Free The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway Page A

his life during the war until one day shortly before the fighting began, when he told him about being in the camps. He told him how, at Jasenovac, the guards had a competition to see who could kill the most people in one day. The winner, a guard named Petar Brzica, killed 1,360 people with a butcher’s knife. For winning this contest he was given some wine, a suckling pig and a gold watch. After the war he escaped to the United States, where to this day his name is on a list of resident war criminals. Many of those killed were the fathers and grandfathers of the men on the hills, and the people they are shooting at.
    “The last time I saw him, he told me, ‘What is coming is worse than anything you can imagine,’” Dragan says. “He killed himself the day the war began.”
    Emina shakes her head. “This cannot be as bad as what happened in those camps.”
    Dragan considers this, wonders how relative suffering is. “No, it’s not. I don’t think he thought it would be. But I think he believed that what he and others suffered there meant something, that people had learned from it. But they haven’t.”
    “Haven’t they?” Emina asks.
    “Look around,” Dragan answers.
    Though he’d intended it as a rhetorical statement, Emina does indeed look around. Prompted by her, Dragan does too, and he wonders if she sees the same things he sees. Does she see the grey that is everywhere? Does she see the mangled buildings, the wreckage in the streets, the people grown thin and tired, slinking along like frightened animals? She must. How could she not?
    He doesn’t know why she sought him out, why she didn’t just walk by him and pretend he wasn’t there. There was no need for this. He didn’t need to see how much the war had taken from her, or from him.
    “One of the things about the war,” she says, “is that I’ve been down a lot of streets I’d never been on before. It has changed my geography.”
    Dragan nods. He has noticed the same thing, found it curious to learn how much of the city he’s lived in his whole life was a block or two outside his experience, how a shell here and a sniper there have altered which streets are familiar and which are only vaguely known.
    “There’s a street near my house that, before the war, I never walked down,” Emina continues. “But with the sniper at the bottom of the street I had to go the long way around, so I found myself in this new street.
    “There was a house there with a huge cherry tree in the yard, full of ripe fruit. An old woman was picking thecherries. She must have had fifteen or twenty kilograms of fruit picked, and there was still more on the tree.
    “I went up to her, mostly because I had never seen a tree like that in Sarajevo, had no idea these cherries grew here.
    “‘That’s a beautiful tree,’ I said to her, and she told me her mother had planted it when she was a girl, and that it had always given good fruit. She was picking the fruit for her grandchildren, but was a little worried, because you can’t give children only sweet things. I suggested she sell some of the cherries, and she told me that perhaps she would.
    “By coincidence, a few days later Jovan brought home some salt he’d got from someone, a huge five-kilogram bag. It was far more than we needed or could ever use. I thought of the woman, and when I went by I took her a kilogram.”
    Emina’s face is relaxed, and her voice is soft. Dragan isn’t really sure what the point of her story is, but he’s happy that she is telling him.
    “The woman was beside herself. I’ve never seen anyone smile so much. She actually hugged me. Over a kilogram of salt. As I was leaving, she gave me two big pails full of cherries. A ridiculous amount. I said, ‘I can’t possibly eat all these. I don’t have any children, it’s just me and my husband.’ But she insisted. ‘Give them away,’ she said. ‘Do whatever you like with them. I havemore than I need.’ So I gave them to our