Preface
In 1945 an Italian musicologist found bars of a sonata’s bass line in the remnants of a firebombed library in Dresden, which he believed were those of 17th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni. He reconstructed the larger work, known as Albinoni’s Adagio, and while experts say it is not like Albinoni’s work, it does have a haunting beauty.
The cellist likes the contradictions of the piece but he has not been playing it very much. He does play his cello every day, but the Adagio is becoming harder each time. Life in Sarajevo is very hard, and it is even harder to remember the time when life had promise.
He considers going to wait in line for bread, but decides against it.
*
He was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, and when the mortars destroyed the Opera Hall it felt like he too was destroyed. Now he does not care if anyone ever hears him; his life is dismantled. The city is being destroyed, with the men on the hills firing mortars day after day and facing only one tank and small handheld weapons in defense.
After the mortar falls on his friends and neighbors while they are waiting for bread and twenty-two of them are killed, he puts on his tuxedo, goes outside, and plans to play the Adagio for twenty-two straight days. He is not sure he will survive, but this is what is going to happen.
Part I
Arrow is a sniper who can make a bullet do things it will not do for others. She is watching three soldiers right now on a hill above Sarajevo. She is so talented that she does not even need the customary formulas other snipers do; she just sends the bullet where it needs to go.
She is in an office tower that was shelled and is now crumbling. She tells herself she is different from other snipers because she only shoots soldiers while they shoot unarmed men, women, and children. They try to kill the city of her youth; Arrow remembers when she was eighteen and had a day where she felt such happiness to be alive, and now those soldiers are chipping away at such a life.
The men in the hills are at the Vraca fortress, above the occupied neighborhood of Grbavica. In WWII the Nazis tormented and killed resisters there, but those men did not use their names because they tried to separate themselves from what they had to do (at least in Arrow’s opinion). Arrow hates the men because they hated her first and made her hate them back, and she wants to separate the part in her that wants to, and enjoys, fighting back from the part that never wanted to fight at all.
She does not want today’s targets to feel safe. It will be dangerous, but worth it. She watches them, and one or another will avoid dying by some random, arbitrary choice they make. The line between life and death is slim. As she watches, no decision comes to her so she simply chooses one.
However, it becomes clear something is wrong—they know where she is. Shots fly at her and a mortar comes through the roof. She is scrambling to get away and has to grab on to a stairwell as the sixth floor of the building crushes the fifth. She is able to get out only barely, and has only a small cut to show for it, though she wonders why this does not make her more relieved.
Kenan is in his kitchen. He is almost forty but he looks much older than that; his wife has also aged rapidly. Their children are still children, but who knows for how long, he wonders. They do not have running water and every four days Kenan has to trek with his containers to the brewery at Stari Grad, one of the only places to get clean water in the city.
Kenan washes his face and shaves by candlelight, but to his surprise the electricity flickers on. It rarely lasts, so he rushes to alert his wife so his children can enjoy it. However, it suddenly pops off.
Kenan inspects the six containers and soon will get two for his neighbor, Mrs. Ristovski. He and his wife exchange goodbyes, softly joking with each other. Kenan doesn't want to go, and his mind thinks of all the normal things he wishes he was doing. He feels himself getting weaker, like everyone else in the city, but does not want the men to know how afraid he is. He also worries about what would happen to his family if he were gone.
He goes to Mrs. Ristovski’s apartment. She is an unpleasant woman but he always tolerated her. She was dismissive of his claims in the early days of the war that this would not last long. As it worsened, Kenan adhered to a loose promise he’d made that people would stick together, and now here he is, getting her water in two canisters without handles. He wishes he could give up on her, as it might teach her a lesson about not being rude. The thought is pleasing but not possible.
It seems like the city he grew up in never existed; everything is now the men on the hills and the guns and the bombs. Dragan still has amorphous memories, though, memories in which people were happy and life was good.
Now one cannot walk from one side of the city to the other, the trains do not run, and going outside means accepting the possibility you could die. This reality is superseding his memories.
Today he has been outside for an hour. He is trying to go to the city’s bakery where he works. He is lucky to have a job and the concomitant military exception. Almost everyone is unemployed and he gets to take bread home as payment. He lives with his younger sister and her family. He was able to get his wife, Raza, and their young son out of the city before the war started and now they are in Italy. He has not heard from them.
He is mostly outside to be outside today, and is taking his time. He walks on the main road but leaves it eventually because it cuts too close to enemy territory. There are defenders there, but they cannot stop snipers. He arrives at one of the most dangerous intersections in the city. He notes how everything around him is in ruins and “is a peculiar shade of gray” (29).
