Time Shelter

1.

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even say Ussher gave a precise time of day as well—around six in the afternoon. Saturday afternoon, that sounds completely believable to me. When else would a bored creator set about building a world and finding himself some company? Ussher devoted years of his life to this, his work itself numbered two thousand pages in Latin; I doubt many have ever made the effort to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, his book became exceptionally popular, well, maybe not the book itself, but the actual discovery. They started to print the Bibles on the island with a date and chronology according to Ussher. This theory of the young earth (and of young time, if you ask me) captivated the Christian world. It should be noted that even scientists like Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton estimated specific years for the divine act of creation that more or less coincided with that of Ussher. But still, the most mind-boggling thing for me is not the year and its relative recency, but the specific day.

October 22, four thousand and four years before Christ, at six in the afternoon.

On or around December 1910, human character changed. So wrote Virginia Woolf. And one can imagine that December 1910, ostensibly like all the others, gray, cold, smelling of fresh snow. But something had been unleashed, which only a few could sense.

On September 1, 1939, early in the morning, came the end of human time.

2.

Years later, when many of his memories had already scattered like frightened pigeons, he could still go back to that morning when he was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Vienna, and a vagrant with a mustache like García Márquez’s was selling newspapers on the sidewalk in the early March sun. A wind blew up and several of the newspapers swirled into the air. He tried to help, chasing down two or three and returning them. You can keep one, said Márquez.

Gaustine, that’s what we’ll call him, even though he himself used the name like an invisibility cloak, took the newspaper and handed the man a banknote, a rather large one for the occasion. The vagrant turned it over in his hand and muttered: But . . . I won’t be able to make change. That sounded so absurd in the Vienna dawn that both of them burst out laughing.

For the homeless, Gaustine felt love and dread, those were the precise words, and always in that combination. He loved them and feared them in the way you love and fear something you have already been or expect to become. He knew that sooner or later he would join their ranks, to use a cliché. He imagined for a moment long lines of homeless people marching down Kärntner and Graben. Yes, by blood he was one of them, albeit a slightly more peculiar case. A vagrant in time, if you will. Simply through a concurrence of circumstances he had ended up with some money, enough to prevent his metaphysical adversity from turning into physical suffering.

At that moment he was practicing one of his professions—that of geriatric psychiatrist. I suspect that he was secretly swiping his patients’ stories so he could take shelter in them, to rest for a bit in someone’s place and past. Otherwise, his head was such a jumble of times, voices, and places that he needed to either place himself immediately in the hands of his fellow psychiatrists or he would do something that would force them to put him away themselves.

Gaustine took the newspaper, walked a little way, and sat down on a bench. He was wearing a Borsalino, a dark trench coat, beneath which the high collar of his turtleneck was visible, old leather boots, and he carried a leather bag in a nobly fading red. He looked like a man who had just arrived by train from some other decade; he could have passed for a discreet anarchist, an aging hippie, or a preacher from an obscure denomination. And so, he sat down on the bench and read the name of the newspaper—Augustin, published by the homeless. Some of the paper was written by them, some by professional journalists. And there, on the second-to-last page down in the left-hand corner, the most inconspicuous place in a newspaper as all editors well know, was the article. His gaze fell upon it. A thin smile that held more bitterness than joy flitted across his face. He would have to disappear again.

3.

Some time ago, when Dr. Alzheimer was still mentioned mainly in jokes—So what’s your diagnosis? It was some guy’s name, but I forgot it—a short article appeared in a small newspaper, one of those news items that was read by five people, four of whom instantly forgot it.

Here is the article, retold in brief:

A certain medical professional, Dr. G. (mentioned only by initial), from a Vienna geriatric clinic in Wienerwald, a fan of the Beatles, decked out his office in the style of the ’60s. He found a Bakelite gramophone, put up posters of the band, including the famous Sgt. Pepper album cover . . . From the flea market he bought an old cabinet and lined it with all sorts of tchotchkes from the ’60s—soap, cigarette boxes, a set of miniature Volkswagen Beetles, Mustangs and pink Cadillacs, playbills from movies, photos of actors. The article noted that his office was piled full of old magazines, and he himself was always dressed in a turtleneck under his white coat. There was no photo, of course, the whole piece was all of thirty lines long, stuffed into the lower left-hand corner. The news here was that the doctor had noticed that patients with memory issues were staying longer and longer in his office; they became more talkative, in other words, they felt at home. And that had radically reduced the number of attempts to run away from that otherwise prestigious clinic. The article had no author.

That was my idea, I’ve had it in my head for years, but clearly somebody beat me to it. (I must admit that in my case the idea was for a novel, but still.)

Whenever possible, I always supplied myself with that homeless newspaper, on the one hand due to my particular attachment to those who wrote it (a long story from another novel), but also because of the clear feeling (a personal superstition) that precisely in this way, through a scrap of newspaper, what must be said comes fluttering down gently or hits you upside the head. And this has never led me astray.

The paper said that the clinic was in the Vienna Woods and nothing more. I checked the geriatric centers nearby, and at least three of them were located in those woods. The one I needed turned out to be the last one I checked, of course. I introduced myself as a journalist, which actually wasn’t such a big fib; I had an ID card from a newspaper so I could get into museums for free, and sometimes I actually wrote for it. Otherwise I used the related, but far more innocent and elusive profession of writer, for which there is no way to legitimize yourself.

Anyway, I managed to reach—with quite a bit of difficulty, I might add—the director of the clinic. When she realized what I was interested in, she suddenly became curt: The individual you are looking for is no longer here as of yesterday. Why? He resigned by mutual consent, she replied, stepping onto the slippery slope of bureaucratic-speak. Was he fired? I asked, sincerely astonished. I told you, mutual consent. Why are you so interested? I read an interesting article in the newspaper a week ago . . . Even as the phrase left my lips, I realized I had made a mistake. That article about attempts to run away from the clinic? We have submitted a claim for a retraction.

I realized I had no cause to stay any longer; I also understood the reason for the resignation by mutual consent. What was the doctor’s name? I asked, turning back just before leaving, but she was already talking on the phone.

I didn’t leave the clinic immediately. I found the wing with the doctors’ offices and saw a worker taking the sign down from the third door on the right. Of course that was the name. I had suspected this from the very start.

4.

To catch a trace of Gaustine, who jumped from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport, is a chance that comes along only once a century. Gaustine, whom I first invented, and then met in flesh and blood. Or perhaps it was the opposite, I don’t remember. My invisible friend, more real and visible than my very self. The Gaustine of my youth, the Gaustine of my dreams of being someone else, somewhere else, of inhabiting other times and other rooms. We shared a common obsession with the past. The difference between us was slight, but fundamental. I remained an outsider everywhere, while he felt equally at home in all times. I knocked on the doors of various years, but he was already inside, ushering me in and then disappearing.

When I called forth Gaustine for the first time, it was to have him sign his name beneath three lines that came to me just like that, out of nowhere, as if from another time. I struggled for months, but still couldn’t add anything to them.

From woman is the troubadour created

I can say it yet again

she has created the Creator

One evening I dreamed of a name written on a leather book cover: Gaustine of Arles, 13th Century. I remember that even while still asleep I said to myself: That’s it. Then Gaustine himself appeared, or I should say, someone who looked like him and whom I mentally took to calling that.

This was at the very end of the ’80s. I must have kept that story somewhere.

5.

Gaustine. An Introduction.

This is how I’d like to present him to you. I saw him for the first time at one of those traditional early September literary seminars at the seaside. In the late afternoon we had sat down in one of the little pubs along the shore, every last one of us writing, unmarried, and unpublished, at that pleasant age between twenty and twenty-five. The waiter could barely keep up, scribbling down our orders of brandy and salads. When we fell silent, the young man at the end of the long table piped up for the first time. Clearly, he hadn’t managed to order anything yet.

One creamer, please!

He uttered this with the confidence of a person who was ordering at the very least duck à l’orange or Blue Curaçao. In the long silence that followed, the only sound was the evening breeze coming from the sea, pushing along an empty plastic bottle.

Pardon? the waiter managed to say.

One creamer, if you would be so kind, he repeated with the same reserved dignity.

We were puzzled as well, but the conversations at the table quickly regained their previous boisterousness. Soon plates and glasses covered the tablecloth. The last thing the waiter brought was a small porcelain dish with a thin band of gold edging. In the middle of the dish, the creamer stood exquisitely (or so it seemed to me). Gaustine drank it so slowly, in such tiny sips, that it lasted him all evening.

That was our first meeting.

The very next day I went out of my way to get to know him, and in the remaining days we completely turned our backs on the seminar. Neither of us were extremely talkative types, so we spent a marvelous time walking and swimming in a mutually shared silence. Nevertheless, I managed to learn that he lived alone, his father had passed away long ago, while his mother had emigrated illegally for the third time a month ago—he very much hoped this time she would succeed—to America.

I also found out that sometimes he wrote stories from the end of the last century, that’s exactly how he put it, and I barely contained my curiosity, trying to act as if this were something perfectly natural. He was especially preoccupied with the past. He would go around to old empty houses, digging through the ruins, clearing out attics, trunks, and gathering up all sorts of old junk. From time to time he managed to sell something, either to an antique dealer or to an acquaintance, and that’s how he made ends meet. I reflected that the humbleness of his order the other night did not inspire confidence in that line of work. For that reason, when he mentioned in passing that at the moment he had three packs of Tomasian cigarettes from 1937 on hand, dusted off, double-extra quality, I, being a die-hard smoker, immediately offered to buy all three of them. Really? he asked. I’ve always dreamed of trying such an aged Tomasian, I replied, and he darted back to his bungalow. He watched me with true satisfaction as I casually lit up with an authentic German match from 1928 (a bonus he threw in with the cigarettes) and asked me how the spirit of ’37 was. Harsh, I replied. The cigarettes really were jarring, they had no filters and smoked like crazy. It must be because of the bombing of Guernica that same year, Gaustine said quietly. Or perhaps it’s because of the Hindenburg, the biggest zeppelin in the world exploded then, I think, on May sixth, about a hundred meters above the ground, right before landing, with ninety-seven people on board. All the radio announcers cried on the air. These things surely clung to the tobacco leaves . . .

I almost choked. I stubbed out the cigarette, but didn’t say anything. He was speaking like an eyewitness who had managed to overcome the incident with enormous effort.

I decided to change the subject abruptly, and that day, for the first time, I asked him about his name. Call me Gaustine, he said, and smiled. Nice to meet you, I’m Ishmael, I replied, so as to keep up the joke. But he didn’t seem to hear, he said he liked that poem with the epigraph from Gaustine of Arles, and I must admit I was flattered. And besides, he continued in utter seriousness, it brings together my two names: Augustine-Garibaldi. My parents never could agree on what to name me. My father insisted on naming me after Garibaldi, he was a passionate admirer of his. My mother, Gaustine said, a quiet and intelligent woman, clearly a follower of Saint Augustine—she did have three semesters of university philosophy under her belt, after all—insisted that they also add the saint’s name. She continues to call me Augustine, while my father, when he was alive, used Garibaldi. And so early theology and late revolutionism were brought together.

That more or less exhausted the concrete information we exchanged during those five, six days as the seminar wound down. I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those.

Oh yes, there was one other short conversation on the last day. I only then learned that Gaustine lived in an abandoned house in a small town in the foothills of the Balkan Mountains. I don’t have a telephone, he said, but letters do arrive. He seemed endlessly lonely and . . . unbelonging. That was the word that came to me then. Unbelonging to anything in the world, or more precisely to the modern world. We watched the generous sunset and kept silent. A whole cloud of mayflies rose from the bushes behind us. Gaustine followed them with his gaze and said that while for us this was simply one sunset, for today’s mayflies this sunset was the sunset of their lives. Or something like that. I foolishly said that that was only a worn-out metaphor. He looked at me in surprise, but said nothing. A full few minutes later, he said: For them, there are no metaphors.

. . . In October and November 1989, a slew of things happened that have already been written and described ad nauseum. I hung out on the squares and never did get around to writing Gaustine. I had other problems, too, as I was getting my first book ready for publication. And I had gotten married. All lame excuses, of course. But during that time I thought of him often. He didn’t write to me then, either.

I got the first postcard on January 2, 1990—an open Christmas card with a black-and-white Snow Maiden that Gaustine had additionally colored in, making her look like Judy Garland. She was holding some kind of magic wand that pointed to the year 1929 written in a large font. On the back there was the address and a short message, written in fountain pen and using all the quaint spelling conventions of that era. It ended with: “Yours (if I may be so bold), Gaustine.” I sat down and immediately wrote him a letter thanking him for the pleasant surprise and saying that I truly appreciated his exquisite mystification.

I received an answer that same week. I opened it carefully; inside there were two pale green sheets of paper with a watermark, covered on one side only in the same elegant hand and strictly following the reformed Bulgarian spelling of the ’20s. He wrote that he didn’t go out anywhere, but that he felt wonderful. He had subscribed to the daily Zora, written “quite objectively by Mr. Krapchev,” and the journal Zlatorog, so as to still keep tabs on where literature was heading these days. He asked me what I thought of the suspension of the constitution and the dissolution of Parliament by the Yugoslav king Alexander on the sixth day of the year, which Zora had reported on the very next day. He ended his letter with a postscript in which he apologized for not having understood what I meant by “exquisite mystification.”

I reread the letter several times, turning it over and over in my hands, sniffing it in hopes of discovering some whiff of irony. In vain. If this was a game, Gaustine was inviting me to play without any clarification of the rules. Well, fine, then, I decided to play. Since I didn’t have any knowledge of that ill-fated 1929, I had to spend the next three days at the library, digging through old issues of Zora. I carefully read about Prince Alexander. Just in case, I glanced at impending events: “Trotsky Exiled from the USSR,” “Kellogg-Briand Pact for Germany Comes into Force,” “Mussolini Signs a Treaty with the Pope,” “France Refuses Political Asylum to Trotsky,” and a month later, “Germany Denies Political Asylum to Trotsky.” I got all the way to “Wall Street Collapses” on October 24. While still at the library, I wrote Gaustine a short and, in my opinion, cold reply, in which I quickly shared my opinion (which suspiciously coincided quite precisely with that of Mr. Krapchev) on the situation in Yugoslavia and asked him to send me whatever he was working on, as I hoped to be able to glean from that what exactly was going on.

His next letter did not come until a full month and a half later. He apologized, saying he had been attacked by some terrible influenza and hadn’t been in a state to do anything. He also asked, by the by, whether I thought France would accept Trotsky. For a long time I wondered whether I shouldn’t just put an end to this whole business and write him a pointed letter to sober things up, but I decided to keep up the charade a bit longer. I gave him some advice about influenza, which, incidentally, he himself had already read in Zora. I advised him not to go out very often and to soak his feet in hot water saturated with a salt infusion every evening. I highly doubted that France would offer political asylum to Trotsky—and neither would Germany, for that matter. When his next letter arrived, France had indeed refused to accept Trotsky, and Gaustine, enraptured, wrote that I had “a colossal sense of politics, in any case.” This letter was longer than the previous ones due to two more sources of rapture. One was the recently released fourth edition of Zlatorog and the new cycle of poems by Elizaveta Bagryana published there, while the other was a wireless radio set, a real Telefunken, which he was now trying to get into working order. To that end he asked me to please send him a Valvo vacuum tube from Dzhabarov’s warehouse at 5 Aksakov Street. He also described at great length some demonstration in Berlin of Dr. Reiser’s twelve-tube device, which received short waves with automatic modulation of the frequency: With this, they’ll be able to listen to concerts all the way from America, can you believe it?

After that letter, I decided not to respond. He, too, did not write to me again. Not the next New Year, nor the next. Gradually the whole story faded away, and if it hadn’t been for the few letters that I have saved to this day, I surely would not have believed it ever happened myself. But fate had other plans for me. Several years later, I once again got a letter from Gaustine. I had a bad feeling about it, so I didn’t hurry to open it. I wondered whether he had come to his senses after all this time, or whether things had gotten worse. I finally opened the envelope in the evening. Inside, there were only a few lines. I will quote them here in their entirety:

Forgive me for disturbing you again after so much time. But you yourself see what is happening all around us. You read the newspapers and with that political sense of yours, you certainly long ago could presage the slaughter that is now upon our doorstep. The Germans are amassing troops on the Polish border. Until now, I have never mentioned that my mother is Jewish (recall what happened last year in Austria, and “Kristallnacht” in Germany). This man will stop at nothing. I have made up my mind and made the necessary arrangements to leave tomorrow morning by train for Madrid, then Lisbon, and from there to New York . . .

Farewell for now.

Yours truly, Gaustine

August 14, 1939

Today is September 1.

6.

On September 1, 1939, Wystan Hugh Auden woke up in New York and wrote in his diary:

I woke up with a headache after a night of bad dreams, in which Ch. cheated on me. The newspapers say that Germany has attacked Poland . . .

Now, there’s everything you need for a true beginning—bad dreams, war, and a headache.

I was at the New York Public Library when I came across Auden’s diary, which is otherwise kept in London, but by some happy accident his archive happened to be on loan there.

Only a diary could bring together the personal and the historical like that. The world is no longer the same—Germany is attacking Poland, the war is starting, my head is aching, and that idiot Ch. has the cheek to cheat on me in my dreams. Today in dreams, tomorrow while awake. (Was that what Auden was thinking?) Let us recall that after discovering such infidelity, Shahryar begins his slaughter of women in One Thousand and One Nights. Did Auden even realize how many things those two lines register, how precise, how personally and cynically precise they are? Two lines about the most important day of the century. Later that same day, when his headache eased a bit, he would start jotting down some lines of poetry:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

And now the dive on Fifty-Second Street, the headache, the cheating and the bad dream, the invasion of Poland on that Friday, September 1—all of it has become history. And that’s exactly what the poem will be called: September 1, 1939.

