The Cellist of Sarajevo (2 page)

From the first time she picked up a rifle to kill she has called herself Arrow. There are some who continue to call her by her former name. She ignores them. If they persist, she tells them her name is Arrow now. No one argues. No one questions what she must do. Everyone does something to stay alive. But if they were to press her, she would say, “I am Arrow, because I hate them. The woman you knew hated nobody.”

Arrow has chosen today’s targets because she doesn’t want the men at Vraca to feel safe. She will have to make an extremely difficult shot. Though she hides on the ninth floor of this depredated building, the fortress
is an uphill run, and she must slip the bullet between a series of buildings that stand between her and her target. The soldiers must stay within a space of about three metres, and smoke from burning buildings periodically obscures her view. As soon as she lets off a shot, every sniper on the southern hill will begin to search for her. They’ll quickly figure out where she is. At that point they’ll shell the building, into the ground if necessary. And the reason this building is burned out is that it’s an easy target. Her chances of escaping the repercussions of her own bullets are slim. But this isn’t an unusual set of challenges. She has sent bullets through trickier air and faced swifter retaliation in the past.

Arrow knows exactly how long it will take them to locate her. She knows exactly where the snipers will look and exactly where the mortars will hit. By the time the shelling stops she’ll be gone, though none will understand how, even those on her own side, defending the city. If she told them, they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t believe that she knows what a weapon will do because Arrow herself is a weapon. She possesses a particular kind of genius few would want to accept. If she could choose, she wouldn’t believe in it either. But she knows it isn’t up to her. You don’t choose what to believe. Belief chooses you.

One of the three soldiers moves away from the other two. Arrow tenses, waiting to see if the two salute him.
If they do she will fire. For a moment she’s unsure, unable to read their gestures. Then the soldier steps out of the narrow corridor her bullet can travel through. He has, in an instant of seeming inconsequence, saved his life. A life is composed almost entirely of actions like this, Arrow knows.

She watches them awhile longer, waiting for a detail to emerge that will dictate which one receives the first bullet. She wants to fire twice, to kill both of them, but she isn’t confident there will be that opportunity, and if she must choose just one of the soldiers she would like to make the right choice, if there’s a right choice to be made. Ultimately she doesn’t believe it will make much difference. Perhaps one of them will live, but he’ll never understand how slim the margin of his existence is. He will chalk it up to luck, or fate, or merit. He’ll never know that an arbitrary fraction of a millimetre in her aim one way or another will make the difference between feeling the sun on his face ten minutes from now and looking down to see an unbelievable hole in his chest, feeling all he was or could have become drain out of him and then, in his final moments, inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.

One of the soldiers says something and laughs. The other one joins in, but from the tightness in his mouth it seems to Arrow that his laugh is perhaps only for his companion’s benefit. She ponders this. Does she shoot
the instigator or the collaborator? She’s not sure. For the next few minutes she watches the two men smoke and talk. Their hands trace hard shapes through the air, physical punctuation, sometimes pausing, like knives poised in anticipation of a strike. They’re both young, younger than she is, and if she wished herself into ignorance she could almost imagine they were discussing the outcome of a recent football match. Perhaps, she thinks, they are. It’s possible, even likely, that they view this as some sort of game. Boys throwing bombs instead of balls.

Then they both turn their heads as though called by someone Arrow can’t see, and she knows the time to fire has come. Nothing has made a decision for her, so Arrow simply chooses one. If there’s a reason, if it’s because one shot is easier, or one of them reminds her of someone she once knew and liked or didn’t like, or one of them seems more dangerous than the other, she can’t say. The only certainty is that she exhales and her finger goes from resting on the trigger to squeezing it, and a bullet breaks the sound barrier an instant before pulping fabric, skin, bone, flesh and organ, beginning a short process that will turn motion into meat.

