Georgi Gospodinov

Because salt has no memory. Nothing grows on salt.

Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The futur

Now, there’s everything you need for a true beginning—bad dreams, war, and a headache.

On another September 1, I’m sitting on the grass in Bryant Park, the dive on Fifty-Second has long since disappeared, I’ve just come from Europe, and, tired (the soul, too, has its jet lag), I look at people’s faces. I’ve taken my little volume of Auden, we owe ourselves the ritual, don’t we? After a day spent in the library, I sit “uncertain and afraid.” I had slept badly, I didn’t dream about infidelity, or perhaps I did but I’ve forgotten . . . The world is at the same level of anxiety, the local sheriff and the sheriff of a far-off country have been trading threats. They’re doing it on Twitter, all within the character limit. There’s none of the old rhetoric, there’s no eloquence. A briefcase, a button, and . . . the end of the world’s workday. A bureaucrat’s apocalypse.

Zurich is a good city for growing old. And for dying as well. If there is some sort of European geography of age, then it must be distributed as follows. Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam are for youth, with all its informality, its whiff of joints, beer-drinking in Mauerpark and rolling around in the grass, Sunday flea markets, the frivolity of sex . . . Then comes the maturity of Vienna or Brussels. A slowing of tempo, comfort, streetcars, proper health insurance, schools for the kids, a bit of a career, Euro-pencil-pushing. Okay, for those who still do not wish to grow old—Rome, Barcelona, Madrid . . . Good food and warm afternoons will make up for the traffic, noise, and slight chaos. To late youth I would also add New York, yes, I count it as a European city that ended up across the ocean due to a certain chain of events.

I wrote that, clearly, in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs.

Was it some sort of joke, planting forget-me-nots in front of a geriatric psychiatric center?

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

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.

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