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A Child and a Country at the End of History
by Lea Ypi
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From that day on, I had a name for the smell. "They smell of sun cream," I said to my cousins one day at the beach.
"I can smell it now," one of them replied. "I can smell sun cream.
They went that way. Let's go. Let's follow them."
We followed them until they disappeared with their parents, onto a tour bus or into a restaurant we had no permission to enter. Then only questions were left. What do they read? Do they enjoy Alice in Wonderland, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, or The Adventures of Cipollino? Do they also have to collect chamomile flowers to help factories make medical herbs? Do they challenge each other on who knows more names of Greek gods? On who can remember more sites of ancient Roman battles? Are they inspired by Spartacus? Do they compete in Maths Olympiads? Do they want to conquer space? Do they like baklava?
I thought about foreign children with curiosity, occasionally envy, but often also pity. I felt especially sorry for them on Children's Day, 1 June, when I received presents from my parents and we went to eat ice cream by the beach and to visit the funfair. On that occasion, they also gave me a yearly subscription to several children's magazines. It was through these magazines that I learned about the fate of other children around the world. The magazine Little Stars was for children from six to eight years old, and on Children's Day it ran a cartoon called "Our 1 June and Theirs." On one side there was a fat capitalist wearing a fat top hat buying ice cream for his fat son, and on the floor next to the shop's entrance two ragged children and a caption: "1 June never comes for us." On the other side, there were Socialist flags, happy children carrying flowers and presents, holding their parents' hands, waiting to buy ice cream in front of a shop. "We love 1 June," their caption read. The queue was very short.
In the late eighties, I also started to receive the Horizon, for teenagers. I was still young for it, but my father loved it because it featured a maths and physics challenges section, as well as a regular column about scientific and astronomic curiosities. Occasionally, he had to be reminded that he had bought the magazine for me and needed to pass it on. The Horizon frequently depicted Western children—never in such detail as to exhaust all possible questions about their lives, but enough to provide a sense of how different they were. Unlike my world, theirs was divided: between the rich and the poor, the bourgeois and the proletarian, the hopeful and the hopeless, the free and the shackled. There were privileged, entitled children who, like their bourgeois parents, had everything they wanted but never shared it with the less fortunate, whose hardship they ignored. There were also poor and oppressed children who had to sleep rough, whose parents could not afford to pay the bills at the end of the month, who had to beg for food in restaurants and train stations, who could not attend school regularly because they were forced to work, who dug diamonds in mines and lived in shantytowns. There were regular reports about the fate of children in places like Africa and South America, and reviews of books about the segregation of black children in the United States and about apartheid.
We knew we would never meet these poor children, humiliated and oppressed by the capitalists, because they could never travel. We sympathized with their predicament but did not think we shared their fate. We knew it was difficult for us to travel abroad because we were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, our holidays were subsidized by the Party. Perhaps one day the Party would be powerful enough to have defeated all our enemies, and would pay for everyone to travel abroad too. In any case, we were already in the best place. They had nothing. We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom.
Excerpted from Free by Lea Ypi. Copyright © 2022 by Lea Ypi. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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