The Cellist of Sarajevo (5 page)

Kenan isn’t sure whether Ismet can sense this tension within him. He’s never brought it up, never known quite how to, and as time passes the fact that Ismet is fighting to save them all and Kenan is not has grown larger and larger.

Today Ismet looks particularly tired. His green jacket, with its insignia stitched on by his wife, is covered in mud, and he hasn’t shaved in a while. Thanks to a recent wound, he walks with a slight limp, more noticeable because of his great height. His hair is longer than he usually wears it, but still the colour of coal. The bags under his eyes remind Kenan of a hound, the kind that chases down escaped prisoners in movies.

The two men embrace, and Kenan is glad to see his friend. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he has been expecting and dreading the day that Ismet doesn’t come back. “How are things?”

Ismet grins. “They are as others want them.” He gestures towards the relief centre. “Any news?”

Kenan shakes his head. “I was hoping for some meat this time. Perhaps a nice steak, or a lamb.” This is a running joke between them.

“Bah. You don’t need that. If you want meat, eat a centipede. You’ll get all the feet you can stomach.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offers it.

Kenan refuses. Though he’d like one, he knows Ismet probably has only this pack, maybe one other, given to
him by the army instead of pay, and when they run out he’ll feel it more. Kenan has given up smoking, viewing it as a luxury he can’t afford, and he thinks he can stick with it.

“Go on, take it, don’t be a martyr. It’s not my last one.” Ismet pulls a cigarette from the pack and thrusts it into Kenan’s hand. “Do it as a favour to me.”

The tobacco makes him a little light-headed, but it’s good. He’s missed this. “Thanks.”

The two men stand in the street, saying nothing, enjoying a brief moment of silence. There is much to talk about, but none of it can be said, none of it is worth saying. After a while, Ismet puts his hand on Kenan’s shoulder. “Good luck with your water. I’ll call in on you tonight or maybe tomorrow.” He digs his hands into his pockets and continues up the street.

Kenan watches him as he disappears around the corner, then picks up his water canisters and walks down the hill. His street runs into another, where there’s a mirror that allows cars to see if anyone’s coming. It’s one of the few unbroken pieces of glass around, and every time Kenan passes it he’s surprised to see it still undamaged. He finds it almost funny. There are hardly any cars on the roads, as those that aren’t damaged beyond repair are inoperable due to the scarcity and resulting high price of fuel. What few moving cars there are have become the favourite targets of the men
on the hills, and they’re driven with a recklessness that makes them as dangerous as the city’s attackers. The traffic lights don’t work, the roads are full of holes and debris, and yet here’s this mirror, without a scratch on it, working as well as it ever did.

He turns the corner, heading east before turning to the south again. He passes a building that has a soup kitchen in the basement and thinks that if they’re open when he comes back he might see if he can get a meal. The supply of food in his kitchen is nearly exhausted, and if he can go without eating this evening it will mean more for the rest of the family.

A little farther south he passes the Music Academy. The building is over a hundred years old, and has been training young musicians for forty. A harp sits atop a cupola facing the street corner. Between the windows of the third and the fourth floor, a rocket-propelled grenade has punched a hole through the wall. Inside, another grenade has blown through the wall in the main concert room, but still Kenan hears the sound of pianos coming from within. Several different pieces are being played in various parts of the building, and the music blends together, sometimes becoming unintelligible, a muddy noise of strings struck by hammers, but every so often one of the songs pauses, creating a space for another to emerge, and a few solitary notes of a melody slip out into the street.

After one quick block Kenan hits a main street. Before the war, he used to wait here for the tram that would take him three stops up the road to work. He’s always liked the tram. To him, and others as well, the tram was one of the most tangible signs of civilization.

When the fighting began, Kenan was at work. Someone rushed into the room and announced that war had broken out. A few people started to panic, rushing to telephones, while others sat, stunned, not wanting to believe. Goran went to the window and looked out at the street. He came back smiling.

