Welcome to the ’60s. Gaustine smiled, observing my shock in the entryway to the decade with a furtive smirk. I didn’t want to leave this transfiguration just yet and immediately turned toward the kids’ room. Two twin beds along the walls, each covered by a yellow shag comforter made of some fake fiber (we called it ledeka back then, it must’ve been an abbreviation) with a brown chest between them, the two beds meeting perpendicularly at the chest. I glanced at Gaustine, he understood and nodded, and I threw myself down on the bed, just as I was, in my jacket, shoes, and fifty-year-old body, and landed in my eight-year-old body amid the tickling fringe of the comforter . . .
The wallpaper, how could I forget, the wallpaper was a true revelation. The pattern here—with a castle and green vines—was very similar to what had hung in my room, pale green diamonds with entwining vegetation, except instead of a castle there had been a cabin tucked deep in the woods, with a little lake in front of it. Hundreds of copies of green cabins with green lakes. Every night as I fell asleep, I would settle into the cabin from the wallpaper, until the unpleasant ringing of the alarm clock would suddenly kick me out into a concrete panel-block apartment. I glanced at the desk, yes, the alarm clock was there, not exactly the same, but more . . . how can I put it, more colorful and Western, with Mickey Mouse on the face.
And here’s where the differences started. This other, Western boy had had a whole collection of those little Matchbox cars painted in what we called “metalisé” back then, just like real cars. With doors that opened and real rubber tires. From a Ford Mustang to a Porsche to a Bugatti, Opels, and Mercedes, there was even a little metal Rolls-Royce . . . I knew all those models by heart, I knew their top speeds, which was the most important thing for us, I knew how many seconds it took for them to go from zero to to a hundred miles per hour. I had the same collection, only on bubble gum wrappers. I got up off the bed and picked up one of the cars, I opened and closed the doors with my index finger, I rolled it across the desk. One of my classmates had had a car like this, brought back by his truck-driver father. (Oh, how crucial it was back then to have a father or uncle who drove a semi, who went to that obscure country known as “Abroad” and brought back real Levi’s jeans, those hard ribbed Toblerone chocolate bars, which I never liked, Venetian gondolas that sang and lit up and which were used as night-lights, Acropolis ashtrays, and so on.) Plus an old copy of that Neckermann magazine, actually it was a German catalog of goods that you could never own in any case, so it lost its commercial character and transformed into pure aesthetics. And erotica, I might add, by the erstwhile standards of my ten-year-old self, especially the section with ladies’ undergarments. I’ll never forget how that magazine lay on the round marble coffee table in a classmate of mine’s living room, right next to the phone—at one time a telephone was considered furniture as well. But it was the Neckermann that was the true treasure. You knew you would never have all the shiny things from that catalog, but they existed somewhere, and the world they existed in also existed.
The posters on the walls of the boys’ room were slightly different. The Levski football team from the 1976–77 season, cut from a newspaper to adorn my room way back when, was here replaced by the Ajax team of 1967–68, and it was an enormous glossy poster with, wowie!, an autograph from Johan Cruyff himself, my father’s idol, which meant he was also mine . . . I was Cruyff and my brother was Beckenbauer.
I had the Beatles on my wall, my most precious Western possession, obtained via barter with that classmate of mine, the trucker’s son, which cost me fifteen teardrop marbles plus another three “Syrian” marbles. The boy in the looking glass of the Western world had a wall full of chaotically ordered posters, which, examined carefully, told the whole bildungsroman of his puberty. From Batman to Superman, those missing heroes from my Eastern childhood (replaced by the more available King Marko and Winnetou), through Sgt. Pepper, a Lolita-esque black-and-white photo of a young Brigitte Bardot strolling along the beach in a bikini, her hair flowing freely, in one of Roger Vadim’s films, three more hot babes, anonymous, probably Playmates from the ’60s, to Bob Dylan with a guitar and a leather jacket. I had Vysotsky.
The room is only for boys, I noted.
We’ve got a girls’ room, too, if you want to check out Barbie and Ken.
Let’s keep going.
The living room was bright and spacious; the philodendron in the corner by the window and the rushes in the tall ceramic vase in front of the photo mural once again sent me back to that decade. I remembered how we used to wipe the philodendron (what a name!) with a wet rag soaked in beer. That’s what was recommended back then, so all living rooms back reeked of alcohol.
But the photo mural on the wall was a true epiphany, as well as the epitome of kitsch. Thanks to yet another international truck driver, a friend of my father’s, even we had gotten our hands on a wall mural. Autumn woods with the sun shining through the trees. A schoolmate of mine had a wall with a Hawaiian beach, complete with a few bathing beauties in the foreground. The one here was more reminiscent of his: an endless beach and a sunset over the ocean. What else to put on a wall mural in Switzerland? Certainly not the Matterhorn and the Alps.
And there’s the small square trunk of the television, standing uneasily on four long wooden legs, the exact same one we had.
Is it an Opera? I glanced at Gaustine in surprise.
No, it’s a Philips, he replied. But guess who was stealing designs from whom.
Indeed, the shape and everything else was one hundred percent identical, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria’s industrial espionage department was not sleeping on the job. But what about those tulip chairs? Why didn’t our guys didn’t steal that design, too? They were familiar to me only from movies and the Neckermann catalog. Elongated, cosmically aerodynamic, deep red, with a single leg, or rather stem. Of course, I immediately wanted to sit down, just as I wanted to help myself to the box of chocolate candies wrapped in tinfoil on the coffee table. I reached, then stopped.
Wait, when are these chocolates from?
They’re fresh, from the ’60s. Gaustine smiled.
Does the past have an expiration date . . . ?
The living room was enormous, with a sliding door that separated the east end into something like a study. Standing on the tall desk was a small red Olivetti typewriter with a piece of paper in its roller. Immediately I wanted—my fingers wanted—to pound something out, to feel the resistance of the keys, to hear the bell ding at the end of a line, and to manually pull the small metal lever for the next line. A desire from a time when writing was physical exertion.
The study was my idea, Gaustine admitted, I’ve always wanted to have my own room, a small den with books and that kind of a typewriter. It’s not completely in the style of the ’60s, back then they stored their books everywhere, even on the floor, wherever they could . . . But I can tell you that the typewriter has been a big hit. Everyone’s eyes light up when they see it, they put in paper and pound their fingers on the keys.
What do they write?
Most often their names, people like to see their names in print. Of course, we’re talking about the ones in the earlier stages of their illness. The others simply hit the keys.
I recalled that this was exactly what I would do as a child with my mother’s typewriter, which would result in strange missives.
Жгмцццрт №№№№кктррпх ггфпр111111111. . . . внтгвтгвнтгггг777ррр . . .
A possible code, which we will never crack.