Time Shelter

1.

From the airport in Zurich I took a train straight to a monastery half an hour away where I could afford a cell with Wi-Fi (what more could you ask for?) in the guest wing. The Franciscans had been taking in pilgrims for years at rock-bottom prices and I availed myself of their benevolence. I wanted to be alone for a time in peace and quiet to follow online what was happening with the referendum in other countries. And I wanted to finish up these notes, which had initially seemed to me to precede and presage what had happened, but which—as was becoming ever clearer—were actually describing and running alongside recent events. Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels.

I saw everything through the computer screen, shut up in this souped-up cell in the ascetic Franciscan monastery with a bell, doors, and windows that were several centuries old. The glass was a true revelation. We’ve gotten used to buildings and rocks lasting, but for something so fragile to have survived since the seventeenth century is a miracle, no matter how you look at it. Grainy, uneven glass poured by human hands, in which the sand it was made from could be seen. Close to the monastery there was a little farm with a dozen cows, and the cows, too, were no different from those during the seventeenth century. Animals eat up the sense of time. I dutifully wrote everything down in my notebook.

I called Gaustine and let it ring and ring. Afterward, I realized that if he’d gone down to the ’60s rooms somewhere, cell phones didn’t exist yet. I had to tell him what I’d seen so far. The short version was: a disaster. His darkest fears had come to pass, our darkest fears.

2.

Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, as has been written.

Everything was going wrong in the family of Europe . . . All was confusion in the European house.

Indeed, the Continent was turned upside down, and every member was unhappy in its own unique way. Incidentally the very word “unique” has multiplied in recent years like the Old Testament flies or Moroccan locusts, such that it has blacked out all other verbal beasts. Everything was “unique.” Most of all unhappiness. No nation wanted to give up its unhappiness. It was raw material for everything, an excuse, an alibi, grounds for pretensions . . .

Why part with unhappiness, when it’s the only wealth some nations have—the crude oil of sorrow is their only inexhaustible resource. And they know that the deeper you dig into it, the more you can excavate. The limitless deposits of national unhappiness.

The idea that nations and homelands seek happiness is an enormous illusion and self-deception. Happiness, besides being unattainable, is also unbearable. What will you do with its volatile matter, that feather-light phantom, a soap bubble that bursts in front of your nose, leaving a bit of stinging foam in your eyes?

Happiness, you say? Happiness is as perishable as milk left out in the sun, as a fly in winter and a crocus in early spring. Its backbone is as fragile as a seahorse’s. It’s not a sturdy mare you can jump onto and gallop far away. It’s not the cornerstone you can build your church or state upon. Happiness doesn’t make it into the history textbooks (there only battles, pogroms, betrayals, and bloody murders of some archduke make the cut), nor does it make it into the chronicles and annals. Happiness is only for primers and foreign phrase books, and for beginners, at that. Perhaps because it is the easiest grammatically, it’s always in the present tense. Only there is everyone happy, the sun is shining, the flowers smell lovely, we’re going to the seaside, we’re coming back from a trip, pardon me, is there a nice restaurant nearby . . .

Swords are not forged from happiness, its stuff is fragile, its stuff is brittle. It does not lend itself to grand novels or songs or epics. There are no chains of slaves, no besieged Troys, no betrayals, no Roland bleeding on a hill, his sword jagged and his horn cracked, nor any fatally wounded, aging Beowulf . . .

You can’t summon legions under the banner of happiness . . .

Indeed, no country wanted to part with its unhappiness, this wine that had been aging nicely in the cellar, where it was always on hand if needed. The strategic national stockpile of unhappiness. But now (for the first time) the moment had come to choose happiness.

3.

It was almost certain that France would choose its own happy and renowned Les trente glorieses, when the economy and prosperity were growing, everyone was in love with French cinema, Resnais, Truffaut, Trintignant, Delon, Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Girardot, everyone was humming Joe Dassin’s “Et si tu n’existais pas” and talking about Sartre, Camus, Perec . . . And behind all of that stood a well-oiled economic machine. The glorious and happy thirty, between 1945 and 1975. Clearly everything in France after the Sun King had to last a long time, their happy periods were thirty years long, as were their wars . . .

Some wagered heavily on the ’60s. Of course, there was a specific favorite year—1968—invented, filmed, and made into legend. To be young during 1968, who wouldn’t choose that?

It turns out that the French themselves would not choose it. The ’60s were a troublesome time, the colonies were leaving, Algeria was lost in 1962, clashes with those who considered you an oppressor rather than a patron. To whom you thought you were a patron. Paris in the ’60s was nice for magazine articles, cinema, and a two-week vacation, but in the end a person always chooses to live in more nondescript times. Nondescript times are the most convenient for life. In fact, the ’60s had no real chance at all.

I presume that 1968 did not exist in 1968. Nobody back then said, Hey, man, that stuff we’re living through now, it’s the great ’68, which’ll go down in history. Everything happens years after it has happened . . . You need time and a story for that which has supposedly already taken place to happen . . . with a delay, just as photos were developed and images appeared slowly in the dark . . . Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.

