The Cellist of Sarajevo (14 page)

He hasn’t moved. He still sits with his eyes closed, one hand on the stock of his rifle, the other at his side. The final notes of the cellist’s melody reach him, and he smiles. His eyes open, and a small hole erupts between them. The back of his head disintegrates and the grey viscus of his brain slaps onto the wall behind him. He falls from sight and his rifle falls on top of him.

Arrow lowers her rifle and looks down at the street. The cellist has finished. He picks up his stool and cello and heads for his door. He pauses just before he enters, and she wonders if he will look in her direction. Even though he can’t possibly see her, she wants him to turn towards her, to acknowledge her in some way. The cellist adjusts his grip on his instrument and disappears into the building.

Kenan

T
HE BREWERY HAS BEEN BADLY DAMAGED AND PARTS
of it are no longer safe, but its springs are deep beneath the surface, and the basement of the building is impenetrable even to the men on the hills, though that hasn’t stopped them from trying to level the bright red building. The brewery is situated in a vulnerable position, only a short distance from the occupied hills. There have been several mortar attacks here already. So far none of them has happened on days when Kenan was present.

Outside, there are about a hundred people in line for water. Kenan has been here when the line had as many as three hundred people, and he’s happy that he won’t have to wait for hours today. Water hoses coming out
to the street from the brewery feed large pipes set up off the ground on supports, which in turn have smaller hoses branching off from them. Kenan estimates about twenty people at a time can get water, and most have roughly as many canisters as he does, so it shouldn’t be too long before it’s his turn. People move forward at a steady pace, though it seems that just as one person leaves with their water another enters the line.

There’s a man at the front of the line who has a dog with him. It’s a medium-sized dog, some sort of terrier with curly brownish fur. There’s a thermos tied to its collar, and before the man fills up his bottles he takes the lid off the thermos and fills it. He places it on the ground, and as he fills his four large canisters the dog laps up the water in the thermos lid as though it was a race, which, Kenan supposes, it is. When the man is finished filling his canisters he fills the terrier’s thermos and puts on the lid. Not a drop is left in it. He ties the thermos to the dog’s collar and begins to load his canisters into the makeshift dolly he’s using to transport them.

Kenan has considered using a dolly, but decided that there was too much debris on the street that might clog its wheels and make it difficult to manoeuvre, slowing him down. Now, though, seeing how much water the man is able to transport, he wonders whether he might try one on his next trip. If he could fill his two backup
containers, and maybe find a couple more somewhere, he wouldn’t have to make the trip as often.

At the taps, people try to move as quickly as they can. No one wants to linger, but it’s a rare opportunity to be out and among others, so some of them can’t help themselves from taking perhaps a bit longer than they need. He hears the sound of water and people and the engines of large trucks that haul water to who knows where, maybe the troops on the front. If he forgets why he’s there, he can almost imagine everything is normal, that this is an everyday street scene. He tries to let his eyes go a little out of focus, tries to believe he’s at an outdoor market. People are talking about a concert or a football match. It’s a good feeling, but it lasts for only an instant, because a woman is shouting at him to take his place at a vacated tap.

After a muttered apology he steps forward. The water pours from the pipes, slapping onto the pavement at his feet. Kenan has never understood why they don’t have a valve on each outlet to shut off the water between users. It seems to him an awful waste of such a precious resource. He has risked his life to get this water, water he can’t get anywhere else, and here it is running into the ground as though it doesn’t matter. Perhaps they can’t get the necessary plumbing, or perhaps it has something to do with the pumps, or perhaps the supply of water underneath the brewery is so vast
that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. He hopes someone has done their homework, that they’re absolutely certain the water will keep running.

