The Cellist of Sarajevo (3 page)

She smiles. Kenan grins back. He’s glad that he can still make her smile. “No,” she says. “But I’ll take a hat if you have time.”

“Of course,” he says. “I assume you would like mink?”

The children are awake now, and she kisses him quick on the cheek before going to check on them. “You should go, before you see them and lose an hour with your jokes.”

As the door to the apartment closes behind him he presses his back to it and slides to the ground. His legs are heavy, his hands cold. He doesn’t want to go. What he wants is to go back inside, crawl into bed and sleep until this war is over. He wants to take his younger daughter to a carnival. He wants to sit up, anxious, waiting for his older daughter to return from a movie with a boy he doesn’t really like. He wants his son, the middle child, only ten years old, to think about anything other than how long it will be before he can join the army and fight.

Muffled sounds seep out of the apartment, and he worries that one of the children might come to the door. They must not see him like this. They must not know how afraid he is, how useless he is, how powerless he has become. If he doesn’t return home today he doesn’t want them to remember him sitting on the landing, shaking like a wet and frightened dog.

He pushes himself to his feet and picks up the water containers. He’s tied them together by the handles with a piece of rope, and although bulky they’re light and easy enough to carry while empty. Later, when they’re full, it will be harder, but he’ll deal with that then. Kenan knows he’s getting progressively weaker, like almost everyone else in the city, and wonders if the day will come when he won’t be able to carry back enough water for his family. What then? Will he have to take his son along on the trip, as many others do? He doesn’t want to do that. If he is killed he doesn’t want anyone in his family to witness it, as much as he would like their faces to be the last thing he sees. And if both he and his son were killed he knows his wife would never recover. If he thinks about what might happen if his son alone died he’ll be back down on the ground.

He descends the flight of stairs that leads to the ground floor and knocks on the door to Mrs. Ristovski’s apartment. Hearing no sounds of movement inside, he knocks again with more force. He hears a shuffling and waits for the door to open.

Mrs. Ristovski has lived in this building nearly her whole life, or so she says. Given that she’s well into her seventies and it was built shortly after the Second World War, Kenan knows that this can’t be true, but he isn’t inclined to argue. Mrs. Ristovski believes what she believes, and no mere facts will convince her otherwise.

When Kenan and his wife first moved into the building their older daughter had just been born. Mrs. Ristovski complained constantly about the child’s crying, and as new parents they listened to her criticisms and advice, deferring to the wisdom of someone older and more experienced. After a while, however, they decided that it wasn’t the crying that was bothering her. Kenan began to suspect that the baby had become a focal point for all her discontent. Though annoyed by her repeated intrusions into their lives, Kenan tolerated Mrs. Ristovski, often above his wife’s objections. There was something about her ferocity that he admired, even if he didn’t quite like it.

After the war started, Mrs. Ristovski knocked on their door and, when Kenan opened it, pushed her way past him. His wife was out, but Mrs. Ristovski didn’t appear to notice. She sat on the sofa in the front room while he made coffee. He put the coffee on a silver tray and placed it on the low table in front of her, but she didn’t touch it.

“Do you have any brandy?” she asked, straightening the tray.

“Of course,” he said. He poured each of them a generous measure.

Mrs. Ristovski downed her glass in one swallow. Kenan watched the colour rise in her corrugated neck, then fade away.

“Well,” she said, “this will be the end of me.”

“What will?” he asked, thinking she was referring to the brandy.

“This war.” She looked him in the eye. He did his best not to stare at the large mole on the side of her face, tried not to wonder if it was getting bigger. She shook her head. “You’ve never lived through a war. You have no idea what it will be like.”

“It won’t last long,” he said. “The rest of Europe will do something to stop it from escalating.”

She snorted. “That won’t matter for me. I’m too old to do the things one must do in wartime to survive.”

Kenan wasn’t sure what she meant. He knew that she had been married just before the last war and that her husband was killed during the initial days of the German invasion. “It might not be that bad,” he said, regretting it immediately, knowing it wasn’t true.

“You have no idea,” she repeated.

