#1144

I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday. Well, actually, we met the day before, but we didn’t speak until yesterday. Yesterday he acquired a name. His name is Henry Dale, and I don’t need to tell him that time has ground to a halt. He already knows.

And he knows a lot more than that. He knows it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay. He knows what the words mean: that yesterday doesn’t mean the seventeenth of November, that tomorrow means the eighteenth again, and that the nineteenth is a day we may never see. He knows it when he wakes up in the morning and when he goes to bed at night.

Now he also knows that he is not alone, because this morning we met at Café Möller. We met because we had arranged to meet, and because we both remembered this was what we had arranged. Two people who remembered. Not one who remembered and one who forgot. It’s strange to think: someone walked through the door with their memory intact.

Because that is what he did: he walked through the door of the café. When he arrived shortly before nine o’clock, I was already sitting at the table. I had got there around half past eight, ordered a coffee at the counter and waited for the table by the window to free up. At 8:39 it did, so I hadn’t been sitting there for very long when Henry D. came up the steps. 

He opened the door, spotted me at the table, and with a look that made it clear he’d recognized me, he walked over, hesitating for the moment it took me to get to my feet, and then we just stood there, face to face, unable to come up with a suitable greeting. 

Henry D. took a step towards me, extending his hand, but as I moved forward, he drew it back a bit. I turned slightly, and we found ourselves in a lopsided embrace — me attempting an air-kiss to the one side, him giving my shoulder a few pats — and this strange medley of hellos, scraps of old habits we had dragged with us from the past, turned the whole thing into an odd little dance: clumsy and a bit off-kilter.

We couldn’t help but laugh, probably at our wavering and the oddness of our gestures, but also because we felt out of practice. We had apparently both lost the knack of greeting another person, or rather, of greeting a person we recognized and who recognized us in return.

Not that there’s anything extraordinary about it. We were just two people who had met the day before and had moved the other from the category of a person to that of a specific person, and now we were meeting again. It should have been simple, but we were clearly so used to being among people who didn’t believe they’d seen us before that we no longer remembered how to greet a person we knew.

But we did: we knew each other. Because we met yesterday and we remembered it today, and even though I’ve seen all the café’s patrons and staff and everybody on the street outside many more times than I’ve seen Henry D., none of them would have said that they knew me. In fact, they would have said they had never set eyes on me before. The recognizing only happens on my part, naturally enough, but then here we were, Henry D. and I, and if anyone had asked whether we knew each other, we could’ve said that yes, as a matter of fact we did. We had spoken, we knew each other’s names, we remembered having met, and now we were resuming a conversation which had started yesterday at the university and could be picked up again as we sat at the window table in Café Möller, where we had both shown up and greeted each other with an awkward dance that made us laugh.

He must have felt as astonished as I did, because all at once a lightness came over us, a giddiness which couldn’t be attributed solely to our lack of sleep the night before. We laughed our quick, relieved laughs, and suddenly there was nothing remarkable about the situation. We were simply picking up a conversation which had already begun.

The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.

I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.

Once our relieved and slightly nervous laughter had died away, Henry D. admitted he’d been worried. He’d been afraid that my memory of our encounter would be erased overnight. I told him that in the early morning hours, after a sleepless night, I had nearly convinced myself that I’d imagined the whole thing; that our meeting hadn’t taken place, that it hadn’t happened at all. But it had, it had happened, and he ordered a cup of coffee and we had breakfast, and although I still don’t quite understand how it could be possible, suddenly there we were, talking about when we first met, yesterday, at the university, he with his version of events, I with mine: him making his way down the steps in an auditorium, me edging my way along a row of seats, him eyeing the woman coming toward him with surprise, me gesturing that I’d like a word. And there we stood, each with our own view, from two different angles, but the ingredients were the same, the room and the rows of seats and the steps leading to the exit. We remembered all of it, and we could share that recollection because there were two of us who had stored our meeting in our memories.

