The Physics of Sorrow

VIII. AN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS OF SORROW

These notes are stored on old punch cards from the dawn of electronic computing devices, which have long since fallen out of use.

QUANTA OF EQUIVOCATION

One of the most mindboggling things in the physics of elementary particles is how important the very act of observation is on their behavior. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, as early as the 1920s quanta act like particles only when we observe them. The rest of the time, hidden from our gaze, they are part of a scattered and supposedly disinterested wave, in which we don’t know exactly what’s going on. Everything there is possible, unforeseeable and variable. But once they sense we’re watching them, they instantaneously start acting as we expect them to, orderly and logically.

The world is the way we know it to be from the old textbooks only because (or when) it is under observation. Or as Idlis, Whitrow, and Dicke put it in the mid-twentieth century, “in order for the Universe to exist, it was necessary for observers to appear at some stage.” I’m watched, therefore I am.

OK, fine, but if no one’s watching me, do I still exist? I live alone, no one comes over, no one calls. On the other hand, there’s always one big invisible observer, an eye we should never forget. The Old One, as Einstein called him. Maybe that’s precisely what quantum physics or metaphysics is telling us. If we exist, that means we’re being watched. There is something or someone that never lets us out of its sight. Death comes when that thing stops watching us, when it turns away from us.

The world behind our backs is some kind of undefined quantum soup, says a Stanford physicist — but the second you turn around, it freezes into reality. I like that definition and never turn around too abruptly. I think about that teacher from kindergarten who threatened to pour my soup down my back if I didn’t eat it all. Then I would’ve found out what quantum reality is.

I write in the first person to make sure that I’m still alive.

I write in the third person to make sure that I’m not just a projection of my own self, that I’m three-dimensional and have a body. Sometimes I nudge a glass and note with satisfaction that it falls and breaks. So I do still exist and cause consequences.

If no one is watching me, then I’ll have to watch myself, so as not to turn into quantum soup.

Someone must constantly be watching and thinking about the world so that it exists. Or someone needs to be watching and thinking about the one who is watching and thinking about the world. Crazy stuff. Can I take on that round-the-clock duty?

The physics of elementary particles rehabilitates randomness and uncertainty. Now that’s why I love it. Whereas Einstein himself was horrified precisely by this and grumbled in his letters: “The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘Old One.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” I, at any rate, am convinced that the Old One — just like the local geezers who spend their afternoons playing backgammon — nevertheless loves throwing dice.

One remark. Quantum physics — perhaps so as not to turn entirely into metaphysics — avoids delving into the question of who that observer could be in order to have such a status. Are we including anything here but the eye of God? Does the eye of man count as capable of maintaining the world? Does the eye of a snail, a cat, or a violet figure in the equation?

Well, we mustn’t forget, after all, that quantum physics explains things on the micro-level. But how can we be sure that God isn’t an elementary particle? It’s quite likely that he’s a proton, electron, or even a boson. God is a boson. It sounds nice. It sounds like God is a bison, Aya would say.

However, He’s most likely a photon — which has a dual nature like all quanta, but a rest mass of absolute zero. And that’s why it can move at the speed of light. When we say that God is light, we don’t even realize how deeply we’ve gotten into quantum physics. Or else he’s a neutrino, maybe even faster than light and capable of unexpected transformations. That which the old Evangelists/physicists described as the Transfiguration of the Lord was a transformation of the neutrino. But I still would like Him to be an ant, a turtle, or a Ginkgo biloba tree.

That which has not been told, just like that which has not happened — because they’re of the same order — possesses all possibilities, countless variations on how they could happen or be told.

Alas, the story is linear and you have to get rid of the detours every time, wall up the side corridors. The classical narrative is an annulling of the possibilities that rain down on you from all sides. Before you fix its boundaries, the world is full of parallel versions and corridors. All possible outcomes potter about only in hesitation and indecisiveness. And quantum physics, filled with indeterminacy and uncertainty, has proved this.

I try to leave space for other versions to happen, cavities in the story, more corridors, voices and rooms, unclosed-off stories, as well as secrets that we will not pry into. And there, where the story’s sin was not avoided, hopefully uncertainty was with us.

A QUESTION FROM THE QUANTUM PHYSICS OF READING

Has anyone ever developed a quantum physics of literature? If there, too, the lack of an observer presupposes all manner of combinations, just imagine what kind of carnival is raging among the elementary particles of the novel. What on earth is happening between its covers when no one is reading it? Now there are questions that deserve some thought.

EXPERIMENTS

That popular experiment with the electron, in which it acts like a wave and passes through two openings at the same time, gives certain grounds for believing that it is possible to be in different places at the same time. But, as the Gaustine in me notes, we’re not talking about electrons weighing 180 lbs. and standing 6’2”. (If this were so, my grandfather would have stayed in both villages — the Hungarian and the Bulgarian one, bringing up both of his sons, living out both of his lives.)

Luckily, the things I’m concerned with have no weight. The past, sorrow, literature — only these three weightless whales interest me. But quantum physics and the natural sciences have turned their backs on them. If Aristotle had known that the formal division of physics and metaphysics would definitively and artificially partition the universe of knowledge, he surely would have burned his work himself. Or at least he would have combined the parts of it.

A while back, under one of my pen names, I published a novel based on the atomism of Leuccipus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera. Ultimately, it turns out that they discovered quanta way back in the fifth century BC. Lots of time needed to pass for everything to be forgotten. I liked those pre-Socratics, those first quantum physicists, who coolly and boldly painted a picture of a world made only of atoms and emptiness. Endless emptiness and countless atoms floating around in it. I wanted to transfer the model of atomism to literature and to discover whether the encounter between individual atoms of classic literature would produce new matter for the novel. An atomic novel of opening lines floating in the void.

This was a wholly serious experiment, but it was taken more as a postmodernist joke, grasped in terms of its metaphorics rather than its physics. Physicists don’t read novels. Which disappointed me greatly and caused me to withdraw from publishing for a decade or so.

