THE BOY NAMED CROW (excerpt from Kafka on the Shore) by Haruki Murakami

Cash isn’t the only thing I take from my father’s study when I leave home. I take a small, old gold lighter
—I like the design and feel of it—and a folding knife with a really sharp blade. Made to skin deer, it has a
five-inch blade and a nice heft. Probably something he bought on one of his trips abroad. I also take a
sturdy, bright pocket flashlight out of a drawer. Plus sky blue Revo sunglasses to disguise my age.

I think about taking my father’s favorite Sea-Dweller Oyster Rolex. It’s a beautiful watch, but something
flashy will only attract attention. My cheap plastic Casio watch with an alarm and stopwatch will do just
fine, and might actually be more useful. Reluctantly, I return the Rolex to its drawer.

From the back of another drawer I take out a photo of me and my older sister when we were little, the
two of us on a beach somewhere with grins plastered across our faces. My sister’s looking off to the side
so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It’s like one of those Greek tragedy masks
in a textbook that’s half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and
sadness. Trust and loneliness. For my part I’m staring straight ahead, undaunted, at the camera. Nobody
else is there at the beach. My sister and I have on swimsuits—hers a red floral-print one-piece, mine
some baggy old blue trunks. I’m holding a plastic stick in my hand. White foam is washing over our feet.

Who took this, and where and when, I have no clue. And how could I have looked so happy? And why
did my father keep just that one photo? The whole thing is a total mystery. I must have been three, my
sister nine. Did we ever really get along that well? I have no memory of ever going to the beach with my
family. No memory of going anywhere with them. No matter, though—there is no way I’m going to leave
that photo with my father, so I put it in my wallet. I don’t have any photos of my mother. My father had
thrown them all away.

After giving it some thought I decide to take the cell phone with me. Once he finds out I’ve taken it, my
father will probably get the phone company to cut off service. Still, I toss it into my backpack, along with
the adapter. Doesn’t add much weight, so why not. When it doesn’t work anymore I’ll just chuck it.

Just the bare necessities, that’s all I need. Choosing which clothes to take is the hardest thing. I’ll need a
couple sweaters and pairs of underwear. But what about shirts and trousers? Gloves, mufflers, shorts, a
coat? There’s no end to it. One thing I do know, though. I don’t want to wander around some strange
place with a huge backpack that screams out, Hey, everybody, check out the runaway! Do that and
someone is sure to sit up and take notice. Next thing you know the police will haul me in and I’ll be sent
straight home. If I don’t wind up in some gang first.

Any place cold is definitely out, I decide. Easy enough, just choose the opposite—a warm place. Then I
can leave the coat and gloves behind, and get by with half the clothes. I pick out wash-and-wear-type
things, the lightest ones I have, fold them neatly, and stuff them in my backpack. I also pack a three-
season sleeping bag, the kind that rolls up nice and tight, toilet stuff, a rain poncho, notebook and pen, a
Walkman and ten discs—got to have my music—along with a spare rechargeable battery. That’s about it.
No need for any cooking gear, which is too heavy and takes up too much room, since I can buy food at
the local convenience store.

It takes a while but I’m able to subtract a lot of things from my list. I add things, cross them off, then add
a whole other bunch and cross them off, too.

My fifteenth birthday is the ideal time to run away from home. Any earlier and it’d be too soon. Any later
and I would have missed my chance.
During my first two years in junior high, I’d worked out, training myself for this day. I started practicing
judo in the first couple years of grade school, and still went sometimes in junior high. But I didn’t join any
school teams. Whenever I had the time I’d jog around the school grounds, swim, or go to the local gym.
The young trainers there gave me free lessons, showing me the best kind of stretching exercises and how
to use the fitness machines to bulk up. They taught me which muscles you use every day and which ones
can only be built up with machines, even the correct way to do a bench press. I’m pretty tall to begin
with, and with all this exercise I’ve developed pretty broad shoulders and pecs. Most strangers would
take me for seventeen. If I ran away looking my actual age, you can imagine all the problems that would
cause.

Other than the trainers at the gym and the housekeeper who comes to our house every other day—and
of course the bare minimum required to get by at school—I barely talk to anyone. For a long time my
father and I have avoided seeing each other. We live under the same roof, but our schedules are totally
different. He spends most of his time in his studio, far away, and I do my best to avoid him.

The school I’m going to is a private junior high for kids who are upper-class, or at least rich. It’s the kind
of school where, unless you really blow it, you’re automatically promoted to the high school on the same
campus. All the students dress neatly, have nice straight teeth, and are boring as hell. Naturally I have
zero friends. I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside
myself. Who could like somebody like that? They all keep an eye on me, from a distance. They might hate
me, or even be afraid of me, but I’m just glad they didn’t bother me. Because I had tons of things to take
care of, including spending a lot of my free time devouring books in the school library.

I always paid close attention to what was said in class, though. Just like the boy named Crow suggested.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn’t going to be very useful in the real
world, that’s for sure. Let’s face it, teachers are basically a bunch of morons. But you’ve got to remember
this: you’re running away from home. You probably won’t have any chance to go to school anymore, so
like it or not you’d better absorb whatever you can while you’ve got the chance. Become like a sheet of
blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.

I did what he said, like I almost always do. My brain like a sponge, I focused on every word said in class
and let it all sink in, figured out what it meant, and committed everything to memory. Thanks to this, I
barely had to study outside of class, but always came out near the top on exams.

My muscles were getting hard as steel, even as I grew more withdrawn and quiet. I tried hard to keep my
emotions from showing so that no one—classmates and teachers alike—had a clue what I was thinking.
Soon I’d be launched into the rough adult world, and I knew I’d have to be tougher than anybody if I
wanted to survive.

My eyes in the mirror are cold as a lizard’s, my expression fixed and unreadable. I can’t remember the
last time I laughed or even showed a hint of a smile to other people. Even to myself.

I’m not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I’ve
erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes, before I even
realize what’s going on, there I am—naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I
always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water.

A dark, omnipresent pool of water.

It was probably always there, hidden away somewhere. But when the time comes it silently rushes out,
chilling every cell in your body. You drown in that cruel flood, gasping for breath. You cling to a vent near
the ceiling, struggling, but the air you manage to breathe is dry and burns your throat. Water and thirst,
cold and heat—these supposedly opposite elements combine to assault you.

The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in—and it doesn’t have to be very big—is
nowhere to be found. You seek a voice, but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess
what? All you hear over and over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice
pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, full to the banks. All signposts that once stood on
the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on
the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s
my heart.

Before running away from home I wash my hands and face, trim my nails, swab out my ears, and brush
my teeth. I take my time, making sure my whole body’s well scrubbed. Being really clean is sometimes
the most important thing there is. I gaze carefully at my face in the mirror. Genes I’d gotten from my
father and mother—not that I have any recollection of what she looked like—created this face. I can do
my best to not let any emotions show, keep my eyes from revealing anything, bulk up my muscles, but
there’s not much I can do about my looks. I’m stuck with my father’s long, thick eyebrows and the deep
lines between them. I could probably kill him if I wanted to—I’m sure strong enough—and I can erase my
mother from my memory. But there’s no way to erase the DNA they passed down to me. If I wanted to
drive that away I’d have to get rid of me.

There’s an omen contained in that. A mechanism buried inside of me.

A mechanism buried inside of you.

I switch off the light and leave the bathroom. A heavy, damp stillness lies over the house. The whispers
of people who don’t exist, the breath of the dead. I look around, standing stock-still, and take a deep
breath. The clock shows three p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They’re pretending to be
noncommittal, but I know they’re not on my side. It’s nearly time for me to say good-bye. I pick up my
backpack and slip it over my shoulders. I’ve carried it any number of times, but now it feels so much
heavier.

Shikoku, I decide. That’s where I’ll go. There’s no particular reason it has to be Shikoku, only that
studying the map I got the feeling that’s where I should head. The more I look at the map—actually
every time I study it—the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me. It’s far south of Tokyo, separated from the
mainland by water, with a warm climate. I’ve never been there, have no friends or relatives there, so if
somebody started looking for me—which I kind of doubt—Shikoku would be the last place they’d think
of.

I pick up the ticket I’d reserved at the counter and climb aboard the night bus. This is the cheapest way
to get to Takamatsu—just a shade over ninety bucks. Nobody pays me any attention, asks how old I am,
or gives me a second look. The bus driver mechanically checks my ticket.

Only a third of the seats are taken. Most passengers are traveling alone, like me, and the bus is strangely
silent. It’s a long trip to Takamatsu, ten hours according to the schedule, and we’ll be arriving early in the
morning. But I don’t mind. I’ve got plenty of time. The bus pulls out of the station at eight, and I push my
seat back. No sooner do I settle down than my consciousness, like a battery that’s lost its charge, starts
to fade away, and I fall asleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night a hard rain begins to fall. I wake up every once in a while, part the
chintzy curtain at the window, and gaze out at the highway rushing by. Raindrops beat against the glass,
blurring streetlights alongside the road that stretch off into the distance at identical intervals like they
were set down to measure the earth. A new light rushes up close and in an instant fades off behind us. I
check my watch and see it’s past midnight. Automatically shoved to the front, my fifteenth birthday
makes its appearance.

“Hey, happy birthday,” the boy named Crow says.

“Thanks,” I reply.

The omen is still with me, though, like a shadow. I check to make sure the wall around me is still in place.
Then I close the curtain and fall back asleep.

SUDDENLY, A KNOCK ON THE DOORS by Edgar Keret

“Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must admit,
is anything but pleasant. I’m someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that
isn’t something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That
was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret—I don’t even remember what exactly—
and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But here the situation is fundamentally different. Because my
son doesn’t have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply
trying to rob me of it.

