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Time Shelter: Reminiscence, not Review

“The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined”*.

The older I get, the more disappointed—and, frankly, disbelieving—I am that we cannot travel back in time. The more years pass, the farther I get from certain cherished moments, the harder it is to accept the permanence of their departure. Watching Doctor Who, the ultimate wanderer in time and space, I get a vague sense of unease from the episodes set in the future. What is the far future to me? I will not see it, so I am not curious about it and not invested in it. But the past, well, it is full of second guesses disguised as second chances. It is full of the comfort of nostalgia. “It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there”*.

In “Time Shelter”, Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov creates the perfect scenario for which my soul has been yearning. Gospodinov is Bulgarian, and we are exactly the same age. I feel his story almost instinctively, beyond the words, for he writes not just about the decades he experienced, but as only an Eastern Block Gen-Xer experienced them. It is rare that I hear the echoes of the voices in my head in print.

His first person narrator meets Gaustine, a mysterious psychiatrist who opens a “clinic for the past”. It is meant to evoke recognizable memories for Alzheimer’s patients by reproducing the surroundings of their comforting past lives, but the concept takes off and everyone wants to starts seeking shelter from the relentless passage of time by stepping into the past. “Everything happens years after it has happened”*.

Like Gaustine’s patients, I am not even interested in the historical past, someone else’s past. I do not want to meet Shakespeare (whoever he really was) or see dinosaurs or anything like that. (OK, maybe I want to meet D’Artagnan in his natural habitat, but that is all). And fine, I don’t even want to change anything. I saw “Sliding Doors”. I read “Midnight Library”. I am no longer sure which parts of my life I would want to erase if there is no guarantee that this would not have a detrimental effect. I can no longer fathom what my life would look like today if I had made different decisions at some critical junctures. I might have been spared some pain, but what unanticipated and ultimately avoided sorrows were waiting in the wings? The decisions that I made, I stand by them. The decisions that were made for me trouble me still with the passage of years but regret is useless. And it all basically worked out.

The pool would have been beyond that fence on the right

It is just that the melancholy longings come unbidden in the twilight, and that is when I sometimes wish I could revisit my past. I want to see the sun rise over the roofs from the balcony of my mother’s apartment, for every occasion on which I visited her there seemed special and wonderful. I want to sit in my childhood apartment’s dark room lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree, the only year my grandparents had a real tree and could finally hang up the one ornament that was too heavy for our little artificial tree—an orange, the size and weight of the actual fruit. I do not want to forget either that orange that always stayed in the ornament box in the entresol except for that one brief appearance or my favorite ornament, wild strawberry with a human face. I want to go to the grocery store on the first floor of our apartment building and buy birch juice by the glass and a hard block of coffee with milk, meant to be dissolved in boiling water and not gnawed like I did as a kid. I want to watch my collection of film strips in the hallway of our apartment on the coldest winter days. I want to marvel at the hollyhock mallow plants in our neighbors’ garden in the summer. I want to see again that inground public pool that was filled in when I was just a toddler, leaving behind a weed-covered wasteland—was my memory of this thing even real, a random outdoor pool on our quiet little street? And I want to sit on our old couch and read the books of my childhood. There is so much from that era of gentle stagnation which seems positively utopian in comparison to our present cataclysmic times. “Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears”*.

My favorite part of this mesmerizing novel, which I had to read twice in a row (and even that was not quite enough to fully take it all in; I am yearning to read it again), is when time shelters become so popular that European countries actually vote on returning to their respective favorite past eras. The clinics of the past are no longer enough; entire countries become engulfed in nostalgia. It is fascinating to read what decade each country chooses as representative of the glory of its people, yet still recognizable and not entirely devoid of modern comforts. Some decades of the last century are obviously fraught; 30s and 40s have their devotees, but Gospodinov is not going there. The story is not about that. So many countries choose the 1970s or the early ‘80s (including most of the [former] Eastern Bloc—the whiff of freedom in the air, before reality bit), with only Italy choosing the ‘60s. Bulgaria’s choice is not mentioned, but there is a hint. “What decade would you choose? “I’d like to be twelve years old in each of them.” * That would be my answer, too.

