Time Shelter

1.

The box was open . . .

In the beginning, after countries had chosen their happy decades, things were relatively calm for several months. There was a noticeable boom in old movies, albums, vinyl records, and the production of record players. Magazines and newspapers from back in the day started publishing again, telegrams, typewriters, and ditto paper reappeared . . . People had forgotten how detailed the past is and they were gleefully rediscovering things, going down to the basement, digging out old stuff, cleaning it off, repainting it, getting it restored. Collections of stamps, matchboxes, napkins, and records were pulled out. Movie theaters were showing old films around the clock, directors were getting orders for remakes, retro dance clubs were springing up like mushrooms, ever more frequently on the streets you could spot old Ladas in the East or Opel Rekords in the West, light industry was switching tracks . . .

But there were also things that could eventually upset the applecart. Sometimes it is harder to forget than to remember. For example, giving up smartphones, the Internet, social media . . . Some people did it gladly, that was the whole point, after all—to forget, to toss things aside . . . but they were quite a small percentage. The heroin of the virtual had done its job. Most people, even those who had voted for the ’50s or the ’60s, didn’t want to give these things up. The mobile operators and social media empires also were not happy about a possible reversal of fortune, and rumor had it that they were secretly pouring money into campaigns to boycott the new rules.

On the other hand, a rebellion was simmering among those who had “lost” the referendum. Those who had voted for the ’90s, for example, refused to go along with the timelessness of the ’70s. Everyone wanted the decade they had voted for and which had been awakened over the course of the campaign. Anarchism and centrifugal turmoil moved upon the face of the countries. Suddenly that which was supposed to be idyllic started breaking down . . . Discontents began breaking off into their own communities and enclaves, marking off small territories and populating them with different times. The local once again became important.

If an uninitiated person were to set out on a trip, they could unexpectedly find themselves in a different time, one not marked in any guidebook: an Eastern European village that had broken away into early socialism, with collective farms and old tractors, a town with late nineteenth century Bulgarian Revival–era houses where preparations for rebellion were in full swing, or a forest with wigwams, Trabants, and East German Indians straight out of 1960s Red Westerns. All sorts of past eras were rolling around the streets of the Continent, fusing together and taking place simultaneously.

The old road maps became time maps.

2.

The world had become a chaotic open-air clinic of the past, as if the walls had fallen away. I wondered whether Gaustine had foreseen all this—he, the one who always made me shut the doors tightly so as not to mix the times . . .

The decades were flowing like streams feeding a river that had surged beyond its banks and was pouring over everything around it, churning through the narrow streets, flooding ground floors, climbing up walls, smashing windows and going into rooms, dragging branches, leaves, drowned cats, posters, street musicians’ hats, accordions, photographs, newspapers, scenes from movies, a table leg, fragments of phrases, other people’s afternoons, skipping records . . . A great tidal wave of the past.

It started to become clear that the time map of the new countries would last only a short while. The demons that the referendum had awakened could not be stuffed back into their bottles. Once they had crept out, they scurried around everywhere, exactly as Hesiod had described them—voiceless, yet seductive . . .

The world was returning to its original state of chaos, but not that primordial chaos, from whence everything arose, rather it was the chaos of the end, the cruel and chaotic abundance of the end, which would drown all available time along with all creation in it . . .

The demons had been set free . . .

3.

I chose two young and ambitious doctors to run the clinic. I equipped myself with an armload of books, empty notebooks, and pencils, and went back to the monastery on the hill, behind the walls of the seventeenth century, just beneath the bell tower. From the height of the monastery (and the seventeenth century) I could better observe where the flood of the past had reached, plus it would take some time before its waters would reach me here. I also took the yellow notebook that Gaustine had left me, filled with all sorts of observations, new and imminent diagnoses (that was what he had called them), personal notes, and blank spaces that seemed to have been left on purpose. I soon began filling them up. I first marked his notes with a “G.,” and then my own with two (“G.G.”), but then I stopped. Our handwriting was indistinguishable.

4.

Is it possible that God is rewinding the film? We are in the uncertain memory of a God who has started to forget. To lose all recollection of what he had said in the beginning. In a world made of names, forgetting them is its natural end.

God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia.

—the yellow notebook, G.

That which I don’t dare do (or say) turns into Gaustine.

But still, he is too radical with that “God has dementia.” God has only just begun forgetting. Sometimes he mixes up times, gets his memories confused, the past does not flow in one direction.

What is going through the head of a God who holds all the stories in the world? Both the happened and the unhappened. All our stories in every second of this world.

—the yellow notebook, G.G.

5.

I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me. People were reading about Gaustine, they were intrigued, they were looking forward to his next appearance, they asked what was taking him so long. The magazine in which I published short stories about him from time to time doubled my honoraria. I could see Gaustine giving me that ’60s wink: Dude, half of that’s mine. You don’t need anything, I would reply, after all, I thought you up, didn’t I? Oh, did you, now? He would arch his eyebrow. Can’t you think up something better than this turtleneck and these round glasses of mine? Why don’t you write in a light blue Pontiac or at least a Mini Cooper for me?

Go on, get lost, I would snap, I can spare you a Vespa and nothing more.

Over the years it became ever more difficult to discern who was writing whom. Or perhaps some third person was writing us both, without much particular effort or consistency. Sometimes I am the happier and better man, that’s how they write me and I soar, but just a paragraph later they clip my wings and I’m wobbling around like a pigeon in the dust. I tell myself: Don’t forget that you’re from the other side of the story, don’t forget that you’re from the other side of the story . . . You’re writing it, it’s not writing you. The second you start to get the feeling that someone else is writing you, your goose is cooked, the demons have captured you, that which you fear most is upon you, your brain is emptying out like a barn in winter. No, I’m still holding it together . . . I still shut the doors tightly, or so it seems to me.

I am the one who writes . . .

When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure.

6.

All the radio stations play music and news from past decades. What’s happening today doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter which decade was chosen in the referendum, everyone is living in their own. We thought that the past was organized like a family album with carefully ordered photos: Here we are as kids, here’s graduation, here I am in the army, my first wedding, my daughter’s birth . . . Nothing of the sort.

