The Silent City

The first thing you notice about Vares is not the silence. It is how ordinary everyone is inside it — a butcher wrapping paper, a boy counting steps, a woman deciding against an umbrella.

I set the recorder on the parapet and let it run for forty minutes. When I played it back that evening there was wind, and under the wind, faintly, the sound of a city holding its breath on purpose.

You cannot archive a decision. I have tried. What I have instead is eleven years of people agreeing, every single morning, not to say the thing.