فصل 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Music

Katy searched for Zeljko all day. No-one seemed to know where he was - or if they did they wouldn’t tell her. She went from the hotel to the basement where he used to play. But it was deserted. She went to the park, and from there to the part of town where Natasa lived. Once she heard the sound of gunfire and saw a puff of smoke from a building to her right. On other occasions she thought she felt bullets pass by her as snipers tried to shoot her down, but in her confused state she couldn’t be sure whether she was imagining it. Her head was full of strange and terrible pictures - of the little girls, of bombs and music, the crash of guns in the hills. She kept seeing Zeljko’s face in front of her, his expression changed forever by the terrible things that had happened as his city lived, day after day, in pain.

Around midday she arrived at the market, which was still functioning despite the danger and yesterday’s killing. It was only when she saw the tables with their small tired collections of fruit and vegetables that she realised that she hadn’t eaten. She bought an apple and some carrots, which she ate right there in front of the surprised market trader - though for him nothing was really strange any more. At the side street cafe where she’d once eaten with Carla and Haris she had a beer, which made her head feel even lighter. She asked for some bread or a biscuit, but there was nothing to eat in the cafe. In the end she had a coffee after her beer. She filled it with sugar to give her energy.

After a few minutes she realised that the woman who worked there was watching her. That wasn’t surprising; she was the only customer. Katy smiled and the woman smiled back. Katy finished her coffee. The woman smiled again and nodded her head.

‘It’s good coffee,’ Katy said. She felt she had to say something.

‘Journalist?’ the woman asked.

‘Yes,’ Katy said.

‘Good coffee,’ the woman said. ‘Difficult to find.’

‘Yes,’ Katy said, and then, because it was all she was thinking about, ‘Zeljko? Where is Zeljko? Do you know where Zeljko is?’

‘Zeljko,’ the woman said slowly, ‘muzickih.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Music. Zeljko,’ Katy said.

‘Six.’ The woman held up six fingers and pointed at her watch. Then she told her where she could find him and Katy wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before.

Six o’clock. The afternoon sun was beginning to fade. Katy heard him before she saw him. It was the same sad solo saxophone, high and beautiful, playing a tune that rose up and up until it seemed it could go no higher - and then it started again, the same extraordinary melody, climbing, rising into the evening sky, like a gentle sorrowful sigh.

He was standing on the ruins of the steps of the old concert hall. In front of him there was a huge hole in the street and she could see terrible dark stains, the blood of the people killed and wounded in the concert explosion.

Zeljko was wearing the clothes of a classical musician: black tailcoat, white shirt, white bow tie. His saxophone case was by his side. He was standing straight as he played. For some reason Katy was reminded of church. A small crowd of people was standing in the street, sheltering in doorways.

Zeljko stopped playing and at that moment there was the thump of two explosions somewhere to the south. The people ran, disappearing into the streets by the park. Now only the two of them were left as he put his saxophone into its case. He looked up and noticed her, and for a long moment their eyes met as they looked at each other. Finally she spoke.

‘What are you doing? What are you doing here?’ Though she knew the answer already.

‘I was playing for my friends,’ Zeljko said.

‘I heard you yesterday.’ For a moment she was back in that hotel bedroom. ‘Were you playing for your friends then?’

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘You’re going to play for them every day?’ she asked.

‘Sixteen people died here two days ago. Musicians, friends, ordinary people. They were listening to music. What is wrong with that? Tell me, what is wrong with that?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ Katy said softly.

‘Sixteen people. Sixteen days. Each day a different person. I have fourteen more days.’ He spoke as if what he was saying was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘But Zeljko, it’s dangerous. You’ll get killed. A sniper. A shell from the hills.’ Her words sounded ridiculous in the middle of the ruined street.

‘So what?’ he said.

‘Please don’t say that.’ She had to try and reach him somehow.

‘It is all there is to say. I have to play for my friends. To say goodbye,’ he said.

‘What was it, the tune?’ she asked. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It is my version of a song by the German composer Richard Strauss. He wrote it near the end of his life. One of his “Four Last Songs”. In German it is called “Beim Schlafengehen”, in English something like “On going to sleep”. The words say that the tired spirit should have a happy restful journey at the end of a long life - as the person goes to that perfect endless sleep where it may “live deeply”. My girlfriend - a girl I knew in London,’ he corrected himself quickly, ‘sang it in a competition at the Academy of Music. She won the competition. That was a life ago, a different world. But the melody - it is the right tune for this place, I think.’ He looked around him and his eyes filled with tears.

Katy rushed up the steps and put her arms around him. ‘Zeljko,’ she whispered. ‘Poor, dear Zeljko. Let me help you.’

For a moment he said nothing. Then he raised his head and gently removed Katy’s arms from around him.

‘Come,’ he said, picking up his saxophone case, ‘and I will show you what we have lost.’ He took her hand and led her up the steps and in through the empty doorway at the front of the building - the entrance to the concert hall.

Inside the damaged building they walked down what had once been corridors, and then they were suddenly in a large empty space, big enough for hundreds of people. She could see the sky through the remains of the roof. There were broken chairs, and the floor was covered in rubbish - the mess that war leaves.

‘That is where I used to play when I was at the university.’

