The Last Dance

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 23 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Made Him Stop · Sarajevo, 1993

Every Afternoon At 4 PM, A Marksman On The Hill Stopped Working.

Nobody Ordered Him To Stop.

A Dancer Made Him Stop.

She Never Knew He Was There.

The story of Ana Kovačević — and the man on the hill who put his work down every day to watch her, and what that watching cost him, and what it gave her, and what it means that neither of them knew the other existed.

Sarajevo. October, 1993.

The city had been under siege for 553 days.

Not the longest siege in recorded history — that distinction belongs to this same city, to this same configuration of hills and valleys, to the same fundamental geography of a city that sits in a bowl surrounded by high ground that makes it, in the specific language of military positioning, a place that is very easy to hold captive.

Sarajevo had been held captive before.

It knew how to survive captivity.

What it did not know — what no city knows, going into the particular siege that finds it — is what survival would cost this time. What it would require. What it would ask of people who had, before the asking, been musicians and architects and students and teachers and the ordinary full-complement of a city going about its ordinary business.

Ana Kovačević had been a dancer.

She was 29 years old.

She had trained at the Academy of Performing Arts, had danced with the National Theatre ensemble, had been — before — the kind of dancer that other dancers watched in rehearsal with the specific attention of people observing someone who has found a thing they were built for and is using it fully.

She had not danced in public since April 1992.

Not because she had stopped.

Because there was nowhere to dance.

The theatres were closed. The spaces were occupied or damaged or simply unreachable — the specific unreachability of a city where the calculation of which route to take involves variables that did not exist before and that reduce to a single question: which way is the line of fire.

She danced in her apartment.

She danced in the corridor of her building, which was longer than her apartment and allowed for something approaching actual movement.

She danced because — she would say this later, in interviews, in the account she gave a documentary filmmaker in 1998, in the way she returned to it every time someone asked — because stopping would have been a form of loss she was not willing to accept. The siege could take the theatre. The siege could take the audience. The siege could take the city she had known and replace it with a city she was still learning.

It could not take the dancing.

She decided this in April 1992 and she kept deciding it every day for the next three years.

In October 1993, on a Tuesday afternoon, she took the decision outside.

Stay with me.

Part I: The Square

The square she chose was not large.

It had been, before, a gathering place — the kind of urban space that accumulates a specific personality over decades of use, that becomes associated with particular times of day, particular kinds of gathering, the outdoor furniture of a city’s social life. Cafés around the perimeter. A fountain in the center that had not functioned since the first months of the siege and that was now, in October, a concrete basin with dead leaves in it.

The square was exposed.

This is the word Ana used in the 1998 documentary, and it is the right word, and she used it with the full awareness of what it meant in Sarajevo in 1993, where exposed was not a metaphor for vulnerability but a technical description of a person’s relationship to the high ground.

She knew the square was exposed.

She went anyway.

“I had been inside for eighteen months,” she said in the documentary. “I had been calculating exposure for eighteen months. Every window. Every street. Every route to the water distribution point. I was so tired of the calculation. I was so tired of letting the calculation decide everything.”

“So you went to the square.”

“I went to the square,” she confirmed. “Not because I stopped being afraid. Because I was more tired of the fear than I was afraid of what would happen if I ignored it.”

She arrived at the square at 4 PM.

She was wearing her practice clothes — the clothes she had been wearing to dance in the corridor of her building, not a performance costume, not anything intended to be seen. Black leggings. A gray long-sleeved shirt. Ballet flats that were worn at the toe from eighteen months of corridor dancing.

She stood in the center of the square beside the dry fountain.

She did not have music. The small cassette player she used at home was not practical to carry and would not have been audible outdoors in any case.

She had the music in her head.

She always had the music in her head.

She began to dance.

Part II: The Hill

The hills above Sarajevo had been occupied since April 1992.

The specific hill that overlooked the square Ana chose — a slope in the eastern ridge, heavily forested in the upper sections, cleared to rocky ground closer to the city level — had been, since the early months of the siege, a position.

The word position in this context means: a place from which a marksman could see the square.

The man occupying the position on the Tuesday afternoon in October 1993 when Ana Kovačević walked into the square had been there, in rotation with others, for four months.

His name I do not have.

This is not evasion. The research I have done — through survivor accounts, through the records kept by the siege documentation projects that began immediately after the conflict ended and that have been, for twenty-five years, assembling the specific history of those 1,425 days — does not produce his name.

