The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

“The last time I saw him, he told me, ‘What is coming is worse than anything you can imagine,’” Dragan says. “He killed himself the day the war began.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t think he thought it would be. But I think he believed that what he and others suffered there

meant something, that people had learned from it. But they haven’t.” “Haven’t they?” Emina asks. “Look around,” Dragan answers.

“But with the sniper at the bottom of the street I had to go the long way around, so I found myself in this new street. “There was a house there with a huge cherry tree in the yard, full of ripe fruit. An

soft. Dragan isn’t really sure what the point of her story is, but he’s happy that she is telling him. “The woman was beside herself. I’ve never seen anyone smile so much. She actually hugged me. Over a kilogram of salt. As I was leaving, she gave me two big pails full of cherries.A ridiculous amount. I said, ‘I can’t possibly eat all these. I don’t have any children, it’s just me and my husband.’ But she insisted. ‘Give them away,’ she said. ‘Do whatever you like with them. I have more than I need.’ So I gave them to our neighbors, a small basket to ten different families.”

“I didn’t need it. She didn’t have to give me the cherries, either.” Emina shrugs. “Isn’t that how we’re supposed to behave? Isn’t that how we used to be?” “I don’t know,” Dragan says. “I can’t remember if we were like that, or just think we were.

It seems impossible to remember what things were like.” And he suspects this is what the men on the hills want most. They would, of course, like to kill them all, but if they can’t, they would like to make them forget how they used to be, how civilized people act. He wonders how long it will take before they succeed.

He can’t believe he isn’t yet even a quarter of the way across. He has never felt so old.

“Sarajevo roulette,” she says. “So much more complicated than Russian.”

He laughs, not because it’s funny but because it’s true, and he stands there, Emina’s hand on his back, glad for the first time in a long while to be alive.

“There is more to life than ice cream,” she said. Arrow wonders, as this memory fades, what she would give up for a scoop of that ice cream today. All the money she has? Certainly. Her rifle? Maybe. The one remaining photograph of her grandmother? She shakes

her head and increases her pace, denying her mind a chance to answer.

Arrow crosses and sits in the spot where the mortar landed, the spot where, later today, the cellist will sit. She knows that twenty-two people died here and a multitude were injured, will not walk or see or touch again. Because they tried to buy bread. A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe they will have some bread to buy.

At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

She expected to feel altered somehow from the person she was, or hoped to be. But that wasn’t the case. It was the easiest thing in the world to pull the trigger, a nonevent.

Everything that came before, all the small things that somehow added up without her ever noticing, made the act of

killing an afterthought. This is what makes her a weapon. A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of...

The cellist doesn’t strike her as a man who has lost his will to live. He appears to care about the quality of his life. She can’t tell what he believes, and it

bothers her that she can’t say exactly what it is, or whether she wants to believe it too. She knows it involves motion. Whatever the cellist is doing, he isn’t sitting in a street waiting for something to happen.

He is, it seems to her, increasing the speed of things. Whatever happens will com...

Arrow wonders if the piece of glass will still be here tomorrow, and if, in

any larger sense, she’s very different from a piece of incidental detritus

lying forgotten at the scene of a massacre. Arrow will keep this man alive. This wasn’t ever really in doubt, but neither had she decided she would do it. Now, as she sits where he sits, she tells herself that she will not allow this man to die. He will finish what he’s doing. It isn’t important whether she understands what he...

The buildings on either side of the street, while providing

many hiding spots, also shield the cellist from the hills to the north and south. So they can’t shoot from their own territory. They’ll have to enter hers.