she said. “How do you—do you mind—get by?”

“We're fine,” said Irena. “Hardest on my father. Nothing to do, and everything to feel bad about. I guess my brother feels that way, too. My mother and I—we have a lot to do.”

“Anything from your brother?” asked Amela. Irena drew on her cigarette as she smiled.

“I thought you'd ask. Not for a while.”

“Chicago still?”

“Maybe,” said Irena. “Maybe Zagreb,” she added softly. “Some people are trying to get to Bihac, one hears.”

“I have,” said Amela, and settled her eyes on the charred cameo of flame on the wall behind Irena's head. “We have our complaints, but I would feel cloddish to say anything here. We eat, we work.”

“Snipers a problem?” Irena asked carefully.

“A little. People living along the front lines can get a bullet up their ass while they're taking a shower.”

“We don't take showers,” Irena told her.

“You see why I don't complain,” said Amela. “You can always come up with something better.”

“Something worse?”

“That's what I mean.”

They mashed their cigarettes into the floor as they laughed, and lit up new ones.

“Have any fun?” asked Irena.

“The usual, I guess. Listen to music. Watch videos. I'm actually reading. Snipers aren't such a problem where we live. People tend to stay in, anyway. There are a few clubs. Mobster hangouts, really. They have money, they get things. But their acquaintance can be dangerous. Besides, I don't drink well when I'm not playing basketball and working it off.”

“Ever see anyone?”

“Our old friends?” Amela asked. She blew out a cloud of smoke—like a distress signal, Irena thought—before answering. “People have scattered.”

Irena put her chin over her knees and made her voice breathless and husky. “I . . . meant . . .
some-one.
”

“Oh. Boys,” said Amela shyly.

“Or men.”

“I haven't seen Dino.”

“Oh, shit,” said Irena. “Don't fuck with me. I didn't mean him. We're both too old for him now.”

Amela palmed down another load of ashes and ran her hand absently through her hair.

“No,” she said quietly. “No one regular. You?”

A speckling of bullet holes in the far end of the hallway was beginning to spark with morning light. Irena repositioned herself against the wall and crooked her legs to one side. “It's difficult. It's not like meeting boys on a spring holiday in Dubrovnik over here,” she said. “You must see plenty of boys in the army.”

“Not my part of it,” said Amela. “You see almost no one. Some of the officers are slobs. They tell me that if I go off with them I can earn extra money, extra food. American cigarettes.”

Irena shook out a fresh Marlboro. “What do you tell them?” she asked.

“No!”
said Amela, drawing in the first breath from Irena's match. “And that if they ask me again I'll shoot off their balls.”

Irena rocked back and forth and slapped her hand with her cigarette against her knee. “You can do that?”

“I get a gun in the army, yes. I wouldn't miss at that distance, I'm sure.”

“Sweet little Amela!” said Irena.

“Hairy bastards, sometimes,” Amela said, laughing.

Irena joined in when she grasped that they were remembering the same hairy bastard. “My mother threatened to cut someone's balls off,” she said. “One of the bastards who dragged us out of Grbavica. She swore at him and stabbed him in the nuts with her house keys.”

“Dalila?” said Amela, expecting a funny story to follow.

“I'd already kicked him in the nuts,” Irena explained. She looked down at her Air Jordans and jiggled their black toes up and down. “Fabulous shoes,” she added.

“You must meet soldiers,” said Amela.

“All the boys are headed to the front,” said Irena. “Except for people like my father.”

“Mild Milan, always singing ‘All You Need Is Love'?”

“A regular Marshal Tito,” teased Irena. “He digs trenches and shit holes. The U.N. soldiers are around, of course. They're not hard to run into.”

“We can see a few sometimes,” said Amela. “Hard bodies.”

“They wear armored vests.”

“I didn't mean their chests,” said Amela with an impish grin.

“You can tell?”

“Don't you think every girl can?”

Irena's voice softened. As the little spokes of sunrise licked in from the end of the hallway, she remembered that her parents were behind the door. “There was this one French soldier—I've told this to no one.” She looked up at the apartment door, then at Pretty Bird, and rolled over a Marlboro for the bird to nose and clutch.

“He did me a favor. Then he—we—went around a corner. He unzipped his pants. Didn't even unhitch his belt. Didn't even drop his pants. Just popped it out. As if he were taking a piss. That's all it meant. It meant nothing. He was as scared as I was. I might as well have been milking a cow. He might as well have been licked by a dog. I scarcely touched him. It was like a sneeze.”

