Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity. It is no coincidence whatsoever that two major discoveries of the twentieth century tied precisely to time were made here, of all places, in Switzerland—Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
I hadn’t come to die in Zurich, not yet. I was walking around the streets, I needed this pause. I was trying to finish a novel that lay bleeding, abandoned halfway through, and I was hoping to run into Gaustine, just like that on the train to Zürichberg or sitting on the hill in the Fluntern Cemetery near the statue of Joyce. I spent several afternoons there. By the smoking Joyce, one leg crossed over the other, with a small open book in his right hand. His gaze is lifted from the book, so as to allow time for the sentences to mix with the smoke from the cigarette, his eyes are slightly squinted behind the glasses, as if at any moment he will lift his head to you and make some comment. I find this one of the most alive tombstones I have ever seen. I’ve strolled through cemeteries around the world, like everyone who is deathly afraid of death and dying (actually, which are we more afraid of—death or dying?), who wants to see his fear’s lair, to confirm that this place is calm, quiet, that it has been made for people after all, for a rest . . . A place for getting used to it, as it were. Even though there’s no getting used to it. Isn’t it strange, Gaustine once said to me, it’s always other people who are dying, but we ourselves never do.
9.
And so, I didn’t run into Gaustine either in the cemetery or on the Seilbahn to Zürichberg. My stay was coming to an end, I was sitting in a café on Römerhofplatz with a Bulgarian woman and we were chatting away breezily, enjoying the advantage of a small language, the calm assurance that no one will understand as you gossip about everything. We critiqued boldly—from the patrons at the café and certain Swiss eccentricities to the eternal sorrow and misfortune of being Bulgarian, a topic ripe for filling any awkward lull in the conversation. For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England, you can never go wrong.
So at that moment a dignified, handsomely aged gentleman next to us who had been sipping his coffee turned and with the most blithe Bulgarian voice (blithe and Bulgarian usually don’t go together) said: Pardon my eavesdropping, but when I hear such beautiful Bulgarian, I can’t possibly turn off my ears.
There are voices that immediately tell a story, and this was an emigrant voice, from the old wave of emigrants, it was astonishing how they preserve their Bulgarian without an accent, just here and there some vowels have been left behind in the ’50s and ’60s of the language, giving it a slight patina. Our discomfiture at having been caught in the act quickly dissipated; after all, we hadn’t said anything about this gentleman.
And so began that conversation between compatriots who have accidentally met up, and my role here was more that of an ear. An hour went by, but what’s an hour to years of absence; the lady excused herself and left, we moved to share a table, Do you have a bit more patience, just let me finish this story and we’ll go; I had, of course. When the conversation began, the sun had been drowsing on the windows of the café and on the clock, which showed three in the afternoon, then the shadows of our cups grew longer, as did our shadows, the coolness of dusk approached, but without hurrying, and it mercifully gave us time to finish a story that was more than fifty years long.
He was a man with an absolutely sharp mind, yet in places he stopped to find a more fitting word. No, now I’m translating from German, wait a moment, it’ll come, there, now, that’s the word . . . and he would continue on. The son of a forgotten Bulgarian writer and diplomat, with a childhood spent on the eve of war in the embassies of Europe. I knew of his father, which made him happy, even if he didn’t show it. Then came the classic Bulgarian post-1944 story—the father was fired, tried, sent to a labor camp, beaten, threatened, broken; their apartment confiscated and given to a “proper” writer, while their family was sent somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
My father never said a word about what had happened to him in the camp, never, my new acquaintance, let’s call him Mr. S., said. Only, once, my mother had boiled potatoes and apologized that they were slightly undercooked, and he said: Don’t worry, I’ve eaten them raw, too, I’ve rooted around in the dirt like a pig. And then he fell silent again like a man who had said more than he should.
Then Mr. S. himself, as was to be expected, was thrown in jail for fifteen months, primarily for being his father’s son, but also just in case after the Hungarian events of ’56. Afterward life more or less fell into place. He told himself that he wouldn’t think about prison or about the secret agents who continued to follow him, but one night, while he was waiting for the last streetcar, he saw a completely empty shop window and stared at it. Inside only a single light bulb hung down on a wire, casting its dim light.
A light bulb, a wire, and an empty shop window.
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. As if in a dream he heard the streetcar come to a screeching halt, wait for a bit, then close its doors and rumble off. He stood and stared at the glowing filament of that simple electric bulb, dangling there as if hanged. And then the light bulb in my own head went off, he said, that which I had always hidden, even from myself—I had to get out of here. The light bulb in my head went off, he said, and laughed. It was February seventeenth, 1966, I was thirty-three.
From then on everything was subordinated to that thought: He had a plan. He would change jobs to find one that sought workers for East Germany. He would say goodbye to everyone, without them realizing it. First to his best friend, then to the woman he was with. He didn’t let it slip to anyone, not even at home. When he left, his father just said, Be careful, and hugged him for longer than usual. And his mother had taken a bowl of water and splashed it on the stairs, an old Bulgarian custom for good luck, which she had never done before. He never saw them again.
On the train to the GDR, he got off at the station in Belgrade for a cigarette and disappeared into the crowd. He left his suitcase on the train. His father had once been ambassador in Belgrade, Mr. S. had spent the first years of his childhood there. And he still remembered how the war had started—with a telegram via diplomatic mail on September 1, 1939. As a child I thought that’s how wars started, with a telegram. Ever since then I’ve never liked telegrams, Mr. S. said.