Pretty Birds (26 page)

         

THE HOME MINISTER
had several small plastic bottles of drinking water on the edge of his desk, and he handed one to Tedic. They unscrewed the caps and touched the bottles together for a squashy plastic toast.

“To Dr. Despres,” intoned the minister. “A good man. God bless him. And please, God, send no more like him.” The men clapped their bottles together with vehemence and brittle little laughs.

“Yes,” said Tedic. “We don't need Dr. Schweitzers. We need howitzers.”

         

DR. DESPRES'S REMAINS
were respectfully repackaged and conveyed to his home in Normandy. The doctor had not been an observant Catholic. He had seen too much mindless, unmerited suffering in the world to believe in a moral puppet master. But his family, friends, and colleagues prepared a huge and affecting memorial for him in the church of the Place du Vieux Marché, where a bishop declared that as Joan had once sacrificed her life for France and God, so Dr. Despres had given his life to uphold France's good name and God's work.

Alma Ademovic could not send a card or make a phone call. But she arranged with the Home Minister to include her name in an official message of condolence approved by the Bosnian cabinet. After she had heard a brief reference to the doctor's funeral on the BBC, she found Zule Rasulavic in the hospital's hallway and motioned to the brown box of delicacies that the doctor had brought along just days earlier.

“Tidbits and luxuries,” she told the nurse. “Cheese, coffee, cookies. Give a bit to everyone, patients and staff, as far as it will go. And remind them,” she called back as she turned to walk to her office, “that it came from Dr. Despres.”

25.

OVER THE NEXT
few weeks, three more people were shot to death in places that had been assumed to be inaccessible to snipers.

A man was found early one morning, splayed out beside the parking spots in the enclosed courtyard of the Presidency Building on Marshal Tito Boulevard. He lay face down over a scattering of crushed plastic water bottles, a single 7.62 X 39-millimeter bullet lodged in his right shoulder blade, no identification in his pockets, and a face that no one professed to recognize.

“A drifter, a squatter, a pain in the ass,” said Tedic. “But dead he is a marker for dangerous territory.”

A Bosnian captain at the scene who had once competed in the biathlon with Coach Dino Cosovic found the shot that felled the man highly improbable. “Not unless they have a balloon they can use to hover above us,” he said, pointing to the severe downward trajectory of the bullet. The captain told Tedic that the man must have been shot a block away, on an open section of Marshal Tito Boulevard, and had staggered into the courtyard for help; or just to die.

But no one on duty in the basement of the building recalled hearing a cry or shout. Perhaps they were merely loath to reveal that they had not dashed out of their brick citadel to help a wounded man. Tedic found the theory suspect, in any case. There was no trail of blood leading to the man's body. And, as Molly pointed out, no blood had trickled down from the wound, as would have been the case if the man had staggered upright for a block. The man's slacks were inescapably filthy—stretchy, maroon nylon Tito-era trousers—but there were no fresh tears or abrasions along the knees to suggest that he had crawled before collapsing atop the clutter of squashed bottles.

“If he had crawled,” said Molly, “the shooter would have finished him off back in the street.”

“Why waste a bullet on a man who's bleeding to death?” asked Tedic.

“Compassion,” Molly said with grim humor. “They've got bullets enough to be generous.”

Tedic bent over the dead man's body, pinching folds of the shiny maroon fabric in his fingers and stretching it out the way a child might tug on a rubber band. “Imagine,” he said, “meeting your Maker wearing”—and here Tedic pulled on the slacks in comic disdain—“these circus pants. Just a lucky shot?” he asked after a pause.

“Fluky. If we're lucky,” said Molly, “I'd say someone got up somewhere and arced one lonely, lovely round exactly right.”

         

THE VERY NEXT
day, a woman pushing her child in a stroller toward a water line behind the barrier of gutted trucks and buses on Sutjeska Street was shot in the top of the head. She fell forward—Allah be praised, said the Home Minister—onto the stroller and thus protected her two-year-old son.

The citizens standing in line had believed they were sheltered behind the barrier. The woman gasped and blood sputtered out of her mouth while her son screamed. People rolled into gutters and under the bus, a chorus of screams mingling with the scraping and clattering of empty water bottles. The boy shrieked; his mother bled. Voices began to call out from gutters and behind walls.

“We must help her!”

“She's dead!”

“How do you know, Dr. Without Borders?”

“She's not breathing! That's a hint!”

