Yet he feels his mouth moving, and words are coming out of him. “I don’t understand how you’re not scared. I don’t understand how the idea of being shot or blown apart doesn’t scare you.”
She breathes out, lets her hands drop to her side. “There is a man playing the cello in the street,” she says. “Near the market. Where the people were killed lining up for bread.”
Dragan heard about the massacre when it happened. It wasn’t far from his sister’s house. If he didn’t bring bread home each day he worked, it is possible she would have been in that line. But he hadn’t thought about it since. While it was one of the worst individual incidents, it wasn’t much more than the overall death toll each day.
“Every day, at four o’clock.” She turns towards him as she says this, as if there’s something he doesn’t understand. “Every day he sits there and plays. People go and listen. Some leave flowers. I’ve been several times. Sometimes I listen all the way through, and sometimes I leave after only a few minutes.”
Dragan nods. He has heard of the cellist, in passing, but has never given him much thought, and has never been to see him. He’s unsure why Emina is telling him all this, but he won’t interrupt her. He will let her speak until she’s finished.
“I don’t know the piece he plays, what its name is. It’s a sad tune. But it doesn’t make me sad.” She’s looking right at him, not looking away, and he’s a little uncomfortable. “Why do you suppose he’s there? Is he playing for the people who died? Or is he playing for the people who haven’t? What does he hope to accomplish?”
Dragan realizes this isn’t a rhetorical question. She expects an answer. He doesn’t have one. He has no idea what would possess a person to do such a thing.
“Who is he playing for?” she asks again, and suddenly Dragan thinks he knows.
“Maybe he’s playing for himself,” he says. “Maybe it’s all he knows how to do, and he’s not doing it to make something happen.” And he thinks this is true. What the cellist wants isn’t a change, or to set things right again, but to stop things from getting worse. Because, as the optimist in Emina’s mother’s joke said, it can always get worse. But perhaps the only thing that will stop it from getting worse is people doing the things they know how to do.
His answer appears to have satisfied Emina, or at least intrigued her. She leans back against the boxcar. After a while, she says, “Jovan says he’s crazy. He says it’s an act of futility, that he’s going to get himself killed.”
Dragan considers this. “Jovan’s a fool,” he says. He doesn’t look at Emina, stares straight ahead.
“I know,” she says. “I used to sort of like that about him.”
He risks a glance at her and sees she isn’t smiling. “I’m afraid, Dragan. I’m afraid of everything, of dying, of not dying. I’m afraid that it will stay like this forever, that this war isn’t a war, but just how life will be.”
Dragan nods. The fight has gone out of him. “Me too,” he says. “Everything.”
She takes a step forward, turns and stands beside him. So far no one has been brave enough to try crossing again, but it looks as if someone will soon make a move, and everyone seems to be waiting to see what will happen. Dragan looks up at the sky and watches a large grey cloud. It appears to him that the cloud is moving slowly. He wonders if this is the case or if it’s a matter of perspective, if the cloud is in fact moving as fast as a bird can fly or a car can drive. He doesn’t think so, but there’s no way to tell, and the fact that there’s no way to tell comforts him. He looks back to the street, making a point not to look skyward again until he’s sure the cloud is gone.
A man wearing a yellow jacket decides it’s safe enough to cross. He darts forward, keeping his head low, and zigzags his way safely to the other side. This seems to bring a measure of relief to the people waiting, and a few more work up the nerve to move. They make it to the other side without anything happening. Gradually the backlog of people who have been lingering disappears, until there’s no one left in the shelter of the boxcar who was there the last time the sniper fired, except for Dragan and Emina.
“A woman has a friend come to visit,” Emina says, her voice quick and light. “The friend comes in, and the woman asks if she would like a coffee. ‘No,’ the friend says, ‘thanks, I’m fine.’ The woman says, ‘Great, now I can take a shower.’”
Dragan laughs, even though he’s heard the joke before. There are a half-dozen variations on it, but in each one the woman manages to do something large with an absurdly small amount of water. It’s not far from the truth. Dragan is now able to wash his whole body with half a litre of water. A quarter to wash, a quarter to rinse. It’s not the same, but it works. It’s a treat if the water is warm.
In a few weeks, his son Davor will turn nineteen. If he were still here he would almost certainly have become involved in the fighting, either voluntarily or as a conscript. Dragan can remember the day his son was born, in the early hours of the morning, the sun not yet up. They had been at the hospital for a day and a half. His wife was in labour for nearly thirty-six hours, and the worried faces of the doctors and nurses had him terrified, but then his son was pulled free of his wife’s body and declared healthy. His small cry emerging from a bundle of blankets sounded to Dragan like music. Afterwards he had an overwhelming feeling of benevolence, not just for his son, but for the world around him, wishing it were everything it wasn’t, wondering what he could do to make things better. But the feeling faded, and then it was gone entirely, like it had never happened.