When does the everyday become history?

Wait a second. That so-oft-quoted We must love one another or die toward the end of the poem, which Auden later did not like at all and was constantly getting rid of, isn’t it connected to exactly that dreamed-up infidelity? Who would want to remember such nightmares?

I would like to know everything about that day, one day in the late summer of 1939, to sit in the kitchens of the world with each person, to peek into the newspapers they have opened while drinking their coffee, to hungrily read everything—from the gathered troops on the German-Polish border to the final days of the summer sales and the new bar Cinzano, which had opened in Lower Manhattan. Fall is already on the doorstep, the ads in the newspapers, paid for in advance, now sit side by side with brief communiqués from the last hours in Europe.

7.

On another September 1, I’m sitting on the grass in Bryant Park, the dive on Fifty-Second has long since disappeared, I’ve just come from Europe, and, tired (the soul, too, has its jet lag), I look at people’s faces. I’ve taken my little volume of Auden, we owe ourselves the ritual, don’t we? After a day spent in the library, I sit “uncertain and afraid.” I had slept badly, I didn’t dream about infidelity, or perhaps I did but I’ve forgotten . . . The world is at the same level of anxiety, the local sheriff and the sheriff of a far-off country have been trading threats. They’re doing it on Twitter, all within the character limit. There’s none of the old rhetoric, there’s no eloquence. A briefcase, a button, and . . . the end of the world’s workday. A bureaucrat’s apocalypse.

Yes, they are gone now, the old dives and the old masters, the war, which was then impending, it is already over, other wars have come and gone as well, only the anxiety remains.

I tell you, I tell you,

I tell you we must die.

Somewhere nearby that Doors song was playing, and suddenly it seemed to me that there was a secret conversation going on, that Morrison was actually talking to Auden. Exactly in that refrain, that line, as if resolving the hesitation in Auden’s least favorite line, We must love one another or die. In Morrison’s case there is no longer any hesitation, the answer is categorical: I tell you we must die.

After some searching I discover that in fact the song had been written way back in 1925 by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill. Weill himself performed it during the 1930s in the most deranged, almost horrifying way . . . And this only made things more entangled. Auden had grabbed and twisted around a line from that song by Brecht and is in fact speaking to him. Both Brecht from 1925 and Morrison from 1966 have set off on death’s trail. I tell you we must die. Against their backdrop, Auden sounds like he’s still giving us a chance—we must love one another or die. Only before wars, even on the very eve of them, is a person inclined to hope. On September 1 most likely the world still could have been saved.

I had come here on urgent business, as one usually comes to New York, running away from something, seeking something else. I’d run away from the Continent of the past toward a place that claimed it had no past, even though it had accumulated some in the meantime. I was carrying a yellow notebook. I was looking for a certain person. I wanted to tell the story before my memory slipped away from me.

8.

Several years before that I would be standing in a city where there had been no 1939. A city that is good for living and even better for dying. A city quiet as a grave. Aren’t you bored? they’d ask me over the phone. Boredom is the emblem of this city. Here Canetti, Joyce, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, and even Thomas Mann have been bored. It’s somehow a bit presumptuous to measure your boredom against theirs. I’m not bored, I’d say. Who am I to be bored? Even though secretly I longed to taste the decadence of boredom.

Time had passed since I had lost Gaustine’s trail in Vienna.

As I was waiting for him to give a sign from somewhere, I looked through the pages of the most obscure newspapers, but clearly he had become more cautious. One day I received a postcard, with no name or return address.

Greetings from Zurich, I’ve got an idea, if it works out, I’ll write.

It could only be him. He didn’t write anything in the following months, but I hurried to accept an invitation for a short residency at the Literaturhaus there.

And so—I had almost a month there—I wandered through the empty streets on Sunday, I enjoyed the sun, which lingered longer on the hill, and at sunset you could see, way back at the far end of the landscape, the peaks of the Alps changing color into a cold violet. I understood why everyone came here in the end. Zurich is a good city for growing old. And for dying as well. If there is some sort of European geography of age, then it must be distributed as follows. Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam are for youth, with all its informality, its whiff of joints, beer-drinking in Mauerpark and rolling around in the grass, Sunday flea markets, the frivolity of sex . . . Then comes the maturity of Vienna or Brussels. A slowing of tempo, comfort, streetcars, proper health insurance, schools for the kids, a bit of a career, Euro-pencil-pushing. Okay, for those who still do not wish to grow old—Rome, Barcelona, Madrid . . . Good food and warm afternoons will make up for the traffic, noise, and slight chaos. To late youth I would also add New York, yes, I count it as a European city that ended up across the ocean due to a certain chain of events.

Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity. It is no coincidence whatsoever that two major discoveries of the twentieth century tied precisely to time were made here, of all places, in Switzerland—Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

I hadn’t come to die in Zurich, not yet. I was walking around the streets, I needed this pause. I was trying to finish a novel that lay bleeding, abandoned halfway through, and I was hoping to run into Gaustine, just like that on the train to Zürichberg or sitting on the hill in the Fluntern Cemetery near the statue of Joyce. I spent several afternoons there. By the smoking Joyce, one leg crossed over the other, with a small open book in his right hand. His gaze is lifted from the book, so as to allow time for the sentences to mix with the smoke from the cigarette, his eyes are slightly squinted behind the glasses, as if at any moment he will lift his head to you and make some comment. I find this one of the most alive tombstones I have ever seen. I’ve strolled through cemeteries around the world, like everyone who is deathly afraid of death and dying (actually, which are we more afraid of—death or dying?), who wants to see his fear’s lair, to confirm that this place is calm, quiet, that it has been made for people after all, for a rest . . . A place for getting used to it, as it were. Even though there’s no getting used to it. Isn’t it strange, Gaustine once said to me, it’s always other people who are dying, but we ourselves never do.

9.

And so, I didn’t run into Gaustine either in the cemetery or on the Seilbahn to Zürichberg. My stay was coming to an end, I was sitting in a café on Römerhofplatz with a Bulgarian woman and we were chatting away breezily, enjoying the advantage of a small language, the calm assurance that no one will understand as you gossip about everything. We critiqued boldly—from the patrons at the café and certain Swiss eccentricities to the eternal sorrow and misfortune of being Bulgarian, a topic ripe for filling any awkward lull in the conversation. For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England, you can never go wrong.

So at that moment a dignified, handsomely aged gentleman next to us who had been sipping his coffee turned and with the most blithe Bulgarian voice (blithe and Bulgarian usually don’t go together) said: Pardon my eavesdropping, but when I hear such beautiful Bulgarian, I can’t possibly turn off my ears.

There are voices that immediately tell a story, and this was an emigrant voice, from the old wave of emigrants, it was astonishing how they preserve their Bulgarian without an accent, just here and there some vowels have been left behind in the ’50s and ’60s of the language, giving it a slight patina. Our discomfiture at having been caught in the act quickly dissipated; after all, we hadn’t said anything about this gentleman.

And so began that conversation between compatriots who have accidentally met up, and my role here was more that of an ear. An hour went by, but what’s an hour to years of absence; the lady excused herself and left, we moved to share a table, Do you have a bit more patience, just let me finish this story and we’ll go; I had, of course. When the conversation began, the sun had been drowsing on the windows of the café and on the clock, which showed three in the afternoon, then the shadows of our cups grew longer, as did our shadows, the coolness of dusk approached, but without hurrying, and it mercifully gave us time to finish a story that was more than fifty years long.

He was a man with an absolutely sharp mind, yet in places he stopped to find a more fitting word. No, now I’m translating from German, wait a moment, it’ll come, there, now, that’s the word . . . and he would continue on. The son of a forgotten Bulgarian writer and diplomat, with a childhood spent on the eve of war in the embassies of Europe. I knew of his father, which made him happy, even if he didn’t show it. Then came the classic Bulgarian post-1944 story—the father was fired, tried, sent to a labor camp, beaten, threatened, broken; their apartment confiscated and given to a “proper” writer, while their family was sent somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

My father never said a word about what had happened to him in the camp, never, my new acquaintance, let’s call him Mr. S., said. Only, once, my mother had boiled potatoes and apologized that they were slightly undercooked, and he said: Don’t worry, I’ve eaten them raw, too, I’ve rooted around in the dirt like a pig. And then he fell silent again like a man who had said more than he should.

Then Mr. S. himself, as was to be expected, was thrown in jail for fifteen months, primarily for being his father’s son, but also just in case after the Hungarian events of ’56. Afterward life more or less fell into place. He told himself that he wouldn’t think about prison or about the secret agents who continued to follow him, but one night, while he was waiting for the last streetcar, he saw a completely empty shop window and stared at it. Inside only a single light bulb hung down on a wire, casting its dim light.

A light bulb, a wire, and an empty shop window.

He couldn’t take his eyes off it. As if in a dream he heard the streetcar come to a screeching halt, wait for a bit, then close its doors and rumble off. He stood and stared at the glowing filament of that simple electric bulb, dangling there as if hanged. And then the light bulb in my own head went off, he said, that which I had always hidden, even from myself—I had to get out of here. The light bulb in my head went off, he said, and laughed. It was February seventeenth, 1966, I was thirty-three.

From then on everything was subordinated to that thought: He had a plan. He would change jobs to find one that sought workers for East Germany. He would say goodbye to everyone, without them realizing it. First to his best friend, then to the woman he was with. He didn’t let it slip to anyone, not even at home. When he left, his father just said, Be careful, and hugged him for longer than usual. And his mother had taken a bowl of water and splashed it on the stairs, an old Bulgarian custom for good luck, which she had never done before. He never saw them again.

On the train to the GDR, he got off at the station in Belgrade for a cigarette and disappeared into the crowd. He left his suitcase on the train. His father had once been ambassador in Belgrade, Mr. S. had spent the first years of his childhood there. And he still remembered how the war had started—with a telegram via diplomatic mail on September 1, 1939. As a child I thought that’s how wars started, with a telegram. Ever since then I’ve never liked telegrams, Mr. S. said.

When he arrived months later in Switzerland, after many transfers and tribulations, a friend of his father’s met him on this very date and Mr. S drank his first coffee in Zurich with him precisely in this spot. The sun was the same. Since then he had come here every year on that date.

Any regrets, nostalgia, at least in the beginning?

No, he said quickly, as if he’d had the answer ready. No, never, never. I was curious about this world, I had lived in it as a child, I spoke its language, and in the end I ran away from a place where I had spent fifteen months in prison, I ran away from prison.

From the haste with which he said this, I suspected that he had never stopped thinking about it.

He told me about a lunch with his friend Georgi Markov in London three days before Markov was killed. Clearly that story still gave him chills.

I had come by car and Gerry, that’s what we called Georgi, wanted to leave with me, he had some business to attend to in Germany, but he could only leave in three days, while I had to get home. We went to see his boss in the BBC editorial office to see whether they’d let him go a bit earlier. They told him he had to find a replacement, he waved his hand and gave up on the idea. I left by myself, stopped for a few days in Germany, then came to Zurich, I bought a newspaper at the station, opened it up, and in front of me—a picture of Gerry, the same man I had hugged just a week ago, dead.

The conversation turned to other topics, it had gotten completely dark by then, my interlocutor was startled, he should have called his wife. And then, as we parted at the door, he suddenly said, You know what, there’s another fellow countryman of ours here, whom I’ve struck up a friendship with. He, like you, has an ear for the past. I help him out, he’s started something up, a little clinic of the past, that’s what he called it . . .

Gaustine? I practically shouted.

Do you know him? Mr. S. replied, truly surprised.

Nobody knows him, I said.

That’s how Gaustine chose to appear to me that time, through an accidental encounter with Mr. S., an emigrant from Bulgaria, at the Römerhof café, Zurich, one late afternoon.

I’ve saved my notes from that meeting with Mr. S., I had quickly jotted down in my notebook some of the stories I had heard that afternoon. Later I thought back on how he had so quickly denied having any nostalgia for his Bulgarian past. I wrote that, clearly, in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs. (I could never do that.)

To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless.

That obsolete organ, like some appendix, which otherwise would become inflamed, it would throb and ache. If you can survive without it, better to cut it out and get rid of it; if not, well, then you’d better suck it up. I wonder whether that was going through his head as he stood in that Sofia night before the empty shop window with the bare hanging bulb. Enlightenment comes in different ways. At the end of my illegible notes I sketched this . . .

Old Mr. S. lived a long time and would later spend his final days in the sanatorium of the past, in Gaustine’s clinic, which he himself had helped with. He passed away happy, it seems to me, in one of his favorite memories, which he had told me during our very first meeting. Gaustine and I were standing there next to him. He asked for a piece of toast. He had been on IVs for a month and couldn’t eat, but the smell alone was enough.

He is a child, his father has come home, he has received an honorarium for some translation, he has bought jam and butter from the shop with the money. After days of nothing but potatoes, his father toasts him a big slice of white bread, spreads it thickly with butter and jam, they are laughing, and his father, who is otherwise a stern man who doesn’t believe in spoiling children, picks him up and puts him on his shoulders. They walk around the room like that, stop in the middle, and little S. looks point-blank at the glowing filament of the bulb, which is now at eye-level.

10.

The next day I was at Heliosstrasse first thing in the morning, Mr. S. had given me the address. I found the apricot-colored building on the western shore of the lake, separated from the other houses on the hill. It was massive yet light at the same time, four stories with a fifth attic floor, a large shared terrace on the second level, and smaller balconies on the other floors. All the windows looked to the southwest, which made the afternoons endless, and the day’s final bluish glimmers nested in them until the very last moment, while the light blue wooden shutters contrasted softly with the pale apricot of the facade.

The whole meadow out front was dotted with forget-me-nots, here and there peonies and some big red poppies erupted. But the petite forget-me-nots shone blue amid the Swiss green of the grass—I am sure that Swiss green exists, I can’t believe someone hasn’t patented it yet. Was it some sort of joke, planting forget-me-nots in front of a geriatric psychiatric center? I went up to the top floor where Gaustine’s clinic was, with several years’ rent paid for in advance by Mr. S. I rang the doorbell and Gaustine himself in a turtleneck and big round glasses opened the door.

Weren’t you heading to New York in 1939 last time I saw you? I said as casually as I could. When did you get back?

After the war, he replied, unruffled.

So what are we going to do now?

Rooms from different times. As a start.

Rooms of the past? It sounds like a title.

Yes, rooms of the past. Or a clinic of the past. Or a city . . . Are you in?

I had just gotten divorced, and I had the vague idea that I could make a living thinking up stories. I had a soft spot for the ’60s. I tumbled easily into any past, but, of course, I did have my favorite years. I had no good reason not to stay for a short while, a month or two at most. (I thought of Hans Castorp and his intention to stay only three weeks at the Magic Mountain.)

Gaustine occupied one of the three apartments on the top floor. The smallest space near the front door, “the servants’ quarters,” as he called it—and it’s highly probable that this was exactly what it had been used for—was now his office. The other three rooms of the apartment, including the hallway, were in another time. You opened the door and fell directly into the middle of the ’60s. The entryway with the classic coatrack-and-bench ensemble, dark green, made of fake leather with brass studs. We had one like it at home. I should say that although I was born at the tail end of the ’60s, I remember them clearly, from beginning to end, and they are part of my Bulgarian childhood, not because of any mystical reasons (although I continue to believe that memories are passed down directly from parent to child—your parents’ memories become your own). The reason I have them in my head is actually quite trivial: the 1960s, just like everything in Bulgaria, were simply delayed and arrived ten or so years later. Most likely during the 1970s.

A light green coat with two rows of wooden buttons was hanging from the coatrack. I remember that when I stepped in for the first time that morning, I froze when I saw it. That was my mother’s coat. It was as if any second she would open the living room door, the typical beveled glass would glint, and she would be standing there: young, twenty-something, much younger than I am now. Although when your mother appears at twenty, you automatically turn into a child and at that moment of awkwardness and joy you wonder whether to hug her or simply to casually call out: Hey, Mom, I’m home, I’m going to my room. All this lasted only a second . . . or a minute.

Welcome to the ’60s. Gaustine smiled, observing my shock in the entryway to the decade with a furtive smirk. I didn’t want to leave this transfiguration just yet and immediately turned toward the kids’ room. Two twin beds along the walls, each covered by a yellow shag comforter made of some fake fiber (we called it ledeka back then, it must’ve been an abbreviation) with a brown chest between them, the two beds meeting perpendicularly at the chest. I glanced at Gaustine, he understood and nodded, and I threw myself down on the bed, just as I was, in my jacket, shoes, and fifty-year-old body, and landed in my eight-year-old body amid the tickling fringe of the comforter . . .

The wallpaper, how could I forget, the wallpaper was a true revelation. The pattern here—with a castle and green vines—was very similar to what had hung in my room, pale green diamonds with entwining vegetation, except instead of a castle there had been a cabin tucked deep in the woods, with a little lake in front of it. Hundreds of copies of green cabins with green lakes. Every night as I fell asleep, I would settle into the cabin from the wallpaper, until the unpleasant ringing of the alarm clock would suddenly kick me out into a concrete panel-block apartment. I glanced at the desk, yes, the alarm clock was there, not exactly the same, but more . . . how can I put it, more colorful and Western, with Mickey Mouse on the face.

