13.

SERGEANT LEMARCHAND LEFT Irena at the entrance to her building. She looked up to see Aleksandra Julianovic sitting on the outdoor staircase between the first and second floors, smoking one of her last Canadian cigarettes. Irena clumped up the stairs to sit beside her.

“You shouldn’t be up here,” Irena said.

“Then it is foolish of you to join me,” Aleksandra pointed out.

“I’m here to save your life,” Irena answered, smiling.

“Then take away my cigarettes,” said Aleksandra, rolling out a Players for Irena. “But take this upstairs so your parents will only see you smoking, not endangering your life out here in the fresh air.”

Irena thought that the hand Aleksandra had thrust into the pocket of her pink housecoat was fumbling for matches. But it proved to be a piece of notepaper. “I’ve been trying to work something out,” Aleksandra said, casting her eyes over a sequence of arrows and numbers. “How many people would you guess are sitting out here like this right now in Sarajevo? Such fools as we.”

“Not many,” said Irena. “Aside from you and me, anyone else would be accidental.”

“Can we say fifty people?”

Irena nodded her assent.

“A few scurrying across the street for water, a few caught dozing in alleys,” said Aleksandra. She had plainly been preparing her case.

“There are a few people like me, just sneaking out for no larger purpose than to inhale fresh air and smoke a cigarette in the sunlight,” she continued. “After a while, of course, it’s the loss of such small luxuries that exasperates. It’s like an irritation in your little toe that throbs. Soon you feel nothing else. You breathe, you swallow, you eat onions. You can even have sex. But all you feel is the pain in your little piggy. So here in this city we are still alive, against all odds. Still eating and breathing, if not a lot. But we are shut up in our gloomy rooms, with closet doors nailed over the windows. We are more desperate to get out than grateful to be alive.” Aleksandra smiled through tinged teeth—everyone had taken to brushing with cold, unfinished tea, or stale orange soda and grains of salt—and spirals of smoke.

“So let’s guess that fifty people are showing their faces and arses right now,” she said. “How many snipers would you say are dug in across the way?”

“Too many.”

“Let’s say ten,” said Aleksandra. “Let’s say twenty, it doesn’t matter. What are the odds that they will hit someone?”

“Who knows? Three, five, six people every day,” said Irena. “When we listen to the radio, that’s the number we hear. Until the next mortar, of course. Then add fifty.”

“Let’s say four,” said Aleksandra. “It may be three one day, seven the next. But at the end of a week, sniper deaths usually add up in the high twenties. I love what you can discover in statistics,” she said. “Even these. Statistics is the science of choosing the right numbers to say anything you want.”

“You are surely leaving out a few factors,” said Irena. “Some snipers must be better shots than others. Some people must be harder to bring down than others. Some of us are quite stealthy—we may be kidding ourselves, of course. And other people can’t even hobble. There are old and injured people who fall down. Rain, wind, politics—it all must make a difference.”

“The supreme, blinding beauty of statistics,” Aleksandra said with a triumphal smile. “Any fifty people, and you still have more or less the same number of hobblers and speeders. Any ten snipers, and you still have better ones and worse ones. All those variables—and it still averages out that four-point-something people get shot here every day. In the universe, math prevails,” she announced. “Even here.”

“Nothing else does,” said Irena with a grim smile.

“So, I have been figuring,” Aleksandra continued. “Let’s say that instead of just fifty foolish, careless, or stupid people sitting outside, that number becomes five hundred. Let’s say that two weeks or two months from now people get tired of always being cooped up and cringing.”

“We are tired already,” Irena said.

“So let’s say a thousand people just begin to spread out,” said Aleksandra, painting the scene with the cigarette in her right hand. “No plan or reason. We sit on staircases, we sit on tree stumps, we stroll down Marshal Tito Boulevard. No particular purpose except to stretch our legs, fill our lungs, clear our minds. Suddenly you have snipers firing at a thousand people. The bastards won’t know where to look! After the first shot, everybody scurries anyway. We are like cockroaches in the light. It will be like trying to track ants in a pile. So let’s even say the figures go up slightly, because there are more of us to shoot before we scurry. Let’s say it’s even ten a day.”

Aleksandra got to her feet, to give added weight to her conclusion. “My point, dear,” she said with intensity, “is that our statistical chances of being shot go down just because we are out here. Isn’t it better that ten out of a thousand people are hit in a day than four out of fifty? Wouldn’t you rather take your chances with a thousand other people crawling the streets than with fifty? The more of us who have the nerve to stay out here, the fewer of us are likely to be shot.”

Irena had been holding the cigarette Aleksandra had given her in the palm of her hand. Now she held it upright, like a teacher with a piece of chalk at the blackboard. “That sounds like the logic of a smoker,” she said.

“Upstairs with you then,” said Aleksandra. The two cackled like schoolgirls as Irena turned to go.