The Cellist of Sarajevo E-Book

Steven Galloway

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

The Top 10 International Bestseller Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family. Dragan, gripped by fear, does not know who among his friends he can trust. And Arrow, a young woman counter-sniper must push herself to the limits - of body and soul, fear and humanity. Told with immediacy, grace and harrowing emotional accuracy, The Cellist of Sarajevo shows how, when the everyday act of crossing the street can risk lives, the human spirit is revealed in all its fortitude - and frailty.

Leseprobe

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Steven Galloway was born in Vancouver in 1975. He is the author of two previous novels. The Cellist of Sarajevo is his first novel to be published in the UK.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Steven Galloway

First published in 2008 in Australia by the Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia.

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Steven Galloway, 2008

The moral right of Steven Galloway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84354 741 9

eISBN:978 1 84887 316 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd. Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

The Cellist

Arrow

Kenan

Dragan

Part Two

Kenan

Arrow

Dragan

Arrow

Kenan

Dragan

Arrow

Kenan

Part Three

Dragan

Arrow

Kenan

Arrow

Dragan

Part Four

Kenan

Dragan

Arrow

for lara

The Sarajevo in this novel is only one small part of the real city and its people, as imagined by the author. This is above all else a work of fiction.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. LEON TROTSKY

The Cellist of Sarajevo

One

The Cellist

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.

In 1945, an Italian musicologist found four bars of a sonata’s bass line in the remnants of the firebombed Dresden Music Library. He believed these notes were the work of the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni, and spent the next twelve years reconstructing a larger piece from the charred manuscript fragment. The resulting composition, known as Albinoni’s Adagio, bears little resemblance to most of Albinoni’s work and is considered fraudulent by most scholars. But even those who doubt its authenticity have difficulty denying the Adagio’s beauty.

Nearly half a century later, it’s this contradiction that appeals to the cellist. That something could be almost erased from existence in the landscape of a ruined city, and then rebuilt until it is new and worthwhile, gives him hope. A hope that, now, is one of a limited number of things remaining for the besieged citizens of Sarajevo and that, for many, dwindles each day.

And so today, like every other day in recent memory, the cellist sits beside the window of his second-floor apartment and plays until he feels his hope return. He rarely plays the Adagio. Most days he’s able to feel the music rejuvenate him as simply as if he were filling a car with gasoline. But some days this isn’t the case. If, after several hours, this hope doesn’t return, he will pause to gather himself, and then he and his cello will coax Albinoni’s Adagio out of the firebombed husk of Dresden and into the mortar-pocked, sniper-infested streets of Sarajevo. By the time the last few notes fade, his hope will be restored, but each time he’s forced to resort to the Adagio it becomes harder, and he knows its effect is finite. There are only a certain number of Adagios left in him, and he will not recklessly spend this precious currency.

It wasn’t always like this. Not long ago the promise of a happy life seemed almost inviolable. Five years ago at his sister’s wedding, he’d posed for a family photograph, his father’s arm slung behind his neck, fingers grasping his shoulder. It was a firm grip, and to some it would have been painful, but to the cellist it was the opposite. The fingers on his flesh told him that he was loved, that he had always been loved, and that the world was a place where above all else the things that were good would find a way to burrow into you. Though he knew all of this then, he would give up nearly anything to be able to go back in time and slow down that moment, if only so he could more clearly recall it now. He would very much like to feel his father’s hand on his shoulder again.

He can tell today won’t be an Adagio day. It has been only a half-hour since he sat down beside the window, but already he feels a little bit better. Outside, a line of people wait to buy bread. It’s been over a week since the market’s had any bread to buy, and he considers whether he might join them. Many of his friends and neighbours are in line. He decides against it, for now. There’s still work to do.

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.