I have found a small semi-legal radio station that tries to report today’s news. But it, too, is forced to broadcast the past (in all of its anarchy).

7.

Today it occurred to me to cook something I haven’t tried to make since I was a kid—egg on a newspaper. This is the simplest recipe I know. You set a piece of newspaper on the burner and crack an egg on top of it. Back in the day, the problem was that there were no eggs, now there are no newspapers. Thank God I found a newspaper. I turned the burner on low, and the room was filled with a scent I hadn’t smelled since I was eight years old. The scent of egg and toasted paper, a dry scent. I recalled how some of the letters would be imprinted on the egg whites. I also recalled how back then newspaper was used for everything. My grandpa would wrap the cheese in it and when we sat down to lunch I could read the headlines on the hunk of feta.

In the summer people would put newspaper on the windows in place of blinds, and also so that flies wouldn’t dirty up the glass. Speaking of flies, that brings to mind the bare light bulb sticky from flies that hung from the ceiling in the village; my grandma would make a lampshade of sorts for it out of newspaper, which would quickly get yellowed and scorched.

The egg in a newspaper turned out quite tasty.

8.

I slept badly, I dreamed of a flood and wild beasts, fires . . . in short, Old Testament dreams, a true nightmare. On top of everything, I was out of cigarettes, but I didn’t feel like going out, I had enough of a supply of tobacco. I just needed to find rolling papers. I didn’t have any newspaper left, and notebook paper was too thick . . . I had an old notebook made of thin sheets, almost rice paper, from back in the ’90s, filled with old poems which were no good in any case . . .

9.

Blind Vaysha Syndrome

A case has been reported of a girl who sees only the past with her left eye and only what will happen in the future with her right. Sometimes the borders between the past and the future grow so thin that with her left eye she sees the moon setting while her right sees the sun rising. Other times the borders grow so distant that the face of the earth from the first days unfurls formless and empty before her left eye, while before her right—the planet in its final days, ravaged and once again formless.

Blind Vaysha Syndrome, as it would become known in science, is characterized by precisely this simultaneity of past and future, with the ability (and misfortune) to see the world in its before and after at one and the same time, but never in its present, here and now. It is different from the syndrome of those inhabiting the past or of those who live only in the future, and it is twice as severe.

Clinical picture: A painful sense of not belonging to any time, quick jumps between past and future, functional blindness despite having normally functioning pupils, attempts at self-harm and suicidal tendencies. Similar to so-called Unbelongers Syndrome.

Patients cannot go out unaccompanied, because the street they are walking down does not yet exist for one of their eyes, while for the other eye it is a highway with cars zooming past. Experts expect the frequency of cases to double in the next one to two years.

—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses

Sometimes G.—I’m not even going to write out his full name—truly infuriates me. He has infuriated me before as well, the funny thing is that now he is doing it even when he is not here. The very fact that he is not here, but instead is grinning between the lines, is outrageous. His whole unscrupulous monopolization of everything infuriates me. This fictitious fellow has run wild and forgotten himself, where does he get off? Hang on a second, I thought you up, I can write you off . . . A single sentence would be enough, for example, “Gaustine passed away on that first day of September,” and it’s all over.

My whole life someone has been taking advantage of my warm southeastern heart.

10.

Years ago, while I was still traveling, I stopped into a Sunday mass at the Dominican church in Kraków. It was February, cold and gloomy, snowflakes were flitting around me. I saw a girl in a short coat sitting on the steps, parents with a baby carriage and two sniveling kids pressed up against them fearfully, an old homeless man wagging his beard in rhythm like a metronome, the faces of anxious people. I had the feeling that I had seen these same faces and bodies, this same scene, at some point during the ’40s, (I was born twenty years after that.) What will people’s faces look like when the Last Days come? Will those faces be marked with a sign, or will they be the same as ours?

One afternoon, years later, after yet another terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, I spent hours in the museum at the Hague. As if in a shelter from another time. It was full of people who had run away from the news of the day. A girl in jeans and a sweater was standing in front of Girl with a Pearl Earring. I was standing a step away from them, not moving. Their faces one and the same. So time is merely a piece of clothing, an earring . . . The gallery guard resembled Vermeer.

11.

My notebooks are full of quickly sketched faces. Faces of people who don’t exist . . . Here as well, in this notebook. Just as in all my notebooks over the years. . . I have no idea who they are, I don’t look for resemblances.

What are you doing?

Drawing faces that don’t exist.

Have they not been born yet or they’re already gone?

They are not born yet and are already gone.

They’ve come up with software that combines facial features to design and produce unfamiliar faces, and they are absolutely realistic. Not a single one of them exists, as the article made sure to repeat under every photo. Yet I kept getting the feeling that I had seen them somewhere. There is something frightening in producing the faces of nonexistent people, but I can’t even say exactly what.

12.

Hunger for faces. I’m nineteen years old, a guard on the Bulgarian-Greek border. I’ll be there for a whole year, in that no-man’s-land where if you see a human face, you should shoot it. No one has the right to cross. At the post there are twelve other soldiers and a commander—the only faces that are constantly before your eyes, morning, noon, and night. And this isn’t even a prison. Every month you have the right to one day of leave. Most soldiers use that day to catch up on sleep. Sleep ranks among the most important things for a solider, right up there with food. Sex is an unattainable luxury. I use that day to go to a nearby provincial town, with a population of barely three thousand. I don’t know anyone there. I get up before sunrise, walk a few kilometers, if I meet a horse cart on the way I hitch a ride, cars almost never pass by here. Two hours later I’m in town, exactly when they open the only café in the center. I sit down outside, place my order, either lemonade or Schweppes, and watch faces. I sit and watch—the faces of “civilians,” as we called them back then. Non-military faces. My eyes follow them of their own accord. This is the only thing that brings me satisfaction and peace. That somewhere in this world, beyond that frontier post, there are people living normal lives. It seems so far away from me, and I’m afraid I’ll never get back there “with all my faculties intact,” as it says in a book, which I keep hidden in the bag with my gas mask.

