Pretty Birds (22 page)

“If you want a bargain, call London and Chicago,” Zoran answered. “A call to the other side of Sarajevo costs.”

“Five packs, then.”

“The carton.”

“The carton, then,” Mrs. Zaric said with a sigh of annoyance. “But the Thursday phone call, too.”

“A carton and five packs.”

“The carton,” Mrs. Zaric said evenly, and glanced at her daughter. “Did I mention they were Marlboros?”

Zoran began to smile as he scuffed his feet against the taxi's tires.

“A pretty girl has ways to convince me,” he said, and Mrs. Zaric stiffened as her hand tightened on her daughter's arm. Before she could shout—or slap—him down, Zoran spoke in the voice of a faded French movie star. “I don't mean your girl, ma'am. I'm a man who values experience.”

Irena was dispatched upstairs to bring back half a carton of cigarettes.

         

AFTERWARD, IRENA AND
her mother sat on the stairs and opened a spare pack plucked from their cache of Marlboros.

“I felt safe about him being in London,” Mrs. Zaric said of her son. “I even thought he was safe in Chicago.”

“Al Capone is dead,” Irena pointed out.

“There are
Serbs
in Chicago,” Mrs. Zaric reminded her. “Lots. But they're Americans. They all have cars, CD players, computers. Most of them want another Bulls championship, not a Greater Serbia.”

“So do I,” said Irena.

“It was the rabbi who told me. I wandered in to look at the board while you were at work one day, and he said, ‘The girl picked one up. I think she has a boyfriend or something who is going to Chicago to join one of our fighting units. Praise be, they will be here in good time.' Praise be,” Mrs. Zaric continued. “Those boys and girls will never get farther than Cleveland. If Tomaslav and the rest manage to sneak into Bosnia, he'll only wind up in the haystacks of Zenica, sharing mud and bugs, and risking his life for peasants.”

“Country people in black dresses and plain scarves?” Irena asked. “Not city folks like us?”

Mrs. Zaric's eyes narrowed comically. She tilted her head back, peered down the barrel of her nose, and blew a ring of smoke between them. “I've told Milan a hundred times,” she said. “We should have had dim-witted children, like everyone else. They are more grateful. They don't remember everything you ever told them and serve it back to you, cold, in your face.”

Mrs. Zaric studied the tip of her cigarette as it darkened and scattered. “We've had our misfortunes,” she said carefully. “The first day in Grbavica. Your grandmother. Nermina I count, too. But how remarkable it is that you, your father, and I, even Tommy, are still alive. We've been so lucky. So favored. If I knew whom to thank—if I believed—I'd give them the rest of my life. But your father digging in the dirt—Tomaslav maybe crawling around some bloody wood, for all we know—you going back and forth doing whatever at the brewery . . . Aleksandra sitting on the stoop and signaling snipers with her cigarettes. I worry about our luck lasting. And now we have to be grateful that Pretty Bird has made it so far, too.”

The two women sat with their hands knotted in their laps and listened to the winter wind scratch over the empty streets.

“Pretty Bird,” said Irena.

“Amazing,” said her mother.

“Pretty Bird.”

         

AMELA WAS SAFE,
and Pretty Bird had survived—Irena wanted to bring the news to Tedic. But Tedic had been called out to Franko Hospital, where good fortune had just run out.

24.

FRANKO HOSPITAL HAD
windows. After just a few months of war, windowpanes looked like extravagant embellishments in the wracked gray cityscape. It was like finding a teacup intact in the wreckage of a tornado.

The hospital still had whole windows that looked north, into the curve of Mount Zuc, and windows that stared south into the smashed and forsaken towers downtown. Nearly all of the city's other windows had been shattered. Almost every block looked like a gallery of blinded heads.

“We are the only building left that has eyes,” said Alma Ademovic, the hospital director.

The hospital had been finished against a deadline in 1984 to welcome the Olympic Games (and thereby named for Jure Franko, the first Yugoslav slalom skier to win an Olympic medal). The new building was meant to impress the West with a show of modernity. It was an Eastern bloc hospital in which the interior walls were not gray concrete blocks but chest-high panels in lemon, mauve, and peach—pastel socialism, topped with transparent plastic leaves that displayed the latest imported medical machinery, like glossy cars in a California parking lot.

Marxism that let the sunshine in.

The windows remained luxuriously whole because there was a whalebacked little flip of the mountain that prevented snipers from firing from the north, and the hospital was too far from the lines to be struck by shots from any snipers roosting in the trees east and west of the city. The south was close, just across the Miljacka River and Serb lines, but the thicket of scarred steel buildings downtown protected that side.

Bosnians were wary about advertising the hospital's seclusion. Officials did not want a community of refugees pitching tents there. But they used the hospital for meetings, battening down participants into the back of ambulances for delivery at the appointed times, and kept the state's reserves of deutsche marks, dollars, and Swiss francs in the basement, as well as rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, and silver coffee servers that several old Sarajevo Serb families had donated, with unwitting generosity, after taking flight across the river. The basement also held boxes of bullets.

