desecrating each other’s headstones; because of that Slovak who steals teeth from skeletons; or for some other reason—for the usual reason, money. Then the thought occurred to me that Wittgenstein might well have been sitting on these steps at the very moment my mother gave birth to me. And then, having severed the umbilical cord, I asked myself what in my life—a chaotic hold in which a socialist childhood, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, civil war, new passports and fractured identities, betrayals, exile, and a new life in a West European country all mix and mingle—what in my lifetime had actually been realized of all the things promised to us by communist ideologues, Hollywood films, the dapper ideologues of consumerism, the homespun ideologues of nationalism, the ideologues of European unification, by gurus of every stripe and shade?
The question bore into me like a poisonous thorn, my heart began to pound and I was overcome with fear, a sudden fear of the empty screen, of the absence of future projections . . . So what, said a consoling internal voice, why do we need future projections—in the near future we’re to live much longer, at least on average (who still wants to live longer in a world like ours?!); and we’re sure to live better (no one’s promising that anymore!); and even if we don’t live better, we’re definitely going to live in greater freedom (yeah right!), in a world without borders (pull the other one!); in a world of solidarity and justice (enough already!); in a world of solidarity and justice we’re going to live like slaves: like s-l-a-v-e-s (hey now, hey now!); don’t get hung up on the details, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. Wittgenstein, old boy, you’re bleating, it’s the only thing you know how to do. I’m not bleating, I just know that a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push . . .
And amazingly, following Wittgenstein’s instructions, my terrified thoughts pried opened the door, fluttered their way outside and raced off toward the Asiatic steppes; my thoughts deftly leapt the frothy crests of waves on the Indian Ocean, soaring above the snowy Nepalese peaks: My thoughts skated the slipstream down onto the plains, slinking through the grass like tigers; God, there was almost nothing my hyper-mobile thoughts, my sensuous thoughts, my thoughts, seductive like a National Geographic clip, couldn’t manage. There, on Wittgenstein’s steps, I calmed my racing pulse, ssshhh, and renounced the prognosis I’d just offered: Bury those fears, forget that nonsense, it’s just these damn gardens. I’d completely forgotten. I was in the stifling heat of the tropics.
YES, INDEED, TIME and space, the ends of the earth, and all manner of things besides, can in a given moment become muddled, inducing a jagged sense of internal terror. For months we’re oblivious and inured, then our fingernail catches a chance thread, and pulling on it, reality, like a woolen jumper, unravels before our eyes. Sometimes it’s a noise that gets to us; the disarming crash of a dropped glass, the shattering of a porcelain cup ringing out like a child’s scream, the creaking of wormholes in the night, the barely audible patter of mouse paws. Sometimes it’s the routine but unforeseeable situation that unsettles us; a delayed flight, a tedious hold-up in traffic, a gaze caught unaware . . .
Who knows what pulled the thread this time? Was it the half-opened door leading from the reception of the Hotel Flanders into an adjoining room, where the melancholic face of Romy Schneider gazed out from a poster for an October 2012 film retrospective, or was it the two receptionists, little goggle-eyed gray mice, Romy’s triste counterpoints?
In late November 2012, I stood at the entrance to the Hotel Flanders in Ghent, waiting for the taxi the youthful receptionist had called for me. It was morning, the city blanketed in a fog that looked like it had every intention of hanging around until spring. Shaded by a low and murky sky, the façades of nearby buildings appeared in worse repair than they actually were. Somewhere on my left I sensed a tram I glimpsed yesterday slip by, swiftly as a blind woman, the name of its terminal station—MOSCOU—on the front. It’s entirely possible that this Moscow (yes, tram number four!), hurtling through the fog, was but a morning apparition. Yet the vertical letters to my left—SAIGON—they were no apparition; at any moment it seemed they might slide from the building’s façade and crash down onto the footpath below. Was it this moment of hostage in the fog between “Moscow” and “Saigon” that tripped the switch of my internal anxiety? Or was it yesterday’s failed attempt to pry a Ghent–Amsterdam train schedule out of the two receptionists, the pair of goggle-eyed gray mice? Online train timetables were apparently a new thing for them, and even when in a moment of final desperation I asked them to try the Deutsche Bahn site, they managed to google Deutsche Bank. Piped jazz screeched in from somewhere, and behind their mousey faces flickered the melancholic and all-empathetic smile of Romy Schneider.
Or perhaps the thread was pulled by the young conference organizer, who couldn’t give me the name of Belgium’s reigning monarch (at the time it was Albert II), soft-soaping me with the line that he wasn’t interested in European royal houses—a lame excuse for a young Anglicist specializing in Victorian literature. But on the subject of Belgium, personally he feels more German than Belgian, which naturally makes his ignorance of the Belgian monarchy all the more understandable. I look at him, hair cropped short, cleanly-shaven, hipster glasses, the chic suit and vest, the kind of polished black shoes worn to weddings and funerals—the nerd look is obviously his schtick. Above his head, like a saintly aura, an imagined PowerPoint fires up, scenes from his future professional success assembling: marriage, two children, a wife—preferably Japanese, thin as a twig—research projects, his name a toboggan run for donor money, students just like him, slimers and asskissers, ever at the ready to laugh at his every dorky joke. My gaze can’t get anywhere near his pupils. He didn’t have a handle on the King of Belgium, but he knows all about the cost of train tickets. He’ll get me the cheapest fare, one that will see me travel five hours from Ghent to Amsterdam instead of the regular two. My turn at the conference is as an unpaid keynote speaker. I’m not under the protective skirt of a university, there’s no professorly pension waiting for me, I’m of no use as a referee for this or that scholarship, this or that job—why shouldn’t he save forty euro and have me travel five hours instead of two? This is his moment. Isn’t Your time is now! the slogan for a brand of men’s luxury watches? The Twitter-bird perches on the conference program, he’s to thank for that: Yes, you can now follow a scholarly conference on the reconfiguration of authorship on Twitter. Around him other young Anglicists blather on about new phenomena: twitterature, SMS-novels, collective writing, collaborative authorship, constructions of authorship, fan fiction. Again I try to connect with his pupils. My young “executor” (oh yes, the author and authorship need to be fundamentally reconfigured!) hides behind his glasses, replacing the absence of eye contact with a smile reconfiguring his surroundings. Smiley face!
But maybe the thread was pulled by Eefje, another vernal Anglicist who joined an esteemed elderly professor and me for coffee during the break. Eefje didn’t know who I was, and didn’t care to; it was the venerable professor she wanted to talk to, whom she was out to impress.
“The creative period in every writer’s life is limited,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?” the elderly professor inquired.
“Roth should have quit ages ago! He left his I’m done way too late. Salman Rushdie’s finished, Martin Amis washed up, Margaret Atwood too, all of them, and heaps of others besides, they’re like the living dead!” Eefje wielded her invisible sword through the air.
“And what are your plans?” asked the elderly professor.
“I’ve just finished my first novel,” said Eefje briskly, vivaciously flicking her fabulous curls.
Perhaps the thread was pulled by what I saw on the train from Antwerp to Ghent, faces like they’d escaped
