Above The Din Of War, A Cellist Played For Peace

Aug 13, 1993

Robert Fulghum

In this edited excerpt from "Maybe (Maybe Not)," Robert Fulghum writes of a common man who, in an uncommon way, brings heroism into an unheroic conflict.

It is the year 2050. In a large Eastern European city - one that has survived the vicissitudes of more than a thousand years of human activity - in an open square in the city center - there is a rather odd civic monument. A bronze statue.

Not a soldier or politican.

Not a general on a horse or a king on a throne.

Instead, the figure is of a somewhat common man, sitting in a chair.

Playing his cello.

Around the pedestal on which the statue sits, there are bouquets of flowers.

If you count, you will always find 22 flowers in each bunch.

The cellist is a national hero.

If you ask to hear the story of this statue, you will be told of a time of civil war in this city. Demagogues lit bonfires of hatred between citizens who belonged to different religions and ethnic groups. Everyone became an enemy of someone else. None was exempt or safe. . . . Many were maimed. Many were killed. Those who did not die lived like animals in the ruins of the city.

Except one man. A musician. A cellist. He came to a certain street corner every day. Dressed in formal black evening clothes, sitting in a fire-charred chair, he played his cello. Knowing he might be shot or beaten, still he played. Day after day he came. To play the most beautiful music he knew.

Day after day. For 22 days.

His music was stronger than hate. His courage, stronger than fear.

And in time other musicians were captured by his spirit, and they took their places in the street beside him. These acts of courage were contagious. Anyone who could play an instrument or sing found a place at a street intersection somewhere in the city and made music.

In time the fighting stopped.

The music and the city and the people lived on.

A nice fable. A lovely story. Something adults might make up to inspire children. A tale of the kind found in tourist guidebooks explaining and embellishing the myths behind civic statuary. A place to have our picture taken.

Is there any truth in such a parable . . . ? The real world does not work this way. We all know that. Cellists seldom become civic heroes - music doesn't affect wars.

Vedran Smailovic does not agree.

In The New York Times Magazine, July 1992, his photograph appeared.

Middle-aged, longish hair, great bushy mustache. He is dressed in formal evening clothes. Sitting in a cafe chair in the middle of a street. In front of a bakery where mortar fire struck a breadline in late May, killing 22 people. He is playing his cello. As a member of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, there is little he can do about hate and war. . . . Even so, every day for 22 days he has braved sniper and artillery fire to play Albinoni's profoundly moving Adagio in G Minor.

Is this man crazy? Maybe. Is his gesture futile? Yes, in a conventional sense, yes, of course. But what can a cellist do? What madness to go out alone in the streets and address the world with a wooden box and a hair-strung bow. What can a cellist do?

All he knows how to do. Speaking softly with his cello, one note at a time, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, calling out the rats that infest the human spirit.

Vedran Smailovic is a real person.

What he did is true.

Neither the breadline nor the mortar shell nor the music is fiction.

For all the fairy tales, these acts do take place in the world in which we live.

Sometimes history knocks at the most ordinary door to see if anyone is at home. Sometimes someone is.

Most everyone in Sarajevo knows now what a cellist can do - for the place where Vedran played has become an informal shrine, a place of honor. Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Christians alike - they all know his name and face.

They place flowers where he played. Commemorating the hope that must never die - that someday, somehow, the best of humanity shall overcome the worst, not through unexpected miracles but through the expected acts of the many.

Sarajevo is not the only place where Vedran Smailovic is known. An artist in Seattle, Washington, saw his picture and read his story. Her name is Beliz Brother. Real person - real name. What could an artist do?

She organized 22 cellists to play in 22 public places in Seattle for 22 days, and on the final day, all 22 played together in one place in front of a store window displaying burned-out bread pans, 22 loaves of bread, and 22 roses.

People came. Newspaper reporters and television cameras were there. The story and the pictures were fed into the news networks of the world. And passed back to Vedran Smailovic that he might know his music had been heard and passed on. Others have begun to play in many cities. In Washington, D.C., 22 cellists played the day our new president was sworn into office.

Millions of people saw Vedran's story in The New York Times. Millions have seen and heard the continuing story picked up by the media.

Now you, too, know.

Tell it to someone. This is urgent news. Keep it alive in the world.

As for the end of the story, who among us shall insist the rest of the story cannot come true? Who shall say the monument in the park in Sarajevo will never come to pass? The cynic who lives in a dark hole in my most secret mind says one cellist cannot stop a war, and music can ultimately be only a dirge played over the unimaginable.

But somewhere in my soul I know otherwise.

Listen.

Never, ever, regret or apologize for believing that when one man or one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world may stop what it is doing and hear.

There is too much evidence to the contrary.

When we cease believing this, the music will surely stop.

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history. In my imagination, I lay flowers at the statue memorializing Vedran Smailovic - a monument that has not yet been built, but may be.

Meanwhile, a cellist plays in the streets of Sarajevo.