As Arrow readies her second shot, in the time between the tick of one second and another, she knows that something has gone wrong. The men on the hills know where she is. She abandons her shot and rolls to
the side, aware of eyes upon her, that a sniper has been hunting her all along, and the instant she shot she was exposed. They have set a trap for her and she has fallen into it. A bullet hits the ground where she lay an instant before. As she scuttles towards the skeleton of a staircase that will lead her nine floors down and out of the building she hears a rifle fire, but doesn’t hear the bullet strike. This means either the sniper has missed entirely or she has been hit. She doesn’t feel any pain, though she’s heard you don’t at first. There isn’t any need to check if she’s hit. If a bullet has found her she’ll know soon enough.

Arrow enters the stairwell and a mortar comes through the roof and explodes. She’s two flights down when another lands, sending the ninth floor crumbling into the eighth. As she reaches the sixth floor the texture of the situation shifts in her mind, and she veers into a dark, narrow hallway and moves as quickly as she can away from the mortar she knows is about to penetrate the stairwell. She manages to make it far enough to avoid the steel and wood and concrete the explosion sends her, a multitude of bullets as interest paid on the loan of one. But then, as the last piece of shrapnel hits the ground, she turns and runs back towards the staircase. She has no choice. There’s no other way out of this building, and if she stays she will collect on her loan. So she returns to the stairwell, not
knowing what remains of it. The sixth floor has collapsed into the fifth, and when she jumps to the landing below she wonders if it will bear her. It does, and from there it’s a matter of staying tight against the inner wall where the stairs meet the building, where the weight of the upper layers of the collapsed stairway has had less impact.

Arrow hears another mortar hit as she reaches the ground, and although the front entrance leading to the street is only steps away she continues to the basement, where she feels her way along a dim corridor until she finds a door. She shoulders it open. The immediate shift from darkness to light momentarily blinds her, but she emerges without hesitation into a low stairwell on the north side of the building, somewhat sheltered from the men on the southern hill. Before her eyes adjust to the world around her she begins to notice the percussion of mortars affecting her hearing, and it reminds her of being in a swimming pool, of a day when she and a friend took turns shouting each other’s names underwater and laughing at how they came out, all garbled and distorted and foreign. When she turns east, away from the building, she feels a pain in her side, and she looks down, half expecting to see her stomach distended between splintered ribs. A quick inspection reveals only a slight cut, a small nothing that attached itself to her at some point during her exit.

As she walks towards her unit’s headquarters in the city centre, she notices that the sky is beginning to darken. A few drops of rain hit her forehead, make her feel her own heat as they evaporate. When she touches her side, her hand comes away without any fresh blood on it, and Arrow wonders what it means that the insignificance of her injury does not bring her any particular sense of relief.

Kenan

A
NOTHER DAY HAS JUST BEGUN.
L
IGHT STRAINS ITS
way into the apartment, where it finds Kenan in his kitchen, his hand reaching for the plastic jug containing his family’s final quarter-litre of water. His movement is slow and stiff. He seems to himself more an old man than one who will soon celebrate his fortieth birthday. His wife, Amila, who is sleeping in the sitting room because it’s more secure than their street-facing bedroom, is much the same. Like him, her middle age has somehow escaped her. She’s barely thirty-seven, but looks well over fifty. Her hair is thin and her skin hangs loose off her flesh, suggesting a former woman who, Kenan knows, never was.

At least their children are, for now, still children. Like all children they rail against the limitations placed on them, and they want to be grown up, and they wish things to be other than they are. They know what’s going on, but they don’t entirely understand. They have learned how to live with it. Perhaps, Kenan suspects, that’s why they don’t turn old.

