Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

Matija was barely breathing. His sister went on, still whispering.

“You didn’t start writing in high school. The only authentic stuff you ever wrote was earlier, when you were a child. Later you were good at it because you’d learned how to lie about what you didn’t want to remember. Mom and I are partly to blame. Whenever you’d make something up and switch it with something that actually happened, we just nodded and smiled. Everything you’ve written—the short stories and the novel—all that is good, but it’s a by-product of the fact that you had to invent a childhood. But understand: Your obsession with writing won’t end, even if you write a hundred stories you think are good. It’s not the writing you’re aching for.”

“This is all totally… incredible.”

“Know what? Take a sedative to calm down, then have a shower because you reek. Sleep here. Tomorrow you’ll go to work, pretend you’re fine, and after you’ll go see a friend of mine whose job it is… to help deal with the serious stuff in life.”

“Please don’t send me to a shrink, I beg you,” said Matija, though there was no fight left in him at all.

“He earned a degree in psychology, but he hasn’t practiced in years. Okay? You’ll go out for a drink, take a walk, whatever. C’mon, do it for me. And don’t forget Stjepan Hećimović, the guy with the worst luck of the decade.”

“My sister informs me you’re no longer working as a psychiatrist. You’re on the young side for retirement.”

“Let’s drop the formalities, all right? Yeah, it didn’t work out, me being a shrink. I had a practice in the Upper Town for a while, but I started losing patients. My fault, I’m sure. I told them they were crazy. Since then, I’ve pretended to sell art, but my wife supports me. I told her, too, that she’s insane herself, putting up with me the way she does.”

“So were they crazy? Your patients, I mean?”

“Who isn’t crazy in their own way? I’m just sorry I didn’t get more money out of those pompous assholes. I should have told them what they wanted to hear: That their parents were to blame, that everything will be fine if they spend fifteen minutes a day repeating they’re worthy, beautiful, and good, and reality is whatever they make of it. The new-age bullshit some young psychologists are selling these days. I’m an old fart.”

“So who’s right?”

“Neither. But when faced with a complicated problem, people shouldn’t lurch off into esoterics. I hate the idea of promising people they’ll be successful, healthy—fuck it, forever young—if they buy into something… You can’t just manifest a change in something rooted so deeply in a person that they can’t reach it. I have a friend who spent the last five years of his life in front of a TV because he was certain everything would turn out fine seeing as he was visualizing success and love.”

“I thought… I assume you’re doing this as a favor to my sister, so I’d be interested to know what she told you.”

“I may not be a shrink anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in human nature. Your sister only said that weird things were happening to you, and you haven’t been yourself lately—nothing more.”

“I came because my sister asked me to, and because I can’t figure out how to move forward. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to be honest with someone I don’t know about such personal stuff. But now that I’m here, I’m…”

“You have no idea what weirdos I’ve listened to: lawyers, politicians, business leaders… and their kids! I promise I won’t tell you you’re crazy.”

“Well, okay… I feel like I’ve been receiving signals from the past… This has been happening a few times a week for the last two years… I see people, and I’m not sure whether they’re actually there.”

“Are they always the same?”

“The same one appears a few times, then stops. I saw an old woman standing in front of my building, always wearing the same apron. A fat man says my name as he walks by. And sometimes I feel like I’m supposed to be someone else. I don’t know how else to describe it. And then sometimes I see something real, like a car or something, and for no reason I’m suddenly really angry.”

“Okay, you really are crazy. Kidding, kidding. Well, you’re probably not delusional—you’re way too lucid for that.”

“I’m almost sure these are things I repressed years ago. I remember very little of my childhood, before we moved to Zagreb. Yesterday my sister told me about some weird things I went through, and I thought I might be able to remember them now. I’m pretty sure I’m not scared of what I would remember. I just want to know what really happened.”

“I don’t know whether it’s possible to access the original experience—perhaps by hypnosis, though even that isn’t a sure thing. But how do you know this is about the past and not a distorted perspective on what’s happening now? Maybe you’d find it easier to project your feelings back into a mysterious past.”

“I know this isn’t proof, but all of it… feels like something terrifying, something only I know. And it doesn’t seem random. Sometimes I can link two of the elements. For instance, never a face and a name, but a yellow short-sleeved T-shirt and the fact that it rained that day, stuff like that.”

“I see. Well, why not try to accept these random isolated signals for what they are: fragments of a whole you can’t access? Why try to understand? It’s highly unlikely things would change significantly for you if someone were to show you a film of your childhood.”

“These episodes, these visions are… getting more intense. At first I ignored them. I thought, I don’t know, maybe they’ll just go away. It’s like I’m living in a house where there are some doors I can’t open because I don’t have the keys, and I don’t know what’s behind them. I thought maybe these things would show themselves in time. But nothing’s happened, except I can see that I’ve started avoiding certain places, while obsessively visiting others. I know what my sister told me, but even still… I’ve made up all sorts of stories about my childhood… and I lost a person who was important to me. Because of the lies. That’s why I need to understand. And besides… I don’t know how to explain this… They have power. They’re frightening. They’re catching up with me, and they don’t mean well. They’re controlling my behavior, impeding me. There’s this primal malice.”

“Good old Sigmund would have loved your story. He’d have sniffed a little of the white stuff and said, ‘ Ja, ja, sehr gut, Matija.’ Look, what you’ve told me is troubling. I am 100 percent certain there’s a mechanism by which what is left behind goes right on affecting us, controlling us. But how, and how much power it has… no one knows. Going back to an original experience, the ‘real’ memories… It’s not possible. People think that when you experience something, you form a memory that’s like a photograph of what happened, and then, when you recall it, you distort it a little, fail to mention some things, add a few others, and that’s that. But we know that memories aren’t really distorted as much as they’re always re-forming. Each time you retell something, you’re erasing the old memory and rerecording it, and the next time, you start from your most recent version and modify that, and so on. Describe the plot of the last book you read, and then read it again. You’ll see you’ve changed things, yet you’re certain that is what you read. When that American space shuttle— Discovery , Challenger , whatever—exploded… a group of elementary school children were assigned to write essays about where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and what they said when they first heard about the tragedy. Twenty years later, they brought the same group together and asked them to rewrite that essay. None of what they wrote was consistent. Every person wrote an entirely different story about what he or she was doing, thinking, and saying that day. When they gave them back the essays they’d written twenty years earlier, the reaction was mainly ‘Yeah, sure, that’s my handwriting, but I didn’t write that.’ Human memory can rarely serve as evidence. I clearly remember paying some jerk €270,000 for an apartment that wasn’t worth half that. But I also remember the asshole snickering as he got into his car. What I’m getting at is that I may have added that part myself. I can’t be sure. As soon as there are feelings in play, particularly negative ones, a person tends, I think, to tell a slightly changed story. Disgrace, fear, guilt… These are the most fickle of narrators.”