The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (8 page)

The past. Fragments appear and disappear when you least expect them. Look, for example; Lu was rejoining Gusti Gora, even though she’d previously said she wouldn’t. Even now, she was playing the role of his one and only wife! No, their marriage hadn’t been an illusion—their separation was the illusion.

“When I first met her, I didn’t just simply meet her; I found her again. She’d been inside of me for a long time,” Professor Gora whispered into the mute receiver.

She hadn’t agreed to accompany Gora to the wastelands of liberty and well-being, but she couldn’t let him go off on his own
either. She joins him, unaware—or perhaps aware—that this is how she defies their separation.

The couple proceeded silently on the sidewalk in front of the station. Bound to each other. All of a sudden, Lu shook her black hair, looking at her husband.

“I don’t think that Peter knows the story of his parents. His father, once married to Liza, who was burned away, along with their little girl Miry … Peter represents Eva’s new beginning, not David’s. The basketball player can’t stand her maternal excesses, I’m sure.”

They were coming back, after accompanying the guest to the station. Gora had been surprised by the ardor with which Lu invested the subject.

In the months that followed, Lu seemed to be uncovering the mysteries of her own being. David and Eva Cşspar’s biographies provided the lost code. Through them she was beginning to come out of the unknown inside of herself.

“It isn’t certain that Peter is David’s son. The delirium of liberation triggered … let’s say impulses, as the former detainees would say. The orgy of liberation, the orgy of pent-up senses. They say that everyone coupled with whoever was around. David might have seen his momentary partner only afterward. Peter was born in Belgrade, on their way home. Eva didn’t want to return, but David insisted on reestablishing the facts. To reinstate justice! It was among parents such as these that Peter grew up to play basketball.”

Fragmentary information, gleaned from others, tied up in presumptions. It wasn’t mere gossip occasioned by the—till then-unknown cousin’s visit, but the reawakening of a dormant question. Warning signs, interferences, expectations. Lu seemed consumed.

Gora felt excluded, relegated to the role of a spectator who had only part of the puzzle in front of him. Lu had had similar lapses previously, swift, imperceptible slips; all of a sudden, you could no longer reach her. It was like an affectionate and reversible kind of autism. An opportune touch was enough to call her back; a lethargic rippling movement would follow, and she was lifted out of the trance, reconnected to reality, with a heightened vitality. She
instantly electrified her partner. Her abandon had the same ardor as her absence; you weren’t sure whether the intense communion wasn’t just another form of estrangement. The dark embers in her eyes deepened, her hands trembled, her lips quivered, her mouth dilated, a voracious leech sucking the blood and pus of her prey.

The magic of desire spurred his memory and brought him close to her. And the memory of desire never faded. An initiation, ever the same, and different every time. A lasting black void, murmurs of enchantment and melancholy.

He’d tried, more than once, to stifle those memories, but they returned in waves, like the tides. The distance in which Lu had hidden herself made the obsession more acute and permanent, intolerable at the start, then magical and longed for.

He’d accepted the highly improbable news, that Lu was Peter’s partner! The young cousin represented an unspeakably shrewd ruse, but also an exercise in humility. And a test, reinvented by the Gora couple—that was what the former and actual husband Au-gustin Gora believed.

The beautiful Lu had no reason to pair up with Peter! There must surely have been more formidable suitors. To choose the young cousin was to show a dubious resignation, and a suspicious defiance of public opinion. While Lu didn’t necessarily champion social conventions, she wasn’t impervious to their implications either.

Was it the masochism of humility? Gora was as happy to fantasize about Lu’s humility as he was to dream about the complicity between them.

The castaway Augustin Gora had also found himself alone and free in the New and Free World, some years back. After a few days, he’d written to Professor Cosmin Dima. He’d gotten a prompt response, repeated phone calls and questions about their common Homeland. Dima offered immediately to help him; he invited Gora to see him and paid for the plane ticket. One of several similar trips over the course of the following months.

Right away Gora was fascinated by the lucidity the Old Man (as he would call him) exhibited. The scholar experienced exile as a sort of adventure and initiation; he even succeeded in opening the world of the new arrival, who’d already wandered around in books and the worlds of books. An essential experience. “Pushed into an extreme situation, you reinvent the strategy of renewal,” the feeble voice was saying.

He considered his relationship to his native country—full of so much collapse and nostalgia—with the same detachment, or apparent detachment. And lately, it was apparent, indeed. If you were up to date with the newspapers of the Library of Congress, you understood that it was only
apparent.

He would say, ad nauseam, “Existence is a privilege! Immense and fleeting,” the timid voice repeated.

As if to amplify the enfeebled sonority of the voice, his small hands, which were stained by ink and disease, animated the words, vibrating above the piles of manuscripts.

And death? Gora asked himself. He’d read Dima’s celebrated texts about Death and the morbid labyrinths; he knew the slogans of Dima’s acolytes, who were armed for the Apocalypse of Purification. Just like his former comrades, the Old Man had made many pious bows to Death, with studies and exegeses.

After a short pause, Dima added melancholically and without having been solicited, “Supreme Death! Reigning over all, absolute Queen, and God Himself. It’s only through Death that we get to embrace Him.” He advised the newcomer to remain in touch with people back home, not to disavow anything, good or bad, from the past. “Our graves are there, in the past. More lasting than we are.”

Dima drew his pipe from the edge of the desk, embarrassed, and began to twirl it between his fingers. “I’m not allowed even this pleasure anymore,” he whispered, still turning his pipe. There was no tobacco in sight.

“Don’t forget the privileges of the past, and take advantage of the present!”

