The Never Born

Faces stare out of the confusion of the station, dark, questioning, occasionally sorrowful and always tired. He stops momentarily, to comprehend, to find a particular face or attempt to overcome their judgement. Blank faces that do not betray the journey that has led them there. Anticipation, perhaps of a further journey or opportunity.

He pulls at the straps of his bag and leaves the glow of the street lighting. Perhaps he is hoping to leave behind the overwhelming noise and mass of humanity, the insecurity and uncertainly. The walk down to the underground offers no reassurance. There are more tents, bartering voices, more dust and hustling.

He continues, through the passageway beneath the station concourse, up staircases, along walkways and travelators. There is dust in the air, smells of far places and mingling peoples, announcements, engines, chatter, footsteps.

Then he begins to approach people and ask them if they know the whereabouts of a person whose name he has made up right before asking. He scans faces as if trying to recognise someone. He calls, and gets attention, and makes up another name and pleas for some information. They shake their heads. They cannot understand his words, or his frantic gestures. They’re not even sure if they share a language.

He is invited into some tents to explain himself further. Tired faces listen with patience. They nod as they follow his words, but shake their heads and raise empty hands when he again asks for names.

There is a sudden skirmish in one of the tents. He staggers backwards as he is ejected from the private enclosure. An angry hand comes flying out of the canvas, protective of a nursing mother inside. He reels, wanders across blankets spread on the ground, lost in a quest that no one around him can understand.

“Everyone had their own concerns. Would they listen to me?”

“Why were you making up the names of the people you were looking for?”

“It’s what everyone was doing.”

“No they were not. You were wasting their time with your questions.”

“They were people that may have existed.”

“Are you a thief?”

“How dare you ask me that.”

I try to turn back to my table and my associates. They are looking at me like I know the man. I brought them to this cafe, after all.

“Please stop bothering us.”

“If you don’t want to hear the end of my story…”

“I didn’t ask to hear this story. I was speaking with my colleagues.”

The man stands abruptly. He chair screeches backwards.

“Then I will tell you no more.”

“Thank you.”

He makes a lavish act of trying to move past my chair until I squeeze in a little to allow him to move across to the exit.

---

There is another entry that seems to suggest that he went back to the café to hear the man’s story in full, perhaps when he was not accompanied by the colleagues he mentions in the first post. It seems it was an embarrassing moment; perhaps the colleagues were held in esteem and their judgement feared.

They stayed late into the night, drinking a local pálinka and seeming to enjoy each other’s company. His post was perhaps written that same night, as it is almost unreadable, repetitive and often hysterical. There is such joy in the transcription. They must have had a great night.

His later posts document his attempts to track down the man in the café. He went back to the café the following morning to ask staff if they could remember the man, or knew who is was. They remembered him, as he had not settled the bill, but they did not know who he was. The man was not a regular. He paid for the drinks and left and walked the streets for a few hours to think how he might track down the man.

It occurred to him that he had only the litany of fake names the man had listed in his story - Kuzman Aleksandar, Risto Janička, Venijamin Besnik, Zlatko Dragomir. He knew there was no point in using these to track down the man. He went back home, but visited the cafe regularly in case he should accidentally meet the man again.

In the following days, as his recollection of the evening becomes more coherent, he began to realise they had discussed the meaning of the fake names, and the search the man claimed to be on. It was the community of the never born he was seeking. He did not know the true whereabouts of the community, or even if it really existed, but he had followed groups of transient people across Europe, conversed with the homeless and waited in refugee camps to try to find it. As the days followed and his memory returned, he posted the fragments on the internet perhaps without any thought that they might one day be read. The tone is of a confused confessional, a memory recorded and forgotten.

And then the posts stopped abruptly. There was not a real sequence - they were not building towards a conclusion or forming a narrative. Their rambling tried to piece together the man’s story as told through a fog of confusion, and then simply stopped. Later, they disappeared from the internet, but by then I had saved them, reread them, annotated them and tried to assemble some coherence.