Dragan still wanted the best for his son, and he still wanted the world to be different, but he never really thought about how he could accomplish this, what possible effect his actions could have. Now he often wonders whether there was anything he did or didn’t do that played some small part in his city’s disintegration. He wonders what would have happened if the men on the hills and the men in the city had in their hearts a tiny fraction of the benevolence felt for and known by a small child.
Approaching from the east, about twenty metres away, is a small black dog. It has its nose to the ground, its tail low, and it moves with a determined gait. The dog doesn’t stop to smell any particular spot or greet any people as they pass. Dragan finds himself watching it getting closer and closer, and when he looks at Emina he sees she’s doing the same. The dog passes by them, close enough to touch, but doesn’t acknowledge their existence. No one else on the street seems to have noticed it, but why should they? The city is full of stray dogs. There’s nothing special about this one. If that is so, he thinks, then why are Emina and I both watching? It’s because of the singularity of the dog’s intent. This dog has somewhere to go.
The dog reaches the intersection and enters it without hesitation. He wonders if it knows that there’s a man with a gun on the hills. As if to answer his question, the dog lifts its nose from the ground, turns its head to the left and glances up into the hills. This makes Dragan believe the dog knows what’s going on. It may even know where the sniper is. Perhaps a dog can smell a bullet’s path, trace its trajectory back to the source. The dog could very well know which window or rooftop the sniper shoots from. Has anyone ever tested this? Do we know for sure what a dog can and can’t smell?
Dragan wonders if a sniper would shoot a dog. Would he waste a bullet, and risk revealing his position to a counter-sniper? If the men on the hills will not shoot at a dog, but they will shoot at us, this must mean they consider us different. But the question is whether we are better or worse. Do they recognize more of themselves in a dog or in a human?
The dog is nearly across the intersection now, its nose to the ground. It reaches the other side and then, unexpectedly, it stops, turns around and looks back. It stares at the street for a few seconds, at what Dragan can’t tell, and then continues on, until it’s out of sight.
“Where do you suppose that dog was off to?” Emina asks him.
He turns to her, sees she’s smiling. “I have no idea.”
/>
“I wonder what urgent task a dog would have to make it move so deliberately?”
Dragan is about to answer when he realizes that, wherever it is going, whatever task it’s engaged with, there’s little difference between him and the dog. They are both only trying to survive. Unlike the men on the hills, who still make a distinction between humans and dogs, Dragan now sees little difference. He felt the same amount of concern for the dog when it was in the sniper’s line of fire as he did for the forty or fifty people who have crossed this intersection since he’s been here.
Emina is looking at him, waiting for an answer to her question.
“Where do any of us have to go that’s so urgent?” he says, hoping this will end the discussion. He doesn’t want to think about the dog anymore.
He wonders how long he’s been here, waiting to cross. Perhaps three-quarters of an hour. Has this time waiting increased or decreased his chances of making it?
“Why did the Sarajevan cross the road?” he asks Emina.
She shakes her head, takes her hands out of her pockets and brushes her hair out of her face. “That’s a good question.”
“To get to the other side,” he answers. Emina groans, because it really is a bad joke. Dragan doesn’t care. He hasn’t told a joke in months. It feels good, even if the joke is awful.
“I think,” she says, still half laughing, “it’s time for this Sarajevan to act like a chicken. If I go now, I might make it back in time to hear the cellist.”
Dragan stops laughing. She’s right. They’ve been here long enough. “I’ll go with you,” he says.
Emina nods, and they move towards the street, with her in front, Dragan following. When they’re almost at the end of the boxcar, at the spot where they will have to run, Dragan begins to lose his nerve. His hands sweat, and then his back and feet. He feels short of breath. He reaches out and places his hand on Emina’s shoulder, stopping her.
“I can’t yet,” he says. “I’m not ready.”
Emina nods. “Do you want me to wait with you?”
He does, but he doesn’t want to tell her this. “I’m okay,” he says. “I’m not in any special hurry.”
She looks at him, her face tense, and he wonders if she’s going to decide to stay with him despite his reassurances.
“Give Raza my love,” she says, leaning in and hugging him. She feels warm and substantial, much larger than when he hugged her only a short time ago. She has become real to him again. She is the person he once knew. Affected by the war, changed, but the woman he knew is still in there. She hasn’t been covered in the grey that colours the streets. He wonders why he hasn’t seen this before, wonders how much else he hasn’t seen.