Here’s what I’m interested in now. Can going back in time by recalling everything down to the last detail, with all senses engaged, bring about a critical point? Can it flip some switch and cause the whole machinery of the Universe to start going backward? It’s on the edge in any case, so the only redemptive move is backward. Minute by minute, during this hour everything that was an hour ago will happen. The entirety of today is replaced by yesterday, yesterday by the day before, and so on and so forth further and further back, we slowly step away from the edge with a creak. I don’t know whether we can meddle in those impending past days. We’ll have to relive our prior failures and depressions, but also a few happy minutes among them. There’s no getting around.

. the new injustice of death. Those, who at the moment of the reversal had already lived eighty years, will live another eighty, backward. Those who had lived not as long, say thirty, forty, or fifty years, will have to be satisfied with that same amount. But let’s note that they will be heading toward their own youth and childhood. Ever happier at the end of their lives, ever younger, ever more adored. Happily wobbling on their unsteady little toddler’s feet, having forgotten language, cooing and gurgling, until the day comes for them to go back home. Thus, I, born on January 1, 1968, will be able to die again on January 1, 1968. That’s what I call complete universal harmony. To die the hour and minute you were born, after passing through your whole life twice. From one end to the other and back again.

G. G.

January 1, 1968—January 1, 1968

Lived happily for 150 years.

(Everyone can insert their own name and date here.)

They claim that life arose on earth three billion years ago. With this mechanism, we can guarantee at least three billion more years of life. If someone else has a better offer, then be my guest.

Another gravity is pressing in on us, one not found in classical physics, one which must be overcome, the gravity of time. That gravitational delay, which Einstein described back in 1915, doesn’t work for me. In 1976 NASA confirmed that in the microgravity of space, time really does slow down a teeny bit, and this gave rise to the legend that people don’t age in space. The myth of eternal youth was again on its way to being revived. A dozen or so aging millionaire matrons must’ve glanced up at the sky as if toward an eternal sanatorium, calculating how much a stay there with their beloved fox terriers would cost, because what’s.

. the point of being young if your pooch is pushing up daisies? This legend even reached us, I remember it vaguely, but being all of eight years old I hardly paid any attention to it. In 2010, they actually measured that time lapse with an interferometer. Yes, there was a slowing of the cesium atom (that’s what they used), but it was insignificantly small — over a few billion years there’s a delay of a hundredth of a second. Those who had hoped to stay forever young in 1976 surely hadn’t lived to see this highly disappointing result.

My goal isn’t to slow time by a few hundredths of a second over a billion years, which I don’t have at my disposal in any case. And not in outer space, which I have no particular soft spot for (even the bus makes me car sick). I want to bring back a slice of the past, a pint of drained-away time right here, within the confines of one insultingly short human life.

NEW EXPERIMENTS

I practice concentrated and close “observation.” I realized relatively early on that the shorter the time period I want to recreate (replicate), the better my chances. I gave up on the idea of my whole childhood. For some time I tried one chosen year. To remember that year in detail, to reconstruct it personally and historically, leaving nothing out.

I picked the year of my birth, because the infant has a more limited and pure world, which in that sense is easier to reconstruct, with fewer extraneous noises. So here’s the new 1968. By happy coincidence, I was born in its first days, so the two stories, mine, small and piss-soaked, and its, grand (and also piss-soaked), could unfold in parallel. The wet cloth diapers, the January cold, my mother’s warm skin, the first signs of spring in the Latin Quarter, nighttime colic, summer in Prague, the international youth festival in Sofia, “brotherly” troops in Czechoslovakia, first tooth. Everything was important. After a few months I was lying on the floor exhausted, crushed by the world’s entropy. I realized that it was beyond my strength and stamina to build — as if from matchboxes — a year in its real dimensions with all of its scents, sounds, cats, rain, and newsworthy events. I’ve kept the draft of that failed experiment.

I need to narrow the range of the experiment. I decided on a month from another year, August 1986, I’m eighteen, my last month of freedom, after which my mandatory military service awaits me. A month, in which you say farewell to everything for two years — actually for forever, but you don’t know that then. You let your hair grow long, you try to get to home base with your girl. Late at night, when your parents are asleep, you sneak out with a friend into the city’s empty streets, you go to the river and look at the dark windows of the panel-block apartment buildings, on the verge of yelling “Sleep tight, ya morons!” à la Holden Caulfield or whatever it was he said.

. but in the end you don’t do it. At the end of the month you go to the barbershop farthest away to get a buzz cut. You watch your hair falling to the floor and you try not to start bawling. You leave the barbershop already a different age, crestfallen, freaked out, sporting the hat you had prepared in advance, and you take the shortest route home. A few days later you’ll have to show up at the appointed place in some strange city — with a shaved head and a bag filled with all the things from the list of what a recruit needs. I’ve kept that list in one of the boxes.

That was more or less the month from which I needed to reconstruct every moment and sensation with all of their subtlest oscillations. It wasn’t so easy. Yes, there was fear during that month, but it was thousands of variations on fear, in some of them it looked like a radical dose of daring. Yes, there was sorrow, but the atoms of this sorrow moved quite freely and chaotically (sorrow’s state of aggregation is gaseous) and in the best-case scenario I could only follow its twists and turns, the smoke that smoldered nearby. I lit up my first cigarettes, I now realize, to give a body to this sorrow, bluish, light-gray, vanishing. I remembered everything clearly, but I couldn’t manage to get back into that former body. What I used to be able to do — entering into different bodies and stories with the ease of a man entering his own home — now turned out to be out of reach.

EPIPHANIES

It happened when I least expected it.

It was a late winter afternoon, the snow was melting. A few days before I completely stopped leaving the basement. I was walking ever more slowly, looking at the houses, the Sunday’s empty streets, January. It occurred to me, for the first time with such clarity (the clarity of the January air) that what remains are not the exceptional moments, not the events, but precisely the nothingeverhappens. Time, freed from the claim to exceptionality. Memories of afternoons, during which nothing happened. Nothing but life, in all its fullness. The faint scent of wood smoke, the droplets, the sense of solitude, the silence, the creaking of snow beneath your feet, the vague uneasiness as twilight falls, slowly and irreversibly.

