Leaving Tabasco

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Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine — and couldn’t stop imagining — that the virulent outbreak of flu was spreading far and wide. My imagination had hit the mark in one sense at least. The winter had lasted longer than usual and the early morning temperature was still stuck at twenty below, even in the first days of March. Anybody who hadn’t already succumbed to bronchitis and a cough was scheduled to do so. But the problem wasn’t just the physical misery that spared nobody; people had gotten so bad-tempered that they made the lead-gray sky look even grayer with faces that reflected the grayness. You couldn’t have found a smile on any passing face, not even by mistake. As kids came out of school, they moved among the silent passengers of the U-Bahn with the sinister docility of grim miniature adults.

O Germany! who could love you in that condition? In similar years — though no winter had been quite so prolonged and so severe — I had floated through the surrounding gloom, buoyed up by the memory of my native sun. Recalling its heat filled me with an angry vigor. I was the one who walked faster on the streets, I was the one who spoke louder when I bought bread. But now my last reserves of energy had been drained away by my sickly fantasy: the whole world was coming down with flu.

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