About twenty people are waiting. They will hesitate, then make a mad dash. Others will wait behind the concrete wall for a sign that it is okay to cross. Dragan has seen three people killed by snipers since the war started. It happens unbelievably fast and after a few moments the body is taken away and things go back to normal. Dragan is afraid of dying but more afraid of the time between being shot and dying.
Dragan sees a man he recognizes, Amil, who used to work at the kiosk outside Dragan’s building. Amil rushes across and makes it. Dragan does not want to talk and hides his face. He feels guilty about it, but what is there to say besides what has been lost? He does not talk to his remaining friends, avoids visitors, and keeps to himself at the bakery.
A couple decides to cross. As they do, a shot rings out. They hesitate but keep going. Another shot sounds, but the sniper misses.
Dragan thinks there is a “strange sense of relief in knowing where the danger is. It’s much easier to deal with than an unfocused sense of doom, of being uncertain about where the men on the hills are shooting” (33).
Analysis
The first thing to note about the novel is that it is based on a true story—there was actually a cellist, Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinoni’s Adagio during the siege of Sarajevo for twenty-two days to honor the dead. Galloway briefly fictionalizes the cellist’s thoughts and motivations in the first part of the novel, but then moves away from the cellist’s interior state to his fully fictional characters of Arrow, Kenan, and Dragan. Though those characters are the product of Galloway’s imagination, their struggles offer readers insights into the trauma of the war. Galloway explained in an interview with Andrew Lawless why he chose three characters: “I chose three, because I did an extraordinarily nerdy thing as a writer: because Albinoni’s adagio is sort of a fraudulent piece of music, an adagio built off a sonata, I wanted to turn it back into a sonata, so I picked the structure of a trio sonato that has three distinct voices that work separately but taken in unison they make up a bigger whole. So I picked three for that reason, to mirror that structure. And almost immediately after looking into it, it seemed to me that the three main concerns in Sarajevo were food, water, and not getting killed so that suggested the characters to me almost immediately.”
Arrow represents “not getting killed” in that she is a sniper working for the city’s defenders, killing and trying to avoid being killed herself. Galloway’s narration provides insight into his characters’ minds, and we learn that Arrow is a rather reluctant sniper but she has reconciled this to herself by only killing soldiers and not having anyone else instruct her on how to do her job. She is deeply conflicted, though; she is does not have a problem firing her rifle, but she is constantly assessing why she does it. She wants to make sure she “[separates] the part of her that will fight back . . . from the part that never wanted to fight in the first place” (6). One of the ways she does this, of course, is by taking the name “Arrow”; she reserves her real name for herself only, hoping to preserve that self for when the war ends. At the end of this first section of Arrow’s, however, Galloway gives us space to doubt how well Arrow is doing that for herself: while she escaped death by shelling, she “wonders what it means that the insignificance of her injury does not bring her any particular sense of relief” (12).
Kenan represents “water,” as his journey in the novel is to the brewery and back in order to provide the precious resource for his family and his cantankerous neighbor. He is an everyman, worried about his wife and his children and trying to do his best to provide for them in an increasingly dangerous city. He attempts to keep his good humor by joking with his wife, and tries to create something of a sense of normalcy for his children, but he knows “he’s getting progressively weaker, like almost everyone else in the city” (18).
Dragan represents “food” as he works at a bakery and spends most of his narrative trying to get there so he can bring bread back home. Like the other characters, he is deeply contemplative and his time outside the walls of his home (he lives with his sister and brother-in-law) is spent trying to come to terms with what has happened, and is happening, to his city. Though the siege has not been going on forever, this irruption has decimated his conventional experience of time and memory. He muses that “the city that he grew up in and was proud of and happy with, likely never existed” (23) and “More and more it seems like there has never been anything here but the men on the hills with guns and bombs” (23). For Dragan, the past is false and fading, and there is no future—just an incomprehensible present. Unsurprisingly, Dragan has “stopped talking to his friends, visits no one, avoids those who come to visit him. At work he says as little as possible. He can perhaps learn to bear the destruction of buildings, but the destruction of the living is too much for him” (32). Thus, at the beginning of the novel Dragan is coping by isolating himself from the rest of the city, but subsequent chapters will challenge that form of existence.
Galloway uses these three characters to comment upon how the siege changed the city and its inhabitants, the ways in which people managed to cope and survive, how they viewed themselves in relation to their fellow citizens, the palliative nature of music, and more.