“There’s no war. The trams are still running,” he said, and sat back down at his desk. Kenan had also returned to work, along with several other colleagues. They didn’t accept that the men on the hills could shoot at the trams, that their bullets would kill those inside. After all he’s seen since then, the one sight he will never forget is that of a burning tram that had been hit first by a mortar and then by sniper fire, heaving thick inky smoke into the air. The trams haven’t run since that day. They are scattered throughout the city, empty husks, some serving as cover against snipers, others simply left to rust. In Kenan’s mind, whatever else happens, the war will not be over until the trams run again.

If he were to head west, two blocks to his right, he’d end up at the marketplace. Without any food from the
relief centre, he’s often forced to shop there at astronomically inflated prices. When the war began, one German mark, about half an American dollar, was worth ten Yugoslav dinar. Now, a mark costs a million dinar. Anyone who didn’t convert their savings at the beginning of the war almost immediately became bankrupt. Not that it matters much. With prices nearly doubling each month, not many people had enough saved to last long anyway. Last month Kenan sold his family’s washing machine on the black market for a hundred and ten marks. Without electricity it was useless to him. The last time he was at the market, a kilo of apples cost fifty marks, a kilo of potatoes twenty marks. Onions were twelve marks, beans eighteen, and for thirty marks you could get three packs of cigarettes. Sugar was sixty marks, coffee a hundred. Everything was easily twenty times more than it had cost before the war. Everything, that is, except incomes. Kenan doubts if he’s made more than a thousand marks since the beginning of the war. He still has a few household items left to sell, but not many.

And yet some people seem untouched by financial pressures. They drive around in new Mercedes, haven’t lost any weight, and possess a ready supply of goods most people only remember from before the war. Kenan isn’t sure how they do it, but he knows a lot of black-market food is being smuggled into Sarajevo
through a tunnel that goes under the airport. To pass through it you need to know someone with pull in the government, and, although the tunnel is open twenty-four hours a day, hardly anyone gets through. Kenan suspects that what does go through is what is making the men in their sports cars rich. He can’t understand how they can do it, how they can make money off trapped and starving people like him.

But there’s little he can do about it. So he forgets about the marketplace, forgets about his empty stomach and crosses the one-way street that encircles the main part of the old town. Here the terrain flattens out as the mountains give way to the bed of the valley. He has been coming here all his life. Everywhere he looks reminds him of some memory, of something lost that can’t be recovered. He wonders what will happen after, when the fighting stops. Even if each building is rebuilt so it’s exactly as it was before, he doesn’t know how he could sit in a comfortable chair and drink a coffee with a friend and not think about this war and all that went with it. But maybe, he thinks, he would like to try. He knows he doesn’t want to give up the possibility.

Two different architects built Strossmayer Street, one designing the east side and the other the west. Kenan remembers coming here as a child with his parents, between Christmas and the New Year, to admire the way the street had been decorated. He was wearing a new
coat and was very proud of how he looked in it. His mother called him handsome, and even his older sister, who teased him every chance she got, said it was a good coat. He held his father’s hand as they walked down the street, stopping every once in a while to look at the lights, and his father spoke to him as though he were an adult. It’s hard to see the street of his memory in the one he’s on now.

If he continues south for another block he will come to the eastbound portion of the one-way street he crossed earlier. The main tram artery, it heads east until it comes to the National Library. It curves northward and then turns west, converging back on itself by the Vrbanja Bridge, across the river from Grbavica. If he were to keep going south, he’d cross the Miljacka River using the Ćumurija Bridge. At some point he’ll have to cross the river to reach the brewery, but the Ćumurija is the least inviting bridge for him, even though it offers the shortest possible distance between his house and the opposite bank of the river. It has been shelled, and all that’s left of it is its steel frame. He could still cross it by balancing on the skeleton of steel, but that is hard to do with the canisters, even when they’re empty, and it would leave him an easy target for the men on the hills.

