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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Pretty
Birds by Scott Simon |
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Rating:
••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Divided Scott Simon’s debut novel, Pretty
Birds, reveals the sorrow of the siege of As Coach Dino left, he
drew a red basketball jersey from the front pocket of his gym jacket and laid
it across Irena’s bedstead. “Guard this while I’m gone,” he said. “Sleep in
it. Keep it in your bed. That’s the place”—he ducked his chin toward
her—”where I want to be.” In fact, Irena and Coach
Dino had never been to bed. Their couplings were staged in stairwells,
equipment closets, and—most challengingly—in a crawl space between the
gymnasium bleachers and a wall of the women’s shower room. The verticality of
their sex was a joke between them. Fucking on her feet, he counseled, was
good for her quadriceps. “You can run fifty laps around the gym,” he would
say, raising his eyebrows like exclamation points. “Or—” “Anything,” Irena would
say, “to avoid running laps.” It wasn’t until Irena had
opened up the shirt that she saw Irena would never wear the
red jersey to school or practice. But her parents would see it on the bed, in
her closet, under her pillow. No lie would be convincing; accepted, perhaps,
for the sake of peace, but never believed. The red jersey was like an
indiscreet letter left in a drawer. Coach Dino must have known that the
jersey would lead Irena to proclaim her adulthood by flinging his name into
her parents’ astonished faces. He must have known that he wouldn’t be coming
back to Mr.
Zaric cleared his throat,
smoothed his hair, and told his small family that he had to declare what he
had been thinking. It was shortly after eight o’clock on a Sunday, and coffee
was dripping down into the electric glass pot. Pretty Bird made bubbling,
popping, and sizzling sounds as the coffee crackled against the hot plate.
Mrs. Zaric sat next to the bird, at the far corner of the kitchen table, her
eyes shining and rimmed in pink. “I’ve been thinking,” he
began. “All night, really. Your brother even mentioned this a few days ago.
When our phone was working.” Irena’s brother, Tomaslav, was traveling with
friends in “I am thinking that it is
not good to leave her alone. Under the circumstances. Especially at night.” Irena was baffled. Her
grandmother lived about ten blocks away. Visits to her flat were casual and
unceremonious. “Shouldn’t Grandma come here?” she asked. “Our place is
larger. She likes Pretty Bird, too.” Mrs. Zaric’s eyes began to
brim with water once again. Irena’s father clenched
his right hand tightly on his daughter’s forearm, then
loosened his grasp as he felt her shrink back. “The idea is for us to stay
with Grandma,” he said. He let the idea stare at his daughter for a moment.
“If we stay here—I don’t know. Mr. Kemal downstairs—their car was burned. He
said the phone rang, and someone said, ‘Your wife and son and dog are in the
trunk.’ They weren’t, thank God. But now they’ve all left for Vitez. There’s
something spray-painted on a side of your basketball court now—” “Kids,” said Irena. “—about ‘This is Serb
country.’ “Kids, kids, kids,” Irena
insisted. “Kids and their crayons.” “I don’t recognize this
planet,” Mr. Zaric said
with slow ferocity. “I can’t walk across the bridge to get the tram, because
thugs in black sweaters want to see my identity card. They warn me that I’m
living in ‘stolen Serb territory.’ I should say, ‘Listen, you goons, we are
both living in “Jerks shooting guns into
the sky,” said Irena. “Coach said that last night. They don’t want to hurt
anyone. They’re worried about being outnumbered.” “Well, they are changing
the numbers,” said Mr. Zaric evenly. “Sending Muslims and Croats packing
from Vukovar, Nadin, and Skabrinj, with only what they could carry on their
shoulders. Bombing those beautiful old stones of Mrs. Zaric stirred now,
and rose as if to protest. Mr. Zaric raised his voice
to stop her. “She has to hear this!” he shouted. “In Bijeljina, a Serb leader
named Arkan set fleeing Muslims on fire. They treat him like Napoleon.” “For fucking Christ’s
sake, Daddy!” Irena exploded in fear and fury. “Who is
they? We are half Serb! At least, I am!” “Half isn’t half enough
for them,” her father bellowed back. “Yes, them. Or too much. Don’t
you see? They want ‘purity.’ My father was a Serb married to a Jew. I married
a Muslim whose mother was a Croat. Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew—what does that
make you and your brother? We have no name. And now we have no place.” “Those weren’t our Serbs,”
Irena insisted. “They’re peasants. The kind of people who squat in fields,
for fuck’s sake.” “And those weren’t our Muslims
in Vukovar or Bijeljina?” asked Mrs. Zaric softly. She had tried to shrink
into the wall behind her husband and daughter, keeping pointedly unaligned.
