The Lover from Sarajevo

Excerpt from The Lover from Sarajevo (2010) by Elizabeth McKague

I.

It was made out of the maple wood recovered from a shipwreck that had long ago been washed onto the shores of the Black Sea. The craftsman signed his name in an odd curly script with puce colored ink on a slip of glue-backed parchment, Aurelius Bumbescu, Bucharest, Romania, 1873.

You had to put your eye right up to the F hole to see it.

Sometimes he’d look up in a safe moment to watch the girl on the fourth floor. He could see her through the shattered windows of her apartment as he played in the plaza down below. She had written a play and spent her days rehearsing it with various dread headed characters. He played the cello. She played a kind of female Mephistopheles, from what he could gather. She was always speaking about the moon. The gnarly haired young men in the rest of her cast were all very tall, emaciated and pale. They stood around her in a circle like skeleton puppets, and from his view in the square, it often looked as if they were levitating, for their heads appeared to touch the ceiling. He lived on the floor above her. They smiled at each other every so often when they coincidentally passed on the winding stair, but never exchanged words. The air was very bad in their building and the fumes from the grenades outside made the stifling stillness inside it so dense, one would actually have to make an effort to say anything at all.

That morning when he came downstairs he heard the sounds of lovemaking echoing into the hall from behind her closed door. It made him nervous, like a bad omen. The streets were slippery when he went outside. It had not rained. He began to worry that it may. He sat on a bench in a corner of the square and unlocked the sturdy case. There was no point in looking at the sky. The pollution from bombs, fires and so much blood had created a perpetual shroud for anything celestial for many seasons. He didn’t even know what day it was, or what month anymore. He tried to remember how the trees had looked when they were alive, but even the trees had been standing stripped of their dignity for so long now it was not inconceivable that all of nature had been subjugated to a never ending winter. He started to play. His fingers were cold. Not rain today, maybe snow. If it became too cold he would have to stop, he didn’t want to hurt the cello, it was so sensitive to extreme temperatures. His fingers were not behaving with the flexibility he’d trained them for and he tried to purge out the stiffness as he continued to play his new piece, the one he was almost but not quite yet absolutely sure of, with a spirit absent of care for the weather.

Aurelius Bumbescu left the cello to Cidro Lemieux’s great grandfather, who left it to his grandfather who left it to Cidro’s father who in turn left it, not to Cidro at all, but just left it when he left Sarajevo on January 5th of 1992, exactly three months before the Siege. He left it leaning against the wall in its ancient hard case and gave Cidro a certain amount of cash but no instructions regarding the cello. He only promised to send his new address, when he got one, as he was headed, “North,” was all he told his son. For a short period Cidro enjoyed living alone. It was the first time he’d ever done so. Then the Serbian army surrounded the village and he felt an erupting sense of trepidation and confusion. Yet what mattered more to him at that point was the beginning of a stranger emotion, a combination of a new, overwhelming sense of individuality mixed with longing to hear from his father. As time went by, he found himself fighting off the persistent feeling that his father had probably died. Cidro grew up believing that he would become a man at the age of 21. This is what his father always told him. And so, that year, within those circumstances, he did. He was now 23.

His fingers were cramping up from the cold. He stopped to blow on them. The piece was all wrong. The arrangement sounded impure and strained and the midsection was too complicated. Perhaps he should change the tempo; it sounded like a thousand bullets in a row. A Bosnian soldier was crossing the plaza at the far end. He walked slowly, then slower and Cidro noticed he was wavering. The soldier began zigzagging directly toward the corner of the square where the cellist played. His steps were disorganized and he appeared intoxicated or... then he dropped. There was blood all over the back of his fatigues. He made an effort to look up at Cidro, who in turn looked the other way and kept playing.

