DAY FIVE
Her perch is upstage right, behind the trombones. From there, Sonja
reigns over the orchestra, peering over the heads of the oboes and
violas, her small, dark eyes riveted resolutely on the
conductor.
Sonja has been dividing her time between kitchen kettles and kettle drums for at least 40 years. Thin, almost gaunt, her frame seems frail beside the huge drums, until she starts swinging those mallets. The rhinestones on her sleeves glitter as her arms fly in a pattern - crisscrossing, then flailing like the wings of a bird. In her blend of frailty and strength, I see the soul of the Sarajevo Philharmonic. These 35 survivors include retirees who have answered the call back into service and young students who otherwise would not have such an opportunity. Their work is a gift from the heart; the players have not been paid for four years.
I'm watching Sonja from a box above the stage in the National Theater. It's my favorite vantage point, because at the same time I can see the orchestra, the audience, and the animated face of my husband, the conductor.
The hall is a small jewel box of Hapsburg elegance - the lower half slate blue trimmed with gold, evolving into dusty rose and painted floral designs as the eye moves upward. For some reason no one seems to know, this building was spared years of Serb shelling.
Still, the war has taken its toll: It took a management decision to heat the building tonight, because oil here is so precious. So the string players, for once, are not fiddling in overcoats. In fact, the minister of energy is in the audience. That means the building will have electricity - and the musicians will have light - throughout the concert.
The performance has started 20 minutes late; it took awhile to get past the soldiers in camouflage uniforms, waving metal detector wands across each elegantly dressed guest. Every nook and cranny of the building has already been searched for bombs by a special team with long-handled mirrors. Even the conductor's briefcase has been examined. But with the first pounding chords of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, those gathered in this hall have left behind the deprivation of war and entered a new sphere of civility and hope.
I look out at the crowd, across journalists and jurists, soldiers and surgeons. My eyes settle on the Mayor of Sarajevo and his wife, Tarik and Essena, with whom we spent two hours earlier in the day.
Sitting in their living room, we discussed the political situation, the challenge of rebuilding a civil society, and the significance of the concert Charles would conduct a few hours later. Then they asked if we would like to hear their daughter, Mihra, play.
It was a simple, quiet piano piece by Bach. As I listened to the predictable musical developments, my eyes wandered to a shattered glass balcony door on one side of the piano. and holes in the wall and sofa on the other. The family had been in the kitchen when bullets riddled this room. Mirha hadn't been practicing just then.
This was not their original home. That one, in a suburb I had visited earlier this morning, had been totally destroyed. There, one apartment building after another stands with gaping holes and burned-out rooms; barricades of buses and wrecked cars are piled high to protect against snipers. Next to one mortar-marked building loom three tall metal poles: today's Golgotha. I walked along one stretch of street where over 500 pedestrians were picked off by marksmen in the surrounding hills.
My driver this morning was from the neighborhood. I asked him about the trenches stretched out before me. For soldiers? "No," he had tried to explain, in broken English. "Citizens." I looked at him puzzled.
As I talked to Essena in her living room, I understood. She described running through those same trenches, braving the snipers to salvage the few small sentimental items she could. With a smile, she held out a napkin embroidered by her mother retrieved from the wreckage.
Now, in the concert hall, I watch the hope on Essena's face. Then a sweet passage from the piano concerto pulls at me from the stage. I look around the audience; there are few dry eyes.
Heaven and earth are meeting in this hall. And Sonja the drummer, with the wisdom of a grandmother, is determined to keep us all moving forward, boldly, into 1996.
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 Swanee Hunt in Sarajevo with her husband, |