---

The man claimed he was an anthropologist, and wished to embed himself in the community of the never born. I considered that perhaps he was with the university, so I attempted to track him down via the social sciences department. Everyone I contacted knew nothing about such a person, although it was difficult to establish just who I was looking for without a name.

I travelled to the city, and wandered the streets looking for a café that matched the brief descriptions in his posts. There were too many. The coffee affected my sleep, and I lay awake in the guesthouse. I imagined meeting the man on the stairs each time I left my room to get some water. When finally I slept, I saw his face, even though we had yet to meet.

A few days later I found that I was repeating his actions, calling out to strangers and asking them the whereabouts of random names I had made up - Johan Portner, Otmar Martz, Alajos Fournier, Alfred Traverse. I was met with the same anger and irritation. At one point, sitting alone in another café with a glass of water, I thought of turning to a stranger and forcing the story of my search on them. I forgot why I had started.

It was a fortunate accident that my last shouted made-up name had been overheard by someone visiting from another city. He was a doctor, and at first I thought his interest was purely professional. He tried to comfort me and after a while, as we sat silently, he told me he knew where the person I had asked for was. I’d asked if anyone knew Lyuben Luther, a name I had repeated several times in different venues. This time it was in the ticket office of the main tram station in the city. The doctor had been queueing when he heard me. He stepped over to me and later, when it was quieter, we spoke.

He didn’t say much, but said he would take me to the man I was seeking. He wanted some money before he would say any more. I didn’t have any cash, so we spent a while marching around looking for an ATM, and then another long silent time waiting to use the machine to withdraw currency.

“I will take you to this man,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Give me the money first.”

I don’t know how much I handed over; it was everything I had withdrawn. The value seemed irrelevant at the time. We ran through the station, and out into the street, where we hailed a cab with similar urgency. We drove through the tangled streets of the old city in silence. The driver often laughed, but perhaps this was at the behaviour of other drivers.

We climbed the stairs of an dilapidated apartment block, stopping occasionally to catch our breath. He still hadn’t spoken.

Finally, he tapped on a door and stood fidgeting, nodding and sighing as if this would encourage the occupant to answer.

“Ah!” The man who opened the door seemed pleased to find us waiting. He was tall and smartly dressed. He was quite enthusiastic in trying to get us into the apartment and close the door behind us.

“Lyuben?” I asked.

The man just laughed and gestured that we should cross the main room with him. He went on ahead in a confident stride. The room had a high ceiling, and all the walls were covered with books. Bright sun beamed in through the high windows. We sat on wide sofas with decadent ease. The man from the tram station watched the other eagerly.

“I don’t think that’s who you’re really looking for,” he said.

“No.”

“It would be true to say that you don’t know who you’re looking for.” He spoke like a professor pleased with his rhetorical skill.

“I suppose.”

“It is interesting that you have found us.”

“Oh.”

“We too are looking for the same people as you. We are investigating the never born. We seek their community. They are amongst us, they are everywhere. We know they are celebrated. We know there are people who celebrate them, even worship them. They honour them, they imagine them, and by imagining them, give them some form in this world. And that, I presume, is what has led you to meeting with us.”

I sat silently for a while, then nodded.

“The person you were looking for was only imagined.”

“I suppose.”

“And you could have imagined anyone. And followed anyone to anywhere. And this is the community we also seek. All the people we could have been, the lost opportunities or unfollowed dreams, or unfulfilled youthful ambition and the aspirations to push on into the confusion of life, a multiverse of identities. This, against the rigid confines of a lack of confidence; against the security of a single life and the same identity lived once. Don’t you think?”

“Ok. But you took money.” I pointed to the man who had claimed he was a doctor. “You’re not a doctor, are you?”

“I could have been.”

“That’s not the same. Give me my money back.” I leaned forward across the expanse of the sofa and pulled at the man’s jacket, where I had seen him stow the money.

“I brought you here.”

“I asked you to take me to Lyuben Luther.”

