Norman Manea - The Lair

“And your name? What’s your name, in fact?”

“RA0298.”

“What’s that you say?”

“My name has become a number. It’s engraved on my arm, just like … would you like to see?” The passenger’s eyes widened.

“You mean to say … no, no, you’re too young. That’s a bad joke. Auschwitz is a bad joke.”

“Okay, okay. It’s a bad joke, I’ll give you that.”

“So then, what is it? Your driver’s ID?”

“Resident Alien. RA 02987896. RA 0298, for short.”

They spoke endlessly, that is, for five minutes. Little Italy, like America, was hurried, pragmatic, energetic, hurried. The engine needed starting.

The driver started the engine. He stepped on the gas, repeated the magic formula of the devil that had brought him to Little Italy and that will take him further. Slow, slow.. Gas, and so on. Foot, yes, foot on the brake, left, mirror.

He stopped. No more than a few meters, and he stopped. Happily, he stopped. A stoplight. A divine, red light. The talkative passenger had stopped talking. Stupefied, he watched the taxi driver. The driver waited a second, the light turned green, he waited another second, “Slow, slow.” Another one-two-three seconds. He could hear the horns behind him, but he had the magic formula. Slow. There was no other solution. That was how he’d gotten to Little Italy, and that was how he’d get to the cemetery of the airport. Slow, this was the only password the devil understood.

He started again, cautiously, was just about going.

“No, no!” The mustached gentleman yelled. “Enough. This isn’t working. No, no, it’s not working,” the VIP was screaming, exasperated. “This isn’t working,” or, “this isn’t working anymore,” or whatever he was jabbering. Red in the face, on the brink of apoplexy.

“Stop! I’m getting out.”

The driver stopped, waited for the elegant gentleman to ask for his valise and for the scandal to start. The celebrity forgot about the bag, however; he didn’t even look in the backseat.

“Get out! You get out, too!”

The driver didn’t understand. He watched the client in a daze; he didn’t understand; he lacked the courage to understand. “Get out. We’ll change places.”

He got behind the wheel, and by the time they arrived at the airport, they were friends.

Before heading over to the departure corridor, Larry forced Peter Ga par to call Stolz, to say that he’d gotten sick at the airport and he’d left the car in the parking garage, and someone should come and get it.

“Here’s my card. I run a college. It’s small, bizarre, but vibrant; I don’t have open positions right now; I can’t offer you anything. If you can’t get by, call me and we’ll figure something out. Give up driving. Choose poison or a bullet. Death at the wheel is trivial, and you’re a sensible man.”

Peter stared, bewildered, at the card. Bedros Avakian! Professor Bedros Avakian. That was all it said. It meant that he was famous, there was no need of other details. Bedros Avakian. So then, Larry! Peter the Driver, alias Kaspar, alias Karl, had decided to call him Larry.

That’s how he’d met Larry. In later retellings, the immigrant Peter would identify through the same generic name, Larry, all the harbingers of his American destiny.

After the failed meeting with Death, the improvised taxi driver was hired by Stolz at one of his gas stations. Lu became the assistant to Dr. Koch. The couple’s situation improved somewhat.

Peter never forgot the first Larry’s advice. Any other kind of death is better than death at the wheel. Even falling off a trampoline.

He’d become friends with the manager at the gas station, a Syrian with his own network of schemes and shady earnings. Cars came and went; it was the sexual hum and hub of the city. A city with no equal, muttered Peter, in love with the Lunar City, unique and unifying.

A seasonal observer of the sky, Peter Ga parobserved, without actually taking in, the red sky. The Hamletian clouds, astral and archaic symbols, birds of every color, elephant bodies riding the improbable batons of their legs. A drizzly twilight. The new Babylon was brashly raising the arrows of its buildings. Pylons stuck into the sordid subterranean depths, where rats, vagabonds, roaches, beggars, moles, and murderers — the fauna of the metropolis — teemed. “A marvelous city,” the wanderer murmured, dumbfounded in the face of the impassable Syrian. A mountainous cheek made of clay, secular whetstones, wilderness in full view.

“Change those bulbs,” a hoarse voice said.

He found the bulbs, grabbed the ladder and went out. He’d been putting off changing them for a few days. One step, and another, hands on the ladder, a rung, then another, left hand holding the side, the right hand outstretched toward the post to unscrew the burned bulb. Hand in the air — boom! Explosion. Not the bulb, but the ground. The mammoth mass hits the earth like a meteor, shaking the pavement.

In the ambulance, the dead hallucinated, “Hauser. Finished, liquidated. Airways. Kennedy.” Kennedy and Airways were easy to distinguish. “Hauser. So little. Liquidated.”

The dead tossed around over the steering wheel in his dream. Those dear, red lights. “Irres … ir-re-sponsible. Liquidated.”

He leaned the evening up against the wall. The burned bulb on the post in the front of the station. The new bulb in his right pants pocket. He’d gotten to the top, and the rain was hammering down. His hand extended toward the post, his hand and his mind up in the air. Wet pavement. Twisted ladder, the elephant toppled to the ground that once bore him. Boom! The cadaver on the pavement.

Emergency visits don’t require insurance, the hospital has to receive anyone who arrives in an ambulance, this much the Syrian knew, as well as Stolz the proprietor, who didn’t offer the immigrants he employed any health insurance. The doctors woke the victim from his blackout to inform him that he’d crushed the bones in both of his legs. He urgently needed surgery, the soldering of crushed bones, implantation of metal rods to make them straight again. The Pakistani surgeon relayed the miracle: Stolz paid a spectacular sum out of the pocket of his former friend Mike Mark, the sensitive shark.

Once revived, Peter Ga par was spared all further medical costs, but the incident aggravated the misunderstanding between the cousins, it would seem.

After his return from London, Dr. Avakian inquired about the chauffer Ga par. Professor Augustin Gora, once given an honorary title by Avakian’s institution, received a call from the president’s secretary. She was asking if he knew anything about that bizarre compatriot of his.

“So then you know Ga par,” the historian exclaimed after a second. “Ga par! RA 0298! Peter Ga par.”

“Yes,” Gora responded, stammering. “I know the name … and more, believe me, much more!”

“No, no, we’re not just joking around. There’s more, believe me. Death is the matter at hand. The paradoxical messenger of death.”

Gora was silent, suddenly overwhelmed.

“Death! That’s the institution your compatriot represents. At first I thought he didn’t know the city, that he was mixing up addresses, that he’d gotten confused. I was trying to divert his attention from the madness of driving, I talked about Little Italy, the neighborhood where he was hunting for death, who was hunting for him, and about Kaspar Hauser, about Brecht, the troupe from Vilna, Kafka, anything. I’m a historian, but I’m also a reader, of course, and not only that. How to distract his attention from driving? No one else could do a better job of this than he himself. His eyes opened wide to the chaos through which he was navigating, but his mind somewhere else, in hell, in heaven. Intangible! He groped around blindly, slowly, extremely slowly, meticulously, horrified. His feet fumbled for the pedal, his eyes electrified, in prayer. Pure terror. Pure, my good man!”