When I set my foot again into the city, she greeted me like at every meeting we had before: embracing me, grabbing me to take me out for a dance, pretending she could be mine for a moment or for a lifetime, whatever I chose it to be.
All the while I knew that she might spit me out at any moment. She would do the same to anybody no matter whether they had come in a pretentious quest for luck and glory, with the firm intention to stay for good and improve their lives and those of their children through hard work and thrift and or whether they had called her home for generations. Her tolerance to accept people of all colours, tongues and aspirations as her citizens, their mere intention to find their luck here being a sufficient qualification, is matched only by her callousness towards all those who fail to keep up with her dizzying tempo and who, instead of luck and glory, can find only loneliness or a path strewn with unsurmountable hurdles. At times, she had given me energy with an intensity that I had never known before, at others she seemed to strip me of my last heartbeat.
As I was riding from her unadorned suburbs to her sprawling center she slowly lured me into her world allowing me brief glimpses of the wealth of colours, origins and stories of her people, arranged almost like in a kaleidoscope, as she sent them on and off the train. Opposite of me a Mexican father was sitting with a child on his knees and the same expression of stoicism I had seen many years ago on the faces in his native land. I wondered whether the long voyage had not done much to improve on the hardship and humiliations of his life or whether he simply could not be bothered to rid himself of an attitude that had carried him through them before.
A little later three girls, barely fourteen, in all shades of black and brown hopped on to the train to pose and perform dance steps to the music from their headphones. One of them was tall and beefy, dressed a bit like a punk with an impressive afro-hairstyle to round off her look. She was giving the impression that she might throw herself to the floor and breakdance at any minute. The second chewed her gum without saying a word while she was being hugged in permanence by her boyfriend from behind. The third was the beauty queen of the band, small, with silk-like long hair and full of self-confidence, dressed in a sexy attire and acting as if she expected to be discovered any minute as a popstar on the train to the city centre. As I observed them I wondered whether children their age would ever come back to wearing hairstyles with outlines that look as though they had been cut around a pot sitting on their head, striped pullovers and corduroy trousers that are too short.
As I was still contemplating my own childhood, next on stage was a man dressed in rags dragging a little waggon behind him that was filled with a pile of random basic commodities he eagerly tried to sell to the audience: trashy romance novels from the 1960s, plastic tea pots and other household appliances, toys for the sandbox and condoms. All the while he was playing music from a half-broken cassette recorder, shaking his greasy hair as best he could under his woollen hat and looking at us through his sunglasses. I marveled at the impassive subway passengers around me who barely seemed to notice this bizarre appearance. Suddenly a faint memory of Jenny sprang to my mind as she walked up to a doorman during an earlier visit to the city asking where she could catch a taxi to xy . "Come on", he hollered at us, " country girls like to walk!"
This it what makes me so uneasy in this city, it constantly seems to unmask me as a country girl.
By the time we reached our final destination for that day: Hervé's apartment in a quiet residential neighbourhood close to one of the city's universities, I felt as if I had never left town. As I walked through the streets amidst hurrying investment bankers in high heels - this time around probably worrying more about their jobs than about their next deal - Mexican streetsweepers, bartenders from the Midwest, artist-waiters from Argentina, Korean shopkeepers and doctors from Iran, I felt as though I was one of them. Submerged into this mass of people from everywhere I had suddenly become again a citizen of this city of all cities. I remembered the Afghani doctor who had once told me at her christmas party in her Central Park West apartment with a view of the park and the skyscrapers: "The world meets in this city". Like nowhere else.
I was happy to see Hervé again after many years. The handsome son of a luckless Parisian actress and a European football coach who was world famous at his time he is fluent in at least five languages, used to play close to professional football and the piano and teaches at a local university. He had made some weak attempts to leave the city over the years. He had to come back each time. Whenever he considers going somewhere else he finds too little culture, too much segregation, not enough movement nor people from everywhere.
He confessed that he found his single life less interesting and fun as everyone had started to have children and stopped going out. But when he later took us out to a downtown restaurant with a woman from Hongkong he subtly referred to as "China", her boyfriend and a smart and pretty Italian woman who used to be his student, I thought to myself that his bachelor life seemed interesting enough after all. As the jetlag slowly took over I readied myself for a rediscovery of the city to find out how life had changed after the bursting of the bubble. I had lived here before and right after the fall of the towers and back then it had shown a remarkable resilience. Yet, your reaction might still be different when your world implodes from whithin rather than being attacked from the outside.
The sweetheart remarked that if the attackers had planned all this knowingly it would have been a stroke of genius. To the felling of the symbols of its economic power, the country reacted with policies that had helped create a humongous financial bubble. No that it burst it has all but destroyed the country's economic system Indeed, it remains to be seen Whether developments will stop short of destroying it. Ultimately, the country had reacted to the attacks with self-desctruction - of its civil liberties, its democracy and its economy now, of everything that had made it strong and enviable. In the ensuing days
we were to get a flavor of both the self-destruction and the ability for reinvention.
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