The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.
13.
Such was the case with Mircea from Turnu Măgurele. He only remembered what hadn’t happened to him. He remembered nothing of socialism or his job at the factory, the endless party meetings, banquets, parades, and chilly warehouses—he had already erased all that while his mind was still working. When the emptying of his memory began, only the things he had yearned for (that’s the right word, no two ways about it) as a young man remained. Even back then he had known everything about America, it was in his heart and soul. He said he had always felt like an American. He had a friend who back in the day had managed to escape to New York and they wrote to each other from time to time. The other guy, the friend, was always complaining, Here they do this, here they do that . . . Finally Mircea couldn’t contain himself and wrote to him: Hey, jackass, so why do you keep sitting there wasting this chance? . . . Come back and let’s switch places. Fate granted one share of good luck to the whole of Turnu Măgurele and it fell to you of all people, you friggin’ whiner.
His son had brought him to the clinic one afternoon. And our Mircea felt right at home here amid those records, sofas, tables, and posters of that past which hadn’t actually been his. He remembered all these things in detail, at the expense of the real past that fate had allotted to him in Turnu Măgurele under socialism. That which had not happened to him, which he had imagined, remained in his memory longer than what had happened. He continued to walk down streets that he knew only from books and films, to hang around all night in the clubs of Greenwich Village, to recount in great detail that open-air concert by Simon & Garfunkel in 1981 in Central Park, where he had never set foot, and to remember women he had never been with.
He was a strange bird both here at the clinic and back in his little Romanian hometown.
Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way.
14.
It was the perfect job for me. When it comes down to it, that’s what I’ve always done—I’ve roamed like a flaneur through the arcades of the past. (Out of Gaustine’s earshot, I could say that I invented him so that he could invent this job for me.) It allowed me to travel, to wander around ostensibly aimlessly, to write down even the most trivial of things—what more could I want? To gather up the bullet casings from 1942 or to see what is left of that dilapidated yet still important 1968. Past eras are volatile, they evaporate with ease like an open bottle of perfume, but if you have the nose for it, you can always catch a whiff of their fragrance. You have a nose for other times, that’s what Gaustine said once, a nose for other times, that’ll come in handy for me. And so I officially became something of a trapper of the past.
Over the years, I’ve realized that it tends to hide above all in two places—in afternoons (in the way the light falls) and in scents. That’s where I laid my traps.
What I’ve come up with isn’t a show, Gaustine would always say, in any case it isn’t The Truman Show, nor is it Good Bye Lenin!, nor Back to the Future. (Somewhere his critics had tried to slap these labels on him.) It’s not recorded on video, it isn’t broadcast, in fact there’s no show at all. I’m not interested in maintaining somebody’s illusion that socialism continues to exist, nor is there any time machine. There is no time machine except the human being.
*
ONCE (NOT SO LONG AGO), as I was wandering around Brooklyn, I sensed for the first time with such clarity that the light was coming from another time. I could define it quite precisely, the light of the ’80s, sometime from the beginning of the decade, I think it was from 1982, late summer. Light as if from a Polaroid picture, lacking brightness, soft, making everything look slightly faded.
The past settles into afternoons, that’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how it is for me. Everything is in the light. I know from photographers that afternoon light is the most suitable of exposures. Morning light is too young, too sharp. Afternoon light is old light, tired and slow. The real life of the world and humanity can be written in several afternoons, in the light of several afternoons, which are the afternoons of the world.
I also realized that I wouldn’t have recognized that light from 1982 if not for its synchronous appearance with a particular smell, which came from the same decade from my childhood. I think our whole memory for scents comes from childhood, it is stored there, in that portion of the brain responsible for our earliest memories. It was the sharp scent of asphalt, of tar melted by the sun, the greasy, yes, greasy smell of petroleum. Brooklyn offered me this scent, perhaps because of the heat, perhaps they were fixing the road somewhere nearby, perhaps because of the big trucks that crisscrossed the neighborhood. Or perhaps because of all of that taken together. (I will add here as well the scent of oil-soaked brown wrapping paper around the Balkanche bike that my parents brought home one evening for me. The scent of impatience, of newness, of warehouses and stores, a joyful scent.)
With light, you can make some pathetic attempt to preserve it, to take a picture of it. Or like Monet you can paint a cathedral in various hours of the day. He knew what he was doing—the cathedral was only a ruse, a trap for capturing the rays of light. But with smells, no such tricks are available to us, there is no film or recording device, no such instrument has been invented over the long millennia, how could humanity have overlooked this?
Isn’t it truly astonishing that there is no recording device for scents? Actually, there is one, a single solitary one that predates technology, analog, the oldest of them all. Language, of course. For now, there is nothing else, thus I am forced to capture scents with words and to add them to yet another notebook. We remember only those scents that we have described or compared. The remarkable thing is that we don’t even have names for smells. God or Adam didn’t quite finish the job. It’s not like colors, for example, where you’ve got names like red, blue, yellow, violet. . . . We are not meant to name scents directly. Rather, it’s always through comparison, always descriptive. It smells like violets, like toast, like seaweed, like rain, like a dead cat . . . But violets, toast, seaweed, rain, and a dead cat are not the names of scents. How unfair. Or perhaps beneath this impossibility lurks some other omen, which we do not understand . . .
And so I traveled around, gathering up scents and afternoons, cataloging them. We needed a precise and exhaustive description of which scent brings which memories back, what age it affects most strongly, which decade we could call forth with it. I described them in detail and sent my findings to Gaustine. In the clinic, scents could always be re-created when needed. Although some attempted to preserve the very molecules of a given scent, for Gaustine this was a waste of effort. It was much simpler and more authentic to toast a piece of bread or melt a bit of asphalt.
15.
When I discovered Gaustine and the clinic, I was just starting to write a novel about the discreet monster of the past, its deceptive innocence, and so on, and what would happen if we began bringing back the past with a therapeutic aim. My work for the clinic and the simultaneous writing of that book were like interconnected vessels. Sometimes I lost my sense of what was real and what was not. One flowed into the other.