His feet don’t respond to his mind’s urgings. He can’t run. At a leisurely pace his body carries him across the road, past where Emina was shot, towards the other side. He could be walking down any street in the world. To a casual observer he’s just an old man out for a stroll.
This is anything but the case. Dragan is terrified, has never been so afraid. But he can’t force himself to move any faster. After a while he stops trying. He keeps his eyes on the safe area he’s heading towards, and he tries not to think about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other.
He begins to understand why he isn’t running. If he doesn’t run, then he’s alive again. The Sarajevo he wants to live in is alive again. If he runs, then it won’t matter how many bodies lie in the streets. Perhaps the people watching him will think he’s snapped, that he’s gone catatonic and doesn’t care anymore whether he lives or dies. They’d be wrong. He cares now more than ever.
He’s been asleep since the war began. He knows this now. In defending himself from death he lost his grip on life. He thinks of Emina, risking her life to deliver expired pills to someone she’s never met. Of the young man who ran into the street to save her when she was shot. Of the cellist who plays for those killed in a mortar attack. He could run now, but he doesn’t.
He waits for gunfire, for the bullet that will hit him. But it never comes. He’s both surprised and not surprised. There’s just never any way to tell. It doesn’t matter. If it comes, it will come. If it doesn’t, he will be one of the lucky ones.
Dragan reaches the opposite side of the road. It hasn’t taken him long at all, but it seems a good portion of his life has gone by. It’s a good thing the cameraman has gone. He knows he’s created horrible television. An old man walking across a street, with nothing happening. Hardly news.
He walks west, towards the bakery. He should be there in ten more minutes. But then his hand feels a small plastic pill bottle and a scrap of paper with an address in his pocket, and he knows he’ll be a little late. Still, no more than a half-hour. He’ll get his bread, and then he’ll come back this way, whether the sniper’s working or not. On his way home he’ll make a small detour to the street just south of the market and wait for four o’clock, so he can tell Emina what happened on the last day the cellist played.
Dragan smiles as he passes by an elderly man. The man doesn’t meet his gaze, keeps his eyes on the ground.
“Good afternoon,” Dragan says, his voice bright.
The man looks up. He seems surprised.
“Good afternoon,” Dragan repeats.
The man nods, smiles, and wishes him the same.
Arrow
ARROW BLINKS. SHE HAS BEEN WAITING FOR A LONG time. She slept well, didn’t wake even once during the night. There’s one sound she’s been listening for, and it’s here. Footsteps echo in the hall outside her door, heavy boots coming up the stairs. They’re making an effort to be quiet, but the stairwell isn’t helping, its acoustics unaccommodating to the aims of men requiring stealth. Arrow opens her eyes. It’s still early in the morning, not quite seven o’clock.
It’s been ten days since she walked away from Hasan on the fourteenth floor of the Parliament Building, ten days since she deserted Edin Karaman’s unit of murderers. This is the first night she’s slept in her apartment since then, and already they’ve found her. She’s a little surprised. She didn’t imagine they’d be so efficient.
Her father’s gun is on the bedside table beside her. It’s loaded and ready, but her hand stays at her side, under her pile of blankets. She wonders what the weather will be like today. Yesterday it seemed it might rain, but there’s never any way to tell what will happen the next day until it comes. She hopes it rains. The city could use the water.
They’ve been hunting her for ten days now, and they have found her because she has allowed them to. They knew where she was all along, knew she was in one of the buildings above the cellist, but they couldn’t find her, no matter how many times they looked. Twice she had Edin Karaman’s head in her sights, but she never pulled the trigger. She hasn’t fired her rifle since killing the sniper the men on the hills sent for the cellist. But she would have, if necessary, and she believes her presence kept him alive.
He played for twenty-two days, just as he said he would. Every day at four o’clock in the afternoon, regardless of how much fighting was going on around him. Some days he had an audience. Other days there was so much shelling that no one in their right mind would linger in the street. It didn’t appear to make any difference to him. He always played exactly the same way.
The only variation in his routine was on the last day. She lay concealed in her hiding spot, invisible. She felt him enter the street, but before he began to play she knew no one was going to shoot him. The men on the hills had given up. Her hands relaxed and her finger fell from the trigger. As the cellist began to play she looked down at the street. It was full of people. No one moved. They all stood motionless, and though it was clear to her that they were listening intently, it also seemed as though they weren’t entirely there.
Arrow let the slow pulse of the vibrating strings flood into her. She felt the lament raise a lump in her throat, fought back tears. She inhaled sharp and fast. Her eyes watered, and the notes ascended the scale. The men on the hills, the men in the city, herself, none of them had the right to do the things they’d done. It had never happened. It could not have happened. But she knew these notes. They had become a part of her. They told her that everything had happened exactly as she knew it had, and that nothing could be done about it. No grief or rage or noble act could undo it. But it could all have been stopped. It was possible. The men on the hills didn’t have to be murderers. The men in the city didn’t have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She didn’t have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.
Arrow closed her eyes, and when she opened them the music was over. In the street, the cellist sat on his stool for a very long time. He was crying. His head leaned forward and a few strands of inky hair fell across his brow. One hand moved to cover his face while the other cradled the body of the cello. After a while he stood up, and he walked over to the pile of flowers that had been steadily growing since the day the mortar fell. He looked at it for a while, and then dropped his bow into the pile. No one on the street moved. They held their breath, waiting for him to say something. But the cellist didn’t speak. There was nothing left for him to say. He turned, picked up his stool and went through the door to his apartment without looking back at the street. Slowly people began to move, and one by one they left the street to return to their lives.
