When he arrived months later in Switzerland, after many transfers and tribulations, a friend of his father’s met him on this very date and Mr. S drank his first coffee in Zurich with him precisely in this spot. The sun was the same. Since then he had come here every year on that date.
Any regrets, nostalgia, at least in the beginning?
No, he said quickly, as if he’d had the answer ready. No, never, never. I was curious about this world, I had lived in it as a child, I spoke its language, and in the end I ran away from a place where I had spent fifteen months in prison, I ran away from prison.
From the haste with which he said this, I suspected that he had never stopped thinking about it.
He told me about a lunch with his friend Georgi Markov in London three days before Markov was killed. Clearly that story still gave him chills.
I had come by car and Gerry, that’s what we called Georgi, wanted to leave with me, he had some business to attend to in Germany, but he could only leave in three days, while I had to get home. We went to see his boss in the BBC editorial office to see whether they’d let him go a bit earlier. They told him he had to find a replacement, he waved his hand and gave up on the idea. I left by myself, stopped for a few days in Germany, then came to Zurich, I bought a newspaper at the station, opened it up, and in front of me—a picture of Gerry, the same man I had hugged just a week ago, dead.
The conversation turned to other topics, it had gotten completely dark by then, my interlocutor was startled, he should have called his wife. And then, as we parted at the door, he suddenly said, You know what, there’s another fellow countryman of ours here, whom I’ve struck up a friendship with. He, like you, has an ear for the past. I help him out, he’s started something up, a little clinic of the past, that’s what he called it . . .
Gaustine? I practically shouted.
Do you know him? Mr. S. replied, truly surprised.
Nobody knows him, I said.
That’s how Gaustine chose to appear to me that time, through an accidental encounter with Mr. S., an emigrant from Bulgaria, at the Römerhof café, Zurich, one late afternoon.
I’ve saved my notes from that meeting with Mr. S., I had quickly jotted down in my notebook some of the stories I had heard that afternoon. Later I thought back on how he had so quickly denied having any nostalgia for his Bulgarian past. I wrote that, clearly, in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs. (I could never do that.)
To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless.
That obsolete organ, like some appendix, which otherwise would become inflamed, it would throb and ache. If you can survive without it, better to cut it out and get rid of it; if not, well, then you’d better suck it up. I wonder whether that was going through his head as he stood in that Sofia night before the empty shop window with the bare hanging bulb. Enlightenment comes in different ways. At the end of my illegible notes I sketched this . . .
Old Mr. S. lived a long time and would later spend his final days in the sanatorium of the past, in Gaustine’s clinic, which he himself had helped with. He passed away happy, it seems to me, in one of his favorite memories, which he had told me during our very first meeting. Gaustine and I were standing there next to him. He asked for a piece of toast. He had been on IVs for a month and couldn’t eat, but the smell alone was enough.
He is a child, his father has come home, he has received an honorarium for some translation, he has bought jam and butter from the shop with the money. After days of nothing but potatoes, his father toasts him a big slice of white bread, spreads it thickly with butter and jam, they are laughing, and his father, who is otherwise a stern man who doesn’t believe in spoiling children, picks him up and puts him on his shoulders. They walk around the room like that, stop in the middle, and little S. looks point-blank at the glowing filament of the bulb, which is now at eye-level.
10.
The next day I was at Heliosstrasse first thing in the morning, Mr. S. had given me the address. I found the apricot-colored building on the western shore of the lake, separated from the other houses on the hill. It was massive yet light at the same time, four stories with a fifth attic floor, a large shared terrace on the second level, and smaller balconies on the other floors. All the windows looked to the southwest, which made the afternoons endless, and the day’s final bluish glimmers nested in them until the very last moment, while the light blue wooden shutters contrasted softly with the pale apricot of the facade.
The whole meadow out front was dotted with forget-me-nots, here and there peonies and some big red poppies erupted. But the petite forget-me-nots shone blue amid the Swiss green of the grass—I am sure that Swiss green exists, I can’t believe someone hasn’t patented it yet. Was it some sort of joke, planting forget-me-nots in front of a geriatric psychiatric center? I went up to the top floor where Gaustine’s clinic was, with several years’ rent paid for in advance by Mr. S. I rang the doorbell and Gaustine himself in a turtleneck and big round glasses opened the door.
Weren’t you heading to New York in 1939 last time I saw you? I said as casually as I could. When did you get back?
After the war, he replied, unruffled.
So what are we going to do now?
Rooms from different times. As a start.
Rooms of the past? It sounds like a title.
Yes, rooms of the past. Or a clinic of the past. Or a city . . . Are you in?
I had just gotten divorced, and I had the vague idea that I could make a living thinking up stories. I had a soft spot for the ’60s. I tumbled easily into any past, but, of course, I did have my favorite years. I had no good reason not to stay for a short while, a month or two at most. (I thought of Hans Castorp and his intention to stay only three weeks at the Magic Mountain.)
Gaustine occupied one of the three apartments on the top floor. The smallest space near the front door, “the servants’ quarters,” as he called it—and it’s highly probable that this was exactly what it had been used for—was now his office. The other three rooms of the apartment, including the hallway, were in another time. You opened the door and fell directly into the middle of the ’60s. The entryway with the classic coatrack-and-bench ensemble, dark green, made of fake leather with brass studs. We had one like it at home. I should say that although I was born at the tail end of the ’60s, I remember them clearly, from beginning to end, and they are part of my Bulgarian childhood, not because of any mystical reasons (although I continue to believe that memories are passed down directly from parent to child—your parents’ memories become your own). The reason I have them in my head is actually quite triviaclass="underline" the 1960s, just like everything in Bulgaria, were simply delayed and arrived ten or so years later. Most likely during the 1970s.
A light green coat with two rows of wooden buttons was hanging from the coatrack. I remember that when I stepped in for the first time that morning, I froze when I saw it. That was my mother’s coat. It was as if any second she would open the living room door, the typical beveled glass would glint, and she would be standing there: young, twenty-something, much younger than I am now. Although when your mother appears at twenty, you automatically turn into a child and at that moment of awkwardness and joy you wonder whether to hug her or simply to casually call out: Hey, Mom, I’m home, I’m going to my room. All this lasted only a second . . . or a minute.