Moving to a Smaller Town

The flat was cheaper by half, which was the number everyone asked about and the least interesting of the numbers. The rent in the city had been taking more than a third of what Marek and Ines earned between them. In the new town it took an eighth.

Almost everything else was slower. The post arrived once a day and sometimes not at all. The train to the city ran hourly until seven and then twice more. A parcel that used to come the next morning now came, at best, the morning after that.

They had expected the quiet and were surprised by how little of it there was. A small town is not as quiet as a city street at four in the morning; it is quiet in a different pattern. Machinery starts at six. Between ten and four nothing moves at all.

What neither of them had thought about was how visible they would be. In the city they had been anonymous for eleven years. Here, by the second week, the woman in the chemist knew which of them was ill, and by the second month so did everyone else.

Ines found that harder than Marek did, and then, quite suddenly, easier. The difference was a broken ankle in February. Three people she could not have named brought food to the door, and one of them came back a week later to take the plates away.

They are still there. Marek keeps a list of the things that are worse, and it has not got any shorter: the trains, the post, the fact that a specialist appointment means a whole day. The list is accurate and it explains nothing about why they stayed.