After breakfast, we returned to my apartment, and I showed him in — not to my Roman mess, not to trash bags by the door, half-empty cups, salad containers, floors strewn with papers and books, but to my tidy kitchen, to my living room with its bookshelves and folders and neatly stacked papers. All the material for my investigations was there. Books on the Greeks and Macedonians, the Mycenaeans and Persians, a few pages of notes on the Hittites and Sumerians, and a pile on the Egyptians. And then, of course, there were the Romans. There were books on the Franks and files on the Spartans and Etruscans. There were notes on northern tribes, lists of various Germanic peoples, and on the table next to the computer lay both Janita Weng’s Rome and Rye and her latest book, Noxious Pustule — The Case Against Claviceps Purpurea, along with a survey on marine archaeological artifacts, everything in an order that was not chronological or alphabetical or geographical or arranged according to any other well-known system, but an order of sorts nonetheless. It was possible to walk around without stepping on piles of papers and books, there was none of the scattered detritus from days and nights spent on the trail of dead Romans and lost civilizations. It was easy to move around the apartment, you didn’t have to dig your way through or clear a forest or hack a path with a machete. It was simply an apartment, the relatively tidy apartment of an inquisitive person, which we left again after a quick tour, a look at the medlar tree in the backyard, a glass of water by the kitchen sink, and then off we went, leaving our bags on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t something we discussed. We just left them there and set off for a walk by the river.

By then we had long since begun to unravel the story, the string of eighteenths of November which we called up from our memories, all the way back to the very first day and further still, to our lives before the eighteenth, and then back again to more November days. We sat on the stone wall by the river watching as boats sailed by, jumping back and forth in our strings of days before arriving once again, or more than once, at the details of our unexpected meeting, at the uneasiness, the surprise and the inexplicable coincidence that had brought us together. And after sitting by the river for long enough, we strolled toward town, eventually returning to my apartment where Henry picked up his bag and we parted ways — he to his hotel, I to my bed, where I would have gone to sleep if I could, but I no longer feel tired; instead I’m oddly perky, filled with wonder, because even though I have sometimes considered whether it would be possible to drag someone else with me into the eighteenth of November, I could never have imagined that I might meet someone already walking around in my loop.

#1167

What do I think of Henry Dale? I don’t know. What would I have thought of him if we had met under different circumstances? I’m not sure it’s sympathy I feel for him. It’s something else, a feeling that we’re bound by a common fate. By something that has befallen us both.

This morning, when Henry D. came into the kitchen wearing a white shirt I hadn’t seen before, it made me think of a hospital room: a bare room containing two beds. And there we lay, myself and another girl. I must have been thirteen or fourteen, she a couple of years older. We were in to have our tonsils removed, and she had turned up carrying a green bag, with her thick curly hair pushed back with a headband, clearly not happy about having to comply with hospital rules and change into hospital clothes and be operated on. While I was already in bed wearing my white hospital gown, she dispatched a nurse to fetch her a new one because the gown she had been given was too small.

The nurse admired her bag and inquired about her life and her school. She responded in a condescending tone and repeatedly asked for help with the slightest things, as if the nurse were her maid or servant.

We had to fast that night, so instead of eating dinner we drank red juice in bed. It was clear that my roommate felt it beneath her dignity to be saddled with me. As though she blamed me and my childishness for our having to drink juice and go to bed early like little kids and after agreeing that the juice tasted weird, we didn’t talk much that evening.

The next morning, we were wheeled off to the operating room — first me, then her shortly afterward. A mask was placed over my face and I was instructed to count to ten, but I only made it to four, and when I woke up I was back in my room and the bed next to mine was gone. All I remember is feeling dizzy and seeing the empty space next to me. I felt sick and looked around for the cord to pull to call a nurse, but it wasn’t there and before long I fell back asleep.

When I woke, the bed next to mine was back in its place and my neighbor was fast asleep. I tried once more to find the cord to call for help. All I could see was a strange hook high up on the wall where the cord should have been fastened. Gingerly, I turned over and tried to inch closer to the wall and up to the hook, but my arms were floppy and buckled under my weight when I tried to prop myself up. The second time I tried, I became nauseous and threw up blood onto the white pillowcase. Later, I tried again and on the third or fourth attempt I succeeded. I managed to push myself against the headboard and wriggle my back up the wall, which was a yellowish-white and oddly grainy, then lifted myself higher and finally pulled on the hook where the cord should have hung. I heard a sound in the hall, but nothing happened.

Some time later, a nurse came into the room. She glanced from one bed to the other, from my sleeping neighbor’s cord to the one that should have been hanging next to me, up to the hook and down to my pillow. I don’t know why I remember it so clearly, since I must still have been affected by the anesthetic. She said my pillowcase looked as if it needed changing, and she must have taken care of that, but I didn’t wake up again until my mother, my father, and my sister Lisa came into the room, one after another through the heavy brown door. My pillowcase was clean and white, my roommate awake and sitting up, and from the hook hung a cord, zigzagging down the wall, still kinked from being folded and stored.

