Careful, we’re in a memory now.

If you feel the need to walk - don’t. Think first of where you want to go.
Places are like taxicabs around here. You just get into one.

So, lets take a look.
Remember, stand still. Distances are nothing.

On our right is a piano. It’s old and the story goes that it was smuggled from Germany during the war. It’s an interesting story, but I will tell it later.

The piano is filled with glass jars filled with water. When you play, if you can play well, the sound floods, it spills and crashes over the apartment. It’s beautiful. Every time I come back I hear its nocturnes. There is never anybody here. You can stay for days.

Listen.

It’s the one in G-Minor. The page that someone ripped at the top. But I put the book back. The piano doesn’t need it.

I have been walking around these walls. Coming back to them. For how long? It’s not always the same. Scholars of travel and of space will argue: time is motion. Motion is time. If you return to the center of your space, to the center of your time, you will find neither.

But I will have to disagree. Kindly.

At this moment the sky is grey outside. Turn a bit more to the right. That door with the glass in it that is hard to see through. That is my room. Peak in.

The windows are closed. Daylight leans over the bookshelf, slightly falls over the new years tree. The tree is in the corner. It’s dry. It must be March then. This year we had left it in for too long. We forgot all about it.

There is a pipe near the window. It sucks up the echoes from the yard. Water drops down like pebbles. It’s March and everything above is melting.

Let us go somewhere else.

Quick.
Through the corridor. The door, the living room (our feet still by the piano).
OK.
We’re here.

It’s warm. Even in the evenings it seems as if the sun never leaves. The grey television screen in the corner holds on to its dust. The vase on a small table near the armchair cradles its mint drops. There’s about four of them there.

And the table! The table where the sun rests in a fixed parallelogram of yellow. The red and white checkered tablecloth.
Everything is good now.

I sit down.

Below me, a bowl. Beans and lettuce and sour cream in a soup that is green and white with everything. To the left, a white little plate, a piece of bread, black, the butter - light yellow. Cut into small little pieces. Small little soldiers. To my right, my mother.

I do not see her. I see an old sweatshirt. Flannel.

My mother tells me then of the lost gnome. There were a thousand stories about him. The gnome once found a machine. Wandering through where the forest became thin he found it by accident. The gnome was tiny and the machine was tiny also.

I see it. Small and rectangular like a digital silver watch. Big as a red-checkered square. I pick it up and put it under the shadow of my plate.

My mother continues. He didn’t know what it was, the gnome. But he couldn’t help but tinker with it. He had to figure it all out.

It took him ages.

That was the hardest part, after all. Years passed. Each day the gnome would run from the village into the forest. He would inspect every lever, every switch.

Then it came to life. Suddenly.

The gnome did not know much. What it was about, where it came from in the first place.
He pulled down the cover.
He pressed a button.

He went.

The watch, this streamlined spec of silver, it could take him anywhere. Any place. Any time. Any person. The gnome met kings. He danced with princesses. Ate grapes with Scheherazade. He listened to her stories.

Porters. Mules. Ali Baba. I listen to them and suddenly time begins to coil. Stories within a story, memories within a memory. The room is funny that way. But it is only from this room, from this apartment that I can travel. This is the terminal, it seems. But why?

I become nervous. For a second I step back.

And there is nobody. Everything clicks downward. The rooms are empty.

Still, the sun is where it was. There are small breadcrumbs over the tablecloth. Muted through the door come the rings of the piano.

Suddenly I see everything better.

Everything begins to fill. There are shoes now by the door, near the shelf in the corridor. I am still in the room, but can see them from here. On top of the shelf there are glass bottles. We use them to fill up with water for the piano. I fill them up in the kitchen. I see everything. The cottage cheese drips bored from a sack near the window. A small wooden table, the wood painted white, brown and soaked in the parts chipped away. My feet are still by the piano, do you see? This is simple.

Watch.

The balcony. We’re on it. We’ve gone through the room where the piano stands, where our feet still are. The piano is playing a mazurka now. A song or two had passed.

I look around. Below the balcony is the yard. Ahead, garages. On the left a new building is being pieced together. They have been building it as long as I can remember, and thus, here, now, they are building it always. A piece goes up. The crane lifts it. It will be somebody’s window. Somebody’s kitchen. At ground level, black tiles paste themselves over the fresh cement. The rest of the floors paint themselves beige. Beige upon beige.

