The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

Life is wondrous and limited

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, how things are no longer what they once were. 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, someone you once knew.

Misery becomes real when shared

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. A nearby merchant’s storeroom caught fire, and the fire quickly reached the Stone Inn, where there was a large army store of barrels of methyl alcohol. Some of the barrels exploded, and the fire spread west, engulfing much of the old town. Firefighters emptied the remaining barrels into the river, not taking into account that alcohol is lighter than water. When they put their pumps into the Miljacka the water they drew wasn’t water at all but fire itself. By the time they realized their mistake it was too 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.

Fighting fire with fire

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 time such a project will be necessary, that from now on things will last forever? Though he can’t quite put his finger on the specifics of 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. They shouldn’t be the ones who get to make a new Sarajevo, if and when it is time for such a thing to be born.

Who will rebuild a city

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 thinks of this in the context of pulling the trigger and ending

No grand moments that would define our humanity

Dragan is about to answer when he realizes that wherever it is going, whatever task it’s engaged with, there’s little difference between him and the dog. They are both only trying to survive. Unlike the men on the hills, who still make a distinction between humans and dogs, Dragan now sees little difference.

Survival during war is a dog's life

A few shout to those in the sniper’s line of fire, yelling for them to run and other obvious ideas.

Obvious ideas

The Sarajevo she fought for was one where you didn’t have to hate a person because of what they were. It didn’t matter what you were, what your ancestors had been, or what your children would be. You could hate a person for what they did. You could hate a murderer, you could hate a rapist, and you could hate a thief. This is what first drove her to kill the men on the hills, because they were all these things. But now, she knows, she’s driven mainly by a hatred of them, the idea of them as a group,

The discriminatory polarizing effect of a war

He feels a rage wash over him, the way it does when he hits his head on the corner of a cupboard door or some object he didn’t expect to be there, a rage that is focused and scattered all at once.

Rage scattered and focused at once

There’s nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive. No one will know if the man had unusually large feet, which his friends used to tease him about when he was a child. No one will know about the scar on his back he got from falling out of a tree, or that his favorite food was chocolate cake. They will not know that when he was eighteen he went on a trip with his friends from school, hitchhiked all the way to Spain, where he slept with a blond girl whose last name he never even knew, and that he would think about this often over the next thirty years, always at the strangest times, while peeling an orange or sharpening the blade of a knife or walking up a hill in the rain.

The unreported life of a dead body

Because civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, re-created daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible. And if he wishes to live, he must do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there’s war, life is a preventative measure.

Civilization is built daily