11.
Why here exactly, why Switzerland? I asked Gaustine, as we sat down in the living room of the ’60s.
Let’s just say it’s due to a fondness for The Magic Mountain. I tried other places as well, but here I could find people to buy my idea and invest money. There are enough people here ready to pay to die happy.
It’s astonishing how cynical Gaustine can be at times.
Let’s just stick with the fondness for The Magic Mountain, I said. (The truth is, Switzerland is the ideal country due to its “time degree zero.” A country without time can most easily be inhabited by all possible eras. It has managed to slip through—even during the twentieth century—without the identifying marks that keep you in a certain era.)
There’s a lot of work yet to be done, Gaustine said, wiping the lenses of his round glasses. Here you see a middle-class ’60s, the past is pricey and not everyone can afford it. But you do realize that not every past and not every youth was like this. We need to have a 1960s for workers, student dorms . . . as well as the ’60s for those who lived in Eastern Europe, our 1960s. One day, when this business really takes off, Gaustine continued, we’ll create these clinics or sanatoriums in various countries. The past is also a local thing. There’ll be houses from various years everywhere, little neighborhoods, one day we’ll even have small cities, maybe even a whole country. For patients with failing memories, Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever you want to call it. For all of those who already are living solely in the present of their past. And for us, he said finally after a short pause, letting out a long stream of smoke. This sudden groundswell of people who have lost their memories today is no coincidence . . . They are here to tell us something. And believe me, one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.
Back then I didn’t understand what he meant. Just as I was never sure whether he was joking or whether he joked around at all.
According to Gaustine, for us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland. The only thing we can do is create a space that is in sync with their internal time. If it’s 1965 in your head, Gaustine said, the year when you were twenty and you lived in a rented attic in Paris, Kraków, or behind Sofia University, then let the outside world, at least in the confines of a single room, be 1965, too. I don’t know how therapeutic that is, who knows whether it will help regenerate neural synapses. But it gives these people the right to happiness, to a memory of happiness, to be more precise. We assume that the memory of happiness is a happy memory, but who knows? You’ll see, Gaustine went on, how they’ll start telling stories, remembering things, even though some of them haven’t said a word in months. “Oh, I remember that lamp perfectly, it was in the parlor at home, then my brother broke it with a ball, then . . . How did you get our sofa . . . shouldn’t it be right here, a bit closer to the wall?”
I asked for a cigarette. I had quit five years ago, but now we were in a different time, damn it, before I had quit. And before I had ever started smoking, to be precise, but never mind. We sat in silence for a while, watching the cigarette smoke of the ’60s wafting beneath the round lamp. The January editions of Time and Newsweek from 1968 had been casually tossed on the coffee table. The whole back of one was an ad for these very same Pall Mall Golds, with an extended filter and the slogan Because it’s extra long at both ends.
I remembered that when I met Gaustine for the first time many years ago, we smoked Tomasian cigarettes from 1937, which he had offered me. Well, at least we had moved thirty or so years ahead in time since then. I was about to remind him of that, but something stopped me. I figured he would give me a strange look as if nothing like that had ever happened.
Look—he lit up a new cigarette, pausing ever so slightly before his next sentence (I recalled that trick from the films of the ’60s and ’70s: you take a deep drag, holding the smoke in your lungs, then exhale slowly with squinted eyes)—I need you.
I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse, as the classic movie scene puts it. But for the moment I played hard-to-get and pretended to be angry.
Well, in that case, you could’ve given me a sign. It was a complete accident that I found you.
There was no way you wouldn’t have found me. After all, you thought me up, right? He muttered, barely bothering to hide his spite. Now and then I read one of your books, I come across an interview here and there. Besides, you’re my godfather, you christened me, otherwise I would still be called Augustine-Garibaldi, or have you forgotten?
You really never can tell when Gaustine is joking.
What the hell did they drink during the ’60s, anyway? I cut in.
Everything. Gaustine took the hint, grabbed a bottle of Four Roses bourbon out of the minibar, and filled two heavy crystal glasses. Look here, with these couches, tables, and the bourbon (cheers!), with these lamps and light fixtures, with the music and all the pop art of the ’60s—all this we can handle fine on our own. But as you yourself well know, the past is more than a set. We’re going to need stories, lots of stories. He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately reached for another one. (I had forgotten how much people smoked in the ’60s.) We’ll need everyday life, tons of everyday life, smells, sounds, silences, people’s faces; in short, all the things that crack the memory open, mixing memory and desire, as our man would say. You have experience with time capsules that they used to bury, right? Well, that’s the sort of thing I mean. Travel around, gather up scents and stories, we need stories from different years, with that ‘premonition of a miracle,’ as you made me say in one of your stories in some literary rag, he added with a laugh. All kinds of stories, big, small, lighter, let them be lighter this time. After all, for some of the folks here they will be the last stories they ever enter into.
It had grown dark outside. The clouds had gathered quickly above the lake and the rain poured down in long streams. Gaustine got up and closed the window.
Well, what do you know, in ’68 today’s date was also a Thursday, he said, glancing at the Pan Am Airlines wall calendar featuring models from different continents. And it also rained that afternoon, if you recall.
I got up to go. Before I started down the stairs, he said, almost off the cuff: The saying that you can never step into the same story twice is not true. You can. That’s what we’re going to do.
12.
And so, Gaustine and I created our first clinic for the past. Actually, he created it, I was only his assistant, a collector of the past. It wasn’t easy. You can’t just tell somebody: Okay, here’s your past from 1965. You have to know its stories, or if you have no way of getting them anymore, then you have to make them up. To know everything about that year. Which hairstyles were fashionable, how pointy the shoes were, how the soap smelled, a complete catalog of scents. Whether the spring was rainy, what the temperatures were in August. What the number one hit song was. The most important stories of the year, not just the news, but the rumors, the urban legends. Things got more complicated depending on which past you wanted delivered to you. Did you want your Eastern past, if you were from the eastern side of the wall? Or on the contrary, did you want to live out precisely that past which had been denied to you? To gorge yourself on the past as if on the bananas you had dreamed about your whole life?