The Cellist of Sarajevo (11 page)

They sat on the sofa Kenan’s parents had given them as a wedding present while his wife made them coffee. Mrs. Ristovski gave him a long list of do’s and don’ts regarding the fern, which he listened to as attentively as he could. The baby was sleeping in the next room. He mentioned her presence several times and spoke in a soft voice, hoping Mrs. Ristovski would follow suit. But she grew louder every time she spoke, until it seemed to Kenan that she was shouting.

His wife returned with the coffee just as the baby woke, screaming. She scowled at him, as though it was his fault Mrs. Ristovski couldn’t keep her voice down. When Amila was gone, Mrs. Ristovski took a small sip of her coffee and wrinkled up her face. “That’s quite a holler your baby has. I hope you and your wife aren’t as loud.”

Kenan assured her they were not, and the rest of the visit passed more or less without incident. She returned once or twice a week from then on, usually in the evenings when Kenan was home. He followed her instructions about the fern as well as he could, but it deteriorated rapidly in his care. This did not escape Mrs. Ristovski’s notice. On a subsequent visit, she looked at the dead fern, shook her head and said, “I hope you’re better with children than you are with plants. They are considerably more difficult.”

Kenan later learned that every time someone moved into the building, Mrs. Ristovski brought them a fern
that without exception died a few weeks later. The common opinion was that it had somehow been poisoned, doomed from the beginning, but Kenan never really believed it. He had, however, noticed that her apartment itself had no plants of any kind.

He often found himself defending her to others, half-heartedly, reminding them that her husband had died fifty years ago and she’d been alone ever since. But the more he thought about it, the less that seemed a good reason for her bitterness. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five when she was widowed, which was certainly young enough to begin a life again. He didn’t have a clue what had made her the way she was, if it was losing her husband in the war, the war itself or something that happened after. Maybe she was always like this.

None of this explains why he is here with her impossible bottles today, he knows. He made her a promise, but he has broken promises to others and suspects he will again. He can’t even pretend to like her, and while he is a little afraid of her, he isn’t so intimidated that he needs to bow to her every wish. If he is honest with himself, he has no idea why he keeps bringing Mrs. Ristovski water.

It’s time to get moving. The brewery isn’t much farther, just a bit west and then south up the hill. He crosses the street and cuts through an empty lot, taking
cover where he can find it. As he climbs the hill, water runs down the street from the taps at the brewery. The trail of those who have come before him reminds Kenan of the traces slugs leave in a garden. A truck with an enormous plastic tank in the back passes him, honks its horn, forcing him to the side of the road. There are a lot more people in the street now, most laden with the paraphernalia of water collection, and they too are forced to the side of the road for this truck and several others that follow soon after. It is a pilgrimage, a parade, all of them rats of Hamelin. When the bright red hulk of the brewery comes into view, he feels both happy and apprehensive, because although he has at last arrived at his destination, he knows he has a long way to go before he is home again.

Dragan

“D
O YOU THINK,”
D
RAGAN ASKS, “IT’S WORSE TO BE
wounded or killed?”

He’s not sure why he asked Emina this question. It seems almost frivolous, like asking if it’s better to be boiled alive using water or cooking oil.

He leans against the boxcar, and she faces him, her back to the street. Every so often she shifts her weight from one foot to the other, as though she can’t find a comfortable way to stand.

“I think,” she says, her eyes moving towards the intersection, “it’s better to be wounded. At least that way you have a chance to live.”

“It’s not much of a chance,” he says, wondering why.
What possible point could there be to this conversation? But the words keep on coming out of him, and he can’t seem to stop. It’s like picking at a scab.

“What do you mean? A chance is a chance.”

“There’s not a whole lot the hospitals can do for you. They’re low on supplies, low on people.” He doesn’t know for sure that either of these things is true, but it seems likely.

“I think they’re fairly well equipped. It seems a lot of people are wounded and don’t die.” He can see that his criticism bothers her, that she doesn’t want him to be right. Her neck has got red, and she’s moved away from him, ever so slightly.

