“Sometimes they try to fly, sometimes they don’t,” he says. “I don’t know what makes the difference.”
He reels the struggling bird all the way in. When it’s close enough, he reaches out and grabs it. For some reason it stops fighting him, perhaps in shock. The man holds the pigeon’s body with one hand and, with the other, twists its neck until it breaks. Then he cuts the bird’s body loose and places it in a bag beside him. The man stands.
“Are you finished for the day?” Kenan asks.
The old man nods. “I’ve caught six, one for each person in my apartment. I only take what I need. If I’m not greedy, perhaps they will still be here tomorrow.”
“Good luck,” Kenan says.
“To you too, sir.” The man picks up his bag and pole and starts up the plaza, heading north towards Vratnik.
Kenan stays there long after the man is gone. Although he has never killed an animal himself, apart from a fish, the idea of it has never particularly bothered him. But he can’t help feeling a sort of kinship with the pigeon. He thinks it’s possible that the men on the hills are killing them slowly, a half-dozen at a time, so there will always be a few more to kill the next day.
Arrow
THE OFFICE OF ARROW’S UNIT COMMANDER ISN’T much to look at. A small room with a desk and three chairs, boarded-up windows, a stained carpet covering a badly worn wood floor. All of it is illuminated by one naked light bulb powered by a generator that she can hear chugging away in another room. The bulb hangs from a wire into the middle of the room above the desk, and if she looks directly at it, she will be blinded for the following ten minutes by a glowing orb centred in her vision. She can never decide if the light has been placed in such an obtrusive location on purpose, as somes sort of intimidation technique, or if it’s only poor design. In her experience the army excels in both intimidation and tastelessness.
“You have been watched for some time now,” her commander says, standing behind her and placing his hand on Arrow’s shoulder in a way that seems as though it’s meant to be reassuring. Arrow wonders whether he’s referring to that morning’s incident, to the enemy sniper who had been hunting her. In the time she spends considering this possibility, the hand on her shoulder goes from feeling benign to malevolent. She fights an urge to tear it off her, rise from the hard chair she sits in and drive the palm of her hand upward into the throat of her unit commander.
“Many people are impressed with your abilities,” he continues. It seems that he isn’t talking about this morning’s sniper, so she calms down. He removes his hand and sits behind his desk, facing her.
Nermin Filipović is a good-looking man, dressed in rumpled but clean camouflage fatigues. His beard is neatly trimmed and his hair is dark, if a little long. Arrow imagines it is soft to the touch. He’s in his late thirties and, as far as she knows, isn’t married. There’s a small scar on his forehead above his right eye, and the nail on his right index finger has turned a dark purple, as though it has recently sustained a blow.
He’s a professional soldier. When the war began, and Europe’s fourth-largest army turned inward on itself and surrounded the city, he was one of the few career officers to break ranks and defend the city against his former colleagues. If they fail and Sarajevo falls, if the men on the hills ever make it into the city, he will be one of the first people they execute. Arrow isn’t sure what her position will be on their list. There’s no way to tell how much they know about her.
“We have a special assignment for you. An important assignment.”
Arrow nods. She has suspected that he was working towards something like this. So far they’ve been content to let her choose her own targets, have left her more or less alone, provided she continues to deliver bullets to worthy destinations. Lately, however, she has felt more attention being paid to her, and she knows that sooner or later they are going to ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do.
“I would remind you of our first conversation,” she says, looking him straight in the eyes, something she rarely does.
Four months after the war started, Nermin had sent a man to request that she come to see him. In a way, Arrow was surprised it had taken them so long to approach her. Most of the other members of the university target-shooting team had already been approached. She would learn later that her father, who was a policeman, had asked Nermin to leave her out of it. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, in front of the Sarajevo Canton Building, and Arrow has never asked Nermin whether he felt her father would have changed his mind about her involvement in the city’s defence or if he simply decided to ignore the request of a dead man. She doesn’t want to know the answer.
“We need people who can shoot as well as you can,” he said.
“I’ve never shot at a person,” she replied, knowing that until quite recently this was probably true of most of the city’s defenders, and maybe even its attackers. “Only at targets.”
“It’s a matter of perspective,” he said.
“I don’t want to kill people.”
“You’d be saving lives. Every one of those men on the hills will kill some of us. Given the chance, they will kill all of us.”
Arrow thought about this. She thought about what it might be like to pull the trigger and have her bullet hit a living being instead of a piece of paper. She was mildly surprised to find that the thought didn’t horrify her, that she could probably do it, and she could probably live with it.
“I think this will end,” she said. Her hands turned her coffee cup in a clockwise circle. She hadn’t drunk any of it yet, and soon it would be cold.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall as if it were a window, as if it offered some view that could lend a new perspective to her statement. “That’s a good view to take. I hope you’re right. I don’t see how it could last forever.”
He turned his gaze back from the wall, seeming to sense that she was moving towards stating an intent.
Arrow nodded. “I think it will end, and when it does I want to be able to go back to the life I had before. I want my hands to be clean.”
