The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Author:Steven Galloway
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, 1991-1995, War Stories, Yugoslav War, Eastern, History, Fiction, Romance, Literary, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Hercegovina), War & Military, General, Violoncellists, Snipers
ISBN: 9781843547396
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

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A night spent drifting between sleep and a replay of the day’s events leaves Arrow with little rest and no further insight into what happened. None of it seems to fit into any scenario she can invent. She’s absolutely certain that the sniper was there, and that he had a shot at the cellist. But otherwise nothing makes sense. This worries her. She’s beginning to think perhaps she has lost her way, perhaps she isn’t the weapon she was just a few days ago. She’s also forced to consider the likelihood that the sniper the men on the hills have sent is much better at his job than most. And maybe he has a plan that is beyond her reach.

It’s nearly nine in the morning, and again she sits in the spot where the cellist will play. But something has changed. Where yesterday she sat with her back straight and her eyes alert to the street around her, today her shoulders sag and pull her spine into a curve. She stares at the ground in front of her feet.

She thinks about the funeral she attended last month. When her neighbor Slavko was killed by a sniper on his way back from collecting water, shot clean through the neck, they took him to the Koševo Stadium, now made into a burial ground. His wife thought he’d like to be buried near to where he’d enjoyed so many football matches.

Arrow doesn’t normally go to funerals. In the early days of the war she went to as many as she could, out of respect, but then she became numb to them, and the more she attended the less she felt, until the misery of death and the sorrow of those left alive made her angry. When she looked at the faces of the husbands and wives and mothers and sons left behind, she felt a rage build inside her, and she felt that rage directed especially at those at the funeral who appeared most bereaved. How could they possibly feel so much grief? How could they not have reached the point months and months ago at which a person simply can’t feel any more pain? And then, just as she was sure she was about to walk up to a weeping widower and snap his neck, she would recognize what she was doing and thinking, and she would be ashamed. How had she become such a person? Then she would remember the men on the hills, and she would know that it was they who had done this. Later that day, or the next, she would kill as many of them as possible. But the process left her exhausted, and it became an expenditure of energy she could no longer afford. She didn’t need to go looking for reasons to send bullets into the hills.

But she had liked Slavko. He had retired just before the war from the city’s parks department, and he knew a lot about animals and birds. As they waited for the elevator, he often told her about interesting things he had seen.

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