The calming knowledge that there are different human faces, and the rising fear that yours is not among them. That perhaps it does not exist.

13.

I observe the world, shut up in a room from the seventeenth century, with Wi-Fi from the twenty-first century, writing on a wooden desk that is at least one hundred years old and sleeping in a bed with metal head- and footboards from the nineteenth century. I try to play out the past that lies ahead. My memory grows weak, my mind deserts me, that which I have thought up is chasing me hard on my heels, it catches up and passes me. Forgive me, O God of utopias, the times have mixed together and now you don’t know whether the story you are telling has already happened or is yet to come.

14.

And so began the mass doubling of the happened and the unhappened . . .

In ever more detail, ever closer to the real events, sometimes even more real than the originals. And no one could discern which was real and which was the likeness anymore . . . One will flow into the other and when blood is spilled, real, warm, human blood, people will applaud as if at the theater, while elsewhere red dye, extracted from poisonous cinnabar, will be taken for blood and they shall fly into a blind rage . . .

—Gaustine, On the Mixing of Times

15.

Burgtheater, 1925/2025

Peer Gynt, that northern Odysseus, comes home . . . A furious storm starts raging, lightning rends the sky, the sea has gone mad, the ship shall be wrecked at any moment . . .

Suddenly, amid the thunderstorms on stage, revolver shots ring out, coming from the audience. A woman screams in a box on the first balcony. A bullet has passed through her right cheek, grazed her tongue, and gone out the other side. Spectators on the ground floor raise their heads. And, horror of horrors, a man’s head is hanging over the railing. Drops of blood soak into the ash-rose dresses of two terrified young ladies whose seats are directly below. The whole auditorium is on its feet. Several couples run out, there is crowding and jostling at the exits, others sit frozen . . .

At that moment a petite woman appears in the box holding a still-smoking Mauser, she offers a hand to the injured party, the murder victim lifts his bloodied face, and the three of them bow politely to the exulted audience . . .

End of the tragedy. The curtain silently comes down on the stage, even though no one is looking in that direction anymore.

One of the greatest attractions in Vienna—Peer Gynt at the Burgtheater. A full reenactment of the production from 1925, complete with the murder of the Macedonian revolutionary Todor Panitsa on May 8 of that same year, during the fifth act, the scene with the storm, right before the line “one dies not midmost of Act Five.” The woman with the injured face is his wife. The petite woman who shot him is part of an enemy faction, her name is Mencha Karnicheva. (Her full name is Melpomena, the muse of theater, how ironic.)

The audience has come primarily for these few minutes—the shipwreck on stage and the blood in the auditorium. Who wouldn’t want to get a taste of the 1920s with a murder at the theater? Tickets are sold out for a year in advance.

16.

Have we spent it yet, my dear friends, the paycheck of the future? The unbacked check of the future . . .

Even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet—isn’t that what St. Augustine says in Book XI of the Confessions?

In that not yet there is still some consolation, it is not here, but it will come. But what will we do when the future is no longer? How different is a future that is not yet from that which is no longer? How different that absence is. The first is full of promise, the second is an apocalypse . . .

—Gaustine, Notes on the End of Time

17.

Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don’t clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child. Suddenly those games of Borges’s, which you loved so much in your youth, those doubling games, become real, they happen to you yourself. What was once a metaphor has now become an illness, to turn Sontag on her head. There are no longer any metaphors here, as G. had said, when we met for the first time and discussed the death of mayflies at the end of the day. Here you really are no longer sure which side of history you’re on. Here “I” becomes the most meaningless word, an empty shell that the waves roll along the shore.

The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave.

The angel of those who leave and the angel of those who are left—sometimes one and the same . . .

18.

In the yellow notebook I came across the following note, which has not given me peace for a few days now.

“While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory . . . He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.”

Is he mocking me, threatening me, or offering me an idea?

19.

The embarrassment of forgetting names . . . Of course, everyone complains about this at a certain age. But I’m talking about the names of our nearest and dearest. For example, you can’t forget the name of the woman you used to live with, whom you were married to for several years, and who now hands you a novel and smiles, expecting a very personal autograph. She had queued up in line at one of my rare public appearances a while ago. And . . . a total blank. I can remember her body in detail, where she has a mole, our first night together, those were five years of my life.

But her name . . . I run through a dozen or so names in my head and none of them is hers. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, but it has never been so frightening, never with someone so close. I look around helplessly, there is a line of people waiting. I know some tricks for such cases—if I see an acquaintance nearby, I’ll introduce him to her so I can hear her name, but unfortunately there is nobody around right now. I go to plan B. I’ll write an inscription that is sufficiently personal, but without a name. I write something like, For the shared past we are made of. I hand her the book. She opens it, then innocently hands it back to me: Come on, add my name, please . . .

In my anxiety I grip the transparent counter of the stand, something gives, and the glass comes crashing down at my feet. Blood gushes from my wrist, a woman in line faints, people crowd around me, the girl from the bookstore pours water on the cut and takes out bandages, the giving of autographs is suspended, the line disintegrates, two photographers are snapping away, tomorrow I’ll see myself on some tabloid website . . . drowning in blood . . . but for me there is such relief in all this . . . Can I help with something? my wife asks anxiously, my ex-wife, that is, for whose sake I am bleeding like a stuck pig. Everything’s fine, I say, noticing a bit of blood on her copy of the book, right by the inscription.

Would you like to exchange it? The girl from the bookstand asks.

Oh, no, thanks, it’s more personal this way, Emma says, and leaves the scene of the crime.

Emma! Emma, of course, Emma . . . Like Emma Bovary.

20.

I went to see a neurologist friend of mine right away. In any case, he had long considered me a hypochondriac.

It’s possible for this to be temporary coping mechanism, stress. You meet lots of people, and when we add all the ones you make up as well . . .

(He was right, I hadn’t stopped to think that I also needed to keep in my head all the characters wandering around in my books; I am a softie and I don’t kill them off easily like others do, which makes it ever harder to keep them in line.)

