Time Shelter

1.

And then the past set out to flood the world . . .

It spread from one person to another like an epidemic, like the Justinian plague or the Spanish flu. Do you remember the Spanish flu of 1918? Gaustine would ask. Not personally, I would reply. It was terrible, Gaustine would say. People simply dropped dead on the streets. You could get infected by everything, all it took was someone saying “Hello” to you and by the next evening you’d be dead.

Yes, the past is contagious. The contagion had crept in everywhere. But that wasn’t the most frightening part—there were some quickly mutating strains that demolished all immunity. Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the twentieth century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness, and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.

No one died, of course (at least not in the beginning), yet the virus was spreading. It wasn’t clear whether it was transmitted by aerosols, whether the very spray of spit when somebody shouted, Germany (or France or Poland . . .) über alles, Hungary for the Hungarians, or Bulgaria on Three Seas, could pass on the virus.

It was most quickly transmitted through the ear and the eye.

In the beginning, when people turned up on the streets in some European countries dressed in their national costumes, this was more or less considered an extravagance, a touch of color, perhaps a holiday of sorts, perhaps the beginning of carnival season, or a passing trend. Everyone smiled as they passed by, some joked about it or whispered among themselves.

Somehow imperceptibly people in native costumes began to take over the cities. Suddenly it became disconcerting to stroll around in jeans, a jacket, or a suit. No one officially banned pants or modern clothing. But if you didn’t want to get dirty looks or to arouse the nationalists’ suspicion, if you wanted to save yourself some headaches or even an ass-kicking or two, it was better to just throw a woolen cloak on over your clothes or slip on lederhosen, depending on where exactly you happened to be. The soft tyranny of any majority.

One day the president of a Central European country went to work in the national costume. Leather boots, tight pants, an embroidered vest, a small black bow above a white shirt, and a black bowler hat with a red geranium. The clothes fit him like some erstwhile czardas master who had since let himself go, but who was already ready to leap up with surprising nimbleness the second he heard music from a wedding. This look was a hit with the people as well as with the TV stations, and he began to dress like that every day.

European MPs also quickly fell in with the new trend, and soon the European Parliament began to resemble some German New Year’s special from the ’80s, as a Euronews journalist put it, recalling the A Kettle of Color program on television in the GDR—a shared and unifying memory for several generations of East Europeans.

The deputy prime minister of a southeastern country also put on a pair of full-bottomed breeches with decorative braid, a wide red cummerbund, and a shaggy shepherd’s hat, which was trimmed with popcorn like in the olden days. The minister of tourism donned a heavy red tunic and an embroidered shirt with wide sleeves. The coins adorning her costume gleamed like real gold and there was a rumor going around that she was wearing part of a Thracian gold treasure kept in the state vaults. Gradually all the ministers started wearing native costumes, and in the end meetings of the Council of Ministers resembled a village working bee. We’re breaking up the working bee, the prime minister would say instead of the official “The meeting is adjourned.” It was slightly embarrassing at first when the minister of defense showed up on horseback in a revolutionary uniform, girded with a long saber and with a silver-handled Nagant revolver tucked into his wide leather belt. The horse would stand all day tied up next to a row of black Mercedes in front of the Council of Ministers, and a cop would give it a bag of oats and sheepishly clean up the dung.

A few websites tried to poke fun at this, but their voices were so weak and even irritating against the background of the general euphoria that they quickly shut up.

A new life was beginning, life as a reenactment.

2.

One evening two quiet electric Teslas would pull up in front of the clinic on Heliosstrasse, and three men in dark blue suits would get out to see Gaustine. One of the men, the chairman in blue, had come there before, since his mother was a patient. Later he stopped by a few more times on his own to hold long conversations with Gaustine. His visits were discreet, incognito, he was one of the big three in the European Union.

That evening the whole triumvirate came. Gaustine would invite them into his favorite study from the ’60s. They would stay there all night, talking, raising their voices, and falling silent.

The past was rising up everywhere, filling with blood and coming to life. A radical move was needed, something unexpected and prescient, which would stop this irresistible centrifugal force. The time for love had ended, now came the time for hate. If hate were the gross domestic product, then the growth of prosperity in some countries would soon be sky-high. A certain delay, a way to inhibit the process and gain some time—that evening the three men in blue had come searching for something of the sort, it seemed to me.

When we talk about Alzheimer’s, about amnesia and memory loss, we skip over something important. People suffering from this not only forget what was, but they are also completely incapable of making plans, even for the near future. In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

The task was as follows. How can we gain a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it’s the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now. If you go two, three, even five decades back, you come out exactly that much ahead. Yes, it might already have been lived out, it might be a “secondhand” future, but it’s still a future. It’s still better than the nothingness yawning before us now. Since a Europe of the future is no longer possible, let’s choose a Europe of the past. It’s simple. When you have no future, you vote for the past.

