The Cellist of the Besieged City

On the twenty-second of the month, at four in the afternoon, a shell came down among the people waiting for bread in Vasa Street, and when the smoke had thinned and the screaming had organized itself into the particular grammar of aftermath, there were twenty-two of them on the cobbles, and Damir Kovač, who had been three buildings away tuning a radio that no longer received anything but static and the besiegers' triumphant marches, came out into the street and counted them, because counting was the only sacrament left to a man who had once been first cellist of an orchestra that no longer existed in a city that was being unmade around him stone by stone.

Twenty-two. He would not afterward be able to say why the number lodged in him the way it did, except that it was exactly the number of years he had given to the instrument before the war, and exactly the number of musicians who had sat in the string section of the National Philharmonic on the last night it played, and exactly the number of days, he would later realize, that he had left himself, though of course he could not know that yet, standing in the smell of cordite and the iron reek beneath it, watching a woman he half-recognized try with great patience to gather something off the stones that could not be gathered.

He had stopped being a musician fourteen months earlier, the way one stops being many things in a siege — not by decision but by attrition, by the slow confiscation of every condition that had made the thing possible. There was no electricity to light a concert hall whose roof was open to the sky. There was no audience that could cross the river without being shot. There was, increasingly, no reason, and reasonlessness was the siege's truest weapon, more patient than the artillery, more accurate than the snipers on the hills who picked off the water-carriers and the funeral-goers with the unhurried boredom of men shooting tins off a fence. The guns meant to kill the body. The reasonlessness meant to kill the thing that made the body worth keeping, and it was winning, and Damir had felt it winning in himself, had felt the music in him going quiet and grey, a fire banked so low he had begun to suspect it was already only ash that remembered the shape of flame.