Norman Manea - The Lair

The cottage wasn’t his office, though. The breasts of the student were covered by a sweater that went all the way up to her neck. Should he offer her a glass of wine? Better not. He’d bought Tara’s favorite apple pie from the library cafeteria.

The professor appears with the tray, the student is flipping through a book. She doesn’t help him, as she usually would; she waits to be served. She knows he’s not too dexterous, but she doesn’t get up to help him. She watches attentively how he arranges the plates and cuts the pie.

“I could really drink a glass of wine,” she says.

Silence. The tenant of the present is silent.

“If you have any, I’d like to drink a glass of wine. You won’t be arrested. I’m over twenty-one, I’m allowed. And it’s a winter evening.”

“In that case, vodka’s better.”

“No, no hard liquor. A glass of wine, if you have any.”

“I do. Red wine.”

“Perfect.”

They resume the conversation. The Eastern European professor’s assassin; the review published nearly two years ago; the famous compatriot’s and the victim’s memoirs.

Exotic subjects. Peter Ga par knows himself to be an exotic figure in the carnival of freedom.

Red sky. A burning bower. Two elephants on stilts approaching one another. Bodies in the sky, thin, infinite legs to the ground.

A fabulous dragonfly, with the body and aspect of an elephant. A primordial stork-turned-elephant. Delicate, transparent, diaphanous extensions, they barely touch the ground. Astral, archaic insects out of the prehistoric wilderness. Elephant bodies on implausible, celestial baguettes. Giant, velveteen ears, imperial tusks, silt oozing from their trunks.

The backs of the pachyderms are covered with carpets, and on each carpet, a funereal stone. Between the stone and the carpet, space; the stones are floating in the air. The trunk of the female to the left is turning like a crank. The male lowers his trunk apathetically, gazes down and faraway: smoky hills, the landing pad, the guard’s post, two scarecrows running with a flag and a torch.

The male and the female try, in vain, to get close to each other. The stilts move in place. The sky is striated with the arrows of their thin legs, which seem as though they might collapse under the weight of the bodies. The male on the right, the female on the left. The tombstones wobble; the eye painted on the carpet wobbles, about to fall into the abyss below, where the infernal alarm sounds.

Ga par jumps, awakened by the rattling windows. He’s not in Lu’s room; it’s a different hotel, a different room, but the alarm has woken him up for good now.

The caravan of firetrucks in the Lunar City. At the fire station across the street, the sirens scream; the day’s fire-breathing mouth opens. He lies numbly in his bed. The minute hand approaches eight o’clock. He lifts the receiver, slowly dialing the number of the all-knowing Gora. Gora picks up the phone, but Ga par changes his mind; he puts the phone back in its cradle.

The city of wanderers; skyscrapers scrape Dali’s sky. Below, the throng of that particular moment. The ogre stares ponderously out the window. The gangster of the garbage cans is as punctual as ever, carrying his great leaden luggage in his right hand. Military pants, yellow work boots, the tight tank top pulled over the bulging, battle-ready torso. In his clay head destiny has hollowed out large red eye sockets. Beardless, clay cheeks. Long, blond hairs covered in mucus extend from his nostrils. Cracked lips, crooked grin, tooth-less mouth, two yellowed walrus fangs, a stony neck, a long, flat, massive nose. His arms are short and pudgy, just like his body; the vigor of an assassin.

Watch him on the street corner, dragging his suitcase full of meteorites. At every step, he sags with the effort.

The first garbage basket. He rummages, he pulls out the bag, opens it, pulls out the opened can, throws it back, takes another bag, opens his luggage, bends over, stuffs the bag back in. He crosses to the opposite sidewalk; he bends over the basket. In his hand, another bag. He pulls out the remains of a loaf of bread, throws the bag, stuffs the bread in his pocket, waits for the light to turn green, crosses toward the opposite post, stops, bends over the basket, opens the luggage, closes the luggage. He sits on a bench in the small square. Nearby, the luggage filled with lead or mercury or cadavers. He slurps from the plastic cup gleaned from the last basket, sinks his mammoth fangs into the bread.

Head upturned, looking into the infinite. The nose sniffs out the danger; the nostrils’ gelatin-covered antennae tremble. Mouth cracked open, exposing his prehistoric fangs. Passersby stop, then hurriedly move away.

Ga par can start his day. The void’s gatekeeper has reconfirmed reality. He abandons the hotel; the library is nearby. You bookish hunter, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, some decoy in the fog of memory, a quotation, known to you at some point, lost in the jungle of another language; you memorized it in your own tongue; you recognize it, it seems, but you don’t recognize it in the language into which you have migrated.

The mind rolls through the old refrains. Fragments unwinding, rewound. The threatening postcard! The quotation! The code of a different dictionary. The cadences of the past reject the language borrowed in this newer age. That was another time, inconvertible. Next time I kill you sounded different in the Gomorrah of juvenile jubilations. The look of the words themselves, their sound when read aloud; the hypnosis of the past won’t migrate into the substitutions of exile. A pent-up memory; a frozen flower that won’t open.

No, he couldn’t place the quotation. The new words didn’t bring back the old ones; yesterday’s sounds wouldn’t collaborate with today’s, and the night that separated them in time was starless.

He’d fallen again in the trap of hunting for words. Labyrinth? Invisible crime? A new, impenetrable code.

The beggar who is no beggar rotates the empty, heavy luggage on the surface of the planet; he is here, a step away, bent over the garbage basket, then the next garbage basket and the next, until he throws himself into the last basket.

The square in front of the modest hotel. Ga par collapses, humiliated, on the bench. His eyes turned up toward the foreign sky. He doesn’t have the courage to turn his gaze toward his neighbor; he sees only the military boots. Nearby, the guard of the grottos. Stubby, rough hands, legs of steel, the head of an ogre, bottomless eye sockets. Thin ropes running from his trunk, greasy hair. Symmetrical tusks, yellow mouth.

Peter sits on the bench for a long time after the soldier of futility leaves, taking up his garbage route once again. His head back, gaze toward the sky and the elephants hauling the funereal obelisk.

Irresponsibility. A need for irresponsibility, that was how Peter Ga par defined his landing in the New World. The game of hide-and-seek with Death, whether at the wheel or by falling off a ladder.

The potential suicide doesn’t seem frightened by death, except on the nights when the Nymphomaniac tortures him.

The large bell in the university chapel announces the lunch hour. The courtyard is blanketed with students and professors, hurrying to fill their stomachs. Shouting, singing. All of a sudden, the square is deserted, quiet. The hungry crowd has disappeared. A white, clean toilet is waiting for them. Palade meditates, smiling, sitting on the toilet seat. A look of Nirvana across his face, wide, childish eyes, enchanted by bookish temptations. The reptile climbs, without a sound, along the wall that separates the neighboring stalls; he climbs up to the top, stops, and from above, considers the squat body of the condemned, as he sits on the throne of waste, for one last moment. The killing shot rushes out from the mouth of the snake.