Could Gaustine help?

He could create a clinic, a street, a neighborhood, even a small city set in a specific decade. But to turn a whole country or an entire continent back to another time—this is where medicine becomes politics. And the moment for that had clearly arrived.

Could Gaustine have stopped them?

Did he want to?

I can’t be sure. I suspect that he had secretly been dreaming about just such a development, that he even, forgive me for saying it, innocently suggested this idea to his acquaintance in blue. There’s no way to know for sure. Or there is, but I don’t want to know. Actually, the three of them wanted advice, expertise, some kind of instructions, but clearly the decision had already been made. Besides, Gaustine didn’t hold the exclusive rights to the past. Not for a whole continent.

In fact, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea, plus anyone could see with the naked eye that there was no other way out. The past was already bursting through all the barely plugged bullet holes in the hull of the present in any case. They needed a farsighted move to take control of the situation, to give it some kind of shape and order. Fine, since you want the past so badly, here’s the past for you, but let’s at least vote on it and choose it together.

A referendum on the past.

That’s what they would talk about that night. Or that’s how I would invent it, outside, in the entryway, with my notebook.

3.

I have a dream . . . My dream is that one day the sons of former victors and the sons of the former vanquished in the Referendum of the past will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . . My dream is that all of us can live in the nation of our happiest time . . .

I observed how Gaustine stormed into action, without leaving his ’60s study. Of course, he never gave a single public speech. But in everything the three men in blue said, you could hear his voice, words, and intonation, borrowed from everyone from Socrates to Martin Luther King.

To me, this seemed to be a project in which everyone was investing different dreams.

That was also why it would succeed in the end.

And why it would fail spectacularly.

4.

All elections up until this point had been about the future. This would be different.

TOTAL RECALL: EUROPE CHOOSES ITS PAST . . . EUROPE—THE NEW UTOPIA . . . EUROTOPIA . . . A EUROPEAN UNION OF THE COMMON PAST.

Those were the headlines in European newspapers. If nothing else, Europe was good at utopias. Yes, the Continent had been mined with a past that divided it, two world wars, hundreds of others, Balkan Wars, Thirty-Year Wars, Hundred-Year Wars . . . But there were also enough memories of alliances, of living as neighbors, memories of empires that gathered together supposedly ungatherable groups for centuries on end. People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.

It was clear that a simple agreement on a unified Continental past was impossible at this stage. For that reason, as was to be expected, following good old liberal traditions (even though an election on the past is a conservative act) it was decided that each member-state would hold its own referendum. Due to the extraordinary nature of the procedure and so as not to lose time, alongside the question of whether there should be a return to the past, voters in favor also had to indicate which specific decade they chose. After that, temporal alliances would form, while further down the line it would even be possible to vote for a unified European time.

Everyone accepted the Memorandum for the Recent Past, which clarified the process for holding the referendum in EU countries. Everything somehow took place more quickly and easily than expected.

And afterward they would agree on the various . . . pasts.

(Hm, this word isn’t usually used in the plural, well, what do you know. The past is only in the singular.)

5.

There are more and more signs of the coming of the past as I write this book. The time is near.

In Cuba they have banned the removal of old cars from the sidewalks because the tourists come specifically for them. Some countries are well supplied with history: Soviet Moskvitches and American Buicks sit there and rot next to each other, with bent wheel rims and flaking paint, while their rusting skeletons crumble, washed clean by the rain and dried by the Caribbean sun (like that marlin picked clean in The Old Man and the Sea).

I wonder, when the Second Coming finally arrives one day, whether old cars will also be resurrected.

TODAY IT SAYS IN THE paper that Germany has brought back typewriters to some of the top-secret government departments, in order to guard against leaks of information after a spy scandal a few years back. You can’t hack and drain a typewriter. I find this piece of news very telling. Back to the Brave Old Analog World.

IN THE UK MILKMEN ARE enjoying a resurgence and more and more people are ordering milk in glass bottles, delivered to their doors in the morning.

THE NEW ISSUE OF THE New Yorker has reprinted (for the first time) one of its old covers from 1927. What would happen if on one and the same day all the newspapers and magazines decided to reprint their old issues from a certain day fifty or sixty years ago? Would the wheel of time creak?

THERE’S NOW A RADIO STATION that plays whole days from different decades, with news, interviews, the entire program for a given day.

6.

The very definition of the recent past turned out to be the subject of more than a few arguments, and for that reason a compromise was reached in which the borders were left flexible. Countries just needed to remain within the confines of the twentieth century.

There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit, but in the end, shouldn’t people get to decide for themselves where they wanted to live? Things imposed from the top down never worked anyway and only provoked irritation. The referendum was a terrible idea, but a better one, as they say, has yet to be proposed.

