I almost choked. I stubbed out the cigarette, but didn’t say anything. He was speaking like an eyewitness who had managed to overcome the incident with enormous effort.
I decided to change the subject abruptly, and that day, for the first time, I asked him about his name. Call me Gaustine, he said, and smiled. Nice to meet you, I’m Ishmael, I replied, so as to keep up the joke. But he didn’t seem to hear, he said he liked that poem with the epigraph from Gaustine of Arles, and I must admit I was flattered. And besides, he continued in utter seriousness, it brings together my two names: Augustine-Garibaldi. My parents never could agree on what to name me. My father insisted on naming me after Garibaldi, he was a passionate admirer of his. My mother, Gaustine said, a quiet and intelligent woman, clearly a follower of Saint Augustine—she did have three semesters of university philosophy under her belt, after all—insisted that they also add the saint’s name. She continues to call me Augustine, while my father, when he was alive, used Garibaldi. And so early theology and late revolutionism were brought together.
That more or less exhausted the concrete information we exchanged during those five, six days as the seminar wound down. I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those.
Oh yes, there was one other short conversation on the last day. I only then learned that Gaustine lived in an abandoned house in a small town in the foothills of the Balkan Mountains. I don’t have a telephone, he said, but letters do arrive. He seemed endlessly lonely and . . . unbelonging. That was the word that came to me then. Unbelonging to anything in the world, or more precisely to the modern world. We watched the generous sunset and kept silent. A whole cloud of mayflies rose from the bushes behind us. Gaustine followed them with his gaze and said that while for us this was simply one sunset, for today’s mayflies this sunset was the sunset of their lives. Or something like that. I foolishly said that that was only a worn-out metaphor. He looked at me in surprise, but said nothing. A full few minutes later, he said: For them, there are no metaphors.
. . . In October and November 1989, a slew of things happened that have already been written and described ad nauseum. I hung out on the squares and never did get around to writing Gaustine. I had other problems, too, as I was getting my first book ready for publication. And I had gotten married. All lame excuses, of course. But during that time I thought of him often. He didn’t write to me then, either.
I got the first postcard on January 2, 1990—an open Christmas card with a black-and-white Snow Maiden that Gaustine had additionally colored in, making her look like Judy Garland. She was holding some kind of magic wand that pointed to the year 1929 written in a large font. On the back there was the address and a short message, written in fountain pen and using all the quaint spelling conventions of that era. It ended with: “Yours (if I may be so bold), Gaustine.” I sat down and immediately wrote him a letter thanking him for the pleasant surprise and saying that I truly appreciated his exquisite mystification.
I received an answer that same week. I opened it carefully; inside there were two pale green sheets of paper with a watermark, covered on one side only in the same elegant hand and strictly following the reformed Bulgarian spelling of the ’20s. He wrote that he didn’t go out anywhere, but that he felt wonderful. He had subscribed to the daily Zora, written “quite objectively by Mr. Krapchev,” and the journal Zlatorog, so as to still keep tabs on where literature was heading these days. He asked me what I thought of the suspension of the constitution and the dissolution of Parliament by the Yugoslav king Alexander on the sixth day of the year, which Zora had reported on the very next day. He ended his letter with a postscript in which he apologized for not having understood what I meant by “exquisite mystification.”
I reread the letter several times, turning it over and over in my hands, sniffing it in hopes of discovering some whiff of irony. In vain. If this was a game, Gaustine was inviting me to play without any clarification of the rules. Well, fine, then, I decided to play. Since I didn’t have any knowledge of that ill-fated 1929, I had to spend the next three days at the library, digging through old issues of Zora. I carefully read about Prince Alexander. Just in case, I glanced at impending events: “Trotsky Exiled from the USSR,” “Kellogg-Briand Pact for Germany Comes into Force,” “Mussolini Signs a Treaty with the Pope,” “France Refuses Political Asylum to Trotsky,” and a month later, “Germany Denies Political Asylum to Trotsky.” I got all the way to “Wall Street Collapses” on October 24. While still at the library, I wrote Gaustine a short and, in my opinion, cold reply, in which I quickly shared my opinion (which suspiciously coincided quite precisely with that of Mr. Krapchev) on the situation in Yugoslavia and asked him to send me whatever he was working on, as I hoped to be able to glean from that what exactly was going on.
His next letter did not come until a full month and a half later. He apologized, saying he had been attacked by some terrible influenza and hadn’t been in a state to do anything. He also asked, by the by, whether I thought France would accept Trotsky. For a long time I wondered whether I shouldn’t just put an end to this whole business and write him a pointed letter to sober things up, but I decided to keep up the charade a bit longer. I gave him some advice about influenza, which, incidentally, he himself had already read in Zora. I advised him not to go out very often and to soak his feet in hot water saturated with a salt infusion every evening. I highly doubted that France would offer political asylum to Trotsky—and neither would Germany, for that matter. When his next letter arrived, France had indeed refused to accept Trotsky, and Gaustine, enraptured, wrote that I had “a colossal sense of politics, in any case.” This letter was longer than the previous ones due to two more sources of rapture. One was the recently released fourth edition of Zlatorog and the new cycle of poems by Elizaveta Bagryana published there, while the other was a wireless radio set, a real Telefunken, which he was now trying to get into working order. To that end he asked me to please send him a Valvo vacuum tube from Dzhabarov’s warehouse at 5 Aksakov Street. He also described at great length some demonstration in Berlin of Dr. Reiser’s twelve-tube device, which received short waves with automatic modulation of the frequency: With this, they’ll be able to listen to concerts all the way from America, can you believe it?