Of course, we’re all growing a bit dimmer, the doctor said, neurons are burning out here and there, some connections have been deeply buried and seem lost, even though they can pop up unexpectedly one day. But not exactly at the moment we look for them. It’s like with sleep—the more you tell yourself while lying in bed at night, I must fall asleep, I must fall asleep, the worse your chances of falling asleep become. Try to get more rest . . .

I left the office with a guilty feeling that they think I’m a faker, an inventor of my own paranoias. But what the hell was the doctor’s name again? I wondered just a few yards down the hall, and went back to read the name on the sign on his door.

As is written, we drank from the waters of the Lethe before we were born, so as to completely forget our previous life. But why do we sometimes wake up in the middle of the night or why do we get a sudden flash of insight at three in the afternoon that we’ve already lived through this and we know what will happen from now on? Unexpected cracks have appeared. Cracks through which the light of the past streams in. And yet we are supposed to have forgotten everything.

The waters of the Lethe aren’t what they used to be.

21.

I can’t find in myths some great god of memory or at least a god of forgetting. Like those for love, fire, revenge . . . I can’t even find demigods or nymphs. The whole of Greek mythology, which is otherwise swarming with deities, demigods, centaurs, heroes, and who knows what else, has forgotten the gods of memory and forgetting. Yes, there is Mnemosyne, but she’s better known as the mother of the muses. There’s also Lethe, but they are all always somehow in the shadows. Most likely when myths first appeared, the world was too young to start forgetting . . . Plus, people died young, before old age emptied their minds.

In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.

The early clay tablets with cuneiform from Mesopotamia do not hold any wisdom about the secrets of the world as we might expect, but rather completely practical information about the number of sheep in one herd or the different words for “pig.” The first written artifacts were lists. In the beginning (and the end), there is always a list.

22.

Since nothing is happening in my life this year, I’m copying out my journal from last year day by day, a friend told me. Today, on November twenty-sixth, I’m copying down what happened to me last year on November twenty-sixth.

I’ve never heard of anything more depressing.

I kept a journal for a long time myself, without putting dates or years in it, noting only if it was day or night, at one point I even stopped doing that.

Now, when I find myself ever more estranged from my memory, I think it was a very stupid move. I’ve lost even the small reference points of the years and months. I recall some things as I read, but when they happened, a year ago or fifteen years back, it’s already hard for me to reconstruct. Other things I have no recollection of at all, as if they had happened to a complete stranger and were written by someone else’s hand.

My handwriting gets ever messier, smaller, and pointier. That’s how I wrote as a child.

Some words are lost as soon as I write them, they simply turn to gibberish, their syllables become scrambled, the head goes to the tail, like some mythical creatures, like centaurs cobbled together quickly or metamorphized tadpoles.

Prayer—Yerpra.

Where was I starting from, what exactly did I want to say? . . . I’m trying to finish a book about memory receding and . . . I’m hurrying to finish it, before I forget what it is actually about. But if everything I write comes to pass, I need to escape into another person.

23.

First a few words disappeared. He turned it into a game, it was a long ago, they were still at the university. He told his wife and his friends those five or six disappearing words and when he needed one of them, they would prompt him—“cornice,” “mercantile,” “rosemary,” “confrontation” . . .

One day, perhaps because he had split up with his wife and had quit seeing his friends, and because the words were multiplying, he decided to write them down. At first a single page was sufficient, then both sides of a sheet of paper. Then another, and another . . . Then he got himself a notebook. He called it A Brief Dictionary of the Forgotten. There was also a section for people’s names. Gradually the number of sections increased—one for scents that reminded him of various things was added. Then one for sounds, he was going deaf on top of everything. (A doctor had told him that hearing loss and memory loss were related, they shared the same room in the brain.)

Finally yet another section appeared in the notebook, perhaps the most important of all—for that which had actually happened to him, so he could differentiate it from what he had read and from what he had invented.

Sooner or later everything would get mixed up—what had happened, what he had read, and what he had invented would jump up and switch places, until they gradually quieted down and faded away, but for now he was trying to hold the borders in place. Years later his ex-wife would line up for an autograph and he wouldn’t be able to find her name in his head . . .

24.

It was the worst with names. And when he had to switch languages, it was a nightmare. He would forget even the right phrase to use to apologize and ask:

Sorry, your name escapes me . . . Sorry, your name . . .

Every morning he would take a blank sheet of paper and write these five words out by hand. It reminded him of punishment from back in school, when he was forced to write out words he had gotten wrong or some minor infraction like “I forgot my homework” a hundred times. From here arose his early discovery that repetition changes meaning, it removes the bones and the sense of what is written. Repeated one hundred times, everything (including guilt) disintegrates into meaningless syllables.

But no matter, he now enjoyed these memories. They were some of the few that had remained, and he cared for them as for a beloved pet; he called them over, stroked their ears, and spoke to them.

He knew that one day he would end up having to use this phrase as well:

Sorry, my name escapes me.

25.

He wondered how soon the moment would come when he forgot letters as well. They were the only thing he could not live without. He had learned to write quite young, at age four or five, which should mean that they would be the last thing to leave him. He could clearly imagine them filing out like little critters, ants or beetles, leaving this notebook, leaving the books in his library, crawling around, crossing the room and leaving en masse. The great migration of the letters. Now there’s Щ, creeping out like a centipede, Б only waves and disappears with its stomach jutting out before it, O rolls around like a well-fed dung beetle, Й doffs its funny little hat in farewell, Ж leaps like a frog and vanishes through the door. I open a book at random, it’s blank, only a little e drops out onto the ground and rolls behind the radiator.

A library with empty, abandoned books—with no titles, no authors, no texts. White pages, tabula rasa. A child’s mind is a tabula rasa and we must write everything upon it. His teacher had said this at the ceremony to mark the start of first grade. He had remembered this strange phrase precisely because he didn’t understand it. His mind was again a tabula rasa, except that now nothing more could be printed upon it. The film had been exposed.

26.