I try to explain to the bearded man that if he puts his pistol away it will only work in his favor, in our
favor. It’s hard to think up a story with the barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head. But the guy
insists. “In this country,” he explains, “if you want something, you have to use force.” He just got here
from Sweden, and in Sweden it’s completely different. Over there, if you want something, you ask
politely, and most of the time you get it. But not in the stifling, sultry Middle East. All it takes is a single
week around here to figure out how things work—or rather, how things don’t work. The Palestinians
asked for a state, nicely. Did they get one? The hell they did. So they switched to blowing up kids on
buses, and people started listening. The settlers wanted a dialogue. Did anyone pick up on it? No way. So
they started getting physical, pouring hot oil on the border patrolmen, and suddenly they had an
audience. In this country, might makes right, and it doesn’t matter if it’s about politics or economics or a
parking space. Brute force is the only language we understand.

Sweden, the place the bearded guy made aliya from, is progressive, and is way up there in quite a few
areas. Sweden isn’t just ABBA or IKEA or the Nobel Prize. Sweden is a world unto itself, and whatever
they have, they got by peaceful means. In Sweden, if he’d gone to the Ace of Base soloist, knocked on
her door and asked her to sing for him, she’d invite him in and make him a cup of tea. Then she’d have
pulled out her acoustic guitar from under the bed and and play for him. And all this, with a smile. But
here? I mean, if he hadn’t been flashing a pistol I’d have thrown him right out. Look, I try to reason.
“Look yourself,” the bearded guy grumbles, and cocks his pistol. “It’s either a story or a bullet between
the eyes.” I see my choices are limited. The guy means business. “Two people are sitting in a room,” I
begin. “Suddenly there’s a knock on the door.” The bearded guy stiffens, and for a moment there, I think
maybe the story’s getting to him, but it isn’t. He’s listening to something else. There’s a knock on the
door. “Open it,” he tells me, “and don’t try anything. Get rid of whoever it is, and do it fast, or this is
going to end badly.” The young man at the door is doing a survey. He has a few questions. Short ones.
About the high humidity here in summer, and how it affects my disposition. I tell him I’m not interested
in answering his questionnaire but he pushes his way inside anyway.

“Who’s that?” he asks me, pointing at the bearded guy. “That’s my nephew from Sweden,” I lie. “His
father died in an avalanche and he’s here for the funeral. We’re just going over the will. Could you please
respect our privacy and leave?” “C’mon Man,” the pollster says and pats me on the shoulder. “It’s just a
few questions. Give a guy a chance to earn a few bucks. They pay me per respondent.” He flops down on
the sofa clutching his binder. The Swede takes a seat next to him. I’m still standing, trying to sound like I
mean it. “I’m asking you to leave,” I tell him. “Your timing is way off.” “Way off, eh?” He opens the plastic
binder and pulls out a big revolver. “Why’s my timing off? Cause I’m darker? Cause I’m not good enough?
When it comes to Swedes, you’ve got all the time in the world. But for a Moroccan, for a war veteran
who left pieces of his spleen behind, in Lebanon, you can’t spare a fucking minute.” I try to reason with
him, to tell him it’s not that way at all. That he simply caught me at a delicate point in my conversation
with the Swede. But the pollster raises his revolver to his lips and signals me to shut up. “Vamos,” he
says. “Stop making excuses. Sit down over there, and out with it.” “Out with what?” I ask. The truth is I’m
pretty uptight by now. The Swede has a pistol too. Things might get out of hand. East is east and west is
west, and all that. Different mentalities. Or else he could lose it, simply because he wants the story all to
himself. Solo. “Don’t get me started,” the pollster warns. “I have a short fuse. Out with the story – and
make it quick.” “Yeah,” the Swede blends in, and pulls out his piece too. I clear my throat, and start all
over again. “Three people are sitting in a room.” “And no ‘Suddenly there’s a knock on the door’” the
Swede announces. The pollster doesn’t quite get this point, but plays along with him. “Get going,” he
says. “And no knocking on the door. Tell us something else. Surprise us.”

I stop short, and take a deep breath. Both of them are staring at me. How do I always get myself into
these situations? I bet things like this never happen to Amos Oz or David Grossman. Suddenly there’s a
knock on the door. Their gaze turns menacing. I shrug. It’s not about me. There’s nothing in my story to
connect it to that knock. “Get rid of him,” the pollster orders me. “Get rid of him, whoever it is.” I open
the door just a crack. It’s a pizza delivery guy. “Are you Keret?” he asks. “Yes,” I say, “but I didn’t order a
pizza.” “It says here 14 Zamenhoff Street,” he snaps, pointing at the printed delivery slip and pushing his
way inside. “So what,” I say, “I didn’t order a pizza.” “Family size,” he insists. “Half pineapple, half
anchovy. Pre-paid. Credit card. Just gimme my tip and I’m outta here.” “Are you here for a story too?” the
Swede interrogates. “What story?” the pizza guy asks, but it’s obvious he’s lying. He’s not very good at it.
“Pull it out,” the pollster prods. “C’mon, out with the pistol already.” “I don’t have a pistol,” the pizza guy
admits awkwardly, and draws a cleaver out from under his cardboard tray. “But I’ll cut him into julienne
strips unless he coughs up a good one, on the double.”

The three of them are on the sofa—the Swede on the right, then the pizza guy, then the pollster. “I can’t
do it like this,” I tell them. “I can’t get a story going with the three of you here and your weapons and all
that. Go take a walk around the block, and by the time you get back, I’ll have something for you.” “The
asshole’s gonna call the cops,” the pollster tells the Swede. “What’s he thinking, that we were born
yesterday?” “C’mon, give us one and we’ll be on our way,” the pizza guy begs. “A short one. Don’t be so
anal. Things are tough, you know. Unemployment, suicide bombings, Iranians. People are hungry for
something else. What do you think brought law-abiding guys like us this far? We’re desperate, Man,
desperate.”

I clear my throat and start again. “Four people are sitting in a room. It’s hot. They’re bored. The air
conditioner’s on the blink. One of them asks for a story. The second one joins in, then the third . . .”
“That’s not a story,” the pollster protests. “That’s an eye-witness report. It’s exactly what’s happening
here right now. Exactly what we’re trying to run away from. Don’t you go and dump reality on us like
some garbage truck. Use your imagination, Man, create, invent, take it all the way.”

I nod and start again. A man is sitting in a room, all by himself. He’s lonely. He’s a writer. He wants to
write a story. It’s been a long time since he wrote his last story, and he misses it. He misses the feeling of
creating something out of something. That’s right—something out of something. Because something out
of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do
that. But when it’s something out of something, that means it was really there the whole time, inside
you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before. The man decides to
write a story about the situation. Not the political situation and not the social situation either. He
decides to write a story about the human situation, the human condition. The human condition the way
he’s experiencing it right now. But he draws a blank. No story presents itself. Because the human
condition the way he’s experiencing it right now doesn’t seem to be worth a story, and he’s just about to
give up when suddenly . . .” “I warned you already,” the Swede interrupts me. “No knock on the door.”
“I’ve got to,” I insist. “Without a knock on the door there’s no story.” “Let him,” the pizza guy says softly.
“Give him some slack. You want a knock on the door? Okay, have your knock on the door. Just so long as
it brings us a story.”
SILK BROCADE by Tessa Hadley

Ann Gallagher was listening to the wireless, cutting out a boxy short jacket with three-quarter-length
sleeves, in a pale-lilac wool flecked with navy. She had cut the pattern from her own design—there was a
matching knee-length pencil skirt—then pinned the paper shapes onto the length of cloth, arranging and
rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle to make them fit with minimum waste. Now her scissors bit in
with finality, growling against the wood surface of the table, the cloth falling cleanly away from the
blades. These scissors were sacrosanct and deadly, never to be used on anything that might blunt them.
Ann and her friend Kit Seaton were renting the back basement of a big house in a residential area of
Bristol for their dressmaking business; because the house was built on a hill, their rooms opened onto a
garden, and sunlight fell through the French windows in shifting patches onto Ann’s cutting table.

Someone came down the steps to the side entrance, then tapped on the opaque glass panes of the
door; Ann looked up, irritated at being interrupted. Kit said that they should always switch over to the
Third Programme when clients came—it was more sophisticated—but there wasn’t time, and Ann could
make out enough through the bubbled glass to know that the woman standing on the other side wasn’t
sophisticated anyway. She was too bulky, planted there too stolidly, with an unassuming patience. Some
clients pushed their faces up against the door and rattled the handle if they were kept waiting for even a
moment.

“Ann? Do you remember me? It’s Nola.”

Nola Higgins stood with military straightness, shoulders squared; she was buttoned up into some sort of
navy-blue uniform, unflatteringly tight over her heavy bust. “I know I shouldn’t have turned up without
an appointment,” she apologized cheerfully. “But do you mind if I ask a quick question?”

Ann and Nola had grown up on the same street in Fishponds and had both won bursary places at the
same girls’ grammar school. Nola was already in her third year when Ann started, but Ann had ignored
her overtures of friendship and avoided sitting next to her on the bus that took them home. She’d hoped
that Nola understood about her need to make new friends and leave Fishponds behind. Nola had trained
to be a district nurse when she left school, and Ann didn’t often cross paths with her; now she guessed,
with a sinking heart, that Nola had come to ask her to make her wedding dress. There had been other
girls from her Fishponds past who’d wanted her to do this—it wasn’t even, strictly speaking, her past,
because for the moment she was still living there, at home with her family. She and Kit needed the work,
but Kit said that if they were seen to be sewing for just anyone they’d never get off the ground with the
right people. Perhaps when Nola knew their prices she’d be put off. Hesitating, Ann looked at her
wristwatch. “Look, why don’t you come on in for ten minutes. I am busy, but I’ll take a break. I’ll put
some coffee on to perk.”

She showed Nola into the fitting room. They had a sewing room and a fitting room and a little
windowless kitchenette and a lavatory; a dentist on the ground floor used the front basement rooms for
storage, and they sometimes heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. The Third Programme helped
drown out the sound of his drill when clients came for fittings. Ann and Kit had made gold velvet curtains
for the fitting-room windows and covered a chaise longue in matching velvet; on the white walls there
were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it.
Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass. Kit sometimes brought her boyfriends to
this room at night, and Ann had to be on the lookout for the telltale signs—dirty ashtrays, wineglasses,
crumpled cushions. She was convinced that Kit had actually been making love once on top of someone’s
evening dress, laid out on the chaise longue after a fitting.

