--- > 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? --- > After a day spent in the library, I sit with Auden’s anxiety. 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. --- > 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. ... 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > actually, which are we more afraid of—death or dying? --- > Isn’t it strange, Gaustine once said to me, it’s always other people who are dying, but we ourselves never do. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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.) --- > 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. --- > But why does the secret agent Mr. A. keep coming? ... 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. --- > 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. --- > In all ancient epics, there is one strong enemy you battle ... 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > Look ... —I need you. ... 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? --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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 …? --- > 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. --- > Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > . 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. --- > 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? --- > The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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. --- > 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). ... 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. --- > The homeless have no history, they are … how shall I put it, extra-historical, unbelonging. --- > 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. ... 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. --- > 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. --- > Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly. There. Is. Nothing. There. --- > All of our encounters began with goodwill on his part, passed through long conversations, and ended in rows. A week later he would call and ask with sincere astonishment, Why haven’t you called? Uh, well, we’re in a fight, I would reply. Well, yeah, so what better time to have a drink and make up? --- > Do things remember us at all? That would still be some sort of compensation. Does the lake, with every frog and lily in it, preserve our reflections somewhere? Has the past itself—have our younger selves—turned into frogs and lilies? --- > 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. --- > People didn’t stop to think that in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch. --- > How can we gain a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it’s the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now. If you go two, three, even five decades back, you come out exactly that much ahead. Yes, it might already have been lived out, it might be a “secondhand” future, but it’s still a future. --- > This will be our final attempt to survive in the face of an impossible future, the chairman in blue was saying, we must choose between two things—living together in a shared past, which we have already done, or letting ourselves fall apart and slaughtering one another, which we have also already done. --- > a man in the line behind me held out a pack of cigarettes: Would you like a smoke? Stewardess! I exclaimed in utter sincerity. The memory of my first cigarette at age nine, which is also the memory of my first theft (of my father’s cigarettes), of my first lie, my first feeling of being a man, my first revolution—how many things lay hidden in the tobacco of a single cigarette. --- > He talks about how people are sick of political parties, they’re sick of globalization and political correctness … What’s globalization ever done to them, I try to cut in … and what political correctness here, of all places, where we curse out people’s mothers as a way of saying hello? --- > It was clear that a simple agreement on a unified Continental past was impossible at this stage. For that reason, as was to be expected, following good old liberal traditions (even though an election on the past is a conservative act) it was decided that each member-state would hold its own referendum. Due to the extraordinary nature of the procedure and so as not to lose time, alongside the question of whether there should be a return to the past, voters in favor also had to indicate which specific decade they chose. After that, temporal alliances would form, while further down the line it would even be possible to vote for a unified European time. --- > Can a person be gathered up like that, piece by piece, through the memories of others, and what would you get in the end? Would some Frankensteinian monster emerge from all that? Something patched together from absolutely incompatible memories and ideas from so many people? --- > The parrot Pechorin would die one morning, and Emma Bovary would shriek and hurl herself against the bars, crazed with grief. She wouldn’t outlive him by a week. The other Emma (yes, that really was her name) and I would break up a few months later. Neither of us would die of grief. --- > The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories. --- > Here every place is formerly something else. --- > Several old rifles, Krnkas and Mannlichers, hung elegantly on the wall. Whenever I see a rifle on display, I automatically imagine Chekhov. --- > The song “A Din Rising near the Bosporus” tells us of Tsar Simeon before the walls of Tsarigrad, a city that would never be his, a city the Greeks called Constantinople. But just the fact that the Byzantine emperor Romanos trembled was still enough for the long-suffering Bulgarian soul. Besides, every day buses dumped Simeon’s descendants out onto the Kapali Carsi Market. Why bother conquering a city when you can bargain for it? --- > None of the outside observers had expected that Bulgaria of all countries would be the first the leave the EU after the referendum. Being first was not part of its portfolio. The nation nationalized, the fatherland fathered anew. I wrote that online. Less than an hour later I had been reported and my account had been blocked. I managed to catch a flight out the next day. The borders were closed two days later. --- > It should be my city and my past tumbling through these streets, peeking out from around every corner, ready to chat with me. But it seemed we were no longer talking. --- > When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past. It’s as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years … There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. ... The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least. --- > What would happen with