The Cellist of Sarajevo (21 page)

He rinses his face with the last of the water and leans in to blow out the candle. As he inhales there’s a
familiar tinkling sound and the light bulb in the ceiling pops to life. A harsh yellow light fills the room, and his eyes adjust to its brightness. Kenan smiles.

He blows out the candle and goes to the closet, where a small charger is connected to a car battery. If the power stays on all day he will be able to listen to the radio for the next two weeks. If it stays on overnight they can perhaps run a light for a few hours each night. He checks the charger, watches its green light glow. The battery is charging.

Amila emerges from her bed. He smiles at her and points to the light in the ceiling. She grins, raises her hands in celebration. If the children weren’t asleep, Kenan would put a CD on, something fast and cheerful, and they would shout and dance. Even though he doesn’t, knowing he can is enough.

“Do you think it will stay on for long?” she asks him as he gets up and goes back into the kitchen.

He nods. “Could be. I guess there’s no way to tell.”

Kenan begins to tie up his bottles, three to a side.

“Be careful,” she says, and he smiles.

“Of course. I always am.”

The light flickers, but doesn’t go out. Amila rolls her eyes. “Pick up one of the large boxes of chocolates while you’re out,” she says, “and two dozen eggs.”

“Yes, certainly. That’s a lot of eggs.”

“I’m going to bake a cake. A very large cake.”

“Ah. In that case I’ll buy some brandy as well.” He leans in and kisses her.

“Good idea. Nothing goes with cake like a good brandy.” She rests her hands in the small of his back, puts her head on his shoulder. “I’m tired,” she says, almost whispering.

“I know,” he says. “I’m tired too.”

They stand like this until Kenan begins to feel time weighing down on him, and he steps back, kisses her again and moves towards the door.

Once he’s in the hall, he sits down on the steps and presses his forehead to his knees. He doesn’t want to go out. He doesn’t want to have to walk through the streets of his city and look at the buildings and with every step be afraid that he’s about to be killed. But he has no choice. He knows that if he wants to be one of the people who rebuild the city, one of the people who have the right even to speak about how Sarajevo should repair itself, then he has to go outside and face the men on the hills. His family needs water, and he will get it for them. The city is full of people doing the same as he is, and they all find a way to continue with life. They’re not cowards, and they’re not heroes.

He has been to hear the cellist play every day since the shelling at the brewery. Each day at four o’clock he stands in the street with his back pressed against a wall and watches as the city is reassembled and its people
awaken from hibernation. Today is the last day the cellist will play. Everyone who died in the street while waiting for bread will be accounted for. Kenan knows no one will play for the people who died at the brewery, or those who were shot crossing the street, or any of the other victims of countless attacks. It would take an army of cellists. But he’s heard what there was to hear. It was enough.

Kenan stands up and makes his way down the flight of stairs. On the ground floor he stops in front of Mrs. Ristovski’s door. He listens for sounds of life, wonders if she’s awake, if she knows the electricity has come back on. She’s usually the first to know such things.

He straightens himself, clears his throat and knocks on the door. He hears a shuffling inside, but the door doesn’t open. He knocks again, louder this time, and waits for Mrs. Ristovski to answer the door, to bring him her bottles so he can begin his long walk down the hill, through town, up the hill to the brewery and back again.

Dragan

T
HERE IS NO WAY TO TELL WHICH VERSION OF A LIE IS
the truth. Is the real Sarajevo the one where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict? Or is the real Sarajevo the one he sees today, where people are trying to kill each other, where bullets and bombs fly down from the hills and the buildings crumble to the ground? Dragan can only ask the question. He doesn’t think there’s any way to know for sure.

It’s past noon. He’s been at this intersection for over two hours now. It seems like days. Stuck in a sort of no man’s land, kept but not kept from going to the bakery, where a small loaf of bread waits for him. He can cross
whenever he likes. At no time has anyone come and said, no, Dragan, you can’t cross. It’s always been his decision.

