The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. — LEON TROTSKY

That life will end has become so self-evident it’s lost all meaning.

“I am Arrow, because I hate them. The woman you knew hated nobody.”

What he wants is to go back inside, crawl into bed, and sleep until this war is over. He wants to take his younger daughter to a carnival. He wants to sit up, anxious, waiting for his older daughter to return from a movie with a boy he doesn’t really like. He wants his son, the middle child, only ten years old, to think about anything other than how long it will be before he can join the army and fight.

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.

It isn’t clear to him how the world will think of the city now that thousands have been murdered. He suspects that what the world wants most is not to think of it at all.

It’s no secret that there’s a struggle between those who would defend the city at all costs and those who feel that the principles of the city, the ideas that made Sarajevo worth fighting for, cannot and should not be abandoned in the fight to save it.

And this is how it goes. Buildings are eviscerated, burned, gutted, streetcars destroyed, roads and bridges blasted away, and you can see that, you can touch it and you can walk by it every day. But when people die they’re removed, taken to hospitals and graveyards, and before the bodies are healed or cold the spot where they were shattered is unrecognizable as a place where anything out of the ordinary happened.

He cries out, but doesn’t recognize the sound that comes out of him. It’s a baby and an animal and an air-raid siren and a man who has been knocked over by his own burden.

If the war ends, if life goes back to some semblance of how it once was, and he survives, he won’t be able to explain how any of it was possible. An explanation implies a logic, but there’s no logic to Sarajevo now. He still can’t believe it happened. He hopes he will never be able to.