Читать книгу Till Kingdom Come - Andrej Nikolaidis - Страница 8

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As if it wasn’t bizarre enough that I experienced the memories of other people, whose identity I woke up in, what I considered my own memory now lost all narrative continuity over time. Not only did I not know what I had in common with the people I remembered, but I didn’t even know what I had in common with the me I could remember.

My time seemed to shrink and then to scatter in all directions, forwards and backwards, up and down, into yesterday and tomorrow, exploding into thousands of droplets – fragments I tried again and again to unite, in vain. It was like a ball of wool that rolls down the hill into a stream and ends up all tangled in the waterweed, or like a piece of Czech porcelain from grandmother’s chest of drawers that falls to the terracotta floor. It demanded an exceptional effort to re-sort the findings about my own existence and assemble an even slightly convincing narrative about myself. Social contacts were becoming ever harder for me. I was terrified of questions and prop-phrases like ‘remember the time we...’ or ‘you know how...’ because I had no answers to them. Actually I did, but they weren’t socially acceptable. A short, honest ‘no’ was out of the question. No, I don’t remember. No, I don’t know you. No, I really don’t know who you are. Lots of little ‘noes’, which each individually and all together meant one thing: no, I don’t know who I am.

In turn, finding consolation in solitude now ceased being a matter of choice and became a necessity. If I wanted to stay outside of institutions I could be put into for my own good by people I knew nothing about, but who claimed to be well-intentioned and even friends, I had to reduce my contacts with the outside world. In that way I created the time I needed to tell myself about myself.

I built myself of water. I tried to give the water shape and hold it back, at least for long enough to glance at myself briefly in the mirror. All that I touched and all that I owned ran between my fingers, trickled away from me, met weirs and then changed course and shape, flowing, falling, gushing away and sinking into the ground, only to well up again, elusive and completely unable to retain any shape.

It was no easy task, but I managed to put my life in order so that I could function in spite of my ‘condition’, which was constantly worsening. There is only one recipe for happiness, and that is to desire as little as possible. A simple life, even if spent in privation, is the closest you’ll get to happiness. When you accept that you have little, most of the problems that have dogged you will vanish – because those problems were fuelled by all the futile efforts to gain more. It’s a simple matter: to have a lot takes a lot. Everything I had gained cost me dearly. It wasn’t worth it.