“If they’re so well equipped, then why are you risking your life to deliver medicine that’s almost a decade old?”

He’s scored a direct hit. She steps back, takes her hands out of her pockets and raises them to her chest. For an instant Dragan wonders if she’s about to strike him. He wouldn’t mind if she did. He knows he deserves it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why I said that.”

She doesn’t move. She stares hard at him without blinking. He doesn’t know what she’s looking for. He tries to appear contrite, tells himself not to say anything, to be quiet. Nothing he can say is going to fix this.

Yet he feels his mouth moving, and words are coming out of him. “I don’t understand how you’re not
scared. I don’t understand how the idea of being shot or blown apart doesn’t scare you.”

She breathes out, lets her hands drop to her side. “There is a man playing the cello in the street,” she says. “Near the market. Where the people were killed lining up for bread.”

Dragan heard about the massacre when it happened. It wasn’t far from his sister’s house. If he didn’t bring bread home each day he worked, it is possible she would have been in that line. But he hadn’t thought about it since. While it was one of the worst individual incidents, it wasn’t much more than the overall death toll each day.

“Every day, at four o’clock.” She turns towards him as she says this, as if there’s something he doesn’t understand. “Every day he sits there and plays. People go and listen. Some leave flowers. I’ve been several times. Sometimes I listen all the way through, and sometimes I leave after only a few minutes.”

Dragan nods. He has heard of the cellist, in passing, but has never given him much thought, and has never been to see him. He’s unsure why Emina is telling him all this, but he won’t interrupt her. He will let her speak until she’s finished.

“I don’t know the piece he plays, what its name is. It’s a sad tune. But it doesn’t make me sad.” She’s looking right at him, not looking away, and he’s a little uncomfortable.
“Why do you suppose he’s there? Is he playing for the people who died? Or is he playing for the people who haven’t? What does he hope to accomplish?”

Dragan realizes this isn’t a rhetorical question. She expects an answer. He doesn’t have one. He has no idea what would possess a person to do such a thing.

“Who is he playing for?” she asks again, and suddenly Dragan thinks he knows.

“Maybe he’s playing for himself,” he says. “Maybe it’s all he knows how to do, and he’s not doing it to make something happen.” And he thinks this is true. What the cellist wants isn’t a change, or to set things right again, but to stop things from getting worse. Because, as the optimist in Emina’s mother’s joke said, it can always get worse. But perhaps the only thing that will stop it from getting worse is people doing the things they know how to do.

His answer appears to have satisfied Emina, or at least intrigued her. She leans back against the boxcar. After a while, she says, “Jovan says he’s crazy. He says it’s an act of futility, that he’s going to get himself killed.”

Dragan considers this. “Jovan’s a fool,” he says. He doesn’t look at Emina, stares straight ahead.

“I know,” she says. “I used to sort of like that about him.”

He risks a glance at her and sees she isn’t smiling. “I’m afraid, Dragan. I’m afraid of everything, of dying,
of not dying. I’m afraid that it will stay like this forever, that this war isn’t a war, but just how life will be.”

Dragan nods. The fight has gone out of him. “Me too,” he says. “Everything.”

She takes a step forward, turns and stands beside him. So far no one has been brave enough to try crossing again, but it looks as if someone will soon make a move, and everyone seems to be waiting to see what will happen. Dragan looks up at the sky and watches a large grey cloud. It appears to him that the cloud is moving slowly. He wonders if this is the case or if it’s a matter of perspective, if the cloud is in fact moving as fast as a bird can fly or a car can drive. He doesn’t think so, but there’s no way to tell, and the fact that there’s no way to tell comforts him. He looks back to the street, making a point not to look skyward again until he’s sure the cloud is gone.

A man wearing a yellow jacket decides it’s safe enough to cross. He darts forward, keeping his head low, and zigzags his way safely to the other side. This seems to bring a measure of relief to the people waiting, and a few more work up the nerve to move. They make it to the other side without anything happening. Gradually the backlog of people who have been lingering disappears, until there’s no one left in the shelter of the boxcar who was there the last time the sniper fired, except for Dragan and Emina.

