Malsky’s unforgetable Memories of shortcuts walking up the hill to the Minature Park - a hill peppered with blackberries on steroids
The bohemian ecclectic atmosphere around the singing fountain
From Levoca’s Marianska hora to enhanced memories of sacred mary and festive rudolf holy water
In Central European spa towns rich in literary history, you can bathe in everything from beer to radon..
The local thermal spring has been called Marienbad since the Thirty Years War when, legendarily, a soldier healed his wounds there, next to a tree where he’d hung a picture of the Virgin. ‘The implication was that Mary herself took ablutions there,’ David Clay Large writes in The Grand Spas of Central Europe, ‘though doubtlessly not in tandem with the troops.’ The town itself is relatively young, as far as historical European spa towns go, and it has always been primarily a tourist destination, and thus always a bit otherworldly in the sense that it does not give a visitor a sense, however illusory, of the country where it’s located, or of the people who live there.
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We went because we thought it would be funny; we came to realize the movie isn’t even really set there. It takes place, if not in the mind, then in a composite setting of several nineteenth-century Central European spa towns, in a sense of vague possibility and in danger of being lost. The misunderstanding was Thom’s fault. He had seen the movie once before, a long time ago; I had not, but I knew I would have to eventually, because it’s one of those movies you have to see. ‘It’s a trip,’ he told me.
Our relationship had recently undergone a series of unlikely transformations, and it was vital to the development of its narrative that we go on a trip. A trip would confirm that we were in a relationship, and that this relationship was not going to remain forever stuck in the past, in a phase of remembering and fighting over what we remembered – over things that had happened, seriously, the previous year. According to the couple clichés, a trip is a new memory you make together. It’s also a test: how moody one of you might become at a setback; how neurotic the other might be about the schedule; how fundamentally incompatible you are suddenly revealed, in an unfamiliar setting, to be. Kafka knew this. When he and his on-again, off-again fiancée Felice Bauer met at Marienbad for ten days in July 1916, they fought the entire time, unable to overcome the ceaseless rain and ‘the hardships of living together. Forced upon us by strangeness, pity, lust, cowardice, vanity, and only deep down, perhaps, a thin little stream worthy of the name of love, impossible to seek out, flashing once in the moment of a moment.’
Neither I nor Thom is anything like Kafka. I would prefer to stay in bed all the time, but I don’t have tuberculosis, or any serious physical ailment, just melancholy and probably a few minor vitamin deficiencies. Thom thinks this is cute and integral to my artistic process. The problem we had was that we both had a lot of work, meaning I would want, or need, to lie down even more than usual, and I didn’t want to go on any more trips. ‘You’ve become one of those people who lives in Berlin and is never there,’ a friend said when I found myself in Italy for the fourth time in a year. I don’t even like Italy. I love Berlin. You can bring golden handcuffs in your carry-on if you upgrade to easyJet Flexi. After what I vowed would be my last distressing international vacation for at least three months, yet another unlikely event required me to go on a cocaine bender across Europe. ‘That’s horrible,’ people would say when I told the story. Truly, it was, and maybe still is.
The idea to visit a fading grand Central European spa town was Thom’s; I suggested Marienbad because its literary reputation for an atmosphere of romantic melancholy and attractiveness to great neurasthenic historical figures appealed. Though others, like Karlsbad or Baden-Baden, are reachable by train from Berlin – a key element of the semi-ironic Central European nostalgia tourist experience – Marienbad overpowers, significance-wise. If I’d known anything about the film, I might have thought the trip too on the nose. But it’s hard to make decisions, and if there’s some arbitrary theme or parameter you can set, it’s easier. We would go to Marienbad and watch the movie, which, as it turns out, is kind of about how it’s hard to make decisions.
On the train from Berlin we had the strange and ultimately prescient feeling that we were too young to be doing this. How was it possible that we had purchased tickets, booked hotel rooms, packed bags? It was as if we were embarking on a mission that we did not fully understand, and perhaps by the end we would only understand that this was precisely why we had been given this mission. We stopped for a night in Pilsen to see where the beer comes from, and the beautiful hotel we stayed in was furnished in comically gigantic proportions. The hallways empty, the grand staircase dark, the functioning of the front desk dependent on a spooky little bell. We felt like naughty orphans or the kids who slept in the Met. We loved all this, of course, in the innocently condescending way of the sophisticated intellectual tourist who, in an era of mass awareness and ease of travel, rarely gets to see something so relatively undiscovered without raising ethical questions. The next morning we departed for the spa.
