27.

A COUPLE OF weeks later, when Zoran drove Irena out to the airport next to Dobrinja, the snows had hardened and the ice had turned a grimy gray. Zoran parked behind a block of bombed-out apartment buildings and stayed in his cab. Irena walked over the cold courtyards toward a row of hedges that Bosnian smugglers had claimed as a bastion. The Bosnian Army didn’t try to displace them. A barrier of hardened professional criminals, ready to die for their plunder, was more dismaying to Serb marauders than Bosnia’s army of conscripted clerks and nearsighted students.

A cluster of men in glossy leather jackets stood smoking behind one hedge. They carried their rifles over their shoulders as casually as if they were knapsacks. Irena almost stopped to admonish them: “Don’t hold your gun that way if you’re serious. You won’t be able to find it to point it.” But she understood—the roughnecks weren’t interested in aiming their rifles.

A man in a smart fur cap snarled at her, “Whore, what are you doing here?”

Irena answered in an even tone. “Meeting a friend.”

“Good. We can all use friends. Is your friend as pretty as you?”

“Prettier,” Irena answered, with a willing smile.

“Good. We should all have a party.” The man wiped the back of his hand against a three-day stubble.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“You don’t understand,” he said more harshly.

“My friend,” said Irena. “She is not just a friend. We are special friends. We are in love.”

The man’s gang snickered behind him and stamped their feet as they flicked ashes from their cigarettes.

“That’s disgusting,” he said. “That is sick.” Irena contrived to look earnest.

“Allah made us so,” she said.

“Allah has nothing to do with it,” said the man. “Allah disapproves. American movies, American music, Sinéad O’Connor, and Elton John have turned you into a bull dyke.”

“Then I’ll pray for Allah to save me.” Irena pressed on around the man and knelt down near the edge of one of the farther hedges to look across the landing strip.

“Allah is far away,” he called after her. “I am here and now!” But he stayed on his side of the thicket.

         

U.N. SOLDIERS PATROLLED the airport. They were Frenchies during most shifts, spelled by Ukrainians and occasional Egyptians, posted to prevent Sarajevans from braving a salvo of Serb bullets to flee a hundred yards across the runway into unbesieged Bosnian territory. The Serbs said the Muslims could slip out from there to take up arms against Serbs. The Bosnians said that anyone who was rash enough to run through gunfire was probably more desperate to eat than to fight, but they had to accept the prohibition. (And, in any case, no one wanted to open a channel for evacuation that could empty the city and drop it, like a deflated football, into Serb hands.)

Smugglers and people wild or desperate enough to try looked forward to Ukrainians or Egyptians relieving the French. A wad of deutsche marks, a plastic flask of Dewar’s, or a carton of Camels could induce a Ukrainian or Egyptian soldier to turn his back. Apprehending brave, desperate people gave the best of them no satisfaction anyway. Some Bosnian gangs had successfully bought off Serb units—bribed them to shoot their guns into the sky while gangsters ran across the runway with sacks of cocaine strapped to their waists and saddles of lamb across their backs. But the French didn’t lack for money, meat, cigarettes, or alcohol; they were therefore depressingly incorruptible.

As the light flattened into a gold stream that flowed across the landing strip, Irena glimpsed the shoulder patches on three blue-helmeted soldiers: the blue, white, and red of France.

         

SHE SAW AMELA waving from under a tree that was just above the Serb side of the runway. Blond hair bouncing against her shoulders, still long, slightly curly, like corn silk at the ends, and a fine-boned hand waving at the end of a slender wrist. She wore a dark green coat. She was smiling. Her mouth was open. Irena caught a glimpse of white teeth, a pink flash of tongue, as if Amela were calling to her. Irena called back. “Hello! Hello!” Amela was holding a satchel in her left hand, her ball-handling hand. Perhaps she had been shopping. Irena imagined apples, oranges, walnuts, and bananas. “Hello! Hello!” she called.

Her words seemed to fall halfway across the field before her voice was swallowed by a larger sound. An aircraft had just landed on the western end of the runway, a dark gray-green transport, probably the last flight in the last light of the day. The whine of its engines overwhelmed Irena. It rolled slowly in between the two sides of the runway—snub nose, vast belly, beady windows, obese, dawdling wheels, and finally the stout tail with the yellow, red, and black patch of the German Air Force.

