The Cellist of Sarajevo

Arrow

Arrow is a 28 year-old, highly intelligent and gifted assassin. As the chapter opens, she has some of the “men on the hills” in her rifle sites—three snipers who are laughing and talking, and, as Arrow thinks, have no idea that they have the best assassin in the Sarajevo army preparing to shoot one or all of them. Arrow is so skilled with a rifle she can even exceed her rifle’s distance range of eight hundred meters. But, of course, Arrow can “make a bullet do things others can’t” (3).

Arrow wasn’t always an assassin, nor was her name always Arrow. Arrow is a name she has carefully chosen to enable her to become something new—a killer. Once she led a more normal life as a university student and member of the sharpshooting team there. Her shooting skills were the reason she was eventually recruited.

Arrow becomes an assassin because of a noble conviction she holds that the men on the hills have taken something valuable, something sacred from her people. What it is Arrow thinks the snipers have taken is reflected in a moment she remembers from ten years ago, when she was driving to see some friends and a song came on the radio that, combined with the light filtering through lacey leaves, suddenly reminded her of her grandmother and she began to cry, “Not for her grandmother who was then still very much alive, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end . . .” (5) Now she realizes she was not being foolish.