We were having dinner on the terrace of a French bistro in the First District. Not far from us was sitting a well-dressed old lady with blond hair, whose thread of words in English I could not avoid overhearing. She was explaining something about Swarovski crystals to a young woman, who I assumed was her daughter-in-law. She pronounced her words slowly and clearly, with an evident dose of aristocracy.
At the next table, two young women of Turkish descent were chatting spiritedly, ignoring the Syrian woman that had just appeared and approached them to ask for some money. The old lady noticed the refugee and called her over.
It looked as if the woman did not dare to approach the old lady at first, knowing that she would never receive anything from such people except for a double humiliation: not only would she refuse to give her any money, but she would deliberately emphasise her superiority at every turn. It was probably politeness – or despair? – that made her approach the old lady’s table when the latter repeated her invitation.
The old lady handed the woman a small package with the slices of bread that had come with her dinner and said that either ‘we’ or ‘you’ – I didn’t hear the pronoun – don’t have any money, but ‘at least you have something to eat now’. The refugee hesitated for a moment, then accepted what she was offered, thanked the old lady timidly, with a fearful briefness, and left.
I thought for a long time about the pronoun that had gone missing in the buzz of the city.
‘We have no money, but at least you have something to eat now’ would sound disturbingly hypocritical, meaning ‘We don’t want to give you our money, but at least you have something to eat now in the form of our leftovers’.
‘You don’t have any money, but at least you have something to eat now’ would be even worse, since with that the old lady would highlight the difference between them to the extreme – ‘you don’t have, we do’ –, making it clear that even far away from her, that refugee woman would live from her grace.
The old lady did exactly what the she Syrian woman had feared.
September 2016