The neuron (from ancient Greek: νεῦρον—fiber, nerve) is an electrically excitable cell that processes and passes on information. Dendrites accept signals from other nerve cells, while the axon via thousands of branches transmits these signals to other neurons, which in turn . . . (Anatomy for Seventh Grade)

That joyful (or alarming) communion of neurons, that constant buzzing. Flashes, the movement of ions, the vibration of membranes, axons, neurotransmitters, exchanges in the synapses, signals, impulses, the happy buzz of work^* . . . And suddenly, or not so suddenly but rather gradually, they stop speaking to one another, they stop paying visits, stop making those neighborly exchanges of flour, salt, gossip, the buzz dies down, everything in the workshop grinds to a halt, it corrodes, the lights go out . . .

27.

A friend of mine used to tell this story about his mother and his mother-in-law, women of around eighty, who almost simultaneously began losing their memories. There was no other choice, they had to take both of them into the family apartment in Sofia. And every morning, the following conversation would take place:

Who is this lady, where might she be from, exactly? one would ask.

Well, I’m from that place there, what’s it called, on the seaside. (They no longer remembered their own names, let alone the names of their hometowns.)

Oh, is that so, I’m from the seaside as well, what a coincidence. And what are you doing here?

I’ve come to visit my son. He lives here with his wife. And to see my grandchild. What about yourself, madam?

Well, I’ve come to see my daughter. She lives here with her husband. I’m also here to see my granddaughter.

Ooh, well, what a coincidence! How old is your granddaughter, madam?

She must be seven or eight, and yours?

Good Lord, what a coincidence, mine is the same age. Here is her picture.

Are you serious, madam? the other would cry. That’s my granddaughter.

Sometimes they got into arguments, sometimes they made peace, realizing that they were in the very same home visiting the very same family, and that one woman’s daughter had married the other woman’s son.

The next morning, my friend would say, everything would start over from the beginning.

Where might the lady be from, exactly . . .

28.

Salt

The old myths (and new ideologies) don’t like looking back . . . Looking back, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever; looking back toward Sodom, Lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt; later those who look back are simply locked up. Everything must start out with a clean slate, with no memory. (New, so new is the star of communism, and there is nothing before it, the local party secretary used to recite back in the day.)

Remember Lot’s wife. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah, the fire that rained from the sky. And don’t you dare look back, that’s what Luke reminds us. Everyone should remain where they are. No one on the rooftop should come down. Nor should anyone in the field leave when the apocalypse arrives. It sounds like orders from the police.

But what terrible crime has the past committed? Why not look back? Why is the past so dangerous, and why is looking back at it such a sin that you will be turned into a pillar of salt? The apocalypse comes precisely to destroy the past. It’s not enough to leave Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s the easy part, everyone flees from disaster. The real test is to forget it, to wipe it from your memory, to not miss it. Lot’s wife left the city, but couldn’t manage to forget it.

Time is not the last second that has just passed, but a whole series of failures going back (and up ahead), heaps of rubble, as Walter Benjamin puts it, before which the angel of history will stand aghast, his face turned away. Could the Angel of History (drawn by Klee as Angelus Novus) actually be Lot’s wife?

Why does she stop and look back?

Because it is human to do so.

What did she leave there?

A past.

Why salt, exactly?

Because salt has no memory. Nothing grows on salt.

In the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel from the end of the fifteenth century, there is an illustration of this scene: In the foreground are the father and his daughters, led by a cheerful angel who is chattering to him. They are striding forward, leaving behind the burning Sodom and its collapsing towers. In the middle between the departing group and the burning city stands a woman in white. She has turned her face back. In fact, she is looking slightly off to the side. The past, just like fire, cannot be looked directly in the eye. Her face is peaceful. There is no horror, no fear, no pain. Only salt. While her daughters and old Lot, led by the chattering angel, don’t even notice her absence. They have already forgotten her.

29.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures in the present, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in the past, where neither moth nor rust destroy, and where thieves do not break in nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart also be.

—Gaustine, Apocryphal Versions and New Testaments

30.

Nothing calms you like neat rows of identical sets of encyclopedias from different continents—old cherry-red, brown, and black.

This mantra of titles can be used against evil spirits and times:

Enciclopedia general ilustrada del País Vasco

Enciclopedia de México

Nueva enciclopedia de Puerto Rico

Diccionario biográfico de Venezuela

Encyclopedia Britannica

The New York Public Library, Oriental Collection

The South in American Literature, 1607–1900

Poisonous and Venomous Marine Animals of the World

Nomenclator Zoologicus

Il grande libro della cucina italiana

The Cuisine of Hungary

Book-Prices Current (London), 1905/06

Subject Index of Books Published Before 1880

The Mother of All Booklists

A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain

Dicionário bibliográfico brasileiro

Catálogo de la bibliografía boliviana

A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland . . . , 1475–1640

Catalogue of German Books, 1455–1600

Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–2000

Bibliografía de la literatura hispánica

31.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future. What would the parable of Lot’s wife sound like in this case?

We walk forward and enter the endless Elysian fields.

I walk forward and become past.

32.

I’m having that dream again. Somewhere, in the library of the world, in the main reading room with a high frescoed ceiling, wooden tables and lathe-turned lamps with the soft color of old gold, sits a man hidden behind an open newspaper. It’s a large newspaper, hence an old one, as newspapers used to be way back when. I walk toward him amid people’s faces (I see only the faces in the dream), which turn toward me. The faces of women and men, familiar from somewhere, but whose names have long been lost. I know (I don’t know but I can sense) that everyone is watching us, it is an important scene. On the front page, the headline is written telegraph-style in large letters . . . what, I still can’t read it.

It looks close, but in the dream the path lengthens on its own, my movements grow ever more difficult, as if I am wading through something sticky or I am simply afraid to reach him . . . My fear is twofold—first, I’m afraid of reading what is written there, even though somewhere inside myself I know what it says. (I know the whole newspaper by heart.)

My second fear is that when I reach him, the man will lower his newspaper and I will see my own face.

33.

There are days when everything seems to be okay, I can even write, I bring back the cities and rooms where I have been, my mind is clear like a bucket of rainwater, then everything gets muddled again, turns boggy . . . some people without faces show up, they stomp around the rooms, they speak, they threaten to make me happy, and afterward I don’t remember anything, I stare at some point and don’t have the strength to avert my gaze . . .