One of the most curious movements to crop up alongside the referendum would be called “A Moveable Feast”—after Hemingway’s memoir of the 1920s, set in the capital of the world. The Paris of cafés in the Latin Quarter, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, of La Closerie des Lilas, La Coupole, La Rotonde, Saint-Michel . . . the home of Miss Stein, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, which Joyce himself liked to stop into, the Paris of Fitzgerald, Pound . . . I’ve always loved that book, and if I could, I surely would have voted for that decade. The movement itself had been founded by a group of young writers. But when it came down to it, not everyone wanted to live in a moveable feast. A feast is good for feasting but inconvenient for life. It raises a racket, you can’t sleep, as one woman, an elderly landlady in the central quarters, said in the news reports. Besides that, the problem was that the movement mainly staked its bets on just one city, never mind that it had been the capital of the world. But France was large and provincial—the fishermen of Breton, the farmers and apple-pickers of Normandy, the quiet towns in the south of France didn’t care a fig about the orgies of some scribblers who meandered from café to café, trading women and rolling around without a penny to their names in cheap hotels. The lost cause of a lost generation. The movement would end up getting around four percent of the vote, which was not at all negligible, perhaps it equaled the exact number of writers at that moment in France.

Supporters of Marine Le Pen chose a strategy that turned out to be misguided. In the beginning they decided to boycott the referendum, which actually lost them quite a bit of time, without bringing them any particular ratings. They only joined in at the very end of the campaign and to everyone’s surprise they supported the Gaullist wing that chose the late ’50s as the decade to return to. De Gaulle was nevertheless the strongest defender of a great and autonomous France, the man was legendary for standing up to the big dogs and championing a “Europe of Nations.” Their man, par excellence.

So many things influenced the choice, irrational and personal things above all, that when the results showed the victory for those who voted for the early ’80s, that sweet timelessness of the outgoing Giscard d’Estaing and the incoming Mitterrand, analysts needed some time to explain why this was logical.

In the end, victory went to those who had been young and active then. The 1960s came in as a very close second, only about three percentage points behind, perhaps due above all to the current anarchist movements which were gaining strength and which wanted another chance to throw the cobblestones of 1968.

Only Le Pen’s nationalists would announce that they refused to accept the election results. They declared their intention to block any decision on the case in the European Parliament.

4.

Spain, with its long experience of being unhappy in its own way, would have an easier time of it. When you’ve got a civil war that overflows into the Franco regime, you can bracket off half a century without a second thought, leaving far fewer years to choose from, which makes things much easier. And if at the beginning of the century you get rid of the first few decades due to the Spanish flu, the Rif War, and the dictatorship of General de Rivera, the situation becomes simple indeed. The ’80s were brilliant years, wild years, one Madrileno said in a news report. After the Franco decades, as cold and gloomy as a ground floor, you suddenly step outside, the sun is shining, the world has opened up, waiting for you to experience everything you’ve missed out on, the sexual revolution and all those other revolutions, in one fell swoop.

Others claimed that they had never lived better than in the ’90s. The post-Franco transition was already over, things had fallen into place, the economy was surging. There was more money than work, there was a future . . .

I didn’t have the right to open a bank account or to have a driver’s license, I couldn’t even get a passport without my husband’s permission, one woman shouted during a discussion in which some elderly gentleman made so bold as to suggest that under Franco things had been calm, and hinted at the Spanish economic miracle of the ’60s.

In the end, Spain chose the “release” of the ’80s with La Movida Madrileña, Almodóvar, Malasaña . . . The first bare tits in post-Franco cinema, sometimes justified, sometimes not. I remember how, when these films finally reached us (we must’ve been seventeen or eighteen), we would make bets that by the second minute there would be nude scenes, that’s why we loved Spanish cinema.

In any case, there was not a civil war during the referendum, as some observers had predicted (the support for Franco was much lower than anticipated) and Spain happily returned to the fiestas of the 1980s.

Once I ended up in Madrid toward the end of a warm September, after midnight on a square filled with young people, beer drinkers, fire eaters, weed smokers, guitar players, laughing groups of friends . . . A scene that would have fit well in at least several centuries. On my way home late that night, I caught glimpses of young men and women calmly pissing in the alleyways, right on the sidewalk between the cars. That’s what Madrid smelled like, beer and urine, and there was joy in that smell.

Portugal, by analogy, after a long, cold regime that ended in the Carnation Revolution, would choose the mid-1970s as a new beginning, when the intoxication of 1974 was still alive. But also when the memory of Estado Novo, Salazar, and his heir Caetano was still fresh and could be counted as part of the unhappiness of being Portuguese. A myth, which had united people for several centuries after the Great Age of Discoveries, and which had only grown stronger after the Great Losses of the Newly Discovered Territories.

I remember how as kids we would play a game called “Nations.” We would stand in a circle and everyone would pick a country according to a special rhyme (round and round the globe does spin, now which country are you in? . . .), then we’d all scream, “Let it be, let it be . . .” France, for example. We’d all run away, then France would shout, “Stop,” and would have to say how many steps it would take to reach one of the other countries. If you guessed the right number of steps, you conquered the foreign territory. There were steps of different sizes—giant steps, human steps, mouse steps, ant steps, and I can’t remember what else. A simple game, in which the most important thing seemed to be which country you chose. We all pushed and shoved to get to be Italy, Germany, France, the U.S., or even “Abroad.” The girl I was secretly in love with always chose Portugal. Thus I duly chose Spain, so as to be near her. In any case, Portugal didn’t have any other neighbors and that geographical location spared me inevitable jealousy. I recall now how well that country fit her.

What did we know about it? It was on the very edge of Europe, small, pressed up against the wall of the ocean. A country not really known for anything. Perhaps she chose it due to its mysterious name, which sounded like portokal, the Bulgarian word for “orange”? I was convinced that oranges lived mainly there, in Portugal. And since it was so far away, they rarely made it here. Someone ate them up during the long journey, most likely the truck drivers themselves, because who could resist the temptation? I didn’t blame them, I wouldn’t have been able to resist, either.

