The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth.

More and more it seems like there has never been anything here but the men on the hills with guns and bombs.

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 Wint...

If you went west you would see neighborhoods like 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...

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 theater, the university, and then, at the old town hall where the library was housed,

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.

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.

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.

behavior. 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 worked at the bakery for almost forty years, and were it not for the war he would likely be contemplating retirement.

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 he and they’d had their son, Davor, late, when she was forty.

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

But the bread Dragan brings home makes him indispensable, and the roof they put over his head traps him there.

.62 miles

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.

He’s on the main road, the one where the streetcars used to run. The south side of the street is piled high in places with barriers to shield cars and pedestrians from the hills to the south, though there are still plenty of places for a sniper to sneak a bullet through.

He’s heard foreigners call this street Sniper Alley, and this makes him laugh, because it seems to him that every street in Sarajevo could have this name.

But, of course, this

is the road that takes the foreigners from the airport to the Holiday Inn, so it must seem particularly dangerous to them. Still, six lanes of pavement and a median for the trams hardly seems to Dragan like an alley.

Everything around him is a peculiar shade of gray. He’s not sure where it came from, if it was always there and the war has simply stripped away the color

There are others who hover for a second and then run as fast as they can until they reach the other side. They make this brief frenetic dash and then keep walking as though nothing has happened.

Since the war began Dragan has seen three people killed by snipers. What surprised him the most was how quickly it all happens.

One moment the people are walking or running through the street, and then they drop abruptly as though they were marionettes and their puppeteer has fainted. As they fall there’s a sharp crack of gunfire, and everyone in the area seeks cover.

It may have in the beginning, months and months ago, but not now. Now people are used to seeing other people being shot in the street.

Of the three people Dragan has seen killed, two were hit in the head and died immediately. One was hit in the chest and then, about a minute later, the neck. It was a much worse death. Dragan is afraid of dying, but what he’s afraid of more is the time that might come between being shot and dying. He isn’t sure how long it takes to die when you’re shot in the head, if it’s instantaneous or if your consciousness remains for a few seconds, and he’s skeptical of anyone who claims to know for certain.

When he’s gone, Dragan thinks about what he’s just done and feels momentarily guilty. He always liked Amil, used to talk to him all the time. But that was before the war. If they were to speak now they would both be reminded only of how much has been lost,

And even though there’s nowhere in the city Dragan could look that wouldn’t tell him this same message, it’s somehow

more painful to see it in another human being, someo...

He’s stopped talking to his friends, visits no one, avoids those who come to visit him. At work he says as little as possible. He can perhaps learn to bear the destruction of buildings, but the destruction of the living is too much for him. If people are going to be taken away from him, either through death or a transformation ...

The sniper will fire again, though, if not here then somewhere else, and if not him then someone else, and it will all happen again, like a herd of gazelle going back to the water hole after one of their own is eaten there.

he forgets about the water bottles he’s carrying, he can, for the first few blocks, fool himself into imagining that he’s on his way to work.

Goran

He continues downhill. If he looks up he can see the mountains to the south. He wonders if the men on the hills can see him. He imagines it’s possible. Any decent pair of binoculars would reveal him,

He doesn’t know why some people die and others don’t. He doesn’t have any idea how the men on the hills make their choices, and he doesn’t think he wants to know. What would he think about it? Would he be flattered they didn’t choose him or offended he wasn’t a worthy target in their eyes?

The man didn’t mention his car being destroyed the last time Kenan saw him, but that’s no longer the sort of thing one mentions.

so people know what kinds of bags and containers to bring with them. As he gets closer he sees there is no poster. It has been weeks since the last aid, maybe over a month.

Sometimes, late at night, he comes to Kenan’s house and tells him about the fighting. He has told him of sharing a gun with another man, how they had twenty bullets, how it was their job to stop three tanks from advancing along a ridge.

All the while they knew that if the tanks advanced there would be nothing they could do. Their bullets would be gone in an instant, and useless anyway. They spent the entire night in terror, flinching every time they heard a noise. When morning came, Ismet had never been so happy, nor had his friend. Later that day, as they slept in an improvised bunker slightly behind the lines, a shell landed a few meters from them, and Ismet’s friend was killed. Ismet told Kenan all this without any expression on his face,

but when he reached the end he smiled and laughed a little. When Kenan asked him why, Ismet looked at him as though he hadn’t been listening. “We survived the nigh...

When we were given it and it made us happy. Whether we lived for another few hours or fifty...

He’s safe while he has the water jugs, as no one is yet bold enough to interrupt this vital civilian mission.