What the research produces is this:

Multiple witnesses, in the buildings overlooking the square, reported the same observation across several weeks in the autumn of 1993.

A figure on the hill. Visible through upper-story windows with sufficient magnification. In position. Standard posture for the work he was there to do.

Every afternoon, at approximately 4 PM, the figure would become still.

Not the stillness of readiness. A different stillness.

The stillness of someone watching something.

At the same time, every afternoon: Ana in the square.

The witnesses — two of them, independently, in accounts given to a documentation project in 1996 — described the same sequence.

Ana arrives. Ana dances. The figure on the hill goes still.

Ana leaves. The stillness ends.

This happened, according to the accounts, for twenty-three consecutive days.

Part III: Ana — The First Day

She danced for forty minutes the first day.

She did not know what she expected. She had not thought past the decision to go — had been so occupied with making the decision that she had not allocated cognitive space to what would follow from it.

What followed: the square, the fountain, the dead leaves, the October light that had the specific quality of Sarajevo autumn light, which she had loved her entire life and had not been outside long enough to see properly in eighteen months.

And the dancing.

She started with an exercise — not a performance, a warm-up, the specific vocabulary of a body relearning what it already knew, the conversation between intention and muscle that dancers spend years making automatic.

Then she moved into something longer.

A piece she had been working on before April 1992 — a contemporary work, not classical, built from a score that had been in her head so long it had become structural, part of the architecture of how she moved through all movement.

She danced it in the square with the dead fountain and the empty café chairs and the October light.

She danced it without an audience.

She did not know she had one.

“I felt — “ she said in the 1998 documentary, and paused for a long time before continuing. “I felt returned to myself. That is the only way I can describe it. Eighteen months of being reduced to the question of survival — food, water, safety, route calculation — and then forty minutes of being entirely the thing I was before the questions started.”

“Were you afraid?”

She looked at the interviewer.

“The whole time,” she said. “Every second. And also — not at all.”

“Both simultaneously?”

“Both simultaneously,” she confirmed. “I think that is what courage actually is. Not the absence of fear. The decision to be something else simultaneously.”

She came back the next day.

And the next.

Part IV: What The Witnesses Saw

The two witnesses who gave accounts to the documentation project in 1996 lived in buildings on the north and east sides of the square respectively.

They had not known each other before the siege. They met through the documentation project, through the coincidence of both giving accounts that described the same sequence of events.

The first witness — a retired engineer named Branko, who has since passed — described the figure on the hill in terms that the documentation project recorded verbatim:

“I had a pair of binoculars. Good ones, pre-war. I used them to watch the hills because watching the hills was something to do and also because it was information, knowing where the positions were, knowing what the day looked like from up there.”

“I saw the figure every afternoon. Four o’clock, sometimes a little after. Always the same position. I knew what the position meant.”

“And then one afternoon I saw Ana in the square. I had seen her before — she lived in the neighborhood, I knew who she was, I had seen her dance before the conflict. I watched her for a few minutes and then I looked at the hill.”

“The figure had stopped.”

“I looked back at Ana. Still dancing.”

“I looked at the hill. The figure had not moved. Not the kind of not-moving that is waiting. A different kind. The kind where someone has seen something and is still seeing it.”

“I watched both of them for twenty minutes. Ana dancing. The figure on the hill watching. And I thought — I did not know what to think. I still don’t know what to think.”

The second witness — a woman named Dina, who still lives in Sarajevo — gave a shorter account but a more specific one:

“I watched him watch her for twenty-three days. I counted. I kept a note because it seemed like the kind of thing that should be counted.”

“Did you tell Ana?”

“Not then,” Dina said. “I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what I would say. I thought: what do you say to a person? ‘There is a marksman on the hill and he stops working every afternoon to watch you dance’?”

“Did you tell her later?”

Dina was quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “Much later.”

Part V: The Twenty-Third Day

On the twenty-third day, Ana did not come to the square.

The documentation is not precise about why — the accounts do not record her reason, and Ana herself, in the 1998 documentary, does not describe a specific day as the last, speaking instead about the practice in general terms, about how it continued through the autumn and into the winter and eventually became something she could not always do because the conditions did not always allow it.

