Two years ago I celebrated my birthday in a tiny, full restaurant. A relative had a cough, and every time she coughed, we joked, “Coronavirus?”
A week later my husband came home. He had interviewed the Italian-based writer Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer for the radio, and he had told about the corona situation there. My husband was slightly panicked.
“I think you’re acting a little hysterical,” I said at the time. I think you’re acting a bit hysterical: those turned out to be historic words, historic in their stupidity, and my husband has often repeated them to me. He didn’t act hysterical, because of pandemic, etcetera.
Somehow I thought at the time that it would all work out. That was because it had run loose all my life, in my own country and on my own continent, then. (In my own life, everything had changed instantly the day my mother died, but all I was left with was a lifelong, deep fear of fate in personal situations.)
I spent my childhood in a persistent Children for childrenmedley about bombs, missiles, the Cold War, seals, acid rain and secondhand cigarette smoke, yet a tangible global crisis never materialized. So I could not imagine such a crisis, although we also received almost daily education about the Second World War. You can’t imagine a world war if you haven’t lived in it yourself.
I still can’t imagine such a war, but something has changed. I can now imagine that from one day to the next something worldwide could go completely wrong.
Despite the doom of the eighties I grew up in, I didn’t have that imagination before. Or maybe it was even because of that doom: every day in my childhood we talked about cruise missiles, but one never fell on our heads. In fact, it just kept getting better. Then you get the idea that everything will always work out in the end.
That’s over now, I notice. I can easily imagine that everything changes one day. And my children too. Two years ago they went to school one day, and the next day they were at home with eight hundred rolls of toilet paper and a mother who could only scream ‘wash hands’.
So I can imagine more. Everyone does, I suspect. Whether that’s a curse or a blessing, I don’t know.