When the mortars destroyed the Sarajevo Opera Hall, the cellist felt as if he were inside the building, as if the bricks and glass that once bound the structure together became projectiles that sliced and pounded into him, shredding him beyond recognition. He was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra. That was what he knew how to be. He made the idea of music an actuality. When he stepped onstage in his tuxedo he was transformed into an instrument of deliverance. He gave to the people who came to listen what he loved most in the world. He was as solid as the vice of his father’s hand.

Now he doesn’t care whether anyone hears him play or not. His tuxedo hangs in the closet, untouched. The guns perched on the hills surrounding Sarajevo have dismantled him just as they have the opera hall, just as they have his family home in the night while his father and mother slept, just as they will, eventually, everything.

The geography of the siege is simple. Sarajevo is a long ribbon of flat land surrounded on all sides by hills. The men on the hills control all the high ground and one peninsula of level ground in the middle of the city, Grbavica. They fire bullets and mortars and tank shells and grenades into the rest of the city, which is being defended by one tank and small handheld weapons. The city is being destroyed.

The cellist doesn’t know what is about to happen. Initially the impact of the shell won’t even register. For a long time he’ll stand at his window and stare. Through the carnage and confusion he’ll notice a woman’s handbag, soaked in blood and sparkled with broken glass. He won’t be able to tell whom it belongs to. Then he’ll look down and see he has dropped his bow on the floor, and somehow it will seem to him that there’s a great connection between these two objects. He won’t understand what the connection is, but the feeling that it exists will compel him to undress, walk to the closet and pull the dry cleaner’s plastic from his tuxedo.

He will stand at the window all night and all through the next day. Then, at four o’clock in the afternoon, twenty-four hours after the mortar fell on his friends and neighbours while they waited to buy bread, he will bend down and pick up his bow. He will carry his cello and stool down the narrow flight of stairs to the empty street. The war will go on around him as he sits in the small crater left at the mortar’s point of impact. He’ll play Albinoni’s Adagio. He’ll do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed. Or at least he’ll try. He won’t be sure he will survive. He won’t be sure he has enough Adagios left.

The cellist doesn’t know any of this now, as he sits at his window in the sun and plays. He isn’t yet aware. But it’s already on its way. It screams downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expands in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible world explodes.

Arrow

Arrow blinks. She has been waiting for a long time. Through the scope of her rifle she can see three soldiers standing beside a low wall on a hill above Sarajevo. One looks at the city as though he’s remembering something. One holds out a lighter so another can light a cigarette. It’s obvious they have no idea they’re in her sights. Perhaps, she thinks, they believe they’re too far from the front line. They’re wrong. Perhaps they think no one could thread a bullet between the buildings that separate them from her. Again, they’re wrong. She can kill any one of them, and maybe even two of them, whenever she chooses. And soon she’ll make her choice.

The soldiers Arrow is watching have good reason to think they’re safe. Were almost anyone else hunting them, they would be. They’re almost a kilometre away, and the rifle she uses, the kind nearly all the defenders use, has a practical range of eight hundred metres. Beyond that, the chances of hitting a target are remote. This isn’t the case for Arrow. She can make a bullet do things that others can’t.

For most people, long-distance shooting is a question of the correct combination of observation and mathematics. Figure out the wind’s speed and direction, and the target’s distance. Measurements are calculated and factored into equations taking into account the velocity of the bullet, the drop over time, the magnification of the scope. It’s no different from throwing a ball. A ball isn’t thrown at a target, it’s thrown in an arc calculated to intersect with a target. Arrow doesn’t take measurements, she doesn’t calculate formulas. She simply sends the bullet where she knows it needs to go. She has trouble understanding why other snipers can’t do this.

She’s hidden among the detritus of a burned-out office tower, a few metres back from a window with a view of the city’s southern hills. Anyone looking would have a difficult if not impossible time spotting a slight young woman with shoulder-length black hair concealed within the smoking wreckage of workaday life. She lies with her stomach pressed to the floor, her legs partially covered by an old newspaper. Her eyes, large, blue and bright, are the only sign of life.

