The Cellist of Sarajevo (8 page)

“No. We have to stay. If we all go they will come down from the hills and the city will be theirs.”

“If we stay they will shoot at us from the hills until we’re all dead, and then they’ll come down just the same.”

“The world will never allow that. They’ll have to help us sooner or later,” she says. He’s not sure from her tone of voice if she believes what she says. He doesn’t know how she could. They must both see the same city disintegrating around them.

“No one is coming.” His voice is harsher than he means it to be. “We’re here on our own, and no one’s coming to help us. Don’t you know that?”

Emina looks down and fastens the top two buttons on her coat. She puts her hands in her pockets. After a while she says, very quietly, “I know no one is coming. I just don’t want to believe it.”

Dragan knows exactly what she means. He doesn’t want to believe it either. For a long time he held out hope, listened to the news, waited for someone to put a stop to this madness. All his life he has lived under the rule of law. If you broke the law, the police would arrest you. There was order, and it was unquestioned. Then, in the blink of an eye, it all fell apart. Like many others, Dragan waited far longer for order to be restored than was logical. He tried to go about his life as though things were still normal, as though someone was in charge. The men on the hills were a minor inconvenience that would be resolved at any moment. Sanity would prevail. But then, one day, he could no longer fool himself. This wasn’t a temporary situation, a momentary glitch in the system, and no one was going to fix it.

“I worked at the bakery with a man who survived Jasenovac, and then Auschwitz,” Dragan says. The man had retired five or six years before there were men on the hills, but Dragan had still seen him every so often. They would meet for a coffee, or occasionally a glass of plum brandy. He had never spoken to Dragan of his life during the war until one day shortly before the fighting began, when he told him about being in the camps. He told him how, at Jasenovac, the guards had a competition to see who could kill the most people in one day. The winner, a guard named Petar Brzica, killed 1,360 people with a butcher’s knife. For winning this contest he was given some wine, a suckling pig and a gold watch. After the war he escaped to the United States, where to this day his name is on a list of resident war criminals. Many of those killed were the fathers and grandfathers of the men on the hills, and the people they are shooting at.

“The last time I saw him, he told me, ‘What is coming is worse than anything you can imagine,’” Dragan says. “He killed himself the day the war began.”

Emina shakes her head. “This cannot be as bad as what happened in those camps.”

Dragan considers this, wonders how relative suffering is. “No, it’s not. I don’t think he thought it would be. But I think he believed that what he and others suffered there meant something, that people had learned from it. But they haven’t.”

“Haven’t they?” Emina asks.

“Look around,” Dragan answers.

Though he’d intended it as a rhetorical statement, Emina does indeed look around. Prompted by her, Dragan does too, and he wonders if she sees the same things he sees. Does she see the grey that is everywhere? Does she see the mangled buildings, the wreckage in the streets, the people grown thin and tired, slinking along like frightened animals? She must. How could she not?

He doesn’t know why she sought him out, why she didn’t just walk by him and pretend he wasn’t there. There was no need for this. He didn’t need to see how much the war had taken from her, or from him.

“One of the things about the war,” she says, “is that I’ve been down a lot of streets I’d never been on before. It has changed my geography.”

Dragan nods. He has noticed the same thing, found it curious to learn how much of the city he’s lived in his whole life was a block or two outside his experience, how a shell here and a sniper there have altered which streets are familiar and which are only vaguely known.

“There’s a street near my house that, before the war, I never walked down,” Emina continues. “But with the sniper at the bottom of the street I had to go the long way around, so I found myself in this new street.

“There was a house there with a huge cherry tree in the yard, full of ripe fruit. An old woman was picking the
cherries. She must have had fifteen or twenty kilograms of fruit picked, and there was still more on the tree.

“I went up to her, mostly because I had never seen a tree like that in Sarajevo, had no idea these cherries grew here.

“‘That’s a beautiful tree,’ I said to her, and she told me her mother had planted it when she was a girl, and that it had always given good fruit. She was picking the fruit for her grandchildren, but was a little worried, because you can’t give children only sweet things. I suggested she sell some of the cherries, and she told me that perhaps she would.

“By coincidence, a few days later Jovan brought home some salt he’d got from someone, a huge five-kilogram bag. It was far more than we needed or could ever use. I thought of the woman, and when I went by I took her a kilogram.”

Emina’s face is relaxed, and her voice is soft. Dragan isn’t really sure what the point of her story is, but he’s happy that she is telling him.

“The woman was beside herself. I’ve never seen anyone smile so much. She actually hugged me. Over a kilogram of salt. As I was leaving, she gave me two big pails full of cherries. A ridiculous amount. I said, ‘I can’t possibly eat all these. I don’t have any children, it’s just me and my husband.’ But she insisted. ‘Give them away,’ she said. ‘Do whatever you like with them. I have
more than I need.’ So I gave them to our neighbours, small baskets to ten different families.”

“You were good to give her the salt,” Dragan says, and he means it.

“I didn’t need it. She didn’t have to give me the cherries, either.” Emina shrugs. “Isn’t that how we’re supposed to behave? Isn’t that how we used to be?”

“I don’t know,” Dragan says. “I can’t remember if we were like that, or just think we were. It seems impossible to remember what things were like.” And he suspects this is what the men on the hills want most. They would, of course, like to kill them all but, if they can’t, they would like to make them forget how they used to be, how civilized people act. He wonders how long it will take before they succeed.

As long as he stands here waiting to cross, he knows, they’re winning. It’s time his day, his life, moved through this intersection and towards whatever end awaits him.

“I think I’ll cross now,” he says to Emina.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll follow after you.”

