It’s late afternoon on the hottest day of the year. I’m part of a crowd of people watching a van burn on the motorway. There’s about twenty of us and more keep joining, all following the same billowing cloud of black smoke. We’re on the motorway bridge down at Bois de Vincennes, edging onto the off-ramp, all trying to get a better view as the flames grow higher and higher. The windows have already shattered. You can hear the air hissing out of the tires. The driver is nowhere to be seen. People keep murmuring this to one another. Where’s the driver? Was there anyone else in there with them? There are sirens in the distance. Something explodes, people scream.
Earlier in the day I was sat in the square. I don’t get any sunlight in my flat so spend my afternoons here when I can. I’m watching an old man take a photo of the spring blossoms. On the bench to my right an old lady with arthritic hands fiddles with her phone to tune into an Italian radio station. A DJ with the same media trained accent I learnt to mimic in an Italian class I took last year. Afternoon ballads. Nostalgie Italia. The woman on the bench to my left, about my age, is reading the French translation of Klara and the Sun, the poche edition sold at metro stations and bookshops alike. The sun glows white. Someone’s smoking a joint. I’ve had to stop reading the book I’ve brought with me, Triste tigre; it’s upsetting, and reading it in big chunks feels wrong. Never has a book had this effect on me. Something horrible you can’t look away from but feel like you have to. Something that is so well written, as it tries to make sense of something so senseless, directly challenging the use of trauma and cruelty in literature as a mode of entertainment, making the reader question their own complicity in this phenomenon. Why can’t we look away?
The old man disappeared as I wrote the above paragraph, and has just returned from the tabac next to the square with two coffees: one for him and one for his partner. In that time too the woman to my left headed off and was replaced by a guy also about my age, who eyed her readying to leave and sat down as soon as she stood up, pulled out a banana, a bottle of water, and a copy of Houellebecq’s La possibilité d’une île. In the thirty minutes since noting that down, the banana remains uneaten.
Andrew’s somewhere in Paris with his girlfriend, Melika. I’ve stayed behind under the pretense of getting work done, though it’s a slow and unrewarding process. Andrew’s staying at mine because it’s Paris and everyone’s flats are small, so Melika’s friend only has the space for her to stay and vice versa.
Yesterday we wandered along the Seine with this same friend who’s putting her up and whose name, try as I might, I can’t remember. She said she’s considering dropping out of her course at the Sorbonne. I told her I’d done the same when I was around her age, and that I didn’t regret it. After a coffee she headed home and the three of us went to Invalides, where Andrew and I became utter caricatures, answering Melika’s questions about Napoleon, and gawking at all the armour and weapons. Afterwards we went for a drink nearby. A guy at the bar asked if I was German. I told him I wasn’t, that I was English. You don’t speak French like you’re English, he told me. That’s not a bad thing, he added. No one here seems to think I’m English, until I speak English, that is. So far I’ve been asked if I’m Québécois, Spanish, Italian, and now, German. Italian is the one I get the most. Melika said its my hair and eyebrows.
I wonder if the old woman listening to the Italian radio station thought I was a fellow countrymen? Was she even Italian? Or were we both listening to a language not our own? Anyway, when she left I followed suit and made my way down to Bois de Vincennes. I saw the black cloud from Porte Dorée and followed it. Lots of people were filming it. I did too and sent the video to a few people. You could still hear murmurs about the missing driver. Were there any passengers?
When the fire brigade turned up the air was thick with burning rubber and petrol. As three of them unrolled the hose two of them put cones on the road and kept any passing cars at a safe distance from the flames. I only realised then that the whole time I’d been watching that no one, despite there being no emergency services on the road, had driven past the burning van. Everyone had just stopped. I didn’t think French drivers could be so patient.
In less than a minute the fire was out, the cloud growing thicker and thicker and the smell getting worse and worse. The guy next to me, both of us perched over the bridge, pointed out three people leaning against the wall further up the road. That’s them, he said, they’re alive.