He leans down until his containers are on the ground, steps out of the rope that runs over each shoulder and across the back of his neck. He kneels, places Mrs. Ristovski’s containers in front of him and unties his own. With a sharp twist he removes the caps and places them in a neat pile. His bottles are lined up at his left, two rows of four. He flexes his hands, takes a deep breath, moves his shoulders in a circle three times until he feels his muscles loosen. Then he picks up the first bottle and places its neck under the stream of cold water. When it’s full he places it to his right and as quickly as he can he reaches left and grabs another container, gets it under the flow of water in one smooth movement designed to keep as much water from spilling out onto the street as possible. He couldn’t say why he does this. He just doesn’t want to be responsible for waste. To him, water has come to mean life, and if more is to be lost, he doesn’t want to be a part of it. He fills the second container with a practised efficiency, and then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth.

Kenan has heard it said that you never hear the shell that kills you. He doesn’t know if this is true, has no idea how anyone could know, or even pretend to know. When he hears the telltale whistle of an incoming shell,
however, he knows that he has never heard this sound so close before. The shell is going to fall very near to him, and he can’t accurately gauge where it’s going to land because he has no experience in determining how this sound corresponds to proximity. In the split second before the shell hits, he thinks of a time when he was a boy and got in a fight in the schoolyard. He wasn’t much of a fighter, had never been in a fight before, and what he remembers is seeing the other boy’s fist, seeing it coming at him slow like a yawn and thinking to himself, “I’m about to get punched in the face.” Now, though, he sees that fist coming at him and thinks, “I’m about to die.”

The shell hits, and an instant after hearing the loudest noise he thought the world could contain, Kenan is knocked off his feet. The boy who punched him thirty years ago has grown into a prizefighter and punched him again. He sprawls on his back, and he stays down, dazed. His ears are ringing and he doesn’t hear the whistle of the second incoming shell, but he hears its detonation. It echoes through his head for what feels like years, and then for a few seconds there is total silence. He wonders if he’s gone deaf. His back is wet, and he assumes he’s wounded, but as his hearing returns he hears screaming all around him, and he thinks that if he were wounded he would feel something.

Kenan finds he can’t move. He wants to, but his limbs don’t respond. Perhaps he’s dead. He can see people running by him, down the street to the right, and he doesn’t know why they’re not stopping. Then he finds he can move his foot, and then his leg, and then his other leg and his arms, and he’s restored to the land of the living. He sits up, feels himself for wounds, finds he’s fine. He’s sitting in a pool of water, though his bottles aren’t tipped over. He isn’t sure whether he should feel relieved or ashamed.

The shells hit about thirty metres up the street from him, near the end of the line. He stands and begins to walk towards where they landed. There are already people there, rushing, frantic, trying to save those who can be saved. On the pavement in front of him is a foot. The shoe is undamaged, as is some of the sock. It doesn’t look real. Then he sees a woman holding her leg, stunned, as if she doesn’t believe it either. She looks at Kenan and begins to shriek, points at her leg to where her foot used to be. Two men rush towards her, one of them tying a piece of fabric around her leg at the thigh, and she passes out. The men pick her up and work their way up the street. There’s a car waiting there, and they put her in the back beside a man who has blood running down his face from a fifteen-centimetre gash in his head. His ear is attached to his head only at the lobe, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
The men close the door on the woman and move to the other side of the car to take a look at him. They confer and remove him from the car, placing him at the side of the road. He doesn’t move, though his eyes are open, and Kenan realizes the man is dead.

Another group arrives with two more injured people, a man bleeding from his stomach and a child, maybe ten years old, who’s unconscious. They’re hastily placed in the car, the man in the back and the child in front. They remind Kenan of a family. In all likelihood they’ve never met before. He wonders what his own family is doing right now, is thankful that he hasn’t brought any of his children with him, though they’ve asked time and time again, and he’d be glad for their company and the help carrying the water home. He can’t risk one of them going home with another family.

One of the men bangs his hand on the rear window of the car and it speeds off. Kenan turns around, and in front of him is the man with the brown terrier. He’s still holding the leash, or half of it. It’s been severed, and the man’s leg is bleeding. He looks at the space at the end of the leash, where his dog should be, then at the street around him.

“Have you seen my dog?” he asks Kenan.

“No,” Kenan answers. “You’re bleeding, sir.”

The man doesn’t seem to hear him. “Friend, have you seen my dog?”

Kenan puts his hand on the man’s arm. “You’re hurt. You need help.”

