Time Shelter

Epilogue

Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.

The end of a novel is like the end of the world, it’s good to put it off.

Death has been preoccupied in reading and has forgotten, its scythe is rusting by its side. It could be a Dürer engraving or a detail from Bosch.

I have never liked endings, I don’t remember the ending of a single book or a single film. I wonder if there’s such a diagnosis—an inability to remember endings. And what is there really to remember about an (always already known) ending?

I only remember beginnings.

I remember how, for a long time, I used to go to bed early . . . I remember when they brought ice to the village for the first time and my dad brought me to see the Gypsy . . . I’ve forgotten his name. I remember a terrible winter storm and the candle that was burning at home, the candle was burning . . . I remember a rose that I am staring at face-to-face, I’m just as tall as it is. I remember sitting around in a wet greatcoat in the trenches of some war, smoking short, harsh cigarettes. I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-Second, uncertain and afraid . . . Or I tie my sandals and raise my shield, which gleams in the sun.

They say that my life was entirely different.

I agree, so as not to irritate them. But I myself do not have any other life.

I don’t remember anymore whether I thought up Gaustine or he thought me up. Was there really such a clinic of the past, or was it just an idea, a note in a notebook, a scrap of newspaper I randomly came across? And whether this whole business about the coming of the past has already happened or whether it will start from tomorrow . . .