Portokalia Portugalova, that’s what I called her. That name is all I can remember of her.

5.

Unlike Spain and Portugal, Sweden, for example, found it much more difficult to choose a happy time to return to due to very few unhappy decades, which left far too many choices available.

Okay, so the first fifteen years of the century could easily be excluded due to the unemployment caused by a sharp increase in population, which some historians attribute to vaccines and potatoes. Then, after two major wars and a cleverly cashed-in neutrality, everything fell into place. That which had decimated the Continent had been good for the country. There would always be a need for strong Swedish steel and machine parts, especially during wartime. This explained the fact that there, on the eve of the referendum, for the first time among all the other countries, a movement in favor of the 1940s arose and even gained popularity. Someone had obligingly excerpted passages from Astrid Lindgren’s diary, which gave a short and sweet account of what could be found on a Swedish holiday table in those wartime years: a leg of pork weighing 3.5 kilograms, homemade liver pate, roast beef, smoked eel, reindeer meat, or a list of family gifts exchanged on Christmas 1944: an anorak, ski boots, a sweater vest, a white woolen scarf, two sets of long underwear (I give him those every year), cuff links, slacks for everyday wear, a chain for his watch, books, a gray pleated skirt, a dark blue cardigan, socks, books, a puzzle, a very nice alarm clock, a bath brush, a little marzipan pig . . .

I don’t know why that little marzipan pig stuck in my head, but clearly it had the same effect on Swedish journalists. Sweden was not a marzipan pig during the war—protesters shouted this slogan against the movement. Such prosperity was a fact, but of course the problem of guilt remained. Could a person be happy and well fed amid the hell unleashed all around? In the end the polls showed the ’40s with a rather modest percentage, which put them in fifth or sixth place in the rankings, without any practical chance of success. But the very fact that the specter of the war years had reared its head as a possibility was jarring enough.

According to analysts, the high percentage of supporters for returning to the 1950s, which all surveys showed to be leading in the campaign, was due precisely to the upswing in the previous decade along with the awkwardness of choosing war, after all. But the ’50s were a strong decade in their own right. The media recalled how, amid a ruined Europe coming out of the war, Sweden stood strong, with unviolated resources and manufacturing. Life was growing ever cozier. We had a nice semi-automatic washing machine, a television for the first time, and a refrigerator yea big . . . a woman on TV was saying, spreading her arms as wide as she could. She was around seventy, well preserved for her years. And . . . here the camera panned to the man next to her, a tall, wiry old man with a red face, who added to the fridge his Volvo Amazon, the first model from 1957, black with a light gray top, quite a piece of work . . . And he thrust at the camera a black-and-white photo of the couple standing in front of the car, grinning from ear to ear. The Volvo resembled my father’s Warszawa, which in turn was an exact copy of the Soviet Pobeda. Those sturdy, slightly hulking cars of the ’50s, solid as tanks and almost as fuel-inefficient.

Another strong and undeniable ace up the sleeve of the movement for the ’50s was, of course, IKEA. Yes, that was when IKEA published its first catalog, opened its first store, and, perhaps most importantly, introduced the idea of dismantling the legs from a coffee table so it would fit in your trunk and so you could put it together at home. That’s how the ’50s were—practical, sturdy, cheap, a bit raw, and simple.

Their big rival was the ’70s, however. The 1950s, on the one hand, or the 1970s, on the other, despite the economic crises, those were the stakes in the Swedish referendum. There was something inherently scandalous in the ’70s. During the 1970s and ’80s, besides the Iron Curtain, the world was also split in two in an equally categorical manner by the question every man faced—the Blonde or the Brunette (sometimes also the Redhead) from ABBA. Posed just like that, not Agnetha vs. Anni-Frid (Frida). I, with all the wisdom of my ten years, was not among the target group, but secretly, like most men, I liked the Blonde. I also already knew, however, that that was banal and that it was cooler to prefer the Brunette. Or at least to say that you did. In any case, ABBA was everything northern, light, Swedish, dancing, glittering, white—in the ’70s.

ABBA or the Poäng chair, for example, an IKEA creation from that same decade, such things turn eras upside down, not the gross domestic product and the export of wood and steel. In the end, despite the crises of the 1970s and the changes of government, despite the jump in gas prices and the subsequent new crisis, despite all of that, the dancing queen of the late ’70s overtook the Volvo of 1957 with its huge refrigerator and semi-automatic washing machine. Romance no longer lay with the fridge, people felt like dancing, and a new sentimentality was hovering over the northern waters. So, after the referendum, Sweden woke up to a new 1977.

It was no surprise that Denmark, too, chose the 1970s in the end, although the ’90s remained in the race until the very last. Yes, there was something Scandinavian about the ’70s. They resembled those New Year’s cards sprinkled with white sugar instead of snow, which we secretly licked.

Because in the 1970s we started taking pleasure in life, that’s what a Danish friend of mine explained to me. But what about the sixties? I asked her, didn’t the pleasure start there? She fell silent for a moment, then said: You’re right, only we still didn’t know what to do with it then. I got pregnant without meaning to, I had a child, the father disappeared, I left the child with my mother and father, went to Moscow, to a new life, I lasted a year, Yevtushenkos were screaming in the stadiums, Ahmadulinas, children of the sixties’ thaw . . . While their real poets were underground, drunk, unpublished, exiled, and I had just discovered them and then they arrested me, I got sent back to Denmark via official channels. In short, that’s how the sixties ended, like a college party where you’ve just gotten drunk, just gotten your buzz on, and suddenly the cops bust in. Only the hangover remains. In the 1970s I already knew how to handle pleasure, we all already knew, and we lived well. Rest assured that everyone will vote for them.

