There's a moment in In the Night of Time that sent my mind racing, and it was unexpectedly echoed in EEG. The protagonist flees Spain, probably forever, carrying just a small suitcase. He crosses the border into France on foot and makes his way to Paris where he puts up at a hotel that is filled with the displaced people of Europe, mostly Eastern European Jews, until he can get his visa to travel to America. He isn't at ease until he's on his ship en route to New York, and even then he's conscious of his small suitcase, his few belongings which must make him suspect precisely because they are so few. This Paris of the 1930s is also in EEG. And luggage: so much luggage.
The directive of EEG seems to be: Remember. The book is virtually a catalogue of under-reported atrocities, mostly perpetrated by fascist regimes. It catalogues Jews slaughtered in the Baltic states (particularly Latvia), Jews deported from France to concentration camps, Muslims killed at Srebrenica. It also catalogues some smaller, more intimate stories: case histories of patients at a psychiatric hospital in Belgrade, the untimely death of chess masters. At one point, the book reproduces a literal catalogue: books taken from the Jews of Zagreb and Dubrovnik in 1941. And it catalogues the perpetrators of many of these atrocities, most unpunished.
When luggage first came up in EEG, I didn't make note of it. I remember a discussion of several suitcases of diminishing sizes, but I won't go back to find it just now. It may have come up several times before I made note of it. I remember a later discussion of a grey checkered Chinese suitcase, and also a Samsonite. But the first note I made to myself was not until page 279, and it wasn't really about luggage either. The narrator is in Paris (in modern day, not the 1930s), and happens upon a building -- formerly a furniture store -- with a memorial plaque acknowledging its use during the Vichy regime as a warehouse for the possessions stolen from Jews and an annex to the Drancy deportation camp. The narrator stops to read the plaque, and then continues on toward the Seine, "but it, that former furniture store for the working class, monumental and brilliant, dragged itself after me, panting." After reading that passage, I did have to go back and find an earlier reference. While much of the book concerns itself with events around WWII, there is a chapter on the massacre at Srebrenica. The narrator visits the Memorial Center at Srebrenica.
On the way out of that victims' cemetery shackles snap round my ankles and I understand, from now on I must drag all this after me, all these Muslim gravestones, and one Christian cross (for Rudolf Hren), these tombs and the secret stories buried beneath them, the trees and grass, as though I were dragging after me the cover, the face of the earth.
The past, memory, history, knowledge are weight that must be carried, or pulled behind us. Elsewhere in EEG there is a cheap rolling suitcase, overstuffed, whose wheels give out so it is dragged across the pavement. There is a cardboard suitcase, stuffed with photographs and photographic equipment, never opened but moved again and again, over a period of 40 years, "as additionally heavy but useless baggage, I drag it after me on all my house moves. Everything in that suitcase must have rotted by now."
Most satisfyingly, at the very end, the narrator finally unpacks some luggage:
I opened my backpack, which I had been hauling with me for two and a half decades, and which had reached the end of the road. In the bottom rolled a few old mislaid trivialities, incidentals, trifles, trinkets that rang like bells, fading away.
I could say a lot more about various aspects of this book, but I'll stop here. I feel like I may need to go back and re-read the first hundred pages, which I found somewhat impenetrable. (Maybe if I do I'll find the first piece of luggage.)
