He wonders what they think about, up there in the safety of their hills. Do they wish for this war to be over? Are they happy when they hit something, or is it enough to frighten people, to watch them run for their lives? Do they feel remorse when they go home and look at their children, or are they pleased, thinking they have done a great service for future generations? Dragan never understood, even before the war began, why they thought people like him were such a threat. He still doesn’t understand what killing him would accomplish, what effect it would have on anyone but him.
Dragan doesn’t want to go to Italy. He misses his wife and son, but he isn’t Italian, and he never will be. There’s no country he can go to where he won’t be from Sarajevo. This is his home, and this is the city he wants to be in. He doesn’t want to live under siege for the rest of this life, but to abandon the city to the men on the hills would mean that he would be forever homeless. As long as he’s here, and as long as he can keep his fear of death from blinding him to what’s left of the world he once loved and could love again, then there’s still hope that one day he will be able to walk openly down the streets of this city with his wife and son, sit in a restaurant and eat a meal, browse the windows of shops, free from the men with guns.
Dragan knows he won’t ever be able to forget what has happened here. If the war ends, if life goes back to some semblance of how it once was, and he survives, he won’t be able to explain how any of it was possible. An explanation implies a logic, but there’s no logic to Sarajevo now. He still can’t believe it happened. He hopes he will never be able to.
Arrow
THE LIGHT BULB IN NERMIN FILIPOVIC’S OFFICE seems more oppressive than ever. Arrow would like nothing more than to reach up and swat it, send it flying into the ceiling. She resists the temptation, knows that the sound of the bulb breaking would bring an aide scurrying into the room to investigate. He would replace the bulb. It would accomplish nothing. It probably wouldn’t even make her feel better.
She sits, alone, for nearly a half-hour before Nermin arrives. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. He barely seems to notice her.
“It’s done,” she says as he falls into his chair.
“He’s dead?” Nermin asks, looking at her for the first time.
Arrow nods. She’s never seen him like this and doesn’t know how to gauge his reactions.
“Which one?”
Arrow’s face is blank. She doesn’t understand the question.
“The cellist or the sniper?” he asks, leaning forward.
“The sniper,” she says, her voice flat. She doesn’t move, refuses to allow her body to reveal how she feels.
“Good.” An assistant, a teenage boy who isn’t old enough to shave, arrives in the room with a tray of coffee. Nermin takes one, hands the other to Arrow. She hesitates before accepting it, which prompts a look of surprise from Nermin. The boy retrieves his tray and leaves, shutting the door behind him.
Nermin takes a sip. “You seem unhappy.”
Arrow says nothing. She drinks her coffee and keeps her eyes on the floor.
For a while neither of them speaks. Then, quietly, in a tone Arrow has never heard him use before, he says, “Maybe you have done this for long enough. Maybe you should stop now.”
Arrow keeps her eyes on the floor. “The sniper had the shot. He had it the whole time. But he didn’t shoot. He was listening to the cellist play.”
Nermin shakes his head. “You don’t understand me.”
She continues. “I killed him because he shot at me, and because I couldn’t trust him not to shoot later. I had no choice.”
“No, you didn’t. But this has nothing to do with the cellist. The time has come for you to disappear.”
Arrow looks up. His bloodshot eyes stare at her. “Disappear?”
He wets his lips and looks away. “I can’t protect you any more. The terms of our deal can no longer be honoured.”
“I don’t understand.” Where, she wonders, am I to disappear to? The city is surrounded. No one can disappear, even if they want to.
“The men on the hills have created many monsters,” he says, “and not all of them are on the hills. There are those here who believe they are in the right simply because they oppose something that is evil. They use this war and the city for their own ends, and I won’t be a part of it. If this is how the city will be once the war is over, then it’s not worth saving.”
“What are they doing?” she asks. There are so many rumours these days that she doesn’t know what to believe. Most of them are easily dismissed as propaganda, but some of them make her wonder.
Nermin takes a final sip of his coffee and sets the empty cup down on his desk. “You should disappear, now, so you don’t have to find out.” He stands, which in the past has been her signal to leave, but she doesn’t move from her chair.
“What will happen to you?”
He steps out from behind the desk and stands beside her. “I expect to be relieved of my command at any moment.”
Arrow stands, and when he leans in to kiss her on each cheek she hugs him. Despite remaining always at a distance, he has become the closest thing to a friend she has. She turns to leave, and he grabs her shoulder, says, to her back, “Your father would never have forgiven me for turning you into a soldier.”
Arrow doesn’t turn around. She places her hand on his. “My father is dead,” she says, “and I forgive you.”
As she walks out of his office and into the bright light of the street, her rifle feels heavier on her shoulder than ever before. She remembers what he said about the opposition of evil, and wonders whether she might believe the same thing herself. Does she think she is good because she kills bad men? Is she? Does it matter why she kills them? She knows she no longer kills them because they are killing her fellow citizens. That’s just a part of it. She kills them because she hates them. Does the fact that she has good reason to hate them absolve her? A month ago she would have answered yes to this question. Now she wonders who decides what is a good reason and what isn’t.
