The Cellist of Sarajevo

  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.”

  “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

  SHE 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.