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.