For the rest of our stay we barely spoke to each other. I was the younger, unremarkable patient who quickly recovered and was soon back to normal, while she lay pale and listless in bed, in pain, her hair lank and dull. She considered herself too grown-up to enjoy the generous scoops of vanilla ice cream we were given, and nothing could remove the woeful expression from her face until, all of a sudden, she felt better, took a long shower and emerged as her old self.

Everyone was thrilled and applauded her dramatic transformation from ashen-faced patient to glamorous teenager. The next day we were picked up by our parents: she by her mother, who was greeted with a half-hearted grimace, me by my family, who insisted on taking pictures of the two of us in our room.

I don’t know if under different circumstances — had we been older, for instance — we might have become friends. I doubt it, but I left the hospital feeling that the situation had brought us together, and that, whether we liked it or not, a bond had been forged between us.

I don’t know why I thought of my hospital companion. Perhaps because that’s how I see Henry D. The strangeness of the situation has brought us together. As if we were alone in a world of anesthetic, juice and white shirts.

#1403

Nothing sounds jarring anymore. Things have peripheral sounds and lateral sounds. They have consonant and resonant sounds. I slip in and out of shops and cafés, I saunter down the pavement, I cross streets and listen to cars and voices, the sounds move away or come closer, they hang in the air, then disappear again. I hear undertones and overtones and the countertones that make every sound distinct. 

Sometimes, I seek out new sounds. I attend concerts; I don’t go just once, I listen and return, and each time there are other sounds: a hidden instrument, a note unfurling in the background, a marginal sound I hadn’t heard before, an unusual timbre, an unexpected echo.

I listen to the clatter of plates and silverware in the university cafeteria, I hear chairs scraping and voices drifting from classrooms, and today I stepped into a long, narrow room where the sounds seemed to stretch along the walls.

A philosopher was scheduled to speak about the role of philosophy in the world, and I only noticed the poster because I had strayed into halls I rarely went down. It was the sound of a shoe that guided me there, a sound like air wrestling water inside something rubbery, it must have been a leaky sole that let in water. I was sitting at a table in the cafeteria when I heard it. I listened, got up and followed the sound, the shoe, the foot stepping, a shoe making its way across the cafeteria and through the atrium, down one hall after another, out a door and finally into a room with a notice on the door, in French. I followed it inside just as the philosopher was being introduced. I took a seat at a desk, not at the back of the room but off to the side. Behind him was a blackboard and a scattering of people in the first couple of rows, perhaps twelve or fourteen in total, but no one seemed concerned by the low turnout. There were exactly as many people present as the room required; there were enough ears.

The philosopher, an older gentleman with a bald head and wisps of hair at his temples, nodded kindly, as if he knew us. He spoke about philosophy and its place in the world, how we would miss it if it were gone.

He believed that philosophy was in a tight spot, but its most vehement critics were, and should remain, philosophers themselves. That philosophy must constantly be put to the test, that it must always seek to challenge itself, to break off pieces of itself, to throw tomatoes and eggs, gifts and Gordian knots in all directions — at others and at itself. That was its ability: to turn against itself. Make a mockery of itself. Be its own target.

He spoke of the other sciences, how they strove to conquer mountains while philosophy dwelled in a peculiar flatland dotted with little cottages, perhaps a few acacia trees. How philosophy continually nourished the other sciences, supplying the equipment for their mountain climbs, balls for their games, knives and forks for their meals. It cut up their food and took them for walks as if they were dogs, it handed them weapons and tools, small implements, props, provisions, oxygen tanks. Band-Aids and needles and dissolvable stitches, making repairs so subtle you’d never know it had stopped by to mend a wound or two. The philosopher talked about sociologists and economists, about the natural sciences, religions and cosmologies, the entire dance through history, and all the while philosophy was busy cutting off slices of itself and tossing them to the nearest branch of science, sometimes in random directions, to the people, the rulers, the arts, and each time it would lose something and each time this would grow back — at least he thought it would, that’s what it usually did. There was nothing wrong with that: making repairs and giving everything away, as long as philosophy kept philosophizing, as long as it was prepared to attack itself when it was wrong, when it missed the mark or fed monsters that should never have been fed.

