Arrow is a young woman and a
sharpshooter. Kenan is husband to Amila; father to two daughters Aida and Sanja,
and son Mak; and neighbour to Mrs. Ristovski. Dragan is middle aged, alone. His
wife Raza and their 18-year-old son have escaped the madness that enveloped
Sarajevo when the Serbian forces laid a siege around the city between 1992 and
1996 – the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is the story of
Arrow, Kenan and Dragan as they come to terms with the reality of a war ravaged
city that they have lived all their lives. The novel narrates the different
ways in which these three civilians come to terms with their radically altered
circumstances during the siege.
To Galloway’s credit, nowhere
in the novel does he ever mention the siege from a macro perspective – Serbian forces
that surrounded the outlying hills of Sarajevo are never named, and neither are
the Bosnian government defense forces named.
The novel shows there isn’t too
much to choose between the attackers and the defenders, and depicts the daily
trauma of living in the city that is changing forever, its inhabitants slowly wilting,
decaying, and disintegrating.
Arrow, the reluctant sniper,
who is tasked with protecting the cellist who decides to play his cello for 22
days to commemorate the death by mortar shelling of 22 people who had lined up
to buy bread, regrets Sarajevo’s transformation.
“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 rapist, and you could hate a thief. This is what first drove her
to kill the men on 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.”
The three characters in
Galloway’s novel seem to derive inspiration from the cellist and resist the all-pervading
sense of gloom that has engulfed the city.
Listening to the cellist play,
Kenan is transported into a different era, an era of peace. As the cellist
plays, “(T)he
building behind the cellist repairs itself. The scars of bullets and shrapnel
are covered by plaster and paint, and windows reassemble, clarify and sparkle
as the sun reflects off glass. The cobblestone of the road set themselves
straight. Around him people stand up taller, their faces put on weight and
colour. Clothes gain lost thread, brighten, smooth out their wrinkles.”
Dragan, caught in a sniper
crossfire that hits Emina, an acquaintance, and kills a stranger.
“Was being killed really better than
being wounded? He isn’t so sure now. The idea of knowing the moment of your
death is imminent no longer seem so bad compared with an instantaneous ending.
Emina will survive, of this he feels confident, but if she didn’t, if she were
more seriously wounded, wouldn’t it be better to get one last look at the
world, even a grey and spoiled vision, than to plunge without warning into
darkness?
“What makes the difference, he realizes,
is whether you want to stay in the world you live in. Because while he will
always be afraid of death and nothing can change that, the question is whether
your life is worth that fear. Do you face the terror that must come with
knowing you’re about to die, just for the sake of one last glimpse of life?
Dragan is surprised to find his answer is yes.”
Then later, he realizes that
giving up would mean defeat.
“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.”
The significance of the novel
is that what happened to Sarajevo can and does happen to other cities quite
suddenly, and there is no way to predict and prevent it.
When people are filled
with hatred – often for who they are or what they have become – they always
look for and find the other. In destroying the other, they destroy themselves.
The Cellist of Sarajevo is Toronto
Public Library’s One Book community read for the Keep Toronto Reading festival of
April 2014. More details are available here: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/ktr/