34.

A haircut in Brooklyn from Jani, a Tajik who hums Frank Sinatra, and when he flicks open his straight razor to shave my neck, I’m seized by that primordial fear of being slaughtered like a lamb. Then he pulls out an unbearably hot and moist towel, which he tosses over my face and presses down. And so, semi-slaughtered, semi-suffocated, doused in lavender-scented cologne as a finale, I open my eyes as if resurrected and give him a nice big tip, as if paying ransom for my survival. As soon as I’m back out on the sidewalk I add to my notebook the scent of barbershop cologne, which awakens memories of haircuts. Everyone has a memory and fear of that. Everyone has noted their own graying hair in the barber’s chair.

That peculiar scent of the New York streets, coming from the rotting fruit of the ginkgo biloba. I write that scent down as well . . . Ginkgo biloba in New York. What must its memory hold, that tree that remembers the end of the dinosaurs, those moving (and collapsing) skyscrapers from before the Ice Age. And alongside them, the collapsing of real skyscrapers as well—this is immeasurable, terrifying memory. Now do you understand why you have nightmares? I tell myself. Because you’ve been stuffing yourself with ginkgo biloba for years to fight forgetting, while it remembers terrible things.

I commute every day from Brooklyn to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. I gradually get used to all the details along the route. Coming up on the Manhattan Bridge, off in the distance the Statue of Liberty, the view of blind walls, chimneys, water towers, huge rooftop terraces with laundry hung out on them before the subway goes underground again. I get off at Times Square, I stand for a minute to read the billboards, as if glancing through the first few pages of the day’s newspaper. Billboards are the new newspapers. What’s written there—some monsters, going back to the future, blockbusters that scare us with the end of the world, clocks and loans . . . Clearly nothing good is on the horizon. I continue up Forty-Second, to the soundtrack of fire engines and police cars, like in a movie. I head into Bryant Park, past the green tables and chairs, passing beneath the tall plantains. I glance over at the Chrysler Building, that Secession in vertical, and sink into the cold cave of the library as if into another time, a time shelter.

35.

On the radio they’re reporting that it is snowing in the desert in July, drifts are piling up on the pyramids, and I imagine the Sphinx with a snowy stocking cap. The snow disfigures public statues, as Auden wrote. I wonder what the camels in this snowy desert are doing. They feverishly search back through some deep memory for what to do in such cases, but there are no records, the time capsule of genes do not contain anything of the sort.

They say that when the end of time comes the seasons will get mixed up.

36.

I had a dream that I only managed to recall a single phrase from: the innocent monster of the past. I forgot the dream, the phrase remained.

37.

Sarajevo 1914/2024

The historical reenactments are becoming ever more brutal, ever more authentic. This ranks among the most popular ones in the Balkans—a spin around Sarajevo in a copy of Franz Ferdinand’s car—a Gräf & Stift Phaeton, black, four cylinders. Plus the clothes, the crown prince’s white shirt, the uniform, the saber, the route, the stops, the driver’s fatal confusion—everything just as on that day.

“Don’t stay outside, step inside history! Be Gavrilo Princip or Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo 1914!”

The organizers, who by the way have connections to the city council, want to do something very special on the anniversary of the murder, June 28 (Gregorian style). Something heretofore unseen and hyper-realistic. It also happens to be a milestone anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. Thousands of locals engaged as extras and dressed in the clothing of the epoch have been strolling through the city for weeks. A detailed reenactment is unfolding in accordance with existing archival photographs and in consultation with historians from the university. But something is missing, there is no suspense, no threat. After all, this is not simply a jaunt about town by a royal personage on a fine June day . . . a war is commencing, after all, not a garden party. They have managed to track down a distant relative of the dynasty—from a rather collateral branch of the family, but still, royal blood is needed, isn’t it?

For the role of Gavrilo Princip, they hold a casting call with young anarchist-leaning Serbian guys, unemployed and up for anything. It turns out that in the meantime the erstwhile Black Hand movement, which had given rise to the assassins back then, has also been reestablished. They choose a young man from its ranks. They suit him up with the proper pistol—a Browning FN M1910, small, flat, perfect for concealed carry. Loaded with blanks, of course, but at least the shots will still be heard.

June 28 rolls around, the whole city comes out to watch, some with tickets, others on the balconies of nearby buildings, kids hanging from the branches of trees. A striking resemblance to that June 28 in 1914, incidentally. Even the clouds are the same, as someone will later note, comparing the photos. A breeze is blowing, carrying the already fallen linden blossoms. The extras, some dressed in tails and top hats, others more eccentrically, are scurrying around impatiently. The women proudly wear their hats as large as storks’ nests, dolled up in the style of an epoch coming to an end (due in large part to that very day).

The archduke putters up in his four-cylinder heavy black Gräf & Stift Phaeton. Everything happens as it did on that forenoon—the motorcade with the three cars sets out, the first unsuccessful attempt with the bomb, the stop at the town hall, where the archduke, visibly shaken, would say: I came here to see you, and you greet me with bombs. A stop by the hospital to visit the wounded, the cars taking the wrong route, the maneuver near the Latin Bridge before the eyes of the despairing Gavrilo Princip, who is guzzling a beer in front of the pub. At that moment the assassin raises his eyes and sees that the victim has come to him of his own accord. He takes out his pistol, leaps toward the car, which is turning in place like a heavy beetle, and shoots the archduke.

A red rose blossoms on the archduke’s white shirt, blood gushes forth. Everything is so realistic that the people in the crowd are stunned, no one dares applaud. The wife Sophie crumples to Franz Ferdinand’s feet, but no one pays any particular attention to this, just as is written in history as well. But something about the assassin’s behavior is unexpected. It’s as if he himself cannot believe what has happened, according to the script he needs to unsuccessfully try to shoot himself, to swallow cyanide, but instead he swallows his tongue.

A long, historically long second hangs over the center of Sarajevo, as if something clicks in time and we can see Gavrilo Princip standing there awkwardly with his still-smoking gun, the crowd is gaping in the frozen moment before they rush to tear him to pieces, the wind has died down, nothing can be heard, a child falls from the tree branches, but doesn’t dare cry . . .