Now I know. I don’t want to relive any of the so-called events from my own life — not that first event of being born, nor the last one which lies ahead, both are uncozy. Just as every arrival and departure can be uncozy. Nor do I want to relive my first day of school, my first time having fumbling sex with a girl, nor my joining the army, nor my first job, nor that ostentatious wedding reception, nothing. none of that would bring me joy. I would trade them all, along with a heap of photos of them, for that afternoon when I’m sitting on the warm steps in front of our house, having just woken up from my afternoon nap, I’m listening to the buzzing of the flies, I’ve dreamed about that girl again who never turns around. My grandfather moves the hose in the garden and the heavy scent of late summer flowers rises. Nothing is determined, nothing has happened to me yet. I’ve got all the time in the world ahead of me.

In the small and the insignificant — that’s where life hides, that’s where it builds its nest. Funny what things are left to twinkle in the end, the last glimmer before darkness. Not the most important things, nor. there’s no way for them even to be written down or told. The sky of memory opens for that minute as dusk falls on that winter day in a distant city, when I am eighteen and have miraculously been left alone for a minute or two, crossing the army base’s enormous parade grounds. A parenthetical note for those who have never been soldiers: you’re never left with a free minute, that’s the way it’s set up. A soldier with free time on his hands is nothing but trouble, that’s what they say. I’ve trimmed the grass around the parade grounds all day with a nail clipper — those were my orders. I’ve carried stones from one pile to another. In the morning. Then in the afternoon I’ve returned the stones to their original place. At first you don’t get it, you think the world has gone mad, you don’t find that even in Kafka. But the majors don’t read Kafka, to say nothing of the sergeants. You’ve come here directly from literature, you’re carrying Proust in your gasmask bag. Hey, Proust, get over here double-quick! Hit the ground! Twenty push-ups!

Anyway, that moment when I was left alone on the enormous parade grounds under an empty sky, amid the cold air saturated with the first scent of winter, of wood and coal smoke sneaking in from the nearby village, the falling dusk and anticipations, alone for the first time, somewhere else for the first time, slight cold fear, cold clouds. And precisely that meeting of hopelessness and anticipation (my year in the army had only just begun), mixed with an endless sky, strange and beautiful, beautiful in a strange way, made that minute eternal. I knew that it couldn’t be retold.

Of course, I could list off several other golden camels in the endless caravan of minutes, three or four, not more, but I’ll try to retell only one of them. Late summer, I’m standing in front of the house, the sunset is endless in those flat places, I’m six, the cows are coming down the road, first you hear their slow bells, the shepherd’s calls, the mooing to announce their return to their calves, the calves’ bellowed response. this is crying, I know it even then. Like the bawling cry that always escapes from me the minute my mother comes back from the city at the end of the week to see me. Relief and accusation are never closer together than in that crying. As close as the crying of a calf and the crying of a child when they have been abandoned for a day or weeks. I missed you so much, I’m so mad at you. I’ll never forgive you, cows and mothers.

In that minute, the memory is so clear even now, in that minute so densely packed with sounds, cows, and scents, suddenly everything disappears, a strip slices the horizon at its most distant point, time draws aside and there, at the very back of the sunset, there is a white room with high ceilings, one I’ve never seen before, with a chandelier and a piano. A girl my age is sitting at the piano with her back to me. Her light hair is tied in a pony tail, she is getting ready to play, she has raised her hands slightly, I see her pointy elbows. And that’s it.

I have never been happier, more whole and peaceful than in that minute, on the warm stone at the end of my sixth summer. As the years passed, I started counting the winters, as my father and grandfather did, they knew it was right for a person to go back home in the winter, during the summer there is too much work to bother with dying. I promised myself then that I would find that girl. I kept looking for her in all those places and years I passed through. No one turned to me with her face. I can feel myself giving up over time. Getting used to it. Old age is getting used to things.

MIGRATION OF SORROW

Empathy is unlocked in some people through pain, for me it happens more often through sorrow.

The physics of sorrow — initially the classical physics thereof — was the subject of my pursuits for several years. Sorrow, like gases and vapors, does not have its own shape or volume, but rather takes on the shape and volume of the container or space it occupies. Does it resemble the noble gases? Most likely not, as much as we may like the name. The noble gases are homogeneous and pure, monatomic, besides they have no color or odor. No, sorrow is not helium, krypton, argon, xenon, radon. It has an odor and a color. Some kind of chameleonic gas, that can take on all the colors and scents in the world, while certain colors and scents easily activate it.

The more important thing is that its gravitational field is negligibly small, to continue the analogy with the gases. From this it follows that invisible fronts, cyclones, and anti-cyclones of sorrow hover around us. Their migration, their movement from one place to another is a remarkable fact. The blindness that causes us to pass over this fact is astonishing. Sometimes I’m overcome by a vague sense of sorrow, which doesn’t seem to be mine. Sorrow from Northern Africa, let’s say. Not local, strange, faded by the sun, yellow with grains of sand from the desert, like that yellow rain that fell last year, leaving opaque blotches on the window. I could sketch out a geographical map of the migration of sorrows. Some places are sad in one century, others in another.

What little success I’ve had with these experiments lies in the fact that for very short slices of time I’ve been able to attract a stray cloud of sorrow from some past afternoon, mine or someone else’s, to walk alongside it, and sink into its nicotine. Like a smoker, who, even after many years without cigarettes, will always recognize the trace of smoke.

QUANTA OF AGING

I’m not talking about old age. I’m talking about the first signs. Not about night, but about dusk. About its irresistible incursions and the first fallen fortresses.

Once, when Aya was three, she came home from kindergarten in tears, because a boy had told her that fathers get old. Fathers get old, she said, sobbing. She glanced at me for a second, fully expecting to hear me disavow this and since I couldn’t think of anything — I’m terribly slow-witted when I have to lie — she burst into tears again, even more hopelessly.

