The Cellist of Sarajevo (7 page)

The cellist opens his eyes. The sadness she saw in his face is gone. She doesn’t know where it went. His arms rise, and his left hand grips the neck of the cello, his right guides the bow to its throat. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. When the first notes sound they are, to her, inaudible. Sound has vanished from the world.

She leans back into the wall. She’s no longer there. Her mother is lifting her up, spinning her around and
laughing. The warm tongue of a dog licks her arm. There’s a rush of air as a snowball flies past her face. She slips on someone else’s blood and lands on her side, a severed arm almost touching her nose. In a movie theatre, a boy she likes kisses her and puts his hand on her stomach. She exhales, and pulls the trigger.

Then sound returns to the world. She isn’t sure what has happened. She doesn’t know what a man playing a cello in the street at four in the afternoon has done to her. You will not cry, she tells herself, and she wills herself calm until after the cellist has finished, risen and returned to the building he came from. There will be no crack in her.

Nermin is looking at her.

“We need you to keep this man alive,” he says.

“I don’t understand.” She’s barely heard what he said and struggles to bring herself back into her situation.

Nermin removes his hat and wipes his sleeve across his brow. “He has said that he will do this for twenty-two days. This is the eighth. People see him. The world has seen him. We cannot allow him to be killed.”

“I can’t be responsible for him,” she says. She’s tired. She’s almost always tired, but she can’t remember the last time she acknowledged it, even to herself. An old woman shuffles past them, keeping close to the wall, and Arrow wonders which one of them is more exhausted.

Nermin shakes his head. “I’m not asking that of you. We require something slightly different.”

The place where the cellist sits, while vulnerable to shells, he says, isn’t within the direct line of fire for a sniper on the southern hills. But they have received information. It’s believed that the enemy will send a sniper into their part of the city to shoot him. And her job will be to stop that. It is, they admit, almost impossible. But, as Nermin reminds her, she has a certain talent for the impossible.

“Why don’t they just shell the street again?”

“It’s not about merely killing him. Shooting him is a statement.”

Arrow leans back against the wall and pictures the cellist lying in the street. She sees Nermin’s point. A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn’t.

“Look,” he says, “we have made you a deal, and I will continue to do my best to honour it. But things are changing on our side. If you can do this, we would both benefit.”

“I don’t kill to benefit myself, or you.”

“I know. I’m just not sure how much longer that will be a position you or I can afford to take.” Nermin leans in, kisses her on each cheek, then turns and walks away. For a while she stands, not moving, not thinking. She just wants things to be still. But then the shelling begins again, and so she forces her feet to move, pulls her coat tight around her shoulders and heads for home.

Dragan

I
T’S POSSIBLE THE SNIPER IS GONE.
A
T LEAST TEN
minutes have passed since he fired, and already several people have made it through the intersection without incident. Dragan moves closer to the edge of the street, contemplating crossing. He’s hungry, feels the emptiness of his stomach urge him across. The bakery is on the other side. Only two more especially dangerous crossings and he will have bread. But another part of him knows there’s no hurry. He’s not going to starve to death over a few extra minutes of waiting, whereas a lack of caution will get him killed quicker than anything.

He steps back a bit, turns to lean against the warm metal of the railcar shielding him from Grbavica and
the hills above, up to Vraca, the old war fort. He used to take his wife and son to Vraca for picnics in the summer, when they didn’t have time to go to the park at Ilidža or up Mount Trebević. From there you could see most of the city, a fact that has taken on a whole new significance in recent months.

On his right a woman approaches, and as she gets closer Dragan recognizes her. Her name is Emina. She’s a friend of his wife, about fifteen years younger than him. Dragan has always liked her, but he doesn’t much care for her husband, Jovan. Whenever they went out for supper, which they did regularly before the war, Dragan was stuck talking to Jovan, whose only apparent interest was politics, a subject Dragan has no patience for. After a while, he began to make excuses to get out of these dinners, until, shortly before the fighting broke out, the invitations stopped and his wife and Emina drifted out of contact.

