The past, perches on our senses in our struggles to seize the moment by slipping through the tulles of time with its sounds, objects and odours stamped in our depths. It shows its colour persistently on the window of today, whispering that it is not lost by wandering the clouds in our hearts with its wind. It sometimes overshadows the present in the uncertainty of the future, sometimes gives joy to the place that narrows time to time with waves of mirth. Because “past is not only the things that happened to you. Sometimes it is only your dreams.” as Georgi Gospodinov says in his novel “Time Shelter”. Memory is the magic of past but it is also the most important issue of the reflection of the past nightmare. “Memory is not digital, it rolls like an old filmstrip and wears out.” Ferzan Özpetek writes so beautifully in his novel “You are My life.”
Agota Kristof is famous with her trilogy “The Notebook”, “The Proof”, “The Third Lie”, a great writer of Hungarian origin. She holds our hands in “Yesterday” and takes us to immigration, alienage, the inevitability of the past in our genes, the unwillingness of avoiding past dreams, “the familiar wind” blows in our hearts as well as we walk with Tobias. Tobias or Sandor, his new name. Tobias starts life at the deepest pit, his mother, the prostitute of the village. He has the chance to go to school, the teacher, a man, his father, maybe, he supports Tobias. He is successful at school, his friend, Line, the teacher’s daughter, his most beautiful dreams. “Yesterday”, whose door he closes, never ceases its efflux, Line. At present, in this developed country he has escaped to, the life he has, “making a hole on a certain part, always at the same machine”, sometimes a woman’s getting up and screaming “I can’t take it anymore!” Getting together with the fellow countrymen from time to time, jails, suicides. To be a foreigner even if you have lived in the country for ten years. Tobias or Sandor writes, his writings are important for him, a hope for the future, from now. He believes that we have the present time, always, all of them exist. Because the events live in him, not in time. And all the things in him are in the present time. And there is Yolande, his girlfriend, but not, he thinks they could get married because they never talk…
One day, another door. He sees that door has always been open and he has never tried to get out of that door. Line. He follows her from a distance, spies out her house, they talk, remembering, like in Tomris Uyar’s book “Silk and Copper”: “Not remembering…something else. Not forgetting maybe…” Love. Line has a certain order, has a child, her unhappiness seen through the windows, but her order…Marriage is something else of course. Love is beaten against residues of century-old experiences, even if you know you cannot love anybody else, you will love that person “a thousand more times”, you do not want to be side by side with him/her in the game of life where there are others as well. Ancestry, occupation, reputation, how can you get married with a person who you are ashamed of walking with? The bitter efflux of our past, in this world where the ultimate aim is to be “like everybody else”, if life goes on, it is fine to lead a life of complete silence of the heart. “There is only harvest, unbearable waiting and inexpressible silence in the world.” Tobias, his mother, his being a bastard, a worker without education, even if he writes all the time. “My parents are virtuous, cultured, honest; we are a decent family.” says Line. Love, limited with family, order. People should not live in another country anyway, kids, how can they go on without relatives?
We remember the frames of “Bergman Island” with these lines. In Mia Hansen-Love’s film, directed in 2021, we see an impossible love between Amy and Joseph in a part that can be called a film in a film. A couple, a script writer and a director, visit the island where Ingmar Bergman directed some of his films and lived in Sweden. In a part of the film we watch a piece of the script that Chris, the scriptwriter writes, Amy and Joseph, who have been together but could not go on with the relationship, runs across on the island, their never-extinguished love sparkles again. But Joseph, takes whatever he wants and goes away, because he has an order which must not be demolished, he has it once, the balance of time and place that has made them come together again is not important. If they could not establish an order together in the past, it is all over now, even if Amy is demolished once more.
Although the past of your dreams are attainable, the black-paged records of yesterday can still hold of you. Traditions and others always want to close the doors of freedom and being just yourself apart from your family, the conditions that you have been raised in. Nightmares cover the dreams with the wind of gloom in our being kept for others and the pen is silent, the melody of the heart does not play in “exemplary” lives.