Pretty Birds by Scott Simon Read Free Book Online Page B

sports—Salvadorans, Ethiopians, Koreans, carrying only what they could squeeze into a wicker hamper, a paper box, or a length of cloth. Now she was carrying the contents of her life, so incompletely accounted for, in a gym bag. Her father, so careful about his appearance, hadn’t shaved that morning and wore the brown tweed jacket that her mother was always trying to hide. Her mother hadn’t made up her face for the day; her hair had been pulled back from her forehead with a green scarf. She would rather die, Irena imagined her mother saying, than be seen that way outside the apartment. A poor choice of words today.
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    OUT IN THE hallway, the Zarics saw that some of their neighbors had the same idea. Mr. Hadrovic had his hands in the pockets of the worn burgundy sweater he pulled on in any weather to watch television.
    â€œThere are Serbs in black sweaters headed this way,” he reported breathlessly. “With rifles and those long tubes.”
    Mr. Zaric was puzzled. “Bows and arrows?” he asked.
    â€œOh, for Christ’s sake, no,” snapped Mr. Hadrovic. “You know, the things we used to see in World War Two movies.”
    â€œWe’re going to see my mother,” Mr. Zaric told him as they walked to the elevator. “We will see you in a couple of days.” Then he stopped. Mr. Hadrovic, he remembered, was a widower who was alone in his apartment, his son at school in Sweden. “Can we do anything for you before we leave?” he asked. More grave offers seemed to form in each sentence, with the rising din of emergency car alarms and pistol pops outside. “Leave you with food, so you don’t have to go out? Would you like to come with us?”
    â€œOh, good Christ, no,” Mr. Hadrovic said. “There are enough idiots out there already. They will have to come get me right here.”
    Irena had already pressed the button for the elevator, and it was like pressing the knob on a tree trunk. “I don’t even hear the car moving,” she told her father. Her mother had been tapping one of the bare lightbulbs in the hall. “I think maybe the power is off,” she said glumly. “Too many people doing their wash on Sunday afternoon.” Sunlight still swept through the hallway from the slatted windows, but when the Zarics opened the steel door into the stairwell, they stepped into darkness.
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    OUTSIDE, THE HOUSING block looked empty and still. Irena’s friends were not perched on the flower boxes and benches, sneaking smokes and gossiping. No one had gotten up a game on the basketball court. There were a couple of cars in parking spaces—Mr. Rusmir’s saucy new red Volkswagen, and the Aljics’ old blue matchbox Lada—but they seemed abandoned. The Lada listed from a tire that had been blown so far off the wheelbase that the orange iron inner ring scraped against the pavement at a slant. The Volkswagen’s windshield had been shattered, and it looked as if the car’s paint had somehow been smeared across the Lada’s hood. Irena looked to see if the car was still serviceable. She leaned in to open the door and saw that Mr. Aljic’s hair, brains, and a wedge of his head had been spilled above the steering wheel.
    â€œMaybe we should get out of here and down to the basement,” Mr. Zaric said.
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    THERE WAS A small window high on the wall of the basement laundry room that looked out on the parking lot, four swings, and the basketball court. The Zarics and people from several other apartments (the Zarics were embarrassed again to realize how few of their neighbors they knew) sat or knelt along the baseboard of the cinder-block wall, jostling for comfort on a grit of old soap powder and dust.
    Franjo Kasic, a waiter at the Bristol Hotel, and Branko Filipovic, an automotive teacher whom Irena couldn’t