lake

When I look back, I remember the world as much smaller. Perhaps that is because

the pain that bit into everything after your death is still achingly fresh, but whilst reminiscing I

seem to be looking at a small-scale, rudimentary reconstruction of reality. Everything that was is

reduced to a photograph that came out out of focus because of the photographer’s distraction,

or to a painting forgotten in an attic and eaten away by the vagaries of time. I can still recognise

most of the faces, the places and the constellation of trivial and significant events. Yet it is all

blurred, confused, spinning around my mind without me being able to pin anything down. I used

to constantly set myself the meticulous and grave task of recuperation, yet I soon came to

realise that the kind of recuperation I aspired to, the level of accuracy I desperately needed to

comfort my sadness, would be a hopeless ideal. I once read about a town somewhere in

Switzerland which was submerged in order to create an artificial lake. The steeple of a church

can still be seen jutting out of the water, and during the cold season, when the lake freezes, it

can be reached on foot. A legend says that on some winter nights, when the whole world is quiet

and everyone is curled up into their beds next to their loved ones, you can still hear the church

bells ring – faintly, as if they were enveloped in cotton-wool. Now imagine that small town lying

underwater, yet envision it with people in it, fully dressed and apparently going about their day,

yet moving at a microscopic rate, like the one of plants growing. When they try to have a

conversation, their voices feel like the distant song you hear when you place an empty seashell

on one of your ears and you are tricked into hearing the sound of the ocean. One day, the

villagers look up at the sky and it looks like it’s going to rain; there is a crease of turmoil amidst a

flock of immaculately white clouds. Yet slowly they become conscious of the peculiar fact that

the water is not precipitating from the sky, but washing away from the churches and the houses,

the trees in the park, the country lanes. And the small town emerges from the water, surprisingly

untouched by the phenomenon. Entirely and miraculously preserved, like a bottled distillation of

life. And sound returns. Everything stirs. Initially they hear the first bird-call in the morning. Then

a child’s cry for his mother. The cows demanding to be milked. And life is breathed back into the

small town.

My obsessive ambition was to recover you and our life before your death in that

same condition; yet I know that in real life, that place is still submerged underwater, immersed in

a deafening and colourless silence. My mentally laborious attempts to organise this constant

carousel of words, voices and faces into a meaningful pattern are exhausting and ultimately

futile; as soon as I think that I have managed to salvage one detail with full precision – the

colour of your favourite dress, or the geometrical patterns of the huge carpet in our summer

house – the waves once again resurface, crashing over that tranquil spot of calmness in an

ocean where I am once more floating adrift, like an empty, carved log, the shell of a person. The

sole mode of salvation I have left, to anchor a last frail thread around the pointed black heads of

the departing gondolas of time, is invention, or re-invention. Sometimes my reconstructions of

the past appear perfectly crafted, meticulously pieced together like masterful reproductions of a

Byzantine mosaic, each tessera shimmering with an alluring yet fake semblance of gold; other

times they are soft and elusive like fragrances, moody caprices of a sad alchemist; on

particularly melancholy days too hazy and illusory to possess even a semblance of realness,

although I wonder more and more often whether these fantasies are the only way I have to

retrieve the closest version of a real past. In fact, whenever I part the velvet curtains and look

inside the tiny, globe-like dimension of it I have created in my mind, I am often surprised by how

alive it appears to be; as if that life had continued to go on as routinely as usual somewhere

else, undisturbed, uncaring. I often find myself envying that elegance of still movement. I do not

see it as death, nor stillness, but as a mere spatial difference in time, the nanosecond that is

eternity for the star.