The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway Page A

destinations. Lately, however, she has felt more attention being paid to her, and she knows that sooner or later they are going to ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do.
    “I would remind you of our first conversation,” she says, looking him straight in the eyes, something she rarely does.
    Four months after the war started, Nermin had sent a man to request that she come to see him. In a way, Arrow was surprised it had taken them so long to approach her. Most of the other members of the university target-shooting team had already been approached. She would learn later that her father, who was a policeman, had asked Nermin to leave her out of it. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, in front of the Sarajevo Canton Building, and Arrow has neverasked Nermin whether he felt her father would have changed his mind about her involvement in the city’s defence or if he simply decided to ignore the request of a dead man. She doesn’t want to know the answer.
    “We need people who can shoot as well as you can,” he said.
    “I’ve never shot at a person,” she replied, knowing that until quite recently this was probably true of most of the city’s defenders, and maybe even its attackers. “Only at targets.”
    “It’s a matter of perspective,” he said.
    “I don’t want to kill people.”
    “You’d be saving lives. Every one of those men on the hills will kill some of us. Given the chance, they will kill all of us.”
    Arrow thought about this. She thought about what it might be like to pull the trigger and have her bullet hit a living being instead of a piece of paper. She was mildly surprised to find that the thought didn’t horrify her, that she could probably do it, and she could probably live with it.
    “I think this will end,” she said. Her hands turned her coffee cup in a clockwise circle. She hadn’t drunk any of it yet, and soon it would be cold.
    He leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall as if it were a window, as if it offered some view that could lend a new perspective to her statement. “That’sa good view to take. I hope you’re right. I don’t see how it could last forever.”
    He turned his gaze back from the wall, seeming to sense that she was moving towards stating an intent.
    Arrow nodded. “I think it will end, and when it does I want to be able to go back to the life I had before. I want my hands to be clean.”
    Nermin’s eyes flickered down to where his own hands lay folded on his desk and then back up. She wasn’t sure if he knew he had done this. It looked involuntary, but still it made her nervous. His hands moved to his lap. “I don’t think any of us will be going back to the life we had before, however this ends. Even those who keep their hands clean.”
    “If I do this, it will have to be done a certain way. I won’t blindly kill just because you say I must.” She raised her cup to her mouth and drank. The coffee was good, strong and bitter, but no longer hot.
    And so they reached an agreement. She would report only to Nermin, she would work alone, and she would, for the most part, choose her own targets. Occasionally Nermin has asked for someone specific, or that she work in a particular area, and thus far she has always been able to accommodate him.
    She’s aware, now, that the woman who sat in this office on that day and said she didn’t want to kill anyone was gone, that with each passing week she’s less and lesscertain there will be an end to all this. The parameters of their deal are dangerously close to irrelevance.
    This does not, however, reduce her resolve. If anything, her desire to adhere to her conditions, to keep her hands clean, has increased. Although she has nearly completely lost sight of the person she was, she still knows who she wants to be, and as far as she can see, the only path leading her towards this person is back through her former self.
    Nermin looks at her for a long time. She can see that he’s