The Prison Book Club (15 page)

To set the scene, Carol distributed images of Smailovic´ playing his cello in the ruined city and of citizens crouching in fear. Then she played a recording of Albinoni's cello piece. The expression of grief in the music never failed to produce a hole in the centre of my chest, an unwept sob. The members fell silent to listen. For the first time, I detected a waltz rhythm in the pacing, like some wailing funeral dance. The strains seemed to evoke deep feelings among the inmates as well. Several men listened with their eyes closed, including Doc, who swung his finger as if conducting with a baton.

As the music came to a close, Carol said, with emotion constricting her voice: “He must have played his heart out—just played his heart out.”

Tom opened the discussion about the cellist with a spot-on insight. “The cellist is a secondary character,” he said. “Other than the one chapter specifically about him, we don't get his point of view.” I'd never considered that until he mentioned it. Why
does
Galloway drop the cellist's point of view after the first chapter? Tom made the point that the cellist played the adagio partly to erase the war in his own mind. As he said this, I looked again at his fingers and realized that only the nails of his thumbs and first fingers were pointy. They were long enough to be weapons and inmates have been known to file their nails for that purpose. Tom was a lot to take in—an intellect with a hint of the macabre.

“I think the cellist responded to a major act of inhumanity by trying to bring humanity back for other people,” said Dallas.

“Yes,” said Carol and I simultaneously.

The theme of humanity caught on. We talked about another character who seemed already dead—a sour, ungrateful elderly woman who'd lost sight of what Sarajevo had once been.

“She's the focal point for other people analyzing their own humanity,” said Tom.

But no one was willing to agree with Carol that Dragan had evolved from looking after his own skin to helping others as he crossed sniper-patrolled streets to get to work at the bakery. When the book club members looked doubtful, Carol reminded them that Dragan had risked his life to drag a corpse from the road before a cameraman could film it. I flipped to the page in my book to jog my memory and found that he was inspired by the selflessness of a female friend who was hit by sniper fire while trying to bring medicine to her mother. Carol made the case that Dragan was trying to keep alive his memory of Sarajevo before the war, as a place of kindness.

“I have to ultimately disagree with that so strongly,” replied Tom. “I don't believe Dragan made a
choice
to become a
brave
person. He was numb.” Nor did he agree with her argument that the characters viewed Sarajevo as a kinder place before the war. He dug in his heels, which prevented Carol from proceeding in her usual vein: inviting the men to see the value of helping others in their own lives.

“Anyone else on this point?” she said, searching faces.

Finally Richard, a middle-aged inmate with thick-lensed black plastic glasses and a madras plaid shirt, who'd earlier said that reading had kept him sane during his many years in prison, introduced a new angle on the humanity question. He asked if anyone had seen the documentary on PBS the previous night about the atrocities committed against women during the siege and about the war crimes tribunals. “I wanted to shout out to the book club members!” he said. “I thought it was interesting the way Galloway's novel totally avoided the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the region. The documentary showed how they began as neighbours and friends, even intermarrying. But within weeks they were mortal enemies.” I studied Richard's face, intrigued that he was watching PBS on his TV, because I understood that at Collins Bay, reality TV and movie channels were preferred viewing.

Dallas suggested to Richard that the novelist couldn't have “painted” religion into the novel because it would have made the story “too political.” “He's avoiding that and painting it in human terms,” he said. Several of the guys around the table nodded and indicated to Graham that they'd like to speak. He acknowledged them and made a note.

Graham said he hadn't seen the PBS documentary but he'd heard that the leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadzic´ and Ratko Mladic´, who were still at large according to Galloway's afterword, had been arrested since the novel was published. “Interestingly enough, both of them have been caught now,” he said.