“Well,” he said, “I will help you. Everyone in the building will help each other. You’ll see.”

Mrs. Ristovski picked up her coffee and took a sip. She didn’t look at Kenan, refusing to acknowledge his smile. “We’ll see,” she said.

A few weeks later, after the men on the hills shut off the city’s water supply, she showed up at his door as he was preparing to embark on his first trip to the brewery. In her hands were two plastic bottles. She pushed them
at him. “A promise is a promise,” she said. Then she turned and went back to her apartment, leaving a dumbfounded Kenan standing in the doorway. But he could not refuse her. No person he would want to be would do that.

The door to Mrs. Ristovski’s apartment opens a crack, just enough for her to see out. “What? It’s early.”

“I’m going for water.” He isn’t going to play her games. It’s common knowledge that she rises with the sun. She’s likely been up for an hour or two, and Kenan can recall at least a half-dozen instances in recent months when she’s knocked on his door earlier than this.

The door closes. “Mrs. Ristovski? I’m not going again for at least a few days.”

He hears her banging around inside, muttering curses, and then the door opens again, wider this time. She thrusts her two water bottles at him, shaking them when he is slow to take them from her.

Kenan looks at the bottles. “These don’t have handles.” They’re the kind that soft drinks come in, holding two litres each. He’s been asking her for weeks to switch to some with handles, so that he can tie them to his own containers. He’s even offered to give her two of his own, his backups.

“This is how much water I need. If I switch to different ones I might not get enough.”

“The other ones are larger.” He holds them out to her, but she doesn’t take them.

“You’re not a human measuring cup,” she says as she closes the door.

Kenan stands in the foyer and listens to the sound of the door echo up the stairwell. He thinks about leaving her bottles outside her door, of just giving up on her. Surely she wouldn’t die if she went a few days without water. It might teach her a lesson. It’s a pleasing but pointless thought. As much as he might regret it, she was right, he made her a promise. He looks at the plastic bottles in his hands, shakes his head, pushes open the door to his building and steps out into the street.

Dragan

T
HERE IS NO WAY TO TELL WHICH VERSION OF A LIE IS
the truth. Now, after all that has happened, Dragan knows that the Sarajevo he remembers, the city he grew up in and was proud of and happy with, likely never existed. If he looks around him, it’s hard to see what once was, or maybe was. More and more it seems like there has never been anything here but the men on the hills with guns and bombs. Somehow that doesn’t seem right either, yet these are the only two options.

This is what Dragan remembers of Sarajevo. Steep mountains receded into a valley. On the flat of the valley, the Miljacka River cut the city in half lengthwise,
from tip to tail. On the left bank, the southern hills led up to Mount Trebević, where some of the alpine events for the 1984 Winter Olympics were held. If you went west you would see the neighbourhoods of Stari Grad, Grbavica, Novi Grad, Mojmilo, Dobrinja and, finally, Ilidža, where there was a park filled with trees, streams, and a pond where swans lived in what looked like a dog’s house. You would pass by the Academy of Fine Arts, the sporting and trade complex of Skenderija, the Grbavica football stadium, the Palma pastry shop, the offices of the newspaper
Oslobo denje,
the airport and the Butmir settlement, where Neolithic humans lived five thousand years ago.

If you then went north, across the river, and headed back the way you came, along the right bank to the east, you would go through neighbourhoods like Halilovići, Novo Sarajevo, Marindvor, Koševo, Bjelave and Baščaršija. You could have ridden the streetcar, which ran down the middle of the main street until it reached the old part of the city. There it formed a loop, west along the river, past the Parliament Building, the Sarajevo Canton building, the post office, the theatre, the university, and then, at the old town hall, where the library was housed, curved up and around, back past the Markale marketplace and Veliki Park until it reunited with the main line. Here you could go north, to Koševo Stadium, where the opening and closing
ceremonies of the Olympic Games were held, or to the hospital, which was just across the street.

