Pretty Birds by Scott Simon Read Free Book Online Page A

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    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.
    Somebody got a brave and absurd idea: surge over the Vrbanja Bridge into Grbavica, and dare the snipers to lay down their guns. Chants rose from the streets. “Stop the war! Peace for Bosnia! Put down your guns!” In their high roosts, the snipers paused for a moment, disbelieving the marchers’ audacity. Two young women, Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic, ran ahead of the rest, cheering, waving, and skipping into a squall of bullets.

4.
    THE ZARICS STARED at the television screen, and kept staring as it blinked and went blank. Pretty Bird gurgled like the bubbling from the kitchen sink. Mr. Zaric crossed over to the telephone, and Irena waited for him to sum up to someone what they had seen and heard. But he slammed the receiver down angrily. “Dead,” he said. “Dead, fucking dead!”
    He opened the closet and reached for a blue windbreaker hanging on a peg. “I’ve got to go find her,” he said. His car keys clanged on the wooden floor.
    Mrs. Zaric stiffened as if she had heard glass being shattered. “We’re going with you,” she announced simply. And as Irena began to lace up her Air Jordans, her mother called out, “We’re bringing our bags. I’ll get Pretty Bird.”
    Cabinet doors squeaked, dresser drawers squealed, feet stamped up and down hallways, and within ten minutes the Zarics had turned the lock on ten years in Grbavica.
    â€œI’ll keep the keys,” said Mrs. Zaric as she bolted the door.
    â€œI have the ones to the car,” her husband said. They stood for a moment to look at each other in the murk and gray of the hallway.
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    IRENA HAD GROWN up seeing pictures of people being expelled from the ghettos of Europe. Many of them looked fat, her grandmother had explained, because they had put as many coats and shirts on their backs as possible. By then they knew they would not be back, although most had not figured—or refused to accept—that they were going to die. Irena remembered pictures she had glimpsed while flipping through newspapers to get to the