TIME
SHELTER
A NOVEL
GEORGI GOSPODINOV
TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY ANGELA RODEL
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER,
WHO ARE STILL WEEDING THE ETERNAL
STRAWBERRY FIELDS OF CHILDHOOD.
TIME SHELTER
All real persons in this novel are fictional, only the fictional are real.
No one has yet invented a gas mask and a bomb shelter against time.
—Gaustine, “Time Shelter,” 1939
But which is our organ of time—tell me that if you can.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter
Man is the only working time machine we have now.
—Gaustine, “Against Utopias,” 2001
Where can we live but days?
—Philip Larkin, “Days”
Oh, yesterday came suddenly . . .
—Lennon/McCartney
. . . If the street were time and he at the end of the street . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “The Boston Evening Transcript”
Yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday . . .
—Gaustine/Shakespeare
The novel comes as an emergency, with lights blazing and siren blaring.
—Gaustine, “Emergency Novel. Brief Theory and Practice”
. . . and God will call the past to account.
—Ecclesiastes 3:15
The past differs from the present in one essential way—it never flows in one direction.
—Gaustine, A Physics of the Past, 1905
Once, when she was little, she drew an animal, absolutely unrecognizable.
What is it? I asked.
Sometimes it’s a shark, sometimes a lion, and sometimes a cloud, she replied.
Aha, so what is it now?
Now it’s a hiding place.
—G.G., Beginnings and Endings
CONTENTS
I. Clinic of The Past
II. The Decision
III. One Country Taken as an Example
IV. Referendum on The Past
V. Discreet Monsters
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
I
CLINIC OF THE PAST
And so, the theme is memory. The tempo: andante to andante moderato, sostenuto (with restraint). Perhaps the saraband, with its controlled solemnity, with the lengthened second beat, would be good for a beginning. More Handel than Bach. Strict repetition, yet at the same time moving forward. Restrained and solemn, as befits a beginning. Afterward everything can—and should—fall apart.
1.
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 to me. When else would a bored creator set about building a world and finding himself some company? Ussher devoted years of his life to this, his work itself numbered two thousand pages in Latin; I doubt many have ever made the effort to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, his book became exceptionally popular, well, maybe not the book itself, but the actual discovery. They started to print the Bibles on the island with a date and chronology according to Ussher. This theory of the young earth (and of young time, if you ask me) captivated the Christian world. It should be noted that even scientists like Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton estimated specific years for the divine act of creation that more or less coincided with that of Ussher. But still, the most mind-boggling thing for me is not the year and its relative recency, but the specific day.
October 22, four thousand and four years before Christ, at six in the afternoon.
On or around December 1910, human character changed. So wrote Virginia Woolf. And one can imagine that December 1910, ostensibly like all the others, gray, cold, smelling of fresh snow. But something had been unleashed, which only a few could sense.
On September 1, 1939, early in the morning, came the end of human time.
2.
Years later, when many of his memories had already scattered like frightened pigeons, he could still go back to that morning when he was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Vienna, and a vagrant with a mustache like García Márquez’s was selling newspapers on the sidewalk in the early March sun. A wind blew up and several of the newspapers swirled into the air. He tried to help, chasing down two or three and returning them. You can keep one, said Márquez.
Gaustine, that’s what we’ll call him, even though he himself used the name like an invisibility cloak, took the newspaper and handed the man a banknote, a rather large one for the occasion. The vagrant turned it over in his hand and muttered: But . . . I won’t be able to make change. That sounded so absurd in the Vienna dawn that both of them burst out laughing.
For the homeless, Gaustine felt love and dread, those were the precise words, and always in that combination. He loved them and feared them in the way you love and fear something you have already been or expect to become. He knew that sooner or later he would join their ranks, to use a cliché. He imagined for a moment long lines of homeless people marching down Kärntner and Graben. Yes, by blood he was one of them, albeit a slightly more peculiar case. A vagrant in time, if you will. Simply through a concurrence of circumstances he had ended up with some money, enough to prevent his metaphysical adversity from turning into physical suffering.
At that moment he was practicing one of his professions—that of geriatric psychiatrist. I suspect that he was secretly swiping his patients’ stories so he could take shelter in them, to rest for a bit in someone’s place and past. Otherwise, his head was such a jumble of times, voices, and places that he needed to either place himself immediately in the hands of his fellow psychiatrists or he would do something that would force them to put him away themselves.
Gaustine took the newspaper, walked a little way, and sat down on a bench. He was wearing a Borsalino, a dark trench coat, beneath which the high collar of his turtleneck was visible, old leather boots, and he carried a leather bag in a nobly fading red. He looked like a man who had just arrived by train from some other decade; he could have passed for a discreet anarchist, an aging hippie, or a preacher from an obscure denomination. And so, he sat down on the bench and read the name of the newspaper—Augustin, published by the homeless. Some of the paper was written by them, some by professional journalists. And there, on the second-to-last page down in the left-hand corner, the most inconspicuous place in a newspaper as all editors well know, was the article. His gaze fell upon it. A thin smile that held more bitterness than joy flitted across his face. He would have to disappear again.