Amela fumbled in her pockets for her own pack of Camels. She had to dig her fingers under the cellophane wrap for matches. “Sometimes that's the way to do it. Sometimes it can take forever.” She handed a cigarette to Irena, and waited until she had taken the light from her match. “Did you see him again?” she asked.

“Just to nod in the street. I don't think he was—neither of us was—pleased with himself. He was Senegalese, I think.”

Amela let a haze of smoke fill the space between them before she asked, “What they say—is it true?”

Irena smiled as demurely as an old Dutch portrait. “In this respect, he was a loyal Frenchman,” she said.

The cigarette smoke floated away.

“One more illusion,” said Amela. “I haven't touched anyone for a favor. Yet. Who knows? I've blown boys just for fun. Usually it wasn't—just something to do.”

“That's a favor,” Irena pointed out, and as the girls began to snigger and gasp, she motioned her arms, as if trying to tamp down a fire. “A
big
favor.”

They paused to catch their breath. Amela leaned over to lend a hand to Pretty Bird, who had inadvertently skewered the Marlboro onto the end of a claw. She gently removed the impaled cigarette and rubbed a finger over his claw.

“Girls?” asked Irena softly.

Amela raised her head slowly. “That may be another matter.”

The girls glanced at each other, taking care to keep their faces blank.

“You're quite safe,” Amela said finally.

“So are you,” Irena said after a hush.

Pretty Bird had the Marlboro back in his beak, and waddled toward the wall like a robed emperor carrying a declaration.

“War is so stupid, isn't it?” asked Amela. But she wasn't really asking. “Two friends have to brave bullets just to have a little fun and a talk. People call war brutal. Sure, it is. That doesn't scare anyone away, does it? It becomes some kind of spell. Utterly
stupid.
Brainless as a fire. It makes trees into torches, scalds little dogs and children, turns cathedrals into cigarette ash. How many centuries has it been since the dinosaurs? Such small brains, but they still left behind bones. After us, they'll find only cinders.”

Irena shifted her weight once more and felt her voice rising higher, but she didn't know at first whether it was anger or irritation. “And who do you think lights those fires?” she asked. “Do you remember that blizzard last summer? The strange moths that melted in our hands? Those were the ashes of the National Library. Your Serbs must have feared that we would take all those books, in so many languages, into our hands and hurl them against your tanks. Fat gray flakes of novels, poems, and plays floated down on our heads while corpses floated in the river.”

“There are victims on both sides,” Amela said quietly and considerately.

“That's not how
we
add it up,” Irena shot back. “The piles of the dead can be just as high—they're not equal. We were hiding in our beds and basements when your brutes in black sweaters came in, swinging their cocks and declaring that Grbavica would be ‘cleansed.' As if Muslims had become pests in your drainpipes. Which they purified by ramming their dicks into Muslim girls.”

Amela stretched her legs and leaned back on her arms. But she was not at rest. In the spokes of light, Irena could see her face quivering like an exposed muscle. She opened her mouth once; nothing came of it. Her chin snapped back soundlessly. Finally she said, “No one I know has done that.”

“Are you
sure
?” Irena challenged her. “Are you quite, quite bloody sure? Where were you that weekend last spring when we had to run for our lives?”

“I would have come running if I had known.”

“How could you
not
know?” Irena throttled her own cry in the darkness. “All the gunfire and shelling. All the
screaming.
” She clapped her hands over her ears. “How could you sleep through that?”

Amela rolled onto her knees. She brought her head closer to Irena's shoulders, but turned her face away.

“We weren't sleeping,” she said. “We were hiding. Same as you. We were scared.”

“I was scared.”
Irena bit off the affirmation so she could spit it back. “I still kicked a bully in his balls. My father still went out to try to talk the monsters out of killing us. They dragged his face over the parking lot and jammed a rifle in his ass. They laughed at us and picked us clean, like chickens, fucked and plucked.
My mother
was scared. But she still made that brute bleed. You'd be surprised—amazed,
terrified
—at what you can do when you're scared.”

“I am,” said Amela.

         

AMELA'S PACK OF
Camels lay between them, but with the faint, unfussy motion of old teammates, she signaled Irena for a Marlboro. When Irena lit it, she kept her right hand softly on the back of Amela's. Irena turned around until they were sitting side by side in the same screen of smoke.

“I don't know if you remember the Zajkos,” said Amela.

“Maybe if I saw them,” Irena said wearily.

“They lived across the way,” Amela explained. “One day—I think that Saturday of the march—Mr. Zajko comes to my father and says, ‘Mr. Divacs, we are going through terrifying times. Who can say what will happen? I have a proposal.'