The Cellist of Sarajevo (6 page)

As he enters the old Turkish neighbourhood of Baščaršija, he feels as though he’s returning to the scene of a crime. He hasn’t been here since the day the library burned, and though he’s still some distance from it, he can feel its proximity. For some reason the mess of shattered roof tiles and crumbled bricks in this part of town bothers him more than it does in other places. There are a few people in the streets, and down one narrow alley he sees a group of tin-men with small displays of items
for sale. For months now they’ve been turning bullets and shell casings into pens, plates, anything they can sell. One man has built a small wood-burning stove, and even though he knows it’s almost certainly more than he has, Kenan wonders how much he would sell it for.

Hardly anyone lives in Baščaršija. For half a millennium, it has served as the city’s marketplace, its streets organized according to the type of trades conducted there. But in recent years this strict discipline had broken down a bit, with more and more shops selling merchandise designed for tourists. Now there are no more tourists, and the shops are closed just like everything else. To his north is the Sebilj, a gazebo-shaped public fountain that serves as a meeting place, or did. Its location, placed firmly in the middle of a large plaza, makes it an exceptionally poor place to be at present. Only pigeons are brave or stupid enough to congregate at its base.

As he passes the Sebilj, staying as close to the cover of buildings as possible, Kenan hears one of the pigeons squawk and sees the others flutter away. The pigeon skids towards him, seemingly moved by a gravity that pulls at it from the side. Kenan stops, confused, and watches as the pigeon disappears into the alcove of a doorway just ahead of him. The squawking halts abruptly, and after a few seconds a piece of bread flies out of the alcove. He looks closer and sees it’s attached
to something. Gradually the birds begin to return, and as one ventures closer to the bread he sees what’s happening. Someone is fishing for pigeons.

He takes a few steps forward and looks into the alcove. There an old man holds a short fishing pole, his face intent on the plaza and his piece of bread. The man sees Kenan and waves slightly, not wanting him to disturb the line.

“How’s the fishing today?” Kenan asks, trying to keep his voice low so as not to startle the birds.

“They’re biting well,” the man says, keeping his eyes on one grey bird who’s eyeing the piece of bread.

“Do you need a licence this time of year?” he asks, smiling so the man understands it’s a joke.

The man looks at him, as if to discern whether he has some sort of official capacity. Eventually he smiles back. “Of course. You need a licence for the fish, and also for the pole.”

“Where do you get the licence?”

The man points at the hills. “Up there you can get one. Just keep going up until you find the office.”

The pigeon is close now. It seems to have its doubts, but another one is coming up behind it and its indecision is under pressure. It moves towards the bread.

“Is it expensive?” Kenan asks.

The man shakes his head. “No, but the lineup’s very long. It could be quite a wait.”

The grey pigeon hops ahead of its rival and lunges at the bread. It swallows it whole, and for a moment nothing happens. The pigeon appears pleased with itself. It has managed a small meal. Life is good. Then it’s jerked hard from the inside, and it gives a sharp squawk as the man reels it in. The pigeon tries to fly away, but the man yanks in the line and pulls it back to earth.

“Sometimes they try to fly, sometimes they don’t,” he says. “I don’t know what makes the difference.”

He reels the struggling bird all the way in. When it’s close enough, he reaches out and grabs it. For some reason it stops fighting him, perhaps in shock. The man holds the pigeon’s body with one hand and, with the other, twists its neck until it breaks. Then he cuts the bird’s body loose and places it in a bag beside him. The man stands.

“Are you finished for the day?” Kenan asks.

The old man nods. “I’ve caught six, one for each person in my apartment. I only take what I need. If I’m not greedy, perhaps they will still be here tomorrow.”

“Good luck,” Kenan says.

“To you too, sir.” The man picks up his bag and pole and starts up the plaza, heading north towards Vratnik.