*All the quotes are from Georgi Gospodinov, “Time Shelter”, English translation by Angela Rodel

https://georgigospodinov.com/

[Caption: my time shelter, for better or worse]

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Tartuffe, Impostor, Hypocrite

To mention, let alone stage, “Tartuffe” (or “The Impostor”, or “The Hypocrite”) in these turbulent times is almost too obvious. There is nothing I can say about this brilliant enduring satire that scholars of history and literature have not already said with significantly greater insight. I will just leave this quote here from the program from the best production of this play that I saw in Stratford in the summer of 2017 (and we thought times were turbulent THEN…):

“Tartuffe” was the first adult play I ever saw live. It was also the only adult play I saw as a child in the Soviet Union, in our externally beautiful, internally uninspired, historic Volkov Theater [https://oldladywriting.com/2020/07/26/all-my-world-is-a-stage/]. Credit goes only and eternally to Molière (and to the translator, whoever he was[1]) that this experience did not sour me on either live theater or French literature. That my enduring love of both has shaped my life is something that could not have been anticipated from that first chaotic encounter.

“Tartuffe” came to town when I was maybe 11, and my mother decided that this will make a fine mother/daughter afternoon of culture. We had fewer such opportunities than one would expect, for reasons that are many, varied, and complicated, ranging from familial to societal. Everything that pertained to cultural development in my childhood, every museum visit, every book about art, came from my mother. I cannot bear to think what my early childhood would have been had we spent less time together, but I used to often wonder what it would have been like if we had spent more. And this is most certainly a story for another time.

In order to prepare for this momentous event, she decided that we will read the play aloud together. It was a great idea. I still remember the first lines spoken by Mme Pernelle to her maid Flipote and Elmire’s response, that opening scene that sets the stage long before the titular character makes his entrance . To me, they are like the iconic opening bars of a musical. We took turns reading it aloud, sitting on the stools in my mother’s kitchen. It was pure joy: the relatable characters with fun names, the dialogue alternately wacky and clever, the ultimate victory of sane minds and loving hearts over liars and cheats. After “Tartuffe”, I read the rest of the plays in the Molière “greatest hits” collection, and liked them all, but none had a lead character as deplorable and deserving of retribution as this one[2]. It aged extremely well, from the day it was written to the day I read it a little over three centuries later to our tense present. My oh my, plus ça change…

And then came the actual day. I do not remember the time of year (but choose to set it on a beautiful springtime day) or what I wore (a good sign; I hold enough grudges from my childhood for not being able to choose what to wear on a special occasion). I remember arriving and heading straight to the theater buffet for a glass of sparkling lemonade and a “basket” pastry. (For how much I keep mentioning this pastry, I should just make it already—there are recipes online. Of course, I fear it will not be as amazing as I remember it from childhood. Nothing ever is.) My mother cannot be credited with coining the phrase “eat dessert first”, but can definitely be trusted to always do it. It was a matinee, the buffet was not crowded, and we enjoyed our pre-show treats before proceeding without undue hurry to our seats. At which point we discovered that we arrived an hour late and missed the entire first act, Mme Pernelle’s opening speech that I memorized being the first, but by far not the only, casualty.

To be honest, I do not recall feeling particular distress at that moment. I was happy to have enjoyed a pastry, and I did not expect much from the spectacle, for I have been to the Volkov before on school field trips. Its reputation at the time was consistent with everything else in our stagnant provincial town. We sat way in the back of the orchestra, under the balcony, a terrible spot in any theater. Either the acoustics or the actors themselves were lacking, but we had trouble making out what was going on; the words were completely unintelligible (and this was back in the days when my young hearing was very keen, so if I could have heard anything, I would have). And thus the second act passed in a haze of confusion.

