When you get right down to it, the realities of war – even a righteous one – are difficult for the uninitiated to grasp. So much more so is that particular brand of civil war called ethnic cleansing, an unimaginable reality in which memories of injustice, perhaps long past, take precedence over more immediate human connections.
The attempted, systematic extermination of a race didn’t begin and end with the Holocaust. Darfur and Rwanda may be the most recent cases, but they were preceded by Sarajevo. Shots were fired during peace demonstrations in April 1992, and by the first days of May, Bosnian Serbs had established a blockade that became known as the longest siege in modern warfare.
Journalist Scott Simon, perhaps best known as the host of National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” program, has turned experience gained in covering the siege of Sarajevo into a powerful first novel, “Pretty Birds.” Simon doesn’t attempt to address the nearly inexplicable roots of a conflict in which an estimated 12,000 people were killed and an additional 50,000 wounded. Instead, he tells a personal story of a young woman whose Muslim family is evicted from its apartment and must cope with suddenly and extremely changed circumstances.
Adaptation is the key to survival for any species, and nowhere was this more true than for Muslims blockaded by Serbs in Sarajevo. Irena Zaric, a high school basketball star, was getting ready for the sectional championships on the weekend that Serbs opened fire on peace marchers. Soon, thugs dressed in black were taking advantage of the chaos to eliminate Muslims from their Grbavica neighborhood. The Zaric family – parents, daughter and Pretty Bird, a pet parrot – crossed the river to seek refuge in the apartment of Irena’s grandmother.
The family finds Irena’s grandmother shot dead on the stairs outside her apartment. Burying her in an unmarked grave that evening is only the first, and as it turns out, a rather a minor sign of just how much things are about to change. Death comes casually and without warning, from snipers bullets while waiting in line for water or mortar rounds blasting through apartment walls in the middle of the night.
Random violence is simply the most immediate threat faced by those who have become refugees in their own homeland. Delivery of water and electricity is sporadic. Communication with the outside world has been cut off. There is little food but for what is brought in by United Nations peacekeepers, whose presence should offer some protection but who in actuality are nothing more than witnesses to the warfare.
Miroslav Tedic, a one-time high school assistant principal, invites Irena to take a stand. In war he has found a new occupation with the Sarajevo Brewery, an operation that has more to do with munitions than with beer. He has seen Irena play basketball; she has the endurance, coordination and reflexes of a sniper.
Irena accepts the role with few questions and grows into it with pride. A good night is one in which she sees the blood mist that indicates a target has been hit. Thoughts that she might be shooting at people who once were her friends, philosophical questions of broad humanity, don’t arise.
Simon hasn’t written a novel of war so much as one of survival. His story is compelling, in no small part because he captures the social as well as the logistical details of life under bombardment. He doesn’t attempt to justify or excuse one teen’s decision to become a sniper, but allows it to stand in stark contrast to Irena’s continued appetite for fashion and pop-culture magazines. He uses the siege as the fait accompli that sets a new life in motion.
His characters and their changed lives are viewed, not through the glare of a spotlight but rather through the subtle details revealed in a sideways glance. He doesn’t directly address the gnawing hunger that is a constant companion, but instead writes of Irena’s having to release her pet, Pretty Bird, because it is no longer possible to find him food. He doesn’t talk about flames arising from bombed buildings, but of survivors squatting in the ashes. It is seeing these relatively minor details that reveals the horror of the larger ones.
“Pretty Birds” is a finely crafted, disturbing novel. The title refers not to the released parrot but to the young women recruited, on both sides of the conflict, to be snipers. It is one more terrible facet to an unimaginable conflict, and a price that should not be allowed to carelessly slip into obscurity. This is intense reading, not necessarily entertaining, but a combination of writing and story that puts the reader in an uncomfortable and ultimately unforgettable skin.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for the Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Pretty Birds
By Scott Simon
Random House, 351 pages, $24.95
