Free The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

seemed okay. But then I saw her a week or two later, and the list had another thirty names on it, and she said it still wasn’t complete.”
    Dragan shakes his head. “It couldn’t possibly take that many people.”
    “No, but that’s not the worst of it.” Emina undoes another button on her coat. “By the time the list was submitted, there were nearly two hundred people on it.”
    “Did they let them go?”
    “No. They knew they wouldn’t come back.”
    It never used to be like this. Before the war, even when the country was a communist state, you could travel anywhere you wanted. There were only four countries in the world that you needed a visa to visit. Now, though, no one leaves without permission. “They should have kept it to just the first thirty-two,” Dragan says. “Then they could have got out.”
    “Jovan says it wouldn’t have mattered. He says they would never have let any of them go.”
    “Maybe. But maybe some of them could have gone. Just a few. Maybe they could have escaped all this.”
    Emina looks up at the sky. “There’s no way to tell.”
    “I would go if I could, I think.” He knows this is a dangerous thing to say. People resent those who manage to get out. They’re considered cowards, and although he suspects that anyone who’s still sane would wish to leave, very few people will admit it, even to themselves, and fewer still would ever say so out loud.
    There are only two ways out now. Either you know someone with power, and you get a pass through the tunnel, or you have money. Other than that, you’re stuck. Those who had power or money when the war began have already left, and those who have power or money now have it because of the war, so have no incentive to leave.
    Emina doesn’t appear shocked by his admission, though. “Why didn’t you leave with Raza?”
    He shrugs. “I didn’t think that it would go on for this long. I wanted to protect our apartment, and I didn’t want to lose my job. Maybe I made a mistake.”
    “No. We have to stay. If we all go they will come down from the hills and the city will be theirs.”
    “If we stay they will shoot at us from the hills until we’re all dead, and then they’ll come down just the same.”
    “The world will never allow that. They’ll have to help us sooner or later,” she says. He’s not sure from her tone of voice if she believes what she says. He doesn’t know how she could. They must both see the same city disintegrating around them.
    “No one is coming.” His voice is harsher than he means it to be. “We’re here on our own, and no one’s coming to help us. Don’t you know that?”
    Emina looks down and fastens the top two buttons on her coat. She puts her hands in her pockets. After a while she says, very quietly, “I know no one is coming. I just don’t want to believe it.”
    Dragan knows exactly what she means. He doesn’t want to believe it either. For a long time he held out hope, listened to the news, waited for someone to put a stop to this madness. All his life he has lived under the rule of law. If you broke the law, the police would arrest you. There was order, and it was unquestioned. Then, in the blink of an eye, it all fell apart. Like many others, Dragan waited far longer for order to be restored than was logical. He tried to go about his life as though things were still normal, as though someone was in charge. The men on the hills were a minor inconvenience that would be resolved at any moment. Sanity would prevail. But then, one day, he could no longer fool himself. This wasn’t a temporary situation, a momentary glitch in the system, and no one was going to fix it.
    “I worked at the bakery with a man who survived Jasenovac, and then Auschwitz,” Dragan says. The man had retired five or six years before there were men on the hills, but Dragan had still seen him every so often. They would meet for a coffee, or occasionally a glass of plum brandy. He had never spoken to Dragan of