She doesn’t know what will happen to Nermin. If he is right, if he is about to be relieved of his command, he will become a man without a place. The men on the hills will show him no mercy. Perhaps he has enough connections left to find a way to leave Sarajevo. It would be hard. Most countries won’t accept anyone who’s been a part of the fighting, and Nermin’s high profile means that he won’t be able to leave unnoticed. His best chance will be to stay out of sight until the war is over. If the men on the hills don’t win, then perhaps things will change and he can re-establish himself in a time of peace. She’s not sure exactly how a career soldier might do this, but lesser men have done greater things. She hopes that she is someday in a position to help him.
She has gone about three blocks when shelling starts. It’s been a quiet day for the most part, but the sky is beginning to darken, and the men on the hills seem to have a fondness for marking the coming of night with shells. She’s often wondered if the shells remind them of fireworks.
First they fall to the west, in Mojmilo and Dobrinja. Then a few land closer, across the river from Grbavica, and towards the riverbank around Baščaršija. Around her, people begin to move faster, heading home to the safety of cellars and basements, where they will likely spend the night. Arrow no longer goes into the basement of her building with the other residents when there’s shelling. It doesn’t seem worth it. Given that she’s in more danger during her average day than she is during the worst night of shelling, she’d just as soon sleep in her own bed. If she’s going to die, that’s where she’d like it to happen. It’s a small measure of control over an uncontrollable situation.
She’s about to turn the corner and head north when a boy runs by her and clips her shoulder with his arm, almost knocking her over. He doesn’t stop, but he glances back at her, and she recognizes him from Nermin’s office, the one who brought coffee. He looks younger now. His face is frightened, almost white, and he’s
moving much faster than anyone else on the street. Several shells land on the hills above her, distracting her, and the boy is gone. She shakes her head. Why would Nermin have a boy on his staff who is so easily terrified? Then she stops walking. He wouldn’t.
The boy isn’t afraid of the shelling. Something is wrong. She turns around and heads back towards Nermin. Her mind is all static, a poorly tuned radio, and she’s surprised to find herself running. The stock of her rifle bounces against her ribs, bruising them, and her boots feel as if they’re full of water, sloppy and awkward. Though it’s less than a minute, it seems to take days to travel a few blocks.
In a smooth and easy motion she slips her rifle off her shoulder and into her hands. Even as she’s doing this she acknowledges that it is simply a reflex. It is unlikely her rifle can solve whatever is happening.
There is no time to ponder this insight, however, because a second after Nermin’s office comes into view an explosion hurtles the doors off the building, sending the plywood covering the windows flying through the air. A ball of fire follows, blowing outward and then sucking back in on itself. The street is showered with dust and debris.
Arrow doesn’t know if she was knocked off her feet by the explosion or if she went to the ground of her own volition. At first she doesn’t even notice that she is on her stomach, watching the building burn through the scope of her rifle.
Nermin’s office is on the ground floor of the three-storey building. The rest of the building is also occupied by the military. Arrow doesn’t know what goes on in the other rooms, but she knows right away that there wasn’t anyone in them when the building exploded. Only one office would have had anyone in it.
The fire brigade arrives and puts out the fire. Men in uniforms block off the building and conduct a search. They don’t find any survivors. It’s lucky, they say, that the shell fell after work hours. A small miracle.
Arrow hears them talk to each other, can tell they all know it wasn’t a shell that hit this building. No one wants to say it, or perhaps they’re in on it. Either way, this explosion came from the inside and wasn’t shellfire from the men on the hills. But no one says anything. After all, people are killed every day. Murder is commonplace. Why should this one be any different?
For several hours Arrow lingers, hoping that Nermin somehow escaped, that he had one more trick up his sleeve no one knew about. Then, after almost everyone has gone, two soldiers come out of the building carrying a body wrapped in a blanket. They load it into the back of a truck and drive off. She shoulders her rifle and turns away from the building, begins the long walk home.
The bombarding hasn’t let up at all. The men on the hills are having a busy night. Arrow lies in her bed, listens to the sound of shells falling, of automatic gunfire, of sirens. She wonders what will be left standing when morning comes, whether there will be any noticeable difference in the appearance of the city. There must come a point where so much has been turned to rubble that ruining a little more makes no difference. It’s possible that point has already been reached.
Does a person work the same way? She can’t tell. It seems that she should be more upset about Nermin’s death, or more angry, or more anything. She wants to be, but she isn’t. She can’t even claim to be surprised.
It’s cold tonight, and the electricity is still off. She has no more firewood for her improvised woodstove, hasn’t bothered to scrounge for any. She shivers under her blankets, gets up and goes to the hall closet for more, returns to bed and continues to shiver. Her stomach grumbles, protesting her small supper of rice and weak tea. She can’t stand rice. She never ate it before the war, except once in an Indian restaurant while on vacation. She doesn’t remember disliking it before the war, but now the very thought of rice revolts her. It’s all she has, though, all that’s left from the last round of humanitarian aid. She gets paid in cigarettes by the army, which she trades for small things like a square of chocolate or a bar of soap. She managed to get a bag of apples a few weeks ago, and even though they were soft and mealy, they were well worth the ridiculous price she paid in a moment of weakness. She still has cigarettes to trade, a drawer full of them, but she can’t be bothered. It seems a waste to her, somehow, and she can’t shake the feeling that she may need them later on. So she eats rice, works her way through the ten-kilogram sack in the corner of the kitchen, augmenting it with bread and weak tea.
