Norman Manea - The Lair

Ga par wasn’t asking questions any longer, and Gora couldn’t guess if Palade had talked to him about Marga Stern.

“When Palade grew enraptured again with the great Dima, I would intervene. When he would dissect esoteric mysteries or dubious incidents, I would let him be. I watched Ayesha, his Indian fiancee and former student. They both wanted to become Buddhists. ‘Any disorientation was better than orthodoxy,’ Palade cried. ‘Better than any orthodoxy.’ And he gazed, adoringly, at his fiancee. ‘We’re both looking for a religion that’s not a religion. We’ll be Buddhists or Martians or polytheist pagans.’ The girl was laughing; we were all laughing. Those were long days and even longer nights. I didn’t know I’d be representing him postmortem. ‘Write the review,’ he said, ‘it will be useful for the book I’m writing. If our countrymen don’t kill us.’ That’s what he said. He’d received threatening letters, phone calls. He was assaulted on the street by an unknown man who told him that the hour of judgment was near. Bad signs in his horoscope. He was anxious, obsessed. He was living out his destiny intensely. He was working on three books at once, unloading. Students swarmed around him.”

“Had he won them over?”

“He exalted the juvenile imagination with extravagant lectures. An encyclopedic mind and memory, just like Dima’s. He’d enchanted the Indian girl. ‘We’re all searching for Ithaca, exiled just like Odysseus/ that was his leitmotif. We discussed exile often, Dima’s exile, Palade’s exile, yours, mine. Lu’s…”

Gora lay in wait, as usual, for the moment when the phantom would utter the explosive name. He was silent, waiting.

“Often, often we talked about exile, the second chance that becomes the only one. Was it an imposture? We’re the same and we’re different, we rid ourselves of ourselves, we change without changing. Palade was head over heels in love, vitalized. The right to change, to happiness! The opportunity wasn’t about truth, but about love.”

Love, happiness, the pathetic words were preparing the attack, and Gora waited.

“Palade had found a new wife; you’re the only one left without one. Here you can choose. Whatever your heart desires. Choose your heart. That’s all.”

Palade had also spoken with Gora about threats and stalkers. The professor didn’t diminish the gravity of the danger, only its mystique. “You receive the results from some medical tests. You have cancer, an incurable kind. Everything changes around you. You’re condemned! You look behind you with bitterness and ahead with terror. This I understand. Terror of death provoked by a medical test, not by some vague premonition.”

Palade had called him the night before the assassination.

“This time, it’s serious. I can feel it. Don’t ask me what or how.”

Gora advised him to tell the police. He refused, as he’d refused many times before; he didn’t trust the police.

“She’s not here. Ayesha isn’t here. When she leaves, I’m vulnerable. She went to see her mother who isn’t well. She’ll be gone for two days. They know. This time it’s for real. I can feel it.”

He was quiet, but not for long. He wanted to add something.

“Dima asked me at one point to recommend a student to help him rearrange his library and archives. I suggested a student of mine, Philip Mendel. You could distinguish his ethnicity by his name and his nose. ‘I don’t want this young man to be going through our papers,’ said Mrs. Dima. ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t feel comfortable with him,’ she said. An adorable woman, as you know. Refined, cultured, aristocratic. They were worried about indiscretions.”

Gora wasn’t interested in these asides; he kept repeating that the police needed to be alerted. He suspected that Palade hadn’t revealed all the ins and outs of the danger, but the police should be alerted. Something needed to be done.

“A kitsch farce,” retorted Ga par. Death is no farce, it has a doomed compass and no sense of humor. Palade had no way of being sure that destiny was drawing out the fatal circle. How could he be sure? No one can be sure. Premonitions, that’s all.

Climbed up on the toilet seat in the bathroom, the mercenary leaned toward the victim, over the top of the short and thin wall that separated them, with a small weapon, like a toy. A victim on a toilet seat!

The face of the deceased aged unexpectedly in the moment when the game abruptly stopped time.

Ga par ignored Dima’s and Palade’s obsession for the occult. “I don’t have an organ for perceiving the invisible. The occult is a comic subject. A farce,” Peter would say, with the firmness belonging to a man of conviction.

The occult occupied a central place in Dima’s and Palade’s lives.

Palade’s death remained sealed with mystery; this couldn’t be ignored. Even if you refused to tie the assassin to the coded games of fatality.

From the sociable and charming immigrant defined by confused, first attempts to adapt to a new place and time, Gora had turned into a sullen and bizarre hermit. Just when he’d gotten past the initial hardships and regained the social status to which he was entitled.

At the start, everything had enchanted him. The inhibitions long exercised in his old byzantine socialism were dissolving effortlessly, as if through magic. He was rapidly liberating himself from the self that had inhabited him in the closed and perverted society of compulsory bliss. He was fascinated by the contrasts and the expansive-ness of America, the joviality and innocence, simplicity, the indiscriminate cordiality. He was hopeful, waiting for news that his wife had decided, finally, to follow him.

At the end of the Fulbright scholarship, he promptly asked for political asylum. He was hired at the Voice of America. His intellectual prestige was an advantage over other collaborators, and he’d found himself the head of the department that dealt with his far-off country. Those who worked with him then recalled his curiosity and competence. His lack of any overbearing managerial tendencies, his luminous camaraderie. The collective harmony was shattered, however, by the arrival of an arrogant and rigid dissident.

“The Jap,” as they called him, incited tension. He was abrupt, full of himself and full of the frustrations of a timid employee who wants to be Boss. He would defy the rules and the work schedule, would go missing for days on end, reappearing serenely and sarcastically, wearing the armor of a celebrity. Gora’s efforts to temper the conflicts failed; the pedagogy of moderation couldn’t subdue the rancor and volatility of the newcomer. In desperation, he called on Dima, who could facilitate his temporary engagement at a state university. Readily welcome and quickly distinguished as a widely read polyglot, Gora was hired permanently. He transferred afterward to Avakian’s college, and from there, to a big university. He frequented circles of immigrants; he seemed to have some vague, budding, amicable (or downright amorous) ties; as an experiment, he began the column “Necrology” in a journal for exiles. He wrote only about the deceased, whether these were deceased ideas or books or ideological or religious movements.

Those who knew him knew him as the brilliant scholar, the former participant in secret debates in an attic refashioned as intellectual redoubt; they expected more from him. It seemed that he himself hadn’t forgotten the large attic with the enormous skylight, where we’d met for the first time.