The Morning After by William Cloonan In Paris I jog early in the morning, when it is still dark. I leave my apartment, head up the Boulevard Blanqui to the Place d’Italie, turn right into the Rue Bobillot, then go through the Butte-aux-Cailles neighborhood and make a long loop home. Despite the wee hour, it is surprising how busy this area normally is on the weekend. Couples heading home from a long night out, parties ending, parties starting, clochards resolving world problems over a few drinks, and on Sunday, produce merchants setting up their stalls for the marché ouvert. The mornings of November 14 and 15 were not, however, normal. There was nobody in the streets, no lovers, no workers, no bums. Just a silence that was eerie rather than calm. By the morning after Friday the 13th , even before most residents of the city had gotten out of bed, Paris had already changed. Like most people in the city in the days immediately after the killings, I did not know what to do with myself. The normal routine was out of the question, but I had no idea how to replace it. So I walked. Initially the city seemed quite normal. Kids running around as their parents shopped and gossiped. That’s how it seemed until I got to the Luxembourg Gardens. Young, heavily-armed soldiers all over the place and the park closed. For want of anything better to do or say, I asked one of the soldiers when the Luxembourg would open again. His “aucune idée”was predictable, but as I was about to walk away, an older woman, about my age, rushed up to him and asked: “Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?” Had I been called upon to answer what seemed to me such a stupid question, the response could not have been printed in the French Review. Yet later that day I realized there was nothing wrong with the question, because it was not really a question. I had gone to a bus station to get a ride home. Public transportation functioned that weekend, but not at the normal pace. The sign at the abri indicated a fifteen-minute delay before the next bus. Normally, if this evokes any reaction from Parisians, it is on the order of: “C’est pas possible! La France est pourrie! C’est pas comme avant!”But on this day France was really not “comme avant,” and people’s talk reflected that. Everyone at the stop was rattling on about the night before, but what made it so striking was that nobody was saying anything new or particularly interesting. Just rehashing what they had seen on television or read in the morning papers. The point, I realized, was not to 12 From the Editor 13 communicate ideas, but to relieve pressure by making noises at each other, and thereby establishing a form of solidarity as aggrieved citizens. This is what I did not initially understand about the lady’s earlier comment. The psychological effects of November 13 on the nation were widespread and readily apparent, even if I was a bit slow to grasp them.A friend reports that when she went to her regular boulangerie, to the usual“Comment ça va?”the man behind the counter replied:“On fait de notre mieux aujourd’hui.”When she left the bakery, she realized that “au revoir” was not really a guarantee.1 But this was not the only hurt inflicted upon the French. In my neighborhood I would occasionally bump into some of the men who work at the Place d’Italie market. They understood that closing markets, as well as other spaces where crowds can gather, was a justifiable security measure, and one of them told me that some wives of colleagues who live outside the city were very nervous about their husbands going to work. Nobody questioned this reaction, yet at the same time, the men I spoke to expressed an equally justified concern about their loss of income, both in terms of sales and of the produce they had to discard. Even among those fortunate enough not to be direct or...