Nermin’s eyes flickered down to where his own hands lay folded on his desk and then back up. She wasn’t sure if he knew he had done this. It looked involuntary, but still it made her nervous. His hands moved to his lap. “I don’t think any of us will be going back to the life we had before, however this ends. Even those who keep their hands clean.”
“If I do this, it will have to be done a certain way. I won’t blindly kill just because you say I must.” She raised her cup to her mouth and drank. The coffee was good, strong and bitter, but no longer hot.
And so they reached an agreement. She would report only to Nermin, she would work alone, and she would, for the most part, choose her own targets. Occasionally Nermin has asked for someone specific, or that she work in a particular area, and thus far she has always been able to accommodate him.
She’s aware, now, that the woman who sat in this office on that day and said she didn’t want to kill anyone was gone, that with each passing week she’s less and less certain there will be an end to all this. The parameters of their deal are dangerously close to irrelevance.
This does not, however, reduce her resolve. If anything, her desire to adhere to her conditions, to keep her hands clean, has increased. Although she has nearly completely lost sight of the person she was, she still knows who she wants to be, and as far as she can see, the only path leading her towards this person is back through her former self.
Nermin looks at her for a long time. She can see that he’s considering saying something to her, and she suspects it’s about her role in defending the city, but he doesn’t. He stands, walks past her and opens the door, motioning with his hand for her to follow him.
“I have something to show you,” he says, turning to her. “Don’t worry. This is as clean as you’re going to get.”
“Wait,” Nermin says, looking at his watch. “It’s almost ti
me.”
Arrow knows this street well. It’s in the heart of the city, just past the point where Turkish buildings give way to Austro-Hungarian ones. Farther down is the Second World War memorial, the eternal flame, which has gone out. Behind her is a street where she used to meet friends for a coffee when she was in university, and the river isn’t far to the south. And past that are the southern hills of the city, where a cable car once carried people to the top of Mount Trebević.
They’re standing in the doorway of a shop that’s no longer open, across from the indoor public market. Arrow knows that not long ago a mortar shell landed in this street and killed a large number of people. She heard all about it on the radio, but although it was unusual for so many to be killed in one spot at one time, she didn’t think much about the incident then. It was simply how things were, she supposed. The opportunity to die was everywhere, and it just wasn’t that surprising when that opportunity became an event. Now, however, standing in the street where it happened, it seems to her that something significant occurred here.
An explosion groans to the west of them, and Arrow involuntarily looks in the direction of the sound.
Nermin, who hasn’t looked, smiles. “I think they’re trying to send us a message.”
“What is the message?” she asks as another shell lands in the same area.
Nermin shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m making a special effort not to listen. Okay, here he comes.”
At first, Arrow isn’t sure whether to trust what she sees. She even wonders if it’s possible she’s hallucinating, or if perhaps she has died and this is how the transition to whatever follows death takes place, through a series of unbelievable circumstances. But gradually she accepts she’s still alive, and she’s lucid, and this is happening.
A tall man with turbulent black hair, an almost comic moustache and the saddest face she has ever seen emerges from a doorway. He wears a slightly dusty tuxedo and carries a cello under one arm, a stool under the other. He walks out of the building with a calm and determined stride, appearing oblivious to the danger he’s putting himself in, sets his stool in the middle of the street, sits down and positions his instrument between his legs.
“What is he doing?” she asks, but Nermin doesn’t answer.
The cellist closes his eyes and remains still, his arms hanging limp. It appears as though the cello stays upright by its own will, independent of the man surrounding it. The wood glows rich and warm against the drab grey of shattered paving stones, and she feels an urge to touch it, to run her fingers over the lacquered surface. Her hand reaches out, a futile attempt to bridge a distance far greater than the thirty or so metres that separate her from the cello.
The cellist opens his eyes. The sadness she saw in his face is gone. She doesn’t know where it went. His arms rise, and his left hand grips the neck of the cello, his right guides the bow to its throat. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. When the first notes sound they are, to her, inaudible. Sound has vanished from the world.
She leans back into the wall. She’s no longer there. Her mother is lifting her up, spinning her around and laughing. The warm tongue of a dog licks her arm. There’s a rush of air as a snowball flies past her face. She slips on someone else’s blood and lands on her side, a severed arm almost touching her nose. In a movie theatre, a boy she likes kisses her and puts his hand on her stomach. She exhales, and pulls the trigger.
Then sound returns to the world. She isn’t sure what has happened. She doesn’t know what a man playing a cello in the street at four in the afternoon has done to her. You will not cry, she tells herself, and she wills herself calm until after the cellist has finished, risen and returned to the building he came from. There will be no crack in her.
Nermin is looking at her.
“We need you to keep this man alive,” he says.
“I don’t understand.” She’s barely heard what he said and struggles to bring herself back into her situation.
Nermin removes his hat and wipes his sleeve across his brow. “He has said that he will do this for twenty-two days. This is the eighth. People see him. The world has seen him. We cannot allow him to be killed.”