Well, not absolutely everyone, but still, she was right.

6.

. . . It rained the whole evening. I woke up to the sound and lay there with my eyes closed, listening to the droplets. There was no attic, only thick roof beams from way back when. I lay there and listened. The body and the rain have an old, ongoing conversation that I had forgotten. There is a simple life, a life in solitude, which I had grown unused to. Eating bread at a wooden table, gathering up the crumbs and tossing them to the sparrows. Slowly peeling an apple with a pocketknife and realizing that this gesture exactly re-creates your father’s gesture, which re-creates the gesture of your grandfather’s. The place is not the same, nor the time, nor the hand. But the gesture remembers. Opening up the local paper, Zuger Woche, to check the weather forecast, thinking of the newly sprouted onion and a blossoming cherry tree in the yard. Concerned about a world you do not belong to. At around five, the huge Franciscan clock beyond the wall sounded, no less booming than the bell. I got up, got dressed, sat down by the window as dawn was breaking. I opened a slim volume of Tranströmer’s poetry, a pocket edition, and read slowly and with an enjoyment from another time. I closed the little book and thought, if nations go back to the ’70s or ’80s, what will happen to the poetry and books that are not yet written and which are forthcoming? Then I tried to recall what great things I had read from the past few years. I didn’t think I would have regrets about any of it.

7.

What would happen with the referendum in the erstwhile East of Europe—that part which is always preceded by the modifier “former”? Of course, everyone had long since scattered, just like a former family that had been forced to live under one roof until the kids grew up, and then everyone went their own way. If they didn’t hate one another, at best they did not harbor any curiosity toward one another, either. Each wanted to go to that (Western) mistress they had been dreaming about while sharing the common socialist nuptial bed.

My final hope for returning to a new 1968 after the French failure lay precisely in this (former) bloc. And naturally, the Czech Republic was the most likely place for this nation of ’68. To be twenty-something and to be on the streets of Paris or Prague, what more could you want? After the vote in France in favor of the ’80s, half of this dream died. Paris was lost, Prague remained.

But just as in France, that which looked good from the outside did not look quite the same from the inside. The legend of ’68 sounded nice, time had smoothed out its rough edges, the Prague Spring was as seductive as the Garden of Eden, minus that episode where a wrathful God came storming in. But this storming in was nevertheless a fact, and God thundered like a Russian tank and was as vengeful as “brotherly troops,” a true deus ex machina, and armored, at that.

After the Prague Spring, a summer of devastation followed, and as always when life breaks, everything changes places: those who had been in the street pass into the cold shadow of that summer and all summers thereafter, while the meek poke their noses outside and are called to take up the now-empty places. It’s not the clashes, the broken windows, the exiled, the imprisoned, the beaten and raped, or even the murdered ones that crush you, but rather the subtle, chilling sense of meaninglessness in some subsequent afternoon, when you see people laughing on the street, getting together, making children within that same system that has already kicked you out of life for a good long while. History can afford to make a hash of fifty or sixty of its years, it’s got thousands of them, to history, that’s no more than a second, but what is that human-fly to do, for whom that historical second is his whole life? Because of the afternoons that followed ’68, in Prague they had no desire to choose the ’60s.

And yet in the Czech Republic a lengthy battle was waged between three possible past nations. Above all, the First Republic—the Golden ’20s . . . an economic miracle . . . a cultural boom—ranked among the top ten economies in the world, the movement’s media arm recalled. The enthusiasm of a young nation that was succeeding in everything. Then came the nation from the other end of the century, the Velvet Revolution of 1989. And bringing up the rear, the Prague Spring of 1968, which, albeit the third-ranking party, was also not to be taken lightly at first. Which nation to choose, their names alone were seductive—golden, velvet, or spring? A certain character with a certain mustache peeked out from behind the ’20s, one who would welcome the Sudetenlanders and turn the blossoming nation into a protectorate. Behind Prague Spring stood a cold Russian summer, behind the Velvet Revolution—the subsequent disappointments of dreams not quite come true.

In the end, fear about that which followed the ’20s turned out to be greater than the fear of what came after the ’90s.

The great battle of fears. And so the Velvet Revolution was victorious for the second time and the Czech Republic returned to the 1990s.

Poland also had a movement pulling for the 1920s and betting on the Second Polish Republic, but without much success. In the end things were clearly leaning toward the 1980s, with two factions. Some wanted to return to the very beginning of the decade, to the resistance, the birth of Solidarity during 1980. Supporters insisted that the enthusiasm from back then had to be reinvigorated, to start things off on a high note. They recalled how in just a few months the membership of the first non-communist labor union allowed by the system reached ten million. 10,000,000. So many years later that figure continued to look impressive.

The other faction, however, brought out the scarecrow that was Jaruzelski from that same time period, the general in the dark glasses whom even my grandma in Bulgaria used to scare me with, Go to bed before that fellow with the glasses comes. After 1980 came martial law, repression, imprisonment . . . For that reason, they wanted to start over fresh at the very end of the decade, with the first semi-free elections, when Wałęsa won. In any case, the faction backing the early 1980s got the upper hand. Poland even went so far as to restart two years earlier, so as to also mark the selection of Pope John Paul II, a sign from God that had given rise to the glorious decade that followed.