The footsteps are at the top of the stairs now, just outside her door. Arrow looks again at the gun on her night table. If she were to use it, she knows exactly what would happen. The men on the other side of the door would die. Every one of them would die and she’d step over their bodies and out into the street. It would take only a few seconds. It would be the easiest thing in the world.
But she isn’t going to pick up the gun. It sits on the night table partly out of habit, and partly because she wants them to know that she was armed and could have fought back. She’s not sure they’ll notice this clue. It doesn’t matter. It matters only that she leaves it.
She wonders what her life might have been like if there had been no war, if the men on the hills hadn’t decided that they needed to be reviled, or that the answer to their aspirations of victimhood lay in guns and tanks and grenades. Maybe she’d have gotten married. Maybe she’d have gone on to graduate school, had a good job, lived in a nice apartment and gone to the theatre in the evenings with her friends. There could have been children. She likes children, or she used to. The possibilities were endless.
The possibilities now, however, are at an end. If she picks up the gun and kills the men on the other side of the door, s
he will become a fugitive. And sooner or later, she will either have to kill again or she will be caught. In the meantime, necessity will force her to hate her pursuers. And Arrow will not let that happen. Whether they are on the hills or in the city, no one will tell her who to hate.
After the cellist disappeared, Arrow went down to the street, not caring whether anyone saw her. She looked at the cobblestones, the shattered windows, the pile of flowers. She didn’t think of anything, couldn’t think of anything she hadn’t already gone over a thousand times. So she just stood there. The cellist wouldn’t be back tomorrow. There would be no more concerts in the street. She was disappointed it was over. Arrow leaned down and placed her rifle beside the cellist’s bow.
In a few seconds the door will open. At least four men, maybe more, will burst through and, as quickly as they can, they will fire as many bullets into her as possible. It won’t take long, only a few seconds, and afterwards they will feel sheepish at how nervous they were about the whole thing.
She hears one of them take a step back, knows he’s about to kick in the door. She closes her eyes, recalls the notes she heard only yesterday, a melody that is no longer there but feels very close. Her lips move, and a moment before the door splinters off its hinges she says, her voice strong and quiet, “My name is Alisa.”
Afterword
IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT THIS NOVEL IS NOT A historically accurate timeline of the Siege of Sarajevo. It is impossible for the events that take place in this book to have occurred in the order they do. For necessity’s sake I have compressed three years into under a month. I hope, however, that the spirit of the book is true.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on 27 May 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, several mortar shells struck a group of people waiting to buy bread behind the market on Vase Miskina. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded. For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailović, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honour of the dead. His actions inspired this novel, but I have not based the character of the cellist on the real Smailović, who was able to leave Sarajevo in December of 1993 and now lives in Northern Ireland.
The name Arrow comes from a Radio Denmark documentary entitled Sniper. A female sniper named Arrow (Strijela) was interviewed for the program, though very little information was given about her. I tried to locate her but failed. She may be dead. In any case the character of Arrow in this novel is my own invention.
The Siege of Sarajevo, the longest city siege in the history of modern warfare, stretched from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. The United Nations estimates that approximately ten thousand people were killed and fifty-six thousand wounded. An average of 329 shells hit the city each day, with a one-day high of 3,777 on 22 July 1993. In a city of roughly half a million people, ten thousand apartments were destroyed and a hundred thousand were damaged. Twenty-three percent of all buildings were seriously damaged, and a further 64 percent had some damage. As of October 2007, the leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, are still at large, despite having been charged in 1996 with war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dinko Mesković, Sana Mesković, Miroslav Nenadić and Olga Nesić-Nenadić in Vancouver and Alija Ramović in Sarajevo for the countless hours they spent telling me stories, showing me places and trying to teach me to think like a Sarajevan. There is much of them in this book, but any errors in fact or fiction are mine alone. Many thanks to Sanja Ramović for loaning me her father.
I would like to thank Henry Dunow for his zealous representation and overall excellentness. I believe Michael Heyward to be the greatest Australian ever to live. Thanks to Mandy Brett, Sarah McGrath, Ravi Mirchandani and Rosemary Shipton for their editorial advice and enthusiasm. To Diane Martin, my friend and editor, I owe a debt I will never be able to repay, but I will continue to try.
Anne Beilby, Nina Ber-Donkor, Sarah Castleton, Marita Dachsel, Louise Dennys, Lara Galloway, Angelika Glover, Anthony Goff, Nancy Lee, Jeff Moores, Emiko Morita, Adrienne Phillips, Sarah Stein, Timothy Taylor, John Vigna, Hal Wake, Terence Young and Patricia Young have each helped me make this book better. Friends and family have met my absence, irritation and distractedness with kindness and encouragement. The University of British Columbia Creative Writing Program and my colleagues there are irreplaceable. The Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio, University of Victoria Department of Writing and the Sage Hill Writing Experience have employed and enriched me. Thank you. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.
ALSO BY STEVEN GALLOWAY
Finnie Walsh
Ascension
Copyright © 2008 Steven Galloway
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo
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