One afternoon, years later, after yet another terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, I spent hours in the museum at the Hague. As if in a shelter from another time. It was full of people who had run away from the news of the day. A girl in jeans and a sweater was standing in front of Girl with a Pearl Earring. I was standing a step away from them, not moving. Their faces one and the same. So time is merely a piece of clothing, an earring . . . The gallery guard resembled Vermeer.
11.
My notebooks are full of quickly sketched faces. Faces of people who don’t exist . . . Here as well, in this notebook. Just as in all my notebooks over the years. . . I have no idea who they are, I don’t look for resemblances.
What are you doing?
Drawing faces that don’t exist.
Have they not been born yet or they’re already gone?
They are not born yet and are already gone.
They’ve come up with software that combines facial features to design and produce unfamiliar faces, and they are absolutely realistic. Not a single one of them exists, as the article made sure to repeat under every photo. Yet I kept getting the feeling that I had seen them somewhere. There is something frightening in producing the faces of nonexistent people, but I can’t even say exactly what.
12.
Hunger for faces. I’m nineteen years old, a guard on the Bulgarian-Greek border. I’ll be there for a whole year, in that no-man’s-land where if you see a human face, you should shoot it. No one has the right to cross. At the post there are twelve other soldiers and a commander—the only faces that are constantly before your eyes, morning, noon, and night. And this isn’t even a prison. Every month you have the right to one day of leave. Most soldiers use that day to catch up on sleep. Sleep ranks among the most important things for a solider, right up there with food. Sex is an unattainable luxury. I use that day to go to a nearby provincial town, with a population of barely three thousand. I don’t know anyone there. I get up before sunrise, walk a few kilometers, if I meet a horse cart on the way I hitch a ride, cars almost never pass by here. Two hours later I’m in town, exactly when they open the only café in the center. I sit down outside, place my order, either lemonade or Schweppes, and watch faces. I sit and watch—the faces of “civilians,” as we called them back then. Non-military faces. My eyes follow them of their own accord. This is the only thing that brings me satisfaction and peace. That somewhere in this world, beyond that frontier post, there are people living normal lives. It seems so far away from me, and I’m afraid I’ll never get back there “with all my faculties intact,” as it says in a book, which I keep hidden in the bag with my gas mask.
The calming knowledge that there are different human faces, and the rising fear that yours is not among them. That perhaps it does not exist.
13.
I observe the world, shut up in a room from the seventeenth century, with Wi-Fi from the twenty-first century, writing on a wooden desk that is at least one hundred years old and sleeping in a bed with metal head- and footboards from the nineteenth century. I try to play out the past that lies ahead. My memory grows weak, my mind deserts me, that which I have thought up is chasing me hard on my heels, it catches up and passes me. Forgive me, O God of utopias, the times have mixed together and now you don’t know whether the story you are telling has already happened or is yet to come.
14.
And so began the mass doubling of the happened and the unhappened . . .
In ever more detail, ever closer to the real events, sometimes even more real than the originals. And no one could discern which was real and which was the likeness anymore . . . One will flow into the other and when blood is spilled, real, warm, human blood, people will applaud as if at the theater, while elsewhere red dye, extracted from poisonous cinnabar, will be taken for blood and they shall fly into a blind rage . . .
—Gaustine, On the Mixing of Times
15.
Burgtheater, 1925/2025
Peer Gynt, that northern Odysseus, comes home . . . A furious storm starts raging, lightning rends the sky, the sea has gone mad, the ship shall be wrecked at any moment . . .
Suddenly, amid the thunderstorms on stage, revolver shots ring out, coming from the audience. A woman screams in a box on the first balcony. A bullet has passed through her right cheek, grazed her tongue, and gone out the other side. Spectators on the ground floor raise their heads. And, horror of horrors, a man’s head is hanging over the railing. Drops of blood soak into the ash-rose dresses of two terrified young ladies whose seats are directly below. The whole auditorium is on its feet. Several couples run out, there is crowding and jostling at the exits, others sit frozen . . .
At that moment a petite woman appears in the box holding a still-smoking Mauser, she offers a hand to the injured party, the murder victim lifts his bloodied face, and the three of them bow politely to the exulted audience . . .
End of the tragedy. The curtain silently comes down on the stage, even though no one is looking in that direction anymore.
One of the greatest attractions in Vienna—Peer Gynt at the Burgtheater. A full reenactment of the production from 1925, complete with the murder of the Macedonian revolutionary Todor Panitsa on May 8 of that same year, during the fifth act, the scene with the storm, right before the line “one dies not midmost of Act Five.” The woman with the injured face is his wife. The petite woman who shot him is part of an enemy faction, her name is Mencha Karnicheva. (Her full name is Melpomena, the muse of theater, how ironic.)
The audience has come primarily for these few minutes—the shipwreck on stage and the blood in the auditorium. Who wouldn’t want to get a taste of the 1920s with a murder at the theater? Tickets are sold out for a year in advance.
16.
Have we spent it yet, my dear friends, the paycheck of the future? The unbacked check of the future . . .
Even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet—isn’t that what St. Augustine says in Book XI of the Confessions?
In that not yet there is still some consolation, it is not here, but it will come. But what will we do when the future is no longer? How different is a future that is not yet from that which is no longer? How different that absence is. The first is full of promise, the second is an apocalypse . . .
—Gaustine, Notes on the End of Time
17.
Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don’t clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child. Suddenly those games of Borges’s, which you loved so much in your youth, those doubling games, become real, they happen to you yourself. What was once a metaphor has now become an illness, to turn Sontag on her head. There are no longer any metaphors here, as G. had said, when we met for the first time and discussed the death of mayflies at the end of the day. Here you really are no longer sure which side of history you’re on. Here “I” becomes the most meaningless word, an empty shell that the waves roll along the shore.