Norman Manea - The Lair

“The Old Man? Old Man Dima? Is he writing to us from the other world?” Peter Ga par asks excitedly. “These were all his concerns. . magic, the labyrinth, mysticism, the fantastic. It’s he, isn’t it? He wants me to meet him, he loves me, he wants to save me from our sinful world, isn’t that right?”

“That’s possible. I’m leaning toward somebody else. I’ve known what the Greeks didn’t know: uncertainty. Do you know the quotation?”

Silence. Ga par, the basketball player, doesn’t know this quotation. He has no idea about the suspects in the attic; around that time he was still playing hockey and turca* and basketball.

“I’ve known what the Greeks didn’t know: incertitude,” repeated Saint Augustin. A phrase once heard in the socialist attic.

Silence. The deathly silence of the grave and the illiterate.

“I’m leaning toward the blind guy. The Great Blind Man,” whispered Gora, more to himself, convinced that Peter wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Peter had no idea about the attic of the past. He allowed the intruder and himself a breathing pause, to allay his agitation and his memories. The attic! It was just too much. . Peter had no idea about the attic of suspects.

“Hello, hello!” the happy intruder exploded. “Perfect! That’s right, I knew you’d have the answer. Bull’s-eye, perfect. Li-qui-da-ted.”

That precious, cunning Augustin offered the magic key, Peter Ga par was surely mumbling to himself. Just like that, the sonorities of youth in Gomorrah reclaimed! The language of so long ago! The juvenile cadences! Jubilation. Memory reborn, triumphant, all of a sudden!

Gora knew that bewilderment, its whirlpools. He knew the tears of joy of the reader in the corner of the library who, book in hand, suddenly untangled the riddle. Transformed all at once from a deaf-mute toad into the prince of youth without aging and life without death.* A god, in the magic of his language! Now, he could defy the anonymous crowd in which he was lost: no passerby could understand those words or understand the murderous quotation, hidden in the language unknown to anyone outside of himself, the crowned wanderer, the king of the world, at least for one second.

Professor Gora was left with the receiver in his hand. He waited for the gasps and fainting spells of the phantom. Nothing.

Folder RA 0298, on which the word mynheer was written, sat still near the white gloves, pushed to the edge of the table.

He listened for the noises of the house. Nothing. He retrieved the yellow folder. Stalled for a second, reopened it.

He instantly identified the passage discussed so often in the attic in Bucharest, a passage to which he referred regularly, then read Palade’s and Dima’s comments. Now, he confronted the variations of that conjuncture, while the buffoon ran to the library, exalted, to settle the question of the code.

After two hours, Peter’s voice:

“Purim! Purim! That’s the key. Perfect! I have the key. Fin-ished!” Gora taps on his computer, the word doesn’t appear.

“You don’t know what Purim is? You never learned? Even in the family of my Communist in-laws people knew what Purim was. I knew Lu’s grandparents. They went to synagogue on holidays. You knew them, too.”

“It’s been decades.”

“So you haven’t understood the millennial madness, either. . Although, you stand by her captives, I know. No small thing, for someone born in our parts. And then abandoned by a wife who wasn’t exactly Christian. The poor woman was unsure if you had chosen her for a symbolic reason. She told me you were reluctant to write to your friend from childhood, Izy Koch, about the marriage. You were afraid he’d think you chose the otherness of her community, the otherness of her tribe, her ethnic identity, rather than the woman.”

A venomous comment, entirely unnecessary. Not at all necessary. Gora was boiling.

The voice stopped, Ga par probably wanted to excuse himself, to correct himself through a sporting remark.

“There aren’t many reasons for us to be loved. Any irritation is enough, to stand as proof of our many defects. One of our many defects. Even one defect, just one, and it’s over with us… li-qui-da-ted. Fin-ished!”

He pants, just like Gora, and can’t regain his composure, just like Gora. He’d never before spoken with so much passion and bitterness. A long silence would follow. Gora gathers his strength, bracing himself for another avalanche.

“Purim is the holiday with masks. The people of the book don’t have joyful rituals. This one is fun, childlike. Haman, the guide of the king of Persia, an anti-Semitic Iago, plots the massacre of the sinners. Esther, the king’s concubine, saves her people. Maybe she was the favorite from the harem. And so the wandering people pardon the sinner and celebrate their salvation. They wear masks, enjoy themselves, eat triangular sweets named Hamantaschen, which means, “Haman’s pockets,” or “the monster’s hat,” as some others call them. They feast every year, for the whore who saved them. Victory over the world’s Hamans. And there are many Hamans, the chosen people feel.”

Peter repeats, with pleasure and venom, “the chosen people.” The bitterness hadn’t disappeared, but the voice was growing thinner.

“Many wise people say that the Holocaust canceled the contract of the All Powerful with his chosen people. So, then, the Bible is no longer valid. Miracles, covenants devalued, expired. With one exception! The legend of Esther, where God is missing from the scene. A hellish tale, whose moral is that the mission of the exiles is to save themselves. Themselves! That’s all. Purim, the celebration of the masks, reminds us of that summons.”

Gora the all-knowing doesn’t know this story, doesn’t see the connection to the threat letter. His fingers run frenetically over the keys of the moment. Bent once again over the folder, he is ready to listen, to learn, to remedy the lacuna and document what he’s learned.

“Look, I bought Ficciones and Labyrinths from the bookstore, as you advised me to do, both editions. I found the text of the Great Blind Man. The first crime. The first letter of the sacred name was pronounced. The second crime. The second letter was pronounced. That’s what the great Argentine writes. A third crime follows. The third of February. The time for carnival. The festival of masks.”

“Does it say that there? The festival of masks?”

“It says that in both volumes. . Carnival appears in both translations. Carnival in Argentina is in February. The message Tara brought me came at the beginning of the semester. Beginning of February. I discovered it late because I don’t get my mail in time. It had arrived at the beginning of February. So then, Carnival is the festival of masks. For the chosen, exiled people, the perpetually threatened, this is Purim. Purim in the lunar calendar. . you know what the lunar calendar is.”

Gora knows, naturally, what the lunar calendar is. He knows at least this much, but the all-knowing Gora is silent.

“So then, in the calendar of the ancients, the calendar that follows the moon, not the sun, Purim should come shortly. The date of the crime. Purim is soon. Soon. So then, the countdown. That’s what the quotation is announcing. As you know, the three victims from the story are all members of the chosen people.”