“These episodes, these visions are… getting more intense. At first I ignored them. I thought, I don’t know, maybe they’ll just go away. It’s like I’m living in a house where there are some doors I can’t open because I don’t have the keys, and I don’t know what’s behind them. I thought maybe these things would show themselves in time. But nothing’s happened, except I can see that I’ve started avoiding certain places, while obsessively visiting others. I know what my sister told me, but even still… I’ve made up all sorts of stories about my childhood… and I lost a person who was important to me. Because of the lies. That’s why I need to understand. And besides… I don’t know how to explain this… They have power. They’re frightening. They’re catching up with me, and they don’t mean well. They’re controlling my behavior, impeding me. There’s this primal malice.”
“Good old Sigmund would have loved your story. He’d have sniffed a little of the white stuff and said, ‘Ja, ja, sehr gut, Matija.’ Look, what you’ve told me is troubling. I am 100 percent certain there’s a mechanism by which what is left behind goes right on affecting us, controlling us. But how, and how much power it has… no one knows. Going back to an original experience, the ‘real’ memories… It’s not possible. People think that when you experience something, you form a memory that’s like a photograph of what happened, and then, when you recall it, you distort it a little, fail to mention some things, add a few others, and that’s that. But we know that memories aren’t really distorted as much as they’re always re-forming. Each time you retell something, you’re erasing the old memory and rerecording it, and the next time, you start from your most recent version and modify that, and so on. Describe the plot of the last book you read, and then read it again. You’ll see you’ve changed things, yet you’re certain that is what you read. When that American space shuttle—Discovery, Challenger, whatever—exploded… a group of elementary school children were assigned to write essays about where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and what they said when they first heard about the tragedy. Twenty years later, they brought the same group together and asked them to rewrite that essay. None of what they wrote was consistent. Every person wrote an entirely different story about what he or she was doing, thinking, and saying that day. When they gave them back the essays they’d written twenty years earlier, the reaction was mainly ‘Yeah, sure, that’s my handwriting, but I didn’t write that.’ Human memory can rarely serve as evidence. I clearly remember paying some jerk €270,000 for an apartment that wasn’t worth half that. But I also remember the asshole snickering as he got into his car. What I’m getting at is that I may have added that part myself. I can’t be sure. As soon as there are feelings in play, particularly negative ones, a person tends, I think, to tell a slightly changed story. Disgrace, fear, guilt… These are the most fickle of narrators.”
“My sister told me I was a weird kid and she was frightened of me, both right after Dad died and later.”
“So there, maybe that’s it.”
“I’d like to know what happened. You mentioned hypnosis.”
“There are all kinds of things—hypnosis, regression, there are even meds for this—but I think they can only lead to a brief moment in the construction of the self. What you’re dealing with isn’t amnesia, it’s repressed-memory syndrome, and it hasn’t been well researched. The people who work on this think you can only really reach a memory when you have a trigger: a smell, or taste, or something else that ties you to it. But it’s controversial. In your case, I think you should focus on the negative feeling that’s associated with the memory. Maybe something will open up for you. Be brave, give in to it, see what happens. I don’t envy you. The key, I think, is when a person realizes he can’t escape himself and the things he’s hidden. The trick is to embrace them. If a person learns to live with his full self, carries around his suitcase packed with repressed, shameful, bad things, opens it once in a while and has a look, and then takes a long moment to process all the debris… he’ll understand himself better, if nothing else. And be happier for it. And, probably, more fair to himself. Whatever you’ve been through, now you’re here, you’ve survived, you’re standing on your own two feet, with all your baggage and your demons. You need to take the first step, that’s all.”
“All that’s swell. But… I don’t know where I’m supposed to be going.”
“That’s not a problem. You said they control you.”
“Yes.”
“So let them. Let them take you there.”
10.
When he came home, even before taking off his shoes, he poured himself a generous glass of whiskey, downed it, then filled the glass again. He sat at the table and leafed through the drawings and messages. He tried to arrange them in some kind of chronological order guided by elementary logic: first were the drawings on their own, then drawings with names over the figures, then drawings with sentences, and finally sentences without drawings. Nothing proved to him he’d really written and drawn them. He tried to imagine the kid and the world that made that kid the way he was. It was a terrifying world full of clocks and bitten-back words, full of shame and defeat. He could clearly imagine the boy watching him from a snowy field in early morning, whispering, “Have you come for me?”
His hell might have gone on forever. He’d tried letting his demons take the lead, but this hadn’t gotten him anywhere. He could ask his sister for the details; she would tell him, unlike their mother, who would’ve twisted the whole thing beyond recognition to avoid the hardest parts. He could get into his car, right now, half-drunk, drive to Međimurje, and cruise around the village. Maybe something he found there would jump-start his memory. One of his cousins still lived there. He knew this because a few years ago, out of the blue, he’d received an invitation to a wedding, and he hadn’t even had the decency to RSVP. He’d imagined himself in a house full of people with whom he shared genetics and nothing else, drinking when the obligatory toasts were made, pretending that the city was inferior to village life, playing down his accomplishments so as not to cause envy, and to keep from coming across as pompous, he’d praise the decor and go on about how he didn’t have a family of his own yet. Maybe now he could tolerate wearisome conversation with people he had nothing in common with so he could find a little space to ask, after a time, perhaps even laughing a little, what he was like as a child and why everyone was so frightened of him.
No way.
In their reconstruction, there’d be a moment when he’d glimpse a face clearly, hear a few words echo, but it would all be strange to him. These were not the things calling out for help in his dreams.
False memories ruled the whole nasty evening until, while poking around in his box of photographs, third glass of whiskey in hand, he stumbled on a high school class picture. Seeing it sent a hot flush rushing to his cheeks, like the painful sting of an insect, and he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the blaze on his cheeks lingered; what he’d glimpsed swirling behind his eyelids was cold and shameful, and totally his.
A kid named Franković’s father had been killed in a car accident, and the whole school was on their way to the funeral. They all stood there, solemn and hushed in little groups in the hallway, waiting to leave for the Miroševac cemetery. The boys were talking quietly about sneakers, the girls musing about how painful this must be for Franković. Korina said her old man was a creep, but she’d die if something happened to him. Everything was fine until Matija blurted out that he didn’t give a shit about Franković’s old man, who’d been a terrible driver anyway. The chatter stopped, and Matija suggested they all go for a drink instead of to the cemetery. He snickered sourly, and the others eyed him, startled and disturbed. Someone said, “Hey, what the fuck,” then another said, “You moron,” and “Dolenčec, shut the fuck up.” He sneered. He pretended to be enjoying himself: “Hey, for God’s sake, lighten up, we get to trade the chemistry and math classes for fun things like Formula One or Stanley Kubrick or, if you prefer, Franković’s old man.” No one laughed; Matija rolled his eyes and acted like he was the only one with the balls to speak his mind.