In the end, almost all the countries from Eastern Bloc (with two exceptions, Bulgaria and Romania) chose the years around 1989 as the desired point for returning and restarting. Of course, in this there is both sound logic as well as a personal angle. Somewhere there, at the very end of the century, everyone was, we were, young for the last time. Including those from the 1950s, who believed that the end would come and who had waited for that end, as well as the young ones from the ’68s that happened and didn’t happen, who saw in ’89 a happy inversion of those two numbers. And finally the youngest of the young, the twenty-somethings in 1989, for whom it was the first revolution, here I can speak in the first person. Finally, the unhappened seemed as if it would happen, everything was ahead of us, everything was beginning, and at the very end of the century, no less.

I will exercise my right to marginalia, to an eyewitness diversion, because I was there at the protests in the real 1989. I jumped, shouted, cried, and then suddenly got old in the bait-and-switch of the following years. Marginalia and sheepish mourning for the ’90s. The system was changing before our very eyes, promising a wonderful life, open borders, new rules . . . And at warp speed, from one day to the next. I remember how on the squares of 1989 the following exchanges could be heard: So, dudes, I don’t mean to be a downer, but surely it’s gotta take a year or two before things get straightened out, a friend said, I wonder whether it wasn’t K.? It might even take three or four, perhaps as long as five, another suggested cautiously. Good God, how we tore into him, we all but kicked his ass, booo, who’s gonna wait your five years, huh, hello, our university exams start three months from now, enough of your five-year plans already . . . At that time there was still a strategic national stockpile of future and we boldly parceled it out. Absolutely naïvely, as would become clear.

A decade later, in the aughts, that reserve was already depleted, only its rock-bottom gleamed glassily before us. Sometime around then, at the end of one decade and the beginning of another, something happened with time, something went off the rails, something snapped, sputtered, spun its wheels, and stopped.

8.

If Scandinavia couldn’t decide which one of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also wracked by doubt, but for the opposite reasons. The whole twentieth century—a time of historical staggering and terrible circumstances, bad choices about which horse to tie their wagon to—the German, English, or Russian one? Lost territories and battles, sieges, crises, internal coups. Even the revolution of 1989 was far from velvety. It was as if only in the late ’60s and early ’70s a window opened briefly (and it would be chosen for lack of any other option)—an attempt at independence in a divided world. Afterward the window would slam shut in the misery of the following decade of debt, empty stores, and Securitate.

All those happy, well-fed peoples, Frenchmen, Englishmen . . . Oh, I am not from here, I have centuries of constant misfortune behind me. I was born in a nation devoid of opportunities. Happiness ends in Vienna; beyond Vienna begins Damnation! The merciless Cioran.

This describes not only the Romanian case.

The vote in Austria seemed to be the most fragmented and unclear. Here we had the lowest rates of voter engagement, and among those who voted, several movements, which were themselves rather anemic, received equal percentages of the vote. The memory of that colorful and multilingual empire from the first decade of the twentieth century, served up above all in literature and Secession style, was slowly growing cold like a coffee forgotten out on the veranda with a dried-out slice of Sachertorte. And it didn’t end well at all—the assassination of an archduke, the Great War, disintegration, and all the rest of it . . . Austria of the Anschluss received a worrisome—but similarly insufficient—percentage of votes. Some public shame, perhaps more a habit than a conviction, still hung in the air. Austria of the ’70s and ’80s, that guilty pleasure of the East and West, which had turned its permanent neutrality into a permanent source of income, was the other preferred slice of the electoral pie. And in the end came the ’90s, when the secret from the preceding decades could finally be revealed—the briefcases were opened, the checks were cashed, double agents claimed what they were owed by the employers on both sides.

With these absolutely unclear and tied results, spread across several decades of the century, Austria risked annihilation, stuck between neighboring temporal empires, with Vienna left as nothing more than a museum-city, which is what it has always been. A border zone in the geography of happiness.

Nevertheless, in the end the ’80s scraped out a win by only a few percentage points. This victory, which most suspected was backed by a hidden nationalist vote from the successors of Jörg Haider, whose star had risen in that very decade. Watching reports from Vienna and Salzburg, I imagined how the winners from the ’80s would quickly pull together a new referendum, in which—now beyond the watchful eyes of Europe, in the privacy of their own home, as it were—the Anschluss of 1938 would come. Many buried things lay at the foot of 1939.

9.

Germany remained the major, decisive mystery. There, history danced the longest and Berlin was its stage, cabaret, place d’armes, shop window and wall, everything all at once. The first half of the century was amputated, despite attempts by the new ultra-right wing to place a prosthesis in that empty space. Germany would not go back there, not yet, despite the autobahns and Volkswagens that turned up on the black market during this race. But each of the following decades had a chance in its own way. Sociologists are forecasting a win for the 1980s, E. wrote to me from Berlin, horrified. Can you imagine? Not the economic miracle of the ’50s, not the ’60s because of ’68 and everything else, but the ’80s, what a disgrace. You know that I am for the ’90s, didn’t we always say those were our ’60s that never happened in Bulgaria: the Summer of Love, Prague Spring, all that. The ’90s were our ’68, okay, so maybe a little shabby, a little second-hand, but still ours. I feel like living in the early ’90s and if we win, come and meet me there, in Berlin or Sofia . . . Much love, E.

Sweet E. She and I passed through the first years of the ’90s together, it was a tumultuous relationship, as could only have happened then. All our waiting for the ’60s has finally paid off, she would say with a laugh back then, handing me her cigarette in bed.

