A Cold Halo of Calm

Last night I went to bed earlier than usual. I’d avoided coffee all day so that sleep might come. Yet after half an hour of turning from side to side, the same unworthy temptation returned. To ingest something I knew would poison my soul—still, I could not restrain myself. My hand drifted back to the phone, to the headphones, to the long analyses of a looming war. Foreign news agencies insisted that only hours remained before it would begin; domestic outlets dismissed it as fabrication, mere psychological warfare and manufactured media frenzy. My head grew heavy, and I slipped into a shallow sleep thick with nightmares. Every half hour I seemed to jolt, as though plunging from a height. By morning, my eyes were swollen.

Through weeks of compulsively following the news, I felt ashamed—worse than that, disloyal. As though my allegiance to my beloved writer Olga Tokarczuk had been tarnished. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, she writes: “Newspapers are designed to keep us in a state of perpetual anxiety, so that our feelings will be kept away from what truly deserves them. Why should I accept their authority and obey their will?” Those sentences had, for a long time, altered the very angle of my gaze.

Studying my wan, anxious face in the mirror, I swore off the news channels and resolved, for the sake of survival, to look only to the sky. Thunderclaps and towering columns of smoke would be my only signs that war had begun. I would no longer allow the news to toy with me.

The sky did not keep me waiting. That very morning, at the outset of my resolve to behave as though life were normal, I found myself on a real estate website, scanning the prices of northern villas—each one cradled by green mountains, set in a landscape as spellbinding as Switzerland. I wanted to buy one. I felt certain the country would soon be free and that I would be able to invite my friends from abroad. If Viktor Frankl had been my analyst, I know he would have diagnosed me with a liberation complex. Perhaps on the threshold of catastrophe the dream of freedom was gently stroking me.

Suddenly the windows trembled; smoke surged upward from every direction. I snapped the laptop shut and ran to the balcony. One blast after another. War had come to us—a monster that fed on blood and left only wreckage in its wake.

And yet I did not believe in change. The regime—collapse? Unthinkable. They would adapt, recalibrate, learn from defeat, devise another way to endure. I knew the iron resolve with which they crushed opponents and protesters to the very last. I opened the domestic news page. Eerily blank. Even in wartime, the Leader—whose authority we’d heard so much about, who derided every ship and missile—was absent, nowhere to steady the nation. We were like children left to fend for ourselves, sustained only by the jokes circulating online for mutual consolation: “They won’t touch us—we’re the Leader’s friends.” The public’s faith in the precision, the calculated intelligence, of violence struck me as astonishing; it felt like a carefully engineered narrative, fed to them by powerful media as unquestionable truth.

my anxiety had grown so acute I needed air. I switched off the news and stepped onto the balcony. Several riot-police motorcycles roared past our alley. It felt like an apocalyptic film: deadly missiles raining from the sky, and in the streets, batons, tear gas, and military weapons poised to quiet any dissenting voice. The god of war was unmistakably mocking us.

Yet, just as in those hard seasons of my past when, in the deepest night and the farthest edge of despair, a snowy voice would suddenly bestow a strange tranquility, now too the beauty of the encircling mountains and the newly budding trees offered an odd consolation—a cool halo of calm at the core of catastrophe. The contrast itself made me laugh. As Friedrich Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science: “To laugh is to be glad in the face of misfortune.”

Holding that fragile, groundless calm, I went back inside. I gathered the essentials—my laptop, my notebook, my gold—and moved them into the narrow corridor by the apartment door, along with some blankets and pillows. Windows encircled the living room and kitchen; the capital’s relentless shockwaves could splinter the glass at any moment. No sooner had I sat down and assembled my small bunker than dread crept back in.

I tried several times to call my son. No tone. The lines were dead. At the very beginning of the war, the authority that only a month earlier had killed thousands of teenagers in the streets proved incapable of resolving even the simplest disruptions. I attempted to send him a message; the internet was down as well. They did not seem to mind. When a country sinks into blackout, anything becomes permissible. Their violence sprang from absolute desperation. They knew they were taking their final breaths, so they were intent on burning every bridge behind them.

The communications shutdown unnerved me—not because of my son, whom I knew would return home at once, but because it summoned the memory of my father. He never permitted a telephone in our house. In that childhood home, when we were whipped with a belt on the most trivial pretext, no one knew; no one could intervene. Perhaps that’s what steered me toward writing. One who only reads can remain a spectator, but to write is to draw others into the act of seeing.

From afar, the thud of air defense continues. Down in the alley, frayed nerves ignite at the slightest provocation; let a driver slow for a moment, and horns and curses descend on him. I call my son’s school—an insistence on contact, futile and irrational. I cannot bear the air inside the house. Anxiety, like a formidable apparition, has pressed its foot to my throat.

I go out to withdraw cash and buy provisions. In the alley, a cluster of schoolchildren run past, faces streaked with tears and fear. One of them cries out, “Don’t go that way—they’re shooting. You can smell the gunpowder.” I keep walking in that direction. I didn’t know there would be war. There is no cash at home.

The bank is closed, though I can see the staff inside. I rap on the glass. An elderly guard gestures sharply at the locked door. “Can’t you see we’re closed?”

“I can,” I say. “But what about the people? If they can’t reach their own money in a crisis, what is a bank for?”

He flicks his hand in dismissal and drags the shutter down.

Anger would be futile. I head for the ATMs. Empty—every one of them. Some still bear the scorch marks of last month’s protests. With the little money in my pocket, I need bread. Every bakery along the way is shuttered. I turn toward the greengrocer; it remains open. A young man with a blanched face, pushing a broom across the floor, murmurs, “God help us.”