There is some sort of grammar of aging.

Childhood and youth are full of verbs. You can’t sit still. Everything in you is growing, gushing forth, developing. Later the verbs are gradually replaced by the nouns of middle age. Kids, cars, work, family — the substantial things of the substantives.

Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age — slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass.

There is also a mathematics of aging, a simple set theory.

We change the world’s proportions over the years. Those younger than we are grow ever more numerous, while the number of those older than we are declines menacingly.

Aging requires a certain audacity. It may not be audacity, but resignation.

At eleven, I started a secret notebook in which I wrote down the first signs of aging and death. Death and children is an unjustly neglected topic, I’ve never been as close to death as I was then. Over the years, we’ve grown a bit distant and cold, although I’ve always kept my eye on it, just as it has on me, of course. Here are the things, from different years and in no particular order, puttering around in that box.

Cardiac exam. Sooner or later, everyone ends up lying here, the nurse says soothingly, as she attaches wires and clamps to my whole body. The noises, which I hear amplified in that way for the first time, are revolting. The discovery that the heart is a frog, judging by its croaking. My death will come like a stork, I write down upon leaving.

(41 y.o.)

I grow old. I grow old.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I love these lines by Eliot and I am afraid of them. That devil-may-care whistled tune of old age, which actually hides nothing. So humbly humiliated, so unheroic, rolling up the pant legs hiding the sagging white skin and the telltale blue veins. Just the ankles.

My left ankle is a frightful sight, shattered and stitched, with the years the scars will only deepen.

(53)

Today in front of the mirror I noticed that my left half is aging more quickly than my right half. I haven’t shaved in a few days (I don’t have anyone to shave for anymore, as my father used to say) and can clearly see how the left half of my beard is almost completely gray, while the right side has only a few gray hairs. Besides that, my left eye has starting visibly drooping in the outside corner, the eyelid muscles can’t hold out like they used to, when I gaze at something for a bit longer I notice some traitorous involuntary twitches. I wonder if such a difference is visible in my body as well. I look it over carefully, but can’t seem to find a visible difference between the left and right sides. OK, that’s if we don’t count that shattered left ankle, which is quite different and swollen, as is my broken left wrist. And one ear that’s ever more hard-of-hearing, precisely the left one.

I’m not even aging evenly.

(49)

They say that as we grow older, our dead start talking to us ever more often. We lose the sounds of the world, so that we can hear other sounds and other voices more clearly and without interference. For now, I’m still only hearing noises.

(38)

How would you describe the noise in your ear, my doctor friend asks.

I don’t know. it’s not that simple.

Come on, now, aren’t you a writer?

Well, I’m the most uncertain of them (even though this, too, is uncertain).

Is it like the sound of the sea? The doctor tries to prompt me.

I guess you could say that, but sometimes it is wild and sounds like crashing surf, other times it’s more like wind in the late October woods, what I mean is, the leaves are dry enough and some of them have fallen, which affects the frequency of the noise. Sometimes, when there are high frequencies, it sounds like a washing machine on spin cycle two floors away, a thin howl. Sometimes it’s like moooooo, but the calf is young and hoarse.

While I list off these sounds, my doctor’s face grows ever more bewildered, rather than clearing up. What can I do, things are never so simple and unambiguous. Once I almost read a nurse the riot act when she made me describe the color of my urine. “Is it the color of beer?” she asked. There are so many different kinds of beer, for Christ’s sake, there’s light beer, dark beer, red ale, white ale, live-culture beer, non-alcoholic. You can’t just roll them all together like that.

I can’t stand categorical people.

(29)

It hurts right here, something down on the left, maybe it’s my appendix.

Stop with the self-diagnoses, if you please. The appendix is on the right. There’s nothing that could be hurting there on the left.

What do you mean nothing?

Just that. There’s nothing there.

Well, it’s precisely that nothing that’s hurting me.

(64)

The hope that if you start telling your life story backward toward childhood, it will set some mechanism into motion and fool the direction [of time].

Funny version. A guy decides to quit smoking using regressive hypnotherapy. He starts going backward toward the time before he started smoking, to awaken the memory of his clean lungs. The hypnotherapy is so successful and the regression goes so far back that he not only quits smoking, but also starts wetting his bed and not being able to say “R.”

(43)

In her Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon gives two lists — Things that inspire sorrow and Things that drive away sorrow. The things that drive away sorrow in the early eleventh century, the Heian Period, include old tales and the sweet chatter of three-to-four-year-old children. I copy it down several times: old tales and the sweet chatter of three-to-four-year-old children, old tales and the sweet chatter.

(990)

I remember clearly how we read back then. The whole ecstasy of that youthful reading, it wasn’t reading, but galloping, racing through books. We sought out the racehorse of action, direct speech, short, muscular expressions. We hated the ritardandos, the descriptions of nature, who needed them.

Now I feel the need to stop, like an old man winded by climbing up a slope he used to take in three bounds. The hidden pleasures of slowness. I love to linger long over some “It was a pleasant May morning, the birds were shouting with song, the dew glowed beneath the sun’s soft rays. ”

(69)

Our lifelong, round-the-clock jabbering seems to have a single, solitary goal, which we never say out loud. To bamboozle death, to send it off on a wild goose chase, to make a feint at the last moment. But death isn’t moved by words. It is most probably deaf (like me). This is the source of its supreme impartiality.

(85)

The years are a rushing river, flowing day by day

In its currents youth and childhood are swept clean away.

The years they are like song birds, flying south in fall

But unlike birds the years will never return to us at all.

(9)

We grew old before we grew up.

(35)

He started traveling, in fact, fleeing from old age, but ironically it was precisely there, in other places, where his first signs of aging appeared.

