The woman sitting next to me is crying
and says ‘excusez-moi.' I say ‘ce n'est
pas grave.' She says ‘si c'est grave,
vous n'en savez rien.' ‘That's true' I
say ‘I don't know a thing about it.' Our
conversation is not a beginning, not an
end. Like everything in a city it's
somewhere in the middle_

A handbag growls, everyone looks up.
A woman zips a dog into view. ‘Shush
now, Mummy's here.' She zips back,
catches the dog's skin. It yelps.
‘Shush!' she hisses and the crowd
screams ‘Mummy's here'_

The crying woman has a big lump of
dough on her lap. She starts to knead it.
‘I always do this when everything's in
danger of falling apart. The more you
knead, the better it sticks together'_

Even before she can bend over the
lump, strange hands grab at the dough.
Ringed hands, clammy children's
hands, wrinkled hands, the hands of a
Chinese too. He doesn't knead, he picks
at it. The woman slaps him in the face.
‘I don't have any wrinkles, life's just
pinched my cheeks'_

The woman next to me has stopped
crying. The dough on her lap is wispy. I
lose her in the crowd, the metro crowd,
that, just as the sea only breaks on the
surface, only breaks and foams above
ground_
Translated by David Colmer