The Travels of Daniel Ascher by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat

Author:Déborah Lévy-Bertherat [Lévy-Bertherat, Déborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-708-6
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

HÉLÈNE WENT BACK TO PARIS on one of the first trains to run again, passengers piled in as best they could, sitting on armrests, in corridors, on their bags, a real exodus. Guillaume had stayed down south, so she celebrated the year 2000 with a girlfriend from the Institute of Archaeology. Everyone was waiting for midnight more impatiently than usual, talking loudly, getting excited, and with good reason, they weren’t just changing year, but changing century and millennium, it was the eve of a new era. Listening to the old Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” they messed around blowing smoke rings, the zeros in 2000, then they blew at them to break them up. However much they made fun of millennium scaremongers, of the millennium bug, and the end of the world foretold by astrologers, they still believed in it all a bit, and as the evening wore on and they drank more and more, their laughter became tainted with anxiety. The recent cyclones could have been signs of something; meteorologists had named them Lothar and Martin, like a couple of escaped fairground bears. A very pretty, totally drunk girl stood on the sofa with her hair tumbling loose, invoking the gods and prophesying the end of our civilization, a turning point in the history of the world.

Hélène was slumped on the divan next to a boy who was trying to explain that, mathematically, the third millennium didn’t start until January 1, 2001. She’d had too much to drink to follow his reasoning. She was thinking about that aunt in America, that Aunt Mala who might still be alive, it was as if a part of Daniel’s family were coming back from the dead. In among the cigarette smoke and the head spin of alcohol, skyscrapers towered before her. In the year 2000, in the spring, she would go to New York.

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