This will be our final attempt to survive in the face of an impossible future, the chairman in blue was saying, we must choose between two things—living together in a shared past, which we have already done, or letting ourselves fall apart and slaughtering one another, which we have also already done. Both options are legitimate. Remember that great line from Auden, We must love one another or die. He paused briefly and repeated it, deliberately lowering his voice, We must love one another or die, knowing full well that he was coining a slogan for the media to seize the next day.

I heard Gaustine behind every word. These people had finally learned to speak, or, rather, to listen.

7.

Sometimes names really are correct by nature, as is argued in Plato’s Cratylus. There is something telling in the very etymology of the word “referendum,” if we drill down to the Latin provenance of the verb re-ferro, which means to go back, to carry back.

Turning back was loaded into the very word, and nobody even realized it . . . A referendum on the past. Do language games, with their etymologies and tautologies, sometimes hint at more than we think? And through the trumpets of tautology, does the revelation of a new apocalypse arrive?

8.

First, a country that had always wondered whether or not it was part of the Continent set itself apart. Great Brexitania, as we called it then.

Literature is to blame for everything, I told Gaustine once.

As usual, he laughed.

More specially, Robinson Crusoe, I went on. The confidence that an island can give you everything you need to survive, sustenance, all of that comes straight from Defoe. I’ll be fine on my own, Robinson declares, God is with me. We’ll be fine on our own, his descendants say, God save the queen (but even without her, we’ll be fine).

Yes, Gaustine agrees, it would’ve been better if they’d read Donne instead of Defoe.

And suddenly, with his seventeenth century voice ringing out—I swear it was in that English from back then, declaiming that which we remember better thanks to a novel by Hemingway—he said:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde . . .

That’s the problem—Defoe defeated Donne, Gaustine said with a melancholy that could sink the whole British navy.

We were silent for a time and he repeated in his voice from the seventeenth century: any mans death diminishes me . . . Funny, we’ve always just skipped over the title: “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” And now the occasion is emergent.

Once again Great Britain presents a troublesome case. Given Brexit, it should remain outside the referendum. But a pro-European movement immediately reared up on the island, insisting that the UK should by rights be included in the referendum on the shared past, since during that very same past it had been part of Europe and the union. Every nation, just like every person, has its moments of madness, the movement declared, let’s give ourselves a historical second chance to shake off this madness.

The argument about a “historical second chance” was an exact quote from the preamble of the memorandum. But Brussels had gotten tired of British dithering in recent years and preferred to take a salubriously firm position. It refused the request.

9.

While these conversations were taking place, however, another miracle occurred. Switzerland, which has always been something like a hidden island within Europe, suddenly expressed the desire to join the Referendum on the Past. This was truly unexpected and headquarters in Brussels did not know how to respond for some time. All sorts of suspicions were whirling around as to why Switzerland would so blithely agree to violate its own traditions. Had it discovered a crack, a weak spot in the project that it could cleverly take advantage of? In the end, as part of a cautious agreement with several additional clauses, it was allowed to take part. Switzerland was an island, but it was also Europe in miniature. Where else could you see Germany, Italy, and France rolled into one? Thus, beyond the suspicions, there lay something very natural in its desire to try, albeit with a certain autonomy, to join the referendum.

10.

A Critical Deficit of Meaning

The acute phase of the disease is characterized by a sharp, strangling pain in various points on the body, which hampers precise diagnosis. Many patients report paroxysms in the late afternoon between three and six o’clock.

Difficulty breathing is one of the most commonly mentioned symptoms. A feeling of suffocation. I don’t have any strength, or any desire, to take a breath. I exhale and don’t know if there’s any point in inhaling again . . . I stopped buying calendars for the new year [N.R. 53, housewife].

A sudden rush of senselessness, while I’m sitting on the couch—that’s one of the best descriptions given by a patient. Empty fields within the memory, holes where you try to remember a source of joy. This is exactly where the photographic negative has been overexposed (according to one person’s complaint), the power has gone out (according to another).

Beyond the individual diagnoses a tendency toward collective fear and rejection of the future, futurophobia, has been observed.

The aftereffects of the syndrome—melancholy, apathy, or intense clinging to the past and the idealization of events which happened in a different way or more commonly never happened at all. In comparison to the past, the present pales, patients claim that they are literally seeing in black-and-white, while their memories are always in color, albeit in the paler hues of a Polaroid. Frequent dwelling in an alternate, made-up everyday life.

—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses

11.

Yes, the referendum was a radical idea and everyone had pinned their hidden hopes on it. For Gaustine, it was, of course, a passion. It looked so simple. That which was valid for an individual patient at the clinic would now be valid for everyone, for an entire society, if we could still use that concept.

The men in dark blue suits were counting down the final seconds before the chain reaction of disintegration in Europe would be set off.