One morning at age thirty-five he saw his body in the large, mirror-laden bathroom of a Greek hotel. He had never examined it so closely before. He had a good, healthy, normal body. Not counting the broken arm, whose white plaster cast was starting to look weather-beaten. That morning, he saw the first signs of aging. Extremely faint, yet nevertheless clear. It had started years earlier, why hadn’t he paid attention until then? He told himself that he would remember the day. That he would remember that hotel in Thessaloniki. His body, white and soft, had started to go slack, the skin had started growing thin, becoming translucent with thin blue veins. It’s old age, he said to himself, just as a year or two earlier he would say to himself: it’s love. That’s how age happens sometimes, in just a few minutes one morning, at some foreign hotel. After that he would keep tabs on his body in hotel mirrors, that’s precisely where old age would be waiting to ambush him.

(34)

My grandfather had no time to notice that he was getting old. He had too much work to do.

(27)

I went to a writer’s funeral. While alive, he had hay fever. Now he was lying there, piled with flowers, looking as if he would start sneezing any minute. An orchid was sticking its tip right up his nose. But clearly he was already cured. I noticed, and I think the others noticed as well, the unfamiliar elderly women with blue hair and chrysanthemums at the other end of the funeral parlor who were truly upset. His former mistresses. The deceased had had a weakness for women. Now they were getting their fifteen minutes of fame. Invisible their whole lives, veterans of secret love affairs. From the army of the anonymous, unlike his official wife and his official mistress. In the end, old age has made everyone equal.

(50)

Little Red Riding Hood and Old Age

The fairytale can be told this way as well:

The little girl went to her grandmother and started asking:

Grandma, why do you have such big (and sagging) ears? The grandmother kept silent.

Grandma, why do you have such big (and faded) eyes? The grandmother said nothing.

Grandmother, why do you have such a big (and wrinkled) mouth?

The grandmother started sniffling softly.

Oh, how cruel Little Red Riding Hood was! And the grandmother — because this time it really was her — took off her glasses, wiped away the two telltale tears and managed to rasp out an answer that exhausted all the questions asked thus far: It’s old age, my Little Red Riding Hood.

And opened her toothless mouth in a frightful laugh.

(60)

The old hostel near the train station in Leipzig, overflowing with high school students brought here for the book fair. The elevator, which stops with a creak on my floor, the opening of the door and the bright light from inside (the lamp on my floor was out). A group of girls, juniors and seniors, laughing, pretty, Lolitas, without having read Lolita.

“Going up?” they ask through their laughter.

“Going down,” I reply softly. It sounds so tragicomic that a new volley of laughter follows. A full four seconds before the doors close, parting me forever from that lovely company. Four seconds in which they and I share a common floor. An awkward and beautiful pause, given to me thanks to someone’s benevolence, a pause that I parsimoniously hide away in my notebook.

(51)

That repeatability of life. That sticky, exhausting, murderous, revolting, yet inevitable and sometimes marvelous repeatability of life.

(65,103,039)

While climbing the hill in this city, intoxicated by the colors and scents, I feel my strength slowly leaving me, my body going soft, the muscles in my thighs traitorously trembling (is it visible through my pants?). Not wanting to admit I’ve been beaten, I simply stop and examine a burning-red blackberry bush up close. Then I see an elderly man, did I say elderly, actually, he is my age, embracing a young woman in an innocent summer dress. He is wearing a nice light-blue sweater, old age piles on the clothes, but still it is autumn after all and he is absolutely in season. She is young and is still in summer. Their meeting is the meeting of two seasons. She — generously reaching out her hand from one season, he — standing unsteadily on the edge of the other. A difficult balance, possible only for a short while, a month or two. A few years ago I would have laughed at the man, now he receives my full understanding and a few pangs of envy.

I watch this couple as the day, which is leaning toward its end, obligingly offers me the threadbare metaphor of its sunset. I watch with the full indiscreetness of the situation, then turn my back and slowly head down the hill, having forgotten that just a short while ago I had been planning to get a coffee at the top.

I walk down, thinking about all the European towns huddled like chicks around such a fortress-hill. The hills of Graz, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Thessaloniki, Rome’s seven hills, which I’ve always confused with the teats of that she-wolf, as if she were lying on her back, hills as wolf-tits. I see myself running across them, always at sunset, at different ages.

I remember hurrying to catch a sunset in Lisbon, running up the steep alleys of São Jorge, I reached the top with my last ounce of strength “and suddenly it’s evening,” as that poet wrote. Everything swam before my eyes, I passed out, when I opened my eyes three elderly ladies and a stern-faced nun were leaning over me. I hadn’t blacked out for long, as the ocean was still glowing beneath the final glimmers. I let myself lie there for a few seconds, my eyes swimming, like a sunset marathoner who has collapsed just before announcing his news. But there is no news. I’m growing old.

(58)

Animals eat up time. They lick at it like the blocks of salt they’re given, they nibble away at it like a donkey nibbles at blades of grass, they suck out its fruity marrow like wasps. The twentieth-century donkey, the eighteenth-century donkey and the thirteenth-century donkey do not differ in any away. Could it be the same with people? No. I can recognize a face from 1985 and tell it apart from faces from the 1970s and the 1990s, to say nothing of previous centuries.

(793)

Aya, at three and a half, draws a picture of me in pen. She hands it to me, takes another a look at me, thinks of something and quickly takes the paper back. I forgot to draw those lines on your forehead, she says.

And thus we age.

(42)

Telomeres get shorter and cells die every second. The truth is that science is still searching for the mechanism of aging. The most important cells, brain cells, never regenerate. I am a walking graveyard. Perhaps that’s why I so devotedly tour all the cemeteries of every city. there is harmony in bringing together your own, second-by-second death with the death of the world.

(66)

Grandma, I’m not going to die, right?