The word Marienbad is German for ‘Mary’s Bath’. Given that it is located in contemporary western Czechia – which I am still used to calling the Czech Republic, though that also sounds awkward in English – but also in the former Sudetenland, which had a majority German-speaking population until they were expelled and the area repopulated after World War II, Marienbad is not really the town’s name, but it also kind of is. The local thermal spring has been called Marienbad since the Thirty Years War when, legendarily, a soldier healed his wounds there, next to a tree where he’d hung a picture of the Virgin. ‘The implication was that Mary herself took ablutions there,’ David Clay Large writes in The Grand Spas of Central Europe, ‘though doubtlessly not in tandem with the troops.’ The town itself is relatively young, as far as historical European spa towns go, and it has always been primarily a tourist destination, and thus always a bit otherworldly in the sense that it does not give a visitor a sense, however illusory, of the country where it’s located, or of the people who live there. There were no buildings in the area until the late eighteenth century, and the place name was officially recognized in 1810. Then a Czech gardener named Václav Skalník had his way with the landscape, transforming it into what he bragged ‘could have been confused with the Garden of Eden.’ When discussing the trip elsewhere I referred to the town as Marienbad, because pretty much everyone I talk to in my pretentious Berlin expat circle knows the film as well as the desire to make a kind of kitschy train trip to a bygone Central European spa, but when we arrived I called it Mariánské Lázně in what I thought might be a respectful counterbalance to the German visitors. As a practiced sophisticated intellectual tourist, I feared offending the local population by using the German name, but given the entangled history, I haven’t encountered anyone who seems to care. As a KurortMarienbad is German in nature, and remains popular among German tourists. It was until recently also popular with Russians, but after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the Czech government barred Russians from visiting the country as tourists, which generated mixed reactions among hoteliers and tour operators who were interviewed for a February 2023 New York Times article about the absence of the ruble in Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary and, by implication, the entire West Bohemian Spa Triangle, of which Marienbad is a part.
I didn’t know much about how the history of tourism created linguistic trends in Marienbad before I visited, so I was mostly excited to hear Thom, who is Polish-American, speak Czech, because the languages are similar enough that you can, as he says, ‘speak Polish in a Czech way’ and get by, and vice versa. If you know Polish, he claims, Czech is ‘cute’; I asked another Polish speaker if this is true and she said, ‘Yes, definitely cute.’ I expected that this would be a key facet of the couple-development project. What I did not expect was that we would have to speak German. German is Thom’s fourth language, which means he has some fun with it; he speaks it with what I refer to as a Habsburg accent – though it’s not quite Austrian or southern German, he rolls the r’s exaggeratedly, ups the cadence and often deepens it ironically. I am more demure. No one knows how good I am at German, including me. While I have taken many classes and sound pretty good, I have never ‘used’ my German, by which I mean I have never truly needed to speak German to communicate. This is because I live in Berlin, which is ‘not really Germany’. It’s of course more complicated, but it is also true that most Germans who live in Berlin speak English better than the many, many people who speak German badly. There is just no reason to seek out a German-speaking experience if your reason for living in Germany is not Germanophilia, which is a strange syndrome most people would not admit to having even if they did. But the working languages in Mariánské Lázně are Czech, Russian and German, so if you enjoy little ironies of life in twenty-first-century Europe such as ‘I spoke more German in the Czech Republic – uh, Czechia – than I ever speak in Germany’, it’s a good place to visit.
It was raining when we arrived, and it didn’t stop, except when it kind of snowed. This was fine; we picked the hotel where we were staying, the Ensana Nové Lázně, in large part because it is connected to two other hotels in the Ensana group by a long underground passageway where we assumed we could get our steps while pretending, again, to be insomniac orphans. Our taxi driver from the train station assured us it was the best hotel in Marienbad, and while we were not undertaking the rapacious kind of travel experience whereby you trek to an ‘exotic’ suffering region where your presence is questionably ethical in order to torture the local population with your unbelievably valuable currency, the best hotel in Marienbad is affordable ‘for what it is’, as the saying goes for us members of the easyJet Flexi class. Two meals at the buffet and unlimited access to the marble Roman baths in the basement are included in the daily rate. I also suspected I might be able to write it all off as a business expense. When the driver, who was already delighted by Thom’s Czech Polish, learned we were from the United States, he was downright thrilled: his cousin plays hockey in the NHL. I’d noticed hockey games on televisions at the train station in Prague. ‘Do Czechs like hockey?’ I asked the driver. I can’t get a handle on them except that they seem fun to drink with. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘but we have no NHL.’
