The Cellist of Sarajevo, Page 2

  Arrow enters the stairwell and a mortar comes through the roof and explodes. She’s two flights down when another lands, sending the ninth floor crumbling into the eighth. As she reaches the sixth floor the texture of the situation shifts in her mind, and she veers into a dark, narrow hallway and moves as quickly as she can away from the mortar she knows is about to penetrate the stairwell. She manages to make it far enough to avoid the steel and wood and concrete the explosion sends her, a multitude of bullets as interest paid on the loan of one. But then, as the last piece of shrapnel hits the ground, she turns and runs back towards the staircase. She has no choice. There’s no other way out of this building, and if she stays she will collect on her loan. So she returns to the stairwell, not knowing what remains of it. The sixth floor has collapsed into the fifth, and when she jumps to the landing below she wonders if it will bear her. It does, and from there it’s a matter of staying tight against the inner wall where the stairs meet the building, where the weight of the upper layers of the collapsed stairway has had less impact.

  Arrow hears another mortar hit as she reaches the ground, and although the front entrance leading to the street is only steps away she continues to the basement, where she feels her way along a dim corridor until she finds a door. She shoulders it open. The immediate shift from darkness to light momentarily blinds her, but she emerges without hesitation into a low stairwell on the north side of the building, somewhat sheltered from the men on the southern hill. Before her eyes adjust to the world around her she begins to notice the percussion of mortars affecting her hearing, and it reminds her of being in a swimming pool, of a day when she and a friend took turns shouting each other’s names underwater and laughing at how they came out, all garbled and distorted and foreign. When she turns east, away from the building, she feels a pain in her side, and she looks down, half expecting to see her stomach distended between splintered ribs. A quick inspection reveals only a slight cut, a small nothing that attached itself to her at some point during her exit.

  As she walks towards her unit’s headquarters in the city centre, she notices that the sky is beginning to darken. A few drops of rain hit her forehead, make her feel her own heat as they evaporate. When she touches her side, her hand comes away without any fresh blood on it, and Arrow wonders what it means that the insignificance of her injury does not bring her any particular sense of relief.

  Kenan

  ANOTHER DAY HAS JUST BEGUN. LIGHT STRAINS ITS way into the apartment, where it finds Kenan in his kitchen, his hand reaching for the plastic jug containing his family’s final quarter-litre of water. His movement is slow and stiff. He seems to himself more an old man than one who will soon celebrate his fortieth birthday. His wife, Amila, who is sleeping in the sitting room because it’s more secure than their street-facing bedroom, is much the same. Like him, her middle age has somehow escaped her. She’s barely thirty-seven, but looks well over fifty. Her hair is thin and her skin hangs loose off her flesh, suggesting a former woman who, Kenan knows, never was.

  At least their children are, for now, still children. Like all children they rail against the limitations placed on them, and they want to be grown up, and they wish things to be other than they are. They know what’s going on, but they don’t entirely understand. They have learned how to live with it. Perhaps, Kenan suspects, that’s why they don’t turn old.

  It has been over a month since the last time the family had electricity for more than a few hours, and even longer without running water. While life is more difficult without electricity, it is impossible without water. So every four days Kenan gathers his collection of plastic containers and travels down the hill, through the old town, across the Miljacka River and up into the hills into Stari Grad, to the brewery, one of the few places in the city that a person can get clean drinking water. Occasionally it is possible to find closer sources of water, and he keeps his eye out for them, but they’re unreliable and often unsafe. He doesn’t want to survive the men on the hills only to be killed by a water-borne parasite, a possibility he considers real and pressing in a city that no longer has a functioning sewage system. The brewery’s water comes from underground springs deep in the water table, and he feels this is well worth the risk of the extra distance.

  As quietly as he can, Kenan picks up the final jug of water and moves down the hall towards the bathroom. His hand flicks on the light switch, a leftover reflex from earlier times. The bulb in the ceiling surges to life. Kenan strikes a match, lights the stub of a candle that sits on the side of the sink below the mirror. He puts the stopper in the drain and pours his quarter-litre of water into the sink. He wets his face, blinks as the cold water registers in his mind as shock. His hands work a small bar of soap into a lather he applies to his cheeks, neck, chin and upper lip. The razor settles into a rhythmic scratch scratch splash, his pupils narrowing in the light as he observes his progress. When he’s done he wets his face again and dries himself on a crusty towel hanging above the toilet. He blows out the candle and is surprised when light does not disappear from the room. After a few seconds he realizes that the electricity is on, that the bulb above his head is glowing, and he almost smiles at his mistake before he understands the significance of it. He has grown accustomed to a world where you shave by candlelight with soap and cold water. It has become normal.

  Still, there is electricity, and because that is no longer normal he rushes out of the bathroom to wake his wife, who will want to get the children up to make the most of it. He imagines a breakfast cooked on the stove, and watching the television next to the warmth of the heater. The children’s excitement will be catching as they laugh at one of their cartoons. Light will fill all of the rooms and chase away the perpetual dusk that hides in the corners. Even if it doesn’t last for long it will make them happy, and for the rest of the day their faces will be tired from smiling. But as he leaves the room he hears a telltale pop, and when he looks back the light is off. He tries the hall light and confirms what he already knows to be true. He returns to the kitchen. There’s no longer any reason to wake his family.

  He sits at the table and inspects each of the six plastic containers he’ll take with him. He checks for any obvious cracks that may have developed since they were last emptied, makes sure each one has the correct lid. He has two backup containers he can substitute if he finds any faults. Deciding how much water you can carry has become something of an art in this city. Carry too little and you’ll have to repeat the task more often. Each time you expose yourself to the dangers of the streets you run the risk of injury or death. But carry too much and you lose the ability to run, duck, dive, anything it takes to get out of danger’s way. Kenan has decided on eight canisters. The six from his house will hold about twenty-four litres of water. Two more will come from Mrs. Ristovski, the elderly neighbour downstairs.

  As he verifies that his six containers are reliable, he hears his wife rise from her bed. She leans into the doorway of the kitchen, rubs sleep from her eyes.

  “It was quiet last night,” he says. “It won’t be too bad out there today.”

  She nods. They both know a quiet night in no way means it will be a quiet day, but Kenan is glad that neither says so.

  His wife moves across the room and stands in front of him. She places her hand on his head, resting it there before letting it slide down to his shoulder, giving his ear a light tug on its way. “Be careful.”

  Kenan smiles. It’s not so much her words that bring him comfort but that she still says them. She knows as well as he that there’s no such thing as careful, that the men on the hills can kill anyone, anywhere, any time they like, and that luck or fate or whatever it is that decides who lives and who doesn’t has not, in the past, favoured those who act in a way that could be described as careful. The odds may punish those who behave recklessly, but everyone else seems about even. Still, there was a time when a person could reasonably act with care for his well-being, and he appreciates that his wife is occasionally willing, f
or the sake of his sanity, to invoke the memory of those times.

  He sees her looking at his bottles, tallying them up. “Mrs. Ristovski?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowns, brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then her face softens, and she stands back to look at him. “You’ll need a new coat soon.”

  “I’ll pick one up while I’m out,” he says. “Would you like me to get you some shoes?”

  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

  THERE 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 tw
o 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.