Ann wondered whether Nola Higgins was impressed by the glamorous new style of her life or simply
accepted it, as calmly as she’d have accepted any place she walked into. She must have seen some things
during the course of her work as a nurse, some of them horrors. Nola’s home perm made her look closer
to their mothers’ age; the dark curls were too tight and flat against her head, and when she sat down she
tugged her skirt over her knees, as if she were self-conscious about her broad hips. But her brown eyes
were very alert and steady, and she had the kind of skin that was so soft it looked almost loose on her
bones, matte pink, as if she were wearing powder, though she wasn’t.

Ann put on the percolator in the kitchenette. Kit had grown up in France, or claimed she had, and
insisted that they always make real coffee. They served it in little turquoise coffee cups, with bitter-
almond biscuits, on a Japanese lacquer tray that Ann had found in a junk shop. Sometimes the coffee
was so strong the clients could hardly swallow it.

“I won’t keep you long,” Nola said. “But I have a favor to ask.”

She didn’t have the same broad Bristol accent as her parents—Ann’s mother would have said that she
was nicely spoken. It was about a wedding dress, of course. The wedding would be in June, Nola said. It
would be a quiet one, at least she hoped so. She knew that this was short notice and probably Ann was
all booked up, but they had decided in a hurry. “Not that kind of hurry,” she added, laughing without
embarrassment. “I suppose you sometimes have to let out the waists as the brides get bigger.”

Ann was accomplished at congratulating other women on their engagements. She hardly felt a pang—
felt instead something sprightly and audacious, more like relief. “Do you know about our prices?” she
said tactfully. “I could show you a price list.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem,” Nola began to say. “Because the man I’m marrying, my fiancé . . .”

And then she had to break off, because her eyes brimmed with tears and a red heat came into her
cheeks; Ann had an intuition that the flush ran thrillingly all over her body. Who’d have thought that Nola
Higgins would be susceptible to that kind of thrill? She was bending over her handbag, fishing for a
handkerchief. “How silly,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, Ann. But I’m just so happy. I can’t quite believe that
I’m saying those words, that we’re really going to be married. He’s such a lovely chap. And he’ll be able
to pay your prices. I knew you wouldn’t be cheap.”

“Well, aren’t you the lucky one,” Ann said admiringly. “A lovely chap, and he can pay as well!”

“I am lucky! Don’t I know it. I was his nurse, you know, when he was very poorly. That’s how we met. But
it’s not how it sounds: that isn’t what he wants me for, just to look after him. I mean, to see him now you
couldn’t tell he was ever ill, except he has a little limp, that’s all.”

“I’m happy for you,” Ann said.

Nola sat very still, holding her coffee cup in both hands, smiling almost dazedly, accepting the tribute.
She had brought some fabric with her in a paper bag—the brides often did, and Ann usually had to talk
them out of it. Her fiancé had a lot of material in his home, Nola said, put away in trunks and cupboards.
And there were some lovely old clothes, too; Ann should come out and see sometime. Ann made a
politely interested noise, wondering if he kept a secondhand shop; she was imagining someone much
older than Nola, respectable and considerate, quiet, perhaps a widower. The material in the bag smelled
of mothballs, but it looked expensive—thick silk brocade, off-white, embroidered with cream flowers.
“It’s old,” Nola said, “but it’s never been used. And there’s some lace, too, good lace. I didn’t bring that—
I wanted to ask you first.” She fingered the brocade uneasily, staring down at it. “It’s too much, isn’t it?
I’ll look like a dog’s dinner, that’s what I said. I just want to wear something sensible, look like myself. But
he insisted, said I had to bring it.”

Ann really was convinced that if you could only find the right clothes you could become whatever you
wanted, you could transform yourself. She let the heavy fabric fall out of its folds and made Nola stand
up, then held it against her in front of the cheval mirror, pulling it in around her waist, frowning expertly
at Nola’s reflection across her shoulder, tugging and smoothing the cloth as if she were molding
something. “You see? The off-white is very flattering against your dark hair and your lovely skin. There
isn’t enough for a whole dress if you want full length, but I think we could get a fitted bodice and a little
peplum out of it and find a matching plain fabric for the skirt. With your full figure you want to go for a
nice clean silhouette, nothing fussy. This could look stunning, actually.”

“Do you think so?” Nola’s eyes, doubting and trusting, looked out from the reflection into hers.

Kit came slamming through the glass door after lunch, in the middle of telling some crazy story,
screaming with laughter, half cut already, with a couple of men friends in tow. Ann was just starting on
the lining for the lilac suit. One of the friends was a medic, Ray, Kit’s current boyfriend, or he thought he
was—Ann knew about other things, one married man in particular. The second friend was also a medic.
Ann hadn’t seen him before: Donny Ross, who played the piano, apparently, in a jazz band. Donny Ross
had a body as thin as a whip and cavernous cheeks and thick jet-black hair with a long quiff that flopped
into his eyes. His mouth was small and his grin was surprisingly girlish, showing his small teeth, though
he didn’t grin much—or say much. He was mostly saturnine and judgmental. It was obvious to Ann right
away that Donny didn’t like Kit. He saw through her bossy know-how and the whole parade of her
snobbery: going on about how Proust was her favorite author and her mother used to have her hats
made on the Champs-Élysées and weren’t the little bureaucrats who wanted our taxes so ghastly—as if
she couldn’t guess what Ann had guessed already, that Donny was a socialist.

He got up while Kit was still talking and went into the kitchenette, banging through the cupboards,
looking for something he didn’t find—alcohol, probably; he came out with the bag of sugar and a cup of
the coffee that Ann had made for Nola earlier, which must have been quite cold. Then he sat spooning
sugar out of the bag into his cup, no saucer, spilling it all over the table, six or seven spoonfuls just to
make the coffee bearable, and Kit didn’t say a word about the sugar bag, though she was so particular
about everything being served up in the right way. Perhaps Donny Ross frightened her, Ann thought.

She told Kit about Nola’s wedding then; best to get it over with while she was in this mood, and there
was company. “I know it’s not exactly our style,” she said. “But we could do with the work.”

She gave Kit the piece of paper where Nola had written down the details, and expected her to make her
usual disdainful face when she read through it, as if something smelled funny. Kit had a long, horsey
face, tousled honey-colored hair, and a stubby, sexy, decisive little body, like an overdeveloped child’s;
she expressed all her tastes and distastes as if they afflicted her physically, through her senses. To Ann’s
surprise, she sat up excitedly. “Oh, Lawd, this is a marvel. I can’t believe you don’t know where this
wedding is, you angel-innocent. It’s the most perfect little bijou Queen Anne house, tucked away in its
own deer park on the way to Bath. Look what you’ve done, you clever daft thing! The pictures will be in
all the good papers.”

“But Nola Higgins is from Fishponds. We were at school together.”

“I don’t care who she is. She’s marrying a Perney, and they’ve owned Thwaite Park for centuries.”

Then Ann began to understand why Nola thought she was so lucky. She explained it all to Kit, and
showed her the old brocade that Nola had left. “She said he had lots more fabric in his house. And old
clothes, too—she thought I might like to see them. And I turned her down! I thought he must be running
some kind of secondhand shop!”
“Which, in a funny way, you could say he was,” Donny Ross said.

Kit flopped back onto the chaise longue in exaggerated despair, limbs flung out like a doll’s. “When she
comes back, you’re to tell her you’ve changed your mind. I’d die for an invitation to go out there and
poke around. Imagine what they’ve got in their attic!”

“Skeletons,” Donny Ross said.

Later that afternoon, while Kit put on different outfits to entertain Ray—and at some point Ray exhibited
himself, too, in a green satin gown, made up with Kit’s lipstick and powder—Donny Ross came prowling
around where Ann was cutting out the lining for the suit. “Do you mind?” he said. And he called her an
angel-innocent and a clever daft thing, in a comical, mincing, falsetto voice. Ann didn’t usually let people
into the sewing room; she was anxious about keeping the fabrics pristine. With his hands in his pockets,
frowning, Donny was working through some jazz tune to himself, in a way that you couldn’t really call
singing; it was more as if he were imitating all the different instruments in turn, taking his hands out of
his pockets to bang out the drum part on the end of her cutting table. Ann might just as well not have
been there: he threw his head back and stared up into the corners of the room as if all the evidence of
her sewing, spread out around him, were simply too frivolous for him to look at. It was peculiar that she
didn’t feel any urge to entertain or charm him, though she knew how charming she could be when she
tried. She carried on steadily, concentrating on her work, feeling as if some new excitement were waiting
folded up inside her, not even tried on yet.

Nola met Kit when she dropped in to look at Ann’s designs. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform; she
wanted to keep on working until she married. Kit went all out to win her over, and Nola sat blinking and
smiling—her plain black shoes planted together on the floor, her back straight—under the assault of Kit’s
mad exuberance, her flattery. Kit really was good fun; when you were with her something new and
outrageous could happen at any moment. Going through the drawings, Nola was full of trepidation. The
models in Ann’s designs were haughty and impossibly slender, drifting with their noses tipped up
disdainfully. This was how she’d learned to draw them at art college; it was only a kind of shorthand, an
aspiration. If you knew how to read the designs, they gave all the essential information about seams and
darts.

“She knows what she’s doing,” Kit reassured Nola. “She’s a genius.”

Kit sewed well, and she had a good eye for style; she could work hard when she put her mind to it, but
she couldn’t design for toffee or cut a pattern. “Ann’s going to make my fortune for me,” she said. “You
wait until we move the business up to London. We’ll be dressing all the stars of stage and screen. I’d put
my life in her hands.”

“These do look beautiful,” Nola conceded yearningly.

“Oh, here—take a penny and make it an even three hundred.”

“Oh, here—take a penny and make it an even three hundred.”

Eventually, they decided on something classic, full-length, very simple, skimming Nola’s figure without
hugging it. Ann would use the brocade that Nola had brought for the bodice and the sleeves, and a
matching silk satin, if they could find it, for the skirt. “Unless there’s any more of the brocade?”

Of course they’d planned all along to ask her this, angling for an invitation to Thwaite Park. And, eagerly,
Nola invited them. “Blaise would love to meet you,” she said. Privately, Kit chose to doubt this. “He
probably thinks it’s pretty funny,” she said, “being invited to meet his fiancée’s dressmaker. I mean, their
love affair’s the most darling romantic story I’ve ever heard, and Nola’s an angel—but what I wouldn’t
give to be a fly on the wall at that wedding! Fishponds meets Thwaite Park.”

“What do you know about Fishponds?” Ann said sharply.

“Come on, Annie-Pannie. You think it’s pretty extraordinary, too, I know you do. Don’t be chippy, don’t
get on your old socialist high horse, just because you’ve got a pash on Mr. Misery-Guts Donny Ross.”

Kit and Ann drove out one Sunday, with Ray and Donny Ross, for a picnic at Thwaite Park. Kit was
engaged to Ray by this time, though Ann didn’t take that too seriously; she’d been engaged several times
already, and, anyway, Ann knew that the other thing was still going on with Kit’s married man, Charlie,
who was a lawyer. Ann had bumped into Charlie recently, out shopping with his wife and children. She’d
been waltzing around the fitting room with him only the night before, while Kit played Edith Piaf on the
portable Black Box gramophone he’d bought her, yet when he passed her in the street he pretended not
to know her, staring at her blankly. His wife was hanging on to his arm, and Charlie held his gloves in his
clasped hands behind his back; as Ann looked after them, he waggled his free fingers at her in a jaunty,
naughty secret signal.

On the day of the picnic it was warm for the first time since winter and the clear air was as heady as
spirits. Ray put down the roof on his convertible and drove fast. Kit tied on a head scarf, but Ann hadn’t
thought to bring one, so her hair whipped in her face, and by the time they turned in between the
crumbling stone gateposts—there were no gates; they must have been requisitioned for the war effort—
she was bewildered with the speed and the rushing air. The house was a Palladian box, perfectly
proportioned, understated to the point of plainness, its blond stone blackened with soot; sooty sheep
grazed on a long meadow sloping down in front of it. A few skinny lambs scampered under the ancient
oaks, where new leaves were just beginning to spring out, implausibly, from the gray crusty limbs. There
were other cars in the drive and in the car park, because the house and the grounds were open to the
public. Laughing and talking confidently—at least, Kit was laughing and confident—they walked right
past the main entrance, where tickets were on sale; peacocks were squawking and displaying on the
stable wall. Nola had instructed them to come around the side of the house, then press the bell beside a
door marked “Private,” in white painted letters. Ann half expected a butler. Donny was stiff with
disapproval of class privilege.

Blaise Perney—who opened the side door himself, promptly, as if he’d been waiting for them—wasn’t in
the least what they’d prepared for. To begin with, he looked younger than Nola: very tall and ugly,
diffident and smiling and stooped, with a long bony face and hair like crinkled pale silk. He welcomed
them effusively, blushing as if they were doing him a favor, and said that he was so looking forward to
getting to know them. Ann thought with relief that Blaise could easily be won over; she always made this
assessment, when she first met men, of whether or not she could get around them if she chose to test
her power. Charlie, for instance—although he liked her and flirted with her madly—she could never have
deflected from his own path in a million years, whereas Ray was a walkover. Blaise said that Nola was
packing a picnic in the kitchen. He led them through a succession of shadowy, chilly, gracious rooms with
shuttered windows, apologizing for the mess and the state of decay: his dragging foot seemed to be part
of his diffidence.

These were private rooms, not open to the public, not arranged to look like scenes from the past but
with the past and the present simply jumbled together: a cheap little wireless set balanced on a pile of
leather-bound books, a milkman’s calendar among the silver-framed photos on a desk whose rolltop was
broken, an ordinary electric fire in a huge marble fireplace dirty with wood ash. Ann found this much
more romantic; it set her imagination racing. What she could have done with this place if it were hers! In
the cavernous, dark kitchen, where the giant-sized iron range was cold and there were fifty dinner plates
in a wooden rack, Nola was boiling eggs on a Baby Belling, looking surprisingly at home. Ann’s envy was
only fleeting—it was benevolent, gracious. Whatever lay ahead for her, she thought, was better than any
house.

When they took their picnic outside, Blaise said that they should have seen the gardens when his mother
was alive. Nola, in a funny, shapeless flowery dress, squinting and smiling into the sun, looked more like a
mother than like anyone’s wife; they saw how she would restore things and bring back order. Scrambling
up among birch trees in a little wood, they were out of the way of the visitors on the paths below; the
bluebells were like pools of water among the trees, reflecting the sky. Ray and Donny raced like
schoolboys and wrestled each other to the ground, while Kit kept up her bubbling talk, making it sound
to Blaise as if she and Ann were specialists in old fabrics. Hoping for more brocade, she said, they hadn’t
started yet on Nola’s dress. Blaise said they must go in search of the brocade later. There were all sorts of
old clothes and fabrics and embroideries upstairs in the cedarwood presses, he told them; he’d hardly
looked in there himself but would love them to discover something valuable, which he could sell. “You
can help yourself to anything you like. I expect it’s all old junk. I’ll show you around properly when the
public have gone. Not that I’m objecting to the public, because they are my bread and butter.”

“What happened to your leg, old man?” Ray asked.

Blaise apologized, because he wasn’t a war hero. He’d managed to catch the dreaded polio—wasn’t that
childish of him? Nola spread out a tablecloth, in a little hollow among the bluebells, while the young
doctors interrogated her sternly about neck stiffness, light intolerance, respiratory muscle weakness.
Blaise rolled up his trouser leg and Ray and Donny examined his twisted, skinny calf; Kit turned her face
away, because she didn’t like looking at sickness or deformed things. Yet Blaise Perney was hardly
deformed at all; he’d made a wonderful recovery. He told them that Nola had saved his life, and she
laughed with shy pleasure. She said he was just lucky, that was all.

The surprise was that Blaise turned out to be as much of a socialist as Donny Ross, even if he did own a
deer park. He didn’t object to any of the taxes, he said. The only damn problem was finding enough
money to pay them, because old houses these days didn’t come with money attached. Thwaite was a
bottomless pit when it came to money. He ought to give the place up, sell it as a hotel or something, but
he was too sentimental. Anyway, there were an awful lot of big old houses on the market, and it wasn’t a
good time in the hotel business. He and Nola called each other “Dear” and passed each other salt, in a
twist of greaseproof paper, to go with the eggs. Kit had made little crustless sandwiches with cucumber
and foie gras from a tin, and pinched bottles of champagne from her father’s wine cellar. She still lived at
home in the suburbs with her widowed daddy, retired from his insurance job, whom she adored—
though Ann thought he was a horrible old man. He’d told her once that little tarts ought to be flogged, to
teach them a lesson.

They drank his champagne anyway, from eighteenth-century glasses, which they’d brought from the
house because Blaise couldn’t find anything else. When the champagne was finished, Kit brought out a
bottle of her father’s Armagnac—“I won’t half be in trouble,” she said—and they started in on that. And
somehow that afternoon they achieved that miraculous drunkenness you get only once or twice in a
lifetime, brilliant and without consequences, not peaking and subsiding but running weightlessly on and
on. Afterward, Ann could hardly remember any subject they’d talked about, or what had seemed so
clever or so funny. When they wandered on the grounds in the evening, after the public had gone, Nola
took off her black shoes and walked carefree in her stockings. And Donny Ross’s pursuit of Ann was as
intent and tense as a stalking cat’s: invisible to everyone else, it seemed to her to flash through all the
disparate, hazy successive phases of the afternoon like a sparking, dangerous live wire. They lay close
together but not touching, in the long grass under a tall ginkgo tree, whose leaves were shaped like
exquisite tiny paddles, translucent bright grass-green. The light faded in the sky to a deep turquoise and
the peacocks came to roost in the tree above them, clotted lumps of darkness, with their long tails
hanging down like bellpulls.

Their drunkenness ought to have ended in some shame or disaster—Ray had drunk as much as the rest
of them, and he was driving them home—but it didn’t. They didn’t break any of the lovely glasses etched
with vine leaves; no one threw up or said anything unforgivable; no one was killed. They didn’t even feel
too bad the next day. Ray delivered the girls decorously back, eventually, to the doorsteps of their
respective houses in Fishponds and Stoke Bishop. On the way home, Kit said what a sweetheart Blaise
was—and what a fabulous place, imagine landing that! Didn’t Ann just wish she’d got to him first, before
Nola Higgins? Then Ann, with her drunken special insight, said that Blaise wasn’t really what he seemed.
He wasn’t actually very easy. He’d seen right through them and he didn’t like them very much. He saw
how they condescended to Nola, even if Nola didn’t see it. Kit said indignantly that she’d never
condescended to anybody in her life.

They had not, after all, gone back inside Thwaite House to look in the cedarwood presses. No one had
had any appetite, in the intensity of their present, for the past. When they had parted finally, because
the medics were on night duty and had to get back, they all made passionate promises to return. The
next time they came, Blaise said, he would show them everything. They couldn’t wait, they told him.
Soon. That was in 1953.

When Sally Ross was sixteen, in 1972, her mother, Ann, made her a jacket out of an old length of silk
brocade, embroidered with flowers. The white brocade had been around since Sally could remember,
folded in a cupboard along with all the other pieces of fabric that might be used sometime, for
something or other. Now they decided to dye it purple. This was the same summer that Sally’s father, the
doctor, had moved out to live with another woman. Ann had sold all his jazz records and chopped his ties
into bits with her dressmaking scissors, then burned them in the garden. Of course, Sally and her sisters
and brother were on their mother’s side. Still, they were shocked by something so vengeful and
flaunting, which they’d never before imagined as part of her character. Her gestures seemed drawn from
a different life than the one they’d had so far, in which things had been mostly funny and full of irony.

Sally and her mother were absorbed together that summer in projects of transformation, changing their
clothes or their rooms or themselves. Sally stood over the soup of murky cold-dye in the old washing-up
bowl, watching for the blisters of fabric to erupt above the surface, prodding them down with the
stained handle of a wooden spoon, feeling hopeful in spite of everything. She wasn’t beautiful like her
mother, but Ann made her feel that there was a way around that. Ann always had a plan—and Sally
yielded to the gifted, forceful hands that came plucking at her eyebrows or twisting up her hair, whipping
the tape measure around her waistline. The jacket was a success: Sally wore it a lot, unbuttoned over T-
shirts and jeans. They both dieted, and her mother lost a stone; she’d never looked so lovely. Ann got a
babysitter and went out to parties with spare knickers and a toothbrush in her handbag, but came home
alone. At the end of the summer, their father moved back in again.

Sally had always known that the white brocade had belonged to a lady who died before her wedding.
The man she was meant to marry had owned a stately home with a deer park, and the twist in the story
was that she’d been a nurse, had saved his life when he was ill. Ann and Kit Seaton—who was Sally’s
godmother—had picnicked with them once in the deer park. Then the nurse had caught diphtheria from
one of her patients and was dead within a week. Her fiancé had written to them, returning their designs
and saying that he would not need their services after all, “for the saddest of reasons.” They hadn’t
known what to do with the fabric, Ann said. They couldn’t just post it to him. They hadn’t even sent a
note—they couldn’t think what words to use; they were too young. Ann hadn’t kept his letter or her
designs; she regretted now that she’d hardly kept anything when she got married and she and Kit gave
up the business. There were only a few woven Gallagher and Seaton labels, tangled in a snarled mass of
thread and bias binding and rickrack braid in her workbasket. She and Kit had never even thought to take
photographs of the clothes they’d made.

One weekend that summer Sally found herself at the very scene of her mother’s stories, Thwaite Park,
which was now used as a teacher-training college. Sally’s boyfriend was an art student, and he worked
part time for a company that catered conferences and receptions; she helped out when they needed
extra staff. She wore her jacket to Thwaite deliberately, and hung it up on a hook in the kitchen. Her job
that day was mostly behind the scenes, washing plates and cups and cutlery in a deep Belfast sink, while
the hot-water urn wheezed and gurgled through its cycles. The kitchen was as dark as a cave, its cream-
painted walls greenish with age, erupting in mineral crusts.

After the conference lunch, in a lull while the teachers drank coffee outside in the sunshine, Sally
wandered upstairs to look around. Although the rooms of the house had been converted into teaching
spaces, with bookshelves and blackboards and overhead projectors, you could see that it had been a
home once. One of the rooms was papered with Chinese wallpaper, pale blue, patterned with birds and
bamboo leaves. In another room, polished wood cupboards were built in from floor to ceiling; these
were full of stationery supplies and art materials. Someone from the catering staff had followed Sally
upstairs, and she found herself explaining the whole story to him—about her parents separating and the
jacket and her mother’s sad association with the house. This wasn’t her boyfriend but another boy who
worked with them, better-looking and more dangerous. Sally was trying her power out on him; she shed
tears of self-pity, until he put his arms around her and kissed her. And, amid all the complications and
adjustments that ensued, she forgot to collect her jacket when they left, though she didn’t confess this
to her mother until months later. A jacket hardly mattered, in the scheme of things.

APOCALYPSE: WHAT DISASTERS REVEAL?

ONE

On January 12, 2010 an earthquake struck Haiti. The epicenter of the quake, which registered a moment
magnitude of 7.0, was only fifteen miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. By the time the initial shocks
subsided, Port-au-Prince and surrounding urbanizations were in ruins. Schools, hospitals, clinics, prisons
collapsed. The electrical and communication grids imploded. The Presidential Palace, the Cathedral, and
the National Assembly building—historic symbols of the Haitian patrimony—were severely damaged or
destroyed. The headquarters of the UN aid mission was reduced to rubble, killing peacekeepers, aid
workers, and the mission chief, Hédi Annabi.

The figures vary, but an estimated 220,000 people were killed in the aftermath of the quake, with
hundreds of thousands injured and at least a million—one-tenth of Haiti’s population—rendered
homeless. According to the Red Cross, three million Haitians were affected. It was the single greatest
catastrophe in Haiti’s modern history. It was for all intents and purposes an apocalypse.

TWO
Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James
Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end of
the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the catastrophes,
personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the Chernobyl meltdown or
the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and critically
damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event that provokes revelation.
The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment
clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must be revelatory.

“The apocalypse, then,” per Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.” Apocalypses
of the first, second, and third kinds. The Haiti earthquake was certainly an apocalypse of the second kind,
and to those who perished it may even have been an apocalypse of the first kind, but what interests me
here is how the Haiti earthquake was also an apocalypse of the third kind, a revelation. This in brief is my
intent: to peer into the ruins of Haiti in an attempt to describe what for me the earthquake revealed—
about Haiti, our world, and even our future.

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing
things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek to
run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s
words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the
underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged
inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the
catastrophe, whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. (I do believe the tsunami-earthquake that
ravaged Sendai this past March will eventually reveal much about our irresponsible reliance on nuclear
power and the sinister collusion between local and international actors that led to the Fukushima Daiichi
catastrophe.)

Becoming a ruin–reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance,
practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our
world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion
brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—
becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

THREE

So the earthquake that devastated Haiti: what did it reveal?

Well I think it’s safe to say that first and foremost it revealed Haiti.

This might strike some of you as jejune but considering the colossal denial energies (the veil) that keep
most third-world countries (and their problems) out of global sightlines, this is no mean feat. For most
people Haiti has never been more than a blip on a map, a faint disturbance in the force so far removed
that what happened there might as well have been happening on another planet. The earthquake for a
while changed that, tore the veil from before planet’s eyes and put before us what we all saw firsthand
or on the TV: a Haiti desperate beyond imagining.

If Katrina revealed America’s third world, then the earthquake revealed the third world’s third world.
Haiti is by nearly every metric one of the poorest nations on the planet—a mind-blowing 80 percent of
the population live in poverty, and 54 percent live in what is called “abject poverty.” Two-thirds of the
workforce have no regular employment, and, for those who do have jobs, wages hover around two
dollars a day. We’re talking about a country in which half the population lack access to clean water and
60 percent lack even the most basic health-care services, such as immunizations; where malnutrition is
among the leading causes of death in children, and, according to UNICEF, 24 percent of five-year-olds
suffer stunted growth. As the Haiti Children Project puts it:

Lack of food, hygienic living conditions, clean water and basic healthcare combine with epidemic
diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to give Haiti among the highest
infant, under-five and maternal mortality rates in the western hemisphere.

In Haiti life expectancy hovers at around 60 years as compared to, say, 80 years, in Canada.

Hunger, overpopulation, over-cultivation, and dependence on wood for fuel have strained Haiti’s natural
resources to the breaking point. Deforestation has rendered vast stretches of the Haitian landscape
almost lunar in their desolation. Haiti is eating itself. Fly over my island—Hispaniola, home to Haiti and
my native Dominican Republic—as I do two or three times a year, and what you will see will leave you
speechless. Where forests covered 60 percent of Haiti in 1923, only two percent is now covered. This
relentless deforestation has led to tremendous hardships; it is both caused by and causes poverty.
Without forests, 6,000 hectares of arable land erode every year, and Haiti has grown more vulnerable to
hurricane-induced mudslides that wipe out farms, roads, bridges, even entire communities. In 2008 four
storms caused nearly a billion dollars in damage—15 percent of the gross domestic product—and killed
close to a thousand people. The mudslides were so extensive and the cleanup so underfunded that
much of that damage is still visible today.

In addition to resource pressures, Haiti struggles with poor infrastructure. Political and social institutions
are almost nonexistent, and a deadly confluence of political instability, pervasive corruption, massive
poverty, and predation from elites on down to armed drug gangs has unraveled civic society, leaving the
majority of Haitians isolated and at risk. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was reeling—it would not
have taken the slightest shove to send it into catastrophe.

All this the earthquake revealed.

FOUR

When confronted with a calamity of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, most of us resort to all
manners of evasion—averting our eyes, blaming the victim, claiming the whole thing was an act of god—
in order to avoid confronting what geographer Neil Smith calls the axiomatic truth of these events:
“There’s no such thing as a natural disaster.” In every phase and aspect of a disaster, Smith reminds us,
the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.

In other words disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible
societal choices that implicate more than just those being drowned or buried in rubble.

This is why we call them social disasters.

The Asian tsunami of 2004 was a social disaster. The waves were so lethal because the coral reefs that
might have protected the vulnerable coasts had been dynamited to facilitate shipping. And the regions
that suffered most were those like Nagapattinam, in India, where hotel construction and industrial
shrimp farming had already systematically devastated the natural mangrove forests, which are the
world’s best tsunami-protectors.

We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina was a social disaster. Not only in the ruthless economic marginalization of poor African
Americans and in the outright abandonment of same during the crisis, but in the Bush administration’s
decision to sell hundreds of square miles of wetlands to developers, destroying New Orleans’s natural
defenses. The same administration, according to Smith, gutted “the New Orleans Corps of Engineers
budget by 80 percent, thus preventing pumping and levee improvements.”

As with the tsunami and Katrina, so too Haiti.

But Haiti is really exemplary in this regard. From the very beginning of its history, right up to the day of
the earthquake, Haiti had a lot of help on its long road to ruination. The web of complicity for its
engulfment in disaster extends in both time and space.

Whether it was Haiti’s early history as a French colony, which artificially inflated the country’s black
population beyond what the natural bounty of the land could support and prevented any kind of
material progress; whether it was Haiti’s status as the first and only nation in the world to overthrow
Western chattel slavery, for which it was blockaded (read, further impoverished) by Western powers
(thank you Thomas Jefferson) and only really allowed to rejoin the world community by paying an
indemnity to all whites who had lost their shirts due to the Haitian revolution, an indemnity Haiti had to
borrow from French banks in order to pay, which locked the country in a cycle of debt that it never broke
free from; whether it was that chronic indebtedness that left Haiti vulnerable to foreign capitalist
interventions—first the French, then the Germans, and finally the Americans, who occupied the nation
from 1915 until 1934, installing a puppet president and imposing upon poor Haiti a new constitution
more favorable to foreign investment; whether it was the 40 percent of Haiti’s income that U.S. officials
siphoned away to repay French and U.S. debtors, or the string of diabolical despots who further drove
Haiti into ruin and who often ruled with foreign assistance—for example, FranÇois “Papa Doc” Duvalier,
who received U.S. support for his anti-communist policies; whether it was the 1994 UN embargo that
whittled down Haiti’s robust assembly workforce from more than 100,000 workers to 17,000, or the
lifting of the embargo, which brought with it a poison-pill gift in the form of an IMF-engineered end to
Haiti’s protective tariffs, which conveniently enough made Haiti the least trade-restrictive nation in the
Caribbean and opened the doors to a flood of U.S.-subsidized rice that accelerated the collapse of the
farming sector and made a previously self-sufficient country overwhelmingly dependent on foreign rice
and therefore vulnerable to increases in global food prices; whether it was the tens of thousands who
lost their manufacturing jobs during the blockade and the hundreds of thousands who were thrown off
the land by the rice invasion, many of whom ended up in the cities, in the marginal buildings and
burgeoning slums that were hit hardest by the earthquake—the world has done its part in demolishing
Haiti.

This too is important to remember, and this too the earthquake revealed.

FIVE
The earthquake revealed our world in other ways. Look closely into the apocalypse of Haiti and you will
see that Haiti’s problem is not that it is poor and vulnerable—Haiti’s problem is that it is poor and
vulnerable at a time in our capitalist experiment when the gap between those who got grub and those
who don’t is not only vast but also rapidly increasing. Said another way, Haiti’s nightmarish vulnerability
has to be understood as part of a larger trend of global inequality.

We are in the age of neoliberal economic integration, of globalization, the magic process that was to
deliver the world’s poor out of misery and bring untold prosperity to the rest of us. Globalization, of
course, did nothing of the sort. Although the Big G was supposed to lift all boats, even a cursory glance
at the stats shows that the swell of globalization has had a bad habit of favoring the yachts over rafts by
a whole lot. The World Bank reports that in 1960 the per capita GDP of the twenty richest countries was
eighteen times greater than that of the twenty poorest. By 1995 that number had reached 37.

In this current era of neoliberal madness, sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “The least
developed countries lag more and more behind and within countries the number of the poor is growing;
on the other side of the split screen is the explosive growth of wealth of the hyper-rich.” It would be one
thing if the rich were getting richer because they are just that much more awesome than we are, but the
numbers suggest that the rich may be getting richer in part by squeezing the poor and, increasingly, the
middle class. This is a worldwide phenomenon. It is happening at the bottom of the market—in Haiti, for
example, where per capita GDP dropped from around $2,100 in 1980 to $1,045 in 2009 (2005 U.S.
dollars)—and at the top. In the United States, the poorest have gained much less than the wealthy:
between 1993 and 2008, the top-1 percent captured 52 percent of total income growth.

Apocalypses are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities: chances for us to see ourselves, to
change.

The world’s goodies are basically getting gobbled up by a tiny group of gluttons while the rest of us—by
which I mean billions of people—are being deprived of even the crumbs’ crumbs. And yet in spite of
these stark disparities, the economic powers-that-be continue to insist that what the world needs more
of is—wait for it—economic freedom and market-friendly policies, which is to say more inequality!

Pieterse describes our economic moment best:

Overall discrepancies in income and wealth are now vast to the point of being grotesque. The
discrepancies in livelihoods across the world are so large that they are without historical precedent and
without conceivable justification—economic, moral, or otherwise.

This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage
where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being
forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the
grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that
just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us
the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would
also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered
through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and
work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with
no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die.

And this too the earthquake revealed.

SIX

I cannot contemplate the apocalypse of Haiti without asking the question: where is this all leading?
Where are the patterns and forces that we have set in motion in our world—the patterns and forces that
made Haiti’s devastation not only possible but inevitable—delivering us? To what end, to what future, to
what fate?

The answer seems to me both obvious and chilling. I suspect that once we have finished ransacking our
planet’s resources, once we have pushed a couple thousand more species into extinction and exhausted
the water table and poisoned everything in sight and exacerbated the atmospheric warming that will
finish off the icecaps and drown out our coastlines, once our market operations have parsed the world
into the extremes of ultra-rich and not-quite-dead, once the famished billions that our economic systems
left behind have in their insatiable hunger finished stripping the biosphere clean, what we will be left
with will be a stricken, forlorn desolation, a future out of a sci-fi fever dream where the super-rich will
live in walled-up plantations of impossible privilege and the rest of us will wallow in unimaginable
extremity, staggering around the waste and being picked off by the hundreds of thousands by “natural
disasters”—by “acts of god.”

Sounds familiar, don’t it?

Isn’t that after all the logical conclusion of what we are wreaking? The transformation of our planet into
a Haiti? Haiti, you see, is not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what is
to come.

And this too the earthquake revealed.

SEVEN

If I know anything it is this: we need the revelations that come from our apocalypses—and never so
much as we do now. Without this knowledge how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the social
practices that bring on our disasters? And how can we ever hope to take responsibility for the collective
response that will be needed to alleviate the misery?

How can we ever hope to change?

Because we must change, we also must refuse the temptation to look away when confronted with
disasters. We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters. We
must refuse the familiar scripts of victims and rescuers that focus our energies solely on charity instead
of systemic change. We must refuse the recovery measures that seek always to further polarize the
people and the places they claim to mend. And we must, in all circumstances and with all our strength,
resist the attempts of those who helped bring the disaster to use the chaos to their advantage—to
tighten their hold on our futures.

We must stare into the ruins—bravely, resolutely—and we must see.

And then we must act.

Our very lives depend on it.

Will it happen? Will we, despite all our limitations and cruelties, really heed our ruins and pull ourselves
out of our descent into apocalypse?
Haiti’s nightmarish vulnerability has to be understood as part of a larger trend of global inequality.

Truth be told, I’m not very optimistic. I mean, just look at us. No, I’m not optimistic—but that doesn’t
mean I don’t have hope. Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I’m from New Jersey: as a
writer from out that way once said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Yes, I have hope. We humans are a fractious lot, flawed and often diabolical. But, for all our deficiencies,
we are still capable of great deeds. Consider the legendary, divinely inspired endurance of the Haitian
people. Consider how they have managed to survive everything the world has thrown at them—from
slavery to Sarah Palin, who visited last December. Consider the Haitian people’s superhuman solidarity in
the weeks after the quake. Consider the outpouring of support from Haitians across the planet. Consider
the impossible sacrifices the Haitian community has made and continues to make to care for those who
were shattered on January 12, 2010.

Consider also my people, the Dominicans. In the modern period, few Caribbean populations have been
more hostile to Haitians. We are of course neighbors, but what neighbors! In 1937 the dictator Rafael
Trujillo launched a genocidal campaign against Haitians and Haitian Dominicans. Tens of thousands were
massacred; tens of thousands more were wounded and driven into Haiti, and in the aftermath of that
genocide the relationship between the two countries has never thawed. Contemporary Dominican
society in many respects strikes me as profoundly anti-Haitian, and Haitian immigrants to my country
experience widespread discrimination, abysmal labor conditions, constant harassment, mob violence,
and summary deportation without due process.

No one, and I mean no one, expected anything from Dominicans after the quake; yet look at what
happened: Dominican rescue workers were the first to enter Haiti. They arrived within hours of the
quake, and in the crucial first days of the crisis, while the international community was getting its act
together, Dominicans shifted into Haiti vital resources that were the difference between life and death
for thousands of victims.

In a shocking reversal of decades of toxic enmity, it seemed as if the entire Dominican society mobilized
for the relief effort. Dominican hospitals were emptied to receive the wounded, and all elective surgeries
were canceled for months. (Imagine if the United States canceled all elective surgeries for a single month
in order to help Haiti, what a different that would have made.) Schools across the political and economic
spectrums organized relief drives, and individual citizens delivered caravans of essential materials and
personnel in their own vehicles, even as international organizations were claiming that the roads to Port-
au-Prince were impassable. The Dominican government transported generators and mobile kitchens and
established a field hospital. The Dominican Red Cross was up and running long before anyone else.
Dominican communities in New York City, Boston, Providence, and Miami sent supplies and money. This
historic shift must have Trujillo rolling in his grave. Sonia Marmolejos, a humble Dominican woman, left
her own infant babies at home in order to breastfeed more than twenty Haitian babies whose mothers
had either been seriously injured or killed in the earthquake.

Consider Sonia Marmolejos and understand why, despite everything, I still have hope.

EIGHT

“These are dark times, there is no denying.” Thus spake Bill Nighy’s character in the penultimate Harry
Potter movie. Sometimes we have to look in our entertainment for truths. And sometimes we have to
look in the ruins for hope.
More than a year has passed since the earthquake toppled Haiti, and little on the material front has
changed. Port-au-Prince is still in ruins, rubble has not been cleared, and the port is still crippled. More
than a million people are still in tent cities, vulnerable to the elements and disease and predatory gangs,
and there is no sign that they will be moving out soon. The rebuilding has made many U.S. companies
buckets of cash, but so far has done very little for Haitian contractors or laborers. Cholera is spreading
through the relief camps, killing more than 4,500 so far, according to the United Nations. In December
2010 Paul Farmer reported that nearly a year after the disaster Haiti had received only 38 percent, or
$732.5 million, of promised donations, excluding debt relief. In the Dominican Republic, threats of
violence caused thousands of Haitian immigrants to abandon the Santiago area just weeks before the
earthquake’s first anniversary.

More than a year later, we can say safely that the world has looked away. It has failed to learn the lesson
of the apocalypse of Haiti.

If anything is certain it is this: there will be more Haitis.

Never fear though—if anything is certain it is this: there will be more Haitis. Some new catastrophe will
strike our poor planet. And for a short while the Eye of Sauron that is the globe’s fickle attention span
will fall upon this novel misery. More hand wringing will ensue, more obfuscatory narratives will be
trotted out, more people will die. Those of us who are committed will help all we can, but most people
will turn away. There will be a few, however, who, steeling themselves, will peer into the ruins for the
news that we will all eventually need.