Alma Ademovic considered the provisions to be unwarranted incursions into her domain. She complained to the Home Minister as he was conveyed to a conference one afternoon.

“You are violating the Geneva convention,” she said, stamping her right foot in her fury. “I'm sure of it.”

The Home Minister considered the Geneva convention as unenforceable in Sarajevo—and as unaffordable—as the Ten Commandments. Camouflaged in an ambulance attendant's smock, the Home Minister looked like an especially insolent underling.

But Alma Ademovic was adamant. “Your pirate's booty and bombs are taking space that could store neomycin, lidocaine, or sulfonamide,” she said heatedly. “That's what's
supposed
to be in this hospital.”

“I was not aware that our shelves are short of space to hold such an excess,” the Home Minister called back as he turned. “But if I had to choose between antibiotics and ammunition . . .” He let the thought hang as he stamped away.

         

RADOVAN KARADZIC, THE
Bosnian Serb leader, had once been a consulting psychiatrist at Franko. Staffers asked about their recollections either had to acknowledge that they had no clear memories of him—which awarded them no prestige—or pass on anecdotes that would prompt the question, “Didn't you know he was a lunatic?”

Karadzic would bustle in, the lapels of his Burberry trench coat flapping expensively, great Waikiki swells of silver hair breaking over his forehead. “Close your eyes with me a moment,” he would command some dimpled and appealing nurse, and take her hands at the wrists, as if the recitation that followed was a human response test.

“The gentlefolks' aortas will gush without me,”
he would begin, eyes half closed, like the hired singer at a wedding party.

The last chance to get stained with blood
I let go by.
Ever more often I answer ancient calls
And watch the mountains turn green.

The doctor was moved, manifestly. He usually peeked at his ensnared audience. The nurses tended to be considerate in their reactions. The doctor had them by the wrist. He was also the consulting psychiatrist for Sarajevo's soccer team, and sometimes doled out tickets.

“Those lines are beautiful, are they not? Images mix over centuries. I like to think that I am perhaps the third-best living poet in our language. And I cannot remember the names of the other two!”

The woman he had detained for his recitation would be stuck for an accolade commensurate with Karadzic's.

“It reminds me of that song about what a cat sees at night,” said one lab technician. “You know: ‘
Midnight,
dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,
the moon has no memory. . . .
' You know, that Englishman.”

The doctor's eyes bulged at the affront. “Andrew Lloyd Webber writes—
pop tunes,
” he sputtered. “Cheap, flimsy”—he was the poet struggling for just the right words here—“
Coca-Cola-flavored
words cannot be compared to my poetry.”

Most of the hospital's psychiatric staff had become scarce since the start of the war, feeling useless or absurd. Anxiety, paranoia, and doom are not disorders when snipers are trying to shoot you through your bathroom window. How could a psychiatrist tell any Sarajevan that he was suffering from depression? Feeling safe and free from terror—
that
would be a clinical disturbance.

         

IN THE FALL,
the U.N. officials overseeing the siege of the city permitted the hospital to receive a skin-graft machine donated by the Charles Nicolle Medical Center of Normandy. The equipment had been packed into a grave-looking silvered valise, heavy as a casket, that came attached to a fifty-three-year-old emergency surgeon, Dr. Olivier Despres, a lean, graying man with the agreeably long face of a pedigreed hound. He was wearing smart field khakis that bore the wrinkles of previous deployment.

He was delivered to Franko Hospital in a French Foreign Legion armored personnel carrier that smelled of other men's boots, breath, and sweat. The young Foreign Legion captain overseeing his delivery was Cambodian; he was the one legionnaire who spoke French. The two enlisted men who turned the slings of their rifles around onto their backs in order to haul the doctor's bags and boxes into the carrier were Kazakh—Russian army refugees who had signed on to the Legion because it paid its troops. The driver was an Egyptian army sergeant whose head could not be seen in the roost in which he sat, above their shoulders. He had to call down in English over the toes of his shoes.

“Franko Hospital, yes?”

The legionnaires yelled back up the sergeant's muddy pant legs.

“Franko Hospital, yes!” They clanged the butts of their rifles twice against the muddy floor. “Franko! Franko!”

There were six small open slits on the khaki-painted steel walls of the carrier. Dr. Despres steeled himself over the bumps and tried to steady his head against a window to glimpse something of the wreckage that had moved him to come to the city. But the slits were so small—no larger than the space under a door—that the doctor could see nothing. One of the Kazakh soldiers waved his hand as Dr. Despres tried to peer through one of the minute openings.

“No,” the soldier called over. “Dangerous.” He held his hands out, as if holding a rifle, and trained his two index fingers toward the doctor's chin.
“P-eee-owww! P-eee-owww!”
he said, then shut his eyes and slumped forward. “Dead, bye-bye.
P-eee-owww!
” Dr. Despres joined in the laughter, and pulled back from the slit with comic haste, as if the wall were electrified. The carrier bounced up and down over rubble and clutter as the soldiers banged their rifle butts against the floor.

“We all live in a yellow submarine!”
they sang.

Clang!

“A yellow submarine!”

Clang!