And here’s where the differences started. This other, Western boy had had a whole collection of those little Matchbox cars painted in what we called “metalisé” back then, just like real cars. With doors that opened and real rubber tires. From a Ford Mustang to a Porsche to a Bugatti, Opels, and Mercedes, there was even a little metal Rolls-Royce . . . I knew all those models by heart, I knew their top speeds, which was the most important thing for us, I knew how many seconds it took for them to go from zero to to a hundred miles per hour. I had the same collection, only on bubble gum wrappers. I got up off the bed and picked up one of the cars, I opened and closed the doors with my index finger, I rolled it across the desk. One of my classmates had had a car like this, brought back by his truck-driver father. (Oh, how crucial it was back then to have a father or uncle who drove a semi, who went to that obscure country known as “Abroad” and brought back real Levi’s jeans, those hard ribbed Toblerone chocolate bars, which I never liked, Venetian gondolas that sang and lit up and which were used as night-lights, Acropolis ashtrays, and so on.) Plus an old copy of that Neckermann magazine, actually it was a German catalog of goods that you could never own in any case, so it lost its commercial character and transformed into pure aesthetics. And erotica, I might add, by the erstwhile standards of my ten-year-old self, especially the section with ladies’ undergarments. I’ll never forget how that magazine lay on the round marble coffee table in a classmate of mine’s living room, right next to the phone—at one time a telephone was considered furniture as well. But it was the Neckermann that was the true treasure. You knew you would never have all the shiny things from that catalog, but they existed somewhere, and the world they existed in also existed.

The posters on the walls of the boys’ room were slightly different. The Levski football team from the 1976–77 season, cut from a newspaper to adorn my room way back when, was here replaced by the Ajax team of 1967–68, and it was an enormous glossy poster with, wowie!, an autograph from Johan Cruyff himself, my father’s idol, which meant he was also mine . . . I was Cruyff and my brother was Beckenbauer.

I had the Beatles on my wall, my most precious Western possession, obtained via barter with that classmate of mine, the trucker’s son, which cost me fifteen teardrop marbles plus another three “Syrian” marbles. The boy in the looking glass of the Western world had a wall full of chaotically ordered posters, which, examined carefully, told the whole bildungsroman of his puberty. From Batman to Superman, those missing heroes from my Eastern childhood (replaced by the more available King Marko and Winnetou), through Sgt. Pepper, a Lolita-esque black-and-white photo of a young Brigitte Bardot strolling along the beach in a bikini, her hair flowing freely, in one of Roger Vadim’s films, three more hot babes, anonymous, probably Playmates from the ’60s, to Bob Dylan with a guitar and a leather jacket. I had Vysotsky.

The room is only for boys, I noted.

We’ve got a girls’ room, too, if you want to check out Barbie and Ken.

Let’s keep going.

The living room was bright and spacious; the philodendron in the corner by the window and the rushes in the tall ceramic vase in front of the photo mural once again sent me back to that decade. I remembered how we used to wipe the philodendron (what a name!) with a wet rag soaked in beer. That’s what was recommended back then, so all living rooms back reeked of alcohol.

But the photo mural on the wall was a true epiphany, as well as the epitome of kitsch. Thanks to yet another international truck driver, a friend of my father’s, even we had gotten our hands on a wall mural. Autumn woods with the sun shining through the trees. A schoolmate of mine had a wall with a Hawaiian beach, complete with a few bathing beauties in the foreground. The one here was more reminiscent of his: an endless beach and a sunset over the ocean. What else to put on a wall mural in Switzerland? Certainly not the Matterhorn and the Alps.

And there’s the small square trunk of the television, standing uneasily on four long wooden legs, the exact same one we had.

Is it an Opera? I glanced at Gaustine in surprise.

No, it’s a Philips, he replied. But guess who was stealing designs from whom.

Indeed, the shape and everything else was one hundred percent identical, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria’s industrial espionage department was not sleeping on the job. But what about those tulip chairs? Why didn’t our guys didn’t steal that design, too? They were familiar to me only from movies and the Neckermann catalog. Elongated, cosmically aerodynamic, deep red, with a single leg, or rather stem. Of course, I immediately wanted to sit down, just as I wanted to help myself to the box of chocolate candies wrapped in tinfoil on the coffee table. I reached, then stopped.

Wait, when are these chocolates from?

They’re fresh, from the ’60s. Gaustine smiled.

Does the past have an expiration date . . . ?

The living room was enormous, with a sliding door that separated the east end into something like a study. Standing on the tall desk was a small red Olivetti typewriter with a piece of paper in its roller. Immediately I wanted—my fingers wanted—to pound something out, to feel the resistance of the keys, to hear the bell ding at the end of a line, and to manually pull the small metal lever for the next line. A desire from a time when writing was physical exertion.

The study was my idea, Gaustine admitted, I’ve always wanted to have my own room, a small den with books and that kind of a typewriter. It’s not completely in the style of the ’60s, back then they stored their books everywhere, even on the floor, wherever they could . . . But I can tell you that the typewriter has been a big hit. Everyone’s eyes light up when they see it, they put in paper and pound their fingers on the keys.

What do they write?

Most often their names, people like to see their names in print. Of course, we’re talking about the ones in the earlier stages of their illness. The others simply hit the keys.

I recalled that this was exactly what I would do as a child with my mother’s typewriter, which would result in strange missives.

Жгмцццрт №№№№кктррпх ггфпр111111111. . . . внтгвтгвнтгггг777ррр . . .

A possible code, which we will never crack.

11.

Why here exactly, why Switzerland? I asked Gaustine, as we sat down in the living room of the ’60s.

Let’s just say it’s due to a fondness for The Magic Mountain. I tried other places as well, but here I could find people to buy my idea and invest money. There are enough people here ready to pay to die happy.

It’s astonishing how cynical Gaustine can be at times.

Let’s just stick with the fondness for The Magic Mountain, I said. (The truth is, Switzerland is the ideal country due to its “time degree zero.” A country without time can most easily be inhabited by all possible eras. It has managed to slip through—even during the twentieth century—without the identifying marks that keep you in a certain era.)

There’s a lot of work yet to be done, Gaustine said, wiping the lenses of his round glasses. Here you see a middle-class ’60s, the past is pricey and not everyone can afford it. But you do realize that not every past and not every youth was like this. We need to have a 1960s for workers, student dorms . . . as well as the ’60s for those who lived in Eastern Europe, our 1960s. One day, when this business really takes off, Gaustine continued, we’ll create these clinics or sanatoriums in various countries. The past is also a local thing. There’ll be houses from various years everywhere, little neighborhoods, one day we’ll even have small cities, maybe even a whole country. For patients with failing memories, Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever you want to call it. For all of those who already are living solely in the present of their past. And for us, he said finally after a short pause, letting out a long stream of smoke. This sudden groundswell of people who have lost their memories today is no coincidence . . . They are here to tell us something. And believe me, one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.

Back then I didn’t understand what he meant. Just as I was never sure whether he was joking or whether he joked around at all.

According to Gaustine, for us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland. The only thing we can do is create a space that is in sync with their internal time. If it’s 1965 in your head, Gaustine said, the year when you were twenty and you lived in a rented attic in Paris, Kraków, or behind Sofia University, then let the outside world, at least in the confines of a single room, be 1965, too. I don’t know how therapeutic that is, who knows whether it will help regenerate neural synapses. But it gives these people the right to happiness, to a memory of happiness, to be more precise. We assume that the memory of happiness is a happy memory, but who knows? You’ll see, Gaustine went on, how they’ll start telling stories, remembering things, even though some of them haven’t said a word in months. “Oh, I remember that lamp perfectly, it was in the parlor at home, then my brother broke it with a ball, then . . . How did you get our sofa . . . shouldn’t it be right here, a bit closer to the wall?”

I asked for a cigarette. I had quit five years ago, but now we were in a different time, damn it, before I had quit. And before I had ever started smoking, to be precise, but never mind. We sat in silence for a while, watching the cigarette smoke of the ’60s wafting beneath the round lamp. The January editions of Time and Newsweek from 1968 had been casually tossed on the coffee table. The whole back of one was an ad for these very same Pall Mall Golds, with an extended filter and the slogan Because it’s extra long at both ends.

I remembered that when I met Gaustine for the first time many years ago, we smoked Tomasian cigarettes from 1937, which he had offered me. Well, at least we had moved thirty or so years ahead in time since then. I was about to remind him of that, but something stopped me. I figured he would give me a strange look as if nothing like that had ever happened.

Look—he lit up a new cigarette, pausing ever so slightly before his next sentence (I recalled that trick from the films of the ’60s and ’70s: you take a deep drag, holding the smoke in your lungs, then exhale slowly with squinted eyes)—I need you.

I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse, as the classic movie scene puts it. But for the moment I played hard-to-get and pretended to be angry.

Well, in that case, you could’ve given me a sign. It was a complete accident that I found you.

There was no way you wouldn’t have found me. After all, you thought me up, right? He muttered, barely bothering to hide his spite. Now and then I read one of your books, I come across an interview here and there. Besides, you’re my godfather, you christened me, otherwise I would still be called Augustine-Garibaldi, or have you forgotten?

You really never can tell when Gaustine is joking.

What the hell did they drink during the ’60s, anyway? I cut in.

Everything. Gaustine took the hint, grabbed a bottle of Four Roses bourbon out of the minibar, and filled two heavy crystal glasses. Look here, with these couches, tables, and the bourbon (cheers!), with these lamps and light fixtures, with the music and all the pop art of the ’60s—all this we can handle fine on our own. But as you yourself well know, the past is more than a set. We’re going to need stories, lots of stories. He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately reached for another one. (I had forgotten how much people smoked in the ’60s.) We’ll need everyday life, tons of everyday life, smells, sounds, silences, people’s faces; in short, all the things that crack the memory open, mixing memory and desire, as our man would say. You have experience with time capsules that they used to bury, right? Well, that’s the sort of thing I mean. Travel around, gather up scents and stories, we need stories from different years, with that ‘premonition of a miracle,’ as you made me say in one of your stories in some literary rag, he added with a laugh. All kinds of stories, big, small, lighter, let them be lighter this time. After all, for some of the folks here they will be the last stories they ever enter into.

It had grown dark outside. The clouds had gathered quickly above the lake and the rain poured down in long streams. Gaustine got up and closed the window.

Well, what do you know, in ’68 today’s date was also a Thursday, he said, glancing at the Pan Am Airlines wall calendar featuring models from different continents. And it also rained that afternoon, if you recall.

I got up to go. Before I started down the stairs, he said, almost off the cuff: The saying that you can never step into the same story twice is not true. You can. That’s what we’re going to do.

12.

And so, Gaustine and I created our first clinic for the past. Actually, he created it, I was only his assistant, a collector of the past. It wasn’t easy. You can’t just tell somebody: Okay, here’s your past from 1965. You have to know its stories, or if you have no way of getting them anymore, then you have to make them up. To know everything about that year. Which hairstyles were fashionable, how pointy the shoes were, how the soap smelled, a complete catalog of scents. Whether the spring was rainy, what the temperatures were in August. What the number one hit song was. The most important stories of the year, not just the news, but the rumors, the urban legends. Things got more complicated depending on which past you wanted delivered to you. Did you want your Eastern past, if you were from the eastern side of the wall? Or on the contrary, did you want to live out precisely that past which had been denied to you? To gorge yourself on the past as if on the bananas you had dreamed about your whole life?

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

13.

Such was the case with Mircea from Turnu Măgurele. He only remembered what hadn’t happened to him. He remembered nothing of socialism or his job at the factory, the endless party meetings, banquets, parades, and chilly warehouses—he had already erased all that while his mind was still working. When the emptying of his memory began, only the things he had yearned for (that’s the right word, no two ways about it) as a young man remained. Even back then he had known everything about America, it was in his heart and soul. He said he had always felt like an American. He had a friend who back in the day had managed to escape to New York and they wrote to each other from time to time. The other guy, the friend, was always complaining, Here they do this, here they do that . . . Finally Mircea couldn’t contain himself and wrote to him: Hey, jackass, so why do you keep sitting there wasting this chance? . . . Come back and let’s switch places. Fate granted one share of good luck to the whole of Turnu Măgurele and it fell to you of all people, you friggin’ whiner.

His son had brought him to the clinic one afternoon. And our Mircea felt right at home here amid those records, sofas, tables, and posters of that past which hadn’t actually been his. He remembered all these things in detail, at the expense of the real past that fate had allotted to him in Turnu Măgurele under socialism. That which had not happened to him, which he had imagined, remained in his memory longer than what had happened. He continued to walk down streets that he knew only from books and films, to hang around all night in the clubs of Greenwich Village, to recount in great detail that open-air concert by Simon & Garfunkel in 1981 in Central Park, where he had never set foot, and to remember women he had never been with.

He was a strange bird both here at the clinic and back in his little Romanian hometown.

Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way.

14.

It was the perfect job for me. When it comes down to it, that’s what I’ve always done—I’ve roamed like a flaneur through the arcades of the past. (Out of Gaustine’s earshot, I could say that I invented him so that he could invent this job for me.) It allowed me to travel, to wander around ostensibly aimlessly, to write down even the most trivial of things—what more could I want? To gather up the bullet casings from 1942 or to see what is left of that dilapidated yet still important 1968. Past eras are volatile, they evaporate with ease like an open bottle of perfume, but if you have the nose for it, you can always catch a whiff of their fragrance. You have a nose for other times, that’s what Gaustine said once, a nose for other times, that’ll come in handy for me. And so I officially became something of a trapper of the past.

Over the years, I’ve realized that it tends to hide above all in two places—in afternoons (in the way the light falls) and in scents. That’s where I laid my traps.

What I’ve come up with isn’t a show, Gaustine would always say, in any case it isn’t The Truman Show, nor is it Good Bye Lenin!, nor Back to the Future. (Somewhere his critics had tried to slap these labels on him.) It’s not recorded on video, it isn’t broadcast, in fact there’s no show at all. I’m not interested in maintaining somebody’s illusion that socialism continues to exist, nor is there any time machine. There is no time machine except the human being.

*

ONCE (NOT SO LONG AGO), as I was wandering around Brooklyn, I sensed for the first time with such clarity that the light was coming from another time. I could define it quite precisely, the light of the ’80s, sometime from the beginning of the decade, I think it was from 1982, late summer. Light as if from a Polaroid picture, lacking brightness, soft, making everything look slightly faded.

The past settles into afternoons, that’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how it is for me. Everything is in the light. I know from photographers that afternoon light is the most suitable of exposures. Morning light is too young, too sharp. Afternoon light is old light, tired and slow. The real life of the world and humanity can be written in several afternoons, in the light of several afternoons, which are the afternoons of the world.

I also realized that I wouldn’t have recognized that light from 1982 if not for its synchronous appearance with a particular smell, which came from the same decade from my childhood. I think our whole memory for scents comes from childhood, it is stored there, in that portion of the brain responsible for our earliest memories. It was the sharp scent of asphalt, of tar melted by the sun, the greasy, yes, greasy smell of petroleum. Brooklyn offered me this scent, perhaps because of the heat, perhaps they were fixing the road somewhere nearby, perhaps because of the big trucks that crisscrossed the neighborhood. Or perhaps because of all of that taken together. (I will add here as well the scent of oil-soaked brown wrapping paper around the Balkanche bike that my parents brought home one evening for me. The scent of impatience, of newness, of warehouses and stores, a joyful scent.)

With light, you can make some pathetic attempt to preserve it, to take a picture of it. Or like Monet you can paint a cathedral in various hours of the day. He knew what he was doing—the cathedral was only a ruse, a trap for capturing the rays of light. But with smells, no such tricks are available to us, there is no film or recording device, no such instrument has been invented over the long millennia, how could humanity have overlooked this?

Isn’t it truly astonishing that there is no recording device for scents? Actually, there is one, a single solitary one that predates technology, analog, the oldest of them all. Language, of course. For now, there is nothing else, thus I am forced to capture scents with words and to add them to yet another notebook. We remember only those scents that we have described or compared. The remarkable thing is that we don’t even have names for smells. God or Adam didn’t quite finish the job. It’s not like colors, for example, where you’ve got names like red, blue, yellow, violet. . . . We are not meant to name scents directly. Rather, it’s always through comparison, always descriptive. It smells like violets, like toast, like seaweed, like rain, like a dead cat . . . But violets, toast, seaweed, rain, and a dead cat are not the names of scents. How unfair. Or perhaps beneath this impossibility lurks some other omen, which we do not understand . . .

And so I traveled around, gathering up scents and afternoons, cataloging them. We needed a precise and exhaustive description of which scent brings which memories back, what age it affects most strongly, which decade we could call forth with it. I described them in detail and sent my findings to Gaustine. In the clinic, scents could always be re-created when needed. Although some attempted to preserve the very molecules of a given scent, for Gaustine this was a waste of effort. It was much simpler and more authentic to toast a piece of bread or melt a bit of asphalt.

15.

When I discovered Gaustine and the clinic, I was just starting to write a novel about the discreet monster of the past, its deceptive innocence, and so on, and what would happen if we began bringing back the past with a therapeutic aim. My work for the clinic and the simultaneous writing of that book were like interconnected vessels. Sometimes I lost my sense of what was real and what was not. One flowed into the other.

In any case, the basic question for both was how the past is made.

Will someone arrive like He the Messiah? Someone who will take mercy on the past’s stiff dis-member-ed parts, its pale face and its stopped heart, and say, “Lazarus, come forth!” and it will gradually get its breath back, blood will start to flow beneath the waxy skin, its members will start to move, its plugged ears will clear up, and its eyes will open.

Or, while we’re waiting, various false prophets, tempters, and mad scientists will perform experiments upon its corpse and every time will end up with Frankenstein’s monster. Can the past be resurrected or re-member-ed again? Should it be?

And how much past can a person bear?

16.

Mr. N.

A person, whom I shall call Mr. N., at the end of his days is sitting by a window and trying to resurrect that which is over and done with. His memory is leaving him, just as his friends left him when he was blacklisted. He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

Sometimes random people tell him stories in which he appears, but he doesn’t remember any of them, they seem made up to him, as if they had happened to someone else. He comes across written works under his name. Most likely he had been relatively famous, then afterward they had erased him. Doctors advised him to go look at his dossier from socialist times. That, too, turns out to have been erased, almost nothing is left of it. But he manages to figure out (they whisper it to him) which agent had primarily kept tabs on him.