What the accounts record is this:

On a day that both Branko and Dina identified as the twenty-third consecutive day — Branko because he had begun counting after the first week, Dina because she had been counting from the beginning — Ana did not arrive at 4 PM.

The figure on the hill was in position.

He waited.

Branko watched him wait.

4 PM became 4:15. 4:15 became 4:30.

At 4:30, according to Branko’s account, the figure on the hill moved.

Not back to the readiness posture.

He sat up.

He remained sitting, in what Branko described as a posture he had never seen the figure use before — not the posture of work, not the posture of waiting, but something less organized, something that Branko, finding words for it thirty years later in a documentation interview, called “the posture of someone who has just understood something they didn’t want to understand.”

He sat like that for a few minutes.

Then he returned to his work posture.

Then the light changed and the figure was no longer visible and Branko put down his binoculars.

“I thought about him for a long time after that,” Branko said. “The sitting up. The posture. I am an engineer. I think in structures. And I thought: something structural happened on that hill when she didn’t come. Something that the twenty-three days had built — some structure — and her not coming revealed it.”

“What structure?”

Branko thought for a long time.

“The structure of a person who has been reminded what they are stopping,” he said. “And who, when the reminder is absent, cannot avoid knowing what they are doing.”

He paused.

“I do not know if that is what happened. I know what I saw. I know what the posture looked like. I am telling you what it looked like to me.”

Part VI: What Ana Knew And When

Dina told Ana in 1996.

Three years after.

The conflict had ended. The siege had ended — after 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern conflict, it had ended and the city had begun the process of becoming itself again, which is never a clean process and which in Sarajevo’s case has been ongoing ever since.

Ana was 32 years old when Dina told her.

She was teaching at the Academy by then. She was dancing again — the National Theatre had reopened, imperfectly and determinedly, and Ana was part of the imperfect determination.

Dina found her after a rehearsal.

She told her what she had seen.

Ana listened without speaking.

When Dina finished, there was a long silence.

“What did you say?” I asked Ana.

We spoke in Sarajevo in 2022. She is 58 years old. She still teaches at the Academy. She is, in the way of dancers who have spent their lives in physical dialogue with what their bodies know, someone whose stillness has a quality — a density, a presence — that is not ordinary stillness.

“I didn’t say anything for a long time,” she said. “I was trying to — I was trying to locate myself in relation to the information.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean: he was the reason I was alive,” she said simply. “Possibly. I cannot know certainly. But possibly. Twenty-three afternoons in the most exposed square in the neighborhood and I came home every time and possibly the reason I came home every time is that a man on a hill put his work down to watch me.”

She paused.

“That is a complicated thing to locate yourself in relation to.”

“How did you locate yourself?”

She looked at her hands.

“I thought about why he stopped,” she said. “Not the logistics of it. The reason. Why does a person doing a particular kind of work put the work down when a dancer arrives in a square?”

“What did you conclude?”

“I concluded that he recognized something,” she said. “I don’t know what to call it. Humanity is too large a word. Beauty is too small. Something in the middle — the specific thing that dancing is, that it insists on, that it cannot be anything other than: a person using their body to say that the body is worth something. That what the body can do is worth doing. That the doing of it is its own justification.”

She paused.

“He recognized that,” she said. “And it stopped him. Every day for twenty-three days, the recognition stopped him.”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“It means that something in him was still — “

She stopped.

“Still intact,” she said. “Still capable of recognizing. Still capable of being stopped by the right thing.”

“Is that forgiveness?”

She looked at me with the same expression Masha Volkov had used — the expression of someone who has been asked for a clean name for something that does not have one.

“It is something,” she said. “I have been trying to name it for twenty-nine years. I have not found the name.”

“Does it need a name?”

She looked at her hands.

“No,” she said. “I think it needs to be carried. Which is different.”

Part VII: The Question She Cannot Answer

I asked Ana the question that the twenty-nine years had not answered.

“Do you think he knew what he was doing? When he stopped?”

She was quiet for a long time.

Outside the Academy window: Sarajevo doing what Sarajevo does — continuing, imperfectly and determinedly, the project of being itself.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that the first day he stopped because something interrupted him. Because something in the square demanded his attention in a way he had not anticipated.”

“And the second day?”

“The second day he came back to the position and he knew what time she would be there,” Ana said. “He had to know. After the first day, he knew.”

“So he chose to stop.”