I know only one Czech person, Roman, so I asked him for tips for a short trip to Marienbad. ‘That is only like small Karlovy Vary,’ he replied. ‘I have no tips.’ An American friend added, ‘Mostly do not under any circumstances eat at Churchill’s.’ Roman’s American wife, Laurel, recommended we go to Jáchymov, a small, disturbing spa town near Karlovy Vary where you can take a radon bath. Marie Curie studied the wastewater from the town’s paint factory to eventually isolate polonium and radium; the discovery that radiation killed cancer cells soon followed, and led to a craze for radioactive treatments at the beginning of the twentieth century. The grand hotel in the center of this radiation village is called the Hotel Radium Palace. ‘Did you know about this?’ I asked Thom. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I would happily undergo radioactive therapy.’ He loves Marie Skłodowska-Curie because she was Polish. Thankfully the radiation village is only really accessible by car.
Tips are unnecessary in Marienbad anyway. ‘There really is nothing to do here,’ one character writes to another in Sholem Aleichem’s 1911 epistolary novel Marienbad. ‘One can go crazy from boredom.’ If the idea of Marienbad is nostalgic, or if Marienbad represents ‘one of those places (rather like Venice) whose future was in its past’, according to Large, being in Marienbad is, for rootlessly aware people like us, a distinct break from any kind of yearning for a historical moment we didn’t experience. In Marienbad we were relieved from the feeling that we’d missed a heyday – we did, but it doesn’t matter. The heydays I wish I could have experienced are characterized by a desire to destroy rather than dubiously regenerate the physical body. I can enjoy and pity the German spa town’s gestures to its past resplendence; I can smile at how badly it has adapted to competitors in the ‘wellness’ space. There is no pressure to have an ‘authentic’ historical German spa town experience or to wish I had been alive to see it decades earlier. I’ve lived in Berlin for several years, sort of, and the pressure to resurrect the city as it exists impossibly in the collective expatriate mind, prone to romance and nostalgia for eras it didn’t experience, is exhausting; living there can feel, at times, like the kind of vacation I hate, full of stuff I’m afraid I’ll regret not having done.
As soon as we arrived, I realized I just wasn’t excited about being in the town where old Goethe fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl. The only thing on the schedule was spa. Given the amount of work I had to do, it wouldn’t be full spa, but it might help. Everyone I know fantasizes about taking a one-to-six-month Kur in a calming natural setting. No one that I’m aware of wants to take the waters – they are stinky and one suspects similar results could be achieved through supplements and regular hydration – but we all believe that a luxurious convalescence, consisting only of massages, slow shuffling walks around the grounds in a bathrobe, and the making of intergenerational friends would cure us. In Germany, the concept of ‘burnout’ is widespread and much discussed; to an American this is precious, bordering on cultural appropriation. I took an online quiz to assess my burnout levels and it told me to ‘seek help urgently’. What might that mean, realistically? You can purchase long-term packages at the best hotel in Mariánské Lázně; we stayed for four days.
The hotel was indeed very nice, opulent, decorated in deep green and ivory and gold, with endless treatment rooms labeled with fin-de-sièclefonts. We immediately wanted to walk the underground passageway, which takes about fifteen minutes one way and involves occasionally passing through soothingly soundtracked hallways as well as the creepy medi-spa. At intervals appear fountains of flowing, dribbling or, at that time, out-of-order mineral water, each sourced from different springs and so of different compositions, with different bad smells and alleged benefits. The water tastes of nothing, but just to reiterate, it stinks. All the hotels, as well as the souvenir shops in town, sell special ceramic sippy cups; they’re designed so you don’t have to put your nose near the water to drink from it. The juxtaposition of nineteenth-century splendor and doctor’s office decor is disorienting, as are the elevation changes throughout the passage. One elevator has you exiting on the fourth floor; you arrive at the next elevator to find you are two levels below ground.