He pointed to the stage, open to the sky. ‘I was lucky. I was principal clarinet in the university orchestra for two years.’

Katy tried to imagine the concert hall full of people and musicians. For just a second she could smell the perfume, hear the audience talking excitedly before the conductor walked onto the stage. Applause. He raises his arms. Music.

‘Come,’ Zeljko said. ‘I will show you where we used to practise.’ He led her to a side room. He looked around the room, as if seeing his old colleagues again. Then he lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hands.

‘Zeljko,’ she said quietly, seeing his shoulders shaking. ‘Zeljko,’ she said again, going over to him and putting her arms around him as she had done outside on the steps. This time he didn’t pull away from her. He started to cry, a terrible sound, hard and bitter in the silence all around them. She held him tight, and then later, when he’d stopped, she lifted her face to his and kissed his sad eyes, touched his sweet mouth, ran her fingers through his thick hair. For a moment he didn’t react, but then, when she felt him respond, when she felt his strong hands reach for her body, she didn’t resist.

The evening turned into night, but they stayed there as the bright moon rose into the dark sky and shone down upon them. All around them was the terrible silence of fear, but they ignored it as she comforted him, holding him close to her, in the empty room of a building that had once been full of music. And then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, they were making love, and for a long still moment she forgot the terrible things she’d seen and she felt him forget the past and the future too, and their cries of joy were cries of peace.

In the morning as it got light she said, ‘I love you, Zeljko.’

‘No, you do not,’ he said gently.

‘Yes, I do. I love what you are, what you’re doing. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it is not beautiful. It is necessary. It is not me that you love, it is the language I speak, the language that we all speak. It is the music which speaks to you, the music which says that death is not here, that the people - my friends, those people at the concert, the mothers and the children - that they are here, still here. Still here with us now.’

Suddenly, as she buttoned her shirt, she felt like a stranger, as if they’d just met. He turned to her and took her face in his strong hands, his beautiful fingers.

‘I am sorry, Katy. I can tell you these things and you can understand them, because you are kind and intelligent and beautiful and lovely. But you cannot feel the experience as I do. Your ghosts do not live here, but mine do.’ He was looking past her now, his dark eyes searching far away for a place that she couldn’t see. He took his hands from her face. It was over.

‘I’m going to write about you, you know,’ she told him.

‘If that is what you want,’ he replied.

‘Yes, it is.’ And when she got back to the hotel, and when she’d told an anxious Colin that she was safe and that she was sorry he’d been worried about her, she went straight up to her room, a sad smile on her face, and her next article flowed out of her like love. I haven’t had much success in love so far. A few boyfriends, nothing serious. And then recently I had a partner and I thought he was ‘Mr Right’, but he wasn’t. He didn’t think he was, anyway. Then I came to Sarajevo.

You probably think that I shouldn’t be telling you this in a newspaper report from a war zone. Love has a hard time when there’s so much death around. But I’m going to tell you about Zeljko Kojic and what he is and does. So I have to tell you about me because I love him.

I love Zeljko Kojic because of his beautiful music. I love him because he plays the saxophone like a poet. I love him because he is fantastically brave. But most of all I love him because here, in this city of despair, he is a symbol of hope and because here, where children die every day, he teaches people how to live.

Two days ago Zeljko organised one of the concerts I have written about before. People went to the steps of the old concert hall to hear him and his friends play for them. They were looking forward to an evening of happiness in the middle of horror. Then a shell from one of the big guns landed and sixteen people were killed. They were ordinary people like you and me, shopkeepers and housewives, teachers and students, taxi drivers and nurses, and musicians. They were Bosniaks and Croats and Serbs (yes, because there are many Serbs here who love this city and hate what’s being done in their name). They were the good people, who look beyond their race and background and see their brothers and sisters, not ‘others’. But they died because up there, in the hills beyond the city, there are people who aren’t like them at all and who don’t care who they kill in their insane desire for some kind of final solution.

Zeljko Kojic didn’t die that evening, but something in his soul died. Except music, the only thing he has left. And so every day, at six o’clock, he goes to the place where the shell landed. He goes at six o’clock because that’s exactly the time those sixteen people died. He will stand there in the sunshine or the rain and play a piece of music by Richard Strauss, ‘On going to sleep’. In his hands it’s a melody full of regret and sadness, and if I was a better writer I could describe it to you. The best thing I can say is that when you hear it you know what it is to lose everything and, at the same time, you know how wonderful it is to be alive.

And so for sixteen days from the terrible day those sixteen people died, Zeljko will stand and play his saxophone. Snipers will shoot at him and shells will land in the street near him. But I know, in the fourteen days remaining, that he will live and that his music will float over this tragic city. I don’t know how I know this, but I believe it to be true. What he’s doing is the best thing I have experienced here, perhaps anywhere. His saxophone cries for the people in this city, for the dead and the living. It cries to the monsters in the hills, telling them to stop. It cries out to all of us.

Now I ask myself how beauty and ugliness can live together in this terrible place and I wonder which will win. And I ask you, who read this article, how long it will take for you to hear Zeljko’s music. Because when you do you will, like me, know that something, anything has to be done, now, to stop the killing and let life start again.