Arrow crosses and sits in the spot where the mortar landed, the spot where, later today, the cellist will sit. She knows that twenty-two people died here and a multitude were injured, will not walk or see or touch again. Because they tried to buy bread. A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe there will be some bread to buy. Of all the places to go, you come here. Of all the days to come, a particular one chooses you. At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.
She reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. It’s either blown up or removed to prevent it from becoming a lethal projectile when it inevitably is blown up. One pane at a time, the windows through which people see the world are vanishing.
This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.
She thinks of this in the context of pulling the trigger and ending a life. Before she ever killed, she had assumed this would put her life at a clear crossroads. She would behave in a way that demarcated the sort of person she had become. She expected to feel altered somehow from the person she was, or hoped to be. But that wasn’t the case. It was the easiest thing in the world to pull the trigger, a non-event. Everything that came before, all the small things that somehow added up without her ever noticing, made the act of killing an afterthought. This is what makes her a weapon. A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.
The cellist confuses her. She doesn’t know what he hopes to achieve with his playing. He can’t believe he will stop the war. He can’t believe he will save lives. Perhaps he has gone insane, but she doesn’t think so. She’s seen the faces of those who have cracked, seen them walk into the street without a care for the danger. She’s seen them die, or survive, and to them it doesn’t appear to register as different. The cellist doesn’t strike her as a man who has lost his will to live. He appears to care about the quality of his life. She can’t tell what he believes, and it bothers her that she can’t say exactly what it is or whether she wants to believe it too. She knows it involves motion. Whatever the cellist is doing, he isn’t sitting in a street waiting for something to happen. He is, it seems to her, increasing the speed of things. Whatever happens will come sooner because of him.
She drops the piece of glass she has been turning over in her hand, listens to the small tick it makes as it returns to the ground. She wonders what will become of it. How long will it sit in the road? Will it be ground into dust that blows away or mixes in with the world, attached to someone’s shoe, the tire of a car, the wing of a pigeon, the moisture in the atmosphere? Arrow wonders if the piece of glass will still be here tomorrow, and if, in any larger sense, she’s very different from a piece of incidental detritus lying forgotten at the scene of a massacre.
Arrow will keep this man alive. This wasn’t ever really in doubt, but neither had she decided she would do it. Now, as she sits where he sits, she tells herself that she will not allow this man to die. He will finish what he’s doing. It isn’t important whether she understands what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. She does understand it’s important, and that is enough.
Her attention shifts towards the surrounding buildings. There are a lot of possible locations for someone wanting to shoot at this spot, but they all fall into two lines of fire, east to west or west to east. The buildings on either side of the street, while providing many hiding spots, also shield the cellist from the hills to the north and south. So they can’t shoot from their own territory. They’ll have to enter hers. And she presumes that they will wish to escape when they are finished. This narrows their possibilities. She decides that the most logical route of escape is to the south, across the river, into Grbavica. A shot from the southwest side of the street would therefore make the most sense.
But Arrow knows they won’t send an ordinary man. Most of their snipers are either hired mercenaries or untrained soldiers. A mercenary would be unlikely to accept such a dangerous job. They prefer to sit on the hills and earn their dirty money in relative safety. An irregular soldier, however, wouldn’t possess the skills necessary to pull this off and still escape, so unless a commander were sending a man on a suicide mission, it won’t be an ordinary soldier she’s facing. No, the person they send will be a properly trained army sniper, and he’ll know what he’s doing.
He won’t be in the southwest, because he’ll know that as soon as the cellist falls, every defender in the area will try to cut off access to Grbavica. It’s simple geography. So the sniper will head in the opposite direction, and either try to slip into the hills to the north or hole up in a safe house until he can move. Either way, he will not go to the southwest.
Arrow looks to the east, and right away she sees where he will be. Not the exact building, but if he’s any good, if he thinks in terms of a bullet’s path and his need to escape, there’s really only one area from which he can make a shot.
She stands and begins to walk east, towards where the shot will come from. She needs to find a spot from where she can target the sniper, but not be in either his natural sight line or an obvious position for a counter-sniper. He will anticipate her presence, and before he even begins to think about killing the cellist, he’ll seek to assure himself that he’s safe. He’ll look for the best place for her to kill him from. Should she be detected, his first shot will be at her, his second at the cellist. That, at least, is what Arrow would do.
Directly above the cellist’s position is the exact sort of location that someone who didn’t really know what they were doing would pick. An apartment building that affords a clear view of the street and the spot from which most would assume a counter-sniper would fire. If she were going to kill the cellist, she would turn her scope to this building with the full expectation of finding a rifle waiting for her here.
