I know what will happen. With a million and a half troops at the ready, it only takes a single shot, and . . . the tanks will roll through the trees, the old ship will start showering rounds, the hidden machine gun nests will be revealed and will start cutting everything down with a rat-a-tat-tat—the first body will be torn apart, aaah, someone has switched the blanks with live ammunition, the other side will return fire . . . the howling of crazed foxes, frightened crows, signal flares that slice the sky, everything has been waiting, everything has been building up, only to open the floodgates now . . . I know from somewhere that on the first day about twenty will be killed, four from the Polish and sixteen from the German side, and in the end—millions . . .
The largest-ever military reenactment, life-sized, with a million and a half extras as soldiers from the Wehrmacht, positioned along the whole sixteen-hundred-kilometer border with Poland, sixty-two divisions, fifty-four of them in full combat readiness, twenty-eight hundred tanks, two thousand warplanes (old Junkerses or Stukas have been tuned up), artillery installations wait hidden in the forest, submarines, battleships, a flotilla of destroyers, a flotilla of torpedo boats.
We are re-creating this war so as to end all wars, someone will say on the radio, and this absurd tautology will unleash everything.
Tomorrow was September 1.
–1.
Жгмцццрт №№№№кктррпх ггфпр111111111. . . . внтгвтгвнтгггг777ррр . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a person who loves the world of yesterday, this book was not easy. To a certain extent it was a farewell to a dream of the past, or rather to that which some are trying to turn the past into. To a certain extent it was also a farewell to the future.
Various places and shelters were part of the journey of this novel.
My thanks to the Cullman Center, New York Public Library, where I spent ten months in 2017–18 happily reading and taking notes.
Thanks also to the Literaturhaus Zurich for their kind invitation in 2019, which gave me time and fresh air to write.
One thinks that writing is done in isolation, but it constantly leads to conversations in one’s head with other people and books. Thanks to all of them, you will most likely discover echoes of these in absentia exchanges in the novel. Thanks also to Gaustine, who was always somewhere nearby.
Thank you to the people with whom I shared ideas while writing or who were my first readers—Boyko Penchev, Ivan Krastev, Nadezhda Radulova, Dimiter Kenarov, Bozhana Apostolova, Angela Rodel, Galin Tihanov . . .
For the research, especially for the chapter about the referendum on the past, I would like to thank Helle Dalgaard, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Maria Vutova, Henrike Schmidt, Magda Pytlak, Jaroslaw Godun, Hellen Kooijman, Borislava Chakrinova, Giusppe Dell’Agata, Vesselin Vačkov, Marinela Lipcheva, and Martin Weiss.
Thanks also to the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, where I finished the book in the leap month of February 2020. I had pleasant and encouraging conversations with friends and colleagues there, such as Efraín Kristal (Borges was with us the whole time), Wolf Lepenies, Thorsten Wilhelmy, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Katharina Biegger, Daniel Schönpflug, Stoyan Popkirov, Luca Giuliani, David Motadel, Felix Körner . . .
Thank you to Bozhana Apostolova, who unflinchingly supported this manuscript, just as she has all my previous books published by Zhanet-45.
Thanks to Nedko Solakov, Lora Sultanova, Hristo Gochev, Nevena Dishlieva-Krysteva, and Iva Koleva, who worked on the book during a pandemic.
Thank you to my parents for the patience and love with which they waited for this book and tolerated my absences.
And finally, as is always the case, thanks to those who were by my side and put up with me while I wrote this novel—to Biliana, who read and edited, and to Raya, who is critical and forgiving. (As she put it, Your characters don’t have names so that you don’t forget them. And she was right.)
Thank you to everyone who will sit down some afternoon in the time shelter of this book.
G.G.
February 29, 2020,
Berlin
ALSO BY GEORGI GOSPODINOV
The Physics of Sorrow
The Story Smuggler
And Other Stories
Natural Novel
Time Shelter is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Georgi Gospodinov
Translation copyright © 2022 by Angela Rodel
Originally published in Bulgarian as Врeмeубeжищe
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“September 1, 1939,” copyright 1940 and © renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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