“I can’t be responsible for him,” she says. She’s tired. She’s almost always tired, but she can’t remember the last time she acknowledged it, even to herself. An old woman shuffles past them, keeping close to the wall, and Arrow wonders which one of them is more exhausted.
Nermin shakes his head. “I’m not asking that of you. We require something slightly different.”
The place where the cellist sits, while vulnerable to shells, he says, isn’t within the direct line of fire for a sniper on the southern hills. But they have received information. It’s believed that the enemy will send a sniper into their part of the city to shoot him. And her job will be to stop that. It is, they admit, almost impossible. But, as Nermin reminds her, she has a certain talent for the impossible.
“Why don’t they just shell the street again?”
“It’s not about merely killing him. Shooting him is a statement.”
Arrow leans back against the wall and pictures the cellist lying in the street. She sees Nermin’s point. A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn’t.
“Look,” he says, “we have made you a deal, and I will continue to do my best to honour it. But things are changing on our side. If you can do this, we would both benefit.”
“I don’t kill to benefit myself, or you.”
“I know. I’m just not sure how much longer that will be a position you or I can afford to take.” Nermin leans in, kisses her on each cheek, then turns and walks away. For a while she stands, not moving, not thinking. She just wants things to be still. But then the shelling begins again, and so she forces her feet to move, pulls her coat tight around her shoulders and heads for home.
Dragan
IT’S POSSIBLE THE SNIPER IS GONE. AT LEAST TEN minutes have passed since he fired, and already several people have made it through the intersection without incident. Dragan moves closer to the edge of the street, contemplating crossing. He’s hungry, feels the emptiness of his stomach urge him across. The bakery is on the other side. Only two more especially dangerous crossings and he will have bread. But another part of him knows there’s no hurry. He’s not going to starve to death over a few extra minutes of waiting, whereas a lack of caution will get him killed quicker than anything.
He steps back a bit, turns to lean against the warm metal of the railcar shielding him from Grbavica and the hills above, up to Vraca, the old war fort. He used to take his wife and son to Vraca for picnics in the summer, when they didn’t have time to go to the park at Ilidža or up Mount Trebević. From there you could see most of the city, a fact that has taken on a whole new significance in recent months.
On his right a woman approaches, and as she gets closer Dragan recognizes her. Her name is Emina. She’s a friend of his wife, about fifteen years younger than him. Dragan has always liked her, but he doesn’t much care for her husband, Jovan. Whenever they went out for supper, which they did regularly before the war, Dragan was stuck talking to Jovan, whose only apparent interest was politics, a subject Dragan has no patience for. After a while, he began to make excuses to get out of these dinners, until, shortly before the fighting broke out, the invitations stopped and his wife and Emina drifted out of contact.
It’s obvious to Dragan that Emina has seen him, is coming to speak to him, and he looks for somewhere to hide even though it’s pointless. There’s no way to prevent this interaction, short of running into the street, and although Dragan can barely bring himself to nod a polite hello to a stranger let alone talk to an old friend, he isn’t yet willing to risk his life to avoid a social exchange. This comforts him slightly, but he wonders if it’s possible that a day will come when he makes a different choice.
Hoping for a miracle, he stares down at his feet, attempting to appear deep in thought. Perhaps she will walk by him. It’s not impossi
ble. It could be that she’ll walk right by him without seeing him and continue into the street, arriving safely on the other side without even knowing he was there. What he wants is to cross and get his loaf of bread as quickly as he can. He doesn’t want to encounter anyone.
“Dragan, is that you?” A hand touches his shoulder, and he realizes that his attempt to look as though he was deep in thought resulted in actual thinking. He smiles, finding this funny, and Emina smiles back.
“Hello, Emina,” he says, leaning in to kiss her on each cheek. She hugs him tight. She feels small beneath her blue wool coat. He remembers this coat. His wife once told him that she liked it, and he’d always meant to ask Emina where she got it, so he could buy one for Raza, but he never did.
“How are you? How is Raza? Where are you staying?”
He tells her as much as he can, tells her about how his wife and son left on one of the last buses out of Sarajevo, how their apartment was one of the first shelled and how he’s staying with his sister. He can’t tell her about how his wife and son left at night and when the bus pulled away he felt, somehow, that he would never see them again, even though they were going to be only a few hundred kilometres away, not even an hour by plane. He can’t tell her about the night his apartment was shelled, how he hid in the cellar with his neighbours and waited for the building to come down on top of them, or how he arrived the next day at his sister’s, his brother-in-law answering the door and looking at him as if it were his fault his apartment was destroyed. He thinks that if he were to tell her all the things he can’t tell anyone, they would be standing there for days.
She looks at him, and he can see she knows there’s more to his story than he’s telling her, but she doesn’t push him. Everyone has more than they declare. He isn’t sure what to say next. Should he ask about Jovan? What if something’s happened to him, or he’s left her? At the very least she’ll be reminded that Dragan never really liked him, and that in itself will be awkward enough.