The Cellist of Sarajevo

Steven Galloway

A dead body won't bother anyone. It will be a curiosity, but unless some viewer knew the hatless man it will mean nothing. There's nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive. No one will know if the man had unusually large feet, which his friends used to tease him about when he was a child. No one will know about the scar on his back he got from falling out of a tree, or that his favorite food was chocolate cake. They will not know that when he was eighteen he went on a trip with his friends from school, hitchhiked all the way to Spain, where he slept with a blond girl whose last name he never even knew, and that he would think about this often over the next thirty years, always at the strangest times, while peeling an orange or sharpening the blade of a knife or walking up a hill in the rain.