It is warm in the streets of our city, as warm as it is in October in Madrid, or April in Paris. The terraces are full. Just a few more days and it’s Christmas. We have worked hard in recent months. The children have been free for a few days now. We don’t yet know what the format will be that will work for all of us over the next two weeks, so that’s why we’re walking among the shoppers without a plan. I’m thinking of getting tablecloths from the attic. Maybe we should put up more decorations around the house. Maybe I should sleep.
“I know a place where they sell the tastiest hot apple juice,” my six-year-old son suddenly says. We ignore him, catering tips from a six-year-old go a bridge too far, but he persists. He recently sat there with his godfather, really, he doesn’t know the name of the café, somewhere in an alley, he knows the way there. I look at him and see from the wrinkle in his nose that I have to listen to him. “Okay, we’ll do it,” I say and he jumps for joy. “Follow me,” he says and uses the pool pass. We trot after him. “It’s really close,” he calls over his shoulder. We prepare ourselves for a meandering and disappointing journey, but at the next corner we see a terrace with green Jardin Luxembourg chairs. “Right here!” he shouts, beaming, and confidently chooses a table in the sun. We order. They bring us steaming cups of hot apple juice, with star anise and ginger and cinnamon sticks. We take a sip, he is right, all winter angels gather in this drink. “I told you so?” he says again and again and grins. In the last two weeks he has lost four baby teeth, it looks great on him. His mouth indicates progress. Not a ruin, but a construction site.
In the last two weeks he has lost four baby teeth, it looks great on him
Prosperity still shuffles past, laden with bags, under trees hung with strings of lights. I read that Americans fleeing Trump like to live in this town. They think it is a liberal paradise, a fairy tale. And it is. All those glowing children, all those fresh-cheeked men, all those beautiful yoga legs who keep stepping in and out of those heritage buildings. If I could sit here forever, on this patio, with my apple juice and my family, I would slowly forget everything we fear all the time.
Maybe we should do that too, sit there forever, until we turn to stone, smiling stiffly and with ice-cold hands. At first people would think we were scary, but after a while a clever official would hammer a sign into the ground at our feet that said ‘The Happy Family’. They would come from far and wide to watch us, even after the next big war. They would touch our noses until they shined. They would try to peer into our eyes, hoping to capture something of what that life was like, how smug people were before nothing was certain anymore.
My son would be on his way to new teeth for good.
We get up. “Maybe from now on we can drink apple juice here every Sunday,” says my son. “As a tradition.” “Except in the summer,” I say. “Then also,” he says, “because who cares.”
We walk. Don’t petrify. Always keep moving.
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