After the second intermission (first for us), my mother, determined to see and/or hear the rest of the play, searched for better seats. Fortified with more treats from the buffet, I was game. We spotted an empty opera box and moved in, feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. We actually started to enjoy the final act when the door behind us opened and two guys in their 20s rolled in, looking and smelling like they partook of something stronger than sparkling lemonade at the buffet. Checking their tickets with some incredulity, they asked if these were in fact their seats. My mother barked that the seats were ours, and they meekly retreated, presumably back to the buffet. We felt triumphant. It might not seem like much, but it was a perfect coda to a memorable and fun afternoon to which the play was merely an atmospheric backdrop.

I do not expect that I will live to see “Tartuffe” again performed in the language in which I first read and loved it, but I would like to someday experience it in the language in which it was written, the original words I studied in college, in the House That Molière Built, where it is allegedly the most produced play (where so far I only keep running into “Cyrano de Bergerac”).

P.S. About translations: I am of the opinion that French and English are not entirely compatible when it comes to literature. Established translations, to my ear, do not convey the lightness of the original—yet some modern translations are too colloquial to retain that time and place that is unmistakably Molière. I have seen some adaptions of his plays that were competent, yet unrecognizable, although for “Tartuffe”, I prefer the crisp, sparkling translation by Ranjit Bolt to Richard Wilbur’s staid and stolid one. This was the translation used in the 2017 production mentioned above.

[1] In this particular case, it was someone by the name of M. Donskoy. I give credit where credit is due.

[2] What were the other plays in this collection, you ask? About what you would expect: “Don Juan”, “L’avare”, “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme”, “Les Fourberies de Scapin”, and “Le Malade imaginaire”. I saw a televised Moscow theater production of “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme” as a child, and never forgot the hilarious part where M. Jourdain discovers that he has been speaking in prose his entire life. Coincidentally, this play remains one of the few on my theater bucket list—I have not seen it live to this day.

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Hometown: Ann Arbor

When I started law school, we had this incoming yearbook with everyone’s photos, so that you could get to know your classmates—you were going to be with them for three years. We had to list our undergraduate institution and hometown. The first was easy because factual; the second, for me, became unexpectedly convoluted.

At that time, I was not even a decade out of the Old Country, but it was lost to me, irrelevant, and politically incorrect (oh, how the times have not changed!). I had no home with my mother and stepfather, last and least because they moved states a couple of times since my last sojourn with them. I was living year round, working, and attending university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and so it became my hometown, by default and of the moment.

I lived in the same studio apartment for three years, which was the only place in this lifetime that was all mine, decorated by my teenage self with a combination of my favorite things, including a porcelain mask bought at Middle Earth from when I dreamed of an entire wall of masks (I still have it, the lone holdover; I never bought any others), and a collection of posters of my favorite people and places: best of the Netherlands sent to me by my beloved Dutch host family, the Marx Brothers and the Monkees, Oscar winning movies when there was still a finite number and I knew every one, Mardi Gras by Andrea Mistretta, a field of poppies that reminded me of a train ride from Moscow to Crimea, and an obligatory poster of Moscow (I am most assuredly not from Moscow, but that was the best that was available at Borders). The posters subsequently fell victims to a flood in the basement of my first house, but most of these are still some of my favorite things.

Out there, next to State Theater, is the location of the original Borders bookstore.

And speaking of Borders, I lived a block away from the original bookstore. This was the Borders before it was a chain, before it was international, before it sold music or had a café, and even before the flagship store moved into the space vacated by Jacobson’s (another sad loss; Jacobson’s was a great store). Being able to just walk in and browse, after work, between classes, on the weekends—ah, it was heaven! It was certainly a big part of what made Ann Arbor home. When I was in high school, coming to Ann Arbor with my mother was a double-edged sword: she would visit her friends, I was either bored or resentful, but Borders and the nearby movie theater on Fifth that showed foreign and art films that would never make it to our painfully provincial town of Jackson were always worth the trip[1].

Summers in Ann Arbor were magical yet awful. It was like being in one of those weird stories in which a person wakes up one day and the world is different: there are no adults, or half the population is gone, or the Beatles never existed. All right, maybe this last one is not strictly relevant. But basically, you just walked out on the street one day, and all the students were gone, save for the few of us year-round semi-townies. On the one hand, it was nice to just work and have the predictability of time off. I craved the stability, but I missed the difference of days and the extra activities that filled the school year. And, full time job was not twice as boring as a part time job, it was more boring cubed or quadrupled. It took up so very much time, leaving only the evenings of nothing to do or the weekends of trying to find things to do. There were no tasks to perform in my free time, but instead, the panic of not having those tasks. It was the waiting time. Which is how I sometimes still feel in my adult life.