The problem, he argued, arose when philosophy sought to itself become a branch of science — when philosophers rushed forward to reap benefits for themselves, something to eat, a tool, a weapon or just some affection, instead of patiently waiting for what philosophy had lost to regrow. Like a bride, he said, who tosses her bouquet to the guests but then dives into the crowd to catch it herself.

We laughed at his imagery and the rather comical way he flung out his arm when describing the bouquet toss. The mood in the room was lighthearted. A young man beside me had written Wie eine Braut on his notepad. I had neither paper nor pencil in my bag, I had come to listen, and that’s what I was doing. I mostly listened to the philosopher’s voice, but also to the words. I hadn’t heard French words in a long time. It felt familiar, like a schoolday long ago.

I had been listening to all the familiar sounds for a while before I noticed that the words had begun to blur strangely at the edges. At first, I thought the oblong shape of the room must have been distorting the sounds. I thought of concert halls and acoustics, the direction of sounds and the empty blackboard behind the philosopher’s back. But it wasn’t the room or the acoustics, it was something in his voice, a sibilance, an awkwardness in his words. 

I wondered if something might be wrong with the philosopher, if he was ill or perhaps having a heart attack, but I had been at the university at this time of day before and I would have noticed if an ambulance had been called. No, there was nothing wrong with him, at least nothing serious, because when I looked up I realized he merely had a tooth coming loose, an incisor. He had been struggling with it, clearly some kind of implant, which now, just as he had delivered his wedding analogy, fell out and dropped onto his tongue. I looked up at the exact moment that it happened. He snapped his mouth shut to catch the tooth and moved it to the side, preparing his next sentence, which came out a bit more garbled than the previous ones, but it didn’t really matter as we were still thinking about the bride. The philosopher didn’t think it necessary — for the bride to try catching her own bouquet, that is. For philosophy to cut and run, so to speak, would be pointless.

While still speaking, he managed — much to everyone’s relief — to regain control of the tooth and with a surprisingly elegant movement he flicked it from his mouth into his left hand. In a flash, his hand had risen to his face, grabbed the tooth, and disappeared into his jacket pocket, all without him missing a beat.

There he stood, hand in his pocket one moment, then back out the next without the tooth, expounding on the role of philosophy the entire time — or at least, that’s how I remember it. If philosophy continually ran off to engage with whichever science or whichever person it had most recently fed, challenged or stitched up, he said, it would leave behind an empty space no one else could fill. Or perhaps not simply an empty space, because that was precisely what philosophy offered: a place from which the bouquet could be tossed. If philosophy chased after the bouquet, it risked creating a void, a vacuum almost, sucking everything into a kind of melting pot in which everything was blended together until all meaning was lost. He believed that philosophy should stay put, contributing as it could, for without it all the other fields would slowly wither, break down, lack oxygen, be reduced to sheer mechanics. Philosophy must persist in this way: forever self-critical and dissatisfied with its own abilities, perpetually clumsy and awkward, busy tying Gordian knots no one could undo, solving problems no one saw as problems, combing through the tangled hair of human thought to set it free once more, attacking oversimplification and simplifying the attackable, and so it had to be, continuously renewing its vain attempts at certainty, wondering and searching, uncouth and utterly unabashed — and here, everyone laughed, or at least the faces I could see — by its toothlessness.

Now I saw the audience shift uneasily, wondering if they had just witnessed a scene that had been orchestrated from the start. Was it a coincidence, was it the philosopher’s knack for improvisation, or had it been planned all along? No one knew, and now the moderator, who up until this point had done nothing beyond briefly introducing the philosopher, hastened to ask a question about one of the philosopher’s books. Other questions followed, in German, English, and French, and the philosopher responded effortlessly in each language, his words still perforated by the sound of his missing front tooth, but it was no longer a jarring sound, simply a sound.

When the lecture ended, I stood up, heard the squelching sound of the shoe again and followed its wearer down the hall. I made my way back to the cafeteria and sat at the same table I had occupied a few hours earlier. The sound of the shoe was gone, I was alone, and shortly afterward I took the tram back to Wiesenweg, somewhat bewildered by the power sounds seemed to have over my actions. Now, I sit here with a window open to the night, feeling that I ought to dampen my receptiveness slightly, as I do not know where it will lead me next.

Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell