Echo, or the Sieve of Time

So here it is: the summer languor; it seems summer will never end. The leaves on the trees are green—they're not turning yet; the grass is green, too, occasionally refreshed by the warm summer rains. The bliss of indolence, when, as the rhythm of the city slows, the rhythm of the blood slows as well, when, after the avalanche of work abates, you gaze, lost in thought, at the motionless cranes over the Samaritaine Department Store imprisoned in scaffolding, or, lounging on the banks of the Seine at the tip of Cité, your eyes comb the willow branches enveloping you, until finally you drown in their thicket. There's nothing you have to do—everything is already done and written, everything has already been said. If you do or say anything, you will just be an impediment. To yourself, to others, to everything around.

The August of that year in Paris was strange. I hadn't left the city, but I felt as if I had come back to it after many years. And as always when you return to places you have not visited for a long time, Paris looked empty and abandoned. It also looked sad, as if it had lost something. I wanted to say that places age the way we do. But no—places don't always age, there are times when people rejuvenate them according to their understanding, but returning to them after many days away, the longing for time gone by always sears you. At least it does me. It's only an illusion that you have returned to the place you left.

The radio announced and the television showed five-to six-hundred kilometer traffic jams on the country's highways: August is vacation time. In the first week there were noticeably fewer people; in the second week, the city emptied out even more. It's always like that: the post office is open shorter hours, but why mention just the post office—the little bakeries and cafés close, lots of things close. But the tourists, replacing the locals, were scarcer, too: that year tourists avoided Paris. We all know why.

To go out into the city is always an adventure; you go out into the city, and you can never guess what's going to happen. But when you know that the probability that something will happen is totally reduced . . .

That August I would go out into the city with no expectations at all. I roamed around it as though I were saying good-bye to it for all time. In the evenings you no longer had to hunt for a space on the lower banks of the Seine; after the earlier throngs during the summer holidays, the people scattered here and there seemed kilometers apart. I felt as if I had wandered out to some wild beaches where you meet only a passerby or two, whom, if you greet them at all, you greet only with your eyes. I felt the ache of the solitude of the sea, a sea unable to defend itself from people and floating ships, but one indifferent to people and ships, closed off inside itself. I no longer heard any voices, nor did I hear the sounds of the city. I only heard the plane trees rustling as the gusts of wind made them dance; the rippling Seine repeated the rhythm of their dance. At times the waves surged when the Bateaux Mouches went by, but they were scarcer; every day there were fewer tourists on them—the joyful cries coming from the decks of the boats only served to cut the veil of dreariness shrouding the city, the same way seagulls slice the sky above the sea, announcing the power and eternity of nature.

And indeed, the more the people in the city diminished, the more it seemed that the city was returning to nature, or perhaps more precisely, nature was returning to it. Listening to the plane trees soughing, watching the waters of the Seine ruffling, I would easily surrender to the distractions of my imagination...