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.