Under other circumstances our townsfolk would probably have found an outlet in
increased activity, a more sociable life. But the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting
their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after
day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks they kept on
coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these
were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent.

Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile.

It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile, that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. Sometimes we toyed with our imagination, composing ourselves to wait for a ring at the bell announcing somebody’s return, or for the sound of a familiar footstep on the stairs; but, though we might deliberately stay at home at the hour when a traveler coming by the evening train would normally have arrived, and though we might contrive to forget for the moment that no trains were running, that game of make-believe, for obvious reasons, could not last. Always a moment came when we had to face the fact that no trains were coming in. And then we realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea anyhow, as soon as could be, once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.

It is noteworthy that our townspeople very quickly desisted, even in public, from
a habit one might have expected them to form, that of trying to figure out the probable
duration of their exile. The reason was this: when the most pessimistic had fixed it at,
say, six months; when they had drunk in advance the dregs of bitterness of those six
black months, and painfully screwed up their courage to the sticking-place, straining all
their remaining energy to endure valiantly the long ordeal of all those weeks and days,
when they had done this, some friend they met, an article in a newspaper, a vague
suspicion, or a flash of foresight would suggest that, after all, there was no reason why
the epidemic shouldn’t last more than six months; why not a year, or even more?
At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so
abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into
which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the
problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak,
their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this
habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded.
For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived
themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by
conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a
middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than
lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could
have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their
distress.

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles,
which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose. Even the past, of
which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret. For they would have wished
to add to it all that they regretted having left undone, while they might yet have done it,
with the man or woman whose return they now awaited; just as in all the activities, even
the relatively happy ones, of their life as prisoners they kept vainly trying to include the
absent one. And thus there was always something missing in their lives. Hostile to the
past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom
men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. Thus the only way of escaping
from that intolerable leisure was to set the trains running again in one’s imagination and
in filling the silence with the fancied tinkle of a doorbell, in practice obstinately mute.