After all, apocalypses like the Haitian earthquake are not only catastrophes; they are also opportunities:
chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change. One day somewhere in
the world something terrible will happen, and for once we won’t look away. We will reject what Jane
Anna and Lewis R. Gordon have described in Of Divine Warning as that strange moment following a
catastrophe where “in our aversion to addressing disasters as signs” we refuse “to interpret and take
responsibility for the kinds of collective responses that may be needed to alleviate human misery.” One
day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen and for once we will heed the ruins. We will
begin collectively to take responsibility for the world we’re creating. Call me foolishly utopian, but I
sincerely believe this will happen. I do. I just wonder how many millions of people will perish before it
does.

POSTSCRIPT

March 15: As I revise this essay, I am watching the harrowing images being beamed in from post-
earthquake-post-tsunami Japan. Another apocalypse beyond the imagination—but one that might affect
us all. The news is reporting that a third explosion has rocked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
and that there might be a fire in the fourth reactor. The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a nicely
combed man is saying. Even if the reactor cores do not melt down, radioactive “releases” into the
environment will continue for weeks, perhaps even months. My friends in Tokyo report that the
convenience stores that I so love have been emptied and that there are signs that the radiation has
already begun to reach that metropolis of 13 million. And finally this, a perfunctory statement from the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “NRC’s rigorous safety regulations ensure that U.S. nuclear facilities
are designed to withstand tsunamis, earthquakes and other hazards.” When pressed for details, NRC
spokesman David McIntyre was reported to have said that the commission is not taking reporters’
questions at this point.
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION by Wole Soyinka

The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived

Off premises. Nothing remained

But self-confession. "Madam" , I warned,

"I hate a wasted journey - I am African."

Silence. Silenced transmission of pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.

"HOW DARK?"...I had not misheard...."ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?" Button B. Button A. Stench

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.

Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered

Omnibus squelching tar.

It was real! Shamed

By ill-mannered silence, surrender

Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis-

"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT" Revelation came

"You mean- like plain or milk chocolate?"

Her accent was clinical, crushing in its light

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted

I chose. "West African sepia"_ and as afterthought.

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness chaged her accent

Hard on the mouthpiece "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding "DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."

"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?"

"Not altogether.

Facially, I am brunette, but madam you should see the rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet.

Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused-

Foolishly madam- by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black- One moment madam! - sensing

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap

About my ears- "Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather

See for yourself?"

THE APOLOGIZER by Milan Kundera

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly
down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between
trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it
was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in
that small round hole at the center of the body.

This provoked him to reflect: if a man (or an era) sees the thighs as the center of female seductive power,
how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer:
the length of the thighs is the metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road (which is why the thighs
must be long) that leads to erotic achievement. Indeed, Alain said to himself, even in mid-coitus the
length of the thighs endows woman with the romantic magic of the inaccessible.

If a man (or an era) sees the buttocks as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe
and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: brutality, high spirits,
the shortest road to the goal, a goal that is all the more exciting for being double.

If a man (or an era) sees the breasts as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and
define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: sanctification of woman,
the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus, the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex.

But how does one define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as
centered in the middle of the body, in the navel?

So: ambling along the streets, he would often think about the navel, untroubled at repeating himself,
and even strangely obstinate about doing so, for the navel woke in him a distant memory: the memory
of his last encounter with his mother.
He was ten at the time. He and his father were alone on vacation, in a rented villa with a garden and a
swimming pool. It was the first time that she had come to see them after an absence of several years.
They closed themselves into the villa, she and her former husband. For miles around, the atmosphere
was stifling from it. How long did she stay? Probably not more than an hour or two, during which time
Alain tried to entertain himself in the pool. He had just climbed out when she paused there to say her
goodbyes. She was alone. What did they say to each other? He doesn’t know. He remembers only that
she was sitting on a garden chair and that he, in his still-wet bathing trunks, stood facing her. What they
said is forgotten, but one moment is fixed in his memory, a concrete moment, sharply etched: from her
chair, she gazed intently at her son’s navel. He still feels that gaze on his belly. A gaze that was difficult to
understand: it seemed to him to express an inexplicable mix of compassion and contempt; the mother’s
lips had taken the shape of a smile (a smile of compassion and contempt together); then, without rising
from the chair, she leaned toward him and, with her index finger, touched his navel. Immediately
afterward, she stood up, kissed him (did she really kiss him? probably, but he is not sure), and was gone.
He never saw her again.

a woman steps out of her car

A small car moves along the road beside a river. The chilly morning air makes even more forlorn the
charmless terrain, somewhere between the end of a suburb and open country, where houses grow
scarce and no pedestrians are to be seen. The car stops at the side of the road; a woman gets out—
young, quite beautiful. A strange thing: she pushes the door shut so negligently that the car must not be
locked. What is the meaning of that negligence, so improbable these days with thieves about? Is the
woman so distracted?

No, she doesn’t seem distracted; on the contrary, determination is visible on her face. This woman
knows what she wants. This woman is pure will. She walks some hundred yards along the road, toward a
bridge over the river, a rather high, narrow bridge, forbidden to vehicles. She steps onto it and heads
toward the far bank. Several times she looks around, not like a woman expected by someone but to be
sure that there is no one expecting her. Midway across the bridge, she stops. At first glance she appears
to be hesitating, but, no, it’s not hesitation or a sudden flagging of determination; on the contrary, it’s a
pause to sharpen her concentration, to make her will steelier yet. Her will? To be more precise: her
hatred. Yes, the pause that looked like hesitation is actually an appeal to her hatred to stand by her, to
support her, not to desert her for an instant.

She lifts a leg over the railing and flings herself into the void. At the end of her fall, she slams brutally
against the hardness of the water’s surface and is paralyzed by the cold, but after a few long seconds she
lifts her face, and since she is a good swimmer all her automatic responses surge forward against her will
to die. She plunges her head under again, forces herself to inhale water, to block her breathing.
Suddenly, she hears a shout. A shout from the far bank. Someone has seen her. She understands that
dying will not be easy, and that her greatest enemy will be not her good swimmer’s irrepressible reflex
but a person she had not figured on. She will have to fight. Fight to rescue her death.

she kills

She looks over toward the shout. Someone has leaped into the river. She considers: who will be quicker,
she, in her resolve to stay underwater, to take in water, to drown herself, or he, the oncoming figure?
When she is half-drowned, with water in her lungs and thus weakened, won’t she be all the easier prey
for her savior? He will pull her toward the bank, lay her out on the ground, force the water out of her
lungs, apply mouth-to-mouth, call the rescue squad, the police, and she will be saved and ridiculed
forevermore.

“Stop! Stop!” the man shouts.

Everything has changed. Instead of diving down beneath the water, she raises her head and breathes
deeply to collect her strength. He is already in front of her. It’s a young fellow, a teenager, who hopes to
be famous, to have his picture in the papers. He just keeps repeating, “Stop! Stop!” He’s already reaching
a hand toward her, and she, rather than evading it, grasps it, grips it tight, and pulls it (and him) down
toward the depths of the river. Again he cries, “Stop!” as if it were the only word he can speak. But he
will not speak it again. She holds on to his arm, draws him toward the bottom, then stretches the whole
length of her body along the boy’s back to keep his head underwater. He fights back, he thrashes, he has
already inhaled water, he tries to strike the woman, but she stays lying firmly on top of him; he cannot
lift his head to get air, and after several long, very long, seconds he ceases to move. She holds him like
that for a while; it is as if, exhausted and trembling, she were resting, laid out along him. Then, convinced
that the man beneath her will not stir again, she lets go of him and turns away, toward the riverbank she
came from, so as not to preserve within her even the shadow of what has just occurred.

But what’s going on? Has she forgotten her resolve? Why does she not drown herself, since the person
who tried to rob her of her death is no longer alive? Why, now that she is free, does she no longer seek
to die?

Life unexpectedly recovered has been a kind of shock that broke her determination; she has lost the
strength to concentrate her energy on dying. She is shaking, suddenly stripped of any will, any vigor;
mechanically, she swims toward the place where she abandoned the car.

she returns to the house

Little by little, she feels the water grow less deep, she touches her feet to the riverbed, she stands; she
loses her shoes in the mud and hasn’t the strength to search for them; she leaves the water barefoot and
climbs the bank to the road.

The rediscovered world has an inhospitable appearance, and suddenly anxiety seizes her: she hasn’t got
the car key! Where is it? Her skirt has no pockets.

Heading for your death, you don’t worry about what you’ve dropped along the way. When she left the
car, the future did not exist. She had nothing to hide. Whereas now, suddenly, she has to hide
everything. Leave no trace. Her anxiety grows stronger and stronger: Where is the key? How to get
home?

She reaches the car, she pulls at the door, and, to her astonishment, it opens. The key awaits her,
abandoned on the dashboard. She sits at the wheel and sets her naked feet on the pedals. She is still
shaking. Now she is shaking with cold as well. Her shirt, her skirt, are drenched, with dirty river water
running everywhere. She turns the key and drives off.

The person who tried to impose life on her has died from drowning, and the person she was trying to kill
in her belly is still alive. The idea of suicide is ruled out forever. No repeats. The young man is dead, the
fetus is alive, and she will do all she can to keep anyone from discovering what has happened. She is
shaking, and her will revives; she thinks of nothing but her immediate future: How to get out of the car
without being seen? How to slip, unnoticed, in her dripping clothes, past the concierge’s window?
Alain felt a violent blow on his shoulder. “Watch out, you idiot!”

He turned and saw a girl passing him on the sidewalk with a rapid, energetic stride.

“Sorry!” he cried after her (in his frail voice).

“Asshole!” she answered (in her strong voice) without turning around.

the apologizers

Alone in his studio apartment two days later, Alain noticed that he was still feeling pain in his shoulder,
and he decided that the young woman who had jostled him in the street so effectively must have done it
on purpose. He could not forget her strident voice calling him “idiot,” and he heard again his own
supplicating “Sorry,” followed by the answering “Asshole!” Once again, he had apologized over nothing!
Why always this stupid reflex of begging pardon? The memory would not leave him, and he felt he had
to talk to someone. He called his girlfriend, Madeleine. She wasn’t in Paris, and her cell phone was off. So
he punched in Charles’s number, and no sooner did he hear his friend’s voice than he apologized. “Don’t
be angry. I’m in a very bad mood. I need to talk.”