“Her child is screaming!”

“His mother is dead and he's scared. He'll bloody scream for the rest of his life!”

“We should at least lift her body off him.”

“Her body shields her child. She wouldn't want to be moved. It's not worth the risk.”

“Whoever you are, you're a selfish pig!”

“Run out yourself! We'll bury you with your medal for stupidity!”

It was almost ten minutes before a brewery truck bearing Tedic could pull up to the scene and take the dead mother into their load. She was dark-haired and thin-boned, and felt as light as a sack of dry leaves when Tedic took her shoulders and Mel lifted her feet to place her in the truck. Tedic himself picked up the frightened brown-headed boy, his small legs churning, and tucked him into the arms of a policeman. Tedic then made a point of pacing around the splatter of blood surrounding the empty stroller, while people cautiously began to creep out of their burrows along the street.

“Brave and noble Sarajevans,” he intoned. “I hear about you all on the BBC. I must say, you don't look the way you have been described.”

But by the time Tedic reported to the Home Minister in the basement of the Presidency Building, his sarcasm was directed at the deceased. “What is a mother doing with her child out on that kind of street, anyway?” he asked.

“Going for water, like everyone else,” answered the Home Minister. “There were two empty bottles alongside the boy.”

“So!” said Tedic. “If she had left the boy behind, she might have carried back more water.”

“Tedic, it is surely best for the world that you have no children,” the Home Minister said with a weary shake of his head. “Claimed and acknowledged, in any case. Best for you. Certainly best for the children. Anyone with even a few nieces and nephews will tell you that you can't leave a child cooped up all the time, never breathing fresh air.”

But Tedic came back credibly. “I have so many broken windows and mortar holes in my apartment, I gag on the fresh air,” he said.

         

THE HOME MINISTER
licked a finger and tried to smooth one of a score of crinkles on his soiled silver London tie. “What do we have here?” he asked finally. “A series of lucky, improbable, unrelated shots, or a pattern?

“Have you heard the Knight?” asked Tedic.

The Home Minister shook his head.

“His words would encourage the latter view.” Tedic read some lines from a transcript. “Perhaps they are just words,” he said. “Okay. Just yesterday morning our friend begins playing Peter Tosh.
Brothers of scorn in exile for so long, we need majority rule. Early morning dew, fight on,
et cetera.” Tedic's Caribbean accent was unconvincing.

“A favorite of my daughter's,” said the Home Minister gloomily. “Twisted to become a Serb anthem with steel drums.”

Tedic ran his finger over a new paragraph. “Okay. Then he says, ‘You know, Muslims, there's something your government won't tell you. They don't think you deserve the truth. You are dolls in a shooting gallery to them. They force you to dodge bullets and go hungry until they can strike their deals and fly into lush exile in the south of France.' ”

“If we get to choose,” the Home Minister interrupted, “I'd prefer Florida. I find I'm always cold.”

“Winter in San Juan, summer in Gstaad is how I've arranged my fantasy life,” said Tedic. “Our friend goes on. ‘What do you think they're doing,' he asks, ‘when they jet off to conferences in Vienna and London? They don't come back waving peace treaties, do they? No gifts for you. What has your mixed-ethnic assembly of Muslim fanatics, Serb stooges, thick-skulled Croats, and anteater-nosed Jews actually done?' ”

“Well, this thick-skulled fanatic,” observed the Home Minister with an edge, “hasn't been to so much as Zagreb since the start of things.”

“He has a phrase coming up,” said Tedic, scanning the next section. “ ‘They have only gotten your friends and family killed. They have only made you starve and freeze. The Americans have a new grinning possum for president. He wouldn't fight for his own country. What makes you think he will risk any precious, pink-assed American boys for your lives?' ”

“He's got a point there,” said the Home Minister.

“ ‘Here's what your government won't tell you, Muslims.' ” Tedic put the Knight's voice back into his own. “ ‘
We can hit you anywhere.
All those barriers and blind spots? Mere decoration. They are fortifications for fools. Their barricades are as flimsy and worthless as toilet tissue—if you remember toilet tissue. And your leaders know it. Ask around. Every week people are getting shot in what are supposed to be safe zones. The truth?
No place
is safe. We Serbs have a viper here who can thread a bullet into your brain even if you lock yourself inside the basement vault of a bank on Branilaca Sarajeva Street. He is that good. His bite is fatal. He is that poisonous. Where can you turn? How can you breathe? Every step you take—' ”

“It should not be difficult to guess the musical accompaniment,” the Home Minister interjected, signaling that the point had been made.
“Every breath you take?”
The Home Minister's voice rose in a question.
“Every move you make, step you take, I'll be watching you?”

