So when his wife knocked on her door and asked her to come to Slavko’s funeral, a request that was unheard of for a bereaved widow to make, she could not refuse. “He always liked talking with you,” Ismira said. They never had any children themselves.
“Of course I’ll come,” Arrow said, and this seemed to make Ismira happy. The funeral was the next day, and as she stood in the converted football field with two dozen other people, she felt the familiar anger begin to build within her. She tried to think of something else, directing her attention away from the mourners. A row of newly dug graves led away from the hole they placed Slavko in. They gaped empty and expectant, like the mouths of baby birds. She knew that by the end of the week they’d all be full.
A fat man stood next to her. She’d never met him, but the presence of anyone who was overweight was remarkable in itself. Most people had lost ten or twenty kilograms since the siege began. She didn’t know how a person could remain fat when there was nothing to eat. Then she remembered that for some people, those with connections and privileges, plenty of food was available. She assumed that this man must be some sort of gangster, or perhaps a corrupt government official. She wondered what a person like that was doing at Slavko’s funeral. She didn’t think he’d travelled in those circles.
As she turned to get a better look at the fat man she heard a familiar whistling and knew that a shell was headed for them. Others knew this as well, but there was nothing she could do for them. She saw immediately that there was no cover to be had. The only real protection possible was the open graves, and although her mind demanded she hurl herself into one she did not comply. She threw herself to the ground, and for the first time in months smelled sweet wet grass. A shell exploded behind her, not far away, and she heard the fat man beside her begin to cry. His sobs were drowned out by another shell striking, this one slightly farther away.
Arrow lay on her stomach until the shelling stopped. When she lifted her head everyone but herself and the fat man was gone. He was alive, shaking, and she couldn’t see any sign that he was hurt. At first she thought that everyone else was dead. She thought the men on the hills had invented some new weapon that could make people disappear. No unpleasant carnage for the world to see. No evidence whatsoever. It would be as if they had never even existed. Then she saw a head emerge from one of the graves, and then another, until people began to climb out of the open graves. She watched as some men helped Ismira and another woman out of Slavko’s grave.
The fat man sat up, tried to get to his feet, failed. He exhaled a long wheeze and looked at her.
“Why didn’t you go into a grave?” she asked him, surprised by how harsh her voice sounded.
His face relaxed a little. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get out,” he said. “If you think I’m big now, you should have seen me before.”
Arrow stood and helped the fat man to his feet. “How did you know Slavko?”
“I didn’t, really. We were waiting in line for water. He helped me when I dropped my canister.” The fat man looked at his feet. “Why didn’t you go in a grave?” he asked, raising his face to her.
She smiled. “I was worried you might land on top of me,” she said, and the man grinned back. Later, though, she knew the real reason. She would not let the men on the hills decide when she went below the ground. If she were to go underground it would be because she decided to or because they killed her. But she wasn’t going to do their work for them. She wasn’t going to live in a grave.
Arrow’s not sure why this memory has come to her now. She doesn’t see a connection with the day’s problem. She looks at the pile of decaying flowers at her feet and is reminded of the job she’s here to do.
She looks up at the window where she believes the sniper hides. It’s a perfect spot. Hitting the cellist from there would be no challenge at all. She looks to the west, to where her own hiding spot is, and she looks above her, where her trap is. All is as it should be. There’s no problem with her plan.
She gets to her feet and is about to turn west when her legs go stiff and her fingers begin to throb. She freezes, trying to figure out what has prompted this reaction in her. She breathes in deep and then she realizes that the sniper is watching her. She doesn’t know where he is, but she can feel his eyes on her. He could be in any window, or he could be one of ten people who are in view and appear to be engaged in legitimate affairs. It doesn’t matter, really, because she doesn’t have her rifle with her. Initially this causes her to panic, but then she thinks that not having the rifle may have saved her. To him, she’s just another person sitting in the street. He may assume she’s a relative of someone who died here, or another citizen come to pay her respects, or an admirer of the cellist. How would he know she’s the one who has been sent to kill him?
Of course she knows that if he were watching her at just the right moment, when she looked up at his window, and then to hers, and then above her, he would know everything. But what would he do with that information? She thinks that if he knew who she was she’d be dead by now.
To be safe, she puts her hands in her pockets and heads east, away from the building she uses. She walks past his window and down the street, not looking back, not really looking anywhere. She continues east until she hits the burned-out ruins of the library. She then heads north, and backtracks towards her apartment to retrieve the rifle she will use to kill her enemy.
