The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (4 page)

Nothing but a petty technician in a petty, socialist enterprise, Ga
par contributed to cultural journals with short, ironic texts, eschewing the wooden, official language. Casual little columns on theater and art exhibitions, even on the races, or philately. He could be spotted at shows and gallery openings and cocktail parties. Em-barrassed
(but not embarrassed enough) by his phantom and persistent prestige, obsessed with the spies that teemed all around.

Tall, lean, and ill at ease as a result of a lanky body, as if he’d borrowed it for too long and forgotten to return it.

Shaved head with a black moustache and goatee, he resembled a hussar employed by a musical theater producer. His intense, black gaze under his thick eyebrows of crude oil. Small hands, smooth brow. Straight nose, in defiance of his heredity.

The way he looked, his name could have been Hungarian or German. It was rumored, however, that he might be circumcised. So he was. The rumor proved sovereign, in keeping with tradition. Some even alleged that his biography contained certain dramatic details, though the facts were vague, just like those concerning his supposed masterpiece. He seemed like any other, though maybe he wasn’t. His comradely casualness, left over from when he played hockey and basketball and football in youth leagues, inspired sympathy.

His post-Habsburgian-Transylvanian education conflicted with the Balkan and Parisian mannerisms characteristic of metropolitan Bucharest. Could Transylvania be considered occidental? Mynheer Peeperkorn also conferred on his successor a second, convenient ennoblement, “The Dutchman.” His company took to calling him by that nickname; you could hear them yell loudly, “Hey, Dutchman!”

Ga
par’s text defied the distorted “debates” of the Authority, the great words and the humanist catchphrases.

Incoherence was subversive. Is that what Ga
par was suggesting? He appeared sometimes, donning Peeperkorn’s felt hat, and, after a few shots of vodka, recited his namesake’s lines, with an outstretched, imploring hand.

We’re
cheating, my good men. This wind, this tender, fresh fragrance … presentiments and memories. Liquidated, my good men. I’ll stop. Li-qui-da-ted. The summit, a black and rotating point and a grand bird of prey. An eagle of the great solitudes. The bird of Jupiter, the lion of the air.

Was the story
Mynheer,
somehow, a codified plea in favor of the New World?
A self-made man,
the international Peeperkorn! The King of Coffee, a Dutchman with a residence in Java, near his lover with the Caucasian eyes. A plea for freedom and for the Statue on the Hudson? Liberty, vitality!

How well can you know a person lost among the consumers of illusions, along the meridian where the Orient meets the Occident? Professor Gora would not have had the courage to respond. Pieter Peeperkorn brought the page to life, while Gora waited in vain; Ga
par would not appear.

In the book the giant Dutchman commits suicide, injecting himself with animal venom and plant poisons. The tropical fevers drain his power. “The failure to perceive life intensely is a cosmic catastrophe,” the letter says. Shame before God.

Gora hoped to understand, gradually, what he couldn’t understand previously. Could Mynheer Ga
par become in America what everyone had said he was, after all?

Some years back, Peter, who was then a senior in high school, suddenly found himself on a visit to relatives in the capital.

Tall, pale, furrowed, and burdened with a mission disproportionately heavy for his age. He had only a few hours to go before the return train. He’d traveled overnight from the western corner of the country, for this bizarre family reunion, to relate what had happened to his father, or to warn his relatives about the consequences that could befall them.

The prosecutor David Ga
par was entirely unaware of his wife’s initiative to send the adolescent—who was, at that moment, generally more preoccupied with basketball than with the shadows of politics—on such a mission. Eva Ga
par arranged for the boy’s absence not to produce any suspicion. The son sometimes used to sleep at the house of a fellow student, Tibor, whose parents kept the secret.

Augustin Gora instantly registered the concern on the faces of Lu’s parents. They already knew, it seemed, about David Ga
par’s dismissal and about similar cases. Comrade Serafim and Comrade Ga
par were merely cousins, but fear was transmitted quickly, like a virus. Worried about their own situation, they didn’t discuss the news with their son-in-law, who was also asking himself, then—and continued to ask himself afterward—if they had confided in friends, and who these friends could have been. He preferred to believe that, if these friends existed, they would have counted him among them.

On that dusty July afternoon Peter was invited to sit in the large, red leather armchair in the living room, to relate the details of his message. Gora felt the danger migrating from the western borders of the country toward his new family.

The young athlete became instantly contaminated with the unease of those listening while he described the absurd and sudden raid of his parents’ house. The former watchmaker David Ga
par was inexplicably dismissed from his function as a prosecutor of socialist justice! If the Party wants to, it sends a watchmaker to a one-year school and turns him into a prosecutor overnight; and if the Party wants to, the prosecutor, overnight, is no longer a prosecutor. He couldn’t be accused of dishonesty or politically iconoclastic actions, just for the excessive intransigence with which he served the Cause. The pretext of the dismissal remained obscure; the disgrace could have consequences just as absurd as the motivation. This was the message with which Eva Ga
par entrusted her young son.