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.
35.
Where does this personal obsession with the past come from? Why does it pull me in, like a well I have leaned over? Why does it seduce me with faces that I know no longer exist? What is left there, that I didn’t manage to take? What’s waiting there, in the cave of that past? Could I beg for just one trip back, even though I do not have Orpheus’s talent, just his desire? And I wonder, will those things and those ones I manage to lead out be murdered by me with a single look back along the way?
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. The past is not the least bit abstract; it is made up of very concrete, small things. When, after he spends seven happy years living with the nymph Calypso, she offers him immortality if he will stay with her forever, Odysseus nevertheless refuses. I’ve wondered about that myself, come on, let’s all be honest and say whether we’d turn that offer down. On the one side of the scale you’ve got immortality, an eternally young woman, all the pleasures of the world, and on the other you’ve got going back to where they hardly remember you, impending old age, a house besieged by hoodlums, and an aging wife. Which side of the scale would you choose? Odysseus chose the second. Because of Penelope and Telemachus, yes, but also because of something specific and trifling, which he called hearth-smoke, because of the memory of the hearth-smoke rising from his ancestral home. To see that smoke one more time. (Or to die at home and disperse like smoke from the hearth.) The whole pull of that returning is concentrated in that detail. Not Calypso’s body nor immortality can outweigh the smoke from a hearth. Smoke that has no weight tips the scale. Odysseus heads back.
Immediately after 1989, a political emigrant, a defector who had been sentenced to death in absentia, returned to his hometown. He hadn’t been there for forty years. The first thing he wanted to see was his family home, which had been built by his grandfather. A nice big house in the center of Sofia, nationalized over the years, had been the Chinese embassy, then stood empty . . . As they showed him around the various floors, he recalled each room one by one, but nothing in particular spoke to his heart. These rooms did not speak to me at all, he said the next day. I asked them to take me down into the basement, the “ice room” had been down there, that’s what we called it, the place where various goods were stored in the cold. I took a deep breath and it was as if all the scents from that time hit me at once. It was only then that I burst into sobs and realized that I was home, I’d come back. Because of the ice room, and nothing else. That ice room melted my heart.
What I wouldn’t give to find out how Odysseus’s story continued, after his return home, a month, a year or two later, when the euphoria of arrival had passed. His favorite dog, the only living creature that recognized him immediately, without the need for proof (unconditional love and memory) would have died. Did he begin to have regrets and pine for Calypso’s breasts, for nights on that island, for all those wonders and adventures on his long journey? I imagine him getting up out of his marriage bed, which he himself had crafted, in the middle of the night, sneaking out so as not to wake Penelope, sitting on the doorstep outside, and remembering everything. That whole twenty-year voyage had become the past, and the moon of that past attracted him ever more strongly, like at high tide. A high tide of past.
The Shortest Novel About Odysseus After His Return Home
One night, now old and flabby and starting to forget, he leaves his home secretly. He’s sick of everything, so he heads back one last time to see the places, women, and wonders he had once encountered. To go back again into his drained memory to see how it had been and who he had been. Because thanks to the bitter irony of old age, he has begun to transform into the Nobody, the name he had once cleverly used when introducing himself to the Cyclops.
Telemachus finds him in the evening, collapsed by the boat, only a hundred yards from home, with no idea what he is doing there and where he had been heading.
They take him back to a house with some woman he no longer remembers.
36.
What thievery life (and time) is, eh? What a bandit . . . Worse than the worst of highwaymen who ambush a peaceful caravan. Those bandits are interested only in your purse and in hidden gold. If you are docile and hand these over without a struggle, they leave you the other stuff—your life, your memory, your heart, your pecker. But this robber, life or time, comes and takes everything—your memory, your heart, your hearing, your pecker. It doesn’t even choose, just grabs whatever it can. As if that’s not bad enough, it mocks you on top of everything. It makes you so your tits sag, your butt grows bony, your back becomes bent, your hair thins, it goes gray, it puts hair in your ears, sprinkles moles all over your body, puts age spots on your hands and face, makes you prattle on about nonsense or fall silent, feeble-minded and senile, because it has stolen all of your words. That bastard—life, time, or old age, it’s all the same, they’re the same scum, the same gang. In the beginning at least it tries to be polite, it thieves within limits, like a skillful pickpocket. Without you noticing, it picks off the small things—a button, a sock, a slight shooting pain in the upper left side of your chest, your glasses a few millimeters thicker, three photos from the album, faces, what was her name again . . .
You lock the door, stop going out, stuff yourself full of vitamins, discover the fully proven magic of deepwater seaweed from that lake, what was the name again, that makes you young again, calcium from little crabs from the clean northern seas, the wonderful properties of Bulgarian yogurt or rose oil, you boil marrow from cow bones over low heat, which is a source of collagen for your connective tissue, you follow the lunar cycle of Deunov’s wheat diet, then you venture further into the labyrinth of the soul, Castaneda, Peter Deunov, Madame Blavatsky, you vanish into the mysticism of ancient teachings, Osho, you make (unsuccessful) attempts at reincarnation, the primal scream, counting backward, breathwork in some neighborhood gym, you stare at parallel bars, Swedish walls, the pommel horse as they talk to you about the illusion of the physical body and lead you into the astral plane, while before your eyes you keep seeing that gym equipment they tormented you with in school, and you tell yourself, now that’s the small joy of old age, you won’t have to climb up on the balance beam or the Swedish wall anymore, your astral body doesn’t have to worry about that, and later, while you are struggling to stand up, you quickly realize that all other bodies have left you, except your own physical one—that limping old donkey that you sink alone into the darkness with, no longer afraid of any bandits.
37.