Standing at midday on Monday on the packed main square in Aix-en-Provence with my face turned up to the hot sun, I felt cold, so cold. The chilling events in Paris last weekend occurred in the neighbourhood I have called home for seven years.
Just two weeks ago, with my husband and four small children, I moved from Paris to Provence. The Bataclan music venue on Boulevard Voltaire, where so many people perished on the night of Friday, November 13th, is 200m from our old apartment and a stone's throw from Charlie Hebdo magazine, where staff were executed on January 7th.
"Tu l'as échappé belle!" ("You had a close shave!") a bartender in a cafe exclaimed yesterday, vocalising the unspoken understanding between me and my husband these past few days that we had dodged a bullet.
Those words of a complete stranger echoed something my mother said when I announced that, after months of stressful property negotiations, our long-term family project had finally come to fruition. “You know what?” she said. “I’m so glad you’ll soon be far from Paris.” A mother’s intuition was a presentiment of terrible things.
Since the dark news of last Friday I have felt flabbergasted by the element of chance in life. Had our house purchase not gone through I would have been dining with my husband at Septime, a restaurant on Rue de Charonne, the abandoned 9pm reservation made months earlier. At 9.38pm gunmen opened fire on the terrace of La Belle Équipe, a few steps away, killing 19 people.
Having observed a long minute's silence on Place de l'Hôtel de Ville in Aix, I haltingly joined the crowd singing the French national anthem. I had learned its rousing words by osmosis last winter: my seven-year-old daughter recited them for homework in the weeks after the January 7th killings, when French patriotism was at its peak and La Marseillaise was being taught to all primary pupils. I might have felt like an impostor singing it in Aix, disloyal to Amhrán na bhFiann, but it was so fitting in its defiance: "Contre nous de la tyrannie, l'étendard sanglant est levé / marchons, marchons!" ("Against us stands tyranny, the bloody banner is raised / let's march, let's march!")
When a friend texted on Sunday to ask how we were doing, "seasick" was the word that came to mind. That family and friends, thankfully all unscathed, could so easily have been caught in the line of fire remains unthinkable. All the places where people died last weekend were our places, full of memories, the backdrop to our daily life in Paris, an extension of chez nous.
Although physically intact, my Parisian friends will be indelibly marked by last weekend's senseless violence. I sent many text messages on Monday morning, wishing my pals courage and safety as they resumed life à l'extérieur. Their responses confirmed the resilient motto of the city on the Seine: "Fluctuat nec mergitur". Shaken but not sunk.
On Monday, when I asked my four-year-old how his day had been, he said his class had learned about extraterrestrials. I realised with a start that Maxim meant terrorists. His teacher had encouraged an open discussion of the attacks, to allow the children to exorcise their demons.
Sleep has been fleeting since depravity descended on our old neighbourhood. A sense of having upped and abandoned my friends in their time of need continues to needle me. I have learned that terror knows no borders.
Sitting in the garden, watching my children play innocently in the evening sunshine, I struggle with a fierce foreboding. I try to shrug off the political and militarist rhetoric of these past days and recite words from a poem by Wendell Berry: "When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be . . . / I come into the peace of wild things . . . / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
