Norman Manea - The Lair

Gora listened, silent.

“Was it her Oriental beauty? Yes, but not the one praised by King Solomon. Romanian, Hungarian, Armenian, one as good as the other. Russian, German, Italian, Peruvian, it didn’t matter. No, Lu is no typical Sulamite beauty. Is that important? It is. Not to mention the fact that she was raised on the lullabies of humanism. Indiscriminate citizens of the world. Universalism, humanism. Colored tags on jars of expired preserves. The guy had probably followed her, he could recognize a beautiful woman who wasn’t ashamed to go out at a particular time in an old, beat-up car, while putting on the mask of a common receptionist. ‘Tou brought us Communism! The comedy is over, get out of here!’ The guy was yelling at her, ‘Invent another mission, another Messiah, somewhere else.’ Lu gave up on going inside the building. She returned home, overexcited.”

Heated discussions followed. The one who’d previously refused the departure now wanted it. We’re getting out of here! We should have done it long ago, we could have done it long ago. “I’m a joker in love with the baroque,” cousin Ga par had replied. “Does anyone need me there? Will anyone feed me?”

Surprisingly, Lu replied, “I will.” She spoke English and was willing to do any kind of work. A juvenile impulse, wanderlust and change. It was hard to imagine Lu doing “just any kind of work.” It was just her impatience to abandon the place that she’d refused until then to abandon. She’d separated from her husband, turned down the great adventure and the unknown. Liberation had come, the Communist morass was receding, reasons to leave seemed to be disappearing. Why push into the unknown now? The curses of a Mercedes owner seemed providential.

Professor Augustin Gora hadn’t forgotten his own embroilments with Lu; destiny’s new joke didn’t amaze him one bit.

“Larry One is on his third wife. They’re all subalterns of his at the college. Larry Two, though younger, is on his third, too. The energy of renewing oneself! Infantility? Humor? Imposture? Courage? The right to happiness! The constitutional right to happiness! Here, no speech starts without a joke. Even a funereal speech. Was Mynheer Dutchman a forerunner of all this?”

He’d changed the direction of the dialogue. The author of obituaries Augustin Gora had become pensive. The question was addressed, as usual, to no one in particular.

“Palade found himself a new wife … You’re the only one left without one. You’ve got plenty of choices here. Chinese, Irish, Arab, whatever your heart desires. Even immigrants from our former country, if you can’t break away from the native cuisine.”

Gora was no longer sure if this was Gaspar’s final account of Palade. After Palade’s death, he returned often to the subject of the Palade-Ga par meeting. The way you reminisce about friends while keeping vigil by their coffins, when only the imagination can modify everything that was never meant to be.

Palade knew too much, and it bored him to take up the tortuous enigma of Cosmin Dima once again. For years on end, he’d struggled on his own, agitated, down the serpentine and darkened roads of the Maestro; he never fully recovered. But Peter’s own life, in turn, was curious. Here was a survivor! The survivor child in the belly of survival. And then there was his rejection of the Communism upheld by his prosecutor father. Curiosity probably overcame the hangover.

“Did he make you tell him the story of his life?”

“He proposed something like that, without saying it, a kind of exchange. I offer him my story, he gives me Dima’s. In spite of all his bitterness, he’d been, and still was at the time, fascinated by Dima, his attraction to modernism, then myth, transcendence, mystic nationalism, extremist politics, defeat, his refuge in mystery and masks, then his academic career. Was it all Dima’s inability to examine himself? His narcissism empowered his evasions. He couldn’t admit his guilt or his mistakes; he didn’t have time; his great projects were subjugating posterity. Though often at the pulpit of spirituality, he declined to debate on moral themes and condescended to the babbling mob.”

“The Dima capsule contains modernism, nationalism, mysticism, diplomacy, and brothels. Narcissism, exile, isolation, esoteric evasions, academic excellence.”

Gora was listening, absolutely unconvinced that Ga par was relating the meeting honestly.

“And the refusal of a naive democracy, naturally! The Anglo-Saxon world won’t ever accept him, Dima said, right before taking advantage of the New World’s freedom. Narrow-minded to the rhetoric of progress. Democracy and debate were for the masses’ consumption. It was hard for Palade to move from the unlimited admiration he had for the Guru to suspicion. He’d uncovered documents, he’d scrutinized the gaps in his biography, the coded allusions in his work. He still adored him. An extraordinary spirit, a lucid conversationalist, erudite, childlike, adorable. I didn’t have the unrequited lover’s disappointment to contend with, as he did. I only had to decide if I would write the review.”

“Have you decided?”

“Yes. We’re not going to untie these knots that are so tightly tangled! That’s what Palade yelled. Freedom and spectacle? To hell with that. The sacred and the profane, narcissism and hypocrisy and so on? He was no less fascinated than Dima himself had been fascinated by his esoteric adventure. The revolt was against himself; he was suspicious of himself, suspicious of his own revolt, just as he was suspicious of his admiration for Dima.”

Did the voice of the intruder come from the void or from inside of Gora himself? He himself knew the whole story all too well, and then Palade had told him the same things, as well, and more than once. Dima’s widow had entrusted him with access to the Green Notebooks of the deceased. Him, Gora, but not Palade. In the yellowed pages of a school notebook, an isolated man was struggling with erotic frustration and the frenzy of writing, furious that Germany was incapable of defeating the Communist beast and the democratic chameleon.

“I recalled the novella about the comrades who were tried for terrorism in 1938; I imagined the night when the Movement mobilized; I saw the photograph of the virile Leader, the moral and mystic guide. Was the sacred hidden inside the profane? Did the Maestro still believe that secrets remain confined in the soul’s memory of previous lives? Was it a camouflaged message? Camouflaged in writing, in fiction? These things nagged him to the point of intoxication. There was always ample intoxication of words and alcohol among us. There was no end to questions. What need did Dima have, after the war, for his old obsessions? Why did he continue to see an old, fanatic doctor who still endorsed the slogans of the Movement? Was it the intensity of idolatry, its magic? Drugs, bordello, Utopia, even writing … He would smile like a baby, no longer seeing.”

Gora remembered Palade’s smile. It was no longer clear whether Ga par was quoting Palade or had moved on to his own questions.

He recognized Palade’s discourse, but also Ga par’s seasoning.

“At some point I mentioned to him a former lover of Dima’s, one who stayed behind in the country, in danger,” replied Gora, apropos of nothing. Deported to Transnistria, she’d survived and returned to the village where she’d been hidden for a while, until the authorities found her. After her return, she committed suicide, in the same village. Dima never even looked into her fate.