To give the book club members a bit of background on the confusing geopolitics of the siege, Graham had asked Earl to prepare some material on the subject because he had once been a member of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cyprus. But when Earl had to leave during the adagio, perhaps to meet a visitor, Graham improvised the history lesson himself. “When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence, the Serbs within Bosnia and Herzegovina, if I'm remembering correctly, rose up, with a little backing from their Serb friends next door, and decided that they didn't want to separate,” said Graham. “And my understanding is they surrounded the city of Sarajevo and basically they shelled the city from the outskirts, from the hills. It went on for four years.They basically devastated the city. And then, if I remember correctly, they split the state in half didn't they, as part of the settlement?”

“Graham, that's great!” said Carol, confessing that she had never been able to fully sort out the roots of the conflict. “And it was the longest siege in modern history, surpassing the sieges of both Stalingrad and Leningrad.”

Graham gave the floor to Richard again. “I wrote something down that Dragan, the baker, said, that I thought was the essence of the book,” said Richard. It was on page 237 of the novel. He read it aloud, a passage that talked about how the city wouldn't die until its occupants were complacent with the idea of death.

I reflected on siege mentality and how it could change people. It could make you numb, it could make you heartless, or it could make you selfless. It is all about how we choose to live our lives. Richard's passage was an arresting moment. No one said it directly, but Sarajevo was a prison for those four years. How central that thought must be to the men with long prison terms—not letting the situation define you, not being branded a bad guy forever but someone who was paying his “debt to society” and could redefine himself.

“The heart of the novel,” I said.

What makes
The Cellist of Sarajevo
so magnetic for book clubs is its many unresolved questions. Even though this was my second time reading the book, I was still confused about why Arrow, the counter-sniper protagonist, would kill the sniper not when he is about to assassinate the cellist, but rather when he is leaning back and smiling, eyes closed, listening to the music. She kills him at a moment when he is expressing his own humanity. Given Galloway's subtle wording, I wasn't even sure if it was Arrow who shot him. Carol was equally unsure. We needed other readers to help us sort it out.

Likewise, we needed a good book club debate to sort out who is good and who is bad toward the end of the novel. The men applauded Arrow for refusing to carry out instructions from her new handlers, who want her to randomly assassinate innocent civilians. As Graham said, she reclaimed her humanity in doing so. But even the inmates found it hard to fathom why Arrow, so skilled and well armed, allows those same operatives who had killed her previous handler to target her in the final scene. Was she, as Richard's passage had said, content to accept death and weary of the fight?

“How about Arrow?” asked Carol. “What did everyone think of her?”

Bookman, the inmate librarian, said, “Arrow realized that even the people up on the hill are stuck in her situation. A mirror image.”

“I like that comparison,” said Phoebe, whose sentences ended with the tonal uptick characteristic of some Canadian accents. “Arrow is constantly comparing herself to the people on the hills and trying to differentiate between the people defending the city and the people attacking the city. And more often than not, some of the characters come to realize that they're a hell of a lot more similar to each other than they would like to think.”

This had to resonate with the men around the table: how war must blur the true goodness or evil of those who must survive in it and how prison does the same. Some of the men thought Arrow was a coward for her ultimate sacrifice at the end of the book. Some of them thought it was an act of goodness. It struck me that in that prison meeting room, each individual around the table had the capacity to recognize goodness. Whatever part of them had been bad was not apparent in our brief time together. It was not until later that that part was revealed to me, when I learned about some of their crimes.

Bookman wanted to explore the theme of sacrifice. “Each of the characters sacrificed something,” he said. “Kenan, the one with the family, sacrificed his safety every couple of days to get water for his family and others. Arrow sacrificed her life to avoid being someone she didn't want to become.”

“So do you think that's part of the theme of humanity,” Carol ventured again, trying to resurrect her point, “that when we are truly human, we put ourselves out for the other?”

Frank responded: “I thought at the end Arrow just got tired of everything. She had all these options and she said, what for? Goodbye. That's the sense I got.”