(For a moment I feel like I can see Demby’s signature here, with his new open-air theater, tragicomedy dell’arte.)

And at that moment the archduke gasps, blood sprays out like a fountain. The man is truly breathing his last.

The guards hurl themselves upon Gavrilo Princip, or rather the one playing Gavrilo Princip, but it doesn’t matter anymore, everything has been set into motion, just as before. The gun goes off one more time in the uproar and the supposed blank pierces the stomach of one of the guards. Then the crowd really does rush to tear the killer apart. Police sirens start howling, ambulances try to make their way through. Horses toss policemen from their backs and in the melee trample several ladies along with their hats. The chaos is uncontrollable and unscripted.

Afterward nobody will be able to explain how the supposedly blank bullets turned out to be live rounds. Once every hundred years even an empty rifle goes off, as the saying goes in this region, but who knows . . . ?

The Austrian authorities immediately send a sharp note protesting the murder of their fellow countryman and descendant of the archduke. The European Prosecutor’s Office brings charges against the organizers of the reenactment and calls for the immediate arrest of everyone involved and an investigation into the Black Hand anarchist movement. The local inhabitants of Sarajevo don’t wait for invitations and the offices of several Serbian companies are trashed immediately.

Europe finds itself on the cusp of a second First World War.

38.

Something has changed, something is not the same.

I hear its dragging footsteps, heavy breathing. It wasn’t like this before, there used to be rhythm, dancing, running.

For a moment, between the shadow of the leaves I catch a glimpse of the tired light of yesterday or of a forgotten afternoon years ago. Something seeps in, drop by drop, the sediment of other times.

On my palate I sense the taste of ash, with my nose I catch the scent of something burned. Like stubble or a forest that has set itself alight . . .

Something has changed, something is not the same.

With my fingers I touch another skin, cold and grainy. Before, it was warm and smooth, alive like a person’s hand, now it is like the shed skin of a viper.

You stroll through the hot afternoon in August and suddenly out from behind some bush the stench of rot hits you. A corpse, of a rat most likely, but still a corpse.

Something has started to go rotten, go bitter, to stink, to go dark, and to grow cold, I feel it with my five senses.

Something has changed, something is not the same.

But what if time has already stopped? How will we know? Will the clocks stop? Will the calendars be stuck on one and the same day? Hardly, they actually don’t feed on time, they do not live off it.

So what feeds on time, then?

Everything living, of course. The cats, cows, bees, and water snakes, the thistles, the lizard hawks and the lizards, the squirrels in the park, the earthworms and the fruit fly, the blue whale and redfish—everything that swims, crawls, silently creeps, climbs trees, grows, reproduces, grows old, and dies. Only these feed on time . . . Or time feeds on us. We are food for time.

For Christ’s sake, we would notice if it died.

39.

And again back to the shelves of books, to convince myself that the world is bound and ordered. Here is WWI, wrapped up in twelve identical red volumes of some encyclopedia. Here is the Cold War, forever buried between the covers of these three big volumes, gray. Neither the Spanish Civil War (sleeping on the top shelf) nor the Second World War, with its two whole bookcases, is frightening anymore. Everything sooner or later ends up in a book, as Mallarmé put it in that quote so beloved by Borges. Which, when you think about it, is not such a bad result.

I stand in the Main Rose Reading Room beneath the Veronese-style suspended and frescoed heavens. I’m sitting close to the shelves of historical books. I’ve taken down, more as an alibi, the first volume in an Encyclopedia of the Cold War, published in 2008, letters A–D. I realize that I can tell stories from the front about this war, we fought in it even as children. I page through it, like a spy tossing secret glances at the people around me. Whatever you read is what you shall become. At the table in front of me there’s a person whom I immediately recognize as homeless. I have always felt an inexplicable closeness to them. He’s wearing a puffy winter jacket, quite large (I have a similar one) and a hat with earflaps sticking out on the sides. It’s warm in the reading room, but it’s better for him this way, all packed up, ready to leave immediately if they chase him out. I know that feeling of anticipatory guilt quite well.

He has placed a pile of books to his left. Actually, he is one of the few around me who is actually reading. The rest are staring at their phones, sending text messages, waiting for the rain outside to stop. The library is a shelter, a warm and dry place open to all. Years ago an attempt was made to prevent the homeless from coming in, but the management gave up on it. I am dying with curiosity to see what exactly he is reading, so I get up and pretend to be looking for something on the nearby shelves and turn around slightly. In front of him is a thick dog-eared Chronicles of the Barbarians. Beneath it I manage to make the title on the spine: A Short History of India. And on the very top of his pile . . . it can’t be, Gaustine’s Selected Writings. I involuntarily reach for it, the homeless man lifts his eyes, and only then do I read the cover correctly—Augustine, of course. (I could have sworn that the author was Gaustine just a short while ago.) I apologize, he stares at me, then hunches over the book he is holding again, an album with enormous Spanish houses from the nineteenth century.

40.

A few years ago I started slowly losing my hearing. A subtle hearing aid, prescribed to me with the promise that it would bring back the blackbirds in the morning and the crickets on summer nights, but it hardly helped at all. Through it I heard everything as if recorded on an old gramophone record, with a faint metallic echo and crackling here and there. A feeling of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin would put it. The soundtrack of yesterday’s world, recorded and played back on an infinite loop.

Birds sang even during the war. I turn this phrase in my head while listening to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and performed for the first time in January 1941 in a French prisoner-of-war camp. I’ve turned up the volume to the max. In the beginning of the quartet, Messiaen has put those words from the Apocalypse—about the angel who announces the end of time. A cold rain fell that afternoon, the concert was outside in the open, but none of the four hundred prisoners or guards left. An unexpected combination of piano, clarinet, violin, and cello—those were the musicians available among the prisoners . . . The first movement, “Crystal Liturgy,” opens with the awakening of the birds, the clarinet imitates a blackbird in a marvelous solo, and the violin follows after it—a nightingale, endless, repetitious, oblivious, mellifluous, and alarmed, at one and the same time calm and anxious.

