Is it possible to kill a city, just wipe out its entire identity and reason for existence, to so decimate its population and dampen its spirit that its surviving inhabitants no longer know who they are, whom to trust and what they care about—or whether they care about anything at all?
To render it, through relentless bombardment, disrupted supplies of food, water and electricity, and concentrated but unpredictable sniper fire from the hills high above, a mere ghost of its once living self, starved of the essential human nutrients of care, security, and community that make a city not just an infrastructure of buildings and roads and utilities, but a place of identity and soul?
These are the underlying macro questions that Steven Galloway explores in his riveting 2008 novel, “The Cellist of Sarajevo.”
Profound because to insist on beauty even amidst ongoing atrocity is a radical act of freedom and resolve that can’t help but provide solace and inspiration to the besieged population…
He channels these questions through the particular lives of three one-named protagonists—Arrow, Kenan and Dragan—whose fate he chronicles in short alternating chapters that track the challenges and torments they face amidst the almost unthinkable specter of a modern European city under years-long siege.
All of it just three years after the fall of the Soviet Empire had been widely expected to usher in a new, unprecedented era of international cooperation among a growing list of democratizing countries.
The novel’s three main characters have no direct connection with one other, but do share a common quest for both physical and spiritual survival against the backdrop of what came to be known as the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. The conflict followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, involving various factions of Bosnians, Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims both for and against each other in an agonizing period of nationalist, ethnic and religious strife.
Also of great interest is the novel’s fourth character—the cellist of the book’s title—who gets only one chapter, the foreword.
His tale, however, lays the groundwork for most everything that follows.
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After 22 local residents waiting in a bread line are killed in a bomb blast, the cellist vows to commemorate them by playing Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” one of the most gorgeous and haunting pieces in the entire classical repertoire, for 22 consecutive days, at exactly 4 p.m.
Not from a concert hall or cathedral, but out in public, amidst the ruins of the National Library that the Serbs purposely targeted for destruction. This is the non-fiction core of the story, and the photo above is of the cellist himself, Vedran Smailović, who managed to escape from Sarajevo in late 1993 and now lives in Northern Ireland at age 67.
Smailović’s gesture is both reckless and profound. Reckless given the danger of doing most anything for long in the open air while shells fly and snipers search for targets from the nearby hills. Profound because to insist on beauty even amidst ongoing atrocity is a radical act of freedom and resolve that can’t help but provide solace and inspiration to the besieged population.
In Galloway’s novelization, that inspiration begets great consternation among the Serb separatists who want to see Smailović and the embers of hope he represents to the oppressed Bosnians and Croats snuffed out once and for all. It is Arrow’s job as an ace Bosnian sniper training her own sights on the enemy to prevent that from happening.
Meanwhile, Kenan is a civilian with children, resisting military service but charged with the almost equally treacherous task of fetching water for his family and an elderly neighbor by running a gauntlet of sniper fire to an old brewery that is the sole location in the city with potable water.
Dragan manages to get his wife and son out of the city at war’s start but hasn’t heard from them since. He spends his days working at a bakery for food only. With everyone hungry to varying degrees most all the time, that is compensation enough.
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More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, nearly 14,000 of them during the siege, in which some 500,000 bombs rained down on the city. The ongoing atrocities across the country included 8,000 Muslim men executed in an ethnic cleansing after Bosnian Serbs barreled through a U.N.-protected safe area in Srebrenica. The International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, later declared the event a genocide, the first such finding since the Holocaust in World War II.
All sieges of a civilian population revolve around one goal: to make everyday life such a living hell that its people lose hope.
Hope that one’s own armed forces can ensure their safety.
Hope that one day’s activity might make a difference in the next day and the ones after.
Might, however thinly, increase the prospects of help coming from the outside world, food making it through blockades, lights staying on long enough to curtail the cursing of the darkness that envelops the city most nights.
Hope, ultimately, that life will not always be like this, that the bomb droppers from above and the snipers in the hills will one day relent and go back to their own lives and the families they love.
That you and your fellow sufferers will not so blacken your own hearts with hatred of the enemy that you forsake your own humanity and thus lose faith in humanity at large.
Listening to the cellist play one day, Arrow is almost overcome with emotion as she takes her finger off the trigger targeting an enemy to better absorb the enormity of what is before her: Beauty ringing out, unrelenting, amidst the madness of war.
“The men on the hills, the men in the city, herself, none of them had the right to do the things they’d done…The men on the hills didn’t have to be murderers. The men in the city didn’t have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She didn’t have to be filled with hatred. The music demands that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still had the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.”
“Capacity,” yes. Things do not have to be the way they are. There are countless more good people in the world than bad. But given the enduring power and persistence of the bad, whether goodness will ultimately triumph remains the open question.
Destruction, after all, takes but a fraction of the time and effort that building requires.
Or will there perhaps be no ultimate triumph at all, but only an endless sequence of beautiful notes and discordant sounds, the cellist vs. the sniper, in a battle everlasting for possession of human freedom?
It’s none too clear that the cellist is confident of any triumph. Perhaps because it is not, in the end, within his control.
All it truly depends on is how many people are listening.
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Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Cello by Andreina Schoeberlein, Switzerland https://www.flickr.com/photos/schoeband/
Cellist of Sarajevo by Mikail Eustafiev, from the public domain
Shovels and graveyard by Adam Cohn, Seattle, Washington https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcohn/
110 years ago, almost to the month, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo, an event that ignited the first World War. The Balkans, a ten-country quilt patch sewn together by threads of religious, linguistic and cultural discordance, have long been plagued by war. The mournful sound of the cello in Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” was the ideal piece to contrast the beauty of life with the horror of war. “The Cellist of Sarajevo” reminds me of a UNICEF article I recently read about Maksym, a young Ukrainian boy, who without any prompting sat down at a piano in a Lviv shelter and played a Ukrainian folk song to dozens of people who were gathered there to escape the Russian invasion to the east. He said after the performance, “When I play the piano, I forget about the war.”
Reading this book on a long day’s flight(s) across the country, my mind kept flipping to the Ukraine War, Putin’s sieges of that country similar, in some ways, to what Sarajevans endured in the aggressor’s intent to break the will of the population and compel them to give up in exhaustion. Ukrainians are more fortunate in having resources to fight back and allies to supply and thus support them psychologically as well, but Putin’s malevolence and desire to basically extinguish Ukraine as a nation state bears a striking resemblance to the Siege of Sarajevo. We can only hope they endure, and that a non-isolationist in the White House continues to support them for as long as they need.
This reminds and reinforces the fact that ruthless, power-grabbing forces go to great lengths to supress (extinguish) the arts and, by extension, all matter of critical thinking and liberal arts. Fear-induced control over people means eradicating hope which necessitates wiping out all forms of beauty and creative expression. Hate and fear suck the sublime joy of being from the soul. Most of us never dreamed we feel this threat as we face a presidential election.
Exactly, Jay—dictators always round up the artists as almost their first order of business—right after the military. It’s happening now in Russia under Putin, according to a report I read just the other day. The war’s gone on too long and the disaffection inevitably seeps into and seeks expression in the creative world, as a rare form of power that terrifies dictators.
And of course our own self-styled dictator who prefers his voters “uneducated” wouldn’t know a poem or novel or painting or concerto if it marched up and smacked him in the nose. But he knows the danger they represent…