Eventually, Ann Arbor became too small to contain me and my dreams. It really is a tiny town, with the downtown you can criss-cross in a quantity of minutes, not hours. Were it not for the diagonal part of the main campus (obviously nicknamed The Diag), you could look right through it. I was weary of walking the same half dozen streets. I needed a change of scenery, and so I went to the biggest city I could find.

Back when there was only one tall building on South University.

I spent another summer in Ann Arbor after that, two years later. All but one of my friends were gone, and I was living out a Cat Stevens song lyric, “For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not” and an agonizing “you can’t go home again” adage. I was a wildly unhappy law student and summer associate in a big firm, terrified by the future not of my own dreaming unfolding in front of me. It was such a weird time, living in an old familiar place, but on different terms, as a quasi-adult in a college town. Living in New York, I yearned for Ann Arbor, yet the minute I arrived, the streets started closing in on me again.

And now, some more decades later, the changes make the town barely recognizable to me. Gone are all the stores I frequented—yes, literally every single one. Not one survives, not Borders, not Middle Earth, not Peaceable Kingdom, not Falling Water, not Schoolkids Records. Some restaurants remain, and there are better ones, including a handful of decent breweries, which would have been irrelevant to the underage me in any case. But the stores were special because of all the solitary browsing one could do, in a crowd yet apart. This is a feeling one can cultivate only in an urban environment, walking in, walking around, walking out, invisible.

Ann Arbor is a reminder, a symbol of the time when everything was possible. Before I started law school, I could have started anything else instead. The road was chosen, but not yet taken. I could have taken a gap year (no, I could not have, I had no resources for that, but it is nice to think that I might have had options). I could have kept working at an office job and used my after work hours to find myself and my path. I could have… well, that is about it. I never really had choices. But there was that one brief shining moment when I thought I did—and that was in Ann Arbor. And so, this town will always be for me a symbol of possibilities, and that is enough for it to have been called “home”.

[1] “Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture” by Frank Uhle is a time-machine trip down memory lane to a time that I just barely glimpsed, but during which I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have lived.

[https://oldladywriting.com/2021/01/30/the-road-not-taken/]

This is the poster I should have guarded more carefully!

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Never Not in a Book Club

I have mentioned before how much I love reading [https://oldladywriting.com/2021/04/03/so-many-books-so-little-time/]. It is generally a solitary activity, unless one is in a book club. The need to share thoughts, ideas, impressions, to laugh and maybe even cry together over a story is so basic and valuable to me that I never not want to be in a book club. Even the worst book club, in my experience, cannot be all bad because, well, books!

Book clubs, I have been in a few. Initially, I thought they have to be run by libraries, for that is how I first got into one. We moved, I found a new library with a new book club, we moved again, and so forth. I loved the discussions, but eventually tired of the transient nature of those institutional associations. The last one, at the library in our current town, was a lunchtime affair. I was the only one who had to make an effort to come from work every month; everyone else was decades older—with the expected outlook on life. Conversation was decent until the librarian assigned Kevin Boyle’s “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age”. As other members spent MY lunch hour lamenting the collapse of property values in Detroit thanks to The Great Migration, I fled never to return.

I had a great time forming a book club with a couple of gal pals. It evolved—or devolved, depending on your viewpoint—almost immediately into an Eating and Drinking Club. The books were entirely incidental to the social aspect. At some point, there weren’t even any books. We clung to the pretense: Book Club goes to the movies, Book Club gets Thai food, Book Club visits speakeasies, Book Club actually tours a library. Eventually, the Eating and Drinking Club grew into Weekly Beer Night, and it happily continues as such to this day.

And yes, you know it’s coming, my tale of being in the worst book club ever–The Rich Ladies’ Book Club. I was invited by an acquaintance, so in my defense, I did not know that books alone would not provide enough commonality or shelter within the group. In their defense, I suppose no one expected a working class interloper or was prepared to deal with one.