The soldier’s eyes lifted toward the sky and froze. His hat had fallen off when he fell and landed right next to a pothole in the street out of which a young boy crawled carrying a plastic, five-liter jug of water. The boy scrambled to his feet, saw the dead soldier, picked up the hat and ran. Cidro heard trucks in the distance. He packed up and ran too, in the same direction of the boy. He waited in an alley for a short while until the fiasco was over and the body was dragged away for he had to cross the plaza to get to the market. They didn’t wash away the blood. He played there every day and the square had become like his own private stage. The boy had forgotten his water. He poured some of it over the cobblestones that had been stained, but replaced the jug knowing the boy would surely come back for it. He was too late. The underground market had already closed. He turned to walk home with his cello strapped to his back and passed a man in a doorway who called out to him, “Hey you...!”

He didn’t stop. “Hey, you! Fuckin’ cellist!” Cidro glanced back into the dim gray alcove. A haggard old man held out his hands. Four fresh eggs. “500 dinars,” he said. Cidro paid him 200, half of what he made that morning before the episode with the soldier cut short his hours.

He’d been playing on the street for money since he was 16. His father’s income had always been inconsistent, sporadic spells of what the Lemieux family knew as wealth, that is, a new jacket, a few dinners out and a ticket to the symphony, were often countered by long periods of nothing but tram change, bread and milk. When his father left, Cidro sold his own cello to pay the rent. Aurelius’ cello was of course worth much more, but he could never let it go, would never let it go. It was the only thing left in this new adult life that could trick him into feeling as if life had any purpose at all. He wrapped the eggs in his scarf and headed toward his home. Mortar was flying through the air and he was forced to cross Bascarsija, the oldest part of Sarajevo, built by the Ottoman's in the 15th century. It was the first district to be demolished. Now it it was a landscape of rubble, all the old turkish buildings broken to the ground and an enormous crater scarring the main square. Only one structure remained, the Sebilj, the public fountain. He used to play there in the summertime and had found such harmony in the constant sound of the soft splashing water, the muffled voices of people meeting in the cafés and the sight of children chasing pigeons with ice cream cones in their hands, even the discordant cooing of the pigeons-- well, that world was gone. He scurried around the corner of the ruins of the cathedral of Jesus Heart and held his body flush between two damaged pillars in the facade for a couple of minutes as several bullets hit the opposite side of the cathedral. Echoes of the fired shots got caught in the dome and rang out like mutated bells.

Cidro’s mother used to take him here on Sundays when she was alive. Now Jesus Heart had a huge hole in its center, blown straight through with a rocket-propelled grenade. He never liked going to mass but he liked the church itself, the candles and incense and music. They would travel by tramway in the early morning and he remembered liking that too because she never let go of his hand. The National Library went next, another monument towering in his memories of innocence. They burned it to the ground. All those books he had spent his afternoons with between school and his music lesson, adventure stories mostly; The Arabian Nights, The Iliad and Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur, Robinson Crusoe, gone.

He moved on, staying close to the crumbled stones. Dim candlelight ebbed through the slits of the female Mephistopheles barricaded windows on the fourth floor. When he past her door he heard muffled laughter. Laughter, funny how it sounded, so foreign, being the one universal language next to tears. He stopped, wishing to knock, to say something or simply try to smile.

There was little coal but he lit the stove anyway, promising himself he would make it to the market on time tomorrow. Night fell fast and he moved about his apartment in the isolated, sapphire colored light from the stove for a while, preparing the place for the evening. When the shelling became routine he had torn off the bathroom door and switched its position with the pretty, tapestry drapes that hung over the one long window facing the street. They were ancient drapes, his Bosnian grandmother’s from the 50’s or something. He poured a shot glass full of kerosene into the base of his lamp and sprinkled it with a pinch of salt to make the fuel last longer. There was a knock at the door. He wished it might be the girl, he could offer her something, an egg. It was Grebo, from across the hall. He had an open bottle of red wine in his hand. Cidro set the table with two glasses and two plates and fried the eggs over the coals. Grebo kept talking. They ate and drank very slowly. After some time Cidro began to listen to him and realized he was pontificating on his grand plan for escape. He had heard it often enough before, but this time his neighbor’s ideas seemed to be making some sense. He gazed intensely into the man’s blue eyes as he spoke, watching them bounce like two umbrageous little balls beneath his wild, curly, reddish graying hair. There were many holes in ‘the plan,’ but overall, his ideas did not seem as far fetched as they had been in the past.