“Just country people in black dresses and rag scarves—not city folks like us?
Maybe we should see Grandma today, anyway. Have her tell you about when the
Nazis came here, and dragged away the Jews and the Gypsies. Has your life
been so kind,” she asked her daughter, “that you thought Nazis were only in
the movies? Like Godzilla and the Terminator?” At some point, as Mrs.
Zaric spoke, they had all sat back down in individual surrender. Irena’s
chair thumped, and Pretty Bird began to whir again
like Mrs. Zaric’s mixer. They all fought a smile, then
gave in. Mrs. Zaric went on in her
softest voice. “We ‘ye seen the bonfires in the streets. Someone threw a bomb
into the synagogue. Somebody threw a match into the library. Someone set a
fire in the post office, and snipers shot at the firemen. You run out of
accidents. This is how it starts.” “How will we be safer just
a few blocks away?” asked Irena. She began to cry into her mother’s shoulder
as her father hovered, speaking gently. “Safer across the river.
We’ll each pack a bag. A week’s worth of clothes. No, three days—Grandma has
a washing machine. Let’s bring a little cheese, some coffee, the things Grandma forgets.” Mr. Zaric smiled down at his
daughter. “And, of course, Pretty Bird. I’ll carry his cage. We’ll stay here
today. There’s a march headed from Dobrinja. The streets are crazy. Tomorrow
is a holiday. We’ll lock up and leave, like we’re going to the mountains.” Irena fixed a hopeful look
on her father. “And if it’s quiet tonight?” “I’ll go anyway, to check
on Grandma, if the phones are still out. If it’s calm outside, I’ll come
right back.” “Maybe we won’t have to
go?” Mr. Zaric hesitated.
“Maybe. Maybe. But get packed. Start now. If something breaks out at
that march, we might leave earlier.” Irena wiped her eyes and
stood up. “This is fucking insane,” she said. “Yes,” said her father. He
spoke gently, and laid a palm against his daughter’s cheek. “It sure fucking
is.” Pretty Bird made a boiling
noise, like the rumble of Mrs. Zaric’s electric kettle. “Get packed,” Mr. Zaric
reminded Irena from the hallway. “No more scenes. I don’t want to give
another history lesson to someone who’s so young she thinks Yuri Gagarin was
one of the Beatles before Ringo.” “That was Pete Best, you
clod. You clod, dear,” Mrs. Zaric called out from the kitchen. “You taught me that,” said
Irena. “Who in the hell is Yuri Gagarin?” Irena
zipped open the shiny
black nylon Adidas bag she had gotten when the team went to her favorite black cotton shell with the
lacy neck, a short Esprit denim dress, her gray West German army jacket, and
the red-and-black Air Irena had Q magazine from June 1991, with Madonna
on the cover in a snug white swimsuit, saying, “Everyone thinks I’m a
nymphomaniac, but I’d rather read a book.” (Mr. Zaric had brought that one
home from the news kiosk, saying to his daughter, “If she can read a book, so
can you.”) She chose The Face from July ‘91, with Johnny Depp on the
cover. Inside, Irena recalled, he insisted that he and Winona did the dishes
together, at least once. She found another Face from May ‘91 with a
sensational shot of Wendy James on the cover: she had strung strands of white
beads around her breasts and nipples, turning them into Christmas trees. She
selected a Sky from August ‘91. Vanessa Paradis was on the cover, but
Irena had saved it for the interview with Madonna (“Her Again!” it squealed
on the front) and a feature on teenage sex kittens through movie history,
including old pictures of Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, Milla Jovovich, and
really old shots of Brigitte Bardot that Irena had been meaning to show to
her grandmother. She thumbed through the article briefly before packing the
magazine away, and thought she rather resembled the shot of Nastassja Kinski
wearing a man’s shirt. It reminded her to pack her Michael Jordan jersey, but
to squeeze it below the magazines, into a corner. Irena placed a copy of The
Little Prince on top of the magazines (that, at least, was a book she had
read and enjoyed), and a copy of SportNews from “Done,” she called out,
and Pretty Bird began to trill like an unanswered telephone. 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 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 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 Pretty
Birds is an emotionally taut, gripping story, well-told for a first
novel. Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2005 |
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ă 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Pretty
Birds.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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