Dragan moves towards the intersection. His stomach hurts. When he’s one step away from being out in the open he takes a deep breath and runs. He tries to keep his head low, but after three steps he feels his back begin to ache and he straightens up. His lungs are raw, his legs like rubber. He can’t believe he isn’t yet even a quarter of the way across. He has never felt so old.

He feels the shot an instant before he hears it. There is a sharp zip, a rush of air as a bullet snaps past his left ear, then the harsh blast of a gun. For an instant he wonders if he’s been shot. He knows that he’d be dead if he was. He heard the bullet, and that means the sniper missed. He’s surprised, confused and frightened. It’s not clear to him what he should do. For no more than two seconds he stands motionless, frozen. It seems like millennia.

Then he runs, back the way he came. He doesn’t feel his lungs or his legs or his stomach. He becomes automatic, an animal, and he flees. His body is braced for the sniper’s next shot, the one that will finish him. The closer he gets to safety, the more he expects it. He can see Emina standing behind the boxcar. Her mouth hangs open, her face contorted, and he thinks he hears her calling his name.

His shoulder slams into metal, and his legs give out. Emina grabs his arm as he tries not to fall, and the world around him blurs. People are asking him if he’s okay, and he thinks he is, but he can’t answer them. This is the first time Dragan has ever been shot at. He’s been in places where there has been shooting, and he’s been in areas where shells have fallen, but no one has ever marked him specifically for death before. A part of him can’t believe it’s happened, and a part can’t believe he’s survived.

Slowly he recovers his senses. He’s still out of breath, panting like a dog, but he finds himself able to speak. When Emina asks him, for at least the tenth time, “Are you hurt?” he’s able to answer her.

“I told you he wasn’t a very good shot,” he says.

Emina looks at him, unsure. Something in him, he wishes he knew what, seems to reassure her. Her face relaxes, and her hand rubs his back. “Sarajevo roulette,” she says. “So much more complicated than Russian.”

He laughs, not because it’s funny but because it’s true, and he stands there, Emina’s hand on his back, glad for the first time in a long while to be alive.

Arrow

S
HE DRESSES IN SILENCE, PICKS UP HER RIFLE AND
closes the door to the apartment. Her footsteps echo in the stairwell despite her efforts at stealth. It’s a quirk of the building’s design, she supposes, and considers whether an inability to muffle sound would be described as a positive or a negative acoustic quality. She decides it all depends on what you want out of a staircase. There are advantages to being able to hear who’s in the hallway.

The sun has been up for half an hour, but the streets are mostly deserted. She encounters a few people as she moves down the hill and into the old town, but she doesn’t make eye contact with them. She passes the
remnants of a shop that once sold the best ice cream, and she remembers being a small girl with her grandmother on this street. She asked her grandmother to stop, in the pleading voice of a child used to getting her way, even though she’d just had some ice cream not an hour earlier. When her grandmother said no, Arrow let go of her hand and refused to continue. Her grandmother knelt down, took Arrow’s face in her hands and kissed her on the forehead.

“There is more to life than ice cream,” she said.

Arrow wonders, as this memory fades, what she would give up for a scoop of that ice cream today. All the money she has? Certainly. Her rifle? Maybe. The one remaining photograph of her grandmother? She shakes her head and increases her pace, denying her mind a chance to answer.

This is her favourite time of day. It’s nearly always quiet. Even the war stops for a rest, if only a short one. The absence of shelling is almost like music, and she imagines if she closed her eyes she could convince herself that she was walking through the streets of Sarajevo as it used to be. Almost. She knows that in the city of her memory she wasn’t hungry, and she wasn’t bruised, and her shoulder didn’t bear the weight of a gun. In the city of her memory there were always people out at this time of morning, preparing for the day to come. They wouldn’t be shut inside like invalids, exhausted from
another night of wondering if a shell was about to land on their house.

She has arrived at her destination. She stands where she stood the day before, her back against the same wall, and takes in the street. Paving stones that withstood the feet of generations have been split open. There’s no glass left in the windows. Some of them are black-eyed, covered in plastic, while others are empty, gaps like absent teeth in an old man’s mouth. The street has been assaulted.

Arrow crosses and sits in the spot where the mortar landed, the spot where, later today, the cellist will sit. She knows that twenty-two people died here and a multitude were injured, will not walk or see or touch again. Because they tried to buy bread. A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe there will be some bread to buy. Of all the places to go, you come here. Of all the days to come, a particular one chooses you. At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.

She reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. It’s either blown up or removed to prevent it from becoming a
lethal projectile when it inevitably is blown up. One pane at a time, the windows through which people see the world are vanishing.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

She thinks of this in the context of pulling the trigger and ending a life. Before she ever killed, she had assumed this would put her life at a clear crossroads. She would behave in a way that demarcated the sort of person she had become. She expected to feel altered somehow from the person she was, or hoped to be. But that wasn’t the case. It was the easiest thing in the world to pull the trigger, a non-event. Everything that came before, all the small things that somehow added up without her ever noticing, made the act of killing an afterthought. This is what makes her a weapon. A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.

The cellist confuses her. She doesn’t know what he hopes to achieve with his playing. He can’t believe he will stop the war. He can’t believe he will save lives. Perhaps he has gone insane, but she doesn’t think so.
She’s seen the faces of those who have cracked, seen them walk into the street without a care for the danger. She’s seen them die, or survive, and to them it doesn’t appear to register as different. The cellist doesn’t strike her as a man who has lost his will to live. He appears to care about the quality of his life. She can’t tell what he believes, and it bothers her that she can’t say exactly what it is or whether she wants to believe it too. She knows it involves motion. Whatever the cellist is doing, he isn’t sitting in a street waiting for something to happen. He is, it seems to her, increasing the speed of things. Whatever happens will come sooner because of him.