So he is forced to call that very same agent from back then. At first the agent recoils and refuses to meet him at all. Mr. N. has no intention of taking revenge on him, he even apologizes for disturbing him, but he would like to see him for a completely different reason. He has lost his memory and must gather up the pieces of himself before he passes away. And the only person left who was close to his past is the agent.

You know every detail of my past better than anyone, including myself, sir, please, let’s meet.

And so their meetings begin. They have long, slow conversations every afternoon. Both of them are now outside the world, or at least outside of the system within which they had been young and enemies, the closest of enemies.

Some of the stories mean nothing to Mr. N., as if they are not about him at all. Others open long-forgotten doors in his memory, such as: A woman used to come visit you often. A very beautiful woman. Every Thursday at three in the afternoon. Then you would be alone in the apartment, your wife wasn’t home, the agent recalls indelicately.

Mr. N. tries to remember and fails. Yes, there were such afternoons. He could reconstruct to some extent a vague feeling of guilt and excitement from back then. But who was this woman, and why had she later disappeared? She was clearly quite brave, since she had decided to have an affair with him. She must have known that he was kept under surveillance. For a person with his past, that was inevitable. What did the woman look like? The agent describes her in detail. How she walked down the sidewalk, how all the old men from the neighborhood would turn around to stare after her (it’s almost straight out of Homer), how she moved freely, not anxiously or hurrying with a net shopping bag like the local women here. How her hair followed in step with her gait.

For the first time the agent forgets himself and speaks at length, as if in a trance, as they walk along beneath the mottled shade of the chestnuts, in the city emptied and bleached by the heat. The pursuer and his victim, finally together.

A year or so after I met up with Gaustine in Zurich, we already had a Bulgarian branch of our clinic. A spacious villa, built in the ’30s not far from Sofia, outside Kostenets. I love coming here, I have appointed myself as a supervisor, but in fact the doctors and staff do all the work and, to be frank, they don’t have much need for me. I sit and observe my Bulgarian past, which is passing away with these people, who have come here at the end of their lives. Old people have always fascinated me. I lived with them as a child. We grew up with our grandparents, we could talk to them, yet we missed out on a whole generation: our parents. Now, when I find myself joining their ranks, my fascination has another motive as well. How to age in the face of death, ever farther away from life, and how to save that which is unsalvageable? Even as a memory. Afterward, where does all that personal past go?

Becoming attached to people here is painful, because you realize you’re becoming attached to someone who will soon leave you. I feel especially close to Mr. N. (His is likely a case of retrograde amnesia.) He has only just come to the clinic, and the agent follows him like a shadow, visiting twice a week. Clearly, he, too, enjoys it or feels some need to do it, because he comes all the way from the city every time and spends the whole afternoon here. In the beginning we sent a car for him, but then he turned it down and started coming with his own. People need to tell stories, I think. Even people like him. Before he couldn’t, and now, when he can, nobody cares. Suddenly he has found someone who hangs on his every word. One man who has turned into an ear for all those stories from back then. One man who is ready to hear everything. The man he followed, who was losing his memory, and has ended up being erased twice over.

Tell me who I am.

The agent feels like a person who could be manipulative, he always had such power thanks to his profession, but not such enormous power as he now has. The power to think up the life of another person who no longer remembers much about it. He could feed Mr. N. completely made-up memories. Okay, so he’d still have to take into account some of Mr. N.’s remaining anchor points of memory. And he would never know when some lost detail might float up, and faces or phrases might travel across a fragile neural bridge. But for now, the agent, let’s call him Mr. A., does not appear to harbor such intentions. He, too, wants to return to the warm cave of the past.

Once, he tells Mr. N., you came and sat down at my table. At the Ivy Café, which was not far from the entrance to your apartment building, on the same street. I usually sat there to watch who was coming in and out. And one afternoon you came out, walked over to the café, looked around, and sat down at my table. There were other empty tables, the café was almost deserted, but you sat down at mine, you didn’t even ask me, “May I?” I was horror-struck, thinking I’d been unmasked. I waited to see what you’d say, going over all sorts of scenarios in my mind. You ordered vodka—at that time we all drank vodka. Vodka with cola, even. In those pretty glass bottles, so, see, we even had cola back then. Anyway. I’m drinking my vodka and waiting for you to show your hand. You didn’t say anything. The most agonizing half hour of my life. You glanced at me from time to time. I felt completely unmasked. And even now I wonder, did you know that I was following you? Usually people can sense it. Did you know?

I don’t remember. Mr. N. shrugs helplessly.

Mr. N. looks forward to these meetings with great excitement. I get the feeling he is still alive only so he can hear the whole story of himself. I love sitting next to him, sometimes we chat a bit, then we fall silent. I don’t know what is going on in his mind, but I suspect he remembers more than he lets on. Maybe he is also playing his own game, that of the forgetful one, the victim, who ostensibly lets the storyteller lead him, and in demonstrating his own total oblivion lulls the storyteller’s vigilance to sleep, forcing him to tell everything, complete with all the details he didn’t plan on revealing.

Tell me, Mr. N. says, what kind of shirts did I wear, what shoes, did I grin or grit my teeth in a frown, did I look down as I walked, was I hunched over . . . was I happy? he finally blurts out. This startles the agent, he can say everything there is to say about the shirts, jackets, overcoats, cigarettes, beer and vodka that the target ordered, but . . .

There’s no one else who remembers these details, even mistresses and wives forget after a time. Only the secret agent knows the details. Let’s try to put ourselves in his shoes. He has to sit there and watch, to describe what he sees. And what he sees is woefully insignificant. Indeed, what could really happen in the day of a man of fifty at that time? He goes out. He walks down the sidewalk. He stops. He takes out a match, cups his hand, lights up a cigarette. What kind of cigarettes does he smoke? Stewardess, of course. What is he wearing? A gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, pants, shoes, well, lookee here! The shoes are Italian, expensive, with pointy toes, that needs to be noted. What’s more, he’s wearing a Borsalino. Not many people wear Borsalinos. That gets noted, too. If anyone took the effort to read as literature all those thousands of pages written during the ’50s/’60s/’70s/’80s by all the eavesdropping and note-scribbling agents, it would surely turn out to be the great unwritten Bulgarian novel of that era. Every bit as mediocre and inept as the era itself.

17.

Notes on the Impossible Epic

In all ancient epics, there is one strong enemy you battle—the Bull of Heaven and Gilgamesh, the monster Grendel, his mother, and finally the Dragon, which fatally wounds the already aged Beowulf, all the monsters, bulls, etc., in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Cyclops in the Odyssey, and so on . . . In modern-day novels these monsters have disappeared, the heroes are gone, too. When there are no monsters, there are no heroes, either.

Monsters still do exist, however. There is one monster that stalks every one of us. Death, you’ll say, yes, of course, death is his brother, but old age is the monster. This is the true (and doomed) battle, with no flashiness, no fireworks, no swords inlaid with the tooth of Saint Peter, with no magical armor and unexpected allies, without hope that bards will sing songs about you, with no rituals . . .

An epic battle with no epos.

Long lonely maneuvers, waiting, more like trench warfare, lying in wait, hiding out, quick sorties, prowling the battlefield “between the clock and the bed,” as one of the elderly Munch’s final self-portraits is called. Between the Clock and the Bed. Who will sing praises of such a death and such an old age?

18.

Mr. N.

(continued)

Mr. A. recalls how difficult it was for him to make up nonsense to write in his reports. To a certain extent he was not immune to writer’s block. He had expected more from his profession, like in the movies or detective novels, car chases, mysterious visitors, for the person he was following to jump out the window in the middle of the night. He needed a plot, without knowing the word. But there was no plot. And therein lies the deep anti-cinematographic-ness of life. Nothing but leaving home, coming back. Even the target’s closest friends had stopped visiting him, so as to spare themselves unpleasantness. Yes, the mistress on Thursday was a promising exception. That was documented, of course. But even that wasn’t much of an adventure. Besides, it’s a part of everyday life, who doesn’t have a mistress (or a lover)?

Sometimes I wondered what to write, Mr. A. admits, because nothing interesting happened. Mr. N. feels anxious that he has caused him trouble, he feels awkward that he lived such a boring life, about which nothing could be written. He should have done something more, you know, daring, he should have shot himself in front of the agent, that would have filled up two pages easily. On the other hand, Mr. N. is interested (or I’m projecting this onto him because I am interested) precisely in the nothingness of everyday life, in life in all its details. This is exactly what he wants to remember. He has systematically erased every exceptionality, if that is the right word, with which he could describe the arrest, the beatings in the basement of Moscow 5, the wretchedness and the stench of urine in the crowded cell of the Pazardzhik prison, the petering out of his visits, the cessation of the letters coming from the outside. All of that has been ripped out. But alongside that it seems something else has disappeared, the normal things, that which we are made of. All of his documented everyday life before prison was confiscated during the searches, then returned, but since then he hasn’t touched it. Two black-and-white photographs as a child, one from his army days, a small photo album from his wedding (he ended up with it after the divorce), again black-and-white, some photo of him walking along the boulevard, caught mid-stride, his overcoat blowing in the wind, he’s laughing and making some gesture toward the person taking the picture. And that’s it. There is no photograph of the woman who visited on Thursdays, of course.

One day Mr. A. arrives with several letters—Mr. N.’s letters to the woman. How did you get these? he asks. Mr. A. merely raises his eyebrows, surprised at that naïve question. Mr. N. opens the letters and finds they are short. He reads them and realizes that he does not remember them at all. He reads with genuine curiosity, as if he were not the author. And he must admit that he is impressed. They are well written, he’d found the right words, he was romantic without going overboard. Quite persistent and bold in certain suggestions. This is something new. He would have described himself as timid and bashful. The final letter ends with a warning that it would be better for her not to come anymore, since they were surely watching him and some shrimpy stooge in a scally cap was loafing around the café across the street all day. At that point Mr. N. lifts his eyes apologetically from the letter. Don’t worry about it, I’m over it, says Mr. A.

Mr. N. leaves the letters on the middle of the table. He doesn’t know whether he can keep them or whether he has to give them back. Understanding his question, Mr. A. nods in encouragement, Yes, they’re for you. They continue to speak in the polite “vous” form, even though neither one of them has anyone closer than the man across from him now.

Over time the woman from those Thursdays starts dominating Mr. N.’s thoughts more and more. But this, for some reason, scares him more than anything. Her image starts to float up from the nothingness, like photos out of the chemical bath of a darkroom. She wears her hair in a ponytail and has a silver streak in her bangs. Even though this is precisely what he wanted in the beginning, now her appearance starts to seem frightening. The reason for this is simple—he suspects that this woman could crack the dike that he has carefully built up over the years, freeing everything he has managed to keep out. He is not sure he could stand it. On the other hand, if there had been someone who loved him, this meant that he had existed after all, even if he doesn’t remember much of himself.

If there had been someone whom he had loved, this could also count as proof of his own presence. But what then?

On his next visit, Mr. A. has yet another surprise for him. He takes a carefully wrapped photograph out of his leather satchel. He hands it to Mr. N. It is a black-and-white photo, strongly contrasted, a deserted street can be seen, and on the sidewalk in the shade of a tree stand Mr. N. and a woman who is leaning toward him, perhaps she wants to whisper something in his ear or to kiss him, it’s hard to tell. The shadows of the leaves are falling on her dress.

The most beautiful woman in Sofia, Mr. A. says finally. She didn’t belong here, not in this time and this place. I knew a lot of people were dying to be with her. Some of your problems were because of her. Of course, first and foremost you were in trouble because of what you wrote and said in the cafés, especially in ’68, about all the events happening then. But also because of her. She was the daughter of an old writer, by the way. He couldn’t stand you, may he rest in peace. A talentless hack, from the big-time nomenclature, the joke was that she was his only good work. She knew she had no future with you. Because you yourself had no future. I think that’s also why she loved you.

Again the future. If he could have, Mr. N. would have remembered that he had always been indifferent to the future. Conversations about the future under communism inspired him to make snarky comments at parties; the cosmic future also seemed unclear and suspicious to him, the new order, the new people—all of it sounded so distant and hollow. The bright future gives me heartburn, he once told a group of friends. (That, of course, immediately got written down). Shortly thereafter Brodsky, if I recall, formulated it more beautifully, but it was the same idea: “My objections to that system were not so much political as aesthetic.” Nevertheless, I prefer Mr. N.’s formulation. His objections to the system were physiological.

19.

There is also a dead, mummified past.

For those of my generation, our first memory of a dead body is a shared memory. It’s as if there was an order from the Ministry of Edification (surely there was just such an order) for everyone in the earliest years of primary school to visit the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov. To bow before the leader and teacher who so loved children and would take time for photos with them, despite his busy workday. To pay their respects to the hero of Leipzig, who bravely set fire to the German Reichstag, as one of my confused classmates put it, thus calling down a world of trouble on himself, which included his parents being called in, getting scolded, etc. Goebbels himself didn’t manage to convict him, yet you have the cheek to call him an arsonist, the teacher shouted at my poor classmate.

Anyway, that first meeting with death stays with you your whole life. The mausoleum guaranteed you a real live experience of death, if I can put it that way. All subsequent deaths and deceased bodies would be compared to that body, they would be copies of that first, model dead body. We knew we were very lucky, as the world is not exactly bursting at the seams with mausoleums and stuffed guys. That’s what we whispered among ourselves before we went inside, and good thing nobody heard that “stuffed guy,” because we would’ve caught hell for it.

They brought us there all the way from the other side of Bulgaria. A whole night rocking and swaying on the slowest passenger train so as to avoid having to pay for a hotel in the capital city. In the morning still groggy, sleepy-eyed, directly from the train station we waded into the thick November fog in front of the mausoleum. Fear comes when it’s our turn to go in. We pass by the honor guards at the entrance, who stand stock-still. Perhaps they are stuffed as well? Inside, the hallways are darkened, illuminated only by electric torches and cold as a refrigerator. The mausoleum is a refrigerator, of course. Something like our freezers at home which our mothers stuff full of pork knuckle and chicken so the meat doesn’t go bad.

We near the room with the body, we can already see the glass coffin lid. Chubby Demby, my friend whom I sit next to in class, had whispered to me outside that if you take a really close look at his eyelids, you can see them twitching slightly. That’s what his brother had told him, who’d already passed through here.

The dead man looked like he was made of plastic, his suit coat and pants were more alive than he was, his lapel covered with medals, the hair of his mustache like a clothes brush. Just then, as I passed slowly by his head, I saw perfectly clearly how for a split second his eyelid twitched. Tick-tick, two times, the left eyelid. I could barely stop myself from screaming. It was as if he were giving me a sign, winking at me from his glass-lidded coffin. Be careful, because Comrade Dimitrov sees everything, our teacher at school had warned us, pointing at the portrait on the wall. Yeah, right, he can see, my ass, I had said to myself then, but now he was winking to punish me for my doubts. He really will turn out to live eternally, as they were always telling us.

Good thing Demby was there to save me from this early metaphysical fear. I’m not sure whether he saw the wink (or whether the sign was for me alone), but as an amateur biologist who had devoured his older brother’s textbooks, he explained everything to me in graphic detail based on the experiments with dead frogs described there. With a frog, even if it’s dead and its legs are just dangling there limp, if you give it a little electrical shock, it’ll start kicking as if alive. We would do this experiment in sixth grade, he said. So the guy here was dead as a frog and would never be getting back up, he just had muscles that still moved.

I still use this explanation when my fears grow too metaphysical.

20.

Mr. N.

(the end)

So how did she end up with me, despite everything? Mr. N. asks.

She was the wife of a friend of yours. He came over to our side, had a few skeletons in his own closet, we put the screws to him a bit. To tell you the truth, he didn’t put up much resistance. He was our main source, but you always suspected other people, at least that’s what you said on the phone. You tapped my phone? Mr. A. does not even deign to reply. The day your friend got promoted to some big-shot position, she came to you on her own for the first time. It was Thursday afternoon, the first of all those Thursdays to follow.

Mr. N. listens and gradually begins to imagine this woman, with her long hair with the white streak in her bangs, and her careless gait. When she walked down the street, they would all turn around to stare after her. A famous theater director was crazy about her, too; he staged a play and had the actress done up like that—hair in a ponytail, with the white streak . . . Everyone knew who she was playing. The director was immediately sent to another theater, the play was canceled, his marriage was over. That woman brought nothing but trouble, Mr. A. said.

But why does the secret agent Mr. A. keep coming? In the beginning, surely out of curiosity or fear of being blackmailed. He quickly must have realized that there was no risk of anything like that. There is something else. If Mr. N. remembers nothing or almost nothing of all that, then Mr. A. is free of guilt, in a manner of speaking. Without being able to formulate it clearly, he senses that if no one remembers, then everything is permissible. If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer’s, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime.

So why, then, does Mr. A. come and tell these stories? Probably because a human being is not meant to keep a secret for so long. Secrets, it seems, are a late outgrowth in the course of evolution. No animal keeps secrets. Just man. If we had to describe a secret’s structure, it would most likely be uneven, granular, some kind of lump. In Mr. A.’s case, this is not a metaphor. The lump is real, he had been trying to ignore it for several months, but after going to the doctor three weeks ago, everything is now clear. The fact that he is terminally ill frees him from many things, but it also spurs him on toward others. Now the predator begs the prey to hear him out. Age is the great equalizer. They have become brothers-in-arms, they have crossed over to the losing side in a battle whose outcome is clear. Mr. A. can finally tell everything. And Mr. N. can finally hear the whole story about himself.

What happened to her? Mr. N. asks again, less and less certain that he wants to know.

