Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

On or around December 1910, human character changed. So wrote Virginia Woolf.

Years later, when many of his memories had already scattered like frightened pigeons,

I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those.

while for us this was simply one sunset, for today’s mayflies this sunset was the sunset of their lives.

When does the everyday become history?

For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England, you can never go wrong.

When the conversation began, the sun had been drowsing on the windows of the café and on the clock, which showed three in the afternoon, then the shadows of our cups grew longer, as did our shadows, the coolness of dusk approached, but without hurrying, and it mercifully gave us time to finish a story that was more than fifty years long.

That obsolete organ, like some appendix, which otherwise would become inflamed, it would throb and ache.

He asked for a piece of toast. He had been on IVs for a month and couldn’t eat, but the smell alone was enough.

All the windows looked to the southwest, which made the afternoons endless, and the day’s final bluish glimmers nested in them until the very last moment, while the light blue wooden shutters contrasted softly with the pale apricot of the facade.

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?

the 1960s, just like everything in Bulgaria, were simply delayed and arrived ten or so years later. Most likely during the 1970s.

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.

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

He said he had always felt like an American.

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.

I’ve realized that it tends to hide above all in two places—in afternoons (in the way the light falls) and in scents.

The past settles into afternoons, that’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners,

ts eliot

how much past can a person bear?

If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

How to age in the face of death, ever farther away from life, and how to save that which is unsalvageable?

If anyone took the effort to read as literature all those thousands of pages written during the ’50s/’60s/’70s/’80s by all the eavesdropping and note-scribbling agents, it would surely turn out to be the great unwritten Bulgarian novel of that era. Every bit as mediocre and inept as the era itself.

Outside Bulgaria’s borders, people age more beautifully and more slowly, old age is more merciful elsewhere.

I’d like to be twelve years old in each of them. That would be my answer, too.

The Gitanes smoked away, sometimes he would forget his half-smoked cigarette and light up another, my eyes were watering from the smoke, yes, from the smoke, or so I thought. Gray clouds drifted ominously over the future or the past, whatever we might call it, that Gaustine was sketching out before me. Of course, this is only a metaphor, I thought back then, trying to shake off my sense of foreboding.

Somewhere Primo Levi wrote that the concentration camp is that inescapable reality which you know that you will sooner or later awaken into amid the dream of life.

Unwittingly you realize how many things in a clinic are potentially charged with hidden violence, as Foucault would say. Nothing would ever be innocent again—bathrooms, cafeterias, the gas stove, a doctor in a white coat who wants to give you a shot, the lighting, the barking of dogs outside, the sharp voice, certain German words …

My father turns to me and says: Look, old man [that’s what he called me], life is more than a single loss.

A person suddenly realizes how much memory they are carrying around in their body, wittingly and unwittingly, on all levels. The way that cells reproduce is also memory. A kind of bodily, cellular, tissue memory.

Somebody has cut the power to the rooms of your own body.

The body that truly desires death no longer experiences vanity.

Things have gotten so bad that you can’t do anything without an assistant, you can’t even die.

whatever you grab in Europe today, it’ll always lead you back to World War Two.

Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.

Every obsession turns us into monsters

Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the twentieth century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness, and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.

How can we gain a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it’s the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now.

Literature is to blame for everything,

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realization. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonizing problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?

A few years ago I flew on some domestic flight from Belgrade to Montenegro standing up as if on a bus, hanging on to a metal bar. The driver, pardon me, the pilot, was just an arm’s length away from me. There was no door, just a threadbare curtain that was unhooked on one side, so he and I shot the breeze a bit. At one point he lit up a cigarette and I was praying he didn’t open up the window to ash outside, and thus wreak havoc with the cabin pressure.

Over the loudspeaker they welcome us to Bulgarian territory with pride, inform us of the outside temperature, and play the song “One Bulgarian Rose” by Pasha Hristova, who died, by the way, in a plane crash on this same airline at this same airport.

Do things remember us at all? That would still be some sort of compensation. Does the lake, with every frog and lily in it, preserve our reflections somewhere?

Then you saw some book on my bed, that very first night, we had just gotten undressed, you turned around and said no way, I’ve got to go, I can’t sleep with someone who reads Coelho,

Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly. There. Is. Nothing. There.

The girls have long since become women, they’ve married other men, how awful. Who knows why, but he thought they would lie there bleeding in the middle of their relationship that had been cut short, still pining over him like Chekhovian heroines.

He slowly sets off down the street, the soles of his shoes sticking to the asphalt melted by the heat; he is shrinking while they scatter from his pockets, tinkling softly and gleaming like coins, all those (no longer needed) minutes that were left to him.

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

The rakia is gone, but the winter is still here. Now, there’s the whole existential novel of a people for you.

The jeep of life, that old battered jeep with the canvas roof, or no, the Moskvitch of your life has gotten stuck at the end of winter, darkness has fallen, the jackals are howling, and you are out of gas. Fuck this life, you say, pounding your fist. Fuck it, fuck you, you even took my rakia. (Nobody’s taken it from you, you drank it yourself, but that’s how people have talked around here since time immemorial, somebody has taken something from you or let you have it.)