There were some positives, such as everyone taking a turn selecting the books, and the books were generally wonderful—that is to say, normal book club fare. The Rich Ladies did not always read them, but I did, and greatly enjoyed. The overwhelming negative was the steady stream of one-up-woman-ship. There were endless talks of the cost of kids’ hockey training and travel (while I wondered when did hockey become rich people’s sport and remembered how back in the Old Country any frozen puddle served its purpose) and other sports. My oldest was already involved in theater, which did not impress anyone; my invitation to a community theater play was met with baffled murmurs. That is your child’s extracurricular activity? Instead of expensive sport? How very unusual…

I was always vaguely feeling like I was in a badly scripted parody of “Mean Girls, the Pre-Menopause Years”. One time, everyone effusively commiserated with one of the Rich Ladies, whose interior designer’s unavailability drove her in desperation to buy a mass-produced lamp at Pottery Barn (while I have been generally satisfied and occasionally thrilled by the offerings at Target). It was a calamity to be sure, but kudos to the resourceful lady of the house who braved the common throng and saved the day—and one could hardly tell that the item was not bespoke. Well, as long as one did not examine it closely.

The proverbial pièce de resistance was the time I brought a bottle of wine, which was an expected offering at each meeting. It was—wait for it—white Zinfandel, and from an unknown label to boot. It was from a local winery owned by someone I knew, so I thought that was a nice touch. Gasp! If there was any doubt before, this misstep immediately outed me as an unwashed mass. The hostess, a woman with a carefully cultivated stereotypical Gallic aggression I never actually encountered in France, insisted that I can only drink the wine I brought, being that it was not fit for The Rich Ladies’ consumption. Not wishing to cast their precious nectars before such a swine, they shared their wine bottles; I drank some of mine and took the rest with me (of course the hostess politely but firmly requested that it be removed from her home). To be fair, this was before I learned that what I really prefer is a robust red. But you know what? If I had to do it all over again, I would not only bring white zin—I would bring a box of it! [I am deliberately not posting any photo of wine in a box, because I do not want to shame any wine maker or drinker thereof] Had I been younger and less secure in my proletarian character, or had The Rich Ladies’ snootiness been less absurdly shallow, I might have felt worse. But as it was, I just never returned to their exclusive club. I am sure a sigh of relief was breathed on both sides.

One unexpected blessing of The Plague is my current book club, courtesy of bookclubs app and Zoom technology. There is a core group of four, with occasional drop-ins. We are friendly, but do not socialize outside of book club—not the least reason for which is that we live all over the country. We have spirited and deep (if I do say so myself) conversations about the books we read, and occasionally go off on tangents. Some months I am reluctant to log in (for I am in charge of technology), because I would rather vegetate on the couch, yet I inevitably emerge refreshed, encouraged, and motivated. As much as life has taught me that all things come to an end and that change is inevitable, I sure hope this remains a constant for as long as possible, and that I am never not in a book club.

[What follows is the list of books read by my book club that I ranked 5 stars on Goodreads. Among these, I particularly recommend “Detransition, Baby” (no spoilers–but read with an open mind), “The Cider House Rules” (not new, but a modern classic, heartbreaking yet heartwarming), “Station Eleven” (I read it before the plague, and it haunted me until the unimaginable happened, and beyond), “The Midnight Library” (if you ever wondered, like me, where the road not taken might lead), and “The Sign for Home” (one of the most unique, thought-provoking, life-affirming, funny, and touching stories I have ever read–and the author, the wonderful and talented Blair Fell, Zoomed into our meeting and was an absolute joy to meet!)]