It’s obvious to Dragan that Emina has seen him, is coming to speak to him, and he looks for somewhere to hide even though it’s pointless. There’s no way to prevent this interaction, short of running into the street, and although Dragan can barely bring himself to nod a polite hello to a stranger let alone talk to an old friend, he isn’t yet willing to risk his life to avoid a social exchange. This comforts him slightly, but he wonders if it’s possible that a day will come when he makes a different choice.

Hoping for a miracle, he stares down at his feet, attempting to appear deep in thought. Perhaps she will walk by him. It’s not impossible. It could be that she’ll walk right by him without seeing him and continue into the street, arriving safely on the other side without even knowing he was there. What he wants is to cross and get his loaf of bread as quickly as he can. He doesn’t want to encounter anyone.

“Dragan, is that you?” A hand touches his shoulder, and he realizes that his attempt to look as though he was deep in thought resulted in actual thinking. He smiles, finding this funny, and Emina smiles back.

“Hello, Emina,” he says, leaning in to kiss her on each cheek. She hugs him tight. She feels small beneath her blue wool coat. He remembers this coat. His wife once told him that she liked it, and he’d always meant to ask Emina where she got it, so he could buy one for Raza, but he never did.

“How are you? How is Raza? Where are you staying?”

He tells her as much as he can, tells her about how his wife and son left on one of the last buses out of Sarajevo, how their apartment was one of the first shelled and how he’s staying with his sister. He can’t tell her about how his wife and son left at night and when the bus pulled away he felt, somehow, that he would never see them again, even though they were going to be only a few hundred kilometres away, not even an
hour by plane. He can’t tell her about the night his apartment was shelled, how he hid in the cellar with his neighbours and waited for the building to come down on top of them, or how he arrived the next day at his sister’s, his brother-in-law answering the door and looking at him as if it were his fault his apartment was destroyed. He thinks that if he were to tell her all the things he can’t tell anyone, they would be standing there for days.

She looks at him, and he can see she knows there’s more to his story than he’s telling her, but she doesn’t push him. Everyone has more than they declare. He isn’t sure what to say next. Should he ask about Jovan? What if something’s happened to him, or he’s left her? At the very least she’ll be reminded that Dragan never really liked him, and that in itself will be awkward enough.

Emina isn’t moving, she’s just standing there, waiting for him to speak. Her hair is tied back, but a few brown strands have fallen across her face. She brushes them aside, tucking them behind her ear, and puts her hand back in her coat pocket. She seems smaller than Dragan remembered, not just thinner but shorter. He’s not sure how that is possible.

If only to break this awkward silence, he speaks. “How is Jovan?” he asks, afraid of the answer.

She shrugs. “He joined the army. I don’t see much of him.”

Dragan is surprised. Jovan didn’t strike him as the sort. He’d always pegged him as more of a talker than a fighter.

Emina hesitates, perhaps seeing his surprise. “Well, he’s more of a liaison for the government between the various branches of the army.” This makes much more sense. “I’m not really sure exactly what it is he does. All I know is that he’s gone almost all the time.”

Dragan nods, not sure what to say. “There’s a sniper covering this intersection. Or at least there was a few minutes ago. I’m waiting to see if he’s gone.”

“Did he get anyone?” Emina looks genuinely concerned. This strikes Dragan as odd. He isn’t indifferent to the deaths around him, but he can’t really say that he feels them so much that they would register on his face. He doesn’t think many other people do either, anymore.

“No,” he says. “He doesn’t look to be a very good shot.”

She appears to think about this. He hopes she doesn’t take it too seriously. He doesn’t know how good a shot the sniper is. All he knows is that he missed the last time he shot. There’s no way to tell how many other times he’s fired without missing.