Mr. A. could wriggle out of this a thousand different ways. She was not a target of operational interest and he never entered into communication with her—this was the bit of officialese nearest to hand. Or he could say some other operative agent took over the expansion of the investigation, or so on. Mr. A. is silent for a bit, rolls a cigarette, his hands trembling. Mr. N. seems only now to notice that in recent months his interlocutor has aged visibly, his skin has turned yellow, his face has suddenly grown gaunt. Two or three weeks earlier he had called to say that he couldn’t come, he had to go get some tests done.

And then Mr. A. admits everything. How, when they arrested Mr. N., she told her husband that she would leave him that very second if he didn’t do something for his friend. How she packed her bags and moved out the next day, how she went around from office to office by herself. She wanted to visit him, but they told her that the prisoner had refused to see her at all. How in the end she reached Mr. A. himself. She came to his home one evening and wanted to talk about Mr. N. She begged him to tell her where he was, to arrange a visit. She would do anything . . .

Suddenly Mr. N. clearly imagines the whole scene between the two of them. With one aberration. The woman’s body is naked in the middle of the room, young and beautiful, Mr. A. is standing in front of her, except that he is his current age, a shriveled old man, skin and bones. Suddenly that terrible heartburn comes back, that nausea that was not metaphysical, on the contrary, it had a physical and even physiological dimension. His whole stomach is burning, as if someone had poured vinegar inside him.

I’m sorry, Mr. A. says, sitting there frozen, waiting to see what Mr. N. will say. Whatever it might be, it will be the end of this story.

Mr. N. doesn’t say anything. He only feels a terrible urge to vomit. The heartburn is back, his body has remembered and is disgusted. He takes the photograph, stands up, and leaves. If this were a film, against the backdrop of the blank screen as the final credits rolled, we would hear a shot.

It’s the afternoon of the world. A man is walking down the sidewalk on the shady side of the street. On top of everything, it’s August—the afternoon of the year. The sun passes through the leaves of the trees, throwing dappled sunlight on the pavement. There is nothing else around, the houses are resting with their baking walls, somewhere a forgotten radio can be heard playing through an open window. The scene is simplified, almost like in a movie. A woman appears from the other end of the street and stops next to the man, the two of them standing in the shade. (The absolute past is something like that—the afternoon of the world, a hideout in the shade of a tree.) A bit farther down the street, invisible to them, a man stands and takes their picture. The photograph is almost a work of art, it has clearly captured the shadows of the leaves on the sidewalk and on their two bodies, the woman’s leaning figure and the emptiness of the afternoon street. Everything that would happen after this photograph has not yet happened.

The man from the photograph is now holding the image of himself and the woman in his hands. Of the couple beneath the tree, only he remains. And the photographer. The photographer is also the only one who will never forget the scene. Because this story, he remembered as he told it, was the only story in his flat life. This woman, also the only woman in his life (who disappeared under mysterious circumstances), has pursued him since then, along with this man, who stands here, his memory gone. Some call this kind of pursuit guilt. But like most others, Mr. A., up until the very end, will not find the right word.

21.

Floors of the Past

A year before Mr. N. joined us, things with the clinic in Zurich were going quite well, even outstripping our expectations. Gaustine now occupied the entire top floor of the building, where we could create all sorts of variants of the ’60s. Not long after that, the Geronto-Psychiatric Center that owned the building invited us to further develop our theory in their wards as well, so in practice we had free run of the whole building. We started opening rooms of the past as well as small clinics in several other countries, including Bulgaria.

Alzheimer’s, or more generally memory loss, had turned into the most quickly spreading disease in the world. According to the statistics, every three seconds someone in the world developed dementia. Registered cases had surpassed fifty million—in thirty years, they would triple. Given lengthening life spans, this was inevitable. Everyone was getting old. Elderly men would bring their wives here, or vice versa, elderly women with discreet diamonds would lead their partners here, the latter would smile awkwardly and ask what city they were in now. Sometimes sons or daughters would bring in both their parents, who were often holding hands, no longer able to recognize their own children’s faces. They would come for a few hours, for an afternoon, to the apartment of their youth. They would enter as if they were right at home. The tea set must be here, I always kept it here . . . They sat down in the armchairs, looked through albums of black-and-white photos, suddenly “recognizing” themselves in some of them. Sometimes their companions brought in their own old albums, which we would leave on the coffee table in advance. There were also people who took a few faltering steps and then returned to the middle of the living room, right under the light fixture.

One elderly man whom they brought in regularly loved to hide behind the curtains. He would stand there like an aged boy trying to play hide-and-seek, but the game had dragged on, the other kids had thrown in the towel, they’d gone home, they’d gotten old. And no one came looking for him. Yet he would stand there behind the curtain and peek out timidly to see what was taking them so long. The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore. I don’t think he will ever come to that realization, thank God.

Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last time in the Elysian fields of childhood. A few well-begged-for, please-just-five-more minutes, like in the old days, playing outside in the street. Before we get called home for good.

And so, the past and Gaustine gradually took over the remaining floors of the clinic. We needed to differentiate the ’40s and the ’50s. We had started with the ’60s as if we were subconsciously preparing rooms for ourselves. But ninety-year-old patients also wanted their childhood and their youth. Thus, World War Two moved into the ground floor. Which turned out to be a good choice, first, because it saved them the trouble of climbing the stairs. And second, the basement below could be used as a bomb shelter, and that made our re-creation of the decade truly authentic. Most people had memories of hiding precisely during bombing raids.

Should we awaken fear, the memory of fear? Classical reminiscence therapy insisted on positive memories. According to Gaustine, however, every awakened memory is important. Fear is one of the strongest triggers of the memory, and so we should use it. Of course, these trips to the basement were rare, but they always produced results. Shivering and shaken up, that’s how people came out of the bomb shelters, scared and alive.

The ’50s sprawled on the floor above. Here was the dominion of Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, here you could hear that whole astonishing mix of jazz, rock-n-roll, pop, and the now old-fashionedly symphonic Frank Sinatra. Here were North by Northwest, Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Nights of Cabiria, Fellini, Mastroianni, Brigitte Bardot, Dior . . . The world was recovering from the war and wanted to live. In one part of the world, that was easier to do. For the other part, we had a separate zone at the end of hallway, several apartments for the Eastern Bloc countries. One for the ’50s for Eastern Europe, and the other—a separate room for the Soviet ’50s (well financed, by the way). Similarly, the Chinese ’50s were established. The past is also a financial investment. The Cuban revolution and Castro did not receive a separate hacienda, but nevertheless half of the people wandering around this section were wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and they would stop in front of the portrait of El Comandante. The hallway between West and East was divided in the middle by an “iron curtain,” a massive wooden gate, which was always locked and which only clinic personnel could pass through. You never knew what those on the one side might think up.

It only took one escape attempt from the Eastern hallway, a guy who tried to jump over the top of this mini–Berlin Wall (there was a few feet of empty space between it and the ceiling), but fell and broke his leg. After that casualty, one of the orderlies patrolled the Eastern side in old military uniforms.

Memory loss was affecting ever younger people, thus the need for a ’70s floor was also growing, so the fourth was dedicated to that. And the ’60s was moved down to the third. The attic was left for the 1980s and ’90s—they would be needed someday.

22.

A Dentist’s Memory

He doesn’t remember faces, nor does he connect them with names. Open your mouth and let’s take a look, aha, now I recognize you, you’re the one with pulpitis on the lower sixth on the left, Kircho, wasn’t it?

Surely it’s possible to create an archaeology of teeth and to clearly establish each decade according to the different kinds of fillings and materials used. Oh-ho, my dentist always says, your teeth are a brief history of the ’90s, the chaos back then, the crisis, those heady first experiments with metalloceramics, mass use of root canals, posts put in crooked, a complete nightmare. If dentists were archaeologists . . .

At the dental clinic in the town where I grew up, in the hallway over the doors to the offices they had hung photos of the whole Politburo, who knows why . . . Even as kids we knew the term “politburo,” a fact which is revolting in and of itself. I was able to recognize some of the faces; their portraits were all over the place, they were often shown on television. So you’d be sitting there trembling in this marble corridor with identical white doors, listening for the grinding sound of the drill. Someone just screamed from inside the rooms. And in this sterile, unfeeling hallway the faces of those guys would be looking down on you. Nondescript, aged faces, unfeeling faces, with no hope at all.

That’s how the 1970s were to some extent, marble and old men.

Those faces have been imprinted in my mind forever and, like with Pavlov’s dog, the second I hear a dentist’s drill, they appear before my eyes like the impassive patron saints of pain. And vice versa, if I catch a glimpse of them in some archival newspaper, I always feel a twinge in my teeth.

23.

Every morning I look through the newly arrived newspapers and magazines. Time magazine from the second week of January 1968. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Stoppard is playing on Broadway. The movie theaters are showing Visconti’s recently released The Stranger. And in almost all sections: The War. You’d think the Second World War hadn’t ended yet or had broken out again. Of course, it’s the Vietnam War. Up in the corner, in a little square, the number of American soldiers killed in 1967: 9,353. Then there are two columns about the events in Czechoslovakia, actually the events are yet to happen, and the title is “A Reason for Hope,” about Dubček’s election, hope that would soon be shot down as well. But now it’s the beginning of 1968, we still don’t know anything. History is still news.

Suddenly Bulgaria appears in a single line stating that nearly twenty percent of the cars on the road are chauffeur-driven, i.e., ferrying bureaucrats and head honchos of various calibers. Coincidentally or not, the whole facing page gleams with an enormous red Pontiac, wide as the street itself, an ad for the Pontiac Bonneville of 1968.

At the same time, during the second week of January 1968, a green village Jeep (the local co-op’s car, Time magazine was right), one of those with a canvas top rather than a hard cover, was bumping down a dirt road toward the maternity hospital in the nearby small town. In that Jeep was my mother, inside my mother was me, the driver was my father. I was on my way to be born.

Just look how those statistics from Time affected me very personally: There were no other cars in the village. Perhaps due to the whole stress of finding a car to drive my mother to the hospital, my father withdrew all of the family savings, took out a loan, and bought a used Warszawa, which dramatically increased the per capita percentage of personal automobiles in the village. The Warszawa was a powerful, corpulent, and booming car, not like that red Pontiac, and according to one neighbor the military kept tabs on them, so in case of a mobilization any Warszawa would be nationalized, some light artillery mounted on the roof, which would automatically turn it into a little tank and the driver into a tank driver. This had my father very worried, since it was already May ’68, spring had sprung in Prague, and that very same neighbor (agent or joker, we never did figure that out) said that we’d have to go free our Czech brothers. Free them from who? my father asked naïvely. What do you mean from who, from their own selves, the neighbor replied and my father could already envision himself setting out for Prague in his mobilized Warszawa.

Did Time magazine have any inking of my father’s worries and of my birth (which happened on the way to the hospital in the cooperative farm’s rustic Jeep), when writing about hope in Prague and about the deficit of privately owned cars in Bulgaria? Did my father have any inkling about Time? Doubtful. Yet despite this, everything is connected. A Jeep, a Pontiac, and Dubček.

Reading magazines and newspapers from forty or fifty years ago. What was worrisome then is no longer worrisome now. News has become history.

Breaking news has long since broken. The paper is slightly yellowed, a faint scent of damp wafts from the magazine’s glossy pages. But what is going on with the ads? The ones we passed over with annoyance back then have now taken on a new value. Suddenly the ads have become the true news about that time. The entrance into it. A memory of everyday life, which goes bad quickest of all and acquires a layer of mold. Of course, the items being advertised are long gone. Which therefore increases their value. A sense of a vanished world that had had a good time, driven a Pontiac, worn white slacks and a wide-brimmed hat, drunk Cinzano, strolled around Saint-Tropez. The very same world that thirty years earlier had waited in line for a special sale on radios in 1939 so as to tune in live to the upcoming war, as if it were a baseball game . . .

Incidentally, in 1939, the use of radios sharply increased. That would be the medium of the war. They would declare it on the radio, they would broadcast congratulatory concerts for the soldiers at the front, all the propaganda would pass over short and long waves, they would crow over victories, keep silent about retreats or losses all on this medium, everyone would huddle around that wooden box.

Where did all of that go . . . what happened to the radios and the people around them, with all the full-color inserts in the magazines? The little blond girl from the ad for the children’s radio hour is now an old woman in hospice and she probably doesn’t even remember her own name.

24.

It was a true revelation for me to look through the half-open door into another room and see an elderly woman, who had arrived with a completely blank face, devoid of any emotion, with an empty gaze, suddenly come to life when she saw the huge wooden radio with the dial of cities on it, and start reading it aloud.

London, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague

Toulouse, Milan, Moscow, Paris

Sofia, Bucharest . . .

Ooh, Sofia, she said, Sofia. In such situations my job was to tactfully draw closer, to strike up a conversation, to be ready to hear a story, to encourage her to remember. She turned out to be an emigrant from Bulgaria. Her father had been a German engineer who had married a Bulgarian woman, they had lived in a nice house with a yard in some village near Sofia, near the mountain . . . she couldn’t remember the name anymore. Her nephew, who had brought her to the clinic, stood next to us and could not believe that his aunt was speaking and livening up. That must be her language, Bulgarian, he said.

For a person who had been silent for so many years in a given language, she spoke very well. Of course, her story was broken up by some blank spots in her memory, in her language, but then it would pick up again in another place. She remembered how in the evenings they would gather around the radio for the music hour. As for the news, only her mother and father listened to it. But they would all listen to the concerts for the soldiers on the front and the classical concerts together. She talked about the blinking light on the radio, how she would read out the cities on the dial like a counting-out rhyme, imagining what lay behind each name.

I remember doing the same thing as a child, that dial was my first Europe and I thought that every city had a different sound and if you moved the dial, the condenser, you’d hear the sound of the noisy streets of Paris or people arguing in a London square. Who knows why, but I always imagined that in London there was somebody squabbling . . . The world was closed and those city names were the only proof that somewhere out there beyond the fading, the crackling, the deliberate jamming, those cities existed, and in them some other people with kids were also sitting around their radio, and if I pricked up my ears enough I could hear what they talked about in the evenings.

And the woman kept on talking and talking . . . And then . . . the radio ordered us, schnell, schnell, we must run, the Russian troops, I kleine Mädchen of nine, a blue cardigan, rote buttons . . . Mama . . . a little bunny here, she pointed at the upper right-hand side of her cardigan, Mama had sewed a Kaninchen there . . . we have to run, Daddy is German, German, they’ll kill him . . . and Grandma yelled . . . here bad, bad, run . . . last train and quick, quick, schnell, airplanes, shooting krrrrrrr train stops, down, we lie. . . grass, grass . . .

Grass . . .

A long pause, as if she had lost her train of thought . . .

Grass . . .

Again a pause, then suddenly the memory comes back, swooping over her head like an airplane . . . Her face is twisted in fear, she raises her arms . . .

(Is it possible, I think I know this woman from somewhere . . .)

Her nephew hugs her . . . I’m not sure she even notices him, he is absent from this memory, she is now in 1944 . . . her language becomes completely broken, more German words slip in . . . Achtung . . . The train is carrying the last German employees, refugees, families . . . the planes are dropping bombs, the train stops, they have to jump out and lie on the ground. The scent of soil, bullets around her, her mother’s body, she doesn’t mention her father . . . but a cow appears, walking toward them, it breaks into a run, stops and looks around, then starts running again, frightened by the bombs and the shooting . . . Get out of here, little cow, the woman yells, the girl yells, Get out of here, cow . . . they’re killing you . . . but the cow clearly doesn’t hear, mooo, right at the girl . . . and then a piece of shrapnel (I’m filling in the unclear parts of the story) hits the cow in the rump, she starts bleeding and limping mooo, mooo, mooo, the woman moos, Hey, cow, hey, cow . . . she gets up and starts running toward the cow, her mother pulls her down sharply and she falls . . . where, where . . . mooo, mooo . . . oh, cow, oh, cow, you not dying, I saving you . . . the cow is lying in front of her, shaking its head . . . and eyes . . . It has eyes and cow cry, the girl-woman is saying, it’s crying, crying, and she’s crying . . .

Tante, tante, her nephew keeps saying in German, with all the awkwardness of a person witnessing a taboo scene, calm down. Do something, he turns to me, she’s crying . . .

She’s remembering, I say, that’s why she’s crying . . .

Hilde! All of a sudden the name comes to me. Hilde, I say loudly, grasping the woman’s hand. The nephew is stunned, How do you know her name?—they are here for the first time, and I wasn’t the one who did her intake registration. She raises her head and looks at me. She won’t recognize me. Twenty or so years ago I was sitting in her living room in Frankfurt, my wife and I had stayed at her place for two nights, a friend had put us in touch. I wrote something about her back then. Hilde, the woman who saved Germany.

She doesn’t recognize me. I hold her hand and speak to her in Bulgarian, I tell her that I see that cow, it is now grazing at the right hand of God, because it wasn’t alone when it died, it had seen a young girl talking to it . . . that is a happy death. Other cows now die unhappily, but that one had been embraced, so everything is okay now, she is okay. I realize that I am not speaking to the elderly woman, but to that nine-year-old girl, and she quiets down, sits on the sofa, lets her head loll back, and falls asleep.

25.

Hilde, Who . . .

I’ll wait for you at the aerodrome Hilde said on the phone. Her voice was bright, her Bulgarian was from the ’40s. There are words that suddenly open unexpected doors into other times. For a moment I wondered whether, when we met up at the Frankfurt airport, which was indeed an aerodrome, it would be 1945 or 2001. (That’s when this conversation took place.) As if, from this moment on, that “aerodrome” would be the “madeleine” of my memory, which would tie me to Hilde. Along with two more things that come up in this story—a cooking pot and the most average, ordinary factory-made bread.

Of course, Hilde was waiting for us right on time at the aerodrome, splendid in her early seventies. Outside Bulgaria’s borders, people age more beautifully and more slowly, old age is more merciful elsewhere.