It has been over a month since the last time the family had electricity for more than a few hours, and even longer without running water. While life is more difficult without electricity, it is impossible without water. So every four days Kenan gathers his collection of plastic containers and travels down the hill, through the old town, across the Miljacka River and up into the hills into Stari Grad, to the brewery, one of the few places in the city that a person can get clean drinking water. Occasionally it is possible to find closer sources of water, and he keeps his eye out for them, but they’re unreliable and often unsafe. He doesn’t want to survive the men on the hills only to be killed by a water-borne parasite, a possibility he considers real and pressing in a city that no longer has a functioning sewage system. The brewery’s water comes from underground springs deep in the water table, and he feels this is well worth the risk of the extra distance.

As quietly as he can, Kenan picks up the final jug of water and moves down the hall towards the bathroom. His hand flicks on the light switch, a leftover reflex from
earlier times. The bulb in the ceiling surges to life. Kenan strikes a match, lights the stub of a candle that sits on the side of the sink below the mirror. He puts the stopper in the drain and pours his quarter-litre of water into the sink. He wets his face, blinks as the cold water registers in his mind as shock. His hands work a small bar of soap into a lather he applies to his cheeks, neck, chin and upper lip. The razor settles into a rhythmic scratch scratch splash, his pupils narrowing in the light as he observes his progress. When he’s done he wets his face again and dries himself on a crusty towel hanging above the toilet. He blows out the candle and is surprised when light does not disappear from the room. After a few seconds he realizes that the electricity is on, that the bulb above his head is glowing, and he almost smiles at his mistake before he understands the significance of it. He has grown accustomed to a world where you shave by candlelight with soap and cold water. It has become normal.

Still, there is electricity, and because that is no longer normal he rushes out of the bathroom to wake his wife, who will want to get the children up to make the most of it. He imagines a breakfast cooked on the stove, and watching the television next to the warmth of the heater. The children’s excitement will be catching as they laugh at one of their cartoons. Light will fill all of the rooms and chase away the perpetual dusk that
hides in the corners. Even if it doesn’t last for long it will make them happy, and for the rest of the day their faces will be tired from smiling. But as he leaves the room he hears a telltale pop, and when he looks back the light is off. He tries the hall light and confirms what he already knows to be true. He returns to the kitchen. There’s no longer any reason to wake his family.

He sits at the table and inspects each of the six plastic containers he’ll take with him. He checks for any obvious cracks that may have developed since they were last emptied, makes sure each one has the correct lid. He has two backup containers he can substitute if he finds any faults. Deciding how much water you can carry has become something of an art in this city. Carry too little and you’ll have to repeat the task more often. Each time you expose yourself to the dangers of the streets you run the risk of injury or death. But carry too much and you lose the ability to run, duck, dive, anything it takes to get out of danger’s way. Kenan has decided on eight canisters. The six from his house will hold about twenty-four litres of water. Two more will come from Mrs. Ristovski, the elderly neighbour downstairs.

As he verifies that his six containers are reliable, he hears his wife rise from her bed. She leans into the doorway of the kitchen, rubs sleep from her eyes.

“It was quiet last night,” he says. “It won’t be too bad out there today.”

She nods. They both know a quiet night in no way means it will be a quiet day, but Kenan is glad that neither says so.

His wife moves across the room and stands in front of him. She places her hand on his head, resting it there before letting it slide down to his shoulder, giving his ear a light tug on its way. “Be careful.”

Kenan smiles. It’s not so much her words that bring him comfort but that she still says them. She knows as well as he that there’s no such thing as careful, that the men on the hills can kill anyone, anywhere, any time they like, and that luck or fate or whatever it is that decides who lives and who doesn’t has not, in the past, favoured those who act in a way that could be described as careful. The odds may punish those who behave recklessly, but everyone else seems about even. Still, there was a time when a person could reasonably act with care for his well-being, and he appreciates that his wife is occasionally willing, for the sake of his sanity, to invoke the memory of those times.

He sees her looking at his bottles, tallying them up. “Mrs. Ristovski?”

“Yes.”

She frowns, brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then her face softens, and she stands back to look at him. “You’ll need a new coat soon.”

“I’ll pick one up while I’m out,” he says. “Would you like me to get you some shoes?”