“It’s a good moment. I’m in a foul mood, too. But why are you?”

“Because I’m angry with myself. Why is it that I find every opportunity to feel guilty?”

“That’s not so awful.”

“Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty—I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a
known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just
attack each other on sight. So instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on each other. The person
who manages to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose. You’re
walking along the street, lost in thought. Along comes a girl, walking straight ahead, as if she were the
only person in the world, looking neither left nor right. You jostle each other. And there it is, the moment
of truth: Who’s going to bawl out the other person, and who’s going to apologize? It’s a classic situation:
actually, each of them is both the jostled and the jostler. And yet some people always—immediately,
spontaneously—consider themselves the jostlers, and thus in the wrong. And others always—
immediately, spontaneously—consider themselves the jostled, and therefore in the right, quick to accuse
the other and get him punished. What about you—in that situation, would you apologize or accuse?”

“Me, I’d certainly apologize.”

“Ah, my poor friend, so you, too, belong to the army of apologizers. You expect to mollify the other
person with your apologies.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re wrong. The person who apologizes is declaring himself guilty. And if you declare yourself
guilty you encourage the other to go on insulting you, blaming you, publicly, unto death. Such are the
inevitable consequences of the first apology.”

“That’s true. One should not apologize. And yet I prefer a world where everyone would apologize, with
no exception, pointlessly, excessively, for nothing at all, where they’d load themselves down with
apologies.”
Alain picked up his cell phone to call Madeleine again. But hers rang and rang in vain. As he often did at
similar moments, he turned his attention to a photograph hanging on his wall. There was no photograph
in his studio but that one: the face of a young woman—his mother.

A few months after Alain’s birth, she had left her husband, who, given his discreet ways, had never
spoken ill of her. He was a subtle, gentle man. The child did not understand how a woman could have
abandoned a man so subtle and gentle, and understood even less how she could have abandoned her
son, who was also (as he was aware) since childhood (if not since his conception) a subtle, gentle person.

“Where does she live?” he had asked his father.

“Probably in America.”

“What do you mean, ‘probably’?”

“I don’t know her address.”

“But it’s her duty to give it to you.”

“She has no duty to me.”

“But to me? She doesn’t want to hear news of me? She doesn’t want to know what I’m doing? She
doesn’t want to know that I think about her?”

One day, the father lost control.

“Since you insist, I’ll tell you: your mother never wanted you to be born. She never wanted you to be
around here, to be burying yourself in that easy chair where you’re so comfortable. She wanted nothing
to do with you. So now do you understand?”

The father was not an aggressive man. But, despite his great reserve, he had not managed to hide his
profound disagreement with a woman who had tried to keep a human being from coming into the
world.

I have already described Alain’s last encounter with his mother, beside the swimming pool of a rented
vacation house. He was ten at the time. He was sixteen when his father died. A few days after the
funeral, he tore a photograph of his mother out of a family album, had it framed, and hung it on his wall.
Why was there no picture of his father in his apartment? I don’t know. Is that illogical? Certainly. Unfair?
Without a doubt. But that’s how it is. On the walls of his studio, there hung only a single photograph: the
one of his mother. With which, from time to time, he would talk.

how to give birth to an apologizer

“Why didn’t you have an abortion? Did he stop you?”

A voice came to him from the photograph: “You’ll never know that. Everything you imagine about me is
just fairy tales. But I love your fairy tales. Even when you made me out to be a murderer who drowned a
young man in the river. I liked it all. Keep it up, Alain. Tell me a story! Go on, imagine! I’m listening.”

“We must root out corruption at the highest levels of government and make it look like it’s happening at
the lowest levels of government.”
“We must root out corruption at the highest levels of government and make it look like it’s happening at
the lowest levels of government.”

And Alain imagined. He imagined the father on his mother’s body. Before their coitus, she’d warned him:
“I didn’t take the pill, be careful!” He reassured her. So she makes love without mistrust, then, when she
sees the signs of climax appear on the man’s face and grow, she cries, “Watch out!” then “No! No! I
don’t want to! I don’t want to!” But the man’s face is redder and redder, red and repugnant; she pushes
at the heavier weight of this body clamping her against it, she fights, but he wraps her still tighter, and
she suddenly understands that for him this is not the blindness of passion but will—cold, premeditated
will—while for her it is more than will, it is hatred, a hatred all the more ferocious because the battle is
lost.

This was not the first time Alain had imagined their coitus; this coitus hypnotized him and caused him to
suppose that every human being was the exact replica of the instant of its conception. He stood at his
mirror and examined his face for traces of the double, simultaneous hatreds that had led to his birth: the
man’s hatred and the woman’s hatred at the moment of the man’s orgasm, the hatred of the gentle and
physically strong coupled with the hatred of the courageous and physically weak.

And he reflects that the fruit of that double hatred could only be an apologizer. He was gentle and
intelligent like his father; and he would always be an intruder, as his mother had viewed him. A person
who is both an intruder and gentle is condemned, by an implacable logic, to apologize throughout his
whole life. He looked at the face hanging on the wall and once again he saw the woman who, defeated,
in her dripping dress, gets into the car, slips unnoticed past the concierge’s window, climbs the staircase,
and, barefoot, returns to the apartment where she will stay until the intruder leaves her body. And
where, a few months later, she will abandon the two of them.

eve’s tree

Alain was sitting on the floor of his studio, leaning against the wall, his head bent low: Perhaps he had
dozed off? A female voice woke him.

“I like everything you’ve said to me so far, I like everything you’re inventing, and I have nothing to add.
Except, maybe, about the navel. To your mind, the model of a navel-less woman is an angel. For me, it’s
Eve, the first woman. She was born not out of a belly but out of a whim, the Creator’s whim. It was from
her vulva, the vulva of a navel-less woman, that the first umbilical cord emerged. If I’m to believe the
Bible, other cords, too: with a little man or a little woman attached to each of them. Men’s bodies were
left with no continuation, completely useless, whereas from out of the sexual organ of every woman
there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions
and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a
tree whose branches reached to the sky. Imagine! That gigantic tree is rooted in the vulva of one little
woman, the first woman, poor navel-less Eve.

“When I got pregnant, I saw myself as a part of that tree, dangling from one of its cords, and you, not yet
born—I imagined you floating in the void, hooked to the cord coming out of my body, and from then on I
dreamed of an assassin way down below, slashing the throat of the navel-less woman. I imagined her
body in death throes, decomposing, until that whole enormous tree that grew out of her—now suddenly
without roots, without a base—started to fall. I saw the infinite spread of its branches come down like a
gigantic cloudburst, and—understand me—what I was dreaming of wasn’t the end of human history, the
abolition of any future; no, no, what I wanted was the total disappearance of mankind, together with its
future and its past, with its beginning and its end, along with the whole span of its existence, with all its
memory, with Nero and Napoleon, with Buddha and Jesus. I wanted the total annihilation of the tree
that was rooted in the little navel-less belly of some stupid first woman who didn’t know what she was
doing or what horrors we’d pay for her miserable coitus, which had certainly not given her the slightest
pleasure.”

The mother’s voice went silent, and Alain, leaning against the wall, dozed off again.

dialogue on the motorbike

The next morning, at about eleven, Alain was to meet with his friends Ramon and Caliban in front of the
museum near the Luxembourg Gardens. Before he left his studio, he turned back to say goodbye to his
mother in the photograph. Then he went down to the street and walked toward his motorbike, which
was parked not far from his apartment.

As he straddled the bike, he had the vague sensation of a body leaning against his back. As if Madeleine
were with him and touching him lightly. The illusion moved him; it seemed to express the love he felt for
his girl. He started the engine.

Then he heard a voice behind him: “I wanted to talk some more.”

No, it wasn’t Madeleine; he recognized his mother’s voice.

Traffic was slow, and he heard: “I want to be sure that there’s no confusion between you and me, that
we understand each other completely—”

He had to brake. A pedestrian had slipped between cars to cross the street and turned toward Alain with
a threatening gesture.

“I’ll be frank. I’ve always felt that it’s horrible to send a person into the world who didn’t ask to be there.”

“I know,” Alain said.

“Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is
the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we’ve stopped seeing it and hearing it.”

For several minutes he kept to a lane between a truck and a car that were pressing him from either side.

“Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn’t founded on any right. They
don’t even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights.”

The light at the intersection went red. He stopped. Pedestrians from both sides of the street set out
toward the opposite sidewalk.

And the mother went on: “Look at them all! Look! At least half the people you’re seeing are ugly. Being
ugly—is that one of the human rights, too? And do you know what it is to carry your ugliness with you
through your whole life? With not a moment of relief? Or your sex? You never chose that. Or the color of
your eyes? Or your era on earth? Or your country? Or your mother? None of the things that matter. The
rights a person can have involve only pointless things, for which there is no reason to fight or to write
great declarations!”
He was driving again now, and his mother’s voice grew gentler. “You’re here as you are because I was
weak. That was my fault. Forgive me.”

Alain was silent; then he said, in a quiet voice: “What is it that you feel guilty for? For not having had the
strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually
not so bad?”

After a silence, she answered, “Maybe you’re right. Then I’m doubly guilty.”

“I’m the one who should apologize,” Alain said. “I dropped into your life like a cow turd. I chased you
away to America.”

“Quit your apologies! What do you know about my life, my little idiot! Can I call you idiot? Yes, don’t be
angry; in my own opinion, you are an idiot! And you know where your idiocy comes from? From your
goodness! Your ridiculous goodness!”

He reached the Luxembourg Gardens. He parked the bike.

“Don’t protest, and let me apologize,” he said. “I’m an apologizer. That’s the way you made me, you and
he. And, as such, as an apologizer, I’m happy. I feel good when we apologize to each other, you and I.
Isn’t it lovely, apologizing to each other?”

Then they walked toward the museum.

YEAR'S END by Jhumpa Lahiri