Keeping close to the buildings, Kenan turns east, opting instead to cross the river using the Princip Bridge.
It’s just as open to the hills to the south, but it’s in much better shape, so he can cross it faster. He passes the remnants of the once grand Hotel Europa. There has been an inn on this site for over five hundred years. The last time it was destroyed, a little over a century ago, it was called the Stone Inn. A nearby merchant’s storeroom caught fire, and the fire quickly reached the Stone Inn, where there was a large army store of barrels of methyl alcohol. Some of the barrels exploded, and the fire spread west, engulfing much of the old town. Firefighters emptied the remaining barrels into the river, not taking into account that alcohol is lighter than water. When they put their pumps into the Miljacka, the water they drew wasn’t water at all but fire itself. By the time they realized their mistake it was too late, and much of the city was destroyed. Even now Kenan can see the demarcation of the street where they halted the Great Fire, where the old Turkish buildings end and the newer Austro-Hungarian ones begin.

What Kenan thinks about isn’t the night of the fire, but the day after. What it must have looked like. Did it compare with what he sees today? But at least the Great Fire was over quickly. He doesn’t know if today is the end or just the beginning. And he doesn’t know what things will look like when and if it does end. How do you build it all up again? Do the people who destroyed the city also rebuild it? Is the city reconstructed so that
it can be wiped away again someday, or do people believe that this will be the last time such a project will be necessary, that from now on things will last forever? Though he can’t quite put his finger on the specifics of this question, he believes that the character of those who will build the city again is more important than the makeup of those who destroyed it. Of course the men on the hills are evil. There’s no room for nuance in that. But if a city is remade anew by men of questionable character, what will it be? He thinks of the men in the fancy cars who bought his washing machine with a few kilos of potatoes and onions. They shouldn’t be the ones who get to make a new Sarajevo, if and when it is time for such a thing to be born.

He’s almost at the Princip Bridge. It used to be called the Latin Bridge, but it’s there that, in 1914, the First World War began. The footprints of the assassin Princip used to be marked on the place where he stood and killed the heir to the Hapsburg throne and his pregnant wife, but they’re gone now, ruined or stolen. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s last words to his wife were, “Don’t die, stay alive for our children.” He wasn’t supposed to be there, in that spot, but he had insisted on going to the hospital to check on the victims of an earlier attempt on his life. Princip had given up on his mission for the day and was eating a meal when he saw the archduke’s car, stepped out onto the street and fired
two shots. As a schoolboy, Kenan had been made to visit the small museum, now destroyed, that commemorated the assassination. He has always been slightly ashamed that, for a generation, when the world thought of Sarajevo, it was as a place of murder. It isn’t clear to him how the world will think of the city now that thousands have been murdered. He suspects that what the world wants most is not to think of it at all.

He’s just about to turn south towards the bridge when a man comes running around the corner. Once safely behind the buildings he collapses, breathless. “Sniper,” he says, pointing towards the bridge. “They’re firing all along the left bank.”

“I’m trying for the brewery,” Kenan says, helping the man to his feet.

“You’re best off crossing the Šeher Ćehaja.”

Kenan pauses. The Šeher Ćehaja is the most eastern of the bridges crossing the Miljacka, and using it will require a significant detour, almost doubling the distance of his trip. As it is, he still has about a kilometre and a half to go before he reaches the brewery, and this route would add another two kilometres. “Are you sure?”

The man shrugs. “It’s for you to say. Maybe he’s not a very good shot. He missed me.”

Any thoughts Kenan might have about risking a crossing are removed by the sound of a shell landing nearby,
probably somewhere just across the river. There’s a short burst of rifle fire, and then another shell lands. Kenan feels himself begin to panic, tries to take a few deep breaths. His mouth has gone dry.

“It’s okay,” the man says. “They can’t get at us here.” Kenan knows this isn’t true, but the words do make him feel better, as does the knowledge that they aren’t the target of the shelling. It seems to be moving farther away, or at least it isn’t getting closer.

It’s clear that he’ll have to take the long way around, so he wishes the man luck and backtracks about fifty metres, heading north, just to be sure he’s well away from the stretch where the men on the hills are shelling. He turns east when he hits the Sweet Corner, named after the cluster of pastry shops located here at the turn of the century, right on the dividing line between the eastern and western architecture of the old town.