The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

But he doesn’t know how long this will last, how long it will be

before there’s a knock on his door and he ends up with a...

It’s true that he’s not a young man, though he’s young enough. It’s true that he’s in poor physical condition, has three children to look after, and has no skills that are of use to an army. But they would take him. Men who are much older, have larger families, and are less suited to combat ha...

If he ends up in the army, he knows that sooner or later he will have to kill someone. And as afraid as he is of dying, he’s more

afraid of killing.

It takes courage to kill a man, and he doesn’t possess such courage. A man who can barely leave his family to collect water without falling down outside the door could not possibly do what Ismet does.

He’s never brought it up, never known quite how to, and as time passes, the fact that Ismet is fighting to save them all and Kenan is not has grown larger and larger.

or a lamb.” This is a running joke between them.

Kenan has given up smoking, viewing it as a luxury he can’t afford, and he thinks he can stick with it.

The two men stand in the street, saying nothing, enjoying a brief moment of silence. There is much to talk about, but none of it can be said, none of it is worth saying. After a while, Ismet puts his hand on Kenan’s shoulder. “Good luck with your water. I’ll call in on you tonight or maybe tomorrow.” He digs his hands into his pockets and continues up the street.

A little further south he passes the Music Academy. The building is over a hundred years old, and has been training young musicians for forty. A harp sits atop a cupola facing the street corner. Between the windows of the third and the fourth floors, a rocket-propelled grenade has punched a hole through the wall. Inside, another grenade has blown through the wall in the main concert room, but still Kenan hears the sound of pianos coming from within.

work. He’s always liked the tram. To him, and others as well, the tram was one of the most tangible signs of civilization.

Goran

Kenan

After all he’s seen since then, the one sight he will never forget is that of a burning tram that had been hit first by a mortar and then by sniper fire, heaving thick inky smoke into the air.

The trams haven’t run since that day. They are scattered throughout the city, empty husks, some serving as cover against snipers, others simply left to rust.

In Kenan’s mind, whatever else happens, the war will not be over unti...

When the war began, one German mark, about half an American dollar, was worth ten Yugoslav dinar. Now, a mark costs a million dinar. Anyone who didn’t convert their savings at the beginning of the war almost immediately became bankrupt. Not that it matters much. With prices nearly doubling each month, not many people had enough saved to last long anyway.

Everything was easily twenty times more than it had cost before the war. Everything, that is, except incomes. Kenan doubts if he’s made more than a thousand marks since the beginning of the war. He still has a few household items left to sell, but not many.

And yet some people seem untouched by financial pressures. They drive around in new Mercedeses, haven’t lost any weight, and possess a ready supply of goods most people only remember from before the war. Kenan isn’t sure how they do it, but he

knows a lot of black-market food is being smuggled into Sarajevo through a tunnel that goes under the airport. To pass through it you need to know someone with pull in the government, and, although the tunnel is open twenty-four hours a day, hardly anyone gets through. Kenan suspects that what does go through is what is making the men in their sports cars rich. He can’t...

Everywhere he looks reminds him of some memory, of something lost that can’t be recovered. He wonders what will happen after, when the fighting stops. Even if each building is rebuilt so it’s exactly as it was before, he doesn’t know how he could sit in a comfortable chair and drink a coffee with a friend and not think about this war and all that went with it. But maybe, he thinks, he would like to try. He knows he doesn’t want to give up the possibility.

It’s hard to see the street of his memory in the one he’s on now.

Mil yaks ka

CU' mirija

He passes the remnants of the once grand Hotel Europa.

There has been an inn on this site for over five hundred years. The last time it was destroyed, a little over a century ago, it was called the Stone Inn.

late, and much of the city was destroyed. Even now Kenan can see the demarcation of the street where they halted the

Great Fire, where the old Turkish buildings end and the newer Austro-Hungarian ones begin.

What Kenan thinks about isn’t the night of the fire, but the day after. What it must have looked like. Did it compare with what he sees today? But at least the Great Fire was over quickly. He doesn’t know if today is the end or just the beginning. And he doesn’t know what things will look like when and if it does end. How do you build it all up again? Do the people who destroyed the city also rebuild it? Is the city reconstructed so that it can be wiped away again someday, or do people believe that this will be the last ti...

this question, he believes that the character of those who will build the city again is more important than the makeup of those who destroyed it. Of course the men on the hills are evil. There’s no room for nuance in that. But if a city is made anew by men of questionable character, what will it be? He thinks of the men in the fancy cars who bought his washing machine with a few kilos of potatoes and onions. Th...

Princip Bridge. It used to be called the Latin Bridge, but it’s there that, in 1914, the First World War began. The footprints of the assassin Princip used to be marked on the place where ...

and his pregnant wife, but they’re gone now, r...

Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s last words to his wife were, “Don’t die, stay a...

Princip had given up on his mission for the day and was eating a meal when he saw the archduke’s car, stepped out onto the street, and fired two shots.

He has always been slightly ashamed that, for a generation, when the world thought of Sarajevo, it was as a place of murder. It isn’t clear to him how the world will think of the city now that thousands

He suspects that what the world wants most is not to think of it at all.

As he enters the old Turkish neighborhood of Baščaršija, he feels as though he’s returning to the scene of a crime. He hasn’t been here since the day the library burned, and though he’s still a distance from it, he can feel its proximity. For some reason the mess of shattered roof tiles and crumbled bricks

in this part of town bothers him more than it does in other places.

Hardly anyone lives in Baščaršija. For half a millennium, it has served as the city’s marketplace, its streets organized according to the type of trades conducted there. But in recent years this strict discipline had broken down a bit, with more and more shops selling merchandise designed for tourists.

gazebo-shaped public fountain that serves as a meeting place, or did. Its location, placed firmly in the middle of a large plaza, makes it an exceptionally poor place to be at present.

He takes a few steps forward and looks into the alcove. There an old man holds a short fishing pole, his face intent on the plaza and his piece of bread. The man sees Kenan and waves slightly, not wanting him to disturb the line.

The old man nods. “I’ve caught six, one for each person in my apartment. I only take what I need. If I’m not greedy, perhaps they will still be here tomorrow.” “Good luck,” Kenan says.

Kenan stays there long after the man is gone. Although he has never killed an animal himself, other than a fish, the idea of it never particularly bothered him. But he can’t help feeling a sort of kinship with the

pigeon. He thinks it’s possible that the men on the hills are killing them slowly, a half-dozen at a time, so there will always be a few more to kill the next day.

the army excels in both intimidation and tastelessness.

the hand on her shoulder goes from feeling benign to malevolent. She fights an urge to tear it off her, rise from the hard chair she sits in, and drive the palm of her hand upward into the throat of her unit commander.

When the war began, and Europe’s fourth-largest army turned inward on itself and surrounded the city, he was one of the few career officers to break ranks and defend the city against his

former colleagues. If they fail and Sarajevo falls, if the men on the hills ever make it into the city, he will be one of the first people they execute.

she has felt more attention being paid to her, and she knows that sooner or later they are going to ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do.