If_A Mother's Memoir by Lise Marzouk

Author:Lise Marzouk [Marzouk, Lise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590510971
Goodreads: 44000734
Publisher: Other Press (NY)
Published: 2019-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

A CITY

The Institute is a city: it concentrates a dense population in a limited space and provides and facilitates a variety of activities for these citizens. Limited resources mean that everything here is on a miniature scale.

A room of about two hundred square feet therefore serves as a school. As in small rural schools, there’s only one class. Two teachers, substitute staff from the national education scheme, welcome students of all abilities and adapt exercises to suit each age group. Primary school children mingle with high-schoolers, and preschoolers with the primary school kids. The school is open every weekday, follows the official curriculum, and respects the calendar of vacations. As such, it is like any other educational establishment in Paris. But in this city, school isn’t compulsory, and there are generally few children here. Two or three at the most. Not that it’s unpleasant. Quite the opposite, in fact; it’s one of the places that connects the children most closely to their previous lives. Which means a lot of them would very much like to attend. Sadly, only too often they’re not well enough to do so. It turns out that education, like good health and eating, is one of those privileges we truly value only when deprived of it.

The classroom sometimes also serves as a gymnasium. A sports instructor comes once a week to supervise the children. The chairs are pushed aside, the computers protected, and the only Formica table moved to the middle of the room. It’s Ping-Pong time. Traditional bats and balls are used while a piece of string stretched between two yogurt pots acts as a net. The table must be only about five feet long by three feet wide, but that doesn’t matter. Its modest dimensions match the physical limitations of the players. In any event, the children wouldn’t be able to expend enough energy for normal forms of exercise. Other times there’s badminton. Here again, the appropriate type of racket is used but, given the lack of space, the shuttlecock is replaced by a balloon. The children enjoy it, a little. Truth be told, there’s something sad, and tragically laughable, about these ersatz sports. The parents probably welcome the organizers’ dedication and inventiveness, but they can’t help noticing the cramped space, the balls going missing among schoolbooks, rackets getting stuck in pipework, and—as ever—the throwing up that interrupts play. It all seems diminished. Even the children’s enjoyment. Parents succumb to a feeling of atrophy and a fear of seeing even this truncated.

Arts and entertainment seem better adapted to the constraints of illness and its treatments. The city has a library that is open to all, consisting of shelves of comics, and there’s a media library that boils down to a laptop and a few DVDs. Every now and then a movie theater is set up in the kitchen in the outpatient department on the far side of the main corridor. Charlie Chaplin films, Disney films, and a whole selection of cartoons are screened. Once a week this same kitchen is transformed into a painting studio.

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