She has decided to give this sniper the benefit of doubt. She will assume he’s as good as, if not better than, she is. She will take all the necessary precautions to avoid detection. Though she’s been in this apartment for nearly five hours, she won’t enter her line of fire for a few more minutes, until just before four o’clock. She won’t even give him a chance of spotting her. She’s already gone to the decoy apartment and repositioned her dummy rifle and hat, so if he notices them he won’t have the opportunity to see that the gun he thinks is looking for him is in the exact same position as the day before.
She didn’t report in to Nermin last night. He will know that she hasn’t killed the sniper, but he will also know that the cellist is still alive. At the end of today, if she lives, she’ll have to see him. She isn’t sure how it will go if she doesn’t get the sniper or, worse, if the cellist dies. She’s never failed before, and she would rather not find out how her army views such failures.
It’s time. Soon the cellist will enter the street and the sniper will be forced to show himself. She moves towards the window, rests her rifle on an overturned table to help steady it, and brings her eye to the scope. She locates the fourth-floor window where he will be and looks for the hole in the plastic. It’s easy to spot, having grown in size since the last time she saw it up close. It’s now more than large enough to aim and fire through, and Arrow is confident that when the sniper attempts to do so, she’ll have a clear and straightforward shot at him. It will be nothing to send him a bullet. She smiles.
The cellist steps out of the doorway and walks to his spot in the middle of the street. Nothing happens in the fourth-floor window. He unfolds his stool and sits, motionless and silent. He lifts his arms and begins to play. Still nothing happens in the fourth-floor window. Arrow realizes that she’s beginning to know the notes he plays. She’s able to hear them in her mind before she hears them with her ears, to fill in those that are drowned out by the street and the shells and her own concentration.
After five minutes she knows something is wrong. The cellist plays for only ten or fifteen minutes at the most, and the sniper hasn’t shown yet. There’s no reason she can think of for him to delay, at least none that doesn’t result in the disintegration of her plans. But she has no choice other than to keep the fourth-floor window in her scope, to wait for him to move. She has, somehow, through her series of decisions, put herself into a position where there’s no alternative to the path she’s chosen. The choices she’s made have left her without choice.
There’s movement in the decoy apartment. She senses it bef
ore she sees it, long before she repositions her rifle barrel forty degrees to the north. When she looks through the scope she doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Everything appears unchanged. She suspects her mind of playing tricks on her and turns her attention back to the fourth-floor window.
Her eye is just adjusting to the change in her scope’s position when she grasps what has changed in the decoy apartment. The rifle she saw isn’t the one she put there. She has fallen into her own trap. And though she doesn’t see it, she knows that the rifle in the window has now found her, and a bullet is on its way. She hits the ground as it rips the plastic and punches through the wall at the back of the room. She clutches her knees to her chest and waits for a second shot, the one that will kill the cellist.
The music continues. The echo of the shot sent for her bounces through the buildings on either side of the street and drowns the cellist out, but once it dissipates, his cello emerges again and there is no second shot. He plays on to the end, either oblivious to or unconcerned about the gunshot that came from less than a dozen metres above him. Of course he would have no way of knowing which side fired the shot, Arrow knows. She wonders whether he cares who fires what bullets. She wonders how much it matters to anyone.
She resists the urge to pick up her gun and attempt to fire back. For some reason the sniper hasn’t killed the cellist. She suspects he isn’t convinced she’s dead, and is unwilling to move his sights from her window. Arrow stays still. She wants him to believe she’s dead.
“I think either he evacuated after the first shot, or else he was waiting to see if he’d hit you,” Nermin says. “Or maybe he didn’t have a clear shot at the cellist.” He leans back in his chair as he says this, as though the act of relaxing indicates a conclusion reached.
Arrow knows he had a clear shot, and she doesn’t think he fled or was waiting to confirm her death. This feeling has been growing in her ever since she left the apartment. She has no idea why he didn’t kill the cellist, however, and isn’t eager to tell Nermin anything about what she does or does not think.
“I’ll put a man in that apartment overnight, in case he comes looking for a body.”
“Make sure he stays away from the window, and that he’s gone by morning,” she says. “He’ll be watching, and he knows what I look like.”
“Of course,” Nermin says. He stares at her like he’s considering something, and then, appearing to have reached a decision, he leans forward. Arrow thinks he looks tired. There are deep creases around his eyes she can’t remember seeing before, and his fatigues, usually crisp and clean, are wrinkled and stained.
“The situation here is uncertain,” he says. “I know I have made promises to you, and I will attempt to keep them, but there are things going on internally that may make it difficult for both of us in the days to come.”