the referendum in the erstwhile East of Europe—that part which is always preceded by the modifier “former”? --- > The new map of Europe would look like this. In the end, in the referendum people chose the years when they were young. --- > Why part with unhappiness, when it’s the only wealth some nations have—the crude oil of sorrow is their only inexhaustible resource. And they know that the deeper you dig into it, the more you can excavate. The limitless deposits of national unhappiness. --- > We split up, then she left for Germany. All Bulgarian students with straight-A’s in German left sooner or later. I had straight-A’s in Bulgarian and so I stayed. --- > The old myths (and new ideologies) don’t like looking back … Looking back, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever; looking back toward Sodom, Lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt; later those who look back are simply locked up. Everything must start out with a clean slate, with no memory. --- ### Epilogue > A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness. --- > I have never liked endings, I don’t remember the ending of a single book or a single film. I wonder if there’s such a diagnosis—an inability to remember endings. And what is there really to remember about an (always already known) ending? --- > There was a certain injustice in that—choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually. --- > Whether the young were entirely innocent is another question. Exit polls indicated that the majority of them voted, in even greater numbers than the old, for the decades of the previous century, which they had no memories of. Some kind of new conservatism, new sentimentality, imposed nostalgia passed down from generation to generation. --- > Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels. --- > Slowly peeling an apple with a pocketknife and realizing that this gesture exactly re-creates your father’s gesture, which re-creates the gesture of your grandfather’s. The place is not the same, nor the time, nor the hand. But the gesture remembers. --- > I’ve bought cheese and fish as well. I clean the fish, cut a sour apple into thin slices, then olive oil, basil, lemon, a splash of wine, and a piece of white alpine cheese. In half an hour the fish is ready. I set it on the table on my nicest plate. I pour myself the rest of the wine. I sit down and realize that I have no appetite whatsoever. --- > I am so very absent. The world is overcrowded with my absence. Life is where I am not. No matter where I am … --- > I also took the yellow notebook that Gaustine had left me, filled with all sorts of observations, new and imminent diagnoses (that was what he had called them), personal notes, and blank spaces that seemed to have been left on purpose. I soon began filling them up. I first marked his notes with a “G.,” and then my own with two (“G.G.”), but then I stopped. --- > That which I don’t dare do (or say) turns into Gaustine. ... Why is the past so dangerous, and why is looking back at it such a sin that you will be turned into a pillar of salt? The apocalypse comes precisely to destroy the past. It’s not enough to leave Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s the easy part, everyone flees from disaster. The real test is to forget it, to wipe it from your memory, to not miss it. Lot’s wife left the city, but couldn’t manage to forget it. ... Over the years it became ever more difficult to discern who was writing whom. Or perhaps some third person was writing us both, without much particular effort or consistency. ... When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure. --- > He would forget even the right phrase to use to apologize and ask: Sorry, your name escapes me … Sorry, your name … Every morning he would take a blank sheet of paper and write these five words out by hand. It reminded him of punishment from back in school, when he was forced to write out words he had gotten wrong or some minor infraction like “I forgot my homework” a hundred times. --- > Take it and eat it, says the angel, handing the book to John. It will be bitter in your stomach, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey. (As a young and devoted reader I once ate a page, I don’t remember which book now, I think it was a poetry chapbook, they use the least ink. It was already bitter in my mouth.) --- > Happiness, besides being unattainable, is also unbearable. What will you do with its volatile matter, that feather-light phantom, a soap bubble that bursts in front of your nose, leaving a bit of stinging foam in your eyes? --- > Sometimes we don’t stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me. As Gaustine would say: Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears … --- > Switzerland’s choice did offer certain advantages to everyone. It wasn’t a bad idea in this historical overturning of time to have one country that everyone could set their clocks by. And what better clock to depend on than a Swiss one? It was good to have a preserved model, a gold standard of the time that the others had pushed off from. --- > People also likely chose the ’80s because of their upcoming end. There was something strange about the voting and this gave us a clear sign. By choosing a decade or a year, you are actually also choosing what comes after it. I want to live in the ’80s, so as to look forward to 1989. --- > The old jokes were funny once more. And frightening. --- > I have found a small semi-legal radio station that tries to report today’s news. But it, too, is forced to broadcast the past (in all of its anarchy). --- > The calming knowledge that there are different human faces, and the rising fear that yours is not among them. That perhaps it does not exist. --- > Even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet—isn’t that what St. Augustine says in Book XI of the Confessions? In that not yet there is still some consolation, it is not here, but it will come. But what will we do when the future is no longer? How different is a future that is not yet from that which is no longer? How different that absence is. --- > In the yellow notebook I came across the following note, which has not given me peace for a few days now. “While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory … He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.” Is he mocking me, threatening me, or offering me an idea? --- > I’m trying to finish a book about memory receding and … I’m hurrying to finish it, before I forget what it is actually about. But if everything I write comes to pass, I need to escape into another person. --- > We are re-creating this war so as to end all wars, someone will say on the radio, and this absurd tautology will unleash everything. Tomorrow was September 1. ---