Arrow believes she’s different from the snipers on the hills. She shoots only soldiers. They shoot unarmed men, women, children. When they kill a person, they seek a result that is far greater than the elimination of that individual. They are trying to kill the city. Every death chips away at the Sarajevo of Arrow’s youth with as much certainty as any mortar shell battering a building. Those left are robbed of not only a fellow citizen but the memory of what it was to be alive in a time before men on the hills shot at you while you tried to cross the street.

Ten years ago, when she was eighteen and was not called Arrow, she borrowed her father’s car and drove to the countryside to visit friends. It was a bright, clear day, and the car felt alive to her, as though the way she and the car moved together was a sort of destiny, and everything was happening exactly as it ought to. As she rounded a corner one of her favourite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterwards she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it.

Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realises that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

So when Arrow pulls the trigger and ends the life of one of the soldiers in her sights, she’ll do so not because she wants him dead, although she can’t deny that she does, but because the soldiers have robbed her and almost everyone else in the city of this gift. That life will end has become so self-evident it’s lost all meaning. But worse, for Arrow, is the damage done to the distance between what she knows and what she believes. For although she knows her tears that day were not the ridiculous sentimentality of a teenage girl, she doesn’t really believe it.

From the elevated fortress of Vraca, above the occupied neighbourhood of Grbavica, her targets bomb the city with assumed impunity. In the Second World War, Vraca was a place where the Nazis tortured and killed those who resisted them. The names of the dead are carved on the steps, but at the time few fighters used their real names. They took new names, names that said more about them than any boastful story told by drunks in a bar, names that defied the governments who later tried to twist their deeds into propaganda. It’s said they took these new names so their families wouldn’t be in danger, so they could slip in and out of two lives. But Arrow believes they took these names so they could separate themselves from what they had to do, so the person who fought and killed could someday be put away. To hate people because they hated her first, and then to hate them because of what they’ve done to her, has created a desire to separate the part of her that will fight back, that will enjoy fighting back, from the part that never wanted to fight in the first place. Using her real name would make her no different from the men she kills. It would be a death greater than the end of her life.

From the first time she picked up a rifle to kill she has called herself Arrow. There are some who continue to call her by her former name. She ignores them. If they persist, she tells them her name is Arrow now. No one argues. No one questions what she must do. Everyone does something to stay alive. But if they were to press her, she would say, ‘I am Arrow, because I hate them. The woman you knew hated nobody.’

Arrow has chosen today’s targets because she doesn’t want the men at Vraca to feel safe. She will have to make an extremely difficult shot. Though she hides on the ninth floor of this depredated building, the fortress is an uphill run, and she must slip the bullet between a series of buildings that stand between her and her target. The soldiers must stay within a space of about three metres, and smoke from burning buildings periodically obscures her view. As soon as she lets off a shot, every sniper on the southern hill will begin to search for her. They’ll quickly figure out where she is. At that point they’ll shell the building, into the ground if necessary. And the reason this building is burned out is that it’s an easy target. Her chances of escaping the repercussions of her own bullets are slim. But this isn’t an unusual set of challenges. She has sent bullets through trickier air and faced swifter retaliation in the past.

Arrow knows exactly how long it will take them to locate her. She knows exactly where the snipers will look and exactly where the mortars will hit. By the time the shelling stops she’ll be gone, though none will understand how, even those on her own side, defending the city. If she told them, they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t believe that she knows what a weapon will do because Arrow herself is a weapon. She possesses a particular kind of genius few would want to accept. If she could choose, she wouldn’t believe in it either. But she knows it isn’t up to her. You don’t choose what to believe. Belief chooses you.

One of the three soldiers moves away from the other two. Arrow tenses, waiting to see if the two salute him.

If they do she will fire. For a moment she’s unsure, unable to read their gestures. Then the soldier steps out of the narrow corridor her bullet can travel through. He has, in an instant of seeming inconsequence, saved his life. A life is composed almost entirely of actions like this, Arrow knows.

