We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go? Does someone buy them, collect them, throw them away? Or does it drift like an old newspaper, blown by the wind along the street? Where do all those familiar and unfinished stories go, those severed connections that still bleed, all those dumped lovers; “dumped”—this word isn’t a coincidence, a garbage word.
Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself? Shouldn’t there be factories for recycling the past somewhere? Can you make anything else out of past besides past? Could it be recycled in reverse into some kind of future, albeit secondhand? Now, there are some questions for you.
Nature annihilates historical time or processes it, just as trees do with carbon dioxide. The glaciers at the North Pole were not particularly touched by the Thirty Years’ War. But everything is recorded within them, in the ice and in the permafrozen ground. Melting strips bare the corpse of the past, the mammoth of the past arises. And times and eras will be mixed, somewhere in Siberia seeds that lay frozen in the ground for thirty thousand years are starting to sprout. The earth will open its archives, even if it’s not clear whether there are any readers for them.
Now, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, for the first time the glacier, the turtle, the fruit fly, the gingko biloba tree, and the earthworm sense with such force that something in human time has shifted. We are the world’s apocalypse. In that sense, we are also our own apocalypse. How ironic—the Anthropocene, the first era named for man, will likely turn out to be the last for him.
—Gaustine, On the End of Time
38.
Gaustine gradually began to change. For him the past had transformed into that white whale, which he pursued with Ahab’s blind passion. Step-by-step, certain principles, certain inhibitions began falling away, as they would only turn out to be obstacles to his larger aim. I have to hand it to him for two things, though. First, that he realized this and tried to control it. And second, he wasn’t chasing some outsized ambition, but rather a slightly old-fashioned and romantic idea (if we take revolutions as old-fashioned and romantic) about a reversal in time, about some shifting and searching for a weak spot, via which the past could be “tamed,” that’s exactly the word he used.
After our first meeting and his later disappearance into 1939 (according to his chronology), Gaustine had studied psychiatry and memory disorders, as if to rationalize his own obsession. And indeed, the Gaustine whom I met later could appear to be perfectly normal. Only sometimes, in the very depths of his eyes, in casual phrases or gestures, something from other times would glimmer for a moment. It seemed to me, however, that in our final months together at the clinic, it found a way to overpower him more often, to overpower even the science with which he had safeguarded himself. I saw him resisting, trying (with ever greater difficulty) to maintain the calmness of a person who lives in the here and now, while the past is simply a project, a type of reminiscence therapy, which he had developed to an unforeseeable extent.
Once or twice, when I tried to remind him about our first encounter as students by the seaside, and his letter from the eve of September 1, 1939, Gaustine’s face would abruptly shift and he would change the subject. As if that guy there had been some other person or it had been a momentary lapse of reason, which he had since overcome and did not wish to be reminded of. I imagined for a moment how he must wake up every morning, he, the same one from all those eras, and before his first coffee, while still in bed, he would let his mind construct that day’s world and himself in it: It is such-and-such a year, in such-and-such a place, I am psychotherapist, a specialist in memory disorders in the clinics of the past, which I myself created, the day is Saturday, let’s not forget the year.
Every obsession turns us into monsters and in that sense Gaustine was a monster, perhaps a more discreet one, but a monster nonetheless. He was no longer satisfied by his clinic with its rooms and floors, those campuses from various decades that were growing and multiplying were not enough. I imagined how one day whole cities would change their calendar and go back several decades. And what would happen if a whole country suddenly decided to do so? Or several countries? I wrote this down in one of my notebooks, telling myself that if nothing else, a short novel could come out of it.
II
THE DECISION
What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even for fisticuffs. Every day fierce arguments, out-of-control shouting-matches would erupt between individuals and among entire groups . . .
—Thomas Mann, “The Great Petulance,”
from The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods
1.
And then the past set out to flood the world . . .
It spread from one person to another like an epidemic, like the Justinian plague or the Spanish flu. Do you remember the Spanish flu of 1918? Gaustine would ask. Not personally, I would reply. It was terrible, Gaustine would say. People simply dropped dead on the streets. You could get infected by everything, all it took was someone saying “Hello” to you and by the next evening you’d be dead.
Yes, the past is contagious. The contagion had crept in everywhere. But that wasn’t the most frightening part—there were some quickly mutating strains that demolished all immunity. Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the twentieth century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness, and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.
No one died, of course (at least not in the beginning), yet the virus was spreading. It wasn’t clear whether it was transmitted by aerosols, whether the very spray of spit when somebody shouted, Germany (or France or Poland . . .) über alles, Hungary for the Hungarians, or Bulgaria on Three Seas, could pass on the virus.
It was most quickly transmitted through the ear and the eye.
In the beginning, when people turned up on the streets in some European countries dressed in their national costumes, this was more or less considered an extravagance, a touch of color, perhaps a holiday of sorts, perhaps the beginning of carnival season, or a passing trend. Everyone smiled as they passed by, some joked about it or whispered among themselves.
Somehow imperceptibly people in native costumes began to take over the cities. Suddenly it became disconcerting to stroll around in jeans, a jacket, or a suit. No one officially banned pants or modern clothing. But if you didn’t want to get dirty looks or to arouse the nationalists’ suspicion, if you wanted to save yourself some headaches or even an ass-kicking or two, it was better to just throw a woolen cloak on over your clothes or slip on lederhosen, depending on where exactly you happened to be. The soft tyranny of any majority.
One day the president of a Central European country went to work in the national costume. Leather boots, tight pants, an embroidered vest, a small black bow above a white shirt, and a black bowler hat with a red geranium. The clothes fit him like some erstwhile czardas master who had since let himself go, but who was already ready to leap up with surprising nimbleness the second he heard music from a wedding. This look was a hit with the people as well as with the TV stations, and he began to dress like that every day.