As a prize-winning (including the Peabody and the Emmy) correspondent for National Public Radio, Scott Simon has covered 10 wars, and now he has written an impressive first novel based on his time in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo during the long, brutal siege of 1992-96. Simon learned that both sides, Serb and Bosnian Muslim, used teenage girls as snipers because they were small, agile and good shots. His novel centers on one such girl, Irena Zaric, a Muslim who is 17 and a high school basketball star when war tears her world apart.
The conflict begins in April 1992, first with rumors, then with open violence. Serb police take off their uniforms and set up barriers: "Men in black sweaters with rifles on their hips barked at people to show identity cards before passing into what they called Serb Sarajevo." Irena's family, like many others in the sophisticated, polyglot capital, prides itself on its complex ethnicity. "My father was a Serb married to a Jew," her father says. "I married a Muslim whose mother was a Croat." But he soon learns he is not pure enough to satisfy the Serbs, who force the family, and many others, from their homes. As they flee, Irena and her parents are attacked by marauding Serb thugs and are lucky to escape with their lives.
They take refuge at Irena's grandmother's apartment, across the Miljacka River in what becomes the Muslim portion of the bitterly divided city. When they arrive, they find that the grandmother has been shot dead. Snipers are a constant threat. Windows that once offered beautiful views of the river and the mountains now offer instant death. They sleep on the floor, scrounge for food and soon are eating "macaroni, grass and snail stew in bean broth." Blue-helmeted U.N. troops arrive as a "protection force" but are forbidden to use their weapons and are universally scorned.
Irena's father, a clothing salesman, is recruited by the Bosnian army to dig ditches and graves. Irena's talents are more highly valued. Tedic, once a high school basketball coach, respects her athletic skills and recruits her for the team of snipers he runs out of a local brewery. Irena resists at first. "I'm kind of a pacifist," she tells Tedic. "So am I," he replies. "When the world permits." She has never fired a gun but, with the help of a gay South African soldier of fortune, she becomes an expert shot. She and the other snipers are paid mostly in beer and cigarettes, which suits them fine.
Part of the fascination of the novel lies in watching a girl of 17 become a killing machine. Irena has been having a furtive affair with her handsome high school basketball coach ("The verticality of their sex was a joke between them"), but she remains a teenager who sleeps with her childhood Pokey Bear, wears Air Jordans and reads every magazine article she can find about Madonna, Johnny Depp and Michael Jackson. Even as a sniper, she embraces a teenager's rules: "Irena decided that she would not shoot at someone who looked like Sting, the Princess of Wales, or Katarina Witt." She sits for hours in deserted buildings, waiting for the distant movement or cigarette glow that gives her a target and then watching for the pink mist that confirms her kill. Once, after shooting a second Serb sniper who was trying to rescue her first victim, Irena "crept carefully toward the edge of the floor, and through the soft gauze of fat snowflakes she saw two pink shadows oozing. Angels in the snow, she thought."
Often Simon moves beyond Irena's kills to give a broader picture of life in Sarajevo. A French doctor with the "agreeably long face of a pedigreed hound" attempts an errand of mercy at the local hospital, and English actors come to put on a performance of "Hair." A news conference suddenly becomes a suicide bombing. In a departure from historical fact, the charismatic Osama bin Laden slips into the city and speaks passionately to local Muslims: "There is a holy war going on here. A genocide that we fight with jihad. The West sends Blue Helmets and dried beans. We bring you guns and men." We hear many bitter jokes: The siege has at least solved the city's traffic jams, residents say, and "What is the difference between Auschwitz and Sarajevo? Auschwitz had gas."
The novel's outcome may perplex some readers; war does not always allow for tidy endings, and Simon clearly understands war. "Pretty Birds" -- like last year's "The Warlord's Son," by the Baltimore Sun's Dan Fesperman -- is the work of a reporter who seems to have easily made the transition to writing first-rate fiction. It is no insult to Simon's novelistic skill to say that his book's excellence rests finally on his reporter's eye and ear. Certainly the novel puts a compelling human face on what was learned about the siege from news reports at the time. The assault on Sarajevo was an ugly, unspeakably sad moment in recent history, and Simon's novel is a fine tribute to the heroes and victims who were his friends there.
