The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (3 page)

“There’s such a thing as a doctorate here … ”

“In art, Professor. History of art. Even in our tranquil Homeland, there were night classes. Art history classes. You couldn’t have known this.”

“No.”

Not true, but he wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation.

Ga
par explained that he had no intention of becoming an expert in German abstract expressionism, as his scholarship promised. He simply wanted to remain in the New World.

Right now, when hope was being reborn in Eastern Europe? He wasn’t a young man anymore; nor had he come for the future of his nonexistent children. And so, then? Was he alone? No, Lu had come with him. She’d finished university with an English degree, as Professor Gora knew all too well. English would dull her in this land, where she’d moored, or run aground. Yes, she had initiated Peter in the New World’s native language, with underwhelming results; he couldn’t decipher the station names as they were announced in the subway. For the time being, he had no work permit.

Laconic answers to Professor Gora’s spare and weary questions.

“I’d had enough, that’s all. I’m not the adventurous type, and I’m not interested in tourism. But I’d never left my country even once. Not once! Forty years of legalized bliss, in the same place! But now I’ve left!
For good,
as you say here. I have an absolute, urgent need for irresponsibility. At least now, before the funeral processions. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.”

He accentuated this word, heavily, twice, as if he were talking to an idiot, or simply to himself. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.

He was speaking of an end, not a beginning, about getting out of a situation, not of entering another. About a departure, not an arrival.

“You’re right. I’m not staking my claim to a new place; I’m freeing myself of the old one. The same hide-and-seek game with death, somewhere new, outside of the old cage. For the time being, I need a job. A salary. It would be both dishonest and wearisome to keep up the charade of the scholarship. Lu’s a babysitter now. She’s always liked the children she never had.”

So, the adventurer had, in fact, come for the adventure … Gloomily, Professor Gora smiled, measuring with his eyes the shelves full of adventure.

“You’ve come for adventure.”

“I didn’t say adventure. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.”

Peter Ga
par made sure to specify that Professor Gora wasn’t to send him money. He just wanted advice from time to time, or, at least, to be able to talk to someone familiar, that was all.

Familiar? Yes, they’d gotten to know each other when Gora was Ludmila’s husband.

“We’ll be in touch,” and that was all that the newcomer wanted to say.

Some time had elapsed since that nebulous conversation with Peter. Or had it been nebulous only in Gora’s mind? Peter maintained that though he’d arrived in America resolved not to look for Gora, he’d changed his mind without knowing why. Time passed between his arrival and this decision, and some more time passed after this first conversation, as well. Peter disappeared but continued to haunt Gora. The professor asked himself how he should define reality. He closed and reopened his eyes, looked at the bookshelves, the large and lustrous desk, the computer, the pair of red gloves on the edge of the table, the telephone, the big, open folder spilling a pile of blank pages.

Peter Ga
par evoked memories about which he was no longer—and didn’t want to be—sure. He had increasingly more faith in books than in memories he didn’t want anything to do with. He believed in what survived in writing. The mind and soul of the interlocutor. The interlocutor that he was now belonged to the past.

A stranger among strangers, one may still reencounter friends from a previous life. In books! The books from his previous life were waiting for him. Hopeful comrades, they welcomed him in other languages. Loyal conversationalists, ready to restore his familiar habits, to humanize his wandering.

He wasn’t at all in the mood for Peter Ga
par. Pieter Peeperkorn, yes. He was happy to encounter Mynheer Peeperkorn again, and immediately following the telephone conversation, he reread those three chapters about the Dutchman in the massive novel of the 1920s.

In the sanatorium of
The Magic Mountain,
Hans Castorp is waiting wistfully for Clavdia Chauchat. The woman of his dreams appears on the arm of a fabulous companion. Tall and rosy brow, dense lines. Long, thin, white hair, thin goatee. Large mouth and nose, mangled lips. Wide, spotted hands, long, sharp nails. With his stature and accent, the Dutchman dominated the society of the sanatorium. Jerky, elliptical, incoherent discourse.

That set-ties it. And you must keep in mind and never—not for a moment—lose sight of the fact that—but enough on that topic
… So
then, Emchen my child, listen well: a little bread, my dear.

That’s what Peeperkorn called the booze that enlivened him: bread.

Bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread, of that we have a sufficiency, in all shapes and sizes. Not baked, but distilled, my angel. The bread of God, clear as crystal, my little Nickname, that we may be regaled … in light of our duty, our holy obligation—for example, the debt of honor incumbent upon me to turn with a most cordial heart to you, so small but full of character—a gin, my love!

The wide-breasted stranger with the tall brow, dingy eyes, and the strong head enveloped in the white flames of his hair was an imposing man. Seized at alternately by chills and by fever. An imposing force, a magnificent incoherence.

Life is short, whereas our ability to meet its challenges is but—those are facts, my child. Laws. In-ex-or-a-bilities.

Telegraphic, fractured missives, confused understandings. A personality! With the greatness of a tribal chief, his countenance and dingy gaze subdue his audience. The large hand of a captain, a clutched fist pounding the table.

Whatever is simple! Whatever is holy! Fine, you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirits—let us first measure up to and enjoy such things before we—absolutely, my dear sir. Settled.

An offbeat burlesque. Powerlessness, just like strength, devastated him.

It may be a sin—and a token of our inadequacies—to indulge in
refined tastes without having given the simple, natural gifts of life, the great and holy gifts, their due … the defeat of feeling in the face of life, that is the inadequacy for which there is no pardon, no pity, no honor
… If
is the end, the despair of hell itself, doomsday …

The face and silhouette of Peter Ga
par, whom he hadn’t seen for over twenty years, and not often even before that, remained obscure. Gora remembered only that he didn’t resemble Pieter Peeperkorn. This he remembered for certain.

There was another motivation behind that nickname. A story that Peter Ga
par wrote,
Mynheer,
caused some ripples among the socialist literati. Slaves forced to praise their slavery are happily receptive even to the most furtive winks of complicity, or a fraction of mockery. Was there some secret gunpowder hidden within the story that spurred Peter Ga
par’s notoriety among the socialist underground? It was just a story! Published in a provincial journal, what’s more. Forty years after the celebrated novel of the celebrated Thomas of Lübeck! Was there some codified allusion that escaped the censor’s eye? Such oddities did happen, quickly to be forgotten. Not long after the publication, the author was branded with the name of his protagonist. Not even a name, a formal address-become-name. Mister, Monsieur, Monsignor. Mynheer! The nickname circulated in the literary cafe, and then beyond it. The name fueled the rumors that surrounded Peter Ga
par; the author never published anything again, but the halo wouldn’t be shattered. In the country that invented rumors, it was rumored that Peter had authored other literary charades, unknown to anyone. It was whispered that he worked, in secret, on a masterpiece. Rumors were the garlicky black bread of the dictatorship.