Salim Grebo was 30 years older than Cidro and was living across the hall ten years ago when the Lemieux family moved in. He had always felt closer to him than his own father. He learned sometime ago that Grebo had had an affair with his mother and he remembered how grief stricken their neighbor was at her funeral. Yes, that day especially, Salim seemed to understand what Cidro was going through, even more so than himself at the turbulent age of 15. It seemed so far away. His mother. Far away as France, the place he was born, as Paris, the city where he spent a very happy childhood.

Salim asked for a piece of bread to clear the thin film of yolk off his plate. Cidro shook his head. “I didn’t get to the market in time today.”

“A piece of bread! One crumb!” Grebo stood, taking the bottle of wine, now more than half empty, in his hand and went out, leaving the door open behind him. He returned in several minutes with the girl from the fourth floor. One of the skeletons was with her. She had black bread and Kashkaval cheese and her friend had hashish. The four of them sat, eating, drinking and smoking at once. They spoke of objects and places in the neighborhood that had been annihilated. A few first names were mentioned: the generous man who ran the local kiosk; if he liked your style of conversation you got a free newspaper or a pack of gum, the odd woman in the red coat who got off the bus at six a.m. sharp, even on Sundays, and the dare devil little boy who used to do tricks with his bike in the square. Cidro asked the girl about her play and she grew uneasy. Her friend began to answer the question, going into lengthy detail about the plot and even quoting, with pretentious affectations, certain passages in which, it was obvious, he had a leading role. Cidro watched the girl’s downcast eyes as her friend spoke. She was so pretty, he thought. But he didn’t like her really. He didn’t think he liked her soul. They finished the spliff and talked some more but did not sit up late. After everyone was gone he played as if he himself had also left and the few objects that caught his attention in the room; the dirty plates and glasses, the glowing red embers of coal in the stove, his three favorite books and the two thin blankets on his bed that he never made, all appeared foreign. He felt as if he were in a stranger’s home in a strange land. He bit his lip and stared at his soft shadow on the panels of the faded, raspberry painted walls. His posture looked monstrous over the cello like some kind of half man, half beast choking a giant insect. The rumpled sheets on his bed were in the shape of a swan. He imagined a swan gliding in a pool of clear blue water. There was a shot outside in the distance. The water became black.

In the first months of the siege he was filled with rage and marched in protests with vigilant peers. Their efforts proved futile yet he chose at last not to fight. Soon there was nothing; no water, no gas, no electricity, no food, and the numbness blanketed time. He found himself gradually turning into a savage, a hunter for the basic means of survival. By 1993 he was a criminal, stealing even the tiniest reflections of human sympathies from the streets of this sinister new world. The cradle of a child’s arm around her doll, young lovers kissing in a doorway as bullets shot past, an old woman at her window hanging laundry to dry in the smoky breeze, these things gave him breath, and especially the smell of bread that somehow still floated down Vrbanja street from Emir’s Bakery every Sunday. How did he light his ovens? Where did he get his flour? Just two weeks ago he dragged Grebo to Vrbanja Street, excited and with 800 dinars in his pocket. They had to walk around a blockade. The street was in shambles. Emir’s wife lifted the boards covering the door. They turned around. The Bakery smelled only of death.

They were always up there in the hills, ruling everything. Three hundred to one thousand shell impacts per day, each day for almost two years now. Some escaped through the tunnel dug by Bosnians for smuggling in food and medical supplies. All you needed was a wad of cash, a big wad. But no one really knew. War is such a temperamental deal. The risk is omnipresent at all times. Yet war is also, to some extent, a strategic affair and the mortar, bombs and bullets constantly bombarding the city were not as random as it appeared. The chetnicks had designated targets in the town below and their shooting ranges were predetermined by the location of each bunker in the hills. As a result, there did in fact exist a few very narrow locations in Sarajevo where one would most likely be safe, that is, unless he or she got blasted away by a wandering sniper. One of these spots was the square where Cidro played his cello. It was the main plaza in Novi Grad, a mostly communist urban area made up of inexpensive and unattractive modern apartment buildings. His mother had been an artist, a renaissance woman who occasionally took spurious low-income jobs and his father’s liberal politics sent him into societies of extremists where he appeared to work diligently yet was never well paid for his assiduous radicalism. The building where his family had lived since Cidro was thirteen was not as obnoxious as its neighbors. It actually had some character and there was a community of the more alternative citizens living in Novi Grad that had always appealed to him. It was the only other home he’d known since Paris.

