The Postcard

by Anne Berest

offers the passengers a bag of juicy red cherries. He lifts the bag up toward the bus window, and dozens of arms thin as matchsticks reach out for it, their spidery fingers grasping for the fruit. “Don’t feed the deportees!” cries the Red Cross nurse aboard the bus. “Their stomachs can’t handle it!” The returning prisoners know very well that the cherries are poison for their systems, but the temptation is too great. The bus starts moving again, toward the Left Bank and the Place Saint-Michel, the boulevard Saint-Germain. And the cherries don’t stay down and are vomited up again. “They should mind their manners,” a watching pedestrian comments. They should eat more politely, thinks another. “They smell so bad. They should shower.”