The Physics of Sorrow (29 page)

I didn’t call that night, but I carefully wrote the number down, along with the whole note. I wonder what Agnieszka is doing now, all these years later. Does she still manage to peddle some belated bliss, or do I need to cross out that (emergency) phone number as well?

L
ISTS AND
O
BLIVION

What do you call the obsession with constantly making lists, with thinking in lists, with telling stories in lists? What kind of disorder is that?

I rush to write everything down, to gather it up in my notebook, just as they rush to bring in the lambs before the thunderstorm whips up. My memory for names and faces is fading ever more quickly. That’s the most likely explanation. That’s how my father’s illness was at the end. Somebody with a big eraser came and started rubbing everything out, moving backward. First, you forget what happened yesterday, the most distant, out-of-the-way stuff is the last to go. In this sense, you always die in your childhood.

My father would go out and wander the streets, lost like a child in an unfamiliar city. Good thing it was a small town, people knew him and brought him back home. Most often they would find him at the train station. He would be watching the trains. Once when I was home for a short visit, I followed him and watched. Whenever a train stopped at the station, he would get up and head toward the open doors, then his gait would slow, he would stop, look
around like a person who has suddenly forgotten or is having second thoughts about the point of his journey and finally he would totter back to his place with uncertain steps. The scene would repeat itself with every train.

My worst nightmare is that one day I will be standing just like that at some airport, the planes will land and take off, but I won’t be able to remember where I’m going. And worse yet, I’ll have forgotten the place I should return to. And there won’t be anyone to recognize me and bring me back home.

L
ABYRINTH AND
C
HOICE

                
The labyrinth is someone’s fossilized hesitation.

The most oppressive thing about the labyrinth is that you are constantly being forced to choose. It isn’t the lack of an exit, but the abundance of “exits” that is so disorienting. Of course, the city is the most obvious labyrinth. Barthes points to Paris as a model: “the labyrinths of the center and the outskirts built by Haussmann.”

I’ve been happily lost in that city, but here I’ll add just one disorienting afternoon. The time when I stood between two streets, wondering which one to go down. Both of them would have led me to the place I was looking for. Incidentally, there was nothing particularly unusual about the streets in and of themselves. The problem was, as always, no matter which one I chose, I would lose the other one. I could only have been satisfied in that quantum physics experiment that shows how a particle also acts like a wave, passing through two openings at once. The minutes were flowing past, and I was standing there, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I must have looked terribly lost, since an elderly woman stopped and asked me if I needed help.

What did I do? I headed down one of them, the street to the right, but I was thinking about the other one the whole time. And with every step, I kept repeating to myself that I had made the wrong choice. I hadn’t gone even a third of the way before I stopped decisively (oh, that decisive gesture of indecisiveness) and turned down an alley toward the other street. Of course, hesitation seized me with the first couple steps and again after a few meters, I practically ran down the next alley to the first street. And then again, seized by hesitation—back to the other one, then back to the first. To this day I don’t know whether with that zigzag I gained both streets or lost them both. In the end, completely exhausted, like a marathon runner in a labyrinth, my heart pounding as if to burst, I sank down onto a bench.

C
HAMOMILE
H
ARVESTERS

I never travel alone. It’s only that my companions are not visible to the naked eye. I’m like a human trafficker, sneaking whole columns of people across the border. Some of them are no longer alive. Others, on the contrary, are far too alive and curious, touching everything, asking about everything, getting lost, wandering away from the group. The metal detectors at the airport don’t catch them.