Two people are crossing from the other side, a man and a woman. The man is about halfway through the intersection, the woman just beginning. The woman’s hair is tied back with a black scarf, and the man wears a brown hat with a peak, a type of hat Dragan has never owned but has always thought looked good. It’s the sort of hat a detective might wear, he thinks.
Emina steps into the street. She begins to accelerate into a run, but it seems to Dragan that she slows down. The whole world has become muddled, sticky, like it’s underwater. The blue wool of Emina’s coat is a blur, and Dragan feels tired. He could sleep for days.
A young man comes up beside Dragan, gets ready to cross. He hesitates for only an instant, taking one deep breath and moving forward. As he steps into the street Emina is thrown to the side with a violent surge, and the sound of gunfire punches through silence. The man in the hat stops for an instant and then runs towards Dragan. The woman turns back, hoping to retreat the way she came. Emina lies still, not moving. Dragan can’t see where she’s been hit, if she’s alive or not.
Beside him the half-dozen or so people who are in the vicinity rush ahead, towards the edge of the boxcar, their eyes on the street. A few shout to those in the sniper’s line of fire, yelling for them to run and other obvious ideas.
The young man moves forward towards Emina. He should be turning back, Dragan thinks. He’s going the wrong way. Then Dragan understands what he’s doing, and he wants to go with the man, to help him and see if Emina can be saved. But his feet don’t move. Around him everyone is alive with a frenzied energy, but he hasn’t stirred an inch.
The young man and the man in the hat reach Emina at the same time, just as the woman makes it to safety. Dragan sees people on the opposite side of the street rush to her, to see if she’s all right, though it’s clear she is. The young man bends down, puts his arms around Emina. The man in the hat keeps running, doesn’t stop. The young man looks up in disbelief as he goes by, shouts out to him for help. If he hears, the man in the hat gives no indication. Just as he’s about to reach the safety of the boxcar there’s another shot. The man’s hat flies off his head and lands at Dragan’s feet. Dragan stares down at the hat, which has landed upside down on the pavement. He can see from the label that it was made in Vienna. He looks ahead. The hat’s owner is lying on his stomach.
Around him, people realize that the sniper is able to fire far closer to the edge of the boxcar than they’d thought. They duck down, all of them except Dragan, and he’s reminded of the way a flock of birds can turn in unison while in flight, as though programmed. Then a hand grabs at him. He understands he’s in danger, and gets down on the ground with the others. They move back, staying as low as they can, until they’re away from the street, about three metres from the man who no longer has a hat.
The young man has picked Emina up, and Dragan sees she’s alive. One of her arms hangs down, her sleeve soaked in blood, but her eyes are open and her good hand holds tight around the shoulder of her rescuer. A bullet strikes the pavement a few feet in front of them. The young man doesn’t react, continues undaunted, slow and awkward, and Dragan doesn’t think he’s going to make it.
As they pass the hatless man, who Dragan assumes is dead, a hand reaches up to them, weak and imploring. The hatless man is somehow still alive, though it seems he’s unable to move. The young man ignores him, keeps moving. Emina looks down at him, says nothing, and then looks away.
Dragan tries to count the seconds since the sniper last fired, tries to figure out how much time they have before the next bullet comes. He doesn’t know how long it’s been, however, and has no idea how long it will take for the sniper to aim and fire again.
Emina and the young man are two metres from him, and then one, and then they’re there. They tumble to the ground behind him, and he hears Emina cry out. Dragan doesn’t turn around. He can’t look away from the street, where the hatless man is trying to crawl, a centimetre at a time, to safety. There’s an expanding smear of blood surrounding him, and although Dragan knows the street around him is full of noise, he doesn’t hear a sound. He counts under his breath, hears slow numbers tick in his own voice. When he gets to eight, the hatless man’s head bursts, the top of his skull evaporating in a fine red drizzle punctuated by the thunder-clap of a rifle echoing down the hill.
Dragan looks down and sees that the hat is in his hands. He doesn’t remember picking it up, has no idea why he’d do such a thing. He looks at the hat, runs his thumb along the brim, and then he leans down and sets it on the asphalt before turning to Emina.
Arrow
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 neighbour 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 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. He was tall and thin and wore large glasses that made him look like a bug. As a young girl, Arrow had often thought of him as a giant grasshopper. Once, when she was kicking a ball in the street with some of the other children in the neighbourhood, the ball got away from them and Slavko, who was walking up the street, stopped it from going down the hill. He held it against the curb, looked at the group of them, and then, with a leg that was far too long, kicked it to her. She wasn’t the nearest child to him, and he certainly knew all of them. She knew that he had chosen her, and when the ball skipped past the other children in a straight line ending at her feet she felt a rush of pride. “Watch out for cars,” he said to the group of them, and as he walked by her he put his hand on her shoulder. “And have fun.”