Anna works in a library downtown; she’s a well-educated and intelligent woman, but at times she feels really stupid. This evening, for example. Going back home from work, she takes the underground, and as always she sits in the first free place available. With a gesture grown mechanical over time, she takes the novel she’s reading out of her backpack and gets ready to immerse herself in the atmosphere born of someone else’s imagination, which soon will grip her with a magnetic force that will make her forget where and why she’s travelling for the whole length of the journey. But before diving with a voluptuous sigh into the depths of the words printed on the page, before the magic mysteriously conveyed by those ink-marks spirit her away from her surroundings and carry her off into another dimension, her eye falls on the person sitting beside her. His skin is a bit dark but he doesn’t look like a north African - he looks more like an Indian or Pakistani: young, well-built, beardless. He’s reading, too, a book in English, and looks very absorbed. Perhaps like me he lets himself be carried away by his reading into a far-away world or perhaps English isn’t his native tongue and translating what he’s reading costs him effort. But it’s not so much the man’s attitude that draws her attention as the large bag deposited at his feet. A long bag, apparently full to its limit, stuffed partly under the seat. These days it doesn’t make you happy to see such large bags on public transport, especially if the owner looks even vaguely middle-eastern. Right away her mind races to the recent attacks on the London underground: how many people dead? Too many to think of it without a shudder of unease and revulsion. The memory annoys and irritates her; she feels like a real fool. She doesn’t want to fall into the trap laid by the terrorists for normal people. This is the very effect they want to have, to frighten us, to turn our daily movements into a cause of anxiety, to distort our everyday reality and cast the shadow of fear over our relationships, to make us feel that we too are at war, just like the Iraqis who have been living in terror for three years, victims of an unjust conflict sparked off by a hypocritical and oil-thirsty West. The last thing she wants is to identify the Foreigner with the Enemy, to give into the hateful propaganda of the so-called conflict of civilizations. She wants to be able say, above all to herself, that at least this battle will be won by the sane part of society: the battle against suspicion, intolerance, cowardice, the monsters generated by fanaticism on both sides. The man sitting next to her is a normal person going calmly back home. Maybe he’s been to the gym, or he goes to see his sister who lives outside Milan and carries what is needed to stay there for a couple of days. In any case, he’s reading, so he’s peaceful, he’s certainly not thinking about blowing himself up at the next stop. Then her eyes meet those of a girl seated in the row opposite her. She must about the same age as she is, with the face of a nice girl, pale and fair. She looks almost terrified; maybe she’s feeling the same anxiety about that overly-large bag. She seems to be searching the other traveller’s eyes for a confirmation or denial of her fear. What should she say? What should she do? We have to resist. Ok, but what if the bag really was full of TNT? Anna would be the first to be blown up, since she’s had the sense to go and sit right next to the terrorist. What a dumb way to die! And what a pity, just now when she’d stopped taking the pill and was trying to have a child. To wind up like this, blown to bits by a bomb in an underground train, alone as a dog among strangers, without giving one last kiss to the people she loved, without even making a will (for what little she had to leave…), with so many things she still wanted to do. The very thought is enough to make her decide. At the next stop, without being too obvious, she quickly gets off the train. She halts on the platform, feeling dismayed and distressed. How cowardly! Cowardly, yes, but alive. A thought suddenly annihilates her: and if the train she just got off of really does carry an abominable distributor of death, how will she be able to quell the internalized appeal of the blond girl sitting opposite when the bomb explodes? Will she be overcome by remorse for not having warned her, for not having communicated the instinct that might have saved her, for having abandoned her, shallowly and indifferently, to that horrible fate? In the end, it’s all a question of a calculation of probabilities. This time the bomb didn’t explode, and she’s relieved to have avoided both travelling next to a possible charge of TNT and the responsibility of igniting a fuse just as dangerous – xenophobic and racist suspicion. This time she made the right choice, without causing harm to anyone. This time it went well. This time.