In the most unexpected and untimely places around this continent, even in the impersonal territory of the airport, that separate country, unexpected faces crop up. As I’m sitting there sipping my tea in the Munich airport, it is suddenly filled to the brim with Gypsy tinkers, boisterous and brightly colored. The police don’t notice them, nor do their silver bracelets, heavy tin pans, and copper kettles set off the metal detectors. There’s that friend of my grandma’s, too, the old Gypsy woman Rusalia, with her tulip-printed headscarf and an enormous wooden rake, going to harvest chamomile. The tea I’m drinking is chamomile, that’s the key. Chamomile
doesn’t grow here at the Munich airport, I want to tell her, but Rusalia doesn’t look at me. Then I realize that I, too, don’t exist for her, just as the police, the metal detectors, and even the whole huge terminal don’t exist . . . It hasn’t been built yet. In its place stretches an endless field of chamomile.

As a child I was afraid of all those noisy Gypsies. Adults would scare us with them, saying they would whisk away naughty children in their big saddlebags. I wasn’t naughty, but who knows, mistakes happen. But I wasn’t afraid of old Rusalia. She would come into our house, sit down and talk with my grandma the whole afternoon. I would hover around them, listening. Rusalia loved my grandma, because she was the only one who let her into her house and talked to her as an equal. My grandma loved Rusalia, because she had travelled far and wide, and she respected everyone who had seen the world. Every summer, Rusalia would tell stories about the world, and my grandma would listen and spin, the stories becoming part of the fiber being spun from her distaff. Why do you invite them into the house, a neighbor woman would always chide her afterward, you can’t trust those Gypsies, while she’s bamboozling you with tall tales, her people are sneaking around, snatching some chicken or swiping some tomatoes from your garden. Let them swipe away, my grandma would say, they’ve got souls, same as we do, plus we’ve got tomatoes galore this year.

The voice over the loudspeaker announces that my flight is delayed, pulling me back to the Munich airport. There is no trace of the Gypsy Rusalia with her big wooden chamomile rake and her colorful people. My tea is gone, too.

As long as I live, Rusalia will go to harvest chamomile at the Munich airport, her people will clatter their pans behind her, and on those endless afternoons my grandmother will spin and listen to stories about the world.

D
ESCRIPTION OF A
F
INNISH
F
AMILY OF
P
OETS
AT
L
UNCH IN
L
AHTI

This could be a painting by Vermeer.

A handsome, very elderly Finnish poet, with an elongated face, as old age does to some faces, very blue, already fading eyes (one with a slight tic), has difficulty moving his hands, there’s a constant smile on his face (could that be a tic, too?), a sweet and uneasy smile, as if he were apologizing for his age. The elderly woman next to him is probably his wife—and enormous hat with a brim edged with strawberries, with a bit too much rouge on her cheeks, as elderly ladies are wont to do . . . She discretely keeps an eye on her husband’s movements, ready to come to the rescue at any moment. For now, he is doing fine on his own despite that tremor in his right hand, which always causes half the contents of his spoon to spill back into the bowl.

Next to her sits their son, also a poet, as he was introduced to us, around 40, thin, lanky, with glasses and teeth jutting forward, not as handsome and refined as the father. It’s strange that sometimes parents are more beautiful than their children, you always expect it to be the opposite. The daughter-in-law, in contrast to the whole family, is plump and dark-haired, most likely a foreigner. And the two charming girls of four and six in their blue suits, torn between table manners and the natural law inside them.

The conversation falters, but this is a picture in which conversation is unnecessary. Fascinated, you watch life itself in its elegant vanquishing of old age. There was love, love gave birth to children, those children have given birth to their own children. There surely have been cataclysms, too, but now here they are together for Sunday brunch, at the table of honor in front of all these writers gathered from around the world who most likely have never read a single line by the great Finnish poet and who surely will not remember his impossible name. To enjoy the respect of people who are seeing you
for the first time, even for just one lunch, and to share it with your loved ones. What more could you ask for?

And now the Finnish poet does something that jerks him out of the picture. His trembling hand drops the spoon, it hits the edge of the bowl with a bang, scooping up a bit of asparagus soup as it falls, spilling it on his white shirt, splashing a few mischievous droplets onto the cheek of his astonished wife, and landing with a clatter on the stone floor.