Perhaps it is this wretched period, my nerves undone and no pills at hand for its harsher symptoms, that strips me of patience. “Nothing is going to end well,” I say. “The day they killed thousands of children, everything ended.”

The young man stops sweeping and stares. One of his eyes drifts slightly. Others turn toward me. I go on: “When you make other people’s lives cheap, your rule enters a crisis of legitimacy—and sooner or later they come for you.”

An elderly woman in a headscarf, peering through thick lenses, lashes out: “Where is your scarf, madam?”

I answer with a thin, dangerous smile. “And you, madam? Doesn’t the Qur’an—your holy book—say, ‘The hand of Allah is over their hands’? Those who commit injustice are overtaken by it.”

Her eyes blaze. “Do not misuse the Holy Book.”

I hardly know how I’ve filled so many plastic bags. People part to let me pay quickly; they do not want my presence to invite trouble. The sharpness of my voice startles even me. I imagine an officer appearing—plainclothes—forcing me into a car bound for nowhere. I leave at once, the bags of potatoes, corn, and tomatoes heavy in my hands.

At an open bakery I take my place in the crowd. Surrounded by so many bodies, I feel a measure of safety. A teenage boy studies me; there is warmth in his gaze, a flicker of joy and mischief. For them, war carries a charge of excitement. And so close to spring, to Nowruz, suspension is harder to endure; most people believe that within weeks this infected tooth will be pulled from the mouth of the nation.

I am not so hopeful. Perhaps it’s my age, or the fact that I was educated for years within this very system: I see change as either impossible or indistinguishable from chaos. Besides, freedom delivered by missiles resembles, at best, Pandora’s box—its hope itself a curse, another form of suspension.

I keep such thoughts to myself, unwilling to distress my aging mother. She calls me a “killjoy.” She favors my brother, who insists that after the war the system will collapse at once, the country will be liberated and set in order without the slightest vacuum of power. I understand them; in the midst of crisis, the image of a utopia consoles. But in crisis, instead of utopia I often think of suicide. The thought is infinitely calming and, in a paradoxical way, keeps me from enacting my conspiracy against myself.

Arms heavy with groceries, I pass motorcycles and cars snaking in a long line at the gas station. A scuffle has broken out; a woman slams a steering-wheel lock against another man’s windshield. People exhausted by inflation, soaring prices, collective mourning, and now war have turned against one another. Everyone is desperate to flee the capital. Most are bound for the north, though the roads are sealed. Still they drive, marooned along the highways, pitching tents beneath whatever cluster of trees they can find.

I remain at home. Only when I see the glass splinter and the building tremble do I descend to level minus two—the basement parking garage of our building.

Nearby, in front of an old car wash whose cobblestones are slick with engine oil, I witness something uncanny—a contradiction distilled. People hurry past in panic, one clutching bottles of mineral water, another balancing trays of eggs. In that grimy space, amid heaps of refuse left by those who had no time for the metal bin at the corner, a small, solitary tree in the strip of earth beside the car wash stands submerged in premature white blossoms, on the last day of February.

Without thinking, I find myself bowing to it, overcome by an unexpected impulse of prayer. Those frail yet potent presences seem to exist outside the world’s uproar—beyond good and evil, within the province of love.

The building manager has warned us not to use the elevator in wartime, but no one heeds him. It keeps shuttling up and down, filling and emptying. I take the emergency stairs. I do not want to meet my end in that narrow box. The building’s backup power is hardly reassuring. I turn the key, put my groceries away.

Our neighbor is making a noisy exit. In the corridor, the woman swears at her small child: “Move, for God’s sake—put your shoes on.” The husband strides off, then rushes back; he’s forgotten the car keys. A moment later the woman returns—she has left the kettle on. Uproar spills into the hallway. They trade accusations without pause.

When finally they’re gone, instead of relief—instead of drawing a long breath—I feel, astonishingly, alone. It startles me. Their baby’s incessant crying from morning till night, the mother’s imprecations—her repeated declaration that she despised marriage and children—often made a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Farewell Party resound in my mind: “The only thing that makes me somewhat skeptical about human procreation is the unwise choice of parents. Some of the least attractive people in the world feel they must reproduce at any cost. They apparently suffer from the illusion that ugliness becomes lighter when shared with their children.”

And yet, now that they are gone, their absence expands strangely; the space they leave is filled by a bleak and dreadful silence. All at once I sense the capital exposed to the missiles—and myself exposed within this building. At any moment, I could be buried here. I steady myself with a cold thought: for the dead, what difference is there between an honorable burial and an anonymous mass grave?

A thunderous blast yanks me back to the present, to my narrow corridor. No one knows what tomorrow will bring—or even the next minute. Worse, there is no safe side, no pure light or pure darkness. Everyone is justified, and everyone is cruel. As Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt writes in Einstein’s Treason: “In war, one does not kill in order to kill; one kills in order not to die.” The tragedy is almost laughable in its enormity: that all who claim to defend the truth must, in the end, aim their weapons at one another.

The windows shudder. The glass could splinter at any second. I have to go two levels down, to the underground parking. My son still has not arrived. I have no word from my family. No one even has my address. This exile began years ago—when publishers rejected all my books, when no university would hire me, when my writing was banished to the back of a drawer. And my family? I was Meursault—Camus’s stranger.

In these moments, though, the thought grants me a curious lightness. I am strangely content. My situation is, in a way, easier than that of those who have many beloved lives to lose. As Irvin Yalom reflects in A Matter of Death and Life, “Grief is the price we pay for having loved.”

I have no one. I am free. Like an abandoned arsenal, so emptied of ammunition that it does not even register as a target.

I make a promise to myself: once I return to my apartment, I’ll begin to read Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch again, from the first page. That stoic, luminous woman is the only companion I possess in the world.