Kenan stays there long after the man is gone. Although he has never killed an animal himself, apart from a fish, the idea of it has never particularly bothered him. But he can’t help feeling a sort of kinship
with the pigeon. He thinks it’s possible that the men on the hills are killing them slowly, a half-dozen at a time, so there will always be a few more to kill the next day.

Arrow

T
HE OFFICE OF
A
RROW’S UNIT COMMANDER ISN’T
much to look at. A small room with a desk and three chairs, boarded-up windows, a stained carpet covering a badly worn wood floor. All of it is illuminated by one naked light bulb powered by a generator that she can hear chugging away in another room. The bulb hangs from a wire into the middle of the room above the desk, and if she looks directly at it, she will be blinded for the following ten minutes by a glowing orb centred in her vision. She can never decide if the light has been placed in such an obtrusive location on purpose, as somes sort of intimidation technique, or if it’s only poor design. In her experience the army excels in both intimidation and tastelessness.

“You have been watched for some time now,” her commander says, standing behind her and placing his hand on Arrow’s shoulder in a way that seems as though it’s meant to be reassuring. Arrow wonders whether he’s referring to that morning’s incident, to the enemy sniper who had been hunting her. In the time she spends considering this possibility, the hand on her shoulder goes from feeling benign to malevolent. She fights an urge to tear it off her, rise from the hard chair she sits in and drive the palm of her hand upward into the throat of her unit commander.

“Many people are impressed with your abilities,” he continues. It seems that he isn’t talking about this morning’s sniper, so she calms down. He removes his hand and sits behind his desk, facing her.

Nermin Filipović is a good-looking man, dressed in rumpled but clean camouflage fatigues. His beard is neatly trimmed and his hair is dark, if a little long. Arrow imagines it is soft to the touch. He’s in his late thirties and, as far as she knows, isn’t married. There’s a small scar on his forehead above his right eye, and the nail on his right index finger has turned a dark purple, as though it has recently sustained a blow.

He’s a professional soldier. When the war began, and Europe’s fourth-largest army turned inward on itself and surrounded the city, he was one of the few career officers to break ranks and defend the city against his
former colleagues. If they fail and Sarajevo falls, if the men on the hills ever make it into the city, he will be one of the first people they execute. Arrow isn’t sure what her position will be on their list. There’s no way to tell how much they know about her.

“We have a special assignment for you. An important assignment.”

Arrow nods. She has suspected that he was working towards something like this. So far they’ve been content to let her choose her own targets, have left her more or less alone, provided she continues to deliver bullets to worthy destinations. Lately, however, she has felt more attention being paid to her, and she knows that sooner or later they are going to ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do.

“I would remind you of our first conversation,” she says, looking him straight in the eyes, something she rarely does.

Four months after the war started, Nermin had sent a man to request that she come to see him. In a way, Arrow was surprised it had taken them so long to approach her. Most of the other members of the university target-shooting team had already been approached. She would learn later that her father, who was a policeman, had asked Nermin to leave her out of it. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, in front of the Sarajevo Canton Building, and Arrow has never
asked Nermin whether he felt her father would have changed his mind about her involvement in the city’s defence or if he simply decided to ignore the request of a dead man. She doesn’t want to know the answer.

“We need people who can shoot as well as you can,” he said.

“I’ve never shot at a person,” she replied, knowing that until quite recently this was probably true of most of the city’s defenders, and maybe even its attackers. “Only at targets.”

“It’s a matter of perspective,” he said.

“I don’t want to kill people.”

“You’d be saving lives. Every one of those men on the hills will kill some of us. Given the chance, they will kill all of us.”

Arrow thought about this. She thought about what it might be like to pull the trigger and have her bullet hit a living being instead of a piece of paper. She was mildly surprised to find that the thought didn’t horrify her, that she could probably do it, and she could probably live with it.

“I think this will end,” she said. Her hands turned her coffee cup in a clockwise circle. She hadn’t drunk any of it yet, and soon it would be cold.

He leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall as if it were a window, as if it offered some view that could lend a new perspective to her statement. “That’s
a good view to take. I hope you’re right. I don’t see how it could last forever.”