Here is the place to mention that Hilde was born in Bulgaria and managed to catch the last train out before the Red Army rolled in. Her family wanted to stay, her father, a German geologist, was not involved with the military, but they warned him that nothing good awaited him there. Hilde fled with her Bulgarian mother and her younger brother. Her father stayed behind to finish up a few things on the house and was supposed to catch the train a week later. They shot him the next night . . . Hilde was nine. They traveled almost a whole week, the train was constantly being bombed. She remembered clearly the scent of grass and dirt as they lay beside the rails. She told us all this as we sat in her living room, which, for its part, had remained forever in the ’60s, with its floor lamp and worn armchairs with wooden armrests.

Then I remembered to take out the factory-made bread she had asked me for on the phone. I must admit that this request had puzzled me. I had to go around to several stores until I could find ordinary factory-made bread in Bulgaria. Who even buys it anymore? Hilde carefully took the bread, she was evidently deeply moved, and went out into the hallway so I couldn’t see her. She returned a short while later and said that she remembered the taste of that bread from her childhood. She cut three slices, sprinkled them with a little salt, and handed one to me and one to my wife. I’ve never seen anyone savor more a slice of simple factory-made bread with salt.

After that she took us to the kitchen and showed us something very special. She opened up the lower compartment in the sideboard and took a pot out from way in the back. It was an enormous, heavy pot, fashioned from rough, solid metal. As if tanks had been melted to cast it, I thought then and even said it aloud. Hilde smiled and said that I had no idea how right I was. This pot was the first and most valuable thing the devastated German state had given out to families. One big cooking pot apiece made of melted-down weapons and munitions. We survived thanks to this pot, Hilde said, you could even boil stones in it.

And I imagined the young Hilde amid the devastation of the ’40s and ’50s in Germany, clearing away the ruins alongside the other women, searching for whole bricks, building, sewing clothes for her brother, waiting for a few potatoes, sitting in the dark to save electricity. Without complaining, like a person whose lot it was to rebuild a nation that had been razed to its foundations.

We sat in her humble apartment and I thought that someday I must tell the story of Hilde, who, without even realizing it, rebuilt Germany. With a heavy, beat-up cast-iron pot and the memory of a slice of factory-made bread with salt.

26.

Gradually Gaustine’s clinic found its fans. Over several years rooms and houses of the past began popping up in various places. In Aarhus, for example, they used an ethnographic village made of old-fashioned houses to show schoolchildren and tourists how their forefathers had lived, how they had raised geese, sheep, goats, and horses. The geese, sheep, goats, and horses were not from the nineteenth century.

This piqued my curiosity, so, using a literary festival in Denmark as an excuse, I went a few days early and took a train to Aarhus. I had asked a Danish friend of mine to call in advance to let them know that as a writer or journalist I was interested in this social project, and so on. Clearly she went above and beyond the call of duty, because when I got there a pleasant young woman was waiting to show me around.

Actually, this place didn’t have much in common with Gaustine’s clinic. It was a museum like any other museum, but twice a month they closed a bit earlier to the general public and in the remaining hours welcomed groups from retirement homes, primarily those suffering from dementia. Some of these men and women, depending on their strength and their memories, would go into the farmsteads, feed the ducks and goats, water the gardens, or sun themselves in the yards. There were also others for whom such activities meant nothing, who had no memories of village life and farming. Those they would take directly to an apartment preserved just as it had been in 1974. I liked that bit with the exact year, although it wasn’t clear whether this apartment hadn’t been the same in both 1973 and the following year, 1975. It’s doubtful that the kitchen table, the refrigerator, and the upholstered couch in the living room would fade in one year like tulips. I snarkily pointed this out to my guide, of course.

The young woman was pleasant. She calmly and in that typically northern way put up with my suspicions, questions, and direct, typically southern jokes. In the apartment, the women headed straight for the kitchen, she said. As if switching on some hidden compass. These women who found it difficult to navigate their own apartments, here instinctively knew their way around—a conditioned reflex that had transformed into instinct. They were attracted by the scent of the spices and would open up jars of basil, cloves, mint, rosemary, burying their noses inside, no longer remembering the names, mixing them up, but knowing what was what.

They set off after the now-lost scent of freshly ground coffee, the girl went on, we have stockpiles of the exact kinds that were popular during the fifties and sixties. They like to grind it themselves. They often keep turning the handle of the grinder after the coffee is ground.

I thought of how the recollection of scents is the last to leave the empty den of memory. Perhaps because it is an earlier sense, so for that reason it is the last to go, departing like a little beast, sniffing with its head to the ground. I clearly pictured those women eternally turning the handles of square wooden coffee grinders or the tall cylindrical ones of tarnished silver with copper handles. It should be a scene from the seventeenth century, worthy of the brush of those old Dutchmen Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt, detailed realism and sublime everyday life rolled into one. The endless spinning of a coffee grinder, the scent which you imbibe with your nose, some things don’t change over the centuries. I imagined them grinding up the years, the seasons, the days, and the hours like coffee beans. When they turn the handles of these coffee grinders, the Girl with a Pearl Earring (that’s what I called my guide, who introduced herself as Lotte) said, it’s like they really go into a different time. We also have a library with books from the sixties and seventies, but letters no longer mean anything to most of them. Sometimes they look at the children’s books, enjoying the pictures and that’s it.

Actually, it turns out that right at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Dutchman, Pieter van den Broecke, managed to transport several coffee seeds across the seas to raise the first plants in Europe. His successor was none other than Carl Linnaeus, who was enchanted by these bushes and took over their care. And Linnaeus himself in his old age also began to suffer from progressive memory loss. He who had given names to the world, who had ordered and classified the unorderable, suddenly began to forget exactly those names. I can imagine him sitting over some forget-me-not and trying to remember the Latin name that he himself had given it.

We strolled past the houses from different eras, stopped into the post office from the 1920s to note the end of an entire industry of anticipation, of the delayed gratification of messages that traveled for days. We crossed paths with noblemen from bygone centuries, with milkmen, with shepherds without sheep, we nodded at the shoemakers sitting in front of their shops, in one spot kids in shorts, suspenders, and flat caps were playing leapfrog, and at an intersection a beggar had meekly laid out his torn hat. Most of them are volunteers, my guide noted, or history students or retirees. They don’t get paid anything, yet more and more turn up every year. Sometimes homeless people come as well. And what do they dress up as? I livened up at this idea. We give them warm, clean clothes from a certain epoch. But most of them don’t want to change their clothes. They want to stay as they are. And as they themselves say, there’ve always been vagrants, right, what century do you need us for?

And they’re right, of course, I think afterward. The homeless have no history, they are . . . how shall I put it, extra-historical, unbelonging. To a certain extent, that is what Gaustine was, too.

Finally we sat down in the most popular chain pastry shop from the ’70s, where they made their cakes, meringues, and croissants from scratch with flour, vanilla, lemon rind, cinnamon, and all the other ingredients from that time, using cake molds and icing from back then, as Lotte emphasized. We sat there and drank some brand of hot chocolate that had been popular in its day, from porcelain cups with a gold rim. The waitresses of the ’70s whirled past us, and there was something very familiar about them which sent me back—one of my first almost erotic memories was connected with those high white shoes that came up over the ankle.

Lotte, I asked without beating around the bush, what decade would you choose—the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties?

She fell silent for a moment and gave the best answer that can be given to such a question: I’d like to be twelve years old in each of them.

That would be my answer, too.

27.

Yes, the experiment in Aarhus worked, but it still had the feel of a museum, like a trip to Disneyland on Sunday. Gaustine’s experiment had a different aim.

Let’s go down to ’68, he suggested when I got back.

It was nice, that “Let’s go down to ’68,” something like Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld. The ’60s were simply on a lower floor. We sat down in the two lemon-yellow armchairs. He’d found them on sale, for what seemed like a ridiculous price to me; they’d been cleaning out the apartment of some rich local Warhol wannabe.

He took out a pack of cigarettes, Gitanes this time, lit one up, and the spicy smoke slowly wafted around the room. He opened a bottle of Seagram’s Extra Dry—The Perfect Dry Gin, as the ad on the last page of Newsweek put it, you bring the olive, we’ll do the rest.

So tell me, he started in . . . is Denmark still a prison?

I replied it was more a museum now and told him in detail about the houses from different eras, about the apartment from 1974, about several more rooms that Lotte had shown me, preserved just as they had been when inhabited by ordinary families, with their stories, albums, suitcases, clothes hangers, bread boxes, vase of fake flowers on the fridge. One apartment was that of Turkish emigrants, a man of fifty and his sons of around twenty, Gastarbeiters; the ashtrays were overflowing with cigarette butts and the smell still lingered. I wondered if they replaced the butts now and then.

The problem with that is, Gaustine began . . . he uttered the words carefully, as if trying to formulate at the moment what he had been thinking about during the night. Did I tell you that Gaustine suffered from insomnia? I could hear him when I slept at the clinic, he would walk around, stop, make tea, or go out to smoke. He was like Funes the Memorious. Once I suggested to him that if we managed to re-create the shape of the clouds on the morning of April 20, 1882, for example, we would have reached the point of perfection. And also how the dog looked in profile at 3:14 in the afternoon. Gaustine joined the game.

According to Gaustine, the problem with the Danish model was that temporarily entering into a regime of reminiscence, visiting a past from two to five in the afternoon, and then coming back out again into some now-unfamiliar present was too jarring and painful. Like opening a door between two seasons or moving from summer straight into winter. Or constantly going from dark to light or from youth to old age, without any transition. Staying for only a few hours opens that window of the past for too short a time. He poured himself more gin from ’68 and said that as he saw it, the moment had come to take a step further, to try something more radical.

In brief, his idea was to create a whole city set in a specific time. But a real city, not one of those simulations with a single street and a few fiberglass houses. It’ll first be in 1985, let’s say. That’s where we’ll start. I replied that I didn’t recall there being anything noteworthy about that year, unless you count the fact that, I added mentally, that was the year my class finished high school and was sent to do our mandatory military service. A year in the shadow of the following one, when we had Chernobyl, silence, radioactive rain, a deficit of iodine, which we secretly stocked up on . . .

There doesn’t need to be something unusual about the year, Gaustine replied. Time doesn’t nest in the unusual, it seeks a quiet, peaceful place. If you discover traces of another time, it will be during some unremarkable afternoon. An afternoon during which nothing in particular has happened, except for life itself . . . who said that? Gaustine laughed.

You, I replied.

You’re always trying to attribute to me everything that pops into your mind. But perhaps you really did swipe this in particular from me. And so the city will first begin in 1985—Gaustine was getting worked up now—we’ve got to turn that year inside out, make it totally gnarly, as they said back in 1985. We’ll be fine with Gorbachev, Reagan, and Kohl, they’ve left clear traces. But let’s find out what they called something cool, what the slang was, which actors everybody was going nuts over, what posters they hung up, which housekeeping magazines, the TV guide, the weather forecast, the whole run of Ogoniok from that year. How much did broccoli and potatoes cost, the Lada in the East and the Peugeot in the West. What were people dying from and what did they fight about at night in their bedrooms? We’ll reprint day by day all the newspapers from that year. Then we’ll do the same for 1984 . . .

Doesn’t 1986 come next? I asked.

I don’t know, maybe first we’ll have to go backward, he replied. On the one hand, having lost their memories, our patients will keep going further and further back, they’ll keep remembering ever-older things. After 1985 for them will come 1984, then 1983, and so on . . . I know you’re not such a fan of the ’80s, but you’ll just have to put up with them. You’ll restore them, fill them up with stories. What made people sad during the ’80s? We can, of course, stay for longer in the same year, we can repeat it. Then we’ll do the 1970s as well, that will be a different neighborhood.

But new forgetters will come, for whom the ’90s are also the past, I cut in. I guess we’ll have to keep all decades available. The past grows like a weed.

In any case, once we reach the ’70s, Gaustine continued, it’ll be more colorful there, psychedelic, you’ve got experience from the clinic. Of course, the clinic will seem like child’s play in comparison with these cities. People will be there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Things will happen between them. We don’t know how things will go. Then comes the neighborhood of the 1960s, there you’ll be in your element. We can extend 1968 to two or three years if you insist, he said with a laugh. Some years last longer than others. We’ll also reach the 1950s. There it’ll be especially important what side of history you’re on, although those were ascetic years for both sides.

And what will we do with the 1940s, I asked, with the war?

Gaustine got up, went over to the window, and after a full minute replied: I don’t know, I honestly don’t know.

To hear the phrase “I don’t know” from him happened only once in a hundred years. Gaustine knew everything, or at least he never admitted anything to the contrary.

Then, in the afternoon of 1968 or 2020, it was one and the same afternoon at the end of the day, Gaustine hinted at that which to some extent would later come about. It seemed logical, yet at the same time so beyond all logic, simultaneously innocent and dangerous—a danger of historical proportions, so to speak. He had taken out an old spiral notebook and was sketching out plans, years, chronotopes, names of cities and countries. The Gitanes smoked away, sometimes he would forget his half-smoked cigarette and light up another, my eyes were watering from the smoke, yes, from the smoke, or so I thought. Gray clouds drifted ominously over the future or the past, whatever we might call it, that Gaustine was sketching out before me. Of course, this is only a metaphor, I thought back then, trying to shake off my sense of foreboding.

What was this whole experiment to him, why did he need to expand the field of the past? He had achieved what others had never even dreamed of. He was one of the first to introduce clinics of the past. Centers based on his experience opened up in various countries. Geriatricians were falling all over themselves to reach him, to work with him, to invite him as a consultant. He never appeared in person, he sent me most places to deliver his refusals, always polite but firm. And although he turned down all sorts of interviews and publicity, his name was mentioned with respect and reverence, just as one speaks of a genius and an eccentric whom few had seen, and this only added to his legend.

28.

The Runaway

I dubbed him the Lonely Long-Distance Runner, a nod to an angry British book from back in the day, which, I must admit, I never did get around to reading, but the title stuck in my head. Lately I remember far more books that I haven’t read than those I have. I don’t find this an anomaly, it’s the same as with the unhappened past.

Anyway, he really had been (or so they tell me) a long-distance runner—physically fit, strong, a former athlete, and it was as if his body didn’t want to forget. Once a very lively, very curious man, the disease had eaten away the past thirty-forty years of his memory, although sometimes he would surprise us with sudden returns. The medications attempted to slow down the process, and we attempted to give him back the time that he remembered . . . (Obviously, there is no cure, but a person has a right to happiness even when ill, as Gaustine would say.) It was a battle for the past, a battle for every memory.

Most probably in two or three years the Runner’s strength would leave him, his muscle memory would weaken, that sliver of remembered time would grow much narrower or even disappear completely. But he was still in good shape now, even in suspiciously good shape. He lived happily at our Alzheimer’s community in the ’70s neighborhood, we’d assigned him to the Seventy-Ninth Regiment, as Gaustine and I liked to joke.

He would go to the little library every day to read the new issues of every newspaper from 1979. We had collected issues from the whole year and released them day by day. Only the weather forecast was off sometimes. But then again, nobody expected much from the weather forecasters, so nobody really even noticed it. The Runner read a lot, he got excited over everything that happened. He was a music connoisseur and still couldn’t get over the fact that the Beatles had broken up, he was on Lennon’s side. The fall of Pol Pot’s regime, Pope John Paul II’s first visit to Mexico—he followed everything, the year started off well that January. Then he moped around downcast for a time, reading about the Chinese attack on the Vietnamese border. He was as delighted as a child to see the first photograph of Jupiter’s rings sent by Voyager. He wanted to talk for a long time about what might be found on these rings, where the colors came from. Whether some form of life might happen to be discovered there . . . I tried to share his anticipation and premonition of a miracle, as Gaustine would say, and to feel that same excitement.

Lennon got him more worked up than anything else. At that time the whole world was blasting ABBA and disco, an incontrovertible sign of decline, yet he followed John’s every step in the magazines and newspapers. They wrote that he had become a homebody, that he baked homemade bread and dandled three-year-old Sean. The Runner saw nothing wrong with this and when caustic comments from Cynthia, John’s ex, appeared in a different paper, saying that actually he just spent the whole day in front of the TV, the Runner got truly angry. Once he came to me with the new issue of Life, if I’m not mistaken, and read to me that Lennon recently had been working on his autobiography and had already made tape recordings of his earliest childhood memories from Penny Lane. I can’t wait to read that, the Runner eagerly said over and over again.

Once he came and found me in the middle of the night. He shut the door behind him but didn’t want to sit down. John Lennon will be killed, he said quickly. Very soon. He was truly worried, in any case he couldn’t explain whether he had dreamed it or not. Some crazy guy will shoot him, I’ve even seen his face. While he’s coming home, in front of the entrance to the Dakota. We need to tell the police immediately. He needs to get out of there right now.

I didn’t know how to react. Was it a sudden flash of memory (that meant the therapy was working!), or a leak of information from outside? I promised that I would call the police the very next morning. We talked for a while longer and I escorted him back to his room.

The next morning, the Runner had disappeared.

The community had a discreet but formidable security force. For no other reason than that people who have lost their memories often lose their way as well, they are easy targets for incidents when outside the protected zone. The Runner was still in good shape, the security guards said they had only seen at the last moment how he had launched himself over the fence and disappeared.

A patient running away is a rare and unpleasant event for everyone involved. Most of all due to the life-threatening danger to the patient himself. In this case, he had leapt over not only a fence, but thirty or forty years as well. We didn’t know what effect this collision with another reality would have. What’s more, the incident could eventually lead to an investigation and a closing of the community, to yet another round of arguments with the guild about the advisability of such therapy, whether we had the right to “synchronize” internal and external time, and so on.

