The Cellist of Sarajevo

Arrow grabs her rifle and leaves her apartment. Her footsteps echo in the stairwell and Arrow is grateful that she can hear when others are there, even if it exposes her own movement. On the street, Arrow passes an ice cream shop she used to love. Now, there is little she wouldn’t give to have an ice cream. In the Sarajevo Arrow remembers, the street would be abuzz with people going to work and preparing for the day at this time of the morning. Now, Arrow passes few people and she does not meet their eyes.

Arrow arrives at the street corner where the cellist played yesterday and begins to scout out the area. She thinks of all the tiny choices that brought people to buy bread at this specific bakery on that fateful day, choices that mean they are now dead or injured. She ponders whether there are truly any life-defining moments, or if all life is just made up of these tiny choices. Before becoming a sniper, she had assumed that pulling the trigger would be a clear cut moment that defined her life. Now, Arrow thinks that it is another small motion like any other.

Arrow cannot understand why the cellist is doing something so useless as playing. It is possible that the cellist no longer cares about life at all, like so many who walk the streets with no will to survive. Yet the cellist doesn’t appear like these ghosts. Arrow commits herself to keeping the cellist alive, even if she doesn’t understand why he plays.

The surrounding buildings have plenty of good sites for a sniper to hide. The best place for a sniper to shoot from is the southwest side of the street, so that the sniper can escape across the river into the enemy controlled neighborhood when he is done. A mission this difficult will require an army trained sniper, however, who will know that the southwest is the most likely place for the Sarajevo militia to expect.

Arrow looks east and sees the one place that the sniper would hide. Now she needs to find a place where she can target the sniper without being in an obvious position for a counter sniper. A less skilled sniper would camp out in an apartment building directly above where the cellist plays. Arrow comes up with a plan, selecting a building to the west where she will be able to see the cellist and the potential sniper. She confirms the logistics of his plan, then wonders if the cellist knows that anyone is protecting him at all.

Hours later, Arrow has set up her position in the southwest building, cutting holes in the plastic covering the window so that she can see the cellist and stretch her rifle just slightly out her window to kill the sniper. In a building to the north, Arrow has set up a decoy sniper camp, with a rifle stretched out of the window to lure the sniper into firing so that Arrow can get a lock on his position. Arrow worries that she has assumed too much about the sniper’s general location, or that other people may live in the decoy apartment.

Arrow’s own camp is in an abandoned apartment, which used to be a nice home. Arrow settles in to watch the general atmosphere of the cellist’s street corner, so that she will notice any sudden changes that mark the arrival of the sniper. She has isolated three windows to the east that present the best location for the sniper and she scans them with growing confidence. Out of the corner of her eyes, Arrow sees the cellist leave his building and sit in the center of the street.

Arrow thinks she sees a shadow of movement in one of the windows to the east. She calms herself, trying not to succumb to the temptation to second guess herself. The cellist begins to play, and Arrow sees a small hole in the plastic of the east window. Arrow could shoot now, but she doesn’t yet know if this is actually the sniper. She is distracted by two teenage girls who have walked up to listen to the cellist. Arrow panics, knowing that the sniper could shoot the girls if she fires at the wrong window too soon.

The cellist stops playing and Arrow keeps her attention on the east window. The cellist goes back inside and Arrow wonders why the sniper never took his shot. She feels as though she has failed, though the cellist is alive and her mission continues. Arrow thinks back to the teenaged girls, wondering if they hate the men on the hills as much as she does. Arrow hates the men for making her hate them with their violence and killing. Arrow goes down to the street and sees that there is a whole pyre of dried flowers left by the cellist’s stool.