Well, not absolutely everyone, but still, she was right.
6.
. . . It rained the whole evening. I woke up to the sound and lay there with my eyes closed, listening to the droplets. There was no attic, only thick roof beams from way back when. I lay there and listened. The body and the rain have an old, ongoing conversation that I had forgotten. There is a simple life, a life in solitude, which I had grown unused to. Eating bread at a wooden table, gathering up the crumbs and tossing them to the sparrows. Slowly peeling an apple with a pocketknife and realizing that this gesture exactly re-creates your father’s gesture, which re-creates the gesture of your grandfather’s. The place is not the same, nor the time, nor the hand. But the gesture remembers. Opening up the local paper, Zuger Woche, to check the weather forecast, thinking of the newly sprouted onion and a blossoming cherry tree in the yard. Concerned about a world you do not belong to. At around five, the huge Franciscan clock beyond the wall sounded, no less booming than the bell. I got up, got dressed, sat down by the window as dawn was breaking. I opened a slim volume of Tranströmer’s poetry, a pocket edition, and read slowly and with an enjoyment from another time. I closed the little book and thought, if nations go back to the ’70s or ’80s, what will happen to the poetry and books that are not yet written and which are forthcoming? Then I tried to recall what great things I had read from the past few years. I didn’t think I would have regrets about any of it.
7.
What would happen with the referendum in the erstwhile East of Europe—that part which is always preceded by the modifier “former”? Of course, everyone had long since scattered, just like a former family that had been forced to live under one roof until the kids grew up, and then everyone went their own way. If they didn’t hate one another, at best they did not harbor any curiosity toward one another, either. Each wanted to go to that (Western) mistress they had been dreaming about while sharing the common socialist nuptial bed.
My final hope for returning to a new 1968 after the French failure lay precisely in this (former) bloc. And naturally, the Czech Republic was the most likely place for this nation of ’68. To be twenty-something and to be on the streets of Paris or Prague, what more could you want? After the vote in France in favor of the ’80s, half of this dream died. Paris was lost, Prague remained.
But just as in France, that which looked good from the outside did not look quite the same from the inside. The legend of ’68 sounded nice, time had smoothed out its rough edges, the Prague Spring was as seductive as the Garden of Eden, minus that episode where a wrathful God came storming in. But this storming in was nevertheless a fact, and God thundered like a Russian tank and was as vengeful as “brotherly troops,” a true deus ex machina, and armored, at that.
After the Prague Spring, a summer of devastation followed, and as always when life breaks, everything changes places: those who had been in the street pass into the cold shadow of that summer and all summers thereafter, while the meek poke their noses outside and are called to take up the now-empty places. It’s not the clashes, the broken windows, the exiled, the imprisoned, the beaten and raped, or even the murdered ones that crush you, but rather the subtle, chilling sense of meaninglessness in some subsequent afternoon, when you see people laughing on the street, getting together, making children within that same system that has already kicked you out of life for a good long while. History can afford to make a hash of fifty or sixty of its years, it’s got thousands of them, to history, that’s no more than a second, but what is that human-fly to do, for whom that historical second is his whole life? Because of the afternoons that followed ’68, in Prague they had no desire to choose the ’60s.
And yet in the Czech Republic a lengthy battle was waged between three possible past nations. Above all, the First Republic—the Golden ’20s . . . an economic miracle . . . a cultural boom—ranked among the top ten economies in the world, the movement’s media arm recalled. The enthusiasm of a young nation that was succeeding in everything. Then came the nation from the other end of the century, the Velvet Revolution of 1989. And bringing up the rear, the Prague Spring of 1968, which, albeit the third-ranking party, was also not to be taken lightly at first. Which nation to choose, their names alone were seductive—golden, velvet, or spring? A certain character with a certain mustache peeked out from behind the ’20s, one who would welcome the Sudetenlanders and turn the blossoming nation into a protectorate. Behind Prague Spring stood a cold Russian summer, behind the Velvet Revolution—the subsequent disappointments of dreams not quite come true.
In the end, fear about that which followed the ’20s turned out to be greater than the fear of what came after the ’90s.
The great battle of fears. And so the Velvet Revolution was victorious for the second time and the Czech Republic returned to the 1990s.
Poland also had a movement pulling for the 1920s and betting on the Second Polish Republic, but without much success. In the end things were clearly leaning toward the 1980s, with two factions. Some wanted to return to the very beginning of the decade, to the resistance, the birth of Solidarity during 1980. Supporters insisted that the enthusiasm from back then had to be reinvigorated, to start things off on a high note. They recalled how in just a few months the membership of the first non-communist labor union allowed by the system reached ten million. 10,000,000. So many years later that figure continued to look impressive.
The other faction, however, brought out the scarecrow that was Jaruzelski from that same time period, the general in the dark glasses whom even my grandma in Bulgaria used to scare me with, Go to bed before that fellow with the glasses comes. After 1980 came martial law, repression, imprisonment . . . For that reason, they wanted to start over fresh at the very end of the decade, with the first semi-free elections, when Wałęsa won. In any case, the faction backing the early 1980s got the upper hand. Poland even went so far as to restart two years earlier, so as to also mark the selection of Pope John Paul II, a sign from God that had given rise to the glorious decade that followed.
In the end, almost all the countries from Eastern Bloc (with two exceptions, Bulgaria and Romania) chose the years around 1989 as the desired point for returning and restarting. Of course, in this there is both sound logic as well as a personal angle. Somewhere there, at the very end of the century, everyone was, we were, young for the last time. Including those from the 1950s, who believed that the end would come and who had waited for that end, as well as the young ones from the ’68s that happened and didn’t happen, who saw in ’89 a happy inversion of those two numbers. And finally the youngest of the young, the twenty-somethings in 1989, for whom it was the first revolution, here I can speak in the first person. Finally, the unhappened seemed as if it would happen, everything was ahead of us, everything was beginning, and at the very end of the century, no less.
I will exercise my right to marginalia, to an eyewitness diversion, because I was there at the protests in the real 1989. I jumped, shouted, cried, and then suddenly got old in the bait-and-switch of the following years. Marginalia and sheepish mourning for the ’90s. The system was changing before our very eyes, promising a wonderful life, open borders, new rules . . . And at warp speed, from one day to the next. I remember how on the squares of 1989 the following exchanges could be heard: So, dudes, I don’t mean to be a downer, but surely it’s gotta take a year or two before things get straightened out, a friend said, I wonder whether it wasn’t K.? It might even take three or four, perhaps as long as five, another suggested cautiously. Good God, how we tore into him, we all but kicked his ass, booo, who’s gonna wait your five years, huh, hello, our university exams start three months from now, enough of your five-year plans already . . . At that time there was still a strategic national stockpile of future and we boldly parceled it out. Absolutely naïvely, as would become clear.