The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

Four months after the war started, Nermin had sent a man to request that she come see him. In a way, Arrow was surprised it had taken them so long to approach her.

She would learn later that her father, who was a policeman, had asked Nermin to leave her out of it. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, in front of the Sarajevo Canton Building, and Arrow has never asked Nermin whether he felt her father would have changed his mind about her involvement in the city’s defense

or if he simply decided to ignore t...

a dead man. She doesn’t want to kno...

“I don’t want to kill people.” “You’d be saving lives. Every one of those men on the hills will kill some of us. Given the chance, they will kill all of us.”

Arrow thought about this. She thought about what it might be like to pull the trigger and have her bullet hit a living being instead of a piece of paper. She was mildly surprised

to find that the thought didn’t horrify her, that she could probably do it, and that she c...

Arrow nodded. “I think it will end, and when it does I want to be able to go back to

the life I had before. I want my hands to be clean.”

“If I do this, it will have to be done a certain way. I won’t blindly kill just because you say I must.”

And so they reached an agreement. She would report only to Nermin, she would

work alone, and she would, for the most part, choose her own targets. Occasionally Nermin has asked for someone specific, or that she work in a particular area, and thus far she has always been able to accommodate him.

She’s aware, now, that the woman who sat in this office on that day and said she didn’t want to kill anyone was gone, that with each passing week she’s less and less certain there will be an end to all this. The para...

This does not, however, reduce her resolve. If anything, her desire to adhere to her conditions, to keep her hands clean, has increased. Although she has nearly complete...

knows who she wants to be, and as far as she can see, the only path leading her toward this person is...

Arrow knows this street well. It’s in the heart of the city, just past the point where Turkish buildings give way to Austro-Hungarian ones. Farther down is the Second World War memorial, the eternal flame, which has gone out.

Arrow knows that not long ago a mortar shell landed in this street and killed a large number of people. She heard all about it on the radio, but although it was unusual for so many to be killed in one spot at one time, she didn’t think much about the incident then.

The opportunity to die was everywhere, and it just wasn’t that surprising when that opportunity became an event.

Her hand reaches out, a futile attempt to bridge a distance far greater than the thirty or so meters that separate her from the cello.

The cellist opens his eyes. The sadness she saw in his face is gone. She doesn’t know where it went. His arms rise, and his left hand grips the neck of the cello, his right guides the bow to its throat. It is the most

beautiful thing she has ever seen. When the first notes sound they are, to her, inaudible. Sound ...

She leans back into the wall. She’s no longer there. Her mother is lifting her up, spinning her around and laughing. The warm tongue of a dog licks her arm. There’s a rush of air as a snowball flies past her face. She slips on someone else’s blood and lands on her side, a severed arm almost touching her nose. In a movie theater, a boy s...

a man playing a cello in the street at four in the afternoon has done to her. You will not cry, she tells herself, and she wills

herself calm until after the cellist has finished, risen, and returned to the building he came from. There will be no crack in her. Nermin is looking at her. “We need you to keep this man alive,” he says.

Nermin removes his hat and wipes his sleeve across his brow. “He has said that he will do this for twenty-two days. This is the eighth. People see him. The world has seen him. We cannot allow him to be killed.”

The place where the cellist sits, while vulnerable to shells, he says, isn’t within the direct line of fire for a sniper on the southern hills. But they have received information. It’s believed that the enemy will send a sniper into their part of the city to shoot him. And her job will be to stop that. It is, they admit, almost impossible. But, as Nermin reminds her, she has a certain talent for the impossible.

“It’s not about merely killing him. Shooting him is a statement.”

Arrow leans back against the wall and pictures the cellist lying in the street. She sees Nermin’s point. A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn’t.

Ger BAV icha

Dragan was stuck talking to Jovan, whose only apparent interest was politics, a subject Dragan has no

patience for.

There’s no way to prevent this interaction, short of running into the street, and although Dragan can barely bring himself to nod a polite hello to a stranger, let alone talk to an old friend, he isn’t yet willing to risk his life to avoid a social exchange.

This comforts him slightly, but he wonders if it’s possible that a day will come when he makes a different choice.

He can’t tell her about how his wife and son left at night and when the bus pulled away he felt, somehow, that he would never see them again, even though they were going to be only a few hundred kilometers away, not even an hour by plane.

cellar with his neighbors and waited for the building to come down on top of them, or how he arrived the next day at his sister’s, his brother-in-law answering the door and looking at him as if it were his fault his apartment was destroyed. He thinks that if he were to tell her all the things he can’t tell anyone, they would be standing there for days.

Dragan is surprised. Jovan didn’t strike him as the sort. He’d always pegged him as more of a talker than a fighter.

“Did he get anyone?” Emina looks genuinely concerned. This strikes Dragan as odd. He isn’t indifferent to the deaths around him, but he can’t really say that he feels them so much that they would register on his face. He doesn’t think many other people do either, anymore.

Radio Sarajevo has organized a medical swap, where people who have old prescriptions they aren’t using can give them to those who need various drugs that are no longer available.

Each day they read out who needs what over the radio, and those who can help

do. The woman she’s going to see has a heart condition and uses the same medication as Emina’s mother, who died about five years ago. Although the drugs are beyond their ...

Dragan had met Emina’s mother once, a year before she died.

“I would go if I could, I think.” He knows this is a dangerous thing to say. People resent those who manage to get out. They’re considered cowards, and although he suspects that anyone who’s still sane would wish to leave, very few people will admit it, even to themselves, and fewer still would ever say so out loud.

There are only two ways out now. Either you know someone with power and you get a pass through the tunnel, or you have money. Other than that, you’re stuck. Those who had power or money when the war began have mostly already left, and those who have power or money now have it because of the war, so have no incentive to leave.

“The world will never allow that. They’ll have to help us sooner or later,” she says. He’s not sure from her tone of voice if she believes what she says. He doesn’t know how she could. They must both see the same city disintegrating around them.

“No one is coming.” His voice is harsher than he means it to be. “We’re here on our own, and no one’s coming to help us. Don’t you know that?”

All his life he has lived under the rule of law. If you broke the law, the police would arrest you. There was order, and it was unquestioned.

Then, in the blink of an eye, it all fell apart.

The winner, a guard named Petar Brzica, killed 1,360 people with

a butcher’s knife. For winning this contest he was given some wine, a suckling pig, and a gold watch.

Many of those killed were the fathers and grandfathers of the men on the hills, and of the people they are shooting at.