“A woman has a friend come to visit,” Emina says, her voice quick and light. “The friend comes in, and the woman asks if she would like a coffee. ‘No,’ the friend says, ‘thanks, I’m fine.’ The woman says, ‘Great, now I can take a shower.’”

Dragan laughs, even though he’s heard the joke before. There are a half-dozen variations on it, but in each one the woman manages to do something large with an absurdly small amount of water. It’s not far from the truth. Dragan is now able to wash his whole body with half a litre of water. A quarter to wash, a quarter to rinse. It’s not the same, but it works. It’s a treat if the water is warm.

In a few weeks, his son Davor will turn nineteen. If he were still here he would almost certainly have become involved in the fighting, either voluntarily or as a conscript. Dragan can remember the day his son was born, in the early hours of the morning, the sun not yet up. They had been at the hospital for a day and a half. His wife was in labour for nearly thirty-six hours, and the worried faces of the doctors and nurses had him terrified, but then his son was pulled free of his wife’s body and declared healthy. His small cry emerging from a bundle of blankets sounded to Dragan like music. Afterwards he had an overwhelming feeling of benevolence, not just for his son, but for the world around him, wishing it were everything it
wasn’t, wondering what he could do to make things better. But the feeling faded, and then it was gone entirely, like it had never happened.

Dragan still wanted the best for his son, and he still wanted the world to be different, but he never really thought about how he could accomplish this, what possible effect his actions could have. Now he often wonders whether there was anything he did or didn’t do that played some small part in his city’s disintegration. He wonders what would have happened if the men on the hills and the men in the city had in their hearts a tiny fraction of the benevolence felt for and known by a small child.

Approaching from the east, about twenty metres away, is a small black dog. It has its nose to the ground, its tail low, and it moves with a determined gait. The dog doesn’t stop to smell any particular spot or greet any people as they pass. Dragan finds himself watching it getting closer and closer, and when he looks at Emina he sees she’s doing the same. The dog passes by them, close enough to touch, but doesn’t acknowledge their existence. No one else on the street seems to have noticed it, but why should they? The city is full of stray dogs. There’s nothing special about this one. If that is so, he thinks, then why are Emina and I both watching? It’s because of the singularity of the dog’s intent. This dog has somewhere to go.

The dog reaches the intersection and enters it without hesitation. He wonders if it knows that there’s a man with a gun on the hills. As if to answer his question, the dog lifts its nose from the ground, turns its head to the left and glances up into the hills. This makes Dragan believe the dog knows what’s going on. It may even know where the sniper is. Perhaps a dog can smell a bullet’s path, trace its trajectory back to the source. The dog could very well know which window or rooftop the sniper shoots from. Has anyone ever tested this? Do we know for sure what a dog can and can’t smell?

Dragan wonders if a sniper would shoot a dog. Would he waste a bullet, and risk revealing his position to a counter-sniper? If the men on the hills will not shoot at a dog, but they will shoot at us, this must mean they consider us different. But the question is whether we are better or worse. Do they recognize more of themselves in a dog or in a human?

The dog is nearly across the intersection now, its nose to the ground. It reaches the other side and then, unexpectedly, it stops, turns around and looks back. It stares at the street for a few seconds, at what Dragan can’t tell, and then continues on, until it’s out of sight.

“Where do you suppose that dog was off to?” Emina asks him.

He turns to her, sees she’s smiling. “I have no idea.”

“I wonder what urgent task a dog would have to make it move so deliberately?”

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. He felt the same amount of concern for the dog when it was in the sniper’s line of fire as he did for the forty or fifty people who have crossed this intersection since he’s been here.

Emina is looking at him, waiting for an answer to her question.

“Where do any of us have to go that’s so urgent?” he says, hoping this will end the discussion. He doesn’t want to think about the dog anymore.