she turned down love her even more hopelessly. I then gave a romantic speech, whose details she spared me, but clearly it was in keeping with the genre, and thus unbearable. When cynics ‘open up their heart’, as the phrase goes, they ought to be shot on the spot like rabid dogs. It becomes clear at that moment that the best in the man – his razor-sharp humour, his cold, refined, analytical mind, and the dignified distance he maintains towards everything, including his own life – is actually just a mask. His confession and tears wash away that mask and you have an intellectual wretch before you who has pretended to be an aristocrat of the mind; instead of a rare being whose reason has overcome instinct, you have a rotten hulk kneeling in front of you for whom you feel nothing but disgust.
That’s what I told her later, too: “You should have killed me.”
“Would you be able to kill me?” she asked with a laugh.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any more,” I said, but it didn’t sound half as good as it would have one day earlier.
She was getting sick of pulling me along against the current, so she called the servants. She took me to a garden, where we sat under an orange tree and waited for the little kitchen hand to come in the pick-up. Then they threw me in, drove me home, took off my wet things and left me on the bed, unconscious.
I woke up in Sarajevo, a city I had never been to. I had a clear memory of the previous night. We had been drinking at the Piccadilly, a bar behind the cathedral. The father of one of the boys in the group, who owned the place, had the waiter bring us a bottle of whisky as soon as we arrived and got settled in the booths. By ten, we were all drunk – it doesn’t take much with teenagers. I wanted to clear my head and decided to go for a walk and get a trolleybus at the Skenderija sports centre. Snow was falling silently through the universe. Each plume of steam from my mouth revealed perfect snowflakes, and whoever saw them would have recognized the structure the world was created from by the principle of endless iteration. I walked past the Markale market hall, the Eternal Flame, and went down Tito Street to the Sarajka department store, where I turned left and stopped outside a bar. I remembered with the precision of the clearest, crispest photograph, although I had never been inside, that I once went in there with a friend the time he bought a matchbox full of hash from the barista before a school excursion to Venice; we smoked it in Cividale del Friuli, another city I had never been to. Recollecting the details of an excursion someone else was on, not me, I arrived at the banks of River Miljacka. It seethed and swirled, flowing as fast as that piddling river could, I recalled.
The trolleybus had broken down at the Olympic Village. I was still drunk and needed to keep walking in the cold air, so I decided not to wait for a bus. I set off for the suburb of Dobrinja, taking a route I had never gone before. The avenue was deserted and I headed down it, ploughing through snow that seemed immaculate. When I unlocked the door of the flat, I heard water flowing in the bathroom. Then I trod on something. I lifted it up from the floor, and in the gleam of light from the upper, glazed section of the bathroom door I saw it was an empty jar of Zolpidem sleeping tablets.
I knew the layout of the flat intuitively and without turning on the light, I undressed, went into one of the bedrooms and crashed. I didn’t care whose bed it was. I remembered all this when I woke up. I jumped out of bed and went to have a shower because I was supposed to meet a young guy called Amar, whom I didn’t know, in the Bazaar that morning. I found a winter coat in the wardrobe and put on my sturdiest boots. I went outside, donned cap and gloves, and was heading for the tram turntable in a Sarajevo suburb when I saw a reflection in a drop of rain on a pine needle, and only then did I realize I was standing on the terrace of my house by the sea; it was night, the 4th May, and the water was draining away from Ulcinj; the sky had opened up, the lights of the town shimmered beneath the stars that had finally come out, and I didn’t know what was happening to me.
TIME
My gentle mother cannot return.
Paul Celan
1
These spatio-temporal lapses continued in the years that followed and became ever more frequent and prominent. To begin with, they occurred just after I had woken up: Lying in bed in my grandmother’s house in Ulcinj, I would open my eyes in Brussels, Paris or London and recall the circumstances that had led me there. I would return five minutes or half an hour later; it was totally unpredictable. Later the lapses became even more common, I’d say almost regular. They could happen at any time: While I was going for a walk, eating a meal or, worst of all, in the middle of a conversation. I would simply fall silent and be somewhere else. The person sitting next to me would call my name, but it didn’t work. Most of them simply got up and left. The well-intentioned and devoted ones would call an ambulance. After a few abortive calls, which ended with me coming round in front of the astonished medics and having to apologize, make them a coffee and beg them to be discreet (“My condition is certainly strange, and this is a small town – you know how it is when people find out about things”), the ambulance dispatchers learned to ignore the calls. “Just leave him,” they’d say to the good Samaritan. “Get on with your business and don’t worry about him. He wanders a bit, and then he comes back as if nothing had happened.”
I was unable to perceive any pattern in those lapses or determine what triggered them. At first I thought it might be alcohol. But abstinence didn’t help; on the contrary, it made things worse. My condition could be described as an absolute lack of interest in the present, let alone the future. My mind was constantly going into rewind because everything I cared about was in the past.
2
I don’t believe those stories about pristine beginnings. True, time spoils everything. And yes, everything gets worse over time. But what is prone to spoil is not necessarily good in the beginning. Everything is bad, even at its inception.
Nor do I believe the stories about the wisdom pronounced by children in their alleged innocence. I’m sure there are children cleverer than I was, and perhaps there have been three-year-olds who walked the earth and had something vital to say. But as a small child I only ever blabbered nonsense. We derive that habit from our childhood, ultimately, and it remains with us even in our so-called mature years and through to our death. There is little consolation when you realize that, until the end, you will write and say things it would have been be wiser not to. And it is small comfort that occasionally people manage to utter a few last words before they die that are not necessarily wise but at least not stupid.
When I was a boy, a year seemed as long as eternity to me. Once my grandmother planted an olive-tree seedling in front of the house. I pranced around the fragile sapling for a while and then decided to be pragmatic and ask when we would be able to pick the first olives.
“In ten years’ time,” she said. She could just as well have said ‘never’ – it would have meant the same to me. But from then on I imagined a year like an olive tree. The tree grew as the year passed: quietly and slowly, visible only to the persistent and patient eye.
For me today, the years don’t pass: They fall like trees – not olive trees but the massive trunks of the northern forests. One minute they’re standing tall beneath the sky, the next they’re beneath the boots of the lumberjack. Nothing remains of their might except the tremble of the moist earth when those giants come crashing down.
Yes, today the years fall like chainsawed trees. And the warning voice that shouts, ‘Timber!’ is in vain: they always fall on me. They fall, and it hurts. Maybe the logic is, the more we get battered, the better we can measure time.
Why not throw away our watches and purge all digital devices of the numbers signifying the passage of time? Clocks only ever measure the time of material things: an abstract entity we measure life with, although it is a sterilized and preserved entity that