Sarajevo was a great city for walking. It was impossible to get lost. If you didn’t know where you were, you just went downhill until you hit the river, and from there it would all be obvious. If you got tired you could sit in a café and have a coffee, or, if you were hungry, stop at a small restaurant for a meat pie. People were happy. Life was good. This is, at least, how Dragan remembers it. It could be, he thinks, that it is all a figment of his imagination. Now, he knows, you can’t walk from one end of the city to the other. Grbavica is entirely controlled by the men on the hills, and even to go near it would be suicide. The same is true of Ilidža. Dobrinja, though it has not fallen, is often cut off from the rest of the city, and is, like most places, extraordinarily dangerous. Skenderija is a smouldering ruin. So are the post office, the Parliament and Canton buildings,
Oslobo denje
and the library. Koševo Stadium has burned to the ground, and its fields are being used to bury the dead. The trains don’t run any more. The streets are full of debris, boxcars and concrete piled at intersections in an attempt to foil the snipers on the hills. To go outside is to accept the possibility you will be killed. On the other hand, Dragan knows, the same can be said of staying inside.

Every day the Sarajevo he thinks he remembers slips away from him a little at a time, like water cupped in
the palms of his hands, and when it’s gone he wonders what will be left. He isn’t sure what it will be like to live without remembering how life used to be, what it was like to live in a beautiful city. When the war first started he tried to fight the loss of the city, tried to keep what he could intact. When he looked at a building, he’d try to see it as it had once been, and when he looked at someone he knew, he tried to ignore the changes in their appearance and behaviour. But as time went on he began to see things as they now were, and then one day he knew that he was no longer fighting the city’s disappearance, even in his mind. What he saw around him was his only reality.

He has been on the streets for about an hour today, trying to make his way west from where he lives in the middle of town, just up the hill from the outdoor market. He’s trying to get to the city’s bakery, where he works. He has worked at the bakery for almost forty years, and were it not for the war he would likely be contemplating retirement. Dragan knows he’s extremely fortunate to have this job and the exemption from forced military service that comes with it, although even an exemption means little to the gangs of thugs searching for new conscripts. Nearly everyone in the city is now unemployed, and even though he rarely gets paid in cash, which is more or less useless anyway, he’s paid in bread to take home, and if he goes to the employee
cafeteria he can eat for free, whether he’s working or not. So even though he isn’t working today, he’s on his way to the bakery to eat, because if he eats there he won’t have to eat at home.

Home is a three-room apartment in Mejtas?, north of the old town, shared with his younger sister and her family. Dragan used to live in what he considered a very nice apartment in the neighbourhood of Hrasno, just to the west of Grbavica. Now it’s on the front line of the fighting. The last time he saw it a grenade had completely destroyed the interior of the apartment, and he’s pretty sure that since then the entire building has collapsed. Either way, it wasn’t possible to stay there, and he knows he won’t ever go back.

Dragan managed to get his wife, Raza, and their eighteen-year-old son out of the city before the war started, and they are, he thinks, in Italy now. He hasn’t heard from them in three months and has no idea when he will get word from them again. A part of him doesn’t want to hear from them until the war is over. He has heard of women sending divorce papers from abroad, and he’s not sure he could handle that. He’s sixty-four, looks more like a grandfather than a father. While they never had the perfect marriage, it was a comfortable life for both of them, though she was six years younger than him and they’d had their son, Davor, late, when she was forty. They’d thought they couldn’t have children.

He hopes that, wherever they are, his wife and son are happy. He’s glad they don’t have to share his sister’s apartment. Dragan and his brother-in-law have never got along and, though neither will admit it, they would both prefer to spend much less time together than they do. But the bread Dragan brings home makes him indispensable, and the roof they put over his head traps him there.

The bakery isn’t far from his sister’s house, maybe three kilometres. Under normal conditions it would be about a forty-five-minute walk. Nowadays it takes an hour and a half if he hurries. Today he’s mainly out for the sake of being out, though, and he’s been taking his time. He’s kept his pace slow almost the whole way, with the exception of the part of the main road that intersects with Vrbanja Bridge, an especially dangerous spot. There he ran across the street as quickly as he could, trying not to think about whether he was in someone’s sights.