Birds sang even during the war. Therein lies the whole horror . . . and consolation.

41.

Even though Ecclesiastes teaches us that there is a time for everything, a time for this and a time for that, all of a sudden in the last book of the Book they announce to us the end of time. This is what the angel in Revelation proclaims, with one foot in the sea and the other on land, holding a scroll in his hands. The scroll John has to eat. When we say, “I absolutely devoured that book,” somewhere an echo of that voice can also be heard.

Take it and eat it, says the angel, handing the book to John. It will be bitter in your stomach, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey. (As a young and devoted reader I once ate a page, I don’t remember which book now, I think it was a poetry chapbook, they use the least ink. It was already bitter in my mouth.)

And right at that moment in Revelation the angel announces that there shall be no more time. That’s it. He doesn’t proclaim the end of the world, but the end of time.

The cages of the days shall be opened and all times will gather as one.

. . . And God will call back the past.

42.

. . . My whole life is sewn together from other people’s lives. Even the one I’m living is some other life, I can’t know whose. I feel like a monster cobbled together from different times. I sit in an unfamiliar city constantly filled with fire-truck sirens, as if it is always engulfed in flames. I spend all my days at its library, in the cold hall under a painted sky, surrounded by the encyclopedias of the world, red covers and gold letters. I read old newspapers and look at people’s faces. I am afraid that at any moment someone will turn up, will look around, and will head straight for me . . .

I sit in a library, the library of the world. Every morning I read papers from one and the same day in 1939. Everything is familiar to me, I have been there, I have had drinks in a dive on Fifty-Second, the rains of that autumn have fallen on me. The newspaper is merely a doorway. Into the petty and insignificant, isn’t that how the saying goes, there hides the past with its clockwork that must be defused. Somewhere there amid the last sales of the season and the article about gas masks in German schools with a large photo on page three in the New York Times (all the students from a high school standing in front of the building, holding hands with their gas masks on, with no faces). I’ll peruse offers from the movie theaters and nightclubs, I’ll sit in the Cinzano bar on page thirty-seven, I’ll switch on my new Emerson wireless and antenna-free radio set for only $19.95, I’ll hear the latest news from abroad, I’ll spend the night in the little ads for rooms for rent in Lower Manhattan, and I’ll look at the faces of the people who have come out toward evening in the gossip columns. I can’t miss anything, the trigger is there somewhere, in one of the final August evenings . . . Yours, G.

I stand at the window with a letter in my hand, both sender and receiver, I read and think that the world is always a little before September 1, at the end of summer, with ads in the paper and the distant roar of a just-started war . . . The afternoon of the world, in which our shadows grow long under the waning sun, before evening falls.

43.

The less memory, the more past.

As long as you remember, you hold at bay the times gone by. Like lighting a fire in the middle of a forest at night. Demons and wolves are crouching all around, the beasts of the past are tightening the circle, but they still don’t dare step into it. The allegory is simple. As long as the flame of memory burns, you are the master. If it starts to die out, the howling grows louder and the beasts draw closer. The pack of the past.

Shortly before the end, times get mixed up. Because the cages have been opened, and everyone will creep out . . . If it weren’t for the days, where will we live, a poet asked, what was his name again. But the days are done . . . The calendar has dismissed itself, there is only one day and one night and they repeat eternally . . .

I remember, so as to keep the past in the past . . .

—the yellow notebook

44.

I’m seven . . . We’re visiting friends in another town, some celebration is going on. There are swarms of people, I reach their waists, they’re jostling, stepping on me, somebody spits the shells of sunflower seeds on me, I cling to my father’s pants, then I let go, I stop in front of a shooting booth, but my head barely reaches the counter, I don’t recall how long I stood there, I turn around . . . my father and mother have disappeared. Now what? Hansel and Gretel’s father took them for a walk in a strange forest and . . . when they turned around, he was gone.

I run through the crowd, I shout, I break out of the swarm, it’s late afternoon, the streets of the town are full, people are coming home from work. I stop a woman my mother’s age, Auntie, I’m lost, I sob. I can’t remember the name of the street or the number of the house where we’re staying. All I know is that it has a green door . . . Ah well, they’re all green, little boy, I’m on my way home from work, ask somebody else. I ask another woman, I don’t dare stop the men, I’m in a hurry, son, I’m in a hurry, there must be a nice police officer somewhere around here, don’t worry . . . It’s getting completely dark, cars are whizzing past, the streets are emptying out, it’s getting cold, no one notices me, blood starts dripping from my nose . . . And suddenly a hand grabs me, two whistling slaps, Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? . . . I’m saved.

45.

I’m six, my brother is four, we’re wearing shorts and sandals, but with long hair like the Beatles (I’m John, he’s Paul) at the village square, in front of a monument to a partisan. The photo was taken by my father a minute before he took us (accompanied by the village policeman) to Grandpa Petre, who was under orders from the mayor to shave our heads. He would also do the same to my father, who, in addition to having long hair, had also grown a mustache. There is no barbershop in the village. Grandpa Petre sits us down on a stump, his donkey is snorting nearby. I watch my hair fall in light blond locks, and I don’t even dare to start bawling, I’m afraid of the policeman. Maybe you’re not allowed to cry, since you’re not allowed to have long hair . . .

In the end, the three of us—my father, my brother, and I—with our heads shaved like prisoners and spritzed with Grandpa Petre’s cheap cologne, hurry home. Don’t you dare cry, my father says through clenched teeth, he can tell we are on the verge of bawling our heads off.

Strawberry fields forever . . .

46.

I’m getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters.

Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.

Let me go back home . . . my mother told me not to be late . . .

47.

I must be three years old. Just as tall as the roses in the garden, I’m standing barefoot on the warm soil, holding my mother’s hand and staring at a rose point-blank for a long time. That’s the only thing I remember. The first and the last.

48.

Unbelongers Syndrome

No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that’s why you’re always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right place, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the place is different.

Incurable.

—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses

*Line from the poem “Let’s Work” by the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, Ivan Vazov (1850–1921).