He turned his gaze back from the wall, seeming to sense that she was moving towards stating an intent.

Arrow nodded. “I think it will end, and when it does I want to be able to go back to the life I had before. I want my hands to be clean.”

Nermin’s eyes flickered down to where his own hands lay folded on his desk and then back up. She wasn’t sure if he knew he had done this. It looked involuntary, but still it made her nervous. His hands moved to his lap. “I don’t think any of us will be going back to the life we had before, however this ends. Even those who keep their hands clean.”

“If I do this, it will have to be done a certain way. I won’t blindly kill just because you say I must.” She raised her cup to her mouth and drank. The coffee was good, strong and bitter, but no longer hot.

And so they reached an agreement. She would report only to Nermin, she would work alone, and she would, for the most part, choose her own targets. Occasionally Nermin has asked for someone specific, or that she work in a particular area, and thus far she has always been able to accommodate him.

She’s aware, now, that the woman who sat in this office on that day and said she didn’t want to kill anyone was gone, that with each passing week she’s less and less
certain there will be an end to all this. The parameters of their deal are dangerously close to irrelevance.

This does not, however, reduce her resolve. If anything, her desire to adhere to her conditions, to keep her hands clean, has increased. Although she has nearly completely lost sight of the person she was, she still knows who she wants to be, and as far as she can see, the only path leading her towards this person is back through her former self.

Nermin looks at her for a long time. She can see that he’s considering saying something to her, and she suspects it’s about her role in defending the city, but he doesn’t. He stands, walks past her and opens the door, motioning with his hand for her to follow him.

“I have something to show you,” he says, turning to her. “Don’t worry. This is as clean as you’re going to get.”

“Wait,” Nermin says, looking at his watch. “It’s almost time.”

Arrow knows this street well. It’s in the heart of the city, just past the point where Turkish buildings give way to Austro-Hungarian ones. Farther down is the Second World War memorial, the eternal flame, which has gone out. Behind her is a street where she used to meet friends for a coffee when she was in university, and the river isn’t far to the south. And past that are the southern hills of the city, where a cable car once carried people to the top of Mount Trebević.

They’re standing in the doorway of a shop that’s no longer open, across from the indoor public market. Arrow knows that not long ago a mortar shell landed in this street and killed a large number of people. She heard all about it on the radio, but although it was unusual for so many to be killed in one spot at one time, she didn’t think much about the incident then. It was simply how things were, she supposed. The opportunity to die was everywhere, and it just wasn’t that surprising when that opportunity became an event. Now, however, standing in the street where it happened, it seems to her that something significant occurred here.

An explosion groans to the west of them, and Arrow involuntarily looks in the direction of the sound.

Nermin, who hasn’t looked, smiles. “I think they’re trying to send us a message.”

“What is the message?” she asks as another shell lands in the same area.

Nermin shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m making a special effort not to listen. Okay, here he comes.”

At first, Arrow isn’t sure whether to trust what she sees. She even wonders if it’s possible she’s hallucinating, or if perhaps she has died and this is how the transition to whatever follows death takes place, through a series of unbelievable circumstances. But gradually she accepts she’s still alive, and she’s lucid, and this is happening.

A tall man with turbulent black hair, an almost
comic moustache and the saddest face she has ever seen emerges from a doorway. He wears a slightly dusty tuxedo and carries a cello under one arm, a stool under the other. He walks out of the building with a calm and determined stride, appearing oblivious to the danger he’s putting himself in, sets his stool in the middle of the street, sits down and positions his instrument between his legs.

“What is he doing?” she asks, but Nermin doesn’t answer.

The cellist closes his eyes and remains still, his arms hanging limp. It appears as though the cello stays upright by its own will, independent of the man surrounding it. The wood glows rich and warm against the drab grey of shattered paving stones, and she feels an urge to touch it, to run her fingers over the lacquered surface. Her hand reaches out, a futile attempt to bridge a distance far greater than the thirty or so metres that separate her from the cello.