“He chose to stop,” she confirmed. “Every day. For twenty-three days. He came to the position and he did his work and at 4 PM he stopped doing his work and he watched.”

“What does that mean?”

She thought for a very long time.

“It means he was not entirely the thing the position required,” she said. “It means something in him was still — “

She stopped.

“Still able to put the work down,” she said. “Still able to choose. Still able to be interrupted by the right thing.”

“Does that matter?”

She looked at me.

“To me?” she said. “Twenty-nine years later? In this room?”

“Yes.”

She looked at the window.

At Sarajevo.

At the city that had been in a bowl surrounded by hills for 1,425 days and had survived it and was still surviving it in the specific way that cities that have been through the unsurvivable survive — imperfectly, continuously, without resolution, with grace.

“It matters,” she said. “I don’t know what it changes. I don’t know what it means for the accounting. But it matters.”

“Why?”

She looked at her hands.

The hands of a dancer who has been dancing for forty years. Who danced in a corridor for eighteen months. Who walked into the most exposed square in the neighborhood at 4 PM and danced without music for twenty-three days.

Who did not know, for three years, that she had an audience of one on a hill who put his work down every afternoon to watch.

“Because he was a person,” she said. “Not a position. Not a function. A person who was still capable of being stopped.”

“And that matters.”

“Everything that is still capable of being stopped by the right thing,” she said, “matters.”

She looked at the window.

“That is what I was doing in the square,” she said. “I didn’t know it then. I know it now.”

“What were you doing?”

“Being the right thing,” she said simply. “Insisting on being the right thing. In the most exposed place I could find.”

“And it worked.”

She was quiet.

“For twenty-three days,” she said. “For twenty-three days and one man on one hill.”

“Is that enough?”

She looked at me for a long time.

“It was enough for me to come home,” she said. “For twenty-three days in the most exposed square in the neighborhood.”

“Then it was enough.”

“Then it was enough,” she agreed.

Coda: 4 PM

Ana Kovačević still dances.

Not publicly — she teaches now more than she performs, the natural migration of a body that has given what it has to give at the highest level and found that teaching is a different kind of giving, not lesser, differently necessary.

But privately. Still. Every day.

“Same time?” I asked.

She smiled.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes at 4 PM.”

“Why?”

She considered this.

“Because 4 PM in October 1993 was the most honest I have ever been,” she said. “The most completely myself. The fear and the dancing simultaneously. The exposure and the choice simultaneously.”

“You go back to it.”

“I go back to it,” she said. “Not to the square. Not to the siege. But to the — “

She paused.

“To the version of myself that walked into the most exposed place she could find,” she said, “because she was more tired of the calculation than she was afraid of what would happen if she stopped calculating.”

She looked at the window.

“That person,” she said, “is worth visiting.”

Outside: Sarajevo. October. The hills still there. The high ground still high. The bowl of the city still visible from every position on every ridge.

And at 4 PM — in the square with the dry fountain, in the corridor of the building, in the studio at the Academy, in whatever space is available —

a dancer.

Still insisting.

Still being the right thing.

Still, after thirty years, capable of stopping someone.

Even if that someone is only herself.

Even then.

Especially then.

Dante Darkside spent three days in Sarajevo with Ana Kovačević. She reviewed this account.

She asked for one addition:

“Tell them Dina is still alive. Tell them Dina counted from the first day. Tell them that someone always counts.”

Dina Hasić is 74 years old.

She still lives in the apartment overlooking the square.

She counted.

The square still has the fountain.

The fountain still doesn’t work.

The dead leaves still collect in it every October.

Ana walks through the square sometimes.

She does not stop.

She has never danced there again.

Once was enough.

Once was everything.

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“‘Everything that is still capable of being stopped by the right thing matters.’ Ana said that. I need to carry that sentence for the rest of my life.” — Reader, Sarajevo “She walked into the most exposed place she could find because she was more tired of the calculation than afraid of what would happen. That is the definition of courage.” — Reader, London “Dina counted from the first day. Someone always counts. I am counting.” — Reader, Belgrade “‘Once was enough. Once was everything.’ The whole story earned those six words.” — Reader, Paris “I lived through the siege. I knew dancers who did what Ana did. I did not know this story. Now I do. Thank you.” — Reader, Sarajevo “Story 19. Still the best series anywhere. Still not once less than everything.” — Reader, New York NY