E. and I even managed to get married, a major mistake. In the 1990s no one got married, they only got divorced. Okay, well, we also managed to correct that mistake in the very same decade. We split up, then she left for Germany. All Bulgarian students with straight-A’s in German left sooner or later. I had straight-A’s in Bulgarian and so I stayed.

Still, she wasn’t completely right about the ’80s, at least not the German ones. Something was brewing there on both sides. Wir sind das Volk!^*—they screamed on Alexanderplatz and the squares of the East. Atomcraft? Nein danke,^** they chanted in the West, human chains, peace marches, red balloons, Nena, HIV, and punk. In the end, it was interesting there on both sides. At the current time, however, few of those who wanted the ’80s imagined that they would have to go back to a divided Germany. But there was a way around that as well, they voted specifically for 1989, the very eve of it. Hoping to drag it out for a year or two or three. If one could remain forever on the eve of the celebration and keep the herring of enthusiasm fresh for a long time (contrary to Bismarck) in a drawn-out delay of the future, what more could you want? I imagined a permanent tearing-down of the Wall and its secret rebuilding afterward, only to be torn down again. Spinning your wheels in happiness.

Frankly, 1968 didn’t have much of a chance in Germany, either. With the exception of a hard-core yet negligible group of late Marxist and arthritic anarchists (anarchists age, too), the grand year of ’68 was not overwhelmed by supporters. Mostly because after it came the 1970s. And they were not an easy choice—what with Baader-Meinhof and all those murders, bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies. Between Mao and Dao, “Bandiera Rossa,” Che Guevara, Marcuse, Dutschke—the mess that was the ’70s in Europe. And the Second World War had ended only twenty- or thirty-odd years earlier.

Sometimes we don’t stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me.

As Gaustine would say: Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears . . .

In the end the ’80s won out. No, it is more accurate to say that the West German ’80s won out. Except that Berlin once again became a divided city. Interestingly enough, both sides insisted on this.

Elderly Germans voted for that decade thanks to the magnificent person of Helmut Kohl, who radiated stability and security. The young, or those who had been young then, i.e., the majority of voters, chose the remnants of disco of the ’80s.

In the end, the banal always wins out, the trivial and its barbarians sooner or later invade and conquer the empires of weighty ideology. The big winners in the referendum were Falco, Nena, Alphaville, the whole West German soccer team from the ’80s, Breitner’s beard, the young Becker and Steffi Graf, the ponderous luxury of KaDeWe, Dallas, Dirty Dancing, Michael Jackson, whom everyone was wild about here, even that ennui-inducing New Year’s celebration on A Kettle of Color on East German television.

You always say that the eighties are the decade that produced mostly boredom and disco in the East, E. wrote me after the elections, but clearly that’s what people want—disco and boredom.

E. was right, but there was something else going on. People also likely chose the ’80s because of their upcoming end. There was something strange about the voting and this gave us a clear sign. By choosing a decade or a year, you are actually also choosing what comes after it. I want to live in the ’80s, so as to look forward to 1989.

(No one paid any attention to the fact that in most of Germany’s eastern provinces, the sinister Party of the ’30s came in second.)

10.

For several days (weeks?) I haven’t spoken to anyone. I seem to be losing my sense of time. I get up, get dressed, go down into town for fish, it’s market day. I try to call Gaustine again, no luck, just a strange signal on the other end of the line. I chat a bit with the olive seller. He speaks Italian, I reply in bad German. He ends up selling me as many olives as he had intended. I roll his last words around in my head like olive pits as I climb back up to the monastery on the hill—prego, olive, grazie, prego, olive, grazie. When I reach the top, I spit them out. I’ve bought cheese and fish as well. I clean the fish, cut a sour apple into thin slices, then olive oil, basil, lemon, a splash of wine, and a piece of white alpine cheese. In half an hour the fish is ready. I set it on the table on my nicest plate. I pour myself the rest of the wine. I sit down and realize that I have no appetite whatsoever.

11.

The Absentee Syndrome

So many places where I’m not. I’m not in Naples, in Tangier, Coimbra, Lisbon, New York, Yambol, and Istanbul. Not only am I not there, I am painfully absent. I am not there on a rainy afternoon in London, I am not there in the clamor of Madrid in the evening, I am not in Brooklyn in autumn, I am not there on the empty Sunday streets of Sofia or Turin, in the silence of a Bulgarian town in 1978 . . .

I am so very absent. The world is overcrowded with my absence. Life is where I am not. No matter where I am . . .

It’s not just that I’m not there geographically; that is, I’m absent not just in space. Even though space and geography have never been merely space and geography.

I am not there in the fall of 1989, in that crazy May of 1968, in the cold summer of 1953. I am not there in December 1910, nor at the end of the 19th century, nor in the Eastern ’80s, stuck in their disco groove, which I personally loathe.

A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time.

—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses

12.

Switzerland’s turn comes around. The country’s willingness to take part in the referendum without being a member-state is one of those flattering (if inexplicable) surprises.

Months earlier, Gaustine and I had been locked in the following argument.

Mark my words, I would say, these folks here will choose the 1940s without blinking an eye, to everyone else’s horror.

Look here, he would say, amid a war-torn Europe, Switzerland may have looked like paradise, but believe me, that wasn’t the case. They were expecting to be attacked at any moment, warplanes were circling the borders. Hitler didn’t pussyfoot around. I assure you, he even had a detailed plan to conquer Switzerland, city by city.

