The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (5 page)

The silence was soon followed by the assurances with which the hosts overwhelmed the guest: it was nothing but a mistake or misunderstanding; David wasn’t the kind to take such an injustice sitting down; he’ll contest it, demand recourse and be exonerated in the end. Rivalries and intrigues exist everywhere people exist; the indignities and mistakes couldn’t go on forever; the young student will find out, and soon, because justice always prevails, after all. The guest was served with sweets. Lu showed him the family library and took him on a long walk through the capital. On the way back,
the traveler was advised to rest, as he faced a sleepless night on the way home.

That night, on the way back from taking his guest to the train, Gora learned the story of Peter’s birth.

The watchmaker David Ga
par had succeeded in hiding during the first year of the war, and then the second year, as well, together with his wife and daughter; but in the spring of 1944, they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz by the Hungarian authorities who presided over Transylvania. His wife and daughter were gassed immediately after arrival. David survived, working first in a little workshop where the gold taken from the living and the dead was turned into jewelry. He was transferred to hard—brutal—labor. He was lucky to possess a vigorous constitution. After the death of his loved ones, he put aside sentiments, worries, and became alone and strong. Indifferent, calculated, determined to survive.

Liberated by the Soviets, he met his future wife in the triage hospital for former detainees. They were married on the long way back home.

Eva, ten years younger than he, didn’t want to return to the place from which she was sent to her death. She dreamed of the Promised Land, the land set aside for survivors. David proved unyielding, however. Determined to come home, to look into the eyes of his former friends and neighbors, the former policemen and politicians who’d erased his name from the roster of the living.

They returned in the fall of 1946, after detours through devastated Europe. David and Eva, his new wife, and the infant Peter, born in Belgrade, along the complicated detours of the return. Oti-lia Serafim, Ludmila’s mother, contended that Peter might not even be David’s son. “In the chaos of the liberation, copulation was general. Anyone with anyone. A great orgy to enliven the dead.”

“The story disturbed us all,” Lu confessed. “Even today the family is uncomfortable with it. We weren’t that well off either during the war. Filth, humiliation, danger, labor camps, daily panic. But David’s story is still something else entirely.”

Once back in his native town, the watchmaker David Ga
par
didn’t look into the eyes of former neighbors or policemen or politicians, as he’d sworn he would. He simply refused to remember the concentration camp. He called on his friends and family to do the same.

Lu’s face had become slender, as in old biblical images. His Madonna had paled. Gora was shocked at the effect those very words had had on her. Vulnerable to emotive excesses, she herself intensified them. Her fragility seemed like the visible face of a presentiment, suddenly alerted. She intercepted, or allowed herself to be intercepted by, vague signs; her incertitude prompted her unease.

She stopped, to calm her pulse. She looked increasingly pale.

“I can feel what you’re thinking. No, there was never any room in my family for religion, as you well know. Not in the past, and even less so now, when atheism has become opportunism. My parents were freethinkers before becoming Communists. They instilled in me their rationalism, and solidarity with the humiliated and oppressed. I had no access to mystical books or people, and I didn’t attend debates about the transcendent. And still, again and again, moments come when something obscure slips by me, or derails me. Something leaves me vulnerable. Susceptible to I don’t know what. Something unknown lives here, hidden, inside me.”

All of a sudden, she shook her rich, black hair. Her face remained white; her eyes burned like a fever. In the course of a brief and nervous spasm, she seemed to have shaken her burden loose, along with her hair.

“I was thinking of Peter. When the boy was born, David Ga
par said to his wife, ‘He’s going to live in another world, and we, with him.’ And Eva told him, ‘He was born to marked parents. The New World contains the Old World, the past will live in him, as well.’ They never revealed to Peter that his father had been married before, and that he’d had another daughter, a sister who was never to be a sister. My mother doubts that David is actually Peter’s father. Only he and Eva know, maybe not even they.”

Lu’s voice and gaze had fallen.

And now that he was in the New World, how much had Peter brought from the past, and how much had Lu? Gora asked himself. What else did they bring?

Later, Professor Gora learned that Peter had refused the “survivor” status that the well-intentioned Americans were prepared to give him, just as he’d always refused any allusion to the tragedy out of which he was born. He distanced himself abruptly from any discussion about the horror that was responsible for his parents’ union.

Between the teenager who found himself unexpectedly in his relatives’ house and the exile who awoke like a phantom, twenty years later, at the sound of the phone (and in the mind of Professor Gora), was Lu, the wife of Augustin Gora, seen on a summer’s evening, on an abandoned sidewalk.

Old anxieties assaulted Professor Gora’s solitude once again. He would have liked to delay them, to remain in Lu’s story. It pained him and pleased him; it invigorated him; it retrieved him from the void.

He’d closed his eyes, to remain this way with Lu, suspended in the impossible.

After the adolescent’s return home, there was no more than the rare news from the Ga
par family.

Lu had started to speak more and more about Eva Ga
par. She didn’t know her personally, but she described her with a mix of admiration and apprehension. She called her on the phone. Eva’s anxiety was probably tied to Peter, not to her husband, or so it appeared to Lu. Some kind of maternal fervor. Eva seemed at last to have found, not through her husband, but through her son, some relief from the past. An obsession with Peter’s future had taken hold of her.

“Eva is possessive,” Gora decided, annoyed. “She’s uncertain about the resolution of her own life. And all too certain about the lives of others.”

Lu shuddered, shocked. She watched him. Frowning, hurt. Frightened, it seemed. The silence had grown, and Gora never brought up the subject of Eva Ga
par again. He resigned himself to listen to the subsequent short bits of information, all of them selected, it seemed, with the aim of contradicting his interpretation.

Peter had been neither a predictable nor a natural choice for Lu. Was he the modest acceptance of the familiar? Lu didn’t value modesty, and didn’t accept psychoanalytical speculations. She considered them frivolous forays devoid of intimacy. She preferred to judge and to be judged on the basis of facts. Though, actually, she didn’t like at all to be judged.

Familiarity, then?

“I’m leaving for a few days, to see the Gaspars. I want to meet Eva. To understand what’s happening over there. Especially, what happened. In that past that wasn’t mine …”

Her husband didn’t hide his perplexity.

“Don’t you see? I live in an aquarium. I can’t, just like that, become a bricklayer on a construction site. Just to see what a wonderful existence our wonderful working class leads, an existence about which I know nothing, except the fairytales I read in the papers. But I can go to the Ga
pars. Not to find out why the prosecutor is no longer a prosecutor, even though the effort would be worth it. But to find out something else, something more painful, probably.”