The Cellist of Sarajevo

The phone rings shortly after 5 am. With all the commotion about the Dubai job, I keep my mobile on in case they call, though I expect them to do the math and calculate the time difference. Still, I pick up half asleep, and clear the throat before I can squeeze a sound from it: “Hallo?”
On the other side a male voice talks fast in language I can’t recognize.
“Who is calling,” I ask. More gibberish.
“Can you speak English?”
Now a voice shouts in the phone, asking for Dan, or some such.
“Do you know what time is it here?” I am getting seriously frustrated.
More gibberish from which I discern only “…suck my d***” I can’t take it any longer, so I launch into tirade loaded with profanities and punch the phone off button. Then I silence the ringer, but it’s too late. I’m fully awake and too pissed to go back to sleep. And so a hellish Thursday starts.

At work I screw up the sound on a video, then spend almost an hour patching it up. The anchor’s voice sounds like coming from a tin can, but it’s audible enough. As I put out one fire, another starts—a freelance client calls to complain about DVDs I delivered yesterday. They are not playing on their Pee-Cees. Damn! Luckily, I have the video file they need with me and am about to send them, but it’s too big to go through the network. I hop in the car and drive another DVD to them, then rush back to work. As I’m about to leave, they call again. The file works on some of their computers, and doesn’t work on the others. No one thinks of checking their software, they want me to fix the video. So, after work I drive back to their office and burn another batch of DVDs. This time it works.

When Maggie suggests to go for a dinner to a Chinese eatery near by, I readily agree, though I feel guilty—usually we eat at home (cheaper) after my evening run. To make it up and to punish myself for being so easy, I go for a run when we come home, but can’t go for a long one. I’m too stuffed, too tired and too sleepy. The run of 5.3 km will have to do. When I come back, there are cars parked in the alley beside our new fence. The neighbor across the alley is either smuggling cars or doing something else illegal. Every week there’s a different car on his driveway and different shady people stopping by, parking right by our backyard and checking the car. He must have sold at least 4 cars in the last 6 weeks.

Yesterday I finished “Lisey’s Story” written by Stephen King. I admit, I like his writing, his style. “Lisey’s Story” is a nice story about love and letting go, but uncharacteristically mild for Stephen King. On my personal rating list I’ve given it 3.5 stars out of 5. Today, I dove into “The Cellist of Sarajevo”, written by Steven Galloway. It’s about Sarajevo during the war, during the siege. A Serbian mortar (although, the book never calls them Serbs, it calls them “the people from the hills”) kills 22 people in the line for bread. A cellist vows to play Albinoni’s Adagio at the same time each day for 22 days—one for each person killed. I found Adagio on my iPod and played it when I started reading the book. It set me in that melancholy mood I remember so well from my days in Bosnia during the war.

Price of bread is up 10% from the last month. Soon we’ll feel the pinch of food crisis here too. Gas is $1.27 a liter today.