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Je Suis Sick of This

To Europeans, Brussels was supposed to be a dull place that you didn’t have to think much about until you had to change planes there. There’s a parlor game in which you stump people by asking them to name 10 famous Belgians. “Brussels, the anti-fanatic attacked by the fanatics,” French journalist Laurent Joffrin wrote in Wednesday’s Libération. “Brussels, a cousin whom one is content to know is there.”

Right after an attack it’s easy to say that everything feels different. People are horrified. Parents keep their kids home from school. Newspapers run headlines like “Europe at War.” There is the sad, familiar search for a slogan: This time, I prefer the Belgian frites arranged to make a rude gesture resembling a finger, and the banner reading, “Je suis sick of this” followed by an expletive.

But soon, for most of us, life returns to normal. A spate of juice bars just opened in my Paris neighborhood. The department store Le Bon Marché is staging an exhibition on the kooky American fashion icon Iris Apfel. Europe still has lots of pretty capitals with rivers running through them.

The French seemed especially determined that nothing should change too much. Late last year, alarmed by news reports saying that schools could be targets of future attacks, I emailed the parents’ committee at my children’s school. I suggested that, in light of the threat, we meet to discuss how to improve security.

When almost no one replied, I wondered if I was having an American overreaction. One father lectured me on the sidewalk about how schools ought to be open places. The school’s director initially told me that he didn’t think any changes were necessary. A few months later, a group of parents did organize to deal with a separate crisis: Their second graders hadn’t learned to conjugate the verb “être.”

But Europe does feel like a different place than it did a year ago. And it’s not just the threat of bombs in suitcases. It’s also the related crises that are hitting the Continent all at once. More than a million migrants and refugees have arrived here in the past 15 months, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind that these refugees are fleeing far worse violence than what we’re now seeing in Europe, and that it is often carried out by the Islamic State, too. Europe’s far-right parties are getting stronger by demonizing them.

All this is testing whether the European Union — which most people here could once safely ignore — will hold together. Britons will vote in June on whether to stay in the union. In a recent survey, a majority of French people said they’d like to hold a referendum here, too.

And while governments are claiming worrying new powers to stop terrorism, they haven’t agreed on how to share intelligence, they aren’t sure how members of Franco-Belgian terrorist cells communicate with one another, and they don’t even agree on how to transliterate foreign names, to track people across borders. Salah Abdeslam, who helped orchestrate the attacks on Paris, managed to slip out of the country afterward. Four months later, he was found hiding in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where he grew up.

That’s one of the hardest facts to reconcile: These are Europeans attacking their own homelands. Roughly 5,000 European Union citizens have fought in Syria, and most come from four countries: France, Germany, Britain and Belgium. Their lives sound very familiar: Mr. Abdeslam was apparently caught after the police noticed a suspiciously large order for a pizza delivery. The three men who planned to bomb the Brussels Airport were briefly stymied when a Brussels taxi company sent the wrong type of car to take them there.

Even their motivations are recognizable. According to ProPublica, a Belgian militant who was training in Syria called his mother to ask what people in Molenbeek were saying about a 20-year-old friend who blew himself up outside the Stade de France. “Are they talking about him?” he asked. “Are they praising him? Are they saying he was a lion?”

Europeans are becoming more vigilant. A friend in Berlin said that on a recent train to Düsseldorf, the passengers and crew got nervous when no one claimed a suitcase left by one of the doors. A bomb squad met the train at its next stop and told passengers they’d be herded into a secure area. Just then, the older Turkish man who owned the suitcase woke up and revealed its contents: a pile of clothes.

Despite the inevitable false positives, it’s hard not to be on guard. I’m constantly making a series of mundane existential calculations: Is it worth it to risk going to a movie? Should I let my kids ride the metro to soccer practice? Daily life has a chiaroscuro quality: One minute you’re riding a bus and enjoying a view of the river; the next you’re wondering about the fellow with an unusually large backpack.

THIS has made it a terrible time to be a dark-skinned European man in his 20s. Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions. I heard about an exasperated passenger in Paris who got so many suspicious looks in the metro, he slowly emptied the contents of his bag, to reassure the other riders that he wasn’t carrying a bomb.

As the European fantasy has dimmed, I hardly get any foreign visitors anymore. A relative who came from New York recently told me that her trip to Paris was an act of solidarity. My mother wants me to leave France altogether.

The French are learning to live with more security. Guards now search bags — or at least glance into them — at the entrances to theaters and department stores. High school students are allowed to take their cigarette breaks on school grounds; it’s too risky to let them gather outside the school gates. There’s been a big fuss about a government proposal that seems unlikely to deter attacks: being able to strip convicted terrorists of their French nationality.

Since the bombings in Brussels, Europeans are demanding more practical measures. Israeli security experts are being consulted. There’s talk of more intelligence-sharing between governments. The headline on the cover of Thursday’s Le Parisien was, “What must be changed now.” But the truth is that, for everyone here, a lot has changed already.

Pamela Druckerman is the author of “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting” and a contributing opinion writer.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 27, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Je Suis Sick of This. Today's Paper|Subscribe


assistant: After yet another terrorist attack in Europe, can life return to normal?