‘Zwei große Menschen,’ I heard an elderly German voice say at one such juncture. Standing in the elevator with her husband, she gestured to us. ‘Zwei große Menschen,’ she said again, looking at us expectantly, like a grandmother awaiting acknowledgment for her cookie recipe. Thom and I are both very tall. In boots, we are taller. Despite the benders, we radiate an image of what is theoretically sought at Marienbad: clear skin, shiny hair, bright eyes, athletic builds. We look like we could save someone’s life, and in fact we have. We quickly realized that despite the relative obviousness of Marienbad as a weekend getaway, two beautiful giants in their early thirties are still a sight to behold there. Except the boring blond couple who showed up in the sauna area on our last night, whom we despised and sought to destroy, the only other young person I saw the entire time was an approximately ten-year-old girl skipping alone down an empty sulfur-smelling hallway. I smiled at the German couple standing in the elevator with my mouth closed, like an American.
The word tourist has negative connotations. The phrase German tourist has many negative connotations. It is an exciting time to be an American tourist in Europe: we are much less hated than we have been in the recent past. Meanwhile, visitors from other countries are becoming very annoying, and at least we still have the glamour of the previous century and, despite the odds, our willingness to spend money. Plus, we’re really friendly, you know? Occasionally a European in my midst will attempt a feeble complaint about a loud American woman TikToking about the absence of tap water on the Continent, but today there are a couple of varieties of tourist reviled more than we. The British, who can’t be helped; the Australians, who, because they’re good-looking, have no idea that they’re just like the British, and so are, on top of the drunken doofishness, cocky; and the Germans.
Contemporary hatred of German tourists focuses on debauchery in the areas known as Schinkenstrasse (Ham Street) and Bierstrasse (Beer Street) in Mallorca – in 2023, one Spanish expat newspaper claimed residents now find them ‘as boozy and awful as the Brits’ because they ‘throw themselves from balconies, they keep mixing their drinks all day . . . they fall asleep in people’s gardens, and they are being robbed.’ But for much of the twentieth century their particularities while traveling abroad were interpreted as evidence for Nazism’s success. ‘All Central Europe seems to me to be enacting a fantasy which I cannot interpret,’ Rebecca West writes at the beginning of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her magisterial Balkan travelogue written in the 1930s and published in 1941. On her way to Croatia, she shares a train car with two German couples who reveal themselves to be ‘unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and so apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. It added to their eerie quality that on paper these people would seem the most practical and sensible people.’ One of the men was, according to his wife, ‘very ill with a nervous disorder affecting the stomach which made him unable to make decisions’; they were on their way to a Dalmatian island in the hope that the sun and air would solve it. None of these Germans is in the Nazi Party – indeed, they resent and fear the Nazis, and the men are both especially daunted by the capriciousness of the Nazi tax system – but they are to West clearly representative of how and why the Nazis came to power: they are simultaneously entitled and desperate for guidance. They lament the absence of German food on the train car and dread the weeks they’ll spend without it, despite West’s extolling of then-Yugoslavia’s ‘romantic soups’; they kick a young ‘Latin’ traveler with a second-class ticket out of their first-class carriage to make room for West and her husband, who impresses them with his perfect ‘real German German’. When a conductor comes around, the Germans reveal that they have second-class tickets, too.
When one has very little to do, the schedule fills up rapidly. It somehow became difficult, if not impossible, to visit the sauna twice a day, though that had been our intention. My inexpert opinion is that most of the benefits of spa treatments come down to two things: increased circulation and enforced relaxation. They are not magical, or so scientific that you need a doctor to explain them. What we are used to from living in Germany is a very hot sauna – 90 degrees Celsius – undertaken nude. You see what you can stand until you can’t stand it anymore. With practice you can stand more. A normally punishing icy shower transforms into relief. It shocks me when people fear or doubt the efficacy of the very hot sauna; it’s almost too obviously a spiritually educational experience.