Cidro was unaware of the safety zone in the square. He played there for money before the war and continued to play there. Of course he did not want to die, but he didn’t even think of it that way. He had to play. People passed him by, or ran past accordingly. When it was quiet they would always stop, listen, and if they could, throw some change or scraps of food into his cello case. In ways he felt proud to have kept his job during wartime. Salim always joked with him about that but called him a complete fool on the days when he’d naively venture across town to play in the ruins of the National Library for no other reason than his own desire. The residual structure of the old building lent to a very fine acoustic resonance, and he could hear himself clearer there than anywhere else as he’d sit alone amidst the heaps of burnt stones, drowning his wrath and despondency in the reverberating waves rising and falling all around him like pages, like wisdom, certainly a forgotten one, perhaps a dead one, a wisdom in ashes, nothing but dust.

Except for his missing father, the girl on the fourth floor, Grebo, the scruffy stray spaniel he saw each morning rummaging in the garbage bins at the edge of the square and his occasional visits to the library, he felt disconnected from it all. Humanity, civilization and the heart were mere abstractions, distractions. He cared about perfecting his posture, his hold on the bow, angles of pressure and the rapidity of certain passages, the moisture of others, the depth of low tones and the flight of the high ones like climbing up a mountain or coming down from the sky; of reaching the point where he could play that first single note with such skill and precision that all other notes would follow, of playing a piece from beginning to end, flawlessly. He believed one day, and this believed each and every day, that sooner or later, the split second would arrive when the fatal bullet would come. And when he did occasionally half-consciously ponder this idea, he never thought about his own death or even of pain, how it might feel or look. He just wondered what note he would be playing at that exact moment and hoped there would at least be a note, a sound that the bullet broke. He hoped that he wouldn’t be pausing or tuning or rosining his bow or-- god forbid-- packing away his cello! No, there had to be a note, a solid, powerful, crystal tone that would continue on after he died, a single sound that from that moment on would never end, for it would travel the earth and move into the universe and come back, repeating itself in circles over and over again for eternity.

Another month went by. Although each day appeared to be a bit harder than the previous one, it was an illusion. The building where he lived remained standing and the stony ground of the square where he played had not yet opened up and swallowed him. He stayed alive.

Then one evening when Grebo routinely knocked on his door, Cidro felt that he was dreaming. His red bearded neighbor stormed into the apartment laughing joyously with a bottle of champagne in each hand, followed by a woman Cidro had never seen before carrying a basket containing a whole roasted chicken, apples, bread and cheese.

“Allow me to present...” Salim bowed before the lady, “Benoîte Melandrine, a goddess!” He kissed her hand then uncorked one of the bottles, “Quick my boy, glasses, plates, forks and a good knife. I can’t wait to cut up that beautiful bird! I tell you, I’ve had it with boiled pigeons.”

Cidro greeted Benoîte shyly and did as Salim said. The two men sat down immediately and began to eat and drink. Their mouths trembled with such sumptuousness that only their frequent groans of satiety proved responsive to Benoîte’s efforts toward a conversation.

When the second bottle was opened and little meat left on the bones, Salim finally picked up where he left off at the door, “Yes. My good friend has come all the way from Paris to save us all!”

“Salim, I can not save you, please, I wish I could.”

“Mais, ma chéri,” he belched happily, “I am saved. So,” he turned to Cidro, “Tu parle Français, non, monsieur?”

“Oui.” The language flooded back into Cidro ’s memory, “I grew up in Paris. My father is from there.”

“A great man, Guillaume Lemieux. I never liked the French,” Grebo broke in then patted Benoîte’s hand, “except for you my dear. But this man, Guillaume, wasn’t like all those other snobs. He had a true heroic character. Ulysses we called him around here, always off on some grand escapade, whether political or artistic.”

