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.