“Sting,” agreed Tedic. “Like the sting of the viper.”

“Let's not get carried away with metaphor,” said the Home Minister. He rose from his seat and began to slap his own arms against the gloom and frostiness of the basement.

26.

AMELA AND IRENA
were able to talk the next week, and the week after that. Zoran would stand next to his cab while the girls went back and forth for ten minutes of conversation. Amela had found the
Q
from January 1992. It had pictures of the
Q
Awards ceremonies at Abbey Road Studios.

“There's a picture of a guy named Lou Reed,” Amela said. “Short and wrinkled.”

“Our parents like him,” said Irena. “Over.”

“Seal likes him. Seal got best newcomer award. He looks
sooo
damn sexy.”

“Tell, tell. Over,” said Irena.

“Purple velvet coat, pure white shirt, unbuttoned, diamond necklace, and black leather pants,” Amela said, describing it. “Big, big diamond buttons on the crotch. Oh-ver.”

“Oh, my,” said Irena. “Over.” She pretended to fan herself with one of her grandmother's old winter gloves.

“An article on the fifty best albums of last year. Over.”

“Who?” asked Irena. “Over.”

“Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg, Nirvana, Ice-T.” Amela's voice clicked out as she used both hands to turn a page.

“Lenny Kravitz?” asked Irena. “Over.”

“For sure. Over.”

“Talk about sexy! Over.”

“Sean Lennon with him. Do you think he would be famous if he was Sean Jezdic? Sting, of course.
The Soul Cages.
Over.”

“Sean grew up quick,” said Irena. “So young when his father got shot. Sting is still sexy. But do you remember a single song from that?”

“Neil Young and Crazy Horse—a live tour album.” Amela's voice clicked out again for a moment. “Oh, God, he is an old fuck. Why does he drive our mothers wild?”

Zoran turned around and signaled to Irena. “Tell your friend that we old fucks like Neil Young,” he said. “There are a lot of old fucks in the world.”

“Oh, God!” Amela suddenly exclaimed. “A story. Strange. Group in Nottingham. Carcass. Heard of them? Over.”

“Never,” Irena said.

“Me neither. Their stuff is
hard-gore
in English. Over.”

“Porno? Over.”

“No,
gore,
” Amela said. “Like a wound, my driver says. They all hide under long hair and wear black. One guy says, ‘No one likes to talk about it, but rotting is a pretty exciting process.' Over.”

“Oooh,”
Irena sneered. “It is not. Over.”

“Want to hear their big song?” asked Amela. “Over.”

“Sure. Over.”

“ ‘Vomited Anal Track.' Over.”

Irena laughed until she began to cough up old cigarette smoke. By the time she had fumbled the microphone back into her hand, Amela's laughing voice had sputtered back on.

“Listen. I'm thinking,” she said. “Keep this secret. Can you trust your driver? Over.”

“For a carton of cigarettes, sure.” Irena glanced over at Zoran and grinned as she used to grin at players she bumped. “I get paid cigarettes,” she added.

“There's a spot at the airport,” said Amela. “People can wave at each other. Over.”

“Of course. I've heard. French soldiers out there. Over.”

“Our boys, too. So what if we both showed up sometime?” Amela said. “Over.”

“At the airport? Over. To wave? Over.”

“To wave,” said Amela. “I'd like to show you something, too. Over.”

Irena peered at Zoran's face as if he held some answer. She could think of only one thing. “Of course,” she said. “We can figure that out. To see you? It's over a hundred yards. Over.”

“I guess. Over.”

“And you've got to be careful. Everyone has a gun out there. Over.”

“We will.”

“To see each other? Amazing! Over,” said Irena.

Both girls had variable schedules. They could be called in to work for the day or the night. But, as it happened, both could usually figure on being free at six at night, when there should be enough light to get to the airport, and enough to see each other wave. Irena said that the falling darkness would actually help mask their routes to get safely back to their cabs and apartments.

“You are so clever!” Amela enthused. “You should be a general, not a clerk. Over.”

“I'm not cut out for brewery work,” said Irena. “That's for sure. Seeing you! Amazing. Over.” They agreed on a date two weeks from then.

