Till Kingdom Come. Andrej Nikolaidis

and whoever saw them would have recognized the structure the world was created from by the principle of endless iteration. I walked past the Markale market hall, the Eternal Flame, and went down Tito Street to the Sarajka department store, where I turned left and stopped outside a bar. I remembered with the precision of the clearest, crispest photograph, although I had never been inside, that I once went in there with a friend the time he bought a matchbox full of hash from the barista before a school excursion to Venice; we smoked it in Cividale del Friuli, another city I had never been to. Recollecting the details of an excursion someone else was on, not me, I arrived at the banks of River Miljacka. It seethed and swirled, flowing as fast as that piddling river could, I recalled.

      The trolleybus had broken down at the Olympic Village. I was still drunk and needed to keep walking in the cold air, so I decided not to wait for a bus. I set off for the suburb of Dobrinja, taking a route I had never gone before. The avenue was deserted and I headed down it, ploughing through snow that seemed immaculate. When I unlocked the door of the flat, I heard water flowing in the bathroom. Then I trod on something. I lifted it up from the floor, and in the gleam of light from the upper, glazed section of the bathroom door I saw it was an empty jar of Zolpidem sleeping tablets.

      I knew the layout of the flat intuitively and without turning on the light, I undressed, went into one of the bedrooms and crashed. I didn’t care whose bed it was. I remembered all this when I woke up. I jumped out of bed and went to have a shower because I was supposed to meet a young guy called Amar, whom I didn’t know, in the Bazaar that morning. I found a winter coat in the wardrobe and put on my sturdiest boots. I went outside, donned cap and gloves, and was heading for the tram turntable in a Sarajevo suburb when I saw a reflection in a drop of rain on a pine needle, and only then did I realize I was standing on the terrace of my house by the sea; it was night, the 4th May, and the water was draining away from Ulcinj; the sky had opened up, the lights of the town shimmered beneath the stars that had finally come out, and I didn’t know what was happening to me.

      TIME

      My gentle mother cannot return.

      Paul Celan

      1

      These spatio-temporal lapses continued in the years that followed and became ever more frequent and prominent. To begin with, they occurred just after I had woken up: Lying in bed in my grandmother’s house in Ulcinj, I would open my eyes in Brussels, Paris or London and recall the circumstances that had led me there. I would return five minutes or half an hour later; it was totally unpredictable. Later the lapses became even more common, I’d say almost regular. They could happen at any time: While I was going for a walk, eating a meal or, worst of all, in the middle of a conversation. I would simply fall silent and be somewhere else. The person sitting next to me would call my name, but it didn’t work. Most of them simply got up and left. The well-intentioned and devoted ones would call an ambulance. After a few abortive calls, which ended with me coming round in front of the astonished medics and having to apologize, make them a coffee and beg them to be discreet (“My condition is certainly strange, and this is a small town – you know how it is when people find out about things”), the ambulance dispatchers learned to ignore the calls. “Just leave him,” they’d say to the good Samaritan. “Get on with your business and don’t worry about him. He wanders a bit, and then he comes back as if nothing had happened.”

      I was unable to perceive any pattern in those lapses or determine what triggered them. At first I thought it might be alcohol. But abstinence didn’t help; on the contrary, it made things worse. My condition could be described as an absolute lack of interest in the present, let alone the future. My mind was constantly going into rewind because everything I cared about was in the past.

      2

      I don’t believe those stories about pristine beginnings. True, time spoils everything. And yes, everything gets worse over time. But what is prone to spoil is not necessarily good in the beginning. Everything is bad, even at its inception.

      Nor do I believe the stories about the wisdom pronounced by children in their alleged innocence. I’m sure there are children cleverer than I was, and perhaps there have been three-year-olds who walked the earth and had something vital to say. But as a small child I only ever blabbered nonsense. We derive that habit from our childhood, ultimately, and it remains with us even in our so-called mature years and through to our death. There is little consolation when you realize that, until the end, you will write and say things it would have been be wiser not to. And it is small comfort that occasionally people manage to utter a few last words before they die that are not necessarily wise but at least not stupid.

      When I was a boy, a year seemed as long as eternity to me. Once my grandmother planted an olive-tree seedling in front of the house. I pranced around the fragile sapling for a while and then decided to be pragmatic and ask when we would be able to pick the first olives.

      “In ten years’ time,” she said. She could just as well have said ‘never’ – it would have meant the same to me. But from then on I imagined a year like an olive tree. The tree grew as the year passed: quietly and slowly, visible only to the persistent and patient eye.

      For me today, the years don’t pass: They fall like trees – not olive trees but the massive trunks of the northern forests. One minute they’re standing tall beneath the sky, the next they’re beneath the boots of the lumberjack. Nothing remains of their might except the tremble of the moist earth when those giants come crashing down.

      Yes, today the years fall like chainsawed trees. And the warning voice that shouts, ‘Timber!’ is in vain: they always fall on me. They fall, and it hurts. Maybe the logic is, the more we get battered, the better we can measure time.

      Why not throw away our watches and purge all digital devices of the numbers signifying the passage of time? Clocks only ever measure the time of material things: an abstract entity we measure life with, although it is a sterilized and preserved entity that passes life by. People’s time is entirely different; it doesn’t flow uniformly, no two minutes or hours are the same, and its only real measure is the desolation it leaves in its wake.

      History is an uninterrupted series of catastrophes – shipwrecks, avalanches, take your pick – where nothing is less important than whether my poor self is going to be dragged under or buried alive. Only arrogant fools expect satisfaction from history; the ordinary, little person is always on the losing end in every brush with history.

      And yet that house of ruins, that past built of catastrophes, is all we have.

      Maria and I shared a love of Walter Benjamin. Both she and I placed him before all other philosophers, even before the majority of poets, but not above Trakl and Celan. How many bleak winter nights we spent in drunken discussions about his Arcades and the Angel of History... We both had a passion for knowledge, which is so rare in our time. Living in a provincial backwater surrounded by people who consider selfishness and greed an expression of faultless utilitarianism only intensified that passion. If you’ve never lived in the backwoods, you don’t know to what extent your enjoyment of knowledge sets you apart from others... How complete is the solitude of bibliophiles and thinkers, and how strongly such people bind together and become totally dependent on each other when they meet, against all probability, near the scaffolds of the soul that are our small towns.

      I’m sure I still know all of Benjamin’s historic-philosophical theses off by heart today, just as Maria did. In the second thesis he says:

      “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature, writes Lotze, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, is the freedom from envy, which the present displays toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly coloured by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to and women who could have given themselves to us (...)”

      3

      As if it wasn’t bizarre enough that I experienced the memories of other people, whose identity I woke up in, what I considered my own memory now lost all narrative continuity over time. Not only did I not know what I had in common