“Quand les Cartes Postales se Croisent” (When Postcards Cross)
I live in France, but am not now in France, my Boston-Paris flight having been postponed for an Equity reading of my new play which, like flight AF332, now feels like a half-forgotten dream. But as across the world everyone's physical and social range has been constricted by fear and necessity — finally narrowed here in the waffling patchwork of US measures to implement 'social distancing' — our mental roaming is less and less tethered to the old, immanent coordinates. There's more time, more imaginative space. Not too much distraction in the here and now, where even bandanas and vegetable seeds have sold out online. And so I find myself this morning walking around my two-room apartment near the Bastille, slippered, watering the geraniums and rosemary in their dry window boxes, running down the wooden, foot-hollowed 17th century stairs into the courtyard to tug bills and flyers from my mailbox, encountering a masked neighbor returned, perhaps, from a pharmacy run. We lament that none of us in the building have a dog! Otherwise we could share it around, and while observing all due rules and precautions, snatch a bit more air and exercise. And that dog would soon be oh, so fit!
In fact, every sortie (how apropos at the moment, the military overtone of this French word loaned to English) must be accompanied by a signed statement of purpose. There was some confusion at first but now it's pretty well worked out: how to download and print this form permitting four types of excuses (including dog-walking) for brief sorties, or else you hand-copy it or get someone to help you. Because people do help one another. President Macron gave a sober speech on March 17th, talked of war and pulling together, announced strict lockdown measures, 'the confinement', since tightened further and recently extended to May 11th. Sorties are limited to one hour per day, before 10 a.m. or after 7p.m., in a one kilometer radius. The gendarmerie is out to spot-control said permission papers and impose fines, even jail sentences, on delinquents. It's a common sense honor system pretty well respected around the country. A tough layer of patriotism lies just below the French surface, and besides, almost 25% of tests have been coming up positive (Arcgis.com). It's mostly a few American expats who wail at the extension.
France, a country largely born of Italian civilization, has been desperately trying to avoid becoming anything like Italy today: with an off-the-chart CFR (case fatality rate), bodies piling up, health workers collapsing from exhaustion. The two countries have the steepest, and parallel, curves of new cases in Europe, though the curves have recently — maybe — flattened some, with the number of confirmed cases doubling only (sic) around every five days. That said, of the many numbers flung around, (total cases/new cases/ hospitalizations/ mortality rate etc.), given the continued vagaries and low incidence of testing, only death can be relied on. On April 2nd, the tally was Italy: 13,230 total, 727 new. France: 4032, 509. Today, over two weeks later, it's approximately 22,000 for Italy, 18,000 dead in France. Terrible numbers to replace, say, rivalry in the soccer standings. Pardon the gallows humor. This season it's Germany out ahead again with a total score of only 3,850.
Italy has stopped domestic travel. In France a few trains are still running, but if you want to board that train you will be controlled, and you had better have your paper filled out with a good and provable reason. Until imposition of the confinement, trains and roads propelled the well-heeled ('bobos') from the infected metropoles out to their vacation homes, much as in the US. In both countries rural health resources are already chronically strapped, and so the rural resentment against this novel breed of refugee simmers on either side of the Atlantic: I hear rumors of cars with NY plates being bashed in a US seaside town that shall remain nameless. A fight breaking out in the one small grocery store.
Just now I had a call from a Paris friend, C., whom I'd not heard from in a year. In his usual high spirits he explained his home-cure for this and other viruses, which involves blowing a hair-dryer up one's nose. (He's emailing the details.) Yes, it's true, everyone is strictly confined to home. C. excoriates a lack of government coordination, and especially the shortage of protection equipment and tests. Hospitals, used to receiving two urgent cases per night, now have 30,000 Covid patients. I point out to C. the “good news”: that compared to the US, France has tested over twice the percentage of its population. (Germany three times more.) He is startled, and suggests quinine could be the cure, based on news of a handful of miracles in Marseilles. I mention my plan about the dog. Bad idea, he says: "The virus drops to the ground you know, dogs step on it, bring it home, you'll spend your life trying to disinfect..." I revise my plan. "And how about you, C.?" I ask. "And the family?" He (with his wife and daughters) has a spacious apartment with a balcony; the girls' teachers are holding regular classes via Internet, with homework: all is fairly well. Except that the all-important baccalaureate exams will probably be put on hold. After thirteen years of familial effort! Bon courage. Let's talk again soon.
Most people in Paris and other towns live in smaller spaces. Twenty square meters for a single person or couple is not uncommon. A writer-friend, a former military man with three small kids, was planning to move his family to new digs this spring. Now they're in limbo, living among boxes. Five people, one partly disabled, in two rooms on a remote edge of town. He can't get meds for a recent re-injury. Worldwide, staples such as morphine are running short, in large part thanks to the US-China trade war. 'We're squeezed between giants,' accuse the hospital administrators. But my friend is busy revising his novel, and not complaining. The present situation, he says, being way better than a jump with a faulty 'chute.
How not to go stir-crazy after weeks then months of 'confinement dur?' French museums are posting their entire collections on the Internet, opera and symphonies ditto, meditation and yoga and exercise classes proliferate. But not everyone has Internet. And anxiety spreads like a...virus, despite the uplifting ceremony of clapping and singing in solidarity at eight every evening. For ten minutes you hear that you are not alone. But the money's running out, despite the government’s relatively speedy dispersion of relief to businesses on condition of keeping folks on payroll, and extras to the existing robust social safety net. And what about the homeless? The Syrians and Afghans and Africans who live in the streets, in orange tents or under bridges or on top of Metro grates, now gone cold. Two thousand unoccupied apartments have been requisitioned by the government, which has also freed up 50 million euros for hotel rooms. In the US, any such initiatives are piecemeal, local, uncoordinated, and poorly funded. It's time for C. to love the government he's with! Which reminds me that the Paris public hospital association has posted a sign-up where people can list their skills as volunteers in case of need. Speaking of helping.