She nods. 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. In the middle are the criminals. When the war first started they were the only ones who knew how to fight, really fight, and they leapt to defend the city. Now they are uncontrollable, and it has become harder and harder for those who aren’t criminals to overlook the profiteering and lawlessness and other abuses. But power is rarely given up voluntarily. It’s a question of who will prevail. She knows the survival of the city depends as much on the attitude of the defenders as it does on repelling the attackers. A city of zealots and criminals isn’t worth saving.
She sees, for the first time, that Nermin is in a difficult position. The autonomy he has granted her does not fit in with the plans of those who are angling for power. An entity like her, a killer you can’t control, is a dangerous thing. It would be different if she were simply good at her job. In that case few would even notice her existence. Perhaps this is what Nermin thought would happen when he sought her out. But her abilities are a known quantity, difficult to disguise. If Nermin is involved in a power struggle, she’s a liability to him.
“Am I in danger?” she asks, knowing she probably is.
Nermin smiles. “Of course you are,” he says. “There are men on the hills with guns. Only hours ago one of them tried to kill you.”
His joke bothers her, and she tells him so. He folds his hands on his desk. She notices his fingernails need cutting.
“There is a lot less tolerance for tolerance right now. I hope this will change. If it doesn’t, we will both be in a dangerous situation. We need to resolve this cellist business. What happens after that is beyond our control.”
He stands, and Arrow understands she’s dismissed. As she leaves the office she’s struck by the distinct feeling that the next time she sees Nermin Filipović the world as they each know it will be entirely different.
When morning comes Arrow doesn’t go to the street. Now that her adversary is aware of her, now that he knows who she is, she can’t risk being spotted. Besides, there’s nothing in the street she hasn’t already seen. The only thing she’s curious about is whether the pile of flowers has grown.
She’s becoming frustrated with how much she doesn’t know. Until recently she didn’t have this problem. She thinks maybe it all started with the cellist, but can’t remember exactly. So she can’t even answer the question of when her questions ceased to have answers. She shakes her head at this, stifles a frustrated smirk. She won’t succumb to the lure of black humour. She’s spent too much time with Nermin and doesn’t like it.
Her plan for the day is simple. She’s reasonably confident that the sniper will think she’s dead. She knows she probably should be. So he will be unlikely to spend too much time worrying about the apartment where she was hiding. No sniper ever returns to the same place twice, particularly a place where someone else was killed. If he thinks she’s alive he’ll assume she’d find another spot, and if he assumes she’s dead he’ll know that the next person they send will avoid the scene of his predecessor’s failure.
She has, in a small concession to how risky her strategy is, switched windows and set up one room to the east, in what used to be the master bedroom. Part of the windowsill is missing, likely caused by the shell that has obliterated the contents of the room. There’s a hole about sixty centimetres wide extending from the sill into the floor, and the plastic covering the window stretches over it but isn’t fastened securely. It’s a simple matter to slip the barrel of her rifle into the hole, pushing aside the plastic enough to have a clear shot at most of the street to the east. She’s invisible here, and as she waits for the day to pass it occurs to her that this is the place she should have chosen to begin with, and that bothers her. She hasn’t done what a weapon would have.
The day goes slowly. She hears heavy shelling to the west, in the direction of Dobrinja and Mojmilo. A part of her wishes she could be there. She thinks of the people who, because she has been here for the past three days, she has not shot. Men who hate her, men who would kill her, men who have killed people like her in the last three days because she did not kill them first.
But then she begins to wonder even about this. Do the men on the hills hate her? Or do they hate the idea of her, because she’s different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the end threatens the potential happiness of everyone? She begins to wonder whether they fight against an idea, and that fight manifests itself as hatred. If so, they are no different from her. Except for one key detail that simply can’t be ignored or pushed aside. The idea she felt prepared to give her life for was not one that could include the hatred she feels for the men on the hills. 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 r
apist, 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, and not by their actions.
This realization stuns her, and she feels an impulse to leave her rifle where it lies and return to her apartment. But she doesn’t. She stays where she is. At four o’clock the cellist comes out and her finger tightens around the trigger.
The sniper shows himself almost immediately. He’s in a second-storey window, one of the three she first suspected. As the cellist begins to play, the sniper appears through a hole in the plastic, one that wasn’t there before and isn’t very well hidden. Arrow is surprised by how easy it is to spot him.
The sniper puts the cellist in his sights. Arrow is about to send a bullet into him, but stops. His finger isn’t on the trigger. This isn’t a detail she would usually notice or care about, but she can see it in her scope, and it makes her pause. His hand isn’t even in the vicinity of the trigger. His right hand holds the uppermost point of the stock, and his shot is clear, but his left hand isn’t on his rifle. It hangs down to his side, out of her view.