“I think I’ll wait a bit. I’m not in any real hurry,” she says. She tells him she’s on her way to deliver some medicine to a woman a few blocks southwest of the bakery. Radio Sarajevo has organized a medical swap,
where people who have old prescriptions they aren’t using can give them to those who need various drugs that are no longer available. Each day they read out who needs what over the radio, and those who can help do. The woman she’s going to see has a heart condition and uses the same medication as Emina’s mother, who died about five years ago. Although the drugs are beyond their use-by date, they’re still better than nothing. “After all,” she says, “they’re just blood thinners. I don’t think they really expire.”

“No,” Dragan says. “You’re probably right.”

“It’s the same stuff as rat poison, and that doesn’t expire.”

“It is?”

“Well, there’s a little arsenic in it. Or I think there is. My mother used to joke about it.”

Dragan had met Emina’s mother once, a year before she died. She looked a lot like Emina, but her sense of humour ran darker than her daughter’s. It was apparent she didn’t think much of Jovan either. When he tried to steer the discussion towards politics, as he always did, she threw her hands up in the air. “You and your politics. Nothing good will happen because of politics.”

“Nothing good will happen without politics,” Jovan replied, shaking his head.

“Which one of them,” Emina said, “do you suppose is the optimist in the family?”

Dragan and his wife laughed, but the question perplexed him, and he wasn’t sure that Emina was joking.

“Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?” Emina’s mother asked, looking at Jovan, who appeared to have heard this before. A small hint of a smile cracked his lips. “A pessimist says, ‘Oh dear, things can’t possibly get any worse.’ And an optimist says, ‘Don’t be so sad. Things can always get worse.’”

When she died, Dragan didn’t go to the funeral. He can’t remember why now. It’s possible he wasn’t invited, but more likely he was and had made some excuse not to go.

“Do you remember Ismira Sidran?” Emina asks him.

He does. She was the director of a theatre company. They had done a production of
Hair
some years ago that was a big success. Dragan has seen several of her shows since then. She was a friend of Emina’s, and once he met her on the street, walking with Emina. She struck him as a loud, difficult woman, and he’d been irritated by her.

“This year is the twenty-five-year anniversary of the first performance of
Hair
on Broadway, and she was invited to bring her company to New York for a performance or a celebration or something.” The sun has come out from behind a cloud, and it’s warming up fast. Emina unclasps the top button on her coat.

“Did the government approve it?” Dragan is surprised. They’ve been very selective about who they let leave the city.

“Sure, to start with. I saw her, and she told me there were thirty-two people on the list. ‘Thirty-two!’ I said. ‘That’s so many people.’ But she said that it took that many to run the lights and the props and all that stuff, people you never see from the audience. So that seemed okay. But then I saw her a week or two later, and the list had another thirty names on it, and she said it still wasn’t complete.”

Dragan shakes his head. “It couldn’t possibly take that many people.”

“No, but that’s not the worst of it.” Emina undoes another button on her coat. “By the time the list was submitted, there were nearly two hundred people on it.”

“Did they let them go?”

“No. They knew they wouldn’t come back.”

It never used to be like this. Before the war, even when the country was a communist state, you could travel anywhere you wanted. There were only four countries in the world that you needed a visa to visit. Now, though, no one leaves without permission. “They should have kept it to just the first thirty-two,” Dragan says. “Then they could have got out.”

“Jovan says it wouldn’t have mattered. He says they would never have let any of them go.”

“Maybe. But maybe some of them could have gone. Just a few. Maybe they could have escaped all this.”

Emina looks up at the sky. “There’s no way to tell.”

“I would go if I could, I think.” He knows this is a dangerous thing to say. People resent those who manage to get out. They’re considered cowards, and although he suspects that anyone who’s still sane would wish to leave, very few people will admit it, even to themselves, and fewer still would ever say so out loud.

There are only two ways out now. Either you know someone with power, and you get a pass through the tunnel, or you have money. Other than that, you’re stuck. Those who had power or money when the war began have already left, and those who have power or money now have it because of the war, so have no incentive to leave.

Emina doesn’t appear shocked by his admission, though. “Why didn’t you leave with Raza?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t think that it would go on for this long. I wanted to protect our apartment, and I didn’t want to lose my job. Maybe I made a mistake.”