The Cellist of Sarajevo (12 page)

He wonders how long he’s been here, waiting to cross. Perhaps three-quarters of an hour. Has this time waiting increased or decreased his chances of making it?

“Why did the Sarajevan cross the road?” he asks Emina.

She shakes her head, takes her hands out of her pockets and brushes her hair out of her face. “That’s a good question.”

“To get to the other side,” he answers. Emina groans, because it really is a bad joke. Dragan doesn’t care. He
hasn’t told a joke in months. It feels good, even if the joke is awful.

“I think,” she says, still half laughing, “it’s time for this Sarajevan to act like a chicken. If I go now, I might make it back in time to hear the cellist.”

Dragan stops laughing. She’s right. They’ve been here long enough. “I’ll go with you,” he says.

Emina nods, and they move towards the street, with her in front, Dragan following. When they’re almost at the end of the boxcar, at the spot where they will have to run, Dragan begins to lose his nerve. His hands sweat, and then his back and feet. He feels short of breath. He reaches out and places his hand on Emina’s shoulder, stopping her.

“I can’t yet,” he says. “I’m not ready.”

Emina nods. “Do you want me to wait with you?”

He does, but he doesn’t want to tell her this. “I’m okay,” he says. “I’m not in any special hurry.”

She looks at him, her face tense, and he wonders if she’s going to decide to stay with him despite his reassurances.

“Give Raza my love,” she says, leaning in and hugging him. She feels warm and substantial, much larger than when he hugged her only a short time ago. She has become real to him again. She is the person he once knew. Affected by the war, changed, but the woman he knew is still in there. She hasn’t been covered in the
grey that colours the streets. He wonders why he hasn’t seen this before, wonders how much else he hasn’t seen.

Two people are crossing from the other side, a man and a woman. The man is about halfway through the intersection, the woman just beginning. The woman’s hair is tied back with a black scarf, and the man wears a brown hat with a peak, a type of hat Dragan has never owned but has always thought looked good. It’s the sort of hat a detective might wear, he thinks.

Emina steps into the street. She begins to accelerate into a run, but it seems to Dragan that she slows down. The whole world has become muddled, sticky, like it’s underwater. The blue wool of Emina’s coat is a blur, and Dragan feels tired. He could sleep for days.

A young man comes up beside Dragan, gets ready to cross. He hesitates for only an instant, taking one deep breath and moving forward. As he steps into the street Emina is thrown to the side with a violent surge, and the sound of gunfire punches through silence. The man in the hat stops for an instant and then runs towards Dragan. The woman turns back, hoping to retreat the way she came. Emina lies still, not moving. Dragan can’t see where she’s been hit, if she’s alive or not.

Beside him the half-dozen or so people who are in the vicinity rush ahead, towards the edge of the boxcar, their eyes on the street. A few shout to those in the
sniper’s line of fire, yelling for them to run and other obvious ideas.

The young man moves forward towards Emina. He should be turning back, Dragan thinks. He’s going the wrong way. Then Dragan understands what he’s doing, and he wants to go with the man, to help him and see if Emina can be saved. But his feet don’t move. Around him everyone is alive with a frenzied energy, but he hasn’t stirred an inch.

The young man and the man in the hat reach Emina at the same time, just as the woman makes it to safety. Dragan sees people on the opposite side of the street rush to her, to see if she’s all right, though it’s clear she is. The young man bends down, puts his arms around Emina. The man in the hat keeps running, doesn’t stop. The young man looks up in disbelief as he goes by, shouts out to him for help. If he hears, the man in the hat gives no indication. Just as he’s about to reach the safety of the boxcar there’s another shot. The man’s hat flies off his head and lands at Dragan’s feet. Dragan stares down at the hat, which has landed upside down on the pavement. He can see from the label that it was made in Vienna. He looks ahead. The hat’s owner is lying on his stomach.

Around him, people realize that the sniper is able to fire far closer to the edge of the boxcar than they’d thought. They duck down, all of them except Dragan,
and he’s reminded of the way a flock of birds can turn in unison while in flight, as though programmed. Then a hand grabs at him. He understands he’s in danger, and gets down on the ground with the others. They move back, staying as low as they can, until they’re away from the street, about three metres from the man who no longer has a hat.

