The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.

In 1945, an Italian musicologist found four bars of a sonata’s bass line in the remnants of the firebombed Dresden Music Library. He believed these notes were the work of the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni, and spent the next twelve years reconstructing a larger piece from the charred manuscript fragment. The resulting composition, known as Albinoni’s Adagio, bears little resemblance to most of Albinoni’s

Nearly half a century later, it’s this contradiction that appeals to the cellist. That something could be almost erased from existence in the landscape of a ruined city, and then rebuilt until it is new and worthwhile, gives him hope. A hope that, now, is one of a limited number of things remaining for the besieged citizens of Sarajevo and that, for many, dwindles each day.

There are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency.

It wasn’t always like this. Not long ago the promise of a happy life seemed almost inviolable.

The fingers on his flesh told him that he was loved, that he had always been loved, and that the world was a place where above all else the things that were good would find a way to burrow into you.

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.

He was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra. That was what he knew how to be. He made the idea of music an actuality. When he stepped onstage in his tuxedo he was transformed into an instrument of deliverance. He gave to the people who came to listen what he loved most in the world. He was as solid as the vise of his father’s hand.

For most people, long-distance shooting is a question of the correct combination of observation and mathematics. Figure out the wind’s speed and direction, and the target’s distance. Measurements are calculated and factored into equations taking into account the velocity of the bullet, the drop over time, the magnification of the scope. It’s no different from throwing a ball. A ball isn’t thrown at a target, it’s thrown in an arc calculated to intersect with a target. Arrow doesn’t take measurements, she doesn’t calculate formulas. She simply sends the bullet where she knows it needs to go. She has trouble understanding why other snipers can’t do this.

Arrow believes she’s different from the snipers on the hills. She shoots only soldiers. They shoot unarmed men, women, children. When they kill a person, they seek a result that is far greater than the elimination of that individual. They are trying to kill the city. Every death chips away at the Sarajevo of Arrow’s youth with as much certainty as any mortar shell battering a building. Those left are robbed of not only a fellow citizen but the memory of what it was to be alive in a time before men on the hills shot at you while you tried to cross the street.

Ten years ago, when she was eighteen and was not called Arrow, she borrowed her father’s car and drove to the countryside to

As she rounded a corner one of her favorite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks.

Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end.

Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

So when Arrow pulls the trigger and ends the life of one of the soldiers in her sights, she’ll do so not because she wants him dead, although she can’t deny that she does, but because the soldiers have robbed her and almost everyone else in the city of this gift.

That life will end has become so self-evident it’s lost all meaning. But worse, for Arrow, is the damage done to the distance between...

For although she knows her te...

were not the ridiculous sentimentality of a teenage girl, she doesn...

In the Second World War, Vraca was a place where the Nazis tortured and killed those who resisted them. The names of the dead are carved on the steps, but at the time few fighters used their real names.

later tried to twist their deeds into propaganda. It’s said they took these new names so their families wouldn’t be in danger, so they could slip in and out of two lives. But Arrow believes they took these

names so they could separate themselves from what they had to do, so the person who fought and killed could someday be put away.

To hate people because they hated her first, and then to hate them because of what they’ve done to her, has created a desire to separate the part of her that will fight back, that will enjoy fighting back, fro...

Using her real name would make her no different from the men she kills. It would be a death great...

Everyone does something to stay alive. But if they were to press her, she would say, “I am Arrow, because I hate them. The woman you knew hated nobody.”

But this isn’t an unusual set of challenges. She has sent bullets through trickier air and faced swifter retaliation in the past.

understand. They wouldn’t believe that she knows what a weapon will do because Arrow herself is a weapon.

If she could choose, she wouldn’t believe in it either. But she knows it isn’t up to her. You don’t choose what to believe. Belief chooses you.

Then the soldier steps out of the narrow corridor her bullet can travel through. He has, in an instant of seeming in-consequence, saved his life. A life is composed almost entirely of actions like this, Arrow knows.

He’ll never know that an arbitrary fraction of a millimeter in her aim one way or another will make the difference between feeling the sun on his face ten minutes from now and looking down to see an unbelievable hole in his chest feeling all he was or could have become drain out of him, and then, in his final moments, inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.

Then they both turn their heads as though called by someone Arrow can’t see, and she knows the time to fire has come. Nothing has made a decision for her, so Arrow simply chooses one. If there’s a reason, if it’s because one shot is easier, or one of them reminds her of someone she once knew and liked or didn’t like, or one of them seems more dangerous than the other, she can’t say. The only certainty is that she exhales and her finger goes from resting on the trigger to squeezing it, and a bullet breaks the sound barrier an instant before pulping fabric, skin, bone, flesh, and organ, beginning a short process that will turn motion into meat.

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.

He doesn’t want to survive the men on the hills only to be killed by a waterborne parasite, a possibility he considers real and pressing in a city that no longer has a functioning sewage system.

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.

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 liters of water. Two more will come from Mrs. Ristovski, the elderly neighbor downstairs.

The odds may punish those who behave recklessly, but everyone else seems about even.

“You should go, before you see them and lose an hour with your jokes.”

As the door to his 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 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.

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 ...

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, de...

Kenan began to suspect that the ba...

a focal point for all her ...

Kenan tolerated Mrs. Ristovski, often above his wife’s objections. There was something about her ferocity that he admired...

“Of course,” he said. He poured each of them a generous measure. Mrs. Ristovski downed her glass in one swallow. Kenan watched the color rise in her corrugated neck, then fade away.