I loved when Gaustine spoke as if he had been an eyewitness, although sometimes it got on my nerves. How can you argue with somebody who talks as if he had been there?

Still, preparing for war is not the same as being in the thick of it, right? I sniped back at him.

I’m not at all convinced of that, he replied, sometimes it’s even worse. Hearing about all the horrors being visited upon your neighbors, sleeping with your rifle on your pillow, in full battle-readiness. Burrowing into the Alps to make yourself bunkers, we called them “redoubts,” hiding in redoubts, always giving larger and larger loans and concessions to the Reich . . . Especially after they had trounced the French in no time. I recall that some cities were bombed by the Allies—Basel and Geneva, for example, if I’m not mistaken, and Zurich.

Navigational errors, I retorted, using the U.S. Air Force’s official explanation. As they say, nobody bombs a bank that is holding his own money.

But just look at how much money those same Swiss poured into charitable funds right after the end of the war, the Marshall Plan, the Red Cross in Geneva, that can’t be denied, Gaustine replied.

And yet, they will still choose the 1940s, mark my words. The influx of gold, money, and paintings was never greater. Banks and Old Masters.

That’s true, but the money went to the banks, while the people were truly poor, especially outside of Zurich. They’ll never choose the 1940s, Gaustine argued.

In the end, Gaustine was right. He always was right. Even though all polls indicated high levels of support for the war years, which put Brussels on tenterhooks. At the last minute, however, the old masters of the referendum made a decision that was so logical, yet at the same time absolutely unexpected. Switzerland, surprise, surprise, chose neutrality. A peculiar, temporal neutrality, so to speak. It chose as its period the year, month, and exact date of the referendum.

But . . . but that isn’t the past, the European commissioners stuttered. On the contrary, it is already the past as we speak, the government responded calmly. And tomorrow it will surely be even more in the past. And so on with every passing day.

Remaining neutral has always been a game outside of time. I don’t dance to your time—for a certain time, at least. But I can measure it out for you, if you’re willing to pay, I’ll time it with a stopwatch (Swiss-made, of course) and I’ll sell you clocks, I’ll guard your paintings, rings, diamonds, and all your baggage, while you’re off playing or fighting.

No objection could be made to that.

After some debate, the Europeans admitted that, in fact, Switzerland’s choice did offer certain advantages to everyone. It wasn’t a bad idea in this historical overturning of time to have one country that everyone could set their clocks by. And what better clock to depend on than a Swiss one? It was good to have a preserved model, a gold standard of the time that the others had pushed off from. And also, if anyone experienced severe claustrophobia from the past, Switzerland could offer them temporary asylum. A shelter.

It was also decided that it was best for the independent European institutions that would oversee compliance with the new temporal borders to be situated in such a country. In the no-man’s-land of time.

13.

P.S. Italy

I had given up all hope when, in the end, Italy, with typical southern dawdling, managed, albeit at the very last moment, to save the ’60s. Especially when at first nothing hinted at this at all.

If we could go back to the time of Mussolini, but without Mussolini, so many things were built back then, one man was saying on RAI 1 before the vote, with a chubby belly and denim coveralls, leaning on his little fiat. Fortunately, over the course of the election campaign such statements became fewer and farther between, a different sort of nostalgia awoke, nearer and dearer than Mussolini’s highways, which turned out not to be of such high quality. Il Duce was replaced by La Dolce.

Not Il Duce, but La dolce vita! supporters of the eponymous movement wrote on the walls. We had money and youth to spend, said an Italian woman from the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, while licking her gelato, and it was like a line from a film. The economic miracle of the ’50s lasted into the ’60s, there were enough TVs, washing machines, Vespas, little Fiats, Fellinis, Lollobrigidas, Mastroiannis, and Celentanos to go around.

In the referendum, Italy finally chose that decade which no one had dared choose in Prague, Paris or Berlin. “Italy Saves the ’60s,” shouted headlines in the Corriere della Sera and most of the major newspapers the following day. “Vita Brevis, Dolce Vita longa!”

The sixties were a film most likely created in the studios of Cinecittà, but who doesn’t want to live in the movies? An Italy of sky-blue Vespas, an Italy of nights, raincoats, impossible divorces in Italiano, Fontana di Trevi. The Italy of Via Veneto, of terraces and legends of the private birthday party of the young Countess Olga di Robilant in early November of 1958, where the dancer Aïché Nana performed a sudden striptease and several leaked photos inflamed the imagination of the nation. The phrase was coined, and the ’60s were ready, invented, and in high demand.

That sweet life, La dolce vita, was possible at least in one country.

I’ve always thought, and as I grow older I think it more and more often, that one day we’ll all go live in the Italy of the ’60s, perhaps not exactly in Palermo, but somewhere there in Tuscano, Lombardia, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Calabria . . . It’s enough just to hold these names on your tongue, the melting gelato of the names, with their soft l, gna, and m, and with the occasional nut of the r.

Once, as a young man, I found myself in a little square in Pisa, and since then I’ve known what the thing I’ve always wanted looks like . . .

It was one of those nights that you realize is not meant for sleep. You sink down into the unfamiliar streets. After a few blocks the noise has died away completely. Then you discover a piazza, with a little fountain and a church in the corner. And with a little group of friends, a few guys and girls, who have come out to shoot the breeze in the coolness around midnight. You sit down on a bench at the other end of the square, you listen to their voices, and if anyone had asked you at that moment what happiness is, you would point silently toward them. Growing old with your friends on a square like this, chattering and sipping your beer on warm nights, in a quadrangle of old buildings. Unperturbed by the lulls in the chatter, followed by waves of laughter, you don’t want anything more or less in the world, besides to preserve that rhythm of silence and laughter. In the inescapable nights of the coming years and old age.