She watches them awhile longer, waiting for a detail to emerge that will dictate which one receives the first bullet. She wants to fire twice, to kill both of them, but she isn’t confident there will be that opportunity, and if she must choose just one of the soldiers she would like to make the right choice, if there’s a right choice to be made. Ultimately she doesn’t believe it will make much difference. Perhaps one of them will live, but he’ll never understand how slim the margin of his existence is. He will chalk it up to luck, or fate, or merit. He’ll never know that an arbitrary fraction of a millimetre in her aim one way or another will make the difference between feeling the sun on his face ten minutes from now and looking down to see an unbelievable hole in his chest, feeling all he was or could have become drain out of him and then, in his final moments, inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.

One of the soldiers says something and laughs. The other one joins in, but from the tightness in his mouth it seems to Arrow that his laugh is perhaps only for his companion’s benefit. She ponders this. Does she shoot the instigator or the collaborator? She’s not sure. For the next few minutes she watches the two men smoke and talk. Their hands trace hard shapes through the air, physical punctuation, sometimes pausing, like knives poised in anticipation of a strike. They’re both young, younger than she is, and if she wished herself into ignorance she could almost imagine they were discussing the outcome of a recent football match. Perhaps, she thinks, they are. It’s possible, even likely, that they view this as some sort of game. Boys throwing bombs instead of balls.

Then they both turn their heads as though called by someone Arrow can’t see, and she knows the time to fire has come. Nothing has made a decision for her, so Arrow simply chooses one. If there’s a reason, if it’s because one shot is easier, or one of them reminds her of someone she once knew and liked or didn’t like, or one of them seems more dangerous than the other, she can’t say. The only certainty is that she exhales and her finger goes from resting on the trigger to squeezing it, and a bullet breaks the sound barrier an instant before pulping fabric, skin, bone, flesh and organ, beginning a short process that will turn motion into meat.

As Arrow readies her second shot, in the time between the tick of one second and another, she knows that something has gone wrong. The men on the hills know where she is. She abandons her shot and rolls to the side, aware of eyes upon her, that a sniper has been hunting her all along, and the instant she shot she was exposed. They have set a trap for her and she has fallen into it. A bullet hits the ground where she lay an instant before. As she scuttles towards the skeleton of a staircase that will lead her nine floors down and out of the building she hears a rifle fire, but doesn’t hear the bullet strike. This means either the sniper has missed entirely or she has been hit. She doesn’t feel any pain, though she’s heard you don’t at first. There isn’t any need to check if she’s hit. If a bullet has found her she’ll know soon enough.

Arrow enters the stairwell and a mortar comes through the roof and explodes. She’s two flights down when another lands, sending the ninth floor crumbling into the eighth. As she reaches the sixth floor the texture of the situation shifts in her mind, an she veers into a dark, narrow hallway and moves as quickly as she can away from the mortar she know is about to penetrate the stairwell. She manages to make it far enough to avoid the steel and wood and concrete the explosion sends her, a multitude of bullets as interest paid on the loan of one. But then, as the last piece of shrapnel hits the ground, she turns and runs back towards the staircase. She has no choice. There’s no other way out of this building, and if she stays she will collect on her loan. So she returns to the stairwell, not knowing what remains of it. The sixth floor has collapsed into the fifth, and when she jumps to the landing below she wonders if it will bear her. It does, and from there it’s a matter of staying tight against the inner wall where the stairs meet the building, where the weight of the upper layers of the collapsed stairway has had less impact.

Arrow hears another mortar hit as she reaches the ground, and although the front entrance leading to the street is only steps away she continues to the basement, where she feels her way along a dim corridor until she finds a door. She shoulders it open. The immediate shift from darkness to light momentarily blinds her, but she emerges without hesitation into a low stairwell on the north side of the building, somewhat sheltered from the men on the southern hill. Before her eyes adjust to the world around her she begins to notice the percussion of mortars affecting her hearing, and it reminds her of being in a swimming pool, of a day when she and a friend took turns shouting each other’s names underwater and laughing at how they came out, all garbled and distorted and foreign. When she turns east, away from the building, she feels a pain in her side, and she looks down, half expecting to see her stomach distended between splintered ribs. A quick inspection reveals only a slight cut, a small nothing that attached itself to her at some point during her exit.