Why not use the unasked-for gift of free time to refresh one's math? It's handy for making sense of the numbers and graphs that are snapshots of us, moving targets in the Covid-19 shooting arcade. Key concepts include rate of change, derivatives, Gaussian distribution, log-normal distribution, logarithmic scale. The trouble with knowing what the charts have to say is that when you listen to the talking heads, you realize most of them haven't a clue. Perhaps because they are among the too-busy few. Or dropped math after eighth grade.
In the first week of confinement France saw about 1.7 million police controls of people outside on the street, and 92,000 citations. Early this month it was 5.8 million checks, 360,000 fines levied. The minimum fine has jumped to 375 Euros, a lot for most working people. Some wanna-be immortals still thumb their noses and sneak out at night to party. Repeat rule offenders risk a fine of 3,750 Euros and six months in jail, and though the latter seems less likely when every country's nightmare is a Covid outbreak in the prisons, exasperated judges have thrown a few books. (Italy already had its prison riots, in which six people died.)
Us-versus-Them resentments in France thrive less on regional divisions than — traditionally and proudly — on class. Recently two prize-winning novelists found themselves coincidentally yoked together in scalding social media water after publication of their respective 'confinement journals.' Apparently readers in cramped apartments who are either losing their work or business, or continuing in high risk jobs, had trouble relating to the upper-crust poesy of 'While my husband telecommutes, two deer are nibbling spring shoots in the garden. In the sky free of airplanes, a bird... (etc.)' Oh well. I found their books overwrought and out of touch to begin with.
The writer I miss most right now is Rainer Maria Rilke. I sense he would have something to say, an unveiling of a reality we can't otherwise perceive.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Who now has no house, won’t build one later.
Who now is alone, will remain a long time so,
will keep watch, read, write long letters,
and restlessly wander in the avenues, to and fro
when the leaves scatter.
Under these imaginative circumstances I can move around Paris with impunity, unlike my friends and neighbors. Like it or not I have the closed and barricaded Seine pedestrian bank all to myself. I stroll by the water, reciting Herbsttag (last stanza above) which every German schoolchild must learn. Absorbing a chill wind, sunshine, and the novelty of audible birdsong instead of traffic noise. I wave to a friend leaning from her window, whose engaging smile, I know, conceals a growing panic. Sandra is in her fifties, single, childless, her income is from a flat she rehabbed and decorated herself — to rent to tourists. Her great fear is not of falling sick, but the melt-down of savings stashed for her bedridden mother's care costs, and her own future.
Since forever, Seine-side cafés in the theater area around Chatelet have spilled tipsy tables and customers over the sidewalks, day and night. Sarah Bernhardt liked to party here! Now the cafés are dark caverns, their chairs piled up inside the windows like huddled ghosts staring wistfully out at the living world: pigeons and seagulls, mostly, swooping over the river bare of boats, of barges.
A few blocks further on (not that Paris has 'blocks') I scan the upper storeys for the window of another friend. In her late seventies, J. is a sparrow-thin volunteer for myriad causes. She lives with portraits of her distant children and long-dead husband, books, letters, sheet music — all covering a piano and firmly stuffed furniture in her rent-controlled room and kitchen. Impossible to swing a cat. Today her window is shuttered. Is her radio on, has she heard about veterinarians being accredited to join doctors in the Covid battle, or about Les Halles, the vast market that normally feeds the city, being refitted as a morgue?
Construction on the Cathedral of Notre Dame began in 1160, and took one hundred years. Now the maimed, blackened silhouette of what remains after the fire looms on my left. I used to go to Mass there, though not often — it's strange to be sealed off by glass from gawking visitors. President Macron has long since had to abandon his bold deadline for rebuilding the cathedral. He did go ahead with scheduled first round municipal elections in early March, buoyed by public support polls of over 60%, in face of virulent criticism from the opposition, but the embattled President's overall approval rating, while rising, remains below 50%.
There are patches of blue in the sky over the Seine today. The Post Office, reduced to emergency service during the confinement, is cautiously opening its doors. And in a lovely gesture of humanity, people will be allowed — with proper paperwork — to visit animal shelters in order to take home a companion for the prolonged isolation ahead. A win-win. We wear masks and gloves, wipe down doorbells and elevators, why not wipe a dog's feet?
The extreme right and left continue to clamor for shutting all borders, and then finally getting on with life, enough's enough — are these fatalities really much worse than the annual toll of the flu? Is the country being led by wimps?
Meanwhile, the second round of national elections has been pushed into the uncertain future. The results of the first may have to be annulled.
Bon Dieu, don't let Democracy become a victim. Not in France, not anywhere.
Kai Maristed is a novelist, playwright, and translator living in Paris and the US. She studied political science and journalism at the University of Munich and holds a M.S. from MIT. Her books include Broken Ground, a novel of Berlin praised by John Coetzee, and the story collection Belong to Me, starred by Publishers Weekly. Stories and essays have been broadcast by Germany’s WDR, and appeared in the Kenyon Review, Zoetrope, The American Scholar, the Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Agni, The Michigan Quarterly, the Iowa Review, and Ploughshares.