(3)

A PAST-TIME MACHINE

The last time I went back to T., I noticed some strange things. They had restored the monument from the 1980s on the town square. I could have sworn it wasn’t there a week ago. I remembered that monument well. A man with a long granite garment, perhaps a cassock, an overcoat or a royal mantle. And with the most nondescript face you’ll ever see. On all important historical dates it somehow inexplicably took on the features of the corresponding hero who was to be honored. On February 19, it became Vasil Levski, on June 2 Hristo Botev. It was also a Bulgarian tsar, most often Simeon, sometimes a monk from Mount Athos, sometimes a partisan guerrilla commander. It was most often saddled with the task of being Georgi Dimitrov or some other (local) communists. A universal monument. It had its overcoat, noble forelock, and high forehead — the minimum requirements for every hero back then. Now they’ve cleaned it up and I could even see that a fresh wreath of braided carnations with two red ribbons had just been placed at its base. I also noticed that the newspapers arrived a day late, the shop clerks had become sullen like back in the day, there was no Internet, while the stores sold only two types of salami and frankfurters.

Given all of this, plus my fruitless experiments on the elementary particles of the past, I was gripped by a gnawing suspicion, which I tried to defang by turning it into a supposedly made-up story.

He opened his eyes with the vague sense that he was awakening into another dream. Could his empathy, which has shown no sign of itself over the past twenty years, be reawakening? Outside he could hear the high school marching band, sounding exactly like it did back then, he could have sworn that they were playing the very same instruments he remembered from his school days. He himself had once played the tuba, standing in the back row next to Nasko with the cymbals, Nasko the Candy Nut with the Blubber-Butt, as his full nickname went. Mr. Blubber-Butt was always a split-second late, a hundredth of a beat behind, which was almost inaudible to the ears up on the platform, but which set Comrade Brunekov, the singing teacher, on pins and needles, and all of us in the band registered that alarming pause, that crack in the music. In the end, the cymbal would nevertheless crash and the simultaneous sigh of relief added yet another note to the march. But that was so many years ago.

Now the music was again thundering down below, all guns ablaze. In the end, it seemed that he had managed to do what he had been trying to do for years — to bring back part of the past, just a little slice, to enter into it and never leave it again. Your body can’t escape from the memory and you remain in your childhood forever. To a certain extent, it’s merciful.

He also might be going crazy, everything might just be in his head. He got up and slowly went over to the window. He stood there for a moment before drawing aside the tatty curtain, then abruptly yanks it away. Down below school kids really were marching around, in the same uniforms as fifty years ago, men and women in suits and long gray trench coats were standing around them. The marching band was doing its routine, while the sun showered its glimmering rays into the brass instruments, which had been shined with putzing polish in advance. He hadn’t thought about putzing in ages. A little farther on stood the platform. He got dressed quickly and went downstairs. They were all real, three-dimensional, living, the men with crew cuts, the women cold-curled, they smelled of strong, cheap cologne, green apples, and once-ubiquitous “Ideal” soap.

They must be shooting a film, how could he have fallen for it? Somewhere here the whole cinematographic machinery would reveal itself. The trucks with the generators, the cameras, the dollies, and slider tracks. He carefully looked around. There was no sign of any equipment, they had hidden it that well. But still, a bearded director with a megaphone would have to appear out of somewhere shouting “Cut!” and making everyone go back for a second take. The demonstration continued, however, the music was playing, the band had marched quite a ways ahead. On the platform, bored people in dark suits waved to the enthusiastic squads of marchers. Twenty or so kids in blue neckerchiefs broke away from the parading ranks and, guided by their teaches, ran over to the platform holding bouquets of carnations. The dark suits took the carnations, patted the children on the heads and kept waving. There were carnations everywhere, just like back in the day, he thought to himself. They were perfect for every occasion — party meetings, demonstrations, weddings, and funerals. In the latter case, you had to make sure they were an even number. The set designers had done a good job. They clearly had a nice, fat budget, yet another one of those stupid co-productions. He couldn’t help himself, he turned toward an elderly man wearing a suit that looked like it had been sewn in the ’70s with a pin on his lapel.

“Excuse me, but what are they filming?”

“What are they filming? Who’s filming?” The man looked around anxiously.

“Uhh. it must be some movie. What’s with this. demonstration?”

“Don’t you know? Today is September ninth.”

That really was the date, but it hadn’t been a national holiday for the past twenty years at least. Bewildered, he begged the man’s pardon and stepped away from the crowd. He now noticed that his clothes also differed quite a bit from the others’. Against the backdrop of the sober brown of their trench coats and suits, their macramé sweater-vests, and the older women’s headscarves, he looked as if coming from another, hostile — or so he thought — world. His short red jacket stood out like a sore thumb, while his jeans and sneakers, in all their casualness, looked strange amid the sharp creases all around him. He ducked off to the right, wanting to stroll for a bit through the deserted side streets. The warm September sun was shining. The faint scent of roasted peppers wafted from somewhere. Flags were hanging from some of the windows. On one corner, a swarthy grubby man of indeterminate age was selling funnels of sunflower seeds, just like back in the day. The funnel is an ingenious invention, his father had loved to say, the cone gives a sense of height and volume, yet the inside holds a much smaller amount, the ideal shape for commerce. He bought himself a funnel. It was made of a piece of old newspaper. Just like in the old days, he thought yet again on that day. Once upon a time, everything could be made from old newspaper — from a painter’s cap to a lampshade. As a rule, everything could be made from everything you had at hand. He could read parts of words, numbers and percentage signs on the scrap of newspaper, which was certainly from back then, with that unmistakable ink and font. If this is a movie shoot, they really have thought of everything down to the smallest detail. He was the only thing that didn’t fit the set at all.