As for the rest of the world? If the referendum turned out to be a success and things went well, then others could draw on the experience, if not—serves those Europeans right in any case, they had gotten too full of themselves these past twenty centuries or so . . .

Europe was no longer the center of the world and its people were intelligent enough to realize this. There is always something tragic about such a realization, whether it be about a person, a nation, or a continent. It usually comes at a later age, when there’s not much that can be done. But at least you can try.

12.

One day Gaustine called and asked me to stop by the clinic.

I was walking toward Heliosstrasse. The April sun shone softly, yet without warmth. Here and there a few trees had begun blooming. A vague scent of soil and barns seeped in even here, in the city. That’s how it smelled in the village, when my grandfather was shoveling manure out of the barn onto the garden in front of the house. That scent is gone now. Everyone uses synthetic fertilizer, so the soil smells like penicillin. Even now the scent of real manure takes me back . . . there, forty years ago and two thousand kilometers to the east. Switzerland was the ideal Bulgarian village of my childhood, the village that never existed.

In the meadow in front of the clinic the late hyacinths blazed in pink and blue, the narcissuses vainly swayed in the light breeze coming from the lake. I like this pre-May lull, before everything bursts out twittering, buzzing, and going crazy with color.

However, the forget-me-nots sprinkled throughout the meadow in front of the clinic were the most striking. Here of all places, forget-me-nots. (With surprise and slight bitterness I discovered that the Latin name of that little flower was not nearly so romantic—Myosotis, which literally means “mouse ears.”) I preferred the legend according to which Flora, the goddess of flowers, when giving out names to various plants, walked right past that humble blue flower and then heard a soft voice behind her: “Don’t forget me! Don’t forget me!” Flora turned around and called it forget-me-not, endowing it with the ability to invoke memories in people. I read somewhere that the blossom of the forget-me-not cures melancholy or, to put it more officially, has an antidepressive effect. Moreover, its seeds can stay in the ground for thirty years, sprouting only when the conditions are right. That flower remembers itself over the course of thirty years.

I entered the clinic. Gaustine had invited me to the 1940s, on the first floor. He was drinking Calvados and smoking some German trophy cigarettes. An old map of the front hung on the wall, where flags indicated the movements of the various armies. On the large, heavy table of burnished cherrywood several detailed prototypes of the Spitfire were lined up, that favorite monoplane of the Royal Air Force from the 1940s, fast and hardy. A Messerschmitt and a Hurricane were keeping them company. They stood there exquisitely, on a stand, as if they had just returned from battle. Gaustine was dressed in a green military shirt with the sleeves rolled up, resembling an English officer responsible for the landing at Normandy, who has just found out that the expected meteorological conditions have suddenly changed. I was seeing him for the first time in uniform. Perhaps he didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere of the decade.

I got the feeling that he was struggling to concentrate, like a person trying to step out of the river of a different time. (I’d noticed such efforts a few times before.) The referendum would begin in just a week. He knew that I was getting ready to go back to Bulgaria, for he himself had insisted upon this. He told me that he wanted to withdraw for a bit during this time, that he would observe developments from afar. Suddenly he strongly reminded me of that young man whom I had met thirty years earlier, with that same sense of othertimeliness and a lack of belonging. It seemed to me that he was walking slowly toward his 1939, where he had disappeared then. We exchanged a few more words, and agreed that when everything was over, we’d meet up again. At six before the war, right? I joked. (I don’t know why I said “before,” in The Good Soldier Švejk it was “after.”) He turned around sharply and stared at me intently for a full minute. Yes sir, at six before the war . . . he said, accenting the “before.”

I’m not sure it was a good idea to— I started in hesitantly.

You’re never sure, that’s why you need me, Gaustine interrupted irritably. You need somebody to do what you don’t dare.

It’s easy for you, because when things get rough, you just change times, whereas I have to stay here . . .

But I fight for every time as if it were the only one, while you, in the only time you have, act as if you’ve got another hundred possible times.

(He’s right, he’s right, goddamn it!)

But you’re a . . . you’re a projection, you’re a monomaniac, except that you’re a serial monomaniac, you just don’t remember your previous manias. You can’t just play with the past. Don’t you remember all those other projects from the last novel . . . the cinema for the poor, where we were supposed to retell movies before they were shown for half the price, without having seen them ourselves, we just about got our asses kicked, what about our projections of clouds on the sky, or the Condom Catwalk . . . All those things were total failures, you’re the prince of failures . . .

That’s enough, Gaustine said coldly. We aren’t the ones who thought up referendums.

But we also didn’t try to stop them.

And should we have? He said quickly as I headed for the door.

I don’t know, sir, I replied dryly, taking in his green shirt and trying to get into the tone of the ’40s. He didn’t laugh. We shook hands coldly and I left. I had the sense that I would lose him again . . .