Pretty Birds Read Online Free

on the cover. She’s a redhead with blue eyes now, and says she likes it. Annie Lennox is going to give up her music to help the homeless. They say she’s going to give hope ‘to those who sleep tonight in a home made of cardboard.’ The Troggs—remember how you used to sing ‘Wild Thing’ at us?—made an album with R.E.M. Bruce Springsteen says, ‘It’s a sad man who’s living in his own skin and can’t stand the company.’ Isn’t that an amazing line? Somebody tore out the k. d. lang interview, but there’s still a picture. She has hair like mine. Michael Jackson is crazy about EuroDisney. They have a quiz—twenty-five questions about American southern music. I only knew one. Didn’t Eric Clapton learn guitar from Muddy Waters? But if we can answer the questions and figure out a way to send them in,
Q
will fly the winner and his family to Tennessee and give them six hundred pounds.”
    â€œMuddy Waters or B. B. King,” said Mrs. Zaric from over the first spits from her small fire. “Nadira Sotra says everybody in town is pretending to be Jewish so they can get out of town on the bus the Serbs are letting leave from the synagogue.”
    â€œIt’s about bloody time that somebody got a break for being a Jew,” Mr. Zaric declared.
    â€œWell,
sha-lom
!” said Irena, speaking into the babble of laughter that followed. “Work was”—she drew out the word in English—
“oh-kay.”

2.
    SPRING
    1992
    MOST PEOPLE IN town didn’t have a September 1st or a December 7th in their minds—a day they could say the war began. Sarajevo had a plaque at the spot where, on a June 28th, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had lit the fuse to world war. Grotesque men, strutting in jackboots and gingerbread uniforms, struck up wars. Wars weren’t begun by people who wore soft French jeans and stylish running shoes.
    There were blood wars in the hinterlands—feuds, really, among country people who clung to their father’s work, their grandfather’s lands, and the primitive bigotry of their forebears. But Sarajevans considered themselves refined. They didn’t live in the woods but along a crossroads. People intermingled, intertwined, and intermarried. Few families couldn’t trace at least a drop of all bloodlines into their own. People might be Muslims or Serbs (or even Catholics or Jews) at birth. They became city people by custom. They found more faith in coffeehouses and movie theaters than in churches or mosques. They were obeisant to Billie Holiday, Beckett, and basketball, not ministers or imams. The rest of what had been Yugoslavia might be broken up by blood grudges. But Sarajevans were convinced that they could find sly ways to maneuver around tribalism, as they had around Communism. Sarajevans could be stupid, brutish, and blinkered between the river and the valley. They could be irrational, indolent, and self-indulgent in their cafés; they joked about it themselves. But the sheer, blunt dumbness of war—it didn’t fit. (The plaque marking the shooting of the Archduke extolled the assassination as a blow for Serbian nationalism. But Sarajevans usually strolled past the brass tablet without giving it as much notice as a soft-drink ad.)
    So each Sarajevan had a different date for the start of the war. It began in that moment they said to themselves, “This will not be over by morning.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    FOR IRENA ZARIC, the war began on a greening weekend in early April. Young Sarajevans who wanted Bosnia to stay peacefully together were marching downtown; many people at her school were going. Eddy Vrdoljak had asked her to go. But Irena knew that Eddy’s interest in the endurance of a multiethnic democracy was his hope to impress girls of varied backgrounds with old myths.
    â€œYou know what they say about Croat men, don’t you?” he