Arrow smiles. A plan is beginning to crystallize in her mind. She backtracks up the street, to the west, and selects a building on the south side that affords her a view of the area where she knows her enemy will be. She then walks back to where the cellist will play and sits, confirming the logistics of what she has mapped out. She wonders if the cellist is aware that someone’s protecting him, and if he is, whether this knowledge brings him comfort. The street is still empty, and the air is cool. Soon the sun will begin to warm the ground and more people will venture out. At four o’clock some of these people might lean against a wall on the southern side of the street and watch the cellist play for a few minutes before continuing on their way. They will be unaware of what goes on above them until she fires, and even then it will be just one more gunshot in a day of hundreds.
Hours later, Arrow crouches in a room on the south side of the street, to the west of the place where soon the cellist will play. She’s a few buildings past where an untalented sniper would shoot the cellist from. She has cut two holes in the plastic covering the window. One affords her a view of where she believes the enemy sniper will set up, to the northeast of her, and the other offers her access to the area where he will think she is, above the cellist. It’s a perfect spot. There’s no need for her to extend the barrel of her rifle into the street to make a shot, reducing the chances of her opposition spotting her. He’ll be at a disadvantage to begin with, as the sun will be heading westward, which won’t interfere with his shot at the cellist but will make it difficult for him to see Arrow’s position.
Every factor is in Arrow’s favour save one. If she has made a mistake, if they haven’t sent a sniper who knows what he’s
doing, and he sets up on the southwest side of the street, she’ll have no shot at him. She doesn’t think she’s made a mistake, but of course there’s no way to tell for sure. It’s another tiny gamble of life, she supposes, though a part of her wonders how tiny this particular one is.
On the third floor of a building on the north side of the street, above where the cellist will play, she has set a trap. In a window of an abandoned apartment she has placed a rifle, its barrel pointing west, towards where a sniper would place himself. The barrel of the rifle extends slightly through a hole in the window’s plastic and, from the building where she thinks the sniper will be, the shadowy outline of a baseball cap is visible. If the sniper does what almost all snipers would do, what Arrow herself would do, he will fire at the hat before firing at the cellist. Often there wouldn’t be time to do this, but a man sitting in the street playing a cello will not be able to move quickly, and he will still be there to shoot a few seconds later. So it would be best to eliminate first the person most likely to shoot you in return. And when the sniper fires at her decoy, if Arrow hasn’t already spotted him, he’ll give his position away. It’s a crude trick, she knows, but because the sun will be in his eyes, and because the plastic covering the window will not allow him a clear view of the inside of the apartment, and because it will be too early in the day to use a night-vision scope, which she herself does not possess, the sniper won’t perceive this trap. An exceptional sniper might notice that his secondary target never moved or be put off by the obviousness of the situation, but she’s banking that her adversary is simply good and not unusually talented.
The glitch in her plan is that she isn’t completely sure the apartment where she has placed her bait is deserted. It appears as though no one lives there, but nearly every building in the city contains seemingly uninhabitable apartments that are, in fact, lived in. If someone were to return, she would be in a predicament. Their presence wouldn’t go unnoticed by the enemy sniper, and he’d more than likely assume they were soldiers. Not that this makes much of a difference. The enemy’s snipers don’t take into account who’s a soldier and who isn’t. But given a choice, Arrow believes they would kill a soldier first. It’s a simple matter of survival. She doesn’t want this blood on her hands, someone whose only mistake was coming home early. Though it happens every day, many times each day, it has never been Arrow’s fault, and she intends that it never will be. She will not be responsible for the death of people who do not deserve to die.
This is why there are two holes in the plastic of her window. She has decided that, at any time, should she detect movement in the apartment above the cellist, she will fire. She won’t hit anything, but the incoming fire will cause whoever is inside to seek cover, taking them out of the enemy sniper’s sights. She’ll then send a bullet in the sniper’s general direction, to let him know that she knows where he is. If he’s like most, that will be enough to convince him to rethink his plans for the day and flee. He’ll come back, she knows, but she’ll deal with that when it happens.
At least she’s confident about the apartment she’s in. A discreet conversation with the man guarding its entrance confirmed that its inhabitants had left, and two packs of cigarettes were enough to convince him to allow her inside and keep her whereabouts to himself. It’s common for the residents of individual buildings to form a security watch among themselves, set in shifts, to keep snipers and other unwanted parties out, but it’s a simple matter to evade these people if you know what you’re doing. A bored man is easily distracted, and a frightened man is distracted to begin with. Slipping undetected into a guarded building is child’s work. Arrow has done so more times than she can count.
The apartment she’s in was once a nice home. Its windows are large, and its rooms spacious. It’s relatively intact, though a shell has hit the bathroom and reduced the sink, tub and toilet to a pile of rubble. On the walls opposite the windows, daggers of glass stick out of the plaster like darts stuck in a corkboard, and a slush of human occupation, papers, photographs, a shredded sofa, lies discarded. Someone will come along eventually to pick it all up, if only to burn as fuel. She tries not to wonder too much about the people who used to live here, what they were like, if they were happy, if they are still alive, if they died here.