Carried away by such thoughts, he didn’t notice the two uniformed men who had been following him for the last few minutes, without bothering to hide it. When they suddenly jumped out in front of him, they gave him a good scare. Then he noticed that the uniforms they were wearing were not exactly like modern police uniforms. With those ridiculous jackets and big peaked caps, those belt buckles, well yes, they were gendarmes from the socialist era. This reassured him a bit, anything could happen in a movie, and could happen like in the movies, without any particular consequences. Your passport? I don’t have it on me. It’s back at the hotel. How long have you been here? Two days. We’ll be forced to take your down to the station. You have not completed the obligatory registration with the local office of the Interior Ministry, you’re sauntering about in provocative attire on a national holiday, not taking part in the event. He let them stuff him into the Lada, Jesus, where did they dig this thing up, and drove off. There most likely weren’t any cameras in the car and he thought that here they would finally put their cards on the table. He smiled and with a wink asked the sergeant who was sitting next to the driver: When will they show the movie? The cops looked at each other, then the sergeant turned around and with a well-aimed swing punched the arrestee between the eyes.

The building they brought him to had just been built, but architecturally it recreated late Happy Socialism from the 1980s, roughly hewn marble, wood and frosted glass. Blood trickled down from his split brow. The man who came out of the building wearing a suit immediately ordered them to get him medical attention, a nurse appeared from somewhere, put on a Band-Aid, found some ice, and led him into an office with a leather couch.

“Sorry, they got a bit carried away. I had explicitly told them not to touch a hair on your head. They can be real brutes sometimes, just like back in the day. Just don’t tell me you don’t remember me”—the man across from him took a bottle of brand-name whiskey and two glasses out of his desk drawer with a practiced gesture.

There was something familiar about that face, soft, babyish, looking ready to start bawling at any minute.

“Baby Cakes, is that you?”

“It’s me, Swift-Footed Stag.”

My (I didn’t know it was me, God damn it) schoolmate Baby Cakes, one of the gang back then, the eternal butt of our jokes, we didn’t even give him an Indian name. He carried Chingachook’s bow and quiver of arrows.

“So you’ve bought up the whole town of T., you’re the one. ”

“When did you get here, when did you learn all the gossip? Yes, I occupy several posts, mayor, party secretary, chief of the gendarmerie.”

“And why did you have to arrest me?”

“Oh, I have more than enough reasons. But above all, I wanted to see you, shame on you for coming here and not giving me a call. Because of the good old days. You’ve rented out a house to write in, and just imagine the coincidence, the same one you used to live in. I’m happy that you look back fondly on those years.”

“What’s with that baloney downtown, are you shooting some kind of a movie? You haven’t become a director, too, now have you?”

“No, it’s far more serious than that. I’ve launched a project. In short, I’m turning time back thirty years. Nothing has changed here in any case. I’m creating the world’s largest museum. A museum of the past, of socialism, call it what you will. The whole town, every day, round-the-clock, a total museum. Actually, ‘museum’ isn’t exactly the right word, everything is live. Everyone keeps being whatever he was then, and we pay him for it. I foot the bill for everything. We don’t pay them much, but we don’t ask much of them, either. Just for them to stay the same. They’re nostalgic for the olden days in any case. We’ve cut off the Internet, TV, we sell newspapers only from back then, actually we reprint the old editions in reverse order, we’ve imposed penalties for telling political jokes, we’ve reintroduced the people’s militia, party meetings, demonstrations. I invited those who had been secret service informers to get back to work. I also pay a few folks who used to grumble against the government to keep doing it. Those sorts of things create atmosphere.

In short, you don’t do a damn thing, you loaf around all day and take home a paycheck in the end. Just like back then. But I’m merciless if someone breaks the rules, my gendarmes are like the ones back in the day. You got a first-hand taste of that, incidentally. People are happy. Do you have any idea how bad unemployment in the neighboring towns is? Rich clients come here and order themselves a demonstration or a party meeting. Everyone wants to go back in time. I’ve built the ultimate time machine. I even have visitors from abroad. Come on now, cheers, and welcome back!”

“Cheers. So what about the whiskey?”

“From Corecom, the hard-currency store. Like I said, we’ve thought of everything.”

“And why are you doing it? If it’s for the money, there are more conventional ways of making a buck.”

“I’ve got money, although I never turn it down. That’s not the reason, though. Let me be frank with you,” he refilled our glasses, “I don’t feel like living in modern times. Nothing but shit. ”

“There was plenty of shit back then, too.”

“Maybe, but to me it smelled good. The world is already bugging out big time, there’s no way you haven’t noticed. I want to invite you to join in. I want you to come up with. days, everyday life. I know that’s a tall order. The holidays are easy, those I can manage. But these folks need a script for daily life. I’ve already got some clients interested in that.” He went over to the bookshelf and pulled out a few of my books. “I’ve got them all. You gave me the idea to a certain extent, I’m indebted to you.”

“Oh no,” I try to protest. “I never gave you the idea of bloodying up my brow.”

“That whole inventory of socialism was a brilliant idea, along with the stories from back then, too. I use them as a handbook, we recreate a lot of those things. People drink Altai soda and cider, we brought back those old bottles of Vero dish soap. We’ve already got a few manufacturing workshops up and running here in town.”

“This is a nightmare, okay, I’m going to wake up now. ” I have the worrisome feeling that I can’t control the plot of the story or even my own lines.

“No, this is a story that you just think you’re writing, but actually, you’re inside it. I’ve known you since childhood, you’ve always been a space cadet, it’s not hard for you to flit off somewhere.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Let’s just say you’ve been invited to join in your own project. Don’t forget that it’s your idea, I’m only the manager.”

He takes a sip from the glass, I barely touch my lips to mine.

“We’ve got some more serious plans as well. The Doctor will arrive shortly, I’ve given him the Yellow House, we’ve fixed it up. He’ll be doing experiments there. Regression therapy. regeneration of cell memory. a sanatorium for the past, gentle electroshock stimulation. He’ll explain it to you better himself. But we urgently need fabricators of the past.”

For a moment it crosses my mind that some Anti-Gaustine has implanted himself in Baby Cakes. And my every thought occurs to him sinisterly turned upside-down. For the first time, I want to stop, to give up, to jump ahead in time. Turning back is not always innocent. The past can be a dangerous place.

“Quite dangerous,” Anti-Gaustine’s voice adds. “Incidentally, the Yellow House is not far from here at all and if we open the window, we’ll hear a very familiar. ”

I didn’t hear whether he said “voice” or “howl,” because I got up and hurled myself through the window headfirst. That always helps with nightmares.