As she walks towards her unit’s headquarters in the city centre, she notices that the sky is beginning to darken. A few drops of rain hit her forehead, make her feel her own heat as they evaporate. When she touches her side, her hand comes away without any fresh blood on it, and Arrow wonders what it means that the insignificance of her injury does not bring her any particular sense of relief.

Kenan

Another day has just begun. Light strains its way into the apartment, where it finds Kenan in his kitchen, his hand reaching for the plastic jug containing his family’s final quarter-litre of water. His movement is slow and stiff. He seems to himself more an old man than one who will soon celebrate his fortieth birthday. His wife, Amila, who is sleeping in the sitting room because it’s more secure than their street-facing bedroom, is much the same. Like him, her middle age has somehow escaped her. She’s barely thirty-seven, but looks well over fifty. Her hair is thin and her skin hangs loose off her flesh, suggesting a former woman who, Kenan knows, never was.

At least their children are, for now, still children. Like all children they rail against the limitations placed on them, and they want to be grown-up, and they wish things to be other than they are. They know what’s going on, but they don’t entirely understand. They have learned how to live with it. Perhaps, Kenan suspects, that’s why they don’t turn old.

It has been over a month since the last time the family had electricity for more than a few hours, and even longer without running water. While life is more difficult without electricity, it is impossible without water. So every four days Kenan gathers his collection of plastic containers and travels down the hill, through the old town, across the Miljacka River and up into the hills into Stari Grad, to the brewery, one of the only places in the city that a person can get clean drinking water. Occasionally it is possible to find closer sources of water, and he keeps his eye out for them, but they’re unreliable and often unsafe. He doesn’t want to survive the men on the hills only to be killed by a water-borne parasite, a possibility he considers real and pressing in a city that no longer has a functioning sewage system. The brewery’s water comes from underground springs deep in the water table, and he feels this is well worth the risk of the extra distance.

As quietly as he can, Kenan picks up the final jug of water and moves down the hall towards the bathroom. His hand flicks on the light switch, a leftover reflex from earlier times. The bulb in the ceiling surges to life. Kenan strikes a match, lights the stub of a candle that sits on the side of the sink below the mirror. He puts the stopper in the drain and pours his quarter-litre of water into the sink. He wets his face, blinks as the cold water registers in his mind as shock. His hands work a small bar of soap into a lather he applies to his cheeks, neck, chin and upper lip. The razor settles into a rhythmic scratch scratch splash, his pupils narrowing in the light as he observes his progress. When he’s done he wets his face again and dries himself on a crusty towel hanging above the toilet. He blows out the candle and is surprised when light does not disappear from the room. After a few seconds he realises that the electricity is on, that the bulb above his head is glowing, and he almost smiles at his mistake before he understands the significance of it. He has grown accustomed to a world where you shave by candlelight with soap and cold water. It has become normal.

Still, there is electricity, and because that is no longer normal he rushes out of the bathroom to wake his wife, who will want to get the children up to make the most of it. He imagines a breakfast cooked on the stove, and watching the television next to the warmth of the heater. The children’s excitement will be catching as they laugh at one of their cartoons.

Light will fill all of the rooms and chase away the perpetual dusk that hides in the corners. Even if it doesn’t last for long it will make them happy, and for the rest of the day their faces will be tired from smiling. But as he leaves the room he hears a telltale pop, and when he looks back the light is off. He tries the hall light and confirms what he already knows to be true. He returns to the kitchen. There’s no longer any reason to wake his family.