Then Donna pointed to the clock and the guys realized they had to rush to Count, so Graham took the floor. “The next meeting will be the second Wednesday of the month,” he said, his voice easily heard over the after-meeting chatter. The book club members grabbed their copies of Jeannette Walls's memoir,
The Glass Castle
. They were all in a hurry, but still stopped to shake our hands and thank us on the way out. Carol told them that she was sorry she wouldn't be able to personally attend the Beaver Creek Book Club each month, given how interesting their comments had been.

Frank and Graham's first book club meeting had been a big success. Frank had found strong contributors and Graham had ensured that everyone who wanted to speak got heard. It was easy to imagine him using those same skills in a meeting of his street crew before his incarceration, or in a legitimate business meeting that might take place post-incarceration.

Frank and Graham asked us to stay until they got back from Count. When they returned, slightly breathless, Graham said “the guys” were asking him if it would be possible to get together in smaller groups first to discuss some of the issues, before meeting in the larger combined group. The book group was a hit! We congratulated them. As we and the other facilitators left the building, Frank shyly gave me a sheaf of typed papers—his journal about his reading in prison. He preferred to type rather than to write in the journal I'd given him.

On the drive back to the city in Carol's car, she and I talked about Frank's progress in his real estate correspondence course, Carol's longing for greater closeness with her siblings, what we had cooked for Thanksgiving and why there were lifers in a minimum-security prison. Roughly a quarter of the inmates at Beaver Creek were serving life sentences and, after a long time behind bars meeting milestones in their correctional programs, they each had earned the right to be there, even if they might spend years in minimum. I asked her why she thought the book club members resisted broadening the discussion to humanity and kindness in their own lives. Had Donna's presence made them guarded? Was it like Sarajevo and they had to self-preserve in hostile circumstances?

It would take them a while to trust, she said. She had seen it with every book club.

I reflected silently on whether some of the men had difficulty talking about kindness in the context of awareness of their own past crimes, when kindness had failed them. I opened a Google screen on my iPhone, then closed it, then opened it again. Sometimes I wasn't sure if I wanted to know what each inmate had done. I keyed in Doc's name. There was a hit. A man who shared the same name, a family physician. I slipped the phone back into my purse.

Carol was getting tired, so I took the wheel. Rain was sheeting down and it was dark. I had to focus on the driving. Not being familiar with her car's dashboard, and being fatally inattentive to gas gauges generally, I paid no attention to the fuel level. Just ten blocks shy of my house, at a busy city intersection, we ran out of gas. Carol insisted that I leave her there because roadside assistance was on the way and it was a safe area. I did so reluctantly, but felt guilty abandoning her. In my taxi ride home, I felt like Dragan early in the novel, looking out for himself.

9

I'M INSTITUTIONALIZED, BRO

B
ACK AT COLLINS BAY, the temperatures were dipping to five degrees Celsius overnight by early October and Ben was keeping the window of his cell closed. “Right now I am wrapped in three blankets and a sheet when I go to bed,” he told his journal.

The previous month had brought plenty of ups and downs for Ben. When I read his journal, it progressed like a novel—full of cliffhangers and hopes. It made me want to read on, to find out what would happen next. “I been trying to get into the welding program and I just received a slip for an interview,” he wrote one day in September. “This would be a positive step for me because it would be a trade I could do when I get out, and move on with my life.” Twelve days later, this simple entry: “I found out yesterday that I didn't get in.” He expressed no anger even though it was his last chance to get a trade before leaving Collins Bay. He was used to not getting a break.

That night he dreamt about being dependent. “I'm so used to doing things myself that the thought of depending on someone or others frightens me,” he confided to his journal. “At times I worry how I'm going to adjust when I get out. Yeah, I got my diploma, but I don't want to be stuck in a basic 9–5 job paying me minimum wage.” He hadn't given up hope, though. Within a few days, he was musing about jobs in the renewable-energy sector and his support for the party in the upcoming provincial election that was promising those jobs. And by the end of that month's writing, he had decided to pursue a job in trucking.