Empty rhetoric, thought Gora. After a few days, in a letter to Lu,
he mentioned the conversation with the idol of those lost souls in the attic where they’d first met. The famous Dima seemed amenable to taking legal steps with the American authorities in order to secure a passport for the young Mrs. Gora, left behind on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The situation in the faraway country had worsened; Gora hoped that Lu had reconsidered her initial refusal. Her stupefying decision hung heavily. Without qualifying it, he evoked that night so long ago, that attic room full of tempestuous and juvenile debates, when one of the students victoriously put on the table three French volumes by Cosmin Dima.

The discussion surrounding the famous and exiled scholar ignited instantly, but, to everyone’s surprise, Gora was quiet and unengaged, answering the students’ questions with curt, paradoxical remarks. He didn’t need to remind Lu why he hadn’t managed to pay attention to those earnest and heady speculations—he was convinced that she hadn’t forgotten their first meeting, either, and that she’d understood, then, just like the others, the reason for his uncustomary silence. He wasn’t simply retreating into himself. He was distancing himself from the loquaciousness of the audience, which he generally dominated, in order to attract—through his sudden silence—the attention of the unknown newcomer.

No one knew who had brought Lu into their midst. But everyone noted the person who accompanied her out at the end of the night.

The following nights they came and left together, and then they were absent for a long time. When they returned, they no longer seemed very interested in subversive controversies. They appeared unexpectedly, disappeared for weeks on end, until they disappeared altogether. After a year, they were married. After the wedding, Lu looked more beautiful than ever. Now, she was also happy, voluble. Even while his marital responsibilities seemed to mature him, Gora infantilized himself. He intently followed his wife’s every gesture. A happy time, devoid of history.

Her refusal to follow him to the majestic United States of America represented for Gora an unfathomable enigma, even after so many
years. In the public eye, the fissure was indiscernible. Intimacy, however, revealed strange constrictions. The rational and pragmatic partner was being undermined by a sleepy double, loosed from a dark place. He no longer recognized the stranger who crouched in the corner as if she were being punished, who thrashed, unseen, among contaminated lianas. Her pride persisted, however. Lu had been taught not to complain, to avoid showing weakness or sorrow. She never lamented, except to herself, in solitude.

These regressive reprises took a grave toll on the enchantment of their first years of living together. Gradually, that enchantment was replaced by the fascination of seemingly living with more than one person at once, each persona asserting its supremacy. He deciphered his wife’s codes slowly and never fully. Ever on the ready, he waited for the shocks, in cycles of shock.

Looking back made him anxious even now, after so many years.

The finery had evaporated, no one knew when or how; Lu would wake suddenly in the morning, robbed of her security, shattered, submerged in gloom. Suspicion would quickly reclaim her; the happy past would recede and cease to exist. There was no longer anything solid around her, just a dubious trap for what might still be. The captive felt herself flung into the void of the anonymous and the rejected, frightened by adverse winds, pushed toward a precipice that had in fact been waiting for her for a long time.

She no longer knew how much love her past had contained, and she couldn’t name the enigma that separated that Lu from the present one. Everything seemed diluted and obscure. And still the confusion of this fraternization, this incest with the sister who didn’t resemble him, persisted.

Was domestic love undermining actual love?

The idea of exile, the humility of wandering, had always frightened her. Was her union with her younger, aloof cousin a kind of orphan’s shelter? Or was she looking for the familiarity of the tribe?

The Dutchman’s Balkan successor was nothing but a simulacrum. And the age in which she lived was just a parody without posterity.

Posterity? Here it was, a step away and all around. Camps of gossip and goods, the citizen plagued by publicity, an earthbound jumble. Mynheer’s laughter in the grave of the farce that celebrity had made of him.

That was a venomous thought, one with which he could go to bed, our good friend Gora. This night was certain to be a garrulous one.

Lu wasn’t yet employed at Dr. Koch’s office when Peter quit his fellowship at New York University. Was that the irresponsibility invoked in his first conversation with Gora?!

An Italian colleague of Gşspar’s was touched by the ease with which the eastern refugee renounced the income of the fellowship, as modest as it was to begin with, and by his readiness to hurl himself into the unknown. She was a colleague with a legendary name, Beatrice, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, married to an elderly, wealthy American. She’d come up with a sensational solution; Peter would have breakfast with her husband every morning! After which, they’d discuss the headlines. The public service would be decently remunerated.

To Mr. Artwein the name Peter Ga
par inspired trust immediately. Peter was to bring and discuss the day’s newspaper. Only, not the current year’s. Mr. Artwein wanted the newspapers of the year in which he himself was born. January 5 became January 5 of 1920; June 22 was June 22,1920, and so on. The world came into being on the same day that Mr. Artwein did, on February 24,1920.

Peter seemed excited by the bizarre preoccupation. He didn’t care that he was, evidently, the object of an act of charity. “Now that’s what I call an idea! Everyone says that Americans are
workaholics,
physically addicted to work; they can’t stop working and they can’t stop thinking about money—look, here’s one who’s made enough, who gives up working, who is ready to throw his money out the window. Unconventional pleasures! As for his wife’s being too young and available, that doesn’t bother him. He’s not obsessed
with supervising or lording over her; he leaves her to the will of her unlimited appetite, hires a Balkan vagabond to conduct his morning conversations about the past among men, just like in the old days!”

He’d begun the gig with great enthusiasm. Every afternoon he went to the city’s central library and photocopied the old newspaper that he would present the following morning at work.

Breakfast would sometimes lengthen, but Mr. Artwein never exaggerated his courtesy; he never invited him to lunch. Not that he’d have had time, anyway. He had other things to do in the afternoons.