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When someone means that much to you, you don’t have many choices, do you, much as you may pretend you’re free to do as you like. That other person is threaded into you as deep as your own soul – you hold his image in your mind, always, and you hope he keeps an image of you, because in the end that’s the only place where you can live secure and complete. You know that if you were to vanish from the world it would be in that person’s thoughts that you lingered, for a while at least, after you were gone. So I understand what it was like, those times he went off alone into the city without quite explaining his plans. Do you remember the night, less than a month after you arrived, when he came home late with two black eyes and a bloody nose? You were frightened for him but he shrugged off your questions. Already he seemed to be breaking away.
It’s true he didn’t reveal much, but I do feel that I came to know him, in my fashion, in the time we had. Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city? You have your secret haunts and private landmarks and favourite short cuts, and I have mine, so as we navigate the streets each of us walks through a world of our own invention. And by following you into your personal city, I can learn a great deal of what I need to know.
Of course I can’t approve of his decision to seek out unlawful employment. I have to make it very clear I think that was the wrong choice. But at the same time I understand how people in your situation can find themselves facing an unenviable range of options, and so I watched with some sympathy as he crossed the city every night for his illicit shift in the kitchens of the Cosmopole. I can assure you, incidentally, that the relevant authorities will be taking a keen interest in working practices at that particular establishment.
Nicolas’s personal city was dingy and utilitarian – he would always take the fastest route to his destination, however squalid or threatening the streets – but there was an honesty about it, and a certain pride as well. He lived in a city populated exclusively with his equals. If he never acknowledged the grand department stores on Vere Street or the fin-de-siècle facades of the Palace Mile, it wasn’t because of his broken shoes and four-day beard but because he found their hypocrisies unacceptable. Once, in the Esplanade, a motorcycle tore past him along the pedestrian precinct, sounding its siren to clear the way for a cavalcade of police jeeps and VIP cars to roar through, followed by more bikes carrying more weaponised, shiny-helmeted men. The passers-by formed naturally into lines of spectators, but Nicolas swore under his breath at the arrant incivility of it.
He preferred cutting through the back streets of the city centre. In those alleys, which seem to contain all the litter that has been swept out of the boulevards, he knew where he was going: his stride became longer and easier and he’d nod to the waiters out for a smoke or slip the odd coin to a sleeping drunk. After work at the Cosmopole, most days, he stopped off to treat himself to breakfast at a place called the Rose Tree Café. Did you know that? Then he’d walk to the Communion Town metro and disappear into the underground crush to fight his way back to Sludd’s Liberty. Half his wages must have gone on metro tokens but there was no alternative if he wanted to snatch a few hours’ sleep each afternoon.
Communion Town: strange, isn’t it. Nowadays it’s hard to remember a time when those two words weren’t loaded with horror. The season has hardly turned since it happened, and yet to think of the days when Communion Town was merely the jostling heart of the Old Quarter, and its baroque subterranean maze of a station nothing more than the hub of the city’s transport, is to recollect another era.
I was nearby at the time of the event. There’s no denying the diabolical ingenuity of what the Cynics did that day. The city was unprepared because no one had imagined they could go so far. At the moment they chose, the station was flowing with the usual early-evening mob of shoppers, revellers, hipsters and tourists – ordinary people, self-absorbed and carefree, sunburnt from the first real day of summer we’d had. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it, finding yourself trapped down in the guts of the metro and slowly realising what’s going on.
I thank my stars I was above ground myself, walking through another part of the Old Quarter to meet friends at the cinema. Have you ever been on the margins of an event like that? The awareness that something was wrong came over us like a change in atmospheric pressure. Without quite knowing why, strangers turned to each other, asking for explanations and swapping instantaneous rumours. There’s a certain thrill: you want to know what’s happening, but more than that you want to know if it might still be going to happen to you.
You’ve seen the news footage of that day. I can’t decide whether the television stations should have been allowed to release the images to the public at all. Perhaps we need to see these things, but it made me uncomfortable that just because the Cynics had managed to feed us those pictures, we went meekly along with it and watched, powerless to intervene, as the horrors unfolded in exactly the way they had planned. Sometimes I think that was the worst aspect of what they did – showing us. Who can make sense of the mentality?
In the days afterwards the weather was superb, deep skies pouring down hot light so strong that the parks stiffened with vegetation and the streets seemed unreal. We had slipped into a strange kind of time: a kind that, instead of passing, accumulated. I remember pausing one afternoon in a small triangular park below an office block, nothing but some trampled grass, a drift of daisies and a rusted-up fountain, and having the most curious sense that as long as I stayed on this spot the city would remain poised and safe, not a mote in the air moving. When I passed that way again I couldn’t find it.
We all did our best to return to normal life – to do so, we assured each other, was nothing less than a principled stand – and soon enough the commuters were again streaming in and out of the ornate arches of the Communion Town metro. The city doesn’t stop, however appalled. But I had a suspicion that the busy citizens were no longer quite so convinced by the performance in which they were taking part. I couldn’t shake a sense of – what? I suppose the fragility of everything we were about.
On the streets the city watch were swollen with seriousness, their automatic weapons perched high on their chests and their eyes scanning. Life was less convenient than before: it was common to have your way blocked by bulky torsos and protuberant holsters, and to be instructed to take an alternative route to your destination. Most frustrating. I don’t pretend that my experiences correspond with yours, Ulya, but we all have mixed feelings about how things have been lately.
The watch stopped me once on Impasto Street when I was already late for an appointment, and I swear they enjoyed making me wait. They were lumpish types, two big raw hams in uniforms, and when they saw I was getting impatient they visibly settled down to savour their task. They took their sweet time establishing where I was going and why. I showed my identification, but they ignored it, conferred for a while, then told me to touch the wall and patted me down. I barely restrained myself from asking ironically whether they thought I looked like a Cynic; who knows where that might have led. At last one of them laid an oversized palm between my shoulder blades and pointed back the way I had just come.
‘You see that street, sir?’ he said. ‘Would you mind walking down it?’
I spent the whole night going over those words. I took a late run to calm down. Maybe it doesn’t hurt to be reminded now and then that the city can clobber you whenever it likes, but the odd thing, it occurred to me as I pushed myself forward with my head bowed under the streetlamps, tarmac filling my vision and grit scraping between my soles and the pavement, was that just for a moment I had been on the side of the malcontents. As I had walked away I’d been half-mad with resentment. That can’t be right, can it?
I ran through the small streets around my place, encountering cars, dark and crouched with their headlights up, waiting, their intentions obscure. It was one of those stifling nights when the lamps only smear the murk and, run as I might, my past opened up underneath my feet: I found my legs working in emptiness and I drifted like a balloonist over the depth of my personal time, seeing straight down to the bottom. Long ago, I felt, I had been the victim of some fleeting violence, of no great importance to the perpetrator but enough to leave me bent and scarred, sculpted casually into what, now, I’d always be.
When