The host rushes to pick up the spoon, as if this were the most important thing, and hits his head on the edge of the table in the process, the four-year-old girl can’t contain herself any longer and bursts out laughing, her mother shushes her, but this only makes matters worse, without a pick-up note the little girl replaces laughter with shrieking, the old poet’s son helplessly turns first toward his mother, then toward the children’s mother, but does not receive any instructions from either one. The wife is trying to clean the stain on the poet’s shirt with a napkin. And the poet himself? He keeps smiling in that innocent, apologetic way, like a little boy who has gotten up to some serious mischief.

If some invisible Vermeer is painting this picture and it is exhibited in the next century, pay attention to the dark spot in the lower right corner, right where the spoon fell. If you look at it long enough, like a Rorschach test, you’ll see the little devil of old age and his malicious grin.

S
ORROW
M
AKES
B
ONES
B
RITTLE

I went to Finland mostly because of my father. I took advantage of a kindly invitation to a literary festival. I had had an intimate connection to this country since childhood, without ever having been there. My father had gone there by chance on his first and, as far as I know, only trip abroad back then. Finland, you might
say, lived in our living room—six Finnish cups made from sturdy light-green glass, which we took out for guests. Setting them on the table always kick-started my father’s story. For us, it was like a fairytale, a Nordic saga, and an adventure novel all rolled into one. How they were each given only five dollars apiece, how they each illegally smuggled in a bottle of cognac or vodka, how afterward, with all the concomitant fear and shame, he had traded his bottle for the glasses we were drinking from, for the Finnish ashtray that was also sitting on the table, and for cloth for a dress for my mother. Here my mother would take the dress out of the wardrobe, bright and colorful, with big, withering roses, and everybody would click their tongues. Finland was the country of my childhood that came closest to that mythical country known as “Abroad.” The country of my father. Of fathers.

It just so happened that my visit to and initiation into Finland came about exactly thirty years later, right when I had become a father myself. And during the very same week when my father got the results of a “routine” test. At first, I decided to not go on the trip, but then it occurred to me that it was no coincidence that it had come about right at this moment, that it was fate, and that this trip would all but set some healing processes into motion.

I boarded the plane with an excess baggage of sorrow. It was the middle of June, the endless white nights. I was dwelling in some strange melancholy. It wasn’t the country I had imagined. It seemed to have aged since the time of my childhood. I was walking through the streets of Helsinki, but I wasn’t completely there. My daughter had just been born, and my father had just gotten a terrible diagnosis. When he had walked these streets, he had been twenty-five, I was already thirty-nine. I would never be able to match his eye for the world, I had already visited quite a few countries, the senses grow accustomed, the eye merely registers, the feeling of déjà vu builds.

And one night, my body gave out.

There is a lot of symbolism in breaking down in a country you have been inventing your whole life.

Past midnight, sometime around noon . . . It’s equally lightish-dark. In the dusk of the room I try to figure out what time of day it is and where my body is. I have no sense of either one. I feel light, hovering a few feet above the bed, nothing hurts, this is either heaven or . . . Those are either nurses or angels. They are speaking an unintelligible language—angelic or Finnish? I have no sense of a body, which would be wonderful if it were not slightly worrisome. With great effort I turn my head to the left and see the bag of liquid dripping into my arm. OK, got it, there are no IVs in heaven. My last memory is of riding the bike I had rented, mulling some things over, and suddenly there was a bright light ahead of me, turns out I was in the wrong lane, I swerved to get back into mine, then the sound of brakes, then . . . the room.

I slowly regain consciousness. The nurse on duty comes in from time to time with a syringe and a single English word, which is nevertheless sufficiently clear: “Painkiller!” She stops for a moment at the door, announces “Painkiller,” as if introducing some very important gentleman who will come in any second, forces the air out of the needle and plunges the syringe somewhere into my absent body. I try to explain in my broken English that nothing hurts. But she shakes her head and says something I don’t understand, in her Moomintroll-speak.