The young man has picked Emina up, and Dragan sees she’s alive. One of her arms hangs down, her sleeve soaked in blood, but her eyes are open and her good hand holds tight around the shoulder of her rescuer. A bullet strikes the pavement a few feet in front of them. The young man doesn’t react, continues undaunted, slow and awkward, and Dragan doesn’t think he’s going to make it.

As they pass the hatless man, who Dragan assumes is dead, a hand reaches up to them, weak and imploring. The hatless man is somehow still alive, though it seems he’s unable to move. The young man ignores him, keeps moving. Emina looks down at him, says nothing, and then looks away.

Dragan tries to count the seconds since the sniper last fired, tries to figure out how much time they have before the next bullet comes. He doesn’t know how long it’s been, however, and has no idea how long it will take for the sniper to aim and fire again.

Emina and the young man are two metres from him, and then one, and then they’re there. They tumble to
the ground behind him, and he hears Emina cry out. Dragan doesn’t turn around. He can’t look away from the street, where the hatless man is trying to crawl, a centimetre at a time, to safety. There’s an expanding smear of blood surrounding him, and although Dragan knows the street around him is full of noise, he doesn’t hear a sound. He counts under his breath, hears slow numbers tick in his own voice. When he gets to eight, the hatless man’s head bursts, the top of his skull evaporating in a fine red drizzle punctuated by the thunder-clap of a rifle echoing down the hill.

Dragan looks down and sees that the hat is in his hands. He doesn’t remember picking it up, has no idea why he’d do such a thing. He looks at the hat, runs his thumb along the brim, and then he leans down and sets it on the asphalt before turning to Emina.

Arrow

A
NIGHT SPENT DRIFTING BETWEEN SLEEP AND A REPLAY
of the day’s events leaves Arrow with little rest and no further insight into what happened. None of it seems to fit into any scenario she can invent. She’s absolutely certain that the sniper was there, and that he had a shot at the cellist. But otherwise nothing makes sense. This worries her. She’s beginning to think perhaps she has lost her way, perhaps she isn’t the weapon she was just a few days ago. She’s also forced to consider the likelihood that the sniper the men on the hills have sent is much better at his job than most. And maybe he has a plan that is beyond her reach.

It’s nearly nine in the morning, and again she sits in
the spot where the cellist will play. But something has changed. Where yesterday she sat with her back straight and her eyes alert to the street around her, today her shoulders sag and pull her spine into a curve. She stares at the ground in front of her feet.

She thinks about the funeral she attended last month. When her neighbour Slavko was killed by a sniper on his way back from collecting water, shot clean through the neck, they took him to the Koševo Stadium, now made into a burial ground. His wife thought he’d like to be buried near to where he’d enjoyed so many football matches.

Arrow doesn’t normally go to funerals. In the early days of the war she went to as many as she could, out of respect, but then she became numb to them, and the more she attended the less she felt, until the misery of death and the sorrow of those left alive made her angry. When she looked at the faces of the husbands and wives and mothers and sons left behind, she felt a rage build inside her, and she felt that rage directed especially at those at the funeral who appeared most bereaved. How could they possibly feel so much grief? How could they not have reached the point months and months ago at which a person simply can’t feel any more pain? And then, just as she was sure she was about to walk up to a weeping widower and snap his neck, she would recognize what she was doing and
thinking, and she would be ashamed. How had she become such a person? Then she would remember the men on the hills, and she would know that it was they who had done this. Later that day, or the next, she would kill as many of them as possible. But the process left her exhausted, and it became an expenditure of energy she could no longer afford. She didn’t need to go looking for reasons to send bullets into the hills.

But she had liked Slavko. He had retired just before the war from the city parks department, and he knew a lot about animals and birds. As they waited for the elevator, he often told her about interesting things he had seen. He was tall and thin and wore large glasses that made him look like a bug. As a young girl, Arrow had often thought of him as a giant grasshopper. Once, when she was kicking a ball in the street with some of the other children in the neighbourhood, the ball got away from them and Slavko, who was walking up the street, stopped it from going down the hill. He held it against the curb, looked at the group of them, and then, with a leg that was far too long, kicked it to her. She wasn’t the nearest child to him, and he certainly knew all of them. She knew that he had chosen her, and when the ball skipped past the other children in a straight line ending at her feet she felt a rush of pride. “Watch out for cars,” he said to the group of them, and as he walked by her he put his hand on her shoulder. “And have fun.”

