Free Pretty Birds by Scott Simon Page A

flip-flops.
    â€œStupid shoes,” said Mr. Zaric. “Not the way to spend eternity.”
    Irena left her parents alone with her grandmother and took another sheet down to Mr. Kovac by the trash bin. The blood around him had thickened into a kind of burgundy mud. His shoes were the old black Soviet kind, bought before Italian and Spanish shoes could be so freely imported. Soviet shoes were laughably flimsy. The leather was about as durable as paper and the stitching unraveled like string. Many Yugoslavians had lost faith in Communism because of Soviet shoes. How could you believe in a workers’ paradise if the workers made shoddy shoes? And
had
to wear them? Mr. Zaric told Irena that he always knew America would reach the moon before Russia, because any cosmonaut would be scared to step onto the moon in a Soviet shoe.
    Irena was certain that her father would never wear Mr. Kovac’s shoes. But someone might. Or might trade them for something else. Even old Soviet shoes shouldn’t be wasted on the feet of a man who would no longer be going anywhere. She pulled on the laces and slipped the shoes off carefully, then stretched the sheet above him.
    â€œThank you, Mr. Kovac,” she said out loud. Carrying the shoes in her right hand as she went back up the stairs, Irena had to step over her grandmother.
    â€œWhen Grandma Melic died we called a funeral home,” her father was saying. “Funeral homes handle all aspects.”
    â€œEven tea cakes,” his wife remembered. “But that would be expecting a lot on a day like this.”
    Irena took charge of the directory and the telephone. After several calls went blank, she got a response from a man at a Muslim funeral home on Sandzacka Street.
    â€œI’m sorry, but we’re really too busy to take any more bodies,” he told Irena. “Our hearse is getting shot at, and for what? Picking up dead people.”
    Irena’s father motioned her to hand over the telephone.
    â€œWe can pay,” Mr. Zaric assured the undertaker, one businessman to another.
    â€œMoney?” The man laughed as if he had never heard anything so ludicrous. Irena and her mother could hear him chortle clearly through the earpiece until the line went dead.
    â€œWe just can’t leave Grandma and Mr. Kovac like this,” said Mr. Zaric. “It’s not right. They deserve to rest.”
    So as darkness fell on the blackening city, blinking with fires but no light, and booming with explosions and cries, Irena Zaric and her father inched carefully downstairs, smashed the window of the shed in the backyard, and took a shovel. Irena lay down for her father in the small backyard so that he could mark the dimensions around her. For about ten minutes, Mr. Zaric struggled with the shovel, wrenching up loads of soil.
    â€œShit,” he said to Irena. “Now I remember why I work in a store.”
    Mr. Zaric had just handed the shovel to his daughter when a middle-aged woman with blond hair caught their attention by leaning out of her first-floor window.
    â€œExcuse me—what are you doing here?”
    â€œWe are the Zaric family,” said Irena’s father. “I am Milan. My daughter, Irena. My wife is upstairs. Perhaps you know my mother, Gita?”
    â€œOf course. I am Aleksandra Julianovic.”
    â€œYes, I’ve heard your name. Well, my mother is dead.”
    â€œI am sorry. A lot of people are. We might be soon.”
    â€œYes. Well, Mother is dead already. And Mr. Kovac too.”
    â€œHim I didn’t know.”
    â€œSecond floor, I think. Well, we are digging graves to get them into the ground quickly.”
    â€œOmigod, are you religious fanatics?” Aleksandra Julianovic said. “We are European in this neighborhood.”
    â€œNot at all,” said Mr. Zaric.
    â€œThey are already dead,” Aleksandra Julianovic pointed out. “What more can happen to them?”
    Irena stepped in,