And now suddenly we see it from below. The sun breaks over the straight edge of the roof under the sky. We’ve dropped straight into the yard. It wasn’t hard. Memory is soft, after all. It is the soft pillow of possibility. Anything could happen here. We land without a sound.

The new building stretches up and up to our left. We are by a tree. There is a rock, an enormous, primeval rock that stands under it. There are a few tree stumps near it. In the autumn we all use the stumps to climb up onto the rock. We make a mountain of leaves below it. We jump. Then we climb back up again.

I am showing you this because you need to know me. If we’re going to walk here, to go around this yard, to see the alleys that flow out of it, we need to know each other. This place is treacherous. It has a peace like no other but it is worse than any summit tightrope. I have seen people ski off rooftops. Fly off swings. Plainly disappear into the garages.

Look, a small road to the garbage pile and we are near them. Stay close. Some of them are open. Mouths of uncertainty. Black, there is a constant smell of cement dust and oil. There was a man in one of them who lived under a car. I only saw his feet until he was no longer there. Everybody said he was sick and that he ended his life with a screwdriver.

I do not go near them. I walk to the garbage pile quickly, I carry a plastic bucket by my side, there are cucumber peels, apricot seeds, a glass bottle, I woosh the bucket up and everything comes out.

In the winter though, this turns into my favorite place in the yard. No one knows about it and yet it is the most beautiful. The owners close their garages and there is no one here. The yard is empty anyway, always, yet it is then that it truly seems at ease. The poplars crunch their twigs softly under the crisp winter air. Snow spreads like sour cream over the burnt back of the yard.

I come to the garbage pile. In the winter it is covered with flakes and has no smell. There is a small mattress near the garages. I am not afraid to go near them because the owners closed them up until the spring. You put the mattress against the garage, you put the tip of your shoe into the wooden frame, and you ascend. You climb.

On the garage roofs, there is snow. Snow up to your knees. No one touches it. You can plop. Make human toilet seats. Human shadows. Arms out, legs out. Human touches. Visualized.

But it is not winter yet. I stand now (feet still by the piano) within the empty yard. Everything is so big. Sounds come like air balloons at me through the summer warmth. It is summer here, now, it is March back in my room and perhaps September around the checkered table in the living room. That is the kind of time we have here. If a stranger would pass through the yard (as often they do on the way to the university or the park), and would ask me: dear boy, what time is it right now, I would tell him:

It is a different sort of time here, sir. It is not the time that circles around the yard in clouds and stars and airplanes. It is only the kind of time that me and you bring into this yard ourselves, dear sir. It is the sort of time that sits in our bone marrow. It is the beautiful disease that we carry. By stepping back here we infect the air with it.

But it’s all right. Do not worry, sir, do not stir for your briefcase or umbrella. We are inside the spindle now. It spins faster than anything. If someone was to try and find us, the spindle would appear to them as standing still, (as spindles do when they are spun). But we know better.

Sir, the time is: a crumpled time, a fragmented time - time of quarks and pigments and memories. Its outside flow breaks here.

I can tell you that it is morning because near us I see two or three apples in the dirt that no one has yet picked up. I can tell you it is midday because the poplars lull as I remember them when coming back home with a chessboard. We piece together the time around us like a quilt. A quilt of understandings, dreams, who knows what else. We stretch it farther and farther until we can make a tent out of it. Our own little planetarium. Fine sir, sit on the ground with me. Do not worry about your appointments.

Look up.

The time is: poplar trees stretching, the crane crowing over, the swings moving only slightly… who touches them? Who rocks them so softly yet precisely?

We are small now, so small sitting on the ground. I see details, small details of the quilt – the way the playground sand sticks to the wooden planks that guard it, the way a stone edges its way out of the ground like a loose tooth, the small apple forgotten, the poplars so high over everything, the road bending beneath them and their leaves hanging out near the curb. I see the sky, the day, time sweeping the clouds along like a brush – the external time, the outside time, the outer edges of the spindle spinning and spinning…

and you fine sir..

What do you see?