Still, we are not immune to the exhilarations of modernity. When we arrived in our room, we were greeted with a long printout of available spa treatments. This was overwhelmingly exciting until we realized many of the treatments required a doctor’s consultation before and after, both of which cost money, and might kill or permanently injure you. A shorter list of normal spa treatments was more manageable. Beyond the hotel, you could also purchase a session at the local ‘beer spa,’ stylized variously as beer spa beerland and spa beerland, which involves renting a private room where you can drink and bathe in actual beer, ‘beer extracts’ and ‘beer herbal mixture’. They actually have these all over the world. There is at least one article online called ‘Why Bathing in Beer Could Be the Healthiest Thing You Do All Summer.’ It has many alleged benefits; all the treatments do.
‘The idea of the beer spa is, basically, what if I could be just like a cow but have all the desires of a man?’ Thom said as we photographed the beer spa beerland sign.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sleeping in a bed of hay’ – this is one of the things you get at the beer spa – ‘drinking so much I can only roll around,’ he said. ‘Masturbating, presumably.’
‘I don’t think cows masturbate?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ he replied.
‘I think dolphins are the only animals that masturbate,’ I replied.
‘What do you mean?’ he replied again. I was actually wrong about that, but it’s a non sequitur.
We took mineral baths instead. This is the marquee treatment at the Nové Lázně. Germans love carbonated water, so it follows that they also like to bathe in it. After you soak in the tub for twenty minutes or so, an employee comes in and wraps you up in towels and sheets. ‘Like baby,’ she says approvingly. The thing about anecdotes like this is that they can seem stereotypical, and thus offensive. But of course if you don’t speak much English, ‘like baby’ is going to be one of the phrases you can produce, especially if your job is swaddling adults like babies. After the baths, Thom and I reconvened in the hallway, whose horrible smell, always stronger in the morning, we could now fully appreciate. We were euphoric. Our skin was soft. We felt productive.
As mentioned, Thom is a large man. His caloric needs are significant. The daily buffet, with its geriatric hours and gestures toward what is healthy and easy to digest, could not sustain him. I am sympathetic to this problem but not the type to bring protein bars for my boyfriend everywhere I go, though as many girlfriends will know, sometimes it is better to maternally fill your purse with snacks than to suffer the consequences of their absence. On the second day of the trip, we planned to have a couple of treatments and work. I did this shockingly diligently. The trip was working, for me, but at times it seemed we were on parallel journeys. ‘Are you hungry?’ Thom would ask hopefully at 11 a.m., 4 p.m. – not at all the buffet hours. No, I would say. We weren’t doing anything. I had a massage appointment. How could I be hungry?
By 4.30 p.m., the situation had worsened. Thom needed to visit, he said, the Wiener Café, the Viennese cafe in the basement decorated as such. I was about to finish editing an essay. I asked if it would bother him if I met him in the Wiener Café when I was done. He said no, he didn’t mind, but he had to go right then. He was starving. I said the gap between men and women is wide and maybe even unbridgeable. He left.
Fifteen minutes later I found the Wiener Café dark and empty. The significance of this development was grave. It must have closed at 5 p.m. Maybe even 4 p.m. The hotel had taken up the German custom of not keeping businesses open at times when they are likely to do business. It is normal in Berlin to encounter coffee shops that don’t open until 10 or 11 a.m. on weekdays. I imagined Thom, hungry, forlorn, roaming the labyrinthine passages of the hotel, having lost the ability to speak. I found him sitting in the bar, despondent. His face looked like it was melting. He was hamming it up, but he needed ham. I looked to the bartender, who was uninterested in us. Dinner was in half an hour. ‘Tell her, “Don’t worry, he is a vulnerable man and I am his girlfriend,”’ he said. ‘But say it in Czech.’
Weakly, he typed this message into Google Translate on his phone. He began to giggle. ‘The word for “girlfriend” means “the one I cuddle with”,’ he said.
The next day we adopted a new strategy: constant treats. We ate breakfast followed by Viennese coffees – coffee with whipped cream – and a slice of Viennese cake. This was luxurious and I enjoyed it. Thom ordered a second Viennese coffee, about which I said nothing. I had an appointment to get dry-brushed and I believe in personal agency.
When I returned from the dry-brushing – they let you keep the brushes! – I saw in front of Thom not only a third Viennese coffee but also another cake. Again I said nothing. He was exuberant.
‘I was just standing at the window and that man said to me, “Eh [German way], du bist ein Sportler!”’ Thom said. ‘Even though my belly is full of cake.’
