9.

At Ecully, on a Wednesday morning, there’s nothing going on. The grey sky hangs low above ground, the membrane of condensed vapour and smog isolates the city from light, holding it in the grip of frost.

Irena had taken the children to school and came back to a quiet house. She cleared away the dishes after breakfast, swept the floor and made the beds. She could go to the gym now. She could call Desirée or Candice or Mireille. Or go do the shopping.

This is perhaps the tenth time since coming back home she’s switching on the telephone display. Not a message, not an email, provided one doesn’t count offers from Gap, the Banana Republic, the French railway, various airplane companies and other dealers to whom at various moments of her life she entrusted her address. Nothing that would please, that would interrupt the monotonous series of operations awaiting her. She reaches for her cell-phone with the same eagerness with which women used to rush to the doorstep looking out for the postman.

She could turn on the TV.

She could call her parents in Prague.

Or she could go shopping.

The living-room is dark, the blind is down.

A slim tall woman with platinum blond hair is sitting in her living room, growing into the silence of the house, disappearing in the dark-blue couch upholstery.

There must be plenty ways out. And at least one must be lucky.

Why is she so tired? Why does she feel like crying all the time?

Irena gets up, walks up the stairs to the first floor, heading towards the bedroom.

At the bottom of her wardrobe, in a box into which she puts her winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, she has a pack of smokes hidden.

She bought it in the summer in Prague, it’s still half-full.

She walks down, puts on her jacket and shawl and heads out into the garden.

When she’s finished smoking, she stubs out the white butt against the ground, wrapping it carefully in a handkerchief. She takes it straight into the rubbish bin. Matt thinks Irena gave up smoking many years ago.

Another ten minutes has passed. By the time she brushes her teeth and washes her hands, another five will have gone by. After that she’s got four hours, more precisely four hours and twenty minutes, before heading out to the school to pick the children up.

Who can be so lucky? Four hours and twenty minutes she can spend by going wherever she may please, or by staying inside a well-heated, gorgeous house. The fridge is full of food, the account full of money.

Irena stares blankly. There’s nothing between the void and her, not even some necessary daily work, some dusty trail, the roaring sea or the barbed wire.

She could go to town to do the shopping now. She could call her hairdresser to see if by chance she’s got a free slot. She could find herself a lover. But for that you need desire and her body may as well be dead.

Only in dreams, sometimes, it comes alive.

For instance last night she dreamt she was dressed in light green tunic and wore white high-heel shoes. She was coming back after a long party with friends to her hotel room in an old shabby palace, perhaps somewhere in Havana. The hotel corridors opened onto the street and the beach. People were grilling food on the fire, calling to her with friendliness. She took of her high-heels and walked barefoot on the white stone and sand. The rising sun was warming up her back. Her body was free, liberated by dance and fatigue.

Time is sand that inconspicuously, grain by grain, smoothens the features of the beings we used to be. But in the sleeping mind it all returns, the apperceptions collected by the myriad of our past selves.

Should Irena pause to think of where she’d experienced this liberated feeling from last night’s dream, she’d recall one morning walk across Prague Castle. She was returning after a night spent dancing at one of Prague’s long-defunct night bars, she could have been around twenty then. Still living with her parents. It was summer. The dawn caught her on Loreto Square, by the baroque stone angels she may have spotted for the very first time then. Her shoes were pressing on her feet, she took them off, walking barefoot on the cobblestone. The rising sun was warming up her back. Everything was happening for the first time, afresh and unlimited. The open space of her life.

 

In the end she decides to call her parents in Prague, after all. She hasn’t told them yet about the move to Singapore, and won’t dare today either, that’s for sure.

It’s her mother who answers. She’s very glad Irena is calling, she was about to call her herself. Father isn’t doing great. They’re alone. Missing Oliver and Zoe. They can’t travel. Father got so angry about those terrorists he became nauseated.

What terrorists?

She doesn’t know? The daily news is full of it. In Paris, right? What about in L.? Anything up?

“Switch on the TV,” mother says. “And most important, take care of yourselves.“

There haven’t caught the Islamic extremists yet, so they may strike again. Their traces peter out at an exit from Paris. The whole of France is officially in a state of emergency.

On one of the TV channels, they’ve rigged up a makeshift studio collecting all the information in real time. While the individual pieces of data are coming together, they’re calling up various personages to pick their brains.

“We find ourselves at the end of a cycle,” a famous philosopher is saying. “The humanist idea of progress is a mere illusion, inspired by modern-day science and the Christian conception of salvation. The civilisation is nothing stable. On the evolution line the human animal doesn’t move forwards, only in a spiral. I reckon that within the current cycle, we’ve already reached the apex and now we’re beginning to descend back into chaos and barbarity.”

Irena didn’t witness the ruins of war. Her parents did, but indirectly as children who do feel fear but have no thought yet of what they’re going to eat or where they’ll rest their heads tomorrow. The war did sweep over the grandparents’ lives directly, body on body. The monster, the Moloch, the grim reaper traversing the mountains with a scythe in one hand and a human head in the other, where did she see that painting? Jutting posts and bones, the ground a shambles, scorched underneath the faltering feet of the homeless.

The number of homeless people in today’s world is the highest since the end of World War II.

People leaving the ruins of villages and towns, treading through dust, dragging their little children by hand. Setting out to sea on makeshift boats, crawling over barbed wires, into a safety that is also only relative, but still immeasurably safer than what they’re fleeing from.

 

By Friday, they’ve got them all, but not alive. Matt and Irena have invited Paul and Susan over for dinner.

“If they had to take care of themselves, they wouldn’t have time for such bullshit,” says Matt angrily. “The youth radicalisation in Europe is the result of an imprudently generous support system. States punish hardworking people with high taxes, rewarding those who do nothing, which ultimately has got to turn against them. To be on social welfare is humiliating and the only result of such easy living is for the individual to begin to hate the hand that feeds them. In order to avoid having to be grateful to anyone, they cajole themselves into believing they’re entitled to the help, and not only that, to much more, actually they’re hoodwinked all the time. Damaged bus stops, cars torched just for fun. Those are the first symptoms of the hatred. From those it’s just one small step toward shooting people.”

Paul thinks the question of social aid is more complex. One also needs to take into account the overwhelming racism, the decline of the school system, and how impossible it is for the youth to make it on the labour market.

Susan agrees with Matt. “If the young cannot make it, the labour market needs to be changed. Adjusted to their needs. In France, this isn’t happening.”

“What can they change? The government’s hands are tied. Once they lay a finger on anything, it’s strikes all over the place.”

“To let it all go bankrupt and start anew, that’s the only solution,” says Matt. “To manage a state isn’t after so different from managing a company.”

They’re eating shrimp and drinking dry white wine.

 

Translated by David Vichnar