“A yellow submarine!”

Clang!

Dr. Despres offered to take down names and phone numbers of loved ones he could call when he returned to France. But the men said they could think of no one who was eager to hear of them.

“I am gone,” said one of the Kazakhs. He laughed joylessly through a three-toothed smile. “Happy here dead.”

         

WHEN DR. DESPRES
reached his destination up on a hill in the north of the city, Franko Hospital doctors expressed gratitude, but also bewilderment.

“We haven't had power for several months,” they said, shaking their heads.

A German army truck drove a generator at the hospital that could power surgical lights, a sterilizer, and a water pump, but not at the same time. The doctors and nurses had learned how to conduct surgeries by lantern light, sluicing away blood and slime by squeezing clumps of soaked paper towels carefully over the wounds as they probed and stitched. The staff squinted at a large block of type on the underside of Dr. Despres's Swiss skin-shearing machine and deduced that it would draw more power than they could deliver.

“You would need at least the lights and the water pump working at the same time,” said Dr. Despres. “This is not a procedure for dim light. Or no water pressure.”

The hospital director was more put out than apologetic. “I know it must seem like we are living in caves,” Alma Ademovic said. “But, honestly, I don't know why the U.N. sent you here. Our limitations cannot surprise them. Of all people,” she added almost into her chin.

Dr. Despres tried to reply lightly. “Oh, that alphabet soup of U.N. agencies often gets things jumbled,” he said. “I learned that in Somalia and Ethiopia.”

“Well,” the hospital director sniffed, “we are surely better off than
that.
We are
Europeans.
”

The director clipped away quickly. Dr. Despres was standing rather forlornly in the hall when the hospital's chief surgical nurse introduced herself. “We had a message telling us that you were coming, Doctor,” she said in English. “But nothing about preparations for a skin-graft machine. Perhaps we can get in to see the U.N. official who approves our equipment to find about getting another generator. Perhaps
you
can get in to see him.”

Zule Rasulavic was fortyish, with a redhead's sprinkling of freckles over her nose. When Dr. Despres took her right hand and unexpectedly brushed it with his lips, she regretted the blue jeans that she had been left with to wear through the war. No matter how much weight had melted away over the months, she was sure that the jeans thickened the look of her hips.

“I am certainly willing,” said Dr. Despres. “I didn't come here just for the mountain view. It is lovely,” he added quickly, having been alerted to local sensitivities. “But I want to help.”

This brought Alma Ademovic back from halfway down the corridor. “What kind of help do you think we need?” she said. “We are taking care of our patients in a modern, educated way. We are
Europeans,
” she fairly hissed at him. “Do you think we are witch doctors?”

The nurses took Dr. Despres by the shoulders and steered him into one of the hospital's waiting rooms, where they told him that he might want to rest and restore himself after a rough journey. After a few minutes, Dr. Despres closed his eyes in the dim midmorning light strained, like weak tea, through the hospital's soiled windows, and fell asleep in a chair that had only one arm.

         

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON,
Dr. Despres towed a heavy brown box that the legionnaires had delivered with him against a wall just across from Alma Ademovic's open office door. The open door did not signal Miss Ademovic's manner of administration. It was an operational necessity, to allow daylight from her window to filter into the murky hallway.

Dr. Despres approached her door cautiously, and pointedly took up a position just outside. “Excuse me, Miss Ademovic,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask about lunch.”

The hospital director's reply was brisk. “Of course. There are no restaurants to speak of. We will serve you in our kitchen.”

“I was advised to provide for myself.”

“That is ridiculous,” she said. “You are our guest. I am sure that we can find
something.
” In fact, the United Nations administration made certain that the hospital was well provisioned. They did not want any stories arising from Sarajevo that the U.N. had failed to provide food for war victims in their hospital beds. The monotony of rice, beans, saltines, and an occasional frozen cutlet was more of a problem than scarcity. But Alma Ademovic had discovered that giving foreign visitors a few pangs of hunger gratified their guests; it sent them back to the West with a vivid story for after-dinner speeches.

Throughout his years in emergency medicine, Dr. Despres had uncomplainingly consumed rather a lot of relief agency–issue beans and rice. But he had another plan.

“You know we French—we take such pleasure in our own foods,” he said. “So I have brought enough for everyone here, if you will permit.” He stepped back to pat the big brown box and lug it several inches into view. “I brought a few
saucissons,
some of our flavorful dried sausages. Also some lovely cured ham from Bayonne. It has the most amazing velvet feel as you carve it away from the bone. We are very proud of our patés in Normandy. I have some tins of very nice duck and goose patés. The goose liver is studded with pistachios. I have also added some small rounds of toasts and a jar of cornichons. I thought a good, tangy Gruyère would compliment all. I have included a couple of pounds of ground coffee—I haven't seen the hospital yet that isn't fueled by coffee—and some Côte d'Or chocolate. I also thought that some of our tasty crisp Brittany butter cookies might be welcome, although,” he added, “I left several with the Norwegian soldiers at the airport who examined my equipment. I thought it might make them more amenable about weight restrictions.”