“Yes, and this time I don’t know the reason.” Cidro added.

“You don’t?”

“No, do you?” Cidro’s eyes shot into Grebo’s, feeling suddenly ablaze with sympathy and angst.

“No. But it was a good reason, I’m sure.”

Cidro cast his gaze to the tattered Persian carpet on the floor. “Regardless, I doubt if he made it.”

“Of course he did! He’ll be back, he’s just waiting until--”

“Until what?” he broke in harshly, fighting the hot surge.

“Shush, boy. He’ll be back.”

Cidro began to pout and Grebo told Benoîte, “Forgive my friend, he can become rather passionate at times, he is a musician.”

“Passion is the paramount of virtue.” She said to him with a sincere sweetness in her voice that seemed familiar somehow, yet he couldn’t place it.

“Who said that?” Cidro looked across the table and into her eyes for the first time that night and realized that she was very pretty, much prettier than the girl downstairs.

“I did.” She smiled, “Perhaps you could play for us?”

“After we finish the cheese!” Grebo took up a knife.

“Of course.” Cidro promised, stealing another glance into the dark eyes of his female guest. She was not young but could not be nearly as old as Salim, although he guessed that she was probably closer to the red beard’s age than his own. They all became a bit drunk. Salim bantered on with his customary obscene humor making them laugh a lot. The shakes and sounds of shells blasting outside were infrequent tonight, perhaps one an hour and on the borders of Novi Grad. Benoîte had a spark of life in her Cidro hadn’t seen in anyone since the war began and because her presence contained such a spirit, he felt alive again too, warm, daring, almost sure. The cozy space of his apartment felt real, the wine and food tasted real, the smile on his face and the sparkle in his eyes felt sincere and his body, he never felt what he felt in his body, even before the war, no woman had made his body feel the way it felt at that moment, watching her speak, moving her shoulders and slightly tossing her hair with a kind of confidence he intuited as being sexual. He looked again into her eyes and wanted to kiss her. Her lips were full and pink. She had asked him a question.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“Twenty three.” Grebo answered for him, “She wanted to know how old you are.”

“Oh, yes. Twenty three.” He didn’t dare ask her age.

She coaxed him to play. She wished to hear something original. He opened his case and handed Grebo a newspaper, “Someone tossed this into my case today.”

“Ah! Just as good as a few hundred dinars.” He took the paper and looked it over then stuffed it into the stove, “They’ve chased out more Jews and hundreds of Muslims are starving to death in the camps. I was wrong, dinars are better.”

Cidro played. Benoîte smoked a cigarette without taking her eyes off him.

“Encore! Encore!” She clapped.

He paused then picked up his bow but set it back down, “I can’t. I’m afraid I’m not used to champagne.”

Grebo rose and patted the cave of his gut, “Well, I’m off to bed.”

Benoîte remained seated, “But I’m not yet tired.” she turned to Cidro, “Are you?”

“No, I’m not.” he smiled. He could tell she liked his smile.

“I’ll come back over soon,” she told Grebo as he opened the door, “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried at all.” Salim left and Cidro returned to the table. They sat with tense, arrested smiles on their faces like statues. He reached across the table for the last piece of bread and she touched his hand, timidly at first but then there was a force, a magnificent force of energy pouring into him from the contact with her flesh. He took her hand, lifting it off the table and brought it to his lips then shyly kissed her fingertips. They tasted like tobacco and chèvre. He loved the taste. He smelled a fragrance on her neck that had long ago lost its subtle strength but lingered in hue like a flower after a hard rain. He kissed her neck then she put her lips to his and they kissed for a long time. They lay down on his bed. She let him do everything he’d been fantasizing about earlier, the minute he had noticed the spirit in her eyes. He wanted to make love to her but grew bashful and would not make the definitive move. She encouraged him eagerly with astounding assertion, her breath was heavy and moist and she moaned sweetly, softly. Her desire made his ache. He looked into her eyes again and felt frozen, like an animal hiding in a cave. A bullet hit the bathroom door propped up before the window, shattering the silence, and he entered her with all the darkness pushing him forward with a kind of force he’d forgotten, the force of life over death, of death disappearing into light.