As long as you remember, you hold at bay the times gone by. Like lighting a fire in the middle of a forest at night. Demons and wolves are crouching all around, the beasts of the past are tightening the circle, but they still don’t dare step into it. The allegory is simple. As long as the flame of memory burns, you are the master. If it starts to die out, the howling grows louder and the beasts draw closer. The pack of the past.
Shortly before the end, times get mixed up. Because the cages have been opened, and everyone will creep out . . . If it weren’t for the days, where will we live, a poet asked, what was his name again. But the days are done . . . The calendar has dismissed itself, there is only one day and one night and they repeat eternally . . .
I remember, so as to keep the past in the past . . .
—the yellow notebook
44.
I’m seven . . . We’re visiting friends in another town, some celebration is going on. There are swarms of people, I reach their waists, they’re jostling, stepping on me, somebody spits the shells of sunflower seeds on me, I cling to my father’s pants, then I let go, I stop in front of a shooting booth, but my head barely reaches the counter, I don’t recall how long I stood there, I turn around . . . my father and mother have disappeared. Now what? Hansel and Gretel’s father took them for a walk in a strange forest and . . . when they turned around, he was gone.
I run through the crowd, I shout, I break out of the swarm, it’s late afternoon, the streets of the town are full, people are coming home from work. I stop a woman my mother’s age, Auntie, I’m lost, I sob. I can’t remember the name of the street or the number of the house where we’re staying. All I know is that it has a green door . . . Ah well, they’re all green, little boy, I’m on my way home from work, ask somebody else. I ask another woman, I don’t dare stop the men, I’m in a hurry, son, I’m in a hurry, there must be a nice police officer somewhere around here, don’t worry . . . It’s getting completely dark, cars are whizzing past, the streets are emptying out, it’s getting cold, no one notices me, blood starts dripping from my nose . . . And suddenly a hand grabs me, two whistling slaps, Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? . . . I’m saved.
45.
I’m six, my brother is four, we’re wearing shorts and sandals, but with long hair like the Beatles (I’m John, he’s Paul) at the village square, in front of a monument to a partisan. The photo was taken by my father a minute before he took us (accompanied by the village policeman) to Grandpa Petre, who was under orders from the mayor to shave our heads. He would also do the same to my father, who, in addition to having long hair, had also grown a mustache. There is no barbershop in the village. Grandpa Petre sits us down on a stump, his donkey is snorting nearby. I watch my hair fall in light blond locks, and I don’t even dare to start bawling, I’m afraid of the policeman. Maybe you’re not allowed to cry, since you’re not allowed to have long hair . . .
In the end, the three of us—my father, my brother, and I—with our heads shaved like prisoners and spritzed with Grandpa Petre’s cheap cologne, hurry home. Don’t you dare cry, my father says through clenched teeth, he can tell we are on the verge of bawling our heads off.
Strawberry fields forever . . .
46.
I’m getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters.
Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.
Let me go back home . . . my mother told me not to be late . . .
47.
I must be three years old. Just as tall as the roses in the garden, I’m standing barefoot on the warm soil, holding my mother’s hand and staring at a rose point-blank for a long time. That’s the only thing I remember. The first and the last.
48.
Unbelongers Syndrome
No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that’s why you’re always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right place, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the place is different.
Incurable.
—Gaustine, New and Imminent Diagnoses
*Line from the poem “Let’s Work” by the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, Ivan Vazov (1850–1921).
Epilogue
Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.
The end of a novel is like the end of the world, it’s good to put it off.
Death has been preoccupied in reading and has forgotten, its scythe is rusting by its side. It could be a Dürer engraving or a detail from Bosch.
I have never liked endings, I don’t remember the ending of a single book or a single film. I wonder if there’s such a diagnosis—an inability to remember endings. And what is there really to remember about an (always already known) ending?
I only remember beginnings.
I remember how, for a long time, I used to go to bed early . . . I remember when they brought ice to the village for the first time and my dad brought me to see the Gypsy . . . I’ve forgotten his name. I remember a terrible winter storm and the candle that was burning at home, the candle was burning . . . I remember a rose that I am staring at face-to-face, I’m just as tall as it is. I remember sitting around in a wet greatcoat in the trenches of some war, smoking short, harsh cigarettes. I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-Second, uncertain and afraid . . . Or I tie my sandals and raise my shield, which gleams in the sun.
They say that my life was entirely different.
I agree, so as not to irritate them. But I myself do not have any other life.
I don’t remember anymore whether I thought up Gaustine or he thought me up. Was there really such a clinic of the past, or was it just an idea, a note in a notebook, a scrap of newspaper I randomly came across? And whether this whole business about the coming of the past has already happened or whether it will start from tomorrow . . .
0.
1939/2029
The troops are assembled and waiting. The first shots will be fired by the ship Schleswig-Holstein at the military depots on the Westerplatte Peninsula near Danzig. It has long been in the works, they have been waiting for the right moment, some anniversary. Everything will be precisely re-created hour by hour. There is a minor preliminary debate over the exact minute, some claim the beginning was at 4:44 a.m., others at 4:48 a.m. The war will claim its first casualty, the Polish sergeant Wojciech Najsarek. The Luftwaffe will support the attack by air . . . Several submarines will be waiting in the Baltic Sea.