He knows which lie he will tell himself. The city he lives in is full of people who will someday go back to treating each other like humans. The war will end, and when it’s looked back upon it will be with regret, not with fond memories of faded glory. In the meantime, he will continue to walk the streets. Streets that will not have dead and discarded bodies lying in them. He will behave now as he hopes everyone will someday behave. Because civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible. And if he wishes to live, he must do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there’s war, life is a preventative measure.

The cameraman has left, gone to a busier intersection. He needs people to take a chance and get shot, or shot at, or, if that doesn’t happen, at least look like they think they’re going to die. Eventually the cameraman will get what he wants. It’s only a matter of time.

Dragan makes up his mind. He’s going across. He’s not going to let the men on the hills stop him. These are his streets, and he’ll walk them as he sees fit. In a little less than four hours the cellist will play for the final time.

He adjusts his coat and shakes one foot, which has fallen partially asleep. The sky is beginning to cloud over, and there’s a slight chill in the air. He steps into the intersection. His shoes scuff on the pavement, and somewhere close by a car accelerates to a high pitch. A small bird flies overhead. Dragan is not running. He knows he should be, is aware that the sniper is likely still in his perch. He could be in his sights right now. All it would take is a squeeze of a trigger and he’d be dead.

His feet don’t respond to his mind’s urgings. He can’t run. At a leisurely pace his body carries him across the road, past where Emina was shot, towards the other side. He could be walking down any street in the world. To a casual observer he’s just an old man out for a stroll.

This is anything but the case. Dragan is terrified, has never been so afraid. But he can’t force himself to move any faster. After a while he stops trying. He keeps his eyes on the safe area he’s heading towards, and he tries not to think about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other.

He begins to understand why he isn’t running. If he doesn’t run, then he’s alive again. The Sarajevo he wants to live in is alive again. If he runs, then it won’t matter how many bodies lie in the streets. Perhaps the people watching him will think he’s snapped, that he’s gone catatonic and doesn’t care anymore whether he lives or dies. They’d be wrong. He cares now more than ever.

He’s been asleep since the war began. He knows this now. In defending himself from death he lost his grip on life. He thinks of Emina, risking her life to deliver expired pills to someone she’s never met. Of the young man who ran into the street to save her when she was shot. Of the cellist who plays for those killed in a mortar attack. He could run now, but he doesn’t.

He waits for gunfire, for the bullet that will hit him. But it never comes. He’s both surprised and not surprised. There’s just never any way to tell. It doesn’t matter. If it comes, it will come. If it doesn’t, he will be one of the lucky ones.

Dragan reaches the opposite side of the road. It hasn’t taken him long at all, but it seems a good portion of his life has gone by. It’s a good thing the cameraman has gone. He knows he’s created horrible television. An old man walking across a street, with nothing happening. Hardly news.

He walks west, towards the bakery. He should be there in ten more minutes. But then his hand feels a small plastic pill bottle and a scrap of paper with an address in his pocket, and he knows he’ll be a little late. Still, no more than a half-hour. He’ll get his bread, and then he’ll come back this way, whether the sniper’s working or not. On his way home he’ll make a small detour to the street just south of the market and wait
for four o’clock, so he can tell Emina what happened on the last day the cellist played.

Dragan smiles as he passes by an elderly man. The man doesn’t meet his gaze, keeps his eyes on the ground.

“Good afternoon,” Dragan says, his voice bright.

The man looks up. He seems surprised.

“Good afternoon,” Dragan repeats.

The man nods, smiles, and wishes him the same.

Arrow

A
RROW BLINKS.
S
HE HAS BEEN WAITING FOR A LONG
time. She slept well, didn’t wake even once during the night. There’s one sound she’s been listening for, and it’s here. Footsteps echo in the hall outside her door, heavy boots coming up the stairs. They’re making an effort to be quiet, but the stairwell isn’t helping, its acoustics unaccommodating to the aims of men requiring stealth. Arrow opens her eyes. It’s still early in the morning, not quite seven o’clock.

