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the hills, and they’re driven with a recklessness that makes them as dangerous as the city’s attackers. The traffic lights don’t work, the roads are full of holes and debris, and yet here’s this mirror, without a scratch on it, working as well as it ever did.
    He turns the corner, heading east before turning to the south again. He passes a building that has a soup kitchen in the basement and thinks that if they’re open when he comes back he might see if he can get a meal. The supply of food in his kitchen is nearly exhausted, and if he can go without eating this evening it will mean more for the rest of the family.
    A little farther south he passes the Music Academy. The building is over a hundred years old, and has been training young musicians for forty. A harp sits atop a cupola facing the street corner. Between the windows of the third and the fourth floor, a rocket-propelled grenade has punched a hole through the wall. Inside, another grenade has blown through the wall in the main concert room, but still Kenan hears the sound of pianos coming from within. Several different pieces are being played in various parts of the building, and the music blends together, sometimes becoming unintelligible, a muddy noise of strings struck by hammers, but every so often one of the songs pauses, creating a space for another to emerge, and a few solitary notes of a melody slip out into the street.
    After one quick block Kenan hits a main street. Before the war, he used to wait here for the tram that would take him three stops up the road to work. He’s always liked the tram. To him, and others as well, the tram was one of the most tangible signs of civilization.
    When the fighting began, Kenan was at work. Someone rushed into the room and announced that war had broken out. A few people started to panic, rushing to telephones, while others sat, stunned, not wanting to believe. Goran went to the window and looked out at the street. He came back smiling.
    “There’s no war. The trams are still running,” he said, and sat back down at his desk. Kenan had also returned to work, along with several other colleagues. They didn’t accept that the men on the hills could shoot at the trams, that their bullets would kill those inside. After all he’s seen since then, the one sight he will never forget is that of a burning tram that had been hit first by a mortar and then by sniper fire, heaving thick inky smoke into the air. The trams haven’t run since that day. They are scattered throughout the city, empty husks, some serving as cover against snipers, others simply left to rust. In Kenan’s mind, whatever else happens, the war will not be over until the trams run again.
    If he were to head west, two blocks to his right, he’d end up at the marketplace. Without any food from therelief centre, he’s often forced to shop there at astronomically inflated prices. When the war began, one German mark, about half an American dollar, was worth ten Yugoslav dinar. Now, a mark costs a million dinar. Anyone who didn’t convert their savings at the beginning of the war almost immediately became bankrupt. Not that it matters much. With prices nearly doubling each month, not many people had enough saved to last long anyway. Last month Kenan sold his family’s washing machine on the black market for a hundred and ten marks. Without electricity it was useless to him. The last time he was at the market, a kilo of apples cost fifty marks, a kilo of potatoes twenty marks. Onions were twelve marks, beans eighteen, and for thirty marks you could get three packs of cigarettes. Sugar was sixty marks, coffee a hundred. Everything was easily twenty times more than it had cost before the war. Everything, that is, except incomes. Kenan doubts if he’s made more than a thousand marks since the beginning of the war. He still has a few household items left to sell, but not many.
    And yet some people seem untouched by financial pressures. They drive around