Craning around a wheel, Irena saw Amela galloping across the runway. Her blond curls, which she always wore pinned up in a game, flounced like a horse’s mane with each stride. With no Frenchie to stop her on the Serb side of the field—why would any Serb risk a bullet to escape into beleaguered Sarajevo?—Amela was drawing near to the plane’s rear wheels. Irena leaped into her own run. She had taken three, four strides when she saw that Amela’s satchel had a mesh screen. A gray bird with a black beak and a sweet red feather-fluff of a tail was inside.

         

THE GIRLS RAN into each other’s arms under the back end of the aircraft. They swung each other around in a dance step, locking arms, skipping, giggling, laughing, and crying too much to draw enough breath to speak. A Blue Helmet surprised them. He had the stock of his rifle against his chin, and was shouting in English into the scream of the engines.

“Get down!” he yelled.

They did.

“Go back!” he added. “Don’t make me shoot!”

“We are friends!” yelled Amela.

“I’m not your friend,” the soldier shouted. “My orders—keep people away.”

Amela was on her knees, right hand stretched out to hold her up in the blast blowing back over their shoulders, left hand still locked onto the handle of Pretty Bird’s case. Irena rolled over onto her stomach to see his pearly crown and black pebbly eyes, set in yellow, blinking back.

“This bird belongs to my friend,” Amela shouted. “I must give him to her.”

The soldier hesitated. He could embarrass himself trying to round up two teenage girls who were determined to outrun him. He could shoot them, of course. His standing orders were to open fire on anyone who refused to stop and return. But shoot two young girls for laughing and dancing in tearful reunion over a parrot? That could put his service photo into Paris Match. It could get him permanently posted to Chad.

“Give her the bird,” he ordered. “Then both run back.”

The German plane had pulled farther away, and the whimper of its engines trailed off. Amela pleaded from her knees. “S’il vous plaît, mon capitaine. Let us talk.”

“This is not a café,” said the soldier.

“It’s been almost a year,” said Irena. “We are sisters.”

“Merde,” he replied. “Merde.”

“We are like sisters.”

Irena heard the field boots of two more Blue Helmets stamping across the tarmac. But she didn’t break away from the Frenchman’s gaze. He looked from girl to girl, then held up his right arm to wave the other soldiers away. Cradling his rifle in the crook of his other arm, he flashed two fingers—pointedly, thought Irena—across the trigger guard.

“Two minutes. Two minutes. Then, run.”

         

IRENA AND AMELA stayed on their knees, their fingers plaited together.

“We’ve packed his cage with seed,” said Amela. “Enough for four months. This will all be over by then. If not, we’ll get more.”

“I can’t—I can’t think of the words to thank you,” said Irena, squeezing Amela’s hand until her fingertips were reddened like rows of candles.

“Don’t. It will waste our two minutes. Pretty Bird has missed you.”

“There’s been a hollow space on my shoulder,” said Irena. “That’s for sure.”

Amela took back a hand to draw two magazines from her right pocket. She had the April 1992 VOX, with Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner sharing the cover in separate squares.

“Look at these,” said Amela. “Bruce is back. Tina says she never wants to be young again.”

“Me too,” said Irena.

Amela tapped a British Vogue—from just last August. Geena Davis was on the cover in something black, lacy, and flimsy.

“Oooh, she is so long and beautiful,” said Irena.

“It is a wonderful magazine,” said Amela. “Tom and Nicole’s new movie. A study says smoking gives you cancer but keeps you from losing your mind. There’s a picture story on women shooters.”

Irena hesitated, hoping to appear confused.

“Women photographers,” Amela went on, unconcerned. “Fashion, war. They can do anything as well as any man. Better.”

“They sure can. We can.”

“Nermina,” said Amela, shaking her head. “I can’t get over it.”

“Me neither.”

“It’s too much,” she said. “Too many people. It is good to see you. Your brother?”

“We don’t know,” said Irena. “He went to London, he went to Chicago.”

“Chicago!” Amela practically sang. “Michael Jordan and Toni Kukoc!”

“Tomaslav said he would tie up Toni for me,” said Irena.

“I want Scottie Pippen.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell Toni to tell Scottie.”

The girls laughed, and rubbed their hands over each other’s shoulders as they talked.

“Have you seen Jagoda?” asked Irena.

“No. I don’t know what side of the city she’s on.”

“Coach Dino?”

“No. You hear of him,” Amela explained. “He’s a champion shooter.”