So when his wife knocked on her door and asked her to come to Slavko’s funeral, a request that was unheard of for a bereaved widow to make, she could not refuse. “He always liked talking with you,” Ismira said. They never had any children themselves.

“Of course I’ll come,” Arrow said, and this seemed to make Ismira happy. The funeral was the next day, and as she stood in the converted football field with two dozen other people, she felt the familiar anger begin to build within her. She tried to think of something else, directing her attention away from the mourners. A row of newly dug graves led away from the hole they placed Slavko in. They gaped empty and expectant, like the mouths of baby birds. She knew that by the end of the week they’d all be full.

A fat man stood next to her. She’d never met him, but the presence of anyone who was overweight was remarkable in itself. Most people had lost ten or twenty kilograms since the siege began. She didn’t know how a person could remain fat when there was nothing to eat. Then she remembered that for some people, those with connections and privileges, plenty of food was available. She assumed that this man must be some sort of gangster, or perhaps a corrupt government official. She wondered what a person like that was doing at Slavko’s funeral. She didn’t think he’d travelled in those circles.

As she turned to get a better look at the fat man she
heard a familiar whistling and knew that a shell was headed for them. Others knew this as well, but there was nothing she could do for them. She saw immediately that there was no cover to be had. The only real protection possible was the open graves, and although her mind demanded she hurl herself into one she did not comply. She threw herself to the ground, and for the first time in months smelled sweet wet grass. A shell exploded behind her, not far away, and she heard the fat man beside her begin to cry. His sobs were drowned out by another shell striking, this one slightly farther away.

Arrow lay on her stomach until the shelling stopped. When she lifted her head everyone but herself and the fat man was gone. He was alive, shaking, and she couldn’t see any sign that he was hurt. At first she thought that everyone else was dead. She thought the men on the hills had invented some new weapon that could make people disappear. No unpleasant carnage for the world to see. No evidence whatsoever. It would be as if they had never even existed. Then she saw a head emerge from one of the graves, and then another, until people began to climb out of the open graves. She watched as some men helped Ismira and another woman out of Slavko’s grave.

The fat man sat up, tried to get to his feet, failed. He exhaled a long wheeze and looked at her.

“Why didn’t you go into a grave?” she asked him, surprised by how harsh her voice sounded.

His face relaxed a little. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get out,” he said. “If you think I’m big now, you should have seen me before.”

Arrow stood and helped the fat man to his feet. “How did you know Slavko?”

“I didn’t, really. We were waiting in line for water. He helped me when I dropped my canister.” The fat man looked at his feet. “Why didn’t you go in a grave?” he asked, raising his face to her.

She smiled. “I was worried you might land on top of me,” she said, and the man grinned back. Later, though, she knew the real reason. She would not let the men on the hills decide when she went below the ground. If she were to go underground it would be because she decided to or because they killed her. But she wasn’t going to do their work for them. She wasn’t going to live in a grave.

Arrow’s not sure why this memory has come to her now. She doesn’t see a connection with the day’s problem. She looks at the pile of decaying flowers at her feet and is reminded of the job she’s here to do.

She looks up at the window where she believes the sniper hides. It’s a perfect spot. Hitting the cellist from there would be no challenge at all. She looks to the west, to where her own hiding spot is, and she looks above her, where her trap is. All is as it should be. There’s no problem with her plan.

She gets to her feet and is about to turn west when her legs go stiff and her fingers begin to throb. She freezes, trying to figure out what has prompted this reaction in her. She breathes in deep and then she realizes that the sniper is watching her. She doesn’t know where he is, but she can feel his eyes on her. He could be in any window, or he could be one of ten people who are in view and appear to be engaged in legitimate affairs. It doesn’t matter, really, because she doesn’t have her rifle with her. Initially this causes her to panic, but then she thinks that not having the rifle may have saved her. To him, she’s just another person sitting in the street. He may assume she’s a relative of someone who died here, or another citizen come to pay her respects, or an admirer of the cellist. How would he know she’s the one who has been sent to kill him?