That kind of Europe is what Gaustine and I were dreaming of, it seems to me, with small chatter-filled squares. Its mornings are Austro-Hungarian, its nights are Italian. The gravity and grief are Bulgarian.

14.

The new map of Europe would look like this.

In the end, in the referendum people chose the years when they were young. Today’s seventy-year-olds were young in the 1970s and 1980s, in their twenties and thirties back then. The aging chose the years of their youth, yet the young, who were not even born then, would have to live in those years. There was a certain injustice in that—choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.

Whether the young were entirely innocent is another question. Exit polls indicated that the majority of them voted, in even greater numbers than the old, for the decades of the previous century, which they had no memories of. Some kind of new conservatism, new sentimentality, imposed nostalgia passed down from generation to generation.

The empire of the 1980s took shape as the largest and most powerful bloc, like a spine running through the center of Europe, encompassing what had been Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Poland. They would be joined by Greece as well, that poorer version of Italy.

The northern alliance of the 1970s was the other major grouping, with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Here the only southern exception was Portugal. But what could be better for the northerners from the ’70s than having their very own southern colony and warm beaches on the other end of the Continent? Hungary also joined this alliance, as the “happiest barracks” in the socialist era.

The 1990s, which came in second in most countries, a second-place dream and in some sense the bright future of the empire of the ’80s, were actually not to be discounted in the least. Here were the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, still intoxicated with their post-1989 independence. Slovenia and Croatia also ultimately chose the final decade of the twentieth century, with the special clause to be included in it only after the end of the Yugoslav Wars. This was a good choice for both liberally and the nationalistically minded voters, as they each saw horizons for development. Here, in that somewhat fragmented and agitated nation of the ’90s, the Irish tiger lent a hand (or rather, a paw). More new immigrants were expected, coming from other countries. The empires of the ’70s and ’80s would end up dropping anchor here, sooner or later. In the end clearly everyone would come together at the point of 1989.

The concentration into only three or four main temporal alliances, all from the second half of the twentieth century, no less, was interpreted as a promising step toward future unification. For some time, however, all citizens had to remain within the borders of their country and the respective decade that had received the largest number of votes. The mixing of time periods was to be avoided, at least in the beginning, until things stabilized and got going.

After that the borders would be opened. Actually, there was sharp disagreement on this point. One group, known as the diachronists, supported the restarting of time and allowing for its natural progression after the first few chosen years. The other camp of synchronists, however, demanded that countries remain in their chosen decades for a longer period. The process of resetting the clocks was slow and unwieldy, and it was not at all clear how long it could be sustained . . .

Pandora’s box with its evils of the past had already been opened . . .

15.

They searched for him everywhere, including in the ’70s and ’80s . . . They rummaged through the ’60s, where he liked to linger, but there was no trace of him. Not in the clinics or the communities of the past. Doctors from Heliostrasse and Lord knows where else called me. I, in turn, tried calling him several days in a row and after he stubbornly refused to pick up, I finally took a train from the monastery to Zurich.

It was a nice day, invisible birds called from the crowns of the trees. One woman was sitting in the sun and had opened up a book. A woman reading on a balcony. The world was still the same.

Gaustine had disappeared, of course. This was not an unusual occurrence, as far as my experience with him was concerned, but still it struck me as quite strange and to some extent irresponsible in a moment like this. Perhaps he had sensed the ticking time bomb in this whole unleashing of the past? Perhaps he felt the atomic guilt of the physicists from the ’30s? Perhaps the past had sucked him in again? Or perhaps his disappearance would be short-lived, a temporary tumble into another time, from whence he would resurface very soon. For a moment I thought that he had decided to put an end to himself.

But if I am alive, could Gaustine be dead?

I remembered the little room on the ’40s floor where we had met for the last time. It was his latest secret office, so to speak. It would be equally frightening to find him there and to not find him there. I opened the door with trepidation. On the desk, next to the model airplanes, lay a big brown envelope with my name on it. Inside was a sheet of paper in his handwriting and with his signature, stating that everything connected to the clinic and the villages of the past was temporarily left under my direction, for an indefinite period of time. There was something else—a yellow notebook, one-sixteenth-inch format with soft covers, half filled. I would read it later. And a black-and-white postcard of the Main Rose Reading Room from the New York City Public Library, with two lines written on it in Gaustine’s hand.

I need to go to 1939, I’ll write when I get there.

Farewell, your G.

Typical Gaustine. Dropping everything with two sentences. (I must admit that I felt personally offended.) No instructions, no heart, no nothing. All his projects ever only made it this far. All his crazy schemes, I should say. And my own crazy schemes, since I had been part of them, I had bought into them, I had created them alongside him. He simply jumped from a moving time, from one century to another. He had known it when we saw each other that last time, it had already been decided. That’s why he had fixed me with that piercing look when I had said that we’d meet at six before the war.

He had gone to defuse the bomb of ’39. I would follow him sooner or later.

What should I do with these clinics and villages of the past, now that the past has crept out of them and officially settled into all the surrounding cities? What to do with Alzheimer’s homes in an Alzheimer’s world? I spent several nights thinking about that. How could he have dumped all of this on me? Of course, the clinics had to stay open, the patients had the right to a protected past. Especially given the temporal chaos outside. Even more so, given the temporal chaos outside.

*“We are the people!”

**“Atomic energy? No, thanks!”