As the day wore on, my mood remained steady; I was actually working for once in my life. Thom, however, was becoming dark and concerning.
‘I think it’s the barometric pressure,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s just not a good day.’
In the afternoon I suggested we take a walk, which we had not really been doing, and visit a little food market on the square. We got beer, sausage and a traditional fried cheese whose mountain origins Thom eagerly explained to me. But even this did not boost his mood.
‘Do you think maybe,’ I proposed at 5 p.m., the worst hour of the day, ‘you have eaten too much dairy?’
‘Sheep’s milk barely has lactose,’ he replied sharply. ‘And I’m not lactose-intolerant! My ancestors brought dairy to the world!’ He was referring to the Tatars.
I listed what he had consumed that day. When I got to the second slice of cake I began to laugh. He was having a sugar crash, aggravated surely by his caffeine addiction. ‘I think you are having a dairy crisis,’ I said mischievously. Days of working in bed had made me happy enough to make jokes.
‘I’m not!’ he cried. ‘It’s not a dairy crisis!’
Marienbad has long inspired emotional volatility in its visitors. ‘These people are the most miserable on earth,’ Aleichem writes. ‘They crave food and aren’t allowed to eat. They yearn to travel and can’t. They desire nothing better than to lie down and aren’t permitted.’ In the United States, the wellness industry has responded to the commodification of the self by coming up with evermore specific pseudoscientific syndromes and accompanying solutions, the pursuit of which can distract you from your real problem, life; in Central European spa towns they’re still hawking the benefits of the periodic table. When there is nothing to see or do, tiny vacillations in mood are the only thing to pay attention to. When you’re not a true believer in the possibility of a cure, your mind has space to wander to dark places. Nietzsche, another famous weakling, sought relief from migraines in Marienbad and found only bitterness and resentment. ‘The people are so ugly here, and a steak costs 80 kreuzer,’ he wrote to his mother in 1880. ‘It is like being in an evil world.’ Though he planned to leave after a month, he was too sick to make the journey home, so he had to stay another four weeks, beset not only by the headaches but also by his memories of his former friend Richard Wagner, with whom he’d had a falling-out after Nietzsche wrote ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ in 1876. After years of idolizing obsession followed by mutual adoration, Nietzsche had become ambivalent about the much older man, not so much as a composer – he praised him in the text – but as a person and foreboding representative of Germany’s past. Famously, Wagner sucked, and Nietzsche had all sorts of other philosophical complaints about how Wagner’s particular brand of decadence was of the decaying kind, spiritually weak, the latter’s antisemitism and alleged Christianity being only two of several examples. If you have a lot in common otherwise, if you love each other, sometimes differences in perspective and temperament don’t really matter, until they do. Disappointment follows, and a sense of betrayal: how could you stray from the path? I thought we were taking it together.
Wagner and his wife Cosima blamed Nietzsche’s turn on masturbation and his Jewish friends. They all cared too much about Germany, but in critically diverging ways. ‘It’s for the best,’ absolutely everyone will tell you. Neither rest cures nor reasonable advice helps. ‘How often I dream about [Wagner], and always in the spirit of our former intimacy,’ Nietzsche wrote to a friend. ‘All that is now over, and what use is it to know that in many respects he was in the wrong?’ Time is what heals, unless you go insane before it can.
The sauna is exhausting, even when you can only manage once a day. On our last night, we hit play on the movie while lying in bed after dinner. When it became clear that the stark shadowy lawns and elaborate interiors were not the same shadowy lawns and elaborate interiors we had been traversing ourselves, that the delight of recognition would not be ours, it became even harder to stay awake. What’s more, the film is incredibly boring, and should not be watched on a computer. I am not against boring movies; I am merely, sadly, a realist. Its themes might have made me sad if Marienbad still carried its associations with loss and memory, but the place has become a straightforward representation of a very specific idea of the past, no longer a site of vague, moody possibility. Is it all in her mind? In his? Might the man pushing the woman to remember him represent a psychoanalyst, a drill sergeant of the unconscious, holding place for some other man she might actually remember, if pressed long and hard enough? Might they all be dead, or in limbo, or in a dream? It will never be certain, but that uncertainty has become certain, obvious, possibly even boring. We never finished the movie, but the trip was great.