Through her scope she scans the buildings to the east. If the sniper is coming, he will already be in place. Over the last few hours she has been watching the street, noting which apartments have legitimate-looking people in them, which have people in them who bear watching and, particularly, which windows show nothing. But most of all she has been establishing a base appreciation for how things are, so that when anything changes she’ll know it. Out of the corner of her eye she keeps a constant vigil on the decoy apartment. She has so far detected no movement from within.
There are, in particular, three windows that give her pause. They’re situated in excellent positions from which to fire on the street below, and each is located close to a stairwell, affording an escape route that’s unlikely to be impeded. There has been no activity she can see, which is exactly how it would be were there a sniper inside.
She’s growing confident in her plan, despite the fact that she still doesn’t know where the sniper is. This conviction isn’t based on anything rational. She hasn’t obtained even one piece of information eliminating the possibility that he’s somewhere in her area, to the west of the cellist, waiting for him to emerge. He could, for all she knows, be in the apartment beside her, below her or on the roof above her. If he’s a fool he will have saved himself. But with each passing minute she feels more certain he isn’t a fool. She knows he is in one of the three windows.
Though she isn’t looking, Arrow is immediately aware that the cellist has stepped out of his doorway. Before he has unfolded his stool and set it down in the middle of the street she has scanned the three windows a half-dozen times and has completed two sweeps of the general area. As he closes his eyes and lowers his arms to hang at his side she glances down at him, only for a second, and then while he sits motionless she checks the windows four more times. She sees nothing.
A shell explodes in a distant sector of the city, and for an instant she thinks she sees something in one of the windows. It’s on the fourth floor of an apartment building about seventy metres east of the cellist. She can’t tell what it is. A shadow perhaps, some slight, nearly indiscernible movement. She’s not sure it’s anything at all.
As she checks the other two possibilities she can’t shake the feeling that each time she looks away from the fourth-floor window she’s missing something. Calm down, she tells herself. Let this come to you. Let things happen as they are going to happen, and react as you are going to react. Don’t complicate it.
She takes an overview of the eastern section of the street, both the north and south sides. She searches for any small detail that might have changed, a moved brick, a change in a shadow. She tries not to get caught up in wondering if there’s a difference or not. If there is, she will know. If there isn’t, thinking about it isn’t going to make it so. The temptation to second-guess is great, but she doesn’t succumb.
The cellist lifts his bow and begins to play. The sound drifts up to Arrow, sometimes nearly inaudible, sometimes so clear and loud it seems he’s in the room. Three floors above him, her decoy sits undisturbed. The apartment remains empty. Her trap, so far, has not succeeded, but neither has it failed.
The fourth-floor window draws her back to it. On first glance she almost misses what’s changed. She’s just about to move her attention to one of the other windows when she sees a hole in the plastic, perhaps three centimetres long, on the lower right-hand side. It’s not big enough to aim and fire through, but it’s large enough to see through. This would be his first step.
She considers taking a chance. She could send a bullet through that hole. If he’s looking through it he will be killed, or at least severely injured. But if he isn’t, he’ll escape, and she’ll be back to square one.
Also, she reminds herself, she has no way of knowing who’s in the apartment. She can’t go firing bullets into apartments without being sure of who’s inside, though she knows she’s right. She knows he’s inside.
There’s movement in her peripheral vision. She looks down to the street. Two girls, not quite teenagers, have approached the cellist and are a few feet away from him. They stand, thin and serious, and they listen to him play. If he knows they’re there he gives no indication. They’re directly in the sniper’s line of fire.
Arrow snaps back to the fourth-floor window. The hole in the plastic hasn’t grown, and there are no new holes. Can he shoot through an opening that small, she wonders. She doesn’t think she could. Not with any degree of accuracy. But what if he can?
Then they will die, a voice inside her says. All three of them. And you will fail.
For the first time since she picked up a gun so she could kill, Arrow feels panic. She’s stuck. There’s nothing she can do. There’s no small moment to retreat into, no chain of events that will dictate an outcome. It’s all loose and floating, and she can do only one thing. She can fire blind. But she’s unwilling to do that. Or she thinks she is. It doesn’t seem as though she’s making a choice. She’s just not doing it. If she made the decision to shoot she’s not sure she would carry it out.
On the street, the girls are moving. They step out of the line of fire and lay a small bouquet of wildflowers in front of the cellist. She thinks she sees dandelions. Then they turn and walk west, towards her, and they continue down the street until they have passed her and are no longer in danger.