Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even say Ussher gave a precise time of day as well—around six in the afternoon. Saturday afternoon, that sounds completely believable

Or perhaps it’s because of the Hindenburg, the biggest zeppelin in the world exploded then, I think, on May sixth, about a hundred meters above the ground, right before landing, with ninety-seven people on board. All the radio announcers cried on the air. These things surely clung to the tobacco leaves …

Now, there’s everything you need for a true beginning—bad dreams, war, and a headache.

The world is at the same level of anxiety, the local sheriff and the sheriff of a far-off country have been trading threats. They’re doing it on Twitter, all within the character limit. There’s none of the old rhetoric, there’s no eloquence. A briefcase, a button, and … the end of the world’s workday. A bureaucrat’s apocalypse.

If there is some sort of European geography of age, then it must be distributed as follows. Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam are for youth, with all its informality, its whiff of joints, beer-drinking in Mauerpark and rolling around in the grass, Sunday flea markets, the frivolity of sex … Then comes the maturity of Vienna or Brussels.

Okay, for those who still do not wish to grow old—Rome, Barcelona, Madrid … Good food and warm afternoons will make up for the traffic, noise, and slight chaos. To late youth I would also add New York, yes, I count it as a European city that ended up across the ocean due to a certain chain of events. Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity.

The whole meadow out front was dotted with forget-me-nots, here and there peonies and some big red poppies erupted. But the petite forget-me-nots shone blue amid the Swiss green of the grass—I am sure that Swiss green exists, I can’t believe someone hasn’t patented it yet. Was it some sort of joke, planting forget-me-nots in front of a geriatric psychiatric center?

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.

One elderly man whom they brought in regularly loved to hide behind the curtains. He would stand there like an aged boy trying to play hide-and-seek, but the game had dragged on, the other kids had thrown in the towel, they’d gone home, they’d gotten old. And no one came looking for him. Yet he would stand there behind the curtain and peek out timidly to see what was taking them so long. The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore. I don’t think he will ever come to that realization, thank God.

melted to cast it, I thought then and even said it aloud. Hilde smiled and said that I had no idea how right I was. This pot was the first and most valuable thing the devastated German state had given out to families. One big cooking pot apiece made of melted-down weapons and munitions. We survived thanks to this pot, Hilde said, you could even boil stones in

The homeless have no history, they are … how shall I put it, extra-historical, unbelonging. To

The past grows like a weed.

One woman I know told me: I feel like jumping off the roof, but when I think how messed up my hair will get as I’m falling, and who knows how wrinkled my skirt will get, full of stains and everything, and I start to feel ashamed and give up on the idea. After all, they still take pictures of you in those cases, right, people watch …

But everything is recorded within them, in the ice and in the permafrozen ground. Melting strips bare the corpse of the past, the mammoth of the past arises. And times and eras will be mixed, somewhere in Siberia seeds that lay frozen in the ground for thirty thousand years are starting to sprout. The earth will open its archives, even if it’s not clear whether there are any readers for them. Now, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, for the first time the glacier, the turtle, the fruit fly, the gingko biloba tree, and the earthworm sense with such force that something in human time has shifted. We are the world’s apocalypse. In that sense, we are also our own apocalypse.

then the growth of prosperity in some countries would soon be sky-high.

People suffering from this not only forget what was, but they are also completely incapable of making plans, even for the near future. In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

I preferred the legend according to which Flora, the goddess of flowers, when giving out names to various plants, walked right past that humble blue flower and then heard a soft voice behind her: “Don’t forget me! Don’t forget me!” Flora turned around and called it forget-me-not, endowing it with the ability to invoke memories in people. I read somewhere that the blossom of the forget-me-not cures melancholy or, to put it more officially, has an antidepressive effect. Moreover, its seeds can stay in the ground for thirty years, sprouting only when the conditions are right. That flower remembers itself over the course of thirty years.