So Many Books, So Little Time

I read a lot. I have always read a lot. It started one warm sunny summer afternoon when I was five. My grandmother was reading “The Wizard of the Emerald City” to me (Russian version of “The Wizard of Oz”), but had to set it down because, as usual, household chores beckoned (this was some years before she started enlisting me and came to the swift conclusion that my lack of floor scrubbing and chicken plucking skills will never land me a husband.) She put the book on a piano stool (a piano in that time and place was mandatory; I was not encouraged to touch it). I circled it for a bit, unsure of how much trouble I will earn myself for touching a library book, but simply dying to know what happened when Ellie, Totoshka, and the gang encountered the savage сannibal. I picked up the book and managed to put enough letters together to get through the rest of the chapter. In my mind’s eye, I still see how the setting sun was streaming through the windows (we had northern exposure in our one room).

And my most enduring, most comforting, most enriching, most faithful, most influential past time was born. I have never stopped reading, not through years of university, child-rearing, long hours at work. Backpacking through Europe at 19, I would go without a meal to spend what seemed like an extraordinary amount of money on English-language paperbacks in non-English speaking countries to read on trains (added bonus—lost weight). I would choose the most pages for the money, which was not always the best literary value, alas.

My reading practices, however, changed over the decades. As a child, if I liked a book, I would read and reread it. I would go back, flip through pages, land on a random passage, read from that point, look for favorite passages, reread those, and so on. This might explain why occasional quotes from “The Three Musketeers” or “Twelve Chairs” or even Chekhov’s short stories still come to me unbidden, but a book I read a month ago is so thoroughly forgotten that I might not recall either the title, the author, or the plot today (I mean you, “Where the Crawdads Sing”. No offense).

At some point, quality fell somewhat of a victim to quantity. You know those Goodreads challenges, to read 50 books a year? (Well, that’s the challenge I set for myself every year—doesn’t everyone? A book a week, with a couple of weeks off for binge-watching Netflix seems very reasonable.) But why such a rush? Is it because a friend said once, “I haven’t even read 1,000 books!” in a self-horrified manner? But, that was probably about 20 years ago, so I have hit the quasi-magic number by now. Or is it just because there is an embarrassment of riches out there? I do not want to miss out on something great, and so gulp books down like Lindor truffles.

But I miss the reflection. And what I really, really miss is the change in my relationship with books.

When I was a child, I read like a child. The literary characters were my friends. They lived in my imagination, and they were my counterlife[1]. I lived in their world, and they lived in mine.

In my childhood, the counterlife was galloping through the vaguely unimaginable streets of Paris with the musketeers. It was pure fantasy, as I never expected to walk the streets of Paris any more than I expected to walk on the surface of the moon[2]. When Did the Arc de Triomphe Start Leaning? – Old Lady Writing

At some point, and I do not know when exactly that border into adulthood was crossed—and the crossing was, I imagine, inevitable—book characters stopped appearing in my reality. Or, more accurately, I stopped going into theirs. A certain detachment occurred where, while I remain entertained, enlightened, educated, and generally touched (and occasionally irritated and even bored) by what I read for pleasure, it is no longer my alternate reality. It is just that—entertainment, education, etc. It is enough—of course it is enough, there are so many great books that I have read and have yet to read—but I sometimes miss that untamed fantasyland of my childhood, where every story was examined through the lens of how it could play out in counterlife, and where I tried every character on for size as a potential friend or alter ego.

It is unavoidable and logical, but it is occasionally sad when I stop and think about it. That wild inventiveness would be very helpful right now, as the global pandemic still rages, theaters are still closed, and non-fictional friends are still remote. This might be a good time to work on breathing new life into the counterlife…

The three most influential books of my childhood. There might be a theme here. Please note and appreciate that the illustration to famous poisoning scene of the “The Anjou Wine” chapter of “The Three Musketeers” is by the author of this blog.

[1] Thank you for introducing this term in “The Glass Hotel”, Emily St. John Mandel. I have always said “parallel universe”, but that implies, I think, something more impossible rather than improbable.

[2] I might add that the vast majority of my childhood literary heroes were male. I am of the generation and culture that was not bothered by that. In the childhood reenactments that I held with my girlfriends, we WERE the musketeers. I even won the top prize at a school New Year’s party, dressed as a musketeer in a costume made by my mom, wielding a plastic rapier, and performing the famous “Song about the sword”. What did I win? Probably an orange. Valor and Glory of the Motorbuilders – Old Lady Writing