A Circle of One Kilometre Radius

Our world has shrunk. In Paris during lockdown, we can only go a kilometre from home. All the parks and playgrounds are closed. We can leave the house for an hour at a time, and during the day we are not allowed to go out to exercise between the hours of 10am and 7pm. We can walk, but not run. We decide for ourselves that this rule applies only to adults, and that children can scoot if the adults with them walk.

This means that our outings are limited in scope. We have circuits we tread. One is around the edge of our local park. Starved of greenery, we gaze through the locked fences at the wooded paradise within. Silent and empty, the ducks have taken over. We see the paths which we used to scoot along, the grass where we rolled down the hill, all closed to us as we tramp along the pavement outside. There are many of us who walk this circuit, as if by
moving around the perimeter we can fool ourselves for just a moment that we are actually in the park.

The other walk we do regularly is to our mairie — the local council offices. In front of the mairie is a paved area which cannot be closed off to the public, and so it is here that families congregate. Roller-blading, scooting and cycling all happen on the slightly-too-bumpy patio, as parents eye up the children and evaluate who is too young to observe social distancing.

After the first week we start to tire of these options. We are used to being able to spread our wings and explore, and now we are confined to this small circle of space. We start to feel that we can’t be bothered to go around the park, again.

Yet we continue, because that is all we can do.

We walk the same routes, tread the same pavements, but we start to notice things we hadn’t seen before. There’s a little area of trees where it almost feels like a park. People and dogs sit on the scrubby grass and pretend they are not breaking the rules, which say no sitting down, keep moving when you are outside. It’s named after a Tunisian. We wonder why.

Another day, we see a strange dome constructed in the gardens of a large building. There’s no way to know what it’s for. Could it be emergency hospital beds, or a pop-up laboratory? We speculate each time we go past.

In our fifth week of lockdown, we notice the aqueduct. Once we’ve seen it, we can’t believe we didn’t see it before. It’s preserved under glass, as it’s over four hundred years old. It was built by the Medici family to transport water to their palace. I’ve run past it many times and never given it a glance. Now I’m not allowed to exercise and so I walk. The world around me has gained detail, come into focus.

Others are doing the same as us. We all lean towards the green when we see it. Never before had we realised how important it was to us to have a change from the grey of pavements and roads, and never before has it been so difficult to find. People take photos of the empty park, reaching their phones through the fence to capture the image of this time out of time.

One day, we find a disused railway line, running beneath our feet underneath the road. We can’t get there but we can see it. Here the green has won, creeping over the rails. It’s lush and verdant, and we stare at it as if starved. Next to us is a man with his toddler in a pushchair. He drinks in the green and tells her to look too. She twists away, too young to appreciate how precious it is in this time of concrete and interiors.

On these outings our conversations flourish. One day we spend the whole walk discussing how it was decided that there were seven days in a week. Such an impractical number to settle on, it can’t be divided into halves, thirds or quarters. Why not ten, or twelve? Perhaps, says my daughter, it was because they just couldn’t wait that long for the weekend. But then, why not six instead?

We are stopped by the police when we go out. We have to show our ID papers and our attestation, authorising our trip. They lurk in unexpected places and they are armed. By the side of the park, outside our local shop. They aren’t friendly, although they aren’t too unfriendly either. We will be fined if our form is incorrectly filled in or if we stray too far from home. Three strikes and you can face a prison sentence.

We think of all the people who have lived in Paris in strange times. We are not the first people to be spending our days inside these Hausmann apartments, confined by rules and the threat of what might be outside. We learn what it is to see police in the street ahead and to turn around and walk in the other direction, hoping that they won’t stop and interrogate us.

We talk of all the people through history and across the world whose movements have been restricted. Up to now, we did not realise how free we were to be able to walk to the local shops whenever we wanted. We did not realise that our liberty was a privilege. Now we know.

We learn things we did not know we would learn, for no one knew this would happen. We learn things that perhaps we would rather not learn, but we learn them regardless. We feel the pressure to show how much we are learning, how well we are using this time, to be seen to triumph over the restrictions. We realise that learning to resist this pressure is valuable in itself.

And through all this we live one day at a time, finding meaning in the details.