THE TIME BEING

In my early thirties, I began to cultivate the friendship of older people—people born twenty or thirty or even fifty years before me. I read many novels in those days.

 My new friends contained the experiences of life in the way that novels did, with chapters involving marriages, careers, wars, intergenerational dramas, travels, dénouements, deaths. Their biographical force field was strong. They embodied the theme of time. Time was thematic. It was not yet a source of ever-worsening personal harm.

One of these older people was V. He was a white European, but my initial impression of him was not unlike the impression I would then gain of certain senior Black Americans, namely, that they were subjects of history. This was the year 2000. In the faces of older New Yorkers, or so I believed, you could spot the vestiges of Jim Crow—for that matter, of the Third Reich and the Iron Curtain and the Great Leap Forward. What Vojtech Bartolomaeus, whom everyone called V. or Mr. V., had been through, I didn’t know. But his bearing was that of the survivor. Mine was not such a bearing. I was not a subject of history. I would never be, I remember thinking.

V. lived in an apartment across the hallway. He had a dapper, churchgoing quality, even as he was often seen in an undershirt. Everything he undertook, from his smile of greeting to the unhurried locking and unlocking of his front door, was done with a touch of form. His social efficiency put me in mind of the extinct, indeed discredited, gestures of courtesy with which V. had presumably grown up: tipping one’s hat, opening the car door for a lady, writing well-wrought and openhearted letters. I never saw V. in a sour mood. He exuded stoicism, as well he might: he was of the cohort that had reflected deeply on the human condition, as the human condition used to be called.