All the police in the region were informed of the incident and asked to be very careful with a patient who “inhabited” another time. I played out all kinds of scenarios in my head as I, too, wandered around the nearby city searching for him. I imagined how he would stop the first policeman he saw and share his concerns that we needed to alert the FBI immediately, as well as the police in New York. Why? the policeman would ask. I have a secret message, John Lennon is going to be killed, the killer might already be on his way. Really, the cop would say breezily with his cop-like sense of humor, aren’t you a little late, buddy? Well . . . what do you mean, has he already been killed, I’ll never forgive myself, the Runner would moan.

I would hate for him to go through all that.

Thank goodness everything ended quickly and in the best possible way. The Runner, whom from then on we would call the Runaway, wandered for a few hours in the nearby city (I was afraid he would go straight to the airport and look for a flight to New York), then he found the police station, where they already knew about the incident. He asked to speak to the boss, who listened to him carefully, wrote everything down, and said he would immediately set the system in motion. In front of the Runner he picked up the phone to speak directly with FBI headquarters. Then he offered to escort him back to the community in the station’s nicest (unmarked) car.

I didn’t know how to deal with the Runaway. He had come back from “another” world, he had mixed times. In that case the therapy probably should have been discontinued and he should have been released. Or perhaps he would request this himself. I imagined him telling everyone that real time was passing outside, while here we were palming some secondhand past off on them. Upon entering the community, patients (at least those in an earlier phase of their disease) and their families knew that this was in fact a form of therapy. Yet nevertheless for the sake of the purity of the experiment it was better not to let particles of another reality in. The environment needed to remain antiseptic with respect to contamination from other times.

What the Runaway did after his return was completely unexpected. After dinner I heard him telling the others how in the city outside everyone was being subjected to an experiment. They were playing out the future, if you can believe it, guys . . . Some people are walking around with wires in their ears and little TV sets in their hands and they never look up, their eyes are glued to the screens. Either they’re filming some crazy expensive sci-fi movie, or they’re testing out what life will be like fifty years from now. That was the Runaway’s conclusion, publicly proclaimed. He had recently read some prognoses in Time and now surely they were conducting experiments. But everything looks so fake that there’s no way people will believe it. Good thing they’ve been strictly fenced off from us, he finished.

Don’t worry, he told me later, I didn’t tell anyone out there what year it is, so I wouldn’t spoil their experiment.

Then he apologized for making trouble, then asked me if I believed they would really take action to protect John.

I thought for a bit and said—yes. I had a whole year until the papers would prove me wrong.

29.

Numbers

You can see where the world is heading, Gaustine said one morning . . . A complete failure, everything we had previously expected for the coming twenty-thirty years has not happened. You yourself know that part of the failure of the future is also the failure of medicine. The world is getting older and every three seconds someone loses their memory.

Statistics were his new obsession. He tracked them, constantly comparing and analyzing the growing curve of various memory disorders, data from the World Health Organization, from the European headquarters and several of the larger national centers. The numbers for the U.S., for example, were truly terrifying—around five million with dementia, another five and a half million with Alzheimer’s. Globally there are now more than fifty million, Gaustine would say, and those are only the registered cases, that’s a country bigger than Spain, in seven or eight years it’ll be seventy-five million, and again that’s only the diagnosed cases. In India, for example, ninety percent of those suffering from dementia are never diagnosed, while in Europe almost half aren’t. Almost half, can you imagine, that means just double the numbers we have. We are surrounded by people for whom the trigger has already been pulled, they just don’t know it yet. You and I could even be among them . . . have you gotten yourself tested?

No.

Me, neither. Some kind of global dementia is coming.

Gaustine knew how to tap into all my hidden fears. Recently I’d had the feeling that every day, names and stories were abandoning me, quietly slipping away like weasels.

That’s not all, he went on with his numbers, it’s one of the three most expensive illnesses at the moment. The Americans have calculated it, two hundred fifteen million dollars a year, and that was five years ago. That includes medicines, social workers, doctors, home health aides, can you imagine how many aides are needed? Some politicians there will soon think to ride this wave, they’ll stir up unrest, nobody wants to pay huge amounts of money for people with mental disabilities, who are just a burden on society, terminally ill, in need of a merciful death, they will demand radical health policies, some kind of realpolitik in medicine . . . you’ve seen this before, that rhetoric was developed and applied back in the 1930s.

Good thing we don’t need to re-create the ’30s, I thought, even though I’d taken a peek into them. I remembered the cover of Neues Volk from 1938, the National Socialists’ flagship magazine, with a photo of an “incurably ill” person along with the caption: 60,000 Reichsmarks is how much this person with a genetic disease costs society per year. Dear countrymen, that is your money, too.

Our patients would be the first on the blacklist. That’s how it had begun back in the ’30s—with psychiatric wards and geriatric clinics.

30.

Once they brought an elderly woman to the clinic, Mrs. Sh., who refused to go into the bathroom and became hysterical every time she caught sight of a shower. This happened sometimes, in the severe phases of the disease people became aggressive, obstinate, like children refusing to do things that previously had been habitual. In such cases we would find soap and shampoo from the right era, which still held their scents, toiletries, shower caps from back then, thick robes with monograms, mirrors with ivory handles, wooden combs . . . Everything that would make a bathroom seem cozy and familiar. But in this case nothing helped. Mrs. Sh. kept trying to pull away, crying and pleading with the nurses to spare her. So Gaustine and I dug through the archives. We searched out the woman’s surviving relatives and documents, and discovered, actually I must admit that Gaustine guessed it first, that Mrs. Sh. had survived Auschwitz. She herself clearly had tried to forget and not talk about it. But now, in the late phase of her illness, that which she had tried to erase for her entire life rushed back at her like an oncoming train and she could not escape into other memories. Somewhere Primo Levi wrote that the concentration camp is that inescapable reality which you know that you will sooner or later awaken into amid the dream of life. And that feeling does not fade with the years.

Suddenly it all made sense—her eternal morning questions of whether they had found her mother or whether her brothers were alive. We also understood why she squirreled away crusts of bread and other leftovers from the cafeteria, hiding them in her cupboard. Everything that awakened that memory had to be avoided—showers, the clicking of the nurses’ high heels in the hallway. (We switched them out with soft slippers.) The daytime lighting was softened. Part of the cafeteria was divided into smaller, cozy booths, so as to avoid large common areas and the rattling of silverware. Unwittingly you realize how many things in a clinic are potentially charged with hidden violence, as Foucault would say. Nothing would ever be innocent again—bathrooms, cafeterias, the gas stove, a doctor in a white coat who wants to give you a shot, the lighting, the barking of dogs outside, the sharp voice, certain German words . . .

This was one of the rare instances in which Gaustine refrained from tapping into a patient’s memory.

31.

New and Imminent Diagnoses

Family Collapse Disorder

Somewhere in a Swiss village a father came back home to find strangers inside his house, a woman and two young men who were making themselves comfortable. He locked them inside and called the police. The police came and surrounded the house.

Dad, what’s wrong with you? his sons cried from inside.

They say that the coming mass loss of memory could be something like a virus that reaches the hippocampus, destroys brain cells, blocks neurotransmitters. And the brain, that supreme creation of nature, is transformed into a pulpy mass in the span of a year or so. Several world-renown scientists offered bees as an example and warned that what is happening with their mysterious disappearance, so-called colony collapse disorder, is actually the same as what the Alzheimer’s mechanism does to the human family.

The Skipping Record Syndrome

One morning they wake up after a night of restless dreams and find, while still in bed, that they have undergone a metamorphosis . . .

Time has skipped, like records used to.

A young man and woman, university students, go to bed in the evening and wake up twenty years later. They sense that something is off with their bodies, stiff, painful, they are not exactly arthropods, but it’s not much better. Some unfamiliar kids barge into the room, screaming at them.

Mom, Dad, wake up, you’ve been sleeping all day . . .

Who are you, what are you doing here? the couple in the bed asks . . . Get out of here!

Where the hell is my hair? What did we have to drink last night, we were at a party . . . Do you remember what you dreamed?

No, not at all.

Me, neither.

Hm. Wait a second, there were some people, they were congratulating us for something, then . . . no, it’s all, a blur. You try to remember.

I was supposed to go back to my parents’ place—I’d just taken my final exams for junior year.

We were in the same major, right?

I was supposed to call them to let them know I wouldn’t be coming home. She looks at her watch. Should I call them now? What year is it?

Where the hell is my hair, for Christ’s sake? He again touches his bald head.

We’d been going together for a few months. That night when we got drunk, you said you wanted to get married.

A person says all kinds of stupid stuff when he’s drunk.

Well, clearly we did . . .

I don’t remember a thing. This isn’t that old apartment of ours.

We must’ve gotten married. We must’ve found jobs. We surely had friends. I don’t remember a thing, zilch. Maybe we took vacations at the sea, we must’ve gone to the seaside. Do you know our kids’ names?

No, goddamn it, I have no idea about any kids.

We’ve got to go to a doctor.

To a doctor? And what will we say?

Well, that we woke up today and it turns out that twenty years have passed.

Did you see the calendar?

Yes, I did, it’s 2020. Two thousand and twenty. I mean, that’s a whole other century.

Wait, when were we juniors in college, when was that party?

It must’ve been 1998.

Okay, right, so we got drunk after that exam in, what was it again . . . and you stayed over at my place. We did whatever we did, then fell asleep. But back then I was twenty-three and had hair, goddamn it.

You also didn’t have that . . . you were thinner, is what I’m trying to say.

You were different, too.

So what would we tell the doctor? We woke up this morning, and the last thing we remember is going to bed in June of 1998. We’ve slept for twenty years. Well, you shouldn’t have slept that long, the doctor will say. Any other symptoms? Well, just that I’ve gone bald, you’ll say, while I’ve gotten old. And we don’t remember a damn thing. Absolutely nothing.

They pull the covers up over their heads and fall asleep again, in hopes that this time they’ll sleep backward and wake up in that old apartment.

32.

Protected Time

The next step came when Gaustine decided to open these clinics of the past not only to patients, but to their friends and family, too. Then we had people showing up who wanted to live in certain years, without having any connection with a patient at all. People who didn’t feel at home in the present time. I suspect that some, if not most of them, did it out of nostalgia for the happiest years of their lives, while others did it out of fear that the world was irrevocably headed downhill and that the future was canceled. A strange anxiety hung in the air, you could catch a whiff of its faint scent when inhaling.

I wasn’t totally sure it was ethical to admit technically healthy people to the clinic. Was it ethical to mix them in with the patients? Or perhaps the right to the past is inviolable and it should be valid for everyone, as Gaustine liked to say. People wanted it, and if not here, they would find it elsewhere. In fact, all sorts of quickly cobbled-together hotels for the past were starting to pop up.

Gaustine didn’t share my equivocations and began gradually opening up the clinics to a broader set of clients. For a person whose obsession is the past, every such expansion of the field was a welcome one. Nevertheless, Gaustine did it carefully. I am not sure that he had a strategy or that he was looking to make money off of it. (Although there was definitely a niche for it.) If you ask me, he was looking for something far greater than the solidly backed paycheck of the past. He wanted to enter into the clockwork of time itself, to nudge some gear, to slow it down, to move the hands backward.

Gaustine’s idea went even further. He didn’t intend for you just to drop in for a couple hours a day, like at a gym, but rather to stay . . . he didn’t say forever, perhaps a week, a month, a year. To live in that place. I say “place” and immediately see how out-of-place that word is. Actually, Gaustine wanted to open up time for everyone. Because that’s exactly what this was about. Where other people were thinking about space, square meters or acres, he was measuring years.

The point of the experiment was to create a protected past or “protected time.” A time shelter. We wanted to open up a window into time and let the sick live there, along with their loved ones. To give a chance for elderly couples, who had spent their whole lives together, to stay together. Daughters and sons, more often daughters, who wanted to spend another month or even a year with their parent, before things completely went to seed. But they didn’t just want to stand next to their beds in a sterile white room. The idea was for them to stay together in the same year, to meet up in the only possible “place”—in the year that still glimmered in the parent’s fading memory.

33.

The Last Game

I was walking along on a warm June evening in 1978. A song floated from somewhere on the street. “Hotel California” by the Eagles flowed out of everywhere back then. Gloomy and intoxicating, in some places it would stop making sense, then it would come back again, that guitar coda at the end truly hypnotizing. Those boys were the real deal. The music magazines foretold a brilliant future for them. Thirty-odd years later, out of all their albums only that song would remain.

. . . some dance to remember, some dance to forget . . .

All the tables were filled at the restaurants that lined the central street. The final game of the World Cup poured from some potbellied Bakelite TV. They were broadcasting live from Buenos Aires. I stopped and watched. Holland vs. Argentina, Europe vs. Latin America. I knew very well how that match would end, for it was the first one I had ever watched with my father forty-some years ago. Because of the Argentinians’ constant dirty tricks, we were rooting for Holland, but they were clearly going to lose. In the ninetieth minute Rob Rensenbrink would get the ball after endless passing, he’d take a shot . . . and hit the goalpost. We’d bet on the losing team. We should be used to it by now, because Bulgaria always loses; besides, we’re not even playing in this game. But you never get used to it. Plus, Holland was playing beautifully. It’s not fair, don’t the good guys always win? I pound my small fist on the table. I’m trying to be even angrier than my father. My father turns to me and says: Look, old man [that’s what he called me], life is more than a single loss.

There are things you remember your whole life. Perhaps because fathers at that time—and my father was no exception—generally spoke down to children. So when my father told me life is more than a single loss, it was an usual event. It must be a fatherly commandment. I never did quite figure out whether he meant that life would be full of losses and this was just the first of them, or that life was always more than any one loss. Maybe both.

The restaurant is buzzing, everyone is keyed up from the game. There at the end table a tall, thin man of eighty is sitting, with pure white hair and light eyes. He doesn’t take his eyes off the television, but it’s as if he is not taking part in the general excitement, at least not visibly. He doesn’t blink and he doesn’t move. I make my way over to him and sit down. May I? I ask. He looks at me without turning his head and his lower lip quivers almost imperceptibly.

The game is already nearing the end of the second half, the score is tied. The stadium is going nuts. The goalpost shot has yet to happen. Overtimes have yet to happen. Everyone is chanting Kempes’s name. Now here’s the ninetieth minute. A beautiful parabolic shot, everyone at the tables bristles, Holland’s fans get up out of their chairs ready to cheer, the ball flies menacingly toward the Argentinian goal, lands on Rensenbrink’s foot, a shot . . . Ah! Aaaah! . . . The goalpost. The shout that had been prepared for a goal in the end collapses into a drawn-out sigh . . .

I glance at the man next to me. Actually, the whole time I’ve been trying to watch the game through his eyes. When Rensenbrink’s shot comes, he just clenches his right hand into a fist on the table. So he is excited after all. The score is still tied, the tension is mounting, the commentator is hoarse. This is followed by a break of a few minutes, during which time the spectators order more beers. I look at the people’s faces. I wonder whether all of them are watching the game as if for the first time. Or do some of them nevertheless know, do they remember? Their companions surely must. But actually, what does it matter, it makes no difference, everyone’s faces are anxious and lit up. We don’t know how a match that ended forty years ago will end. I, too, try to watch it as if for the first time. Maybe this time a miracle will happen. Everything is possible, everything is once again imminent.

The morning papers will be bought up right away, they’ll have the first analyses, the first photos from the game. The same ones from forty years ago, just reprinted on new paper that still smells like ink. They’ll be talking about that game for a whole month, about Kempes’s goal during overtime. About the Dutchmen’s refusal to appear at the awards ceremony, about Cruyff’s refusal to play on the tulips’ national team, which predetermined the outcome of the World Cup, about the Argentinians’ dirty move in delaying the game due to concerns over a cast on the wrist of one of the Dutch players . . . About all of those details that history is made of.

But right now I’m not interested in history, I’m interested in biography. People don’t hurry to leave, they stay, finishing their beers, commenting, fuming. Those who were rooting for the Argentinians don’t dare celebrate. I sit at the table next to the man. It’s dark, people start getting up and leaving. A cold wind picks up.

I take him by the arm and say in a quiet but clear voice: Look, old man, life is more than a single loss. He turns to me very slowly. He looks at me, and I’m not sure what he’s seeing, what is racing through his drained memory. Forty years have passed since we watched that game together.

If I’m not in his memory, do I exist at all?

A minute passes. His lips move and he repeats voicelessly, only with his lips, but I understand, that is the password, two syllables: Old man . . .

This is our final conversation. He does not recognize me anymore, everything progresses terribly quickly. His brain has surrendered, the provinces of the body rise up in rebellion. I’ve brought him to be here with me in the community that Gaustine just opened.

Of course, before that I checked to see what was available in the country I come from. The clinic I went to—supposedly to “visit a relative” so they would let me in—was horrific. Most patients were tied up so as not to be unruly, they rolled their eyes frantically and howled softly like animals, their voices hoarse from screaming. I think it was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen some truly horrifying things. What do you expect? an orderly snapped at me as he passed me in the hallway. I’m alone here with thirty people, I can’t keep them in line, but at least they don’t suffer for too long . . . I raced outside and shut the front door, where I saw an ad for a funeral home with several telephone numbers printed on a normal sheet of paper. I remembered its name: Memento Mori.

I snatched up my father and against his will brought him to Gaustine’s clinic in Switzerland. A human being has the right to die like a human being. For the last three years, when he was still in his right mind, he constantly wanted to “leave.” “Leaving” in his language means that we should help him die. He wrote this on all sorts of scraps of paper, even on the wallpaper in his room. While he could still write.

Ten months later I give in and decide to check out the possibilities for euthanasia. Just to look into it.

34.

A Guidebook for the End

We have never before suspected that memory loss could be fatal. Or at least I never suspected it. I’ve always taken it as more of a metaphor. A person suddenly realizes how much memory they are carrying around in their body, wittingly and unwittingly, on all levels. The way that cells reproduce is also memory. A kind of bodily, cellular, tissue memory.

