In Babylon. Marcel Moring

stared into the flames and tried to remember whether she used to call me that in the past, when she was a child. N. All the members of my family did, had done, though I never knew why. No one had ever addressed Zoe or Zelda or Zeno as Z.

      ‘You tell me,’ I said.

      She didn’t answer. Only the greenish-blue gleam of her eyes, the perfectly tranquil face and the red wreath around it.

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t recognize this house at all anymore.’ I saw her gaze grow vague. ‘It’s as if I’ve woken up after being asleep for a hundred years and I look around me and there are things I recognize, but everything is different, just different enough to make me doubt what I thought I knew.’

      There was a silence. Now and then a piece of wood snapped in the hearth, or part of the burning pile caved in with a sigh.

      ‘How did that tape get there?’

      ‘I really don’t know. What’s the matter? Do you think I planned all this? Nathan Hollander’s mystery weekend?’

      ‘A film,’ she said. She lowered her voice slightly: ‘He’s searching for the secret of his past, but the past doesn’t want to be found. Coming soon, to a cinema near you: Nathan Hollander, the movie.’

      ‘Starring …’

      ‘Dustin Hoffman, as Nathan Hollander.’

      ‘I’m twice his size.’

      ‘Okay, Jack Nicholson then.’

      ‘I don’t have those acrobatic eyebrows. Besides, then we’d need a love interest.’

      She looked at me for a while. ‘I don’t know any red-haired actresses.’

      ‘Hordes,’ I said. ‘Nicole Kidman. Lucille Ball. There’s also this slightly whorish, but very charming redhead I once saw in the film version of Hotel New Hampshire. And there’s a beautiful Italian woman. The same hair as you, that fan of red curls. What was her name? Domenica … She played in that Tarkovsky film and at one point she begins to unbutton her dress and you see this magnificent alabaster breast. My God.’ I stared at the fire.

      ‘I think we’d better forget about that love interest. I haven’t got magnificent alabaster tits and your eyebrows can’t dance. Let’s do something.’

      ‘What did you have in mind?’

      ‘Don’t you have anything in mind?’

      I shrugged.

      We fell silent. ‘The fairy tale writer doesn’t know,’ said Nina. She sat down and stared into the fireplace. I smiled wrily. She drew her legs under her and settled back into the chair. Then, her face raised to me, like a sleepy cat, her eyes narrowed, she said: ‘I expected you to at least tell me a fairy tale about it.’

      ‘I thought you wanted to know why we were here.’

      ‘I don’t want to think about the snow. I don’t want to think about that tape. Or about the barricade. Or about all that food.’ She opened her eyes until they were so wide that it was impossible for me to miss the import of her words. ‘And I don’t want to talk about Zeno, either. Didn’t you say this was a great opportunity for you to read me Uncle Herman’s biography?’

      ‘Out loud? I thought I’d just hand you the manuscript. It’s a long story.’

      She smiled.

      ‘And a tall one.’

      She nodded.

      ‘It’s all about arrival and departure and Zeno …’

      Nina’s gaze strayed to the fire.

      ‘… and the atomic bomb and …’

      ‘The what?’

      ‘The atomic bomb,’ I said, ‘I know everything there is to know about that.’

      ‘The atomic bomb … You say it the way most people would say: I know everything there is to know about cars. Or football. Books, even.’

      I could feel the wine, and the glow of the hearth.

      ‘Are you going to keep avoiding this? I told you before: do your Decamerone, give me the Canterbury Tales, unexpurgated. You’ve promised me stories galore, but so far all I’ve had are coming attractions. Please begin. What is the beginning, anyway?’

      ‘The beginning,’ I said. I went to the reading table, behind the chairs, and opened my bag. The packet of paper I had printed out the week before felt cool, almost as though it didn’t belong to me.

      ‘Should I get some more wine?’

      I nodded. The beginning. I sat down, the manuscript on my lap, and stared into the flames.

      Here I am, I thought, a fairy tale writer. A memory that stretches back to the seventeenth century, though I myself was born midway into the nineteen-thirties. Son of an inventor, who was the son of a physicist, who was the son of a clockmaker, whose forefathers had all been clockmakers, ever since the invention of the timepiece. Nephew of Herman Hollander, the Herman Hollander, nephew and sole heir. Brother of Zeno Hollander, the Zeno Hollander. Son of a failed painter – my mother – brother of two sisters, one of whom fluttered through life like falling cherry blossom and the other who was born with the soul of a nun and the body of a Jewish bombshell. I was the only normal one in my family and I’m the only one, except for Nina, who is still alive. When I die, no more Hollanders. What a relief that’ll be. Travelling for centuries and finally arriving. Nothing gained, but at least, oh Lord of the Universe, peace.

      The end of the century, I thought, is this – the door handle in one hand, my other hand on the light switch. I look round and see the room. Soon I’ll turn out the light, shut the door behind me, walk into the hall, open the heavy front door, cross the threshold, and leave the house.

      The beginning. What I’ve seen in the part of the century that I’ve lived through, and what I’ve heard about the part when my parents and my uncle were alive. Those who don’t know me will think that I’ve been everywhere a person has to be if he wants to say anything valuable about these last hundred years. But that isn’t true. No one has less knowledge of people, my kind of people, the country in which I lived and the world in which I grew up, than I do. This life is a mystery to me. I close my eyes and let the newsreel of my, our history, go by – images of departing steamers (why do I remember the ship, that distant past, in black and white?), flashing neon signs in the desert, the glow-in-the-dark hands of Mickey Mouse on an alarm clock, a house like the head of a giant and Gene Kelly in Broadway Melody, I close my eyes and see nothing that kindles even the tiniest spark of light in me. This century, this life, the history of my family, it has all passed me by and left me, like a mouse in the middle of Times Square, in total bewilderment.

      The beginning. Uncle Chaim once said, ‘Beginning? No beginning. We’re clockmakers. One big family of clockmakers. People of time. Time has no beginning.’

      If there’s one thing I do know about, it’s beginning. Although Uncle Herman didn’t share that opinion.

      ‘What’s this?’ he once asked me. He had taken down a book of mine and opened it. ‘This is a beginning? “Kei was in love with the miller’s daughter and the miller’s daughter loved him, but one day Kei’s love disappeared. He gazed, as always, at his young wife, but her hair was like straw, her eyes, dull grey pebbles, and her skin, unwashed linen. Kei knew this wasn’t so, but that was how he saw her. He decided to go in search of his love.” What sort of nonsense is this? In and out of love in a single line. Where’s the development?’

      I had answered what I always answered (because the question was the same as the previous year and the year before that): ‘Why do I have to explain why love disappears between a man and a woman? Half of world literature is already about that. I’m concerned with the other phenomena.’

      ‘What phenomena?’

      ‘The