The man ignores him, brushes off his hand. He limps away, stops a woman after a few steps, and repeats his question.

There are sirens in the distance, coming from the other side of the river, and then he hears the sound of shelling, followed by the sharp crack of sniper fire. They’re firing at the ambulances sent to help, and as the sirens get closer he begins to worry that they’re drawing the fire towards him, towards the brewery. But the men on the hills can hit the brewery any time they like. They’re firing at the ambulances to tell him, and everyone else, that help will not arrive if they have anything to say about it. Someone somewhere turns on the air-raid sirens, and the sound of the ambulances is drowned out. At the top of the street a car slides to a halt, and a few more people are deposited inside. The line of bodies on the side of the road has grown.

All around him people are screaming, running, shouting, moaning. Those who are injured but can walk are making their way to the top of the street in the hope that it won’t be long before a car can take them. Kenan thinks they can hear the shelling as well as he can, so they must know their ordeal isn’t over. Those who can’t walk are being carried. The first of the ambulances arrives and unloads a half-dozen stretchers into waiting
arms. The sound of the air-raid sirens swells and then dies off, swells again. After a while it begins to sound to him like the breathing of an asthmatic.

Kenan is able to identify three types of people here. There are those who ran away as soon as the shells fell, their instinct for self-preservation stronger than their sense of altruism or civic duty. Then there are those who didn’t run, who are now covered in the blood of the wounded, and they work with a myopic urgency to help those who can be saved, and to remove those who can’t to go to whatever awaits them next. Then there’s the third type, the group Kenan falls into. They stand, mouths gaping, and watch as others run or help. He’s surprised he didn’t run, isn’t part of the first group, and he wishes he were part of the second.

He looks down at his feet. He’s only a few metres from where the first shell struck. There aren’t many people left here now, no more than a dozen. In places, the ground is stained dark red, but where he stands it’s clean. Water runs down from the taps, which are undamaged, and there’s a clear river in the centre of the road. The gutter is turning pink, washing away the blood spilled only minutes ago.

Kenan walks back up the hill to his canisters. His six are full. He binds them together, three on each side. He looks at the water gushing out of the pipe in front of him. It won’t be long before the street is clear again. He
reaches out and puts his hands over the pipe. It’s easy to block, and the water stops, but all around him other pipes continue to flow. He’s soaked to the skin, and he knows that he can stand here with his hands on the pipe for a year and it will make no difference. He steps back, watches the water run downhill away from him. He imagines it travelling through the streets and ending up in the Miljacka, from there making its way out of Sarajevo until it runs into the ocean.

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. This is why the men on the hills are able to kill with impunity. If there were bodies in the streets, rotting where they fell, if the water from these taps didn’t wash away the blood and bone and skin, then maybe the men would be forced to stop, maybe they would want to stop.

At the top of the street an old Yugo hatchback takes away the last of the wounded. At the side of the road there are at least seven bodies. A large blue van pulls up. Four men get out and begin to put the corpses into the back, one man on each arm and one man on each leg.
The bodies are loaded in feet first, and as they’re lifted into the van their heads loll back, as though taking one last look at the place where they died.

Kenan picks up one of Mrs. Ristovski’s bottles. He pays no attention to the water that spills as his grip falters and the bottle tilts. When it’s full he doesn’t rush. He takes his time as he caps the first bottle, then fills the second one. He sets the bottles on the ground and stands there. He has grown used to the sound of the air-raid sirens, hasn’t noticed it for a while. Now he hears them again, and he listens to them wail, listens to the screech of shells falling, the gunfire from both sides. He puts his hands back under the water, washes them even though they’re not dirty, leans down and puts the rope over his head. He picks up Mrs. Ristovski’s water, one bottle in each hand, and stands. The rope cuts into his neck and shoulders, and he bends down, shifting it to a more comfortable position. Then he stands once more and turns away from the men who are loading the last of the bodies into their van. He begins to walk back down the hill, past the spot where the first mortar fell, then the spot where the second fell. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t look at the ground. There’s nothing more to see.