More violence, of death, pain for everyone
After the shock depression
[This is a very rough translation of a piece by Auster in La Presse]
Paul Auster - Born in the New Jersey in 1947, the writer Paul Auster lives New York since years. A city which, in its Trilogy newyorkaise as in several of its novels, is not only one background. It is made character. September 11, Paul Auster was at his place, in Brooklyn. With a few kilometers of the twin towers whose familiar silhouette cut out in the windows of the fourth floor of its house. A expensive friend, Michael Naumann, the editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit , then telephoned to him. Begged to write some lines. " I did not want of it. I did it for him, affirms the novelist, still shaken, in a short telephone interview. This text, included in the Barber of September 18, was not published in French on this side of the Atlantic. Paul Auster offered to the readers of the Press . Only one condition: a gift at the organization which comes to assistance of the families of the firemen missing in the drama. It will be done.
Our 14 year old daughter entered today to the high school. For the first time of its life, it took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, only.
It will not re-enter to the house this evening. The subways do not function any more in New York and my wife and me made so that it remains with friends in Upper West Side.
Less than one hour after it had passed under World Trade Center, the twin towers broke down.
Since the last floor of our house, we can see the smoke which invades the sky of the city. The wind blows towards Brooklyn today and the odors of the fire penetrated each part of the house. A terrible odor and cuisante, mixture of plastic, wire electric and extreme building materials.
The sister of my wife, who lives in TriBeCa *, with Juste 10 or 12 blocks of houses in north of what was before World Trade Center, invited to speak to us about the cries which it heard after the first tower had broken down. Friends with it, who lived in John Street, even more close to the site of the catastrophe, were evacuated by the font after the gate of their apartment had implosé under the impact. They sauntered towards north through rubble and the remains of which some, have says him, contained pieces of human bodies.
After having looked at information with television all the morning, my wife and me left in the district. Many people belonged to the handkerchiefs on their face. Others carried masks of workmen of the building. I stopped and I spoke to my hairdresser who was held devans his shop empty, the face corroded by the anguish. A few hours earlier, has it says me, the woman who holds the store of objets d'art right at side was on the telephone with her son-in-law, prisoner in his office with the 107e stage of World Trade Center. Less than one hour after it had spoken to him, the tower broke down.
All the day, by looking the horrible images on the television screen and smoke through the window, I thought of my friend, the funambulist Philippe Petit, who evolved/moved between the turns of World Trade Center in August 1974, just after the building work of the turns had been completed. A small man dancing at the edge of a vacuum of several hundred meters in an act of an indelible beauty.
Today, this same place was transformed into a place of mort.Cela terrifies me to imagine how many people were killed.
We knew all that a similar thing could arrive. We had evoked the assumption since years, but, now that the tragedy struck, it is quite worse of all than whoever had been able to imagine. The last foreign attack on the American ground took place in 1812. We do not have other precedents as regards not arrived today and the consequences of this aggression will undoubtedly be terrible. More violence, of death, pain for all the monde.Et thus XXIe century finally started.
* Abbreviation of Triangle Below Channel, district of Manhattan between SoHo and Financial District.