Norman Manea - The Lair

A poisoned silence. Gora opens the folder.

“Have you notified the police?”

“I first called the distinguished Professor Augustin Gora, who was known, in my family, as Gusti. An all-knowing expert. To find out where the quotation came from. I haven’t been able to figure it out until now, though I thought I was smart, capable of untangling the riddle on my own. Somnambulant, lost, all the nocturnal wild beasts in my head, but I considered myself smart nonetheless. The professor saved me. He offered the solution, just as I’d anticipated. Saint Augustin knows everything. I found the source of the quotation. Labyrinths and Ficciones. I have both volumes. I read, reread, confronted. I hit on the Carnival. The festival of masks. Purim. Should I notify the police about Purim?”

“Yes, you should, yes, notify them now, right now, immediately! Do you have a contact number, in case of emergencies?”

“Yes, of course I do. Little Patrick must be used to being snagged from his wife’s side or from the side of whomever or children or television. However, I’m not going to perform this kindliness. He’s going to come see me tomorrow, in any case. Routine meeting. Tomorrow I will tell Larry Eight. He’ll gape, eyes and mouth, like a crocodile. Convinced I’m pulling his leg.”

“You say what you discovered.”

“What did I discover? A course in fantastic literature? An Argentine author of fantastic literature? Should we go to Argentina, Patrick and I, on the tracks of Lonrot and Scharlach, Borges’ characters? Or should we go on a pilgrimage to Palade’s grave? Or, better yet, to Cosmin Dima’s grave? We wait, hidden, in the cemetery, to see who comes to bow at the sacred gravesite and who brings flowers and petitions? Dima’s zealots, Palade’s assassins, my stalkers? What should poor Patrick do? Should he learn about the archaic calendar, the lunar holidays, the Purim rituals? Or about the tricks of Communist and post-Communist espionage? Or should we go to the little Paris of the Balkans, as Bucharest was called during the interbellum, grab a beer with the old and new informants who decided to murder Mihnea Palade while he meditated on the toilet throne? What should Mr. Murphy do? He will become increasingly suspicious of the Eastern European professor, that’s what he will do! Professor Peter Ga par, hyperbored of the America of all possibilities, where he regrets he did not come twenty years earlier, in the example of the wise Professor Gora, the husband of his cousin Ludmila Serafim, the significant other. That’s some hypothesis, no? Here when they find a body, the first suspects are the poor people who mourn the dead. You start the investigation with them. Those who reported the crime. What should Patrick do? What would we do in his place? ‘Scrutinize the surroundings for anything unusual,’ the FBI officer advised me. I can’t. I am absentminded and neglectful. Is it ‘happy anxiety’ or ‘anxious happiness?’”

“Careful with the warning,” repeats Professor Gora, irritated. “Don’t forget that Lonrot dies because he’s too rational. He allows himself to be fascinated by a rational scheme, but the perfect reader eliminates logic and good sense and sufficiency and skepticism. He gives himself entirely to the will of the text, he lives it. There are warnings and there are warnings, you have to be vigilant.”

“Warning? They can kill me without warnings. To subdue me? Anyway, I’m subdued now. I’m not going to reenter the nebulas of the Homeland. I did it for Palade. He’d asked me. That’s it! I left the place, definitively. Ciao!”

“Palade was warned, then killed.”

“Because he wasn’t obedient. They repeated the warnings, and he still wasn’t subdued. He enraged them. And then, he was a renegade. Renegades are punished.”

“What do you mean ‘a renegade’?”

“Dima’s disciple had become antinationalist, offending the sacred symbols. Paired up with a young, pagan witch, in love with America, where he changed his name, ready to change his religion. I’m the old nuisance. Fin-ished. Basta. One more blunder shouldn’t matter. The review was my only work. Li-qui-da-ted. A trifle.”

“There’s also the famous and well-known text Mynheer and your unknown masterpiece. That was the gossip.”

“Maybe the gossipers wrote it.”

“You received a threat, don’t forget. A condemnation.”

“To temper me. I’m tempered. Mute, the black swan. Deaf like the Buddha’s statue, mute like Moses’ sculpture. Deaf-mute like my deaf-mute brothers of anywhere and anytime. I don’t care about imbeciles allied with other imbeciles. They will forget about me, they’ll find some other targets. The threat is the joke of a semi-literate failure.”

“Failures can be very dangerous. Hitler was a failure.”

“Condemned to death? We are all condemned to death. Death, invisible authority? Invincible? A half-wit with cultural pretentions. The author of the letter wants to appear as something he’s not.”

When Gora heard his voice again after two weeks, something had changed.

“The woods. It invades at night. The patrols, the dogs, skeletons, barbed wire. My guilt, or the guilt of others, I don’t know. I sleep very little. I wake up sweating, terminated. At the door, at the window, the dogs of night, the patrols. Lucky that my mother can’t see me. I crash into sleep, into nightmare, I wake up exhausted.”

Had he notified the police? He’d notified the college’s administration. A student had advised him. “A student? How?”

A female student with whom he’d had some kind of conflict at some point.

“Beautiful?”

“It’s not Lu, don’t worry. . she’s no double for Lu. I am talking to someone, that’s what’s important. W.A.S.P. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, that’s as much as I learned. She doesn’t have our neuroses. She has others.”

The student had persuaded him to notify the campus administration.

“It was worse.”

“How could it be worse? Why would it be worse?”

“The patrols. The night patrols. Every two hours. No …” Saint Augustin babbled something. Who knows what, but he was writing madly.

“I’d forgotten to tell you something, Maestro. I talked to Palade. His brother, I mean. Lucian, Luci. Luci Palade, who’s still back in the old country. He told me that the attacks against the foreigner that I am continue in all the papers. Only the cliche has changed, they don’t call me a foreigner, a traitor, but a failure. I never wrote anything, I have no talent, how do I dare speak out? They’re right. The universal vote gets suspended if you have no talent. You have no talent, you have no vote, no voice in the country of the talented. The idiots forgot the national proverb, ‘the mouth of the fool speaks the truth.’ Isn’t that right, they forgot?”

“They consider you an enemy. Failures are dangerous, as I was saying, and vengeful, be careful that you don’t…”

Saint Augustin didn’t get to keep prattling on. Peter had disappeared, his voice had disappeared, the phantom had moved his tricks into the void.

The phantom, however, still sends riddles, suggestions, traps.

Left alone, Saint Augustin recapitulates. Could the basketball-star-turned-reader actually never have heard of the Borges story? Hard to believe. Lu might have told him stories about the attic of suspects where the suspect fable was read. She might also have reminded him about the evening when Palade debated Borges’ parallel worlds. Or even if Lu, discreet and dignified as she always was, avoided the past, Ga par would have found out about the story from Palade. Inevitably. They had talked so much about Dima, and Borges should have been an unavoidable reference; Dima and Palade had published exegeses about the blind man from Buenos Aires.