He sits at the table and inspects each of the six plastic containers he’ll take with him. He checks for any obvious cracks that may have developed since they were last emptied, makes sure each one has the correct lid. He has two backup containers he can substitute if he finds any faults. Deciding how much water you can carry has become something of an art in this city. Carry too little and you’ll have to repeat the task more often. Each time you expose yourself to the dangers of the streets you run the risk of injury or death. But carry too much and you lose the ability to run, duck, dive, anything it takes to get out of danger’s way. Kenan has decided on eight canisters. The six from his house will hold about twenty-four litres of water. Two more will come from Mrs Ristovski, the elderly neighbour downstairs.

As he verifies that his six containers are reliable, he hears his wife rise from her bed. She leans into the doorway of the kitchen, rubs sleep from her eyes.

‘It was quiet last night,’ he says. ‘It won’t be too bad out there today.’

She nods. They both know a quiet night in no way means it will be a quiet day, but Kenan is glad that neither says so.

His wife moves across the room and stands in front of him. She places her hand on his head, resting it there before letting it slide down to his shoulder, giving his ear a light tug on its way. ‘Be careful.’

Kenan smiles. It’s not so much her words that bring him comfort but that she still says them. She knows as well as he that there’s no such thing as careful, that the men on the hills can kill anyone, anywhere, any time they like, and that luck or fate or whatever it is that decides who lives and who doesn’t has not, in the past, favoured those who act in a way that could be described as careful. The odds may punish those who behave recklessly, but everyone else seems about even. Still, there was a time when a person could reasonably act with care for his well-being, and he appreciates that his wife is occasionally willing, for the sake of his sanity, to invoke the memory of those times.

He sees her looking at his bottles, tallying them up. ‘Mrs Ristovski?’

‘Yes.’

She frowns, brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then her face softens, and she stands back to look at him. ‘You’ll need a new coat soon.’

‘I’ll pick one up while I’m out,’ he says. ‘Would you like me to get you some shoes?’

She smiles. Kenan grins back. He’s glad that he can still make her smile. ‘No,’ she says. ‘But I’ll take a hat if you have time.’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I assume you would like mink?’

The children are awake now, and she kisses him quickly on the cheek before going to check on them. ‘You should go, before you see them and lose an hour with your jokes.’

As the door to the apartment closes behind him he presses his back to it and slides to the ground. His legs are heavy, his hands cold. He doesn’t want to go. What he wants is to go back inside, crawl into bed and sleep until this war is over. He wants to take his younger daughter to a carnival. He wants to sit up, anxious, waiting for his older daughter to return from a movie with a boy he doesn’t really like. He wants his son, the middle child, only ten years old, to think about anything other than how long it will be before he can join the army and fight.

Muffled sounds seep out of the apartment, and he worries that one of the children might come to the door. They must not see him like this. They must not know how afraid he is, how useless he is, how powerless he has become. If he doesn’t return home today he doesn’t want them to remember him sitting on the landing, shaking like a wet and frightened dog.

He pushes himself to his feet and picks up the water containers. He’s tied them together by the handles with a piece of rope, and although bulky they’re light and easy enough to carry while empty. Later, when they’re full, it will be harder, but he’ll deal with that then. Kenan knows he’s getting progressively weaker, like almost everyone else in the city, and wonders if the day will come when he won’t be able to carry back enough water for his family. What then? Will he have to take his son along on the trip, as many others do? He doesn’t want to do that. If he is killed he doesn’t want anyone in his family to witness it, as much as he would like their faces to be the last thing he sees. And if both he and his son were killed he knows his wife would never recover. If he thinks about what might happen if his son alone died he’ll be back down on the ground.

He descends the flight of stairs that leads to the ground floor and knocks on the door to Mrs Ristovski’s apartment. Hearing no sounds of movement inside, he knocks again with more force. He hears a shuffling and waits for the door to open.

Mrs Ristovski has lived in this building nearly her whole life, or so she says. Given that she’s well into her seventies and it was built shortly after the Second World War, Kenan knows that this can’t be true, but he isn’t inclined to argue. Mrs Ristovski believes what she believes, and no mere facts will convince her otherwise.