Carol > Recent Status Updates

”I went to that family boarding house you mentioned first of all. It’s a bit like some of those hotels on the Left Bank, with palm trees in the lobby and old women sitting in rattan chairs. Hardly any of the guests were under fifty. Mainly foreigners — English, Swiss and American women who visit museums and write never-ending letters.”

“The air had grown cooler, but there was still the occasional warm gust that seemed to rise from the pavement. The bar front had been opened up, and a depleted band was playing some music inside. Like them, most of the customers sat at their tables without a word, watching the world go by, their faces becoming more and more obscured by the dusk. Later the electric lights came on and revealed them in a new aspect.”

She selects the seals and writes a message on the back which may or may not stir in Nadine a memory of a conversation they once had, way back, time out of mind ago, when they were quite other people, when all the roads lay open, when choice was so prodigal that it held no terrors.

It is moth-eaten, this fabric of the past. But Stella’s moth holes do not coincide with Judith’s moth holes, it would seem. Of course not. Unreliable witnesses, all of us. We select the evidence, or something does.

’Don’t need to be much of a detective to know you’ve spent time out of this country,’ the removal foreman had said, perched on a pile of cases with a mug of tea in his hand, watching one of his henchmen carry in the big khelim rug, the Turkish brass tray. ‘And all these books. Dead give-away.’ He sat upon three book boxes, his feet upon another. He did not specify what it was that was given away….

The old and the young are washed to the margins of life — unessential and dependent. They share only the opportunity for untrammeled observation.

“In Stella’s opinion, marriage had flung her friend into a premature matronhood that seemed like some smug assumption of the veil. Nadine, on the other hand, saw Stella as perversely embracing a future of promiscuity and ultimately solitude. This disparity of vision was to prompt a gradual distancing…. Monthly messages would give way to an occasional exchange of letters and eventually to the ritual Christmas card.”

Real life continues here, beneath the surface gloss of brown signs inviting departure from the main roads….People are still growing things and selling them and providing one another with services…. Most of them spend much of their time in one place, contemplating the same view, locked in communion with those they see every day. For some this is a stranglehold; others are more fortunate.

The schools remained closed until late June 1997, when they opened for a few days to enable final-year students like me to take their exams. International peacekeeping troops had arrived a few weeks before, in an effort to stabilize the country—not so much to stop the violence as to help the state regain the monopoly on it.

I don’t want to leave. Leaving makes you forget things. It makes you forget people.