         

IRENA FIGURED THAT
the price of a carton ought to include a brief stop before she was delivered back home, and prevailed upon Zoran to stop first at the central synagogue. There was a room in the basement where old clothes were stored. Clothes were given out freely to anyone who could offer a convincing case for need, but you had to make the case. Synagogues in New York, Paris, and London had collected bales of discarded tweeds, socks, and boots. But the Serb siege stymied delivery. The thin stocks there now were mostly the unintended bequest of dead people. The synagogue sent people in to receive their donation before squatters and scavengers—who, to be sure, also needed clothes—could help themselves.

Irena found an elderly man with an unexpectedly powerful torso sitting on a folding chair, reading a yellowed copy of the
Guardian.
More James Joyce letters had been released in Dublin, but not, Irena gathered from the headline, all that had been promised. Seven-year-olds were being tested in Leeds; their parents were upset. The West, thought Irena, where people fight over a writer's old notes and seven-year-olds don't get tested by gunfire.

“Excuse me,” she said.

The man looked up, but barely.

“I have a friend,” she said. “He is embarrassed. He needs clothes. He is cold.”

The elderly man seemed to welcome the diversion, even as he discouraged expectation. “I just can't give clothes out,” he said, rising from his chair. “We have to make sure people really need them. We don't want to give out clothes and see them sold on the black market.”

Where they might be exchanged for food, thought Irena, but kept the observation to herself.

“He really needs them. He has just one set of everything, and it's falling apart.”

“Who is your friend?” the man asked skeptically. Irena could see that it was not only his broad arms that had gotten him assigned to the storeroom.

“No one special. I mean, quite special, but no relation. He lives in our building.”

“Got a name?”

“He is too embarrassed, I told you.”

“Why doesn't he have clothes?”

“He was—we all were—driven out of Grbavica with nothing.”

“That's what everyone says,” the man said.

“I'm telling the truth,” said Irena. “I am Irena Zaric. Number Three High School.”

The man grunted and brought his thick arms closer to his sides.

“The basketball player.” It was a declaration, and Irena returned it simply.

“The same.”

“Your friend,” he continued. “Perhaps there are other forms of assistance he could use. He is eating?”

“Fairly well, yes. We help out.”

“We serve lunch here for elderly people.”

“He is not that elderly.”

“No one asks for birth certificates,” said the man.

“He is embarrassed, I keep telling you.”

“What does he eat?” Irena was taken by surprise. It was a case she had not expected to make.

“What we eat. Beans, rice, canned stuff. Grass and leaves, when it was warmer. Powdered cheese and milk. Olives. Whatever. “

“Has he ever gone on the black market? You can get clothes for olives.”

“He doesn't get out. He is embarrassed, I keep saying.”

“You've given him what you can? I think it's a Talmudic saying. We should do all we can to help others before we ask others to help.”

“It sounds like the Koran, too,” said Irena. “We have given him socks and stuff. But—we took over our grandmother's place. She didn't keep men's clothes.”

“Your grandmother—Gita Zaric?”

“Of course.”

“I haven't seen her,” said the man.

“She is
dead,
” Irena said, and sensed that the game had suddenly turned in her favor.

“I'm sorry,” the man said after a pause. “I hadn't heard. There are too many to keep track. This man. How tall?”

“A little taller than me. We can't stand up much in our building.”

“How old?”

“Forties, I guess. Like what's-his-name—Brian Wilson. But not as fat.”

“Hoo,” said the man. Irena thought she could detect a stifled smile. “We have nothing that big. No one here is that big anymore. Your father—can't he help him out?”

“My father—I explained, all of us—left with just the clothes on his back.”

“Why didn't he pack a case?”

“We did. All of us. We were robbed, too.”

“That's easy to say.”

“Because it's true.”

“Kids will do anything these days to get money for beer, smokes, rubbers, drugs. If I give you clothes, and you sell them, understand: you can only fuck me over once. Does your father know you're here?”

Irena tried to fight back tears, then realized that she didn't have the strength. The man became fuzzy, and when she finally spoke she had to bite off the words between sobs and sniffles.

