A sudden rush of senselessness, while I’m sitting on the couch—that’s one of the best descriptions given by a patient. Empty fields within the memory, holes where you try to remember a source of joy. This is exactly where the photographic negative has been overexposed (according to one person’s complaint), the power has gone out (according to another).
Beyond the individual diagnoses a tendency toward collective fear and rejection of the future, futurophobia, has been observed.
The aftereffects of the syndrome—melancholy, apathy, or intense clinging to the past and the idealization of events which happened in a different way or more commonly never happened at all. In comparison to the past, the present pales, patients claim that they are literally seeing in black-and-white, while their memories are always in color, albeit in the paler hues of a Polaroid. Frequent dwelling in an alternate, made-up everyday life.
—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses
11.
Yes, the referendum was a radical idea and everyone had pinned their hidden hopes on it. For Gaustine, it was, of course, a passion. It looked so simple. That which was valid for an individual patient at the clinic would now be valid for everyone, for an entire society, if we could still use that concept.
The men in dark blue suits were counting down the final seconds before the chain reaction of disintegration in Europe would be set off.
As for the rest of the world? If the referendum turned out to be a success and things went well, then others could draw on the experience, if not—serves those Europeans right in any case, they had gotten too full of themselves these past twenty centuries or so . . .
Europe was no longer the center of the world and its people were intelligent enough to realize this. There is always something tragic about such a realization, whether it be about a person, a nation, or a continent. It usually comes at a later age, when there’s not much that can be done. But at least you can try.
12.
One day Gaustine called and asked me to stop by the clinic.
I was walking toward Heliosstrasse. The April sun shone softly, yet without warmth. Here and there a few trees had begun blooming. A vague scent of soil and barns seeped in even here, in the city. That’s how it smelled in the village, when my grandfather was shoveling manure out of the barn onto the garden in front of the house. That scent is gone now. Everyone uses synthetic fertilizer, so the soil smells like penicillin. Even now the scent of real manure takes me back . . . there, forty years ago and two thousand kilometers to the east. Switzerland was the ideal Bulgarian village of my childhood, the village that never existed.
In the meadow in front of the clinic the late hyacinths blazed in pink and blue, the narcissuses vainly swayed in the light breeze coming from the lake. I like this pre-May lull, before everything bursts out twittering, buzzing, and going crazy with color.
However, the forget-me-nots sprinkled throughout the meadow in front of the clinic were the most striking. Here of all places, forget-me-nots. (With surprise and slight bitterness I discovered that the Latin name of that little flower was not nearly so romantic—Myosotis, which literally means “mouse ears.”) I preferred the legend according to which Flora, the goddess of flowers, when giving out names to various plants, walked right past that humble blue flower and then heard a soft voice behind her: “Don’t forget me! Don’t forget me!” Flora turned around and called it forget-me-not, endowing it with the ability to invoke memories in people. I read somewhere that the blossom of the forget-me-not cures melancholy or, to put it more officially, has an antidepressive effect. Moreover, its seeds can stay in the ground for thirty years, sprouting only when the conditions are right. That flower remembers itself over the course of thirty years.
I entered the clinic. Gaustine had invited me to the 1940s, on the first floor. He was drinking Calvados and smoking some German trophy cigarettes. An old map of the front hung on the wall, where flags indicated the movements of the various armies. On the large, heavy table of burnished cherrywood several detailed prototypes of the Spitfire were lined up, that favorite monoplane of the Royal Air Force from the 1940s, fast and hardy. A Messerschmitt and a Hurricane were keeping them company. They stood there exquisitely, on a stand, as if they had just returned from battle. Gaustine was dressed in a green military shirt with the sleeves rolled up, resembling an English officer responsible for the landing at Normandy, who has just found out that the expected meteorological conditions have suddenly changed. I was seeing him for the first time in uniform. Perhaps he didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere of the decade.
I got the feeling that he was struggling to concentrate, like a person trying to step out of the river of a different time. (I’d noticed such efforts a few times before.) The referendum would begin in just a week. He knew that I was getting ready to go back to Bulgaria, for he himself had insisted upon this. He told me that he wanted to withdraw for a bit during this time, that he would observe developments from afar. Suddenly he strongly reminded me of that young man whom I had met thirty years earlier, with that same sense of othertimeliness and a lack of belonging. It seemed to me that he was walking slowly toward his 1939, where he had disappeared then. We exchanged a few more words, and agreed that when everything was over, we’d meet up again. At six before the war, right? I joked. (I don’t know why I said “before,” in The Good Soldier Švejk it was “after.”) He turned around sharply and stared at me intently for a full minute. Yes sir, at six before the war . . . he said, accenting the “before.”
I’m not sure it was a good idea to— I started in hesitantly.
You’re never sure, that’s why you need me, Gaustine interrupted irritably. You need somebody to do what you don’t dare.
It’s easy for you, because when things get rough, you just change times, whereas I have to stay here . . .
But I fight for every time as if it were the only one, while you, in the only time you have, act as if you’ve got another hundred possible times.
(He’s right, he’s right, goddamn it!)
But you’re a . . . you’re a projection, you’re a monomaniac, except that you’re a serial monomaniac, you just don’t remember your previous manias. You can’t just play with the past. Don’t you remember all those other projects from the last novel . . . the cinema for the poor, where we were supposed to retell movies before they were shown for half the price, without having seen them ourselves, we just about got our asses kicked, what about our projections of clouds on the sky, or the Condom Catwalk . . . All those things were total failures, you’re the prince of failures . . .
That’s enough, Gaustine said coldly. We aren’t the ones who thought up referendums.
But we also didn’t try to stop them.
And should we have? He said quickly as I headed for the door.
I don’t know, sir, I replied dryly, taking in his green shirt and trying to get into the tone of the ’40s. He didn’t laugh. We shook hands coldly and I left. I had the sense that I would lose him again . . .
III
ONE COUNTRY TAKEN AS AN EXAMPLE
We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realization. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonizing problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?