The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave.
The angel of those who leave and the angel of those who are left—sometimes one and the same . . .
18.
In the yellow notebook I came across the following note, which has not given me peace for a few days now.
“While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory . . . He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.”
Is he mocking me, threatening me, or offering me an idea?
19.
The embarrassment of forgetting names . . . Of course, everyone complains about this at a certain age. But I’m talking about the names of our nearest and dearest. For example, you can’t forget the name of the woman you used to live with, whom you were married to for several years, and who now hands you a novel and smiles, expecting a very personal autograph. She had queued up in line at one of my rare public appearances a while ago. And . . . a total blank. I can remember her body in detail, where she has a mole, our first night together, those were five years of my life.
But her name . . . I run through a dozen or so names in my head and none of them is hers. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, but it has never been so frightening, never with someone so close. I look around helplessly, there is a line of people waiting. I know some tricks for such cases—if I see an acquaintance nearby, I’ll introduce him to her so I can hear her name, but unfortunately there is nobody around right now. I go to plan B. I’ll write an inscription that is sufficiently personal, but without a name. I write something like, For the shared past we are made of. I hand her the book. She opens it, then innocently hands it back to me: Come on, add my name, please . . .
In my anxiety I grip the transparent counter of the stand, something gives, and the glass comes crashing down at my feet. Blood gushes from my wrist, a woman in line faints, people crowd around me, the girl from the bookstore pours water on the cut and takes out bandages, the giving of autographs is suspended, the line disintegrates, two photographers are snapping away, tomorrow I’ll see myself on some tabloid website . . . drowning in blood . . . but for me there is such relief in all this . . . Can I help with something? my wife asks anxiously, my ex-wife, that is, for whose sake I am bleeding like a stuck pig. Everything’s fine, I say, noticing a bit of blood on her copy of the book, right by the inscription.
Would you like to exchange it? The girl from the bookstand asks.
Oh, no, thanks, it’s more personal this way, Emma says, and leaves the scene of the crime.
Emma! Emma, of course, Emma . . . Like Emma Bovary.
20.
I went to see a neurologist friend of mine right away. In any case, he had long considered me a hypochondriac.
It’s possible for this to be temporary coping mechanism, stress. You meet lots of people, and when we add all the ones you make up as well . . .
(He was right, I hadn’t stopped to think that I also needed to keep in my head all the characters wandering around in my books; I am a softie and I don’t kill them off easily like others do, which makes it ever harder to keep them in line.)
Of course, we’re all growing a bit dimmer, the doctor said, neurons are burning out here and there, some connections have been deeply buried and seem lost, even though they can pop up unexpectedly one day. But not exactly at the moment we look for them. It’s like with sleep—the more you tell yourself while lying in bed at night, I must fall asleep, I must fall asleep, the worse your chances of falling asleep become. Try to get more rest . . .
I left the office with a guilty feeling that they think I’m a faker, an inventor of my own paranoias. But what the hell was the doctor’s name again? I wondered just a few yards down the hall, and went back to read the name on the sign on his door.
As is written, we drank from the waters of the Lethe before we were born, so as to completely forget our previous life. But why do we sometimes wake up in the middle of the night or why do we get a sudden flash of insight at three in the afternoon that we’ve already lived through this and we know what will happen from now on? Unexpected cracks have appeared. Cracks through which the light of the past streams in. And yet we are supposed to have forgotten everything.
The waters of the Lethe aren’t what they used to be.
21.
I can’t find in myths some great god of memory or at least a god of forgetting. Like those for love, fire, revenge . . . I can’t even find demigods or nymphs. The whole of Greek mythology, which is otherwise swarming with deities, demigods, centaurs, heroes, and who knows what else, has forgotten the gods of memory and forgetting. Yes, there is Mnemosyne, but she’s better known as the mother of the muses. There’s also Lethe, but they are all always somehow in the shadows. Most likely when myths first appeared, the world was too young to start forgetting . . . Plus, people died young, before old age emptied their minds.
In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.
The early clay tablets with cuneiform from Mesopotamia do not hold any wisdom about the secrets of the world as we might expect, but rather completely practical information about the number of sheep in one herd or the different words for “pig.” The first written artifacts were lists. In the beginning (and the end), there is always a list.
22.
Since nothing is happening in my life this year, I’m copying out my journal from last year day by day, a friend told me. Today, on November twenty-sixth, I’m copying down what happened to me last year on November twenty-sixth.
I’ve never heard of anything more depressing.
I kept a journal for a long time myself, without putting dates or years in it, noting only if it was day or night, at one point I even stopped doing that.
Now, when I find myself ever more estranged from my memory, I think it was a very stupid move. I’ve lost even the small reference points of the years and months. I recall some things as I read, but when they happened, a year ago or fifteen years back, it’s already hard for me to reconstruct. Other things I have no recollection of at all, as if they had happened to a complete stranger and were written by someone else’s hand.
My handwriting gets ever messier, smaller, and pointier. That’s how I wrote as a child.
Some words are lost as soon as I write them, they simply turn to gibberish, their syllables become scrambled, the head goes to the tail, like some mythical creatures, like centaurs cobbled together quickly or metamorphized tadpoles.
Prayer—Yerpra.
Where was I starting from, what exactly did I want to say? . . . I’m trying to finish a book about memory receding and . . . I’m hurrying to finish it, before I forget what it is actually about. But if everything I write comes to pass, I need to escape into another person.
23.
First a few words disappeared. He turned it into a game, it was a long ago, they were still at the university. He told his wife and his friends those five or six disappearing words and when he needed one of them, they would prompt him—“cornice,” “mercantile,” “rosemary,” “confrontation” . . .