“You nasty old son of a bitch!” she yelled. “The clothes are
for
my father! My father is digging
shit holes!
He's wearing shreds, and
they're
falling apart! I see him shivering in the middle of the day, like an embarrassed little boy who has wet his pants. He sleeps all the time, because he's bored! And cold. His mother is dead. My brother is—God knows where by now—wrestling with Serbs in some bloody forest. I'm only trying to get my father a warm shirt and a pair of pants with no holes. And
you
—you, you mean, dumb, overbearing
bully
—guard this pile of old rags like they were the crown jewels!”

Without another word, the old man turned into the storeroom and came back with a heavy dark blue cotton shirt, thick gray cotton pants, and a pair of gray socks. He placed the clothes on his chair and shuffled slowly back into a closet. When he returned, he had a ribbed coffee-colored woolen sweater in his arms, topped by a dark blue ski mask.

“The mask,” he said quietly, “may help your father when he digs. The sweater is a little worn, but fine.” He pressed his thumbs down into the ribs of the fabric. “Thick. Feel it. Warm. Burberrys', a good name. It belonged to Mr. Levi. He got it on a visit to New Jersey,” the man explained as he presented the pile to Irena, but turned away from her. “May your father wear it in good health.”

He sent Irena off with the old
Guardian
he had been reading, and a
Jerusalem Post
besides. He told her to come to back if she needed anything,
anything
else.

         

IT GOT SO
cold that the Zarics rarely went anywhere in the apartment but the living room and the bathroom. Mrs. Zaric moved their cookstove under the window, but burned it only at a low temperature. Smoke could draw sniper fire. When Irena returned home, she put the clothes and newspapers into her grandmother's old bedroom, where she sometimes retreated for a few minutes of privacy. Her parents understood; indeed, they welcomed an hour or two to themselves. Irena quietly tucked the shirt, slacks, socks, and ski mask into a drawer and held the sweater under her arm when she rejoined her parents in the living room.

“I found this at the brewery,” she announced to her father. “No one minded—they all said I could bring it home for you.”

Mr. Zaric rubbed his thumbs over and under the thick shawl collar.

“It's a very good garment,” he declared. “Maybe twenty years old. Designed in Britain, made in Hong Kong—the best of both worlds. Are you sure Dr. Tedic said it was all right?”

“He said he wouldn't even know it was gone.”

“How did it get there?” Mr. Zaric asked.

“No one seemed to know,” said Irena. “Things get left. People don't know where else to bring them. Everyone supposes that whoever owned the sweater is dead. So you may as well wear it. Something so warm shouldn't be wasted.”

Mr. Zaric thanked his daughter, and asked her to thank Dr. Tedic. He kept the sweater on his lap as he listened to an afternoon newscast from London and drifted off to sleep in a small pool of winter sunlight.

         

IRENA WENT TO
work early the next morning. She rolled the man's shirt and trousers under her coat and slipped the ski mask into a pocket. She kept the
Guardian
and the
Jerusalem Post,
crumpling and yellowed, under her arm.

She rolled all of her new acquisitions into the sleeves and legs of Dragan's smock as she donned it in the back of the brewery truck. She folded the
Guardian
in half and tucked it into the belt of the smock. Allah be praised, she thought to herself, that Dragan liked his pita and strudel. She slipped the pages of the
Post
behind her, so that it fell over the small of her back.

There were two tall blue modern buildings in Marindvor, just over the river, known as Momo and Uzeir, after two characters in a continuing series of Bosnian jokes. (Momo breaks wind while he's standing in front of Uzeir in a water line. “Pardon the fart,” says Momo. “That's all right,” answers Uzeir. “Where did you get the beans?”) The buildings were referred to as skyscrapers. Indeed, Sarajevans sometimes called them the Twin Towers, although they were a fifth as tall as the towers of New York's World Trade Center. Momo and Uzeir—no one knew which was which, who was Serb and who was Muslim—had been headquarters for an energy company.

The buildings were rigged with sprinklers that were thought to be as sophisticated and effective as any in, say, Toronto. But when they were bombed during the first days of the Serb assault, their water reserves had already been tapped by thirsty citizens. The fires had raged up and down unchecked. The flames burned away all papers, carbon copies, telephone messages, blueprints, schematics, family photos, memorandums, lamp shades, paper plates, manila folders, orange envelopes, and
cevapcici
wrappers. The blaze melted telephones into puddles of ooze, and linoleum-topped steel desks and foam-rubber chairs into scorched skeletons. The heat baked the stain-free nylon carpeting down to a squirrel-gray powder that stank of cold ashes and charred plastic.