MindSpinner

I’m still reading Pretty Birds off and on, when I decide it’s time to ignore everything else that clamors for attention. I’ve been using that little stack of index cards called a Hipster PDA to keep up with all my action list, and I’ve decided that I need to write on the front card, “Read 20 minutes,” along with “Exercise.” It’s too easy to let those things go when there are not enough hours in the day. And there won’t be enough hours in the day, now that school is starting.

At first I decided that Pretty Birds is clearly a journalist’s novel. Well-written, certainly. I knew I had to buy the book when, listening to NPR, I heard Scott Simon read the passage in which Irena shoots the lemons. I also wanted to read it because of Yelena, a Serb exchange student I taught in ’92-’93. After my first three dips into the book – maybe 75 pages – I was feeling, despite the capable prose, a reporter’s careful, restrained distancing from dimensions of characters’ inner lives. Even Irena’s rape seemed matter-of-fact, as if our tough young heroine could not be fazed by something as morally weak as the Serb soldier’s clumsy assault. (In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Irena’s involvement with her coach and the apparently gratuitous sex scene that occurs early in the novel aren’t there most crucially so that she won’t be a virgin when the soldier forces himself on her, so that she’ll be sexually experienced and tough and not let a war-time rape haunt her, though of course at some level it must.)

I’d even begun to take some issue about what began to feel like a misrepresentation of the human experience of war simply through omission. The focus on reportable exteriorities seemed to insist that an objective and somewhat distanced approach was the only way to tell the truth, to avoid putting oneself where one could never actually really be, in the shoes of these characters during this war. However, that is exactly where a novel has to put us, in order to tell what readers can know of such truths, at least by reading rather than by experiencing war.

Now that I’ve read to page 109, the distance that defines objectivity has telescoped inward as Scott Simon works his way into psychological and physical truths that are at the heart of the story he was obviously compelled to tell. Nermina’s death and Mrs. Zaric’s letter to the dead girl’s parents move us in that direction. Objective artifact, a letter, but full of human feeling.

Setting Pretty Bird free, in hopes that he will survive, strikes a new note of pathos that is not reserved for a severed human foot with its painted toenails or even for Milan Zaric’s mother earlier in the book. Likewise the story of Cesar the old blue hound and Kolo the starving bear in the zoo. It is Cesar the hound, however, that has seized upon my thinking.

Another woman brought in an old blue hound who was exhausted and hoarse from barking. The poor dog had been driven crazy by bombs. It was a quiet morning. But Cesar whimpered, bucked, and cringed in a corner, hearing whines from mortars and bombs that were above human register. (p. 101)

Irena helps the vet, Dr. Pekar, put the dog down, death being the only peace the doctor can offer. I cried. Instantaneously. Now this moment is probably, for many readers, less affecting than, say, the death of Nermina, Irena’s teammate. Maybe it struck a chord for me because, when our Sheltie had grown so old and ill that the spark left her eyes, I was the one who had to take her, on my own, to have her put down. I still remember the horrid shock when I realized that “putting a dog to sleep” was not – had not been - a five-minute process or even a two-minute process of the dog’s drifting off in my arms but a process of mere seconds. I had watched the needle emptying into the vein, not the life leaving the eyes. So maybe it was this connection that made the small incident in the book bring home some true thing about the horror of war, that it could drive the dog mad.

Three days later, I’m still puzzling. What made the death of the dog more affecting to me than the death of Nermina or Milan Zaric’s mother? Is it because in war I expect people to die but simply hadn’t thought of this additional horror - because I was braced for the one but not the other (as may have been Scott Simon’s experience, too)? Is it because humanity feels culpable – even the apparently innocent among us - for the whole business of war, having proven over and over again that war is a predilection of our species, such that we may, any or all of us, find ourselves damned to it now and then? Is it because dogs cannot pick up guns and shoot back, as Irena will do? Is it because we therefore ascribe to animals a sort of innocence we do not find in ourselves, even though Kolo the bear eats his cagemates? I don’t know.

But, in the final analysis, I am not sure I think of my former students who have gone to fight in Iraq as significantly less innocent than Cesar the dog. May they live and come home whole in body and mind. Somehow.