“He doesn’t exist.”

“So how can you take money?”

“The errands have been the same. I needed the taxi fare anyhow.”

For a few moments, we struggled on the sofa while I tried to retrieve the money from his jacket pocket.

“Please, let us check the books. We can tell you the story of Lyuben Luther,” said the other man, who had not claimed to be a doctor. He tapped his finger on his chin and strode around the bookshelves. “We’re not really too good with organising all of this,” he said, as he went back and forth.

The other man sat with his arms tightly folded, to protect his pocket.

“Here!” The professorial man seemed pleased with himself again. He raced up a small set of steps and grasped at a book on a high shelf. “Here it is!” He climbed down the steps much more slowly, flicking the pages of the book in an ostentatiously thoughtful manner.

I feigned interest, turning on the sofa to follow his progress down the ladder and across the room.

“Our project is to document the lives of the never born. We have here in our biographical library the story of Lyuben Luther. See. Written here. Just a few pages on the highlights of his life, his loves, ambitions and achievements. Do you wish to read?”

I took the book from him, as he had leaned across to offer it to me.

“You see, Lyuben Luther was quite an anxious man. He tried to become a man of the cloth, but his constant worry about not believing meant he had to take up an academic post, and even then he became disillusioned with the insular world of knowledge, and instead became a baker. This satisfied his anxieties. He had a wife and six children and lived comfortably and happily for many years.”

“Really. Where did that information come from?”

“From here. The book.”

“Who wrote that?”

“We did. We wrote all this.”

“All this?”

“The books here,“ gesturing at the shelves of books and the small stepladder that was required to reach them. “These books document the lives of the never born.”

“You wrote all this?”

“Yes. I told you.”

“What are you doing this for?”

“We are trying to catalogue the never born. To provide a repository of biographical information. A records office for the never born.”

“Why?”

The man started laughing, and strutted about the room again. He seemed to be quite pleased with himself.

“You’re right. This is what our colleague here keeps telling me as well. We used only to record the names of the never born, and then the dates they might have been born on had they been born. Then we sketched in a few genealogical details, and where they might have lived had they been born. This can be quite disheartening. There is something so crude and brutal about the date and time of birth and death. It’s blunt factuality lacks any consideration of the human situation, the desires and hopes and dreams of each individual. We have taken lately to providing a much richer biographical note, and documenting much of the key potential lifetime events of the individual had he or she been born, and quite often developing an exploration of their inner lives and beliefs and regrets. It has become quite time consuming.”

“Yes.”

“Our colleague here wishes to take things still further. He argues we should live the lives of the never born. We should adopt their personae and celebrate their birthdays and live out their potential existences as well as our own. He’s not even a doctor. Some of the time he claims to be a doctor. Doctor Rudolf Martínek.”

I looked at the man who had claimed to be a doctor as the other gentleman pointed at him. He smiled and made a gesture with his hands that I did not understand.

“We should live the lives of the never born, he claims. More than writing their names or celebrating their birthdays. Each day could be the birthday of someone never born. Let us embrace that and live their lives on that day. This is what he does. Dr Martínek.”

“We’re not the only people to do this. We know of people across the world who join us in lamenting and celebrating the never born.” The doctor spoke as if defending their activities from someone accusing them of wasting their time. “Perhaps it is part of what it means to be human.”

“There are also people across the world claiming to be others, forging passports and living under fake names. It is such a common pursuit, perhaps more common than persisting with the same name and identity all through one’s life.”

“You think so?”

“You must know. Tell us. Why are you looking for Lyuben Luther? Who are you?”

I laughed, and stood.

“I am Lyuben Luther.”

---

The posts ended there. We were not convinced that the man was indeed Lyuben Luther, but we plotted his activities on our map. He was the fifth man we had detected who claimed to have the name Lyuben Luther. There seemed to be some overlap in their biographical details, but this could have been coincidental. Efforts to track him down and attempt to prosecute failed because we could not confirm his identity. To this day, his whereabouts are unknown.