“He’s the best,” Irena said with unconvincing disinterest. Then she slumped back to the ground and squeezed her eyes shut. When she spoke, her words came in little rushes of breath. “There’s something. I haven’t been able to tell anyone. Coach Dino. We had—something.”

Irena heard Amela exclaim something in a small voice before she had the nerve to open her eyes.

“Oh, God,” Amela repeated.

“It doesn’t seem shocking now. So much else has happened.”

“I mean, I’m down on my knees, I want to take you there.”

Irena used up two seconds of their two minutes just looking into Amela’s mild and amused blue eyes.

“Coach was screwing you?” Amela asked.

“Yes.” Irena felt Amela’s hands reach back for her own and wind even deeper around her fingers.

“Me, too,” said Amela. The German plane had rolled to a stop and cut its engines to a low whistle.

All Irena could say was, “The Magic Johnson jersey?”

“He gave it to me.”

“He gave me a Michael Jordan.”

The girls laughed and rocked back and forth on their knees in each other’s arms on the cold field as the French soldier looked on from a distance.

“Do you remember Anica?” asked Amela.

“The center from Veterans. Dark hair, blue eyes. Snow White.”

“Snow White.” Amela snickered. “She’s in the army, too. Not long ago, I saw her at a fruit stand. She was wearing a Patrick Ewing jersey.”

“I guess Coach Dino is doing okay,” said Irena.

The soldier had clomped back above them. His rifle was slung down, but he waved two fingers into their faces. “Two minutes gone,” he said. “Get going. Get out.”

         

AMELA TURNED AS she ran back into the Serb woods.

“Tell your brother hello,” she called out. “He’s cute.”

Irena looked around from her own sprint toward the hedges on the Bosnian side of the field. “I didn’t know you’d noticed,” she said.

Amela turned around and gripped her hands to her chest, as if she were launching a last shot from half-court. “Maybe there’s one boy I can screw that you won’t!” she yelled across the runway.

         

THE ZARICS OPENED a can of small German frankfurters in celebration of Pretty Bird’s return. They wiped down his cage with a discarded sock and installed him in the living-room corner near where Irena bedded down. He was quiet through the preparations for dinner—no fizzes or whirrs—but apparently unperturbed at his relocation. Irena abandoned herself to the feeling that Pretty Bird was at ease and happy.

Mrs. Zaric brought Pretty Bird up to her mouth and kissed his black beak. She let him press his pearly crown into her chin. “Pretty Bird,” she cooed with deliberate elegance. “Pret-tee Bird, we are glad to see you.”

Mr. Zaric seemed to be revived by Pretty Bird’s return. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and clipped back the dead skin on his toes. “It is so amazing,” he told Irena. “All that has happened, and he is back with us. So amazing what Amela risked to bring him.”

The account of the reunion that Irena had given her parents had been thoughtfully incomplete.

“When you speak to Amela again,” he said, “as I hope you will—”

“I will.”

“—tell her we are grateful. And that she is so brave,” her father said, putting his hand out so that Pretty Bird could nip it with his beak. “As we are thankful to you.” Irena’s silence—she had absorbed the tactic from Tedic—forced her father to go on. “The way you go back and forth—I know, it’s dangerous. Sweeping mud floors at the brewery so we can have a little more.”

“The drudgery must be killing,” said her mother.

Aleksandra interrupted by holding a Vogue up to the light of Mrs. Zaric’s cooking fire. “There are beautiful models in here who look like frogs because they cover themselves with sludge from seaweed,” she announced.

Irena turned to her with an air of authority. “It draws out the toxins,” she explained.

“Vogue models are so toxic? Look,” she said, nudging Irena.

It was a recruitment ad for the Royal Navy. There were small, full-color murals of thatched beach huts in some unspecified West Indian port, sapphire blue waves lapping the beaches of Rio, and the gull wings of the Opera House against the glitter of Sydney’s skyline.

“Look at this,” Alexandra said again, tracing over the words with the burning end of her cigarette. “ ‘The sport, the social life, the comradeship, the travel.’ I think I’ve figured out why the West won’t help us,” she said. “War is messy. The beaches close. How do we get help when all we can advertise is ‘The snipers. The cold. Getting shot in a place you don’t know or care about.’ Why should we expect anyone in the world to come and save us?”

The small gray franks began to sputter and pop in the pan.