“Disappear,” Nermin told her. He’s right, she should disappear. Her stash of cigarettes might be enough to buy a pass through the tunnel. She has no idea what that costs. But she can’t stop thinking about Slavko’s funeral, the fat man and the grave. Is there a difference between disappearing and going into a grave? Does it matter whether she succumbs to the wishes of the men on the hills or the men in the city?
There is, of course, the question of survival. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to be shot by anyone, regardless of whether they’re on the hills or in the city. But the young girl who was overcome by what it means to be alive, the girl who was so happy and afraid and awestruck that she had to pull her car to the side of the road, doesn’t want to die either. That girl may be gone for now, may have no place in the city of today, but Arrow believes it’s possible that someday she might return. And if Arrow disappears, she knows she’s killing that girl. She will not come back.
Then there is the cellist. A part of her job is done. She has killed the sniper they sent. But if the cellist is true to his pledge, and Arrow believes he will be, then he is not yet finished. So they may send another sniper. They will have trouble finding a willing man, knowing what happened to his predecessor, but it is possible they will try again. And where will she be if that happens? Will she be protecting the cellist? She wants to protect him. If it is in her power, she will.
Arrow wakes to the sound of boots in the stairway. She doesn’t remember falling asleep and feels as though she hasn’t. But her eyes open, and she knows that the boots she hears are not on the feet of any of her neighbours. There is a pounding at the door. She gets out of bed, pulls on her clothes and opens the drawer to the small table beside her bed. She takes out her father’s revolver, the gun he used during his time as a police officer, and puts it in the pocket of her coat. Her rifle sits on the table in the kitchen, clean and ready, but she leaves it where it is.
Whoever is there continues hammering away, and she hears her neighbour’s door open. There is a pause, during which no words are spoken, and then the neighbour’s door closes again. Arrow checks that her gun is loaded, then answers the door.
Three men wait on the other side. One of them has his fist raised, ready to strike the door again, and the other two stand farther back from him. They carry guns, appearing casual. She knows they are anything but. They all wear hiking boots. The one who’s knocking is wearing green fatigues and an army jacket with a patch bearing the country’s insignia sewn on it. The other two wear street clothes, with no identifying badges on them at all.
The man in green looks at her in a way that reminds her of the way men used to look at her in nightclubs. He pauses before speaking, looking at the other two. “Are you Arrow?” His voice is intended to sound tough, but comes across as almost comic.
“Possibly. What do you want?” Her hand is in her coat pocket, but she hasn’t decided what to do yet. She could kill all three of them before they even raised their weapons, but that doesn’t seem like the correct course of action. They don’t appear to pose an immediate threat to her. They’re more likely messengers. Don’t shoot the messenger, the old saying goes, though she can’t remember exactly why. She decides to make no move for now.
“Come with us.”
Arrow pauses, wonders what her choices are. Does a refusal mean she must kill these men? “I don’t think so,” she says.
The two at the rear move their hands on their guns to a less casual position, raise the barrels slightly, and Arrow gets the answer to her question.
“This is not a request,” the one in front
says, though she can see it is. He is jumpy, she thinks. These men have heard of her. They might not be sure if the stories they’ve heard are true, but they’ve heard enough to be afraid. She feels pleased, momentarily, and then is irritated with herself for revelling in the fear of others. She never wanted anyone to fear her.
“Where are we going?” she asks, her voice low and smooth. She wants them to know they do not intimidate her.
“To see Colonel Karaman,” he says. “Bring your rifle.”
Arrow waits, lets them sweat it out while she decides what she’ll do. She can say no, and she will have to kill these three men, which will result in her being a fugitive. It seems easier and more prudent to go with them. She has never heard of a Colonel Karaman, and that makes her nervous. She nods and walks away from them, into the kitchen. She picks up her rifle and returns to the door. She closes the door, and the three men fall into step with her, the one in jeans beside her and the other two behind. She gets the distinct feeling they are treating her as a prisoner.
Arrow steps out of a blue BMW and is directed to wait while one of the men goes inside a café in a narrow street just north of the library. The other two men stand nearby, smoking, but they don’t try to talk to her. After a few minutes the first man returns and motions for her to follow him.
The inside of the café is poorly lit, and the air is stale. The windows have been barricaded with sandbags, and there is very little furniture left in the room. At a table in the back corner sits a man in uniform. He is in his late forties, and his hair and beard are greying. His face is tanned, his eyes an indistinguishable shade of brown. He looks hard, a man used to fighting. Arrow is immediately aware that he’d make a dangerous enemy.
“Sit,” he says, pushing out a chair with one of his feet. “And leave your rifle by the door.”
Arrow sets her rifle down, gently, and sits. She feels uneasy, aware that the situation is getting out of hand. She waits for the man to speak, eager to try to find a way to regain some control over what will happen.