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.