Discovering a Memory
Nothing shakes my confusion: how am I discovering a memory?
Prague, 2011
Discoveries are perfectly acceptable in the wild, but I prefer to avoid them in my apartment. Earlier this week, however, I spotted a curious green book, situated in a reasonable enough place—along the bookshelf, of course—but looking a tad exotic to my eye. Its spine resembled the green olive of a martini, a conclusion that might have resulted from the hour. Perhaps I could have conjured a distant, colorless, and blurry memory to explain the book, but I was pretty much lost.
My books are ordered by location and then by writer; both factors are contingent on a few asymmetric corners, and the archivist works peculiar hours and refuses questions anyway. But the mysterious green spine had somehow positioned itself among my collection from Prague, with The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash to its left, and The Cowards by Josef Škvorecký to its right. Instinctively, this struck me as correct—it must have been a book from Prague, and that was its spot, despite my inability to recall the particulars. And my first visit to Prague forced me to jettison a few possessions merely to lug back the books I bought, so this story wasn’t exactly a stretch.
Looking at the cover didn’t help. My reaction was that it looked like a book worth exploring. I had a vague recollection of the writer’s name, Paul Leppin, but I couldn’t place this title, Others’ Paradise, nor its minimalist cover. In my judgement, the book appeared lightly read, with its spine given just one sporting crack—it wasn’t new, but nobody had used it to study for an exam. My eye landed on a dedication when I opened its pages:
I give this book to those women who seek dead years in the lamp at night. Who stare into their days, transfixed, as into a light. Who know Resignation from the romances and Sorrow from the ballads. Who are ever Strangers among men.
After scanning these lines, now even more intrigued, I flip to the copyright page and learn that the publication date was 1921, while the English translation in my hands came in 1995. Then I drift to the table of contents, and its eight chapter titles, which appear to be unrelated stories, or perhaps simply stories collected for this volume. Chapter Two, The Ghost of the Jewish Quarter, and Chapter Five, The House on the Riverbank, gives me solid evidence that I’m in Prague. Despite all this shaking of the snow globe inside my mind, however, the loose flakes don’t fall into place. A stray through prods me to flip backwards, once again, and I examine the title page, where I find the pencil marking that I expected: 250—. Although it wouldn’t be sufficient for a jury trial, these small numbers provide conclusive proof that I bought the book in Prague, during my first visit, for 250 Czech Koruna, though the details of that memory have vanished.
Here’s the first sentence of The House on the Riverbank, where my fingers land next:
The house with the sign over the gate which portrayed the moon amongst a throng of stars, stood on the edge of the Vltava, not far from the ruined wall of a burnt-out mill.
Nothing I read shakes me from my confusion: these seem like new words. When I flip more pages, however, I note a few worrisome dashes in black ink. A longer search tells me that there are perhaps five or six marks in the book’s 137 page. All are crisp lines, adjacent to a paragraph or flagging a sentence, and conclusively from my hand.
Failing to retrieve a memory is a paradoxical sensation. You’re aware enough to comprehend the existence of the memory, but the pipes are somehow clogged. Perhaps the most illogical point comes whenever a pipe abruptly clears: the name or city or date flashes into focus. What’s retrieved comes without a prompt, and by a process that you can’t describe. But the divide between the archive in your mind and the librarian searching that archive is what’s most peculiar. It’s adjacent to the peculiar nature of frightening dreams, where you’re the writer, director, actor, and audience—in charge of the pyrotechnics, instructed to shock, the recipient of the shock. A little contemplation drives a recognition of how little of you exists within you.
After a few sentences of Others’ Paradise, the title story, some aspects of the book did begin to surface, fragment by fragment. In this poignant story, Master Thomas has a cellar workshop with a small window, where he can watch as people pass along the sidewalk, though he’s only able to see their shoes.
He divined the fates of the passerby from the nervous, weary, wanton movements, the swift, agitated flights of their feet.
During his many years of labor—time a ghostly, trancelike element in this story—he begins to doubt faces, and to distrust people; his solace can only be found in shoes.
The cobbler had never taken an interest in women, and the radiance and bitter sweetness of love had never strayed into the solitude and silence of his isolated life. He had forgotten love, like everything else. His youth had evaporated between work and the resulting fatigue — now, the cracked mirror near the clock showed him a furrowed, gaunt face beneath an unkempt beard.
In many ways it’s a particularly curious story to forget:
He had lost all recollection of life as it had once been; the cool, heavy smell of the leather had deadened his powers of recollection.
In a rather awkward hammering of a metaphoric nail, the clock in his cellar workshop has stopped long ago. The story is only a few pages, yet Master Thomas embarks on a journey, eventually discovering an interest in “two wondrous feet” that are “clad in gaily strapped shoes.” A careful reader might notice that the young girl’s feet appeal to Master Thomas because he senses her poverty, and believes she, too, lives a monotonous life. His desire comes from recognizing what he believes is a shared fate.
When he’s left sobbing in the final paragraph, his dejection may at first appear tragic—the young girl has a partner, her steps are now quicker, and they’re returning from the park, a place Master Thomas loathes. He halts, looks to the stopped clock, and recognizes all his lost days. But you don’t need to squint to see the resentment. Rather than leaving his cellar, he wanted to yank the young girl downward. She was appealing because of what he presumed to be her fate: a misfortune to justify his misfortune. Master Thomas, in this story, is a drowning man who is unwilling to swim, yet perfectly capable of pulling down a rescuer.
In my translation, the word monotony is repeated several times; when you consider that repetition with the broken clock metaphor, it’s easy to spot the waste. Master Thomas can’t even remember the passing days. While he’s toiling away in solitude, the world has moved on. His forgetfulness, his inability to remember one day from the next, doesn’t come from excitement, intrigue, or an abundance of experience. He’s never left the cellar, and despite his sobs, he’ll soon forget why.
Monotony is a dreadful reason to forget the days: when morning bleeds into night, month into year, without any notes of punctuation between, there’s little purpose in memories. In many ways, the clock has already stopped, as present is both past and future. But that’s only one way to forget, the path portrayed in the story of Master Thomas. An alternative and much better method of forgetting is to crowd those mornings and nights with memories, until the archive itself feels a tad unwieldy and overwhelmed from use.
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