Marseille | Fiction | Souad Zakarani
Marseille He drives along the narrow riverbed and gradually the littered landscape reveals itself: overturned buckets at the bend in the river, a broken pram covered in weeds, a petrol drum with a dry tongue of rust sticking out, the carcass of a fridge in the brambles. It didn't look like this before, Blaise realized, and his gaze on the landscape became more alert and worried than it had been an hour before. The pine trees were as green as ever, interspersed with oversized chunks of white limestone. But the idyllic picture is disturbed by leftovers, by rusty things, by squadrons of rubbish cutting swaths through the landscape. This rubbish is old, Blaise thinks, confused again. Even before he has rounded the next bend and seen the misty blue sea and Marseille in the distance, a queasy feeling has spread through his body. What lies ahead no longer looks like the city he left the day before yesterday. Thin plumes of smoke rise from the Old Port into the cloudy sky, and a g...
