Read Online The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway - Free Book Online Page B

least there was a few minutes ago. I’m waiting to see if he’s gone.”
    “Did he get anyone?” Emina looks genuinely concerned. This strikes Dragan as odd. He isn’t indifferent to the deaths around him, but he can’t really say that he feels them so much that they would register on his face. He doesn’t think many other people do either, anymore.
    “No,” he says. “He doesn’t look to be a very good shot.”
    She appears to think about this. He hopes she doesn’t take it too seriously. He doesn’t know how good a shot the sniper is. All he knows is that he missed the last time he shot. There’s no way to tell how many other times he’s fired without missing.
    “I think I’ll wait a bit. I’m not in any real hurry,” she says. She tells him she’s on her way to deliver some medicine to a woman a few blocks southwest of the bakery. Radio Sarajevo has organized a medical swap,where people who have old prescriptions they aren’t using can give them to those who need various drugs that are no longer available. Each day they read out who needs what over the radio, and those who can help do. The woman she’s going to see has a heart condition and uses the same medication as Emina’s mother, who died about five years ago. Although the drugs are beyond their use-by date, they’re still better than nothing. “After all,” she says, “they’re just blood thinners. I don’t think they really expire.”
    “No,” Dragan says. “You’re probably right.”
    “It’s the same stuff as rat poison, and that doesn’t expire.”
    “It is?”
    “Well, there’s a little arsenic in it. Or I think there is. My mother used to joke about it.”
    Dragan had met Emina’s mother once, a year before she died. She looked a lot like Emina, but her sense of humour ran darker than her daughter’s. It was apparent she didn’t think much of Jovan either. When he tried to steer the discussion towards politics, as he always did, she threw her hands up in the air. “You and your politics. Nothing good will happen because of politics.”
    “Nothing good will happen without politics,” Jovan replied, shaking his head.
    “Which one of them,” Emina said, “do you suppose is the optimist in the family?”
    Dragan and his wife laughed, but the question perplexed him, and he wasn’t sure that Emina was joking.
    “Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?” Emina’s mother asked, looking at Jovan, who appeared to have heard this before. A small hint of a smile cracked his lips. “A pessimist says, ‘Oh dear, things can’t possibly get any worse.’ And an optimist says, ‘Don’t be so sad. Things can always get worse.’”
    When she died, Dragan didn’t go to the funeral. He can’t remember why now. It’s possible he wasn’t invited, but more likely he was and had made some excuse not to go.
    “Do you remember Ismira Sidran?” Emina asks him.
    He does. She was the director of a theatre company. They had done a production of Hair some years ago that was a big success. Dragan has seen several of her shows since then. She was a friend of Emina’s, and once he met her on the street, walking with Emina. She struck him as a loud, difficult woman, and he’d been irritated by her.
    “This year is the twenty-five-year anniversary of the first performance of Hair on Broadway, and she was invited to bring her company to New York for a performance or a celebration or something.” The sun has come out from behind a cloud, and it’s warming up fast. Emina unclasps the top button on her coat.
    “Did the government approve it?” Dragan is surprised. They’ve been very selective about who they let leave the city.
    “Sure, to start with. I saw her, and she told me there were thirty-two people on the list. ‘Thirty-two!’ I said. ‘That’s so many people.’ But she said that it took that many to run the lights and the props and all that stuff, people you never see from the audience. So that