Free Things and A Man Asleep by Georges Perec Page A

in the distance. They dragged their feet, holding hands, dripping with sweat, scarcely daring to shout, and ran off as soon as the first signal was given.
    It didn't add up to much. They were the first to be aware of this, and they often wondered, standing in the middle of the pack, what they were doing there, out in the cold, in the rain, in these sinister parts of the town — Bastille, Nation, Hôtel de Ville. They wished something would happen to prove that what they were doing was important, necessary, irreplaceable, that their fear-struck efforts would have a meaning for them, would be something they needed, something that might help them to know themselves, to change themselves, to live. No: their real lives were elsewhere, in a near or distant future also full of menace, but of a more subtle, less straightforward kind: traps you could not touch, spellbound webs.
    The attempted assassination at Issy-les-Moulineaux and the brief demonstration which followed it marked the end of their militant activities. Their local Anti-Fascist Committee held one more meeting and agreed to step up its activity. But, as the holiday season was nearly upon them, there didn't really seem to be any good reason for them even to remain vigilant.
     
     
     
    VIII
     
    They could not have said exactly what it was that changed when the war ended. For a long time it was as if the only impression they could feel was the sense of an ending, of something completed or concluded. Not a happy ending, not a dramatic resolution, but quite the opposite, a melancholy, dying fall, which left behind it feelings of emptiness, of bitterness, memories clouded over by darkness. Time had passed, time had fled; an era was over; peace had returned, a peace they had never known; the war came to an end. At a stroke, seven years tipped into history: their student years, their years of making friends, the best years of their lives .
    Maybe nothing had changed. They would still sometimes stand at their window, looking at the courtyard, the tiny gardens, the chestnut tree, listening to the birds singing. Other books, other records were now piled up on their rickety bookshelves. The gramophone needle was beginning to wear out.
    Their work had stayed the same. They were doing the same surveys as three years before. What do you shave with? Do you put polish on your shoes? They had seen films, and seen films again, they had travelled, and discovered other restaurants. They had bought shirts and shoes, jumpers and skirts, plates, sheets and trinkets.
    What was new was terribly insidious, terribly vague, terribly bound up with their own unique story, with their dreams. They were weary. They had aged; yes, they had.
    Some days they felt as if they still hadn't begun to live. But the life they were leading came more and more to seem to them a precarious and ephemeral thing; and they felt drained of strength, as if their waiting, their hardships, their pinched budgets had worn them out, as if all of it - unsatisfied desires, imperfect pleasures, wasted time - had been in the natural order of things.
    On occasions they wished everything would stay the same, not ever move. Then they would be able just to drift. Their life would keep them warm: it would stretch ahead through the months and years without - or almost without - altering, without ever hampering them. It would be but the harmonious sequence of their days and nights, the one almost imperceptibly modulating the other, a never- ending reprise of the same themes, a continuous happiness, a perpetuated enjoyment which no upset, no tragic event, no twist or turn of fate would ever bring into question.
    At other times they could not stand it a moment longer. They wanted to fight, and to win. But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and