Passionless Powder Keg

War is not a topic that lends itself easily to fiction. Don’t get me wrong: there are many great war novels, written by authors of differing magnitude, from Leo Tolstoy to Erich Maria Remarque to James Michener to Miroslav Krleža to Miodrag Bulatovič.

Krleža? Bulatovič? Who are they, you would be right to ask. Since there is nary a translation available in English of the works of either Yugoslav writer, please take my word for it: to understand the people of the Balkans from the viewpoint of their brethren, one needs to familiarize oneself with the opus of those Croatian and Montenegrin writers.

The term Balkans encompasses most of the southern Slavs (Slovenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians and Montenegrins), Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldovians, Albanians and, historically, Greeks and European Turks. The area currently inhabited by these groups over the centuries has experienced more than its fair share of conflict.

The Balkan war that followed the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the death of the iron-fisted dictator Marshall Josef Broz Tito had many causes—and not one sensible explanation. Even though all wars are senseless, this one made less sense than most.

After all, in the late 1980s, Yugoslavia seemed to have achieved a “third way,” navigating between the communism/socialism of the rest of eastern Europe and the relentless free market model of western Europe and America. Its people travelled freely and had decent living conditions, state-subsidized education, health care and culture. The media, although not fully free, were more “guided” than suppressed and that compromise seemed to work well for all concerned.

The stirring up of a jingoistic, nationalistic rhetoric was at first considered to be political posturing by regional leaders clamouring for the federal throne. Soon, however, real hostilities erupted. The main conflict, between the two most powerful republics, Serbia and Croatia, led respectively by Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, squeezed Bosnia and Herzegovina between them. The Bosnians, who shared a common language (the population was largely a mix of the other two groups), were nonetheless separated in many—but not all—cases by religion (Serbs are largely orthodox Christian, Croats Roman Catholic and many Bosnians Muslim) and found themselves between a rock and a hard place.

As if we somehow forgot that the First World War started in Bosnia, it was a great shock that one of the most brutal chapters of the second half of the 20th century also played itself out here. The most reported-on and dramatic phase of the conflict was the siege of Sarajevo.

During that siege, the city was shelled from the surrounding hills, while its wide boulevards became known as sniper alleys. Tens of thousands perished, many were summarily executed, some tortured. The siege of Sarajevo dragged on, while pointless no-fly zones were established (mortar shells need no planes to drop them and none of the former Yugoslav republics were aviation powers).

It is this siege that provides Steven Galloway with the central premise for his novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. In one of the saddest episodes of the already tragic war, almost two dozen Sarajevans waiting in a queue for bread were annihilated by one artillery shell. That horrific event is observed in the book by a cello player with the Sarajevo Symphony, who decides that he will play his cello in the blood-stained crater for 21 days—one day for each life lost.

His is the reaction of a human being trying to cling to his humanity. Music is what defined him before the war and he refuses to change that definition. This insistence on not losing the link with their past is what connects the characters of Galloway’s novel—the counter-sniper Arrow, the baker Dragan, the family man Kenan and others, mere shadows of their former selves, sneaking about Sarajevo’s mean streets. Among these characters, the best drawn is Arrow, a young woman whose target-shooting excellence is enlisted in the fight against the men besieging Sarajevo. Her motivations always remain clear, whether she is targeting the soldiers on the hills or protecting the cellist from snipers. The cellist himself is a less successful character, a palimpsest of a man, devoid of a name and obviously devastated by the tragedy, but neither fully understood nor understandable. The others, reduced by the war to animals interested only in survival, have our sympathy, although their incomplete effigies rob them of our empathy.

There are many poignant moments in the novel and many points where one wishes the author would follow a local story or a legend, such as those of the assassination or the great Sarajevo fire. “A nearby merchant’s storeroom caught fire, and the fire quickly reached the Stone Inn, where there was a large army store of … methyl alcohol … Firefighters emptied the …. barrels into the river … alcohol is lighter than water. When they put their pumps into the Miljacka, the water they drew wasn’t water at all but fire itself … and much of the city was destroyed.”

The descriptions of the dreary surroundings and daily terror of life in Sarajevo during the siege do move the reader, and it is impossible to read The Cellist and not become in turn outraged, ashamed or very sad. Despite engaging us on that level, the novel remains seriously flawed. It ignores the complicity of Sarajevans themselves in the war. The author refers to “the men in the hills” repeatedly, as if they were some outside force, arrived out of nowhere and not connected to any of the principal characters. This narrative error flies in the face of the greatest tragedy of the last Balkan war: it was a war of brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. A war that split families and marriages among ethnic and religious lines. It is highly likely that Arrow would have recognized her former neighbours, co-workers and acquaintances among her many targets. Sarajevo always was and will remain an ambiguous place—a place where Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian-backed assassin of Archduke Ferdinand and de facto harbinger of the First World War, has his own museum and a bridge named after him. To put all the suffering and madness down to the men in the hills is to wilfully ignore history.

If only Steven Galloway gave us the colour, the passion, the emotions that made the Balkans the powder keg of Europe, instead of somewhat generic descriptions of war-time suffering and pale pictures of a city without identifying marks. As it stands, we are given a story that sounds, well, second-hand: moving and at times powerful, but essentially devoid of the imprint of personal experience, as if culled from newspaper reports and radio commentaries.