Free Things and A Man Asleep by Georges Perec

uncommon effectiveness, to forget, or rather, to suspend their habitual concerns. Their gloomiest forecasts, their fear of never making it, of ending up in some obscure and narrow rut, looked a good deal less dreadful, on some days, than what was happening before their eyes, than what threatened them day by day.
    Those were sad and violent times. Housewives stocked up with sugar in kilos, bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, coffee and condensed milk. Squads of helmeted security policemen in shiny black waterproof capes and service boots patrolled at ease up and down Boulevard Sebastopol, carrying cavalry rifles.
    Because the back seats of their cars were often strewn with a few out-of-date issues of newspapers which some touchy individuals could be expected to consider demoralising, subversive or just plain liberal - Le Monde , Libération, France-Observateur - Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends fell prey on occasions to furtive fears and worrying hallucinations: they were being followed, their number-plates were being taken down, they were being watched, being framed: five wine-sodden foreign legionnaires were going to set upon them and leave them for dead in a dark alley, on the rain-washed pavement, in a neighbourhood of ill repute . . .
    Thus martyrdom burst into their daily lives, became, on occasions, an obsession and, it seemed to them, a characteristic of a particular group attitude, and it gave the days, the events and the thoughts of this time their specific colouring. Visions of blood, of explosions, violence and terror went with them always. It might seem on some days that they were ready for anything; but the next day life would be precarious, the future bleak. They would dream of exile, of the countryside, of long cruises. They wished they could live in England, where policemen are reputed to behave with respect for the individual. And all through that winter, as the cease-fire drew nearer and nearer, they would dream of the coming spring, of holidays to come, of the year ahead when, as the papers said, fratricidal passions would have subsided, when it would be possible once again to saunter, to go out at night on foot with your mind at rest and your body safe and sound.
    The pressure of events led them to take a stand. They were committed, of course, only superficially. Their political consciousness, insofar as they had any such thing as a structured and considered set of thoughts rather than an inchoate eruption of more or less consistently angled opinions, was, they thought, already beyond or above the Algerian issue, engaged with alternatives that were more Utopian than real, with general questions which, they conceded with some regret, had little chance of producing any kind of practical result. None the less, they joined the Anti-Fascist Committee which had just been set up in their area. They rose, on occasions, at five in the morning, to go out, with three or four comrades, pasting up posters calling on people to be alert, denouncing the guilty and their stooges, protesting at outrages and honouring the innocent victims. They took petitions round all the houses in their street, and, three or four times, did guard duty in threatened premises.
    They took part in some demonstrations. On such days, there were buses on the streets without number-plates, cafés would shut early, people would hurry home. They were frightened all day long. They went out feeling uneasy. It was five o'clock and a thin drizzle was falling. They looked at the other demonstrators, smiling tensely, sought out their friends, tried to talk about other things. The marchers formed into columns, which moved forward, then came to a standstill. From the midst of the crowd they were in, they could see, in front of them, a great expanse of wet and gloomy tarmac and then, taking up the whole width of the boulevard, the thick black line of the Riot Police. Cohorts of midnight-blue pantechnicons with wire netting over their windows processed