What happens when memory begins to withdraw? First you forget individual words, then faces, rooms. You search for the bathroom in your own home. You forget what you’ve learned in this life. It’s not much anyway and will run out soon. And then, in the dark phase, as Gaustine calls it, comes the forgetting of that which accumulated before you even existed, that which the body knows by nature, without even suspecting it. Now, that’s what will turn out to be fatal.

In the end the mind will forget how to speak, the mouth will forget how to chew, the throat will forget how to swallow.

Legs will forget how to walk, How does this work again? Goddamn it . . . Someone has remembered for us how to lift one foot, to bend the knee, make a half circle and then set it in front of the other foot, then to lift the other one that is now the back foot, again a half circle, then set it down in front of the other one. First the heel, then the whole sole, and finally the toes. And again you lift the other leg which is now lagging behind, you bend the knee . . .

Somebody has cut the power to the rooms of your own body.

The last phase of the illness did not exactly fall within the scope of our clinic, although people did die here, too. Most went to hospices and spent a bit more time on life-support systems, despite signs that the body was now refusing to support life. It kills itself piecemeal, organ by organ, cell by cell. Bodies get fed up, too, they get tired, they want a rest.

Only in a few places around the world can this desire of the body be heard. Besides being a paradise for the living, Switzerland is also a paradise for the dying. For several years in a row, Zurich has invariably been the best city for living in the world. It probably is the number one best city for dying, but the shocking thing is that they don’t actually make such rankings, at least not officially. The best cities for dying. Of course, the best for those who can afford it. Dying has gotten to be quite expensive. But was death ever free? Perhaps with pills it is slightly pricier, it’s harder with a gun, at least until you get your hands on one, but there are far simpler and perfectly free methods—drowning, jumping from a height, hanging. One woman I know told me: I feel like jumping off the roof, but when I think how messed up my hair will get as I’m falling, and who knows how wrinkled my skirt will get, full of stains and everything, and I start to feel ashamed and give up on the idea. After all, they still take pictures of you in those cases, right, people watch . . .

Now, those are the signs of a healthy body—it feels ashamed, it foresees what might happen, it thinks about the future, and even after its death, it is vain. The body that truly desires death no longer experiences vanity.

In short, if you manage to kill yourself, it’s a freebie of sorts. But what happens when you no longer have the strength to kill yourself, and not just strength but you no longer even remember how to do it? How do you leave this life, goddamn it, where have they hidden the door? You’ve never had firsthand experience of it, or maybe you have once or twice, but they were unsuccessful attempts. (Actually, it is precisely the unsuccessful suicide attempt that is a real tragedy, the successful one is merely a procedure.) How, for the love of God, does a person kill himself, the fading brain wonders, how did they do it in books? There was something about the throat, something happens with the throat, air, you stop the air or water gets in and fills you up like a bottle . . . or the sharp edge cuts, I think there was a rope involved, but what do I do with that rope . . . ?

Then comes assisted suicide. What an expression. Things have gotten so bad that you can’t do anything without an assistant, you can’t even die.

And in this hopeless situation, a service appears. If you are in a position to order and pay for such a service yourself, you’re in luck. If not, you’ve just created a whole lot of worry and expense for your nearest and dearest. The question is how they, in paying for your murder, can avoid feeling like murderers. Indeed, human civilization has advanced quite a bit when you now have to justify a murder. Don’t ever underestimate civilization in that respect. It’ll always think up a nice word for it. Eu-than-a-sia. It sounds like an ancient Greek goddess. The goddess of a good, beautiful death. I imagine her with a slender syringe in her hand instead of a scepter. “Euthanasia is a death caused for the benefit of the person whose death is being caused.” Now, there’s the awkwardness of language, which must justify the act and so it spasms, twists, biting its own tail in the end. I’m killing you for your own good, you’ll see (how could you not?) that it’ll be better for you and the pain will be gone.

I assume that in this country the practice has been going strong since World War Two. Euthanasia suits it. Illegal at first, then semi-legal. Everyone closed their eyes to it, like so many other times, and gave the private clinics an opportunity to welcome people from Europe who were headed toward death. From one part of Europe, to be precise. For those from the other part, my part, this, too, was denied to us. We didn’t even have anesthesia, never mind euthanasia. Death under communism was no indulgent affair in silk sheets. Besides, nobody would have given you a passport and visa to leave the country with a one-way ticket, without a guarantee that you would return. You go, die, and automatically become a defector, for which you are sentenced to death. In absentia and posthumously.

Switzerland as euthanasialand. If you’re looking for a good destination for dying, we can help you. The funny thing is that this death business has not officially entered the guidebooks, the tourist handbooks. All guidebooks are created with the illusion that a person is alive and traveling. This is a given. Death does not exist in the world’s guidebooks. What an omission!

And when the time draws near for a person to set off? When he is already a traveler in the other sense of the word? Why are we still waiting for guidebooks for such travelers? Or perhaps they already exist, who knows?

Sterbetourismus. I’m almost positive that the word was first thought up in Switzerland. The data indicates around a thousand foreigners per year, mainly Germans, but quite a few Brits as well. And not only the terminally ill. Elderly couples who have decided in advance to leave together, if one of them is terminally ill. I can imagine how they arrive, mild-mannered and slightly awkward, holding hands. And just like that, holding hands, they go through the whole procedure. They don’t want to lose each other somewhere in those boundless Elysian fields. It’s not like they can arrange a time and place to meet up.

The cost. What is the cost, after all? I dig through the sites. Around seven thousand francs for the prep work. With a burial and all the formalities—ten thousand francs. Surely if you hire a killer it would be more expensive, and far less comfortable, to boot.

Perhaps couples get some kind of discount. But then again, seven thousand francs isn’t much for a country like this. So that means they make their money off turnover. When you think how everything has gotten more expensive . . . Clearly the price of life has fallen, while everything else has gone up. Even though death could never really keep its prices high throughout human history, while in the twentieth century it was outrageously cheap. Yes, indeed, they surely count on a high turnover.

On the other hand, how much could it really cost, fifteen grams of pentobarbital powder? You can get it in Mexico from any vet if you tell them you’re going to euthanize your elderly dog.

I carefully study the website of one of these organizations, supposedly a nonprofit. The site is quite simple, in green. I have never imagined green as the color of death. The slogan up on top is To live with dignity, to die with dignity, and seems more fitting for an order of samurai, which I guess makes some sense. A simple photo of the whole team, which inspires a quiet horror—all of them smiling widely, nice white teeth and open arms. How big was the team? Twelve, like the apostles. I wonder if that was deliberate, I doubt it. In 2005, however, one of them turned out to be Judas and leaked insider information, calling the organization a “well-paid death machine.”

There are no reviews, just as there are no money-back guarantees.

This process is absolutely risk-free and painless, this is what the medical brochure they give me says. But isn’t it life-threatening? What are they trying to say, goddamn it, that you won’t get stomach issues, constipation, blood pressure crashes, or risk addiction?

There is also a discount during the summer months. Clearly people prefer to die primarily in the winter. I wonder whether these discounts cause more people to decide to go for it. For your swan song, there’s really no reason to be a cheapskate, you can allow yourself a certain luxury. I assume that the brokers and discreet managers of death (surely they must exist, disguised as tourist agencies) take advantage of this. A long black limousine, to have room for the stretcher if you are bedridden, which whisks you off along the highways of Europe. If the patient so desires and is in a suitable condition, we stop for the evening in Austria, then spend the afternoon at the Zurich Lake. On the way back the limousine transforms into a hearse and takes the urns straight back, with no stopovers on the return trip.

Sterbetourismus is for people of means, the poor don’t use euthanasia.

After the whole slaughter of the Second World War and the death industry in the camps, it is much more difficult for Europe to permit the business of offering good death. Thus neutrality by necessity turns Switzerland into a delicate monopolist. As Gaustine would say, whatever you grab in Europe today, it’ll always lead you back to World War Two. Nothing was the same after 1939.

I went to see the building where they carry out the ritual or procedure, and it was completely unremarkable. It looked more like a big two-story shed with plastic siding on the exterior. The décor inside was humble as well, judging from the photos on the website. A bed, a nightstand, a painting on the wall, and two chairs. Some of the windows look out toward the lake.

I tried to read everything coldly and technically, so I wouldn’t think about the main thing. Funny, but the whole time I was imagining myself, and not my father. The technology was clear, but still, how do you deal with the feeling of guilt? My father, seeming to sense this, delicately helped me. Just as parents subtly sacrifice themselves for their children their whole lives. He passed away on his own. I was with him in his final hours. I held his hand and I wondered what he would like to sense once again with his last cells of memory if he could. I lit up a Stewardess cigarette from our ’70s stockroom with Eastern supplies. My father was the most beautiful smoker I ever knew. I tried to imitate him when I secretly lit my first cigarettes. I now took a drag off the Stewardess in his place, and noticed how his nostrils twitched slightly and his eyelids registered the change. Then he went quiet.

Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.

35.

Where does this personal obsession with the past come from? Why does it pull me in, like a well I have leaned over? Why does it seduce me with faces that I know no longer exist? What is left there, that I didn’t manage to take? What’s waiting there, in the cave of that past? Could I beg for just one trip back, even though I do not have Orpheus’s talent, just his desire? And I wonder, will those things and those ones I manage to lead out be murdered by me with a single look back along the way?

I find myself turning back to the Odyssey more and more often. We always read it like an adventure novel. Later we came to understand that it was also a book about searching for the father. And, of course, a book about returning to the past. Ithaca is the past. Penelope is the past, the home he left is the past. Nostalgia is the wind that inflates the sails of the Odyssey. The past is not the least bit abstract; it is made up of very concrete, small things. When, after he spends seven happy years living with the nymph Calypso, she offers him immortality if he will stay with her forever, Odysseus nevertheless refuses. I’ve wondered about that myself, come on, let’s all be honest and say whether we’d turn that offer down. On the one side of the scale you’ve got immortality, an eternally young woman, all the pleasures of the world, and on the other you’ve got going back to where they hardly remember you, impending old age, a house besieged by hoodlums, and an aging wife. Which side of the scale would you choose? Odysseus chose the second. Because of Penelope and Telemachus, yes, but also because of something specific and trifling, which he called hearth-smoke, because of the memory of the hearth-smoke rising from his ancestral home. To see that smoke one more time. (Or to die at home and disperse like smoke from the hearth.) The whole pull of that returning is concentrated in that detail. Not Calypso’s body nor immortality can outweigh the smoke from a hearth. Smoke that has no weight tips the scale. Odysseus heads back.

Immediately after 1989, a political emigrant, a defector who had been sentenced to death in absentia, returned to his hometown. He hadn’t been there for forty years. The first thing he wanted to see was his family home, which had been built by his grandfather. A nice big house in the center of Sofia, nationalized over the years, had been the Chinese embassy, then stood empty . . . As they showed him around the various floors, he recalled each room one by one, but nothing in particular spoke to his heart. These rooms did not speak to me at all, he said the next day. I asked them to take me down into the basement, the “ice room” had been down there, that’s what we called it, the place where various goods were stored in the cold. I took a deep breath and it was as if all the scents from that time hit me at once. It was only then that I burst into sobs and realized that I was home, I’d come back. Because of the ice room, and nothing else. That ice room melted my heart.

What I wouldn’t give to find out how Odysseus’s story continued, after his return home, a month, a year or two later, when the euphoria of arrival had passed. His favorite dog, the only living creature that recognized him immediately, without the need for proof (unconditional love and memory) would have died. Did he begin to have regrets and pine for Calypso’s breasts, for nights on that island, for all those wonders and adventures on his long journey? I imagine him getting up out of his marriage bed, which he himself had crafted, in the middle of the night, sneaking out so as not to wake Penelope, sitting on the doorstep outside, and remembering everything. That whole twenty-year voyage had become the past, and the moon of that past attracted him ever more strongly, like at high tide. A high tide of past.

The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home

One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once encountered. To go back again into his drained memory to see how it had been and who he had been. Because thanks to the bitter irony of old age, he has begun to transform into the Nobody, the name he had once cleverly used when introducing himself to the Cyclops.

Telemachus finds him in the evening, collapsed by the boat, only a hundred yards from home, with no idea what he is doing there and where he had been heading.

They take him back to a house with some woman he no longer remembers.

36.

What thievery life (and time) is, eh? What a bandit . . . Worse than the worst of highwaymen who ambush a peaceful caravan. Those bandits are interested only in your purse and in hidden gold. If you are docile and hand these over without a struggle, they leave you the other stuff—your life, your memory, your heart, your pecker. But this robber, life or time, comes and takes everything—your memory, your heart, your hearing, your pecker. It doesn’t even choose, just grabs whatever it can. As if that’s not bad enough, it mocks you on top of everything. It makes you so your tits sag, your butt grows bony, your back becomes bent, your hair thins, it goes gray, it puts hair in your ears, sprinkles moles all over your body, puts age spots on your hands and face, makes you prattle on about nonsense or fall silent, feeble-minded and senile, because it has stolen all of your words. That bastard—life, time, or old age, it’s all the same, they’re the same scum, the same gang. In the beginning at least it tries to be polite, it thieves within limits, like a skillful pickpocket. Without you noticing, it picks off the small things—a button, a sock, a slight shooting pain in the upper left side of your chest, your glasses a few millimeters thicker, three photos from the album, faces, what was her name again . . .

You lock the door, stop going out, stuff yourself full of vitamins, discover the fully proven magic of deepwater seaweed from that lake, what was the name again, that makes you young again, calcium from little crabs from the clean northern seas, the wonderful properties of Bulgarian yogurt or rose oil, you boil marrow from cow bones over low heat, which is a source of collagen for your connective tissue, you follow the lunar cycle of Deunov’s wheat diet, then you venture further into the labyrinth of the soul, Castaneda, Peter Deunov, Madame Blavatsky, you vanish into the mysticism of ancient teachings, Osho, you make (unsuccessful) attempts at reincarnation, the primal scream, counting backward, breathwork in some neighborhood gym, you stare at parallel bars, Swedish walls, the pommel horse as they talk to you about the illusion of the physical body and lead you into the astral plane, while before your eyes you keep seeing that gym equipment they tormented you with in school, and you tell yourself, now that’s the small joy of old age, you won’t have to climb up on the balance beam or the Swedish wall anymore, your astral body doesn’t have to worry about that, and later, while you are struggling to stand up, you quickly realize that all other bodies have left you, except your own physical one—that limping old donkey that you sink alone into the darkness with, no longer afraid of any bandits.

37.

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go? Does someone buy them, collect them, throw them away? Or does it drift like an old newspaper, blown by the wind along the street? Where do all those familiar and unfinished stories go, those severed connections that still bleed, all those dumped lovers; “dumped”—this word isn’t a coincidence, a garbage word.

Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself? Shouldn’t there be factories for recycling the past somewhere? Can you make anything else out of past besides past? Could it be recycled in reverse into some kind of future, albeit secondhand? Now, there are some questions for you.

Nature annihilates historical time or processes it, just as trees do with carbon dioxide. The glaciers at the North Pole were not particularly touched by the Thirty Years’ War. But everything is recorded within them, in the ice and in the permafrozen ground. Melting strips bare the corpse of the past, the mammoth of the past arises. And times and eras will be mixed, somewhere in Siberia seeds that lay frozen in the ground for thirty thousand years are starting to sprout. The earth will open its archives, even if it’s not clear whether there are any readers for them.

Now, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, for the first time the glacier, the turtle, the fruit fly, the gingko biloba tree, and the earthworm sense with such force that something in human time has shifted. We are the world’s apocalypse. In that sense, we are also our own apocalypse. How ironic—the Anthropocene, the first era named for man, will likely turn out to be the last for him.

—Gaustine, On the End of Time

38.

Gaustine gradually began to change. For him the past had transformed into that white whale, which he pursued with Ahab’s blind passion. Step-by-step, certain principles, certain inhibitions began falling away, as they would only turn out to be obstacles to his larger aim. I have to hand it to him for two things, though. First, that he realized this and tried to control it. And second, he wasn’t chasing some outsized ambition, but rather a slightly old-fashioned and romantic idea (if we take revolutions as old-fashioned and romantic) about a reversal in time, about some shifting and searching for a weak spot, via which the past could be “tamed,” that’s exactly the word he used.

After our first meeting and his later disappearance into 1939 (according to his chronology), Gaustine had studied psychiatry and memory disorders, as if to rationalize his own obsession. And indeed, the Gaustine whom I met later could appear to be perfectly normal. Only sometimes, in the very depths of his eyes, in casual phrases or gestures, something from other times would glimmer for a moment. It seemed to me, however, that in our final months together at the clinic, it found a way to overpower him more often, to overpower even the science with which he had safeguarded himself. I saw him resisting, trying (with ever greater difficulty) to maintain the calmness of a person who lives in the here and now, while the past is simply a project, a type of reminiscence therapy, which he had developed to an unforeseeable extent.

Once or twice, when I tried to remind him about our first encounter as students by the seaside, and his letter from the eve of September 1, 1939, Gaustine’s face would abruptly shift and he would change the subject. As if that guy there had been some other person or it had been a momentary lapse of reason, which he had since overcome and did not wish to be reminded of. I imagined for a moment how he must wake up every morning, he, the same one from all those eras, and before his first coffee, while still in bed, he would let his mind construct that day’s world and himself in it: It is such-and-such a year, in such-and-such a place, I am psychotherapist, a specialist in memory disorders in the clinics of the past, which I myself created, the day is Saturday, let’s not forget the year.

Every obsession turns us into monsters and in that sense Gaustine was a monster, perhaps a more discreet one, but a monster nonetheless. He was no longer satisfied by his clinic with its rooms and floors, those campuses from various decades that were growing and multiplying were not enough. I imagined how one day whole cities would change their calendar and go back several decades. And what would happen if a whole country suddenly decided to do so? Or several countries? I wrote this down in one of my notebooks, telling myself that if nothing else, a short novel could come out of it.