William is a violinist, but since the new regime forbade music he has taken up writing epitaphs. His eight-year-old daughter Molly is a bright, lively child with a quick wit and a voice that remains silent. The city they inhabit is governed by a totalitarian state that erases people.
In Zenda we present the opening pages of Curfew (Sigilo) by Jesse Ball.
***
A commotion rose, followed by a gunshot. The window stood wide, for the late-summer weather in the city called C was agreeable and the air delicate; so the shot sounded with a crack, as if it had burst into the room, as if one of the two people inside had chosen to fire at the body of the other.
But that wasn’t the case. And since no one in the room had been shot, the man, William Drysdale, twenty-nine years old, once a violinist and now an epitaphist, and his daughter Molly, eight, a student, kept sleeping.
Those were their occupations. Each day, Drysdale sat through interviews while Molly attended a school where she was repeatedly urged to recite things. She couldn’t, and she didn’t.
The street visible from the window looked shaded and pleasant. An elderly woman sat on a bench, bent with age and bleeding. Two men stood about fifteen meters away, and one carried a weapon. Three meters from the bench, a man lay beneath the wheels of a truck, perhaps suffering injuries that could never fully heal. The driver knelt and said something. He stood up and signaled to the two men. The man who held the gun tucked it away. A smaller truck arrived to remove the bodies. The man who had held the weapon, though he no longer displayed it, commanded the crowd to leave. People began to depart.
One minute after the shot, the street lay empty. This happened often. I will present this city to you as a city of deserted streets: deserted only when something occurred, deserted for a moment and then filled again, yet still deserted.
I will present this city and its inhabitants as a set of objects whose relationships cannot be described with any certainty. Although violence can connect them, and mercy, compassion, and hope might bind some to others, still what is happening cannot be judged, and what has passed is beyond judgment, leaving us once again with lives and belongings, places moving to and from here and there, unfortunate, ignorant, discordant.
Well, what kind of school was it, then? It was one of those schools where you sit in rows of benches and the teachers tell you what to think. You recite things and write things by rote. You read books chained to desks and you sit exams, often with rods used to enforce discipline. There was a patch of ground where lunchtime games could be played. Play was encouraged, and so was snitching.
*We have arrived — said Molly.
—Goodbye! —William replied, and held her back for a moment.
She ran into the building. Other children pushed past him as he watched her go.
—Drysdale, did you hear? —a rough older man asked, standing there with his wife. Either of them could be mistaken for a banker.
—Latreau is dead. He was shot this morning.
—The old woman? Why?
—She threw someone into the path of a bus.
—I heard it was a truck, —the wife said—. She thought the man was a cop, so she threw him in front of a truck. But they caught her before she could escape.
—Sorry to hear that —William said, distractedly—. Truly.
He moved his lips but barely.
William walked away without looking at either of them. He hadn’t looked at them once. If anyone had been watching, they might have thought the man and the woman were speaking to each other. William was that cautious.
[…]
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