It’s been ten days since she walked away from Hasan on the fourteenth floor of the Parliament Building, ten days since she deserted Edin Karaman’s unit of murderers. This is the first night she’s slept in her apartment
since then, and already they’ve found her. She’s a little surprised. She didn’t imagine they’d be so efficient.

Her father’s gun is on the bedside table beside her. It’s loaded and ready, but her hand stays at her side, under her pile of blankets. She wonders what the weather will be like today. Yesterday it seemed it might rain, but there’s never any way to tell what will happen the next day until it comes. She hopes it rains. The city could use the water.

They’ve been hunting her for ten days now, and they have found her because she has allowed them to. They knew where she was all along, knew she was in one of the buildings above the cellist, but they couldn’t find her, no matter how many times they looked. Twice she had Edin Karaman’s head in her sights, but she never pulled the trigger. She hasn’t fired her rifle since killing the sniper the men on the hills sent for the cellist. But she would have, if necessary, and she believes her presence kept him alive.

He played for twenty-two days, just as he said he would. Every day at four o’clock in the afternoon, regardless of how much fighting was going on around him. Some days he had an audience. Other days there was so much shelling that no one in their right mind would linger in the street. It didn’t appear to make any difference to him. He always played exactly the same way.

The only variation in his routine was on the last day.
She lay concealed in her hiding spot, invisible. She felt him enter the street, but before he began to play she knew no one was going to shoot him. The men on the hills had given up. Her hands relaxed and her finger fell from the trigger. As the cellist began to play she looked down at the street. It was full of people. No one moved. They all stood motionless, and though it was clear to her that they were listening intently, it also seemed as though they weren’t entirely there.

Arrow let the slow pulse of the vibrating strings flood into her. She felt the lament raise a lump in her throat, fought back tears. She inhaled sharp and fast. Her eyes watered, and the notes ascended the scale. The men on the hills, the men in the city, herself, none of them had the right to do the things they’d done. It had never happened. It could not have happened. But she knew these notes. They had become a part of her. They told her that everything had happened exactly as she knew it had, and that nothing could be done about it. No grief or rage or noble act could undo it. But it could all have been stopped. It was possible. The men on the hills didn’t have to be murderers. The men in the city didn’t have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She didn’t have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.

Arrow closed her eyes, and when she opened them the music was over. In the street, the cellist sat on his stool for a very long time. He was crying. His head leaned forward and a few strands of inky hair fell across his brow. One hand moved to cover his face while the other cradled the body of the cello. After a while he stood up, and he walked over to the pile of flowers that had been steadily growing since the day the mortar fell. He looked at it for a while, and then dropped his bow into the pile. No one on the street moved. They held their breath, waiting for him to say something. But the cellist didn’t speak. There was nothing left for him to say. He turned, picked up his stool and went through the door to his apartment without looking back at the street. Slowly people began to move, and one by one they left the street to return to their lives.

The footsteps are at the top of the stairs now, just outside her door. Arrow looks again at the gun on her night table. If she were to use it, she knows exactly what would happen. The men on the other side of the door would die. Every one of them would die and she’d step over their bodies and out into the street. It would take only a few seconds. It would be the easiest thing in the world.

But she isn’t going to pick up the gun. It sits on the night table partly out of habit, and partly because she wants them to know that she was armed and could
have fought back. She’s not sure they’ll notice this clue. It doesn’t matter. It matters only that she leaves it.

She wonders what her life might have been like if there had been no war, if the men on the hills hadn’t decided that they needed to be reviled, or that the answer to their aspirations of victimhood lay in guns and tanks and grenades. Maybe she’d have gotten married. Maybe she’d have gone on to graduate school, had a good job, lived in a nice apartment and gone to the theatre in the evenings with her friends. There could have been children. She likes children, or she used to. The possibilities were endless.