THE MINOTAUR’S DIARY

I have no idea how much time has passed since I’ve been here. I don’t remember whether I came in by myself or whether someone locked me in. The darkness is so thick that time has gotten lost. Only in darkness is there no time. I don’t know how old I am. I’ve been forgotten. I feel like pounding on the door until they hear me and open up. There’s only one unsolvable problem and therein lies the whole horror. There is no door.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. It’s so obvious that it’s almost impossible to see. The deoxyribonucleic acid of every living creature with its double helix is structured like a labyrinth. A vertical labyrinth that unwinds in a spiral. The genetic instructions for all forms of life are written in a labyrinth. So that means it’s the perfect form for preserving and transmitting information. That’s why DNA has remained encrypted for so long. We are made of labyrinths.

DE

OX

Y

RI

BO

NU

CL

E

IC

AC

ID

Deoxyribonucleic acid. Deoxy. An ox plods through the primordial soup of the world. I write it out over and over again until I lose myself in the labyrinth of that name.

Except that there’s some mistake there, some bug, some hitch. Which automatically turns me into a Minotaur. I walk through the whole labyrinth of my own deoxyribonucleic acid to find that mistake. I am locked up in one, the other is locked up inside me. The labyrinth in the Minotaur.

Things that resemble a labyrinth

The human brain. The cranial folds of all mammals.

A body’s nervous system or a nerve taken individually with all of its branches, nerve fibers, axons, and so on.

The serpentine of the small intestine and the internal organs.

DNA

Banitsi, burek, saralias. All the winding, phyllo-dough sweets of the Orient.

The flight of bees, the language they use to communicate with one another, the interwoven figures. The language of bees is a labyrinth.

A forest.

The root systems of annual and perennial plants.

The structure of the inner ear with its membranous and bony labyrinth.

A city without a river that you find yourself in for the first time. The absence of a river is important. Otherwise the Ariadne’s thread of its course easily shows you the way.

Secret routes taken on a walk with a mistress you are keeping hidden.

Doodles on a scrap of paper while having a boring phone conversation.

The pubis of a young woman. Here the labyrinth comes before the cave.

A ball of yarn.

The labyrinth sketched out by the reader’s eyes.

If you look closely at a rose for a long time, you will see the labyrinth within it. And the horns of a beetle-Minotaur.

Good thing this darkness is here, this basement, so I can stay here, turning back time, running through its corridors, shouting, mooing. The darkness helps me get used to it. When the one who is coming comes, I’ll be ready. The transition will be truly smooth, from one darkness to another.

I remember, or I imagine that I remember, strange things. I remember afternoon, towns baking in the sun, deserted streets that grow crowded toward evening. I remember, and this is my earliest memory, my mother hiding behind a curtain and waving to me, I’m laughing, because I get the game, I head toward the curtain, I’ve just learned to walk, but she’s not there. Sometimes I see rooms with high ceilings, a girl from behind, a cart disappearing into a field, an injured man in a strange city, a book in which I read my own story, full of mistakes.

I remember that I was once happy. It lasted about six minutes. It happened in the Kensington Gardens in West London, early in the morning. I can’t find a reason for that happiness, which is proof positive of its authenticity. Any other kind of happiness is a conditioned reflex, like in Pavlov’s dog. The stimulus comes and happiness is secreted, like gastric juices.

I was walking down the pathway, breathing deeply and sensing things with the body of a child. That is the key. With the body of a child.

I haven’t gone out to the street in eighty-four days. I only slip out late in the evening to get the newspapers out of the mailbox, they’re how I count the days. I don’t want to meet anybody. I’ve stopped shaving, my jaw has gone stiff, probably because I haven’t talked to anyone. Can your mouth atrophy?

I stop eating for some time. In any case, my supply of tin cans and provisions has been drastically diminished. I consider reducing my weight as part of going back in time. Children do not weigh 180 lbs. I feel better in this thinning skin. I’m looking more and more like that child-Minotaur. I don’t know whether I’m a boy, the sickly thin person has no gender or age.

When Theseus came out of the cave, he was leading a child by his left hand. The myth has erased that child from its memory. Myths don’t like children. Just imagine how incredibly awkward it would be. The hero Theseus with his short sword, Theseus who had defeated the giant Periphetes, the bloodthirsty bandit Sinis, the wild Crommyonian Sow, the hulking Cercyon, the cruel Procrustes, the Marathonian Bull, and so on, in the end sees a frightened child. Theseus tosses his short sword on the ground and leads the child out of the labyrinth.

That night he tells Ariadne: you know what, there was no monster there, just a little boy with a bull’s head. And that boy somehow reminded me of myself.

(Theseus and I really do look alike, yet at the same time he is handsome. Perhaps he sensed that one and the same divine father was peeking out from behind both of us — at once god and bull. My brother begotten by a god, I by a bull.)

Ariadne doesn’t pay attention to his words, but only hugs and kisses him, telling him that they have to get out of there right away.

The truth is, while looking for loopholes for the Minotaur in the story, I keep dreaming ever more frequently of my death in a basement, run through by a short, double-edged sword. The hand and the sword come out of the darkness of another time, they have travelled for so long that my human-faced killer is completely worn down from the journey, his arm is weak, and I myself have to help him with my own execution. To make a door with a sword in my very own body. My whole life I’ve been trying to lead the Minotaur out of myself.

But what if my killer (that which will kill me) doesn’t notice me in the darkness and passes me by? What if I hide, like way back on that summer night when we were playing hide-and-seek and they forgot me. And I stand there hidden for a long time, while death goes about its business for years, a century. And what if outside there are now other people, a few generations have passed, and I won’t be able to share the apple of a single memory with anyone? If that’s the price. I hear myself yelling, howling, mooing like a bull in the corridors of that basement, because I no longer know which language is mine. I’m here, don’t pass me by, here I am. Moooooo.