Norman Manea - The Lair

An irresistible voice. A child with an irresistible voice. The specialist on the ancient world was right. The assassin wants to invite Professor Ga par to dinner, to talk to him. More specifically, to cook for him a special meal. Balkan cuisine. Does Professor Ga par have a kitchen? Yes, the kitchen could be set up. Perfect. She’ll take care of everything. He should just tell her when she should arrive with the ingredients. She’d prefer not to disturb him. That is, to cook while the professor isn’t home.

“Yes, of course, that can be arranged, why not …” mumbles Ga par.

“There’s something else, something important,” adds the child. Is the professor on a diet? It wasn’t that… she doesn’t want to … you understand, don’t you? Yes, the elephant understands and sweats, reeling from the most recent blow. How should the old, fat, bald man speak to an enchanting young woman about diet? How? He must admit the truth: it hurts him here, and there, every morning and sometimes in the middle of a seminar, gastritis, colitis, ulcer, hemorrhoids, kidney stones… are these subjects to discuss with the young woman from war-torn Sarajevo?

Deste waits; her enchanting voice allows itself an enchanting pause. All that can be heard is the sound of her breathing. Her breathing is diaphanous, like a summer’s night.

“What did you say? What was that?”

“I didn’t say anything, no, nothing,” the elephant burst out. “Nothing.”

“So then, nothing. No diet. Perfect!” decides the homemaker, victorious. “See you soon!” Professor Ga par hears the flutter of the girl mirage.

That very afternoon, he finds an envelope blue as the sky under the cabin door, bearing the name and delicate handwriting of the Sarajevo Siren. Within, some typewritten sheets.

Dear President Avakian,

Following our meeting in your office with the Dean and Ms. Tang, I sent Professor Ga par another letter. I reformulated the first letter, with an addendum. It seems strange that Professor Ga parhas not received any of my previous letters. I will send this one with Express Mail. As I’ve told you, it wasn’t my intention to provoke misunderstanding and trouble. I thank you for your help in calming the tensions.

Yours,

Deste Onal

Another letter, this one on blue paper.

Dear Professor Ga par,

This is the third letter I am writing regarding my tortured art project, The Lottery of Babylon. I regret the unease that I’ve caused. The first letter, sent to the campus address, contained nothing but apologies. During the conversation with President Avakian and Ms. Jennifer Tang, I understood that you never received that letter. A second letter was addressed to the hotel where you live with your wife. President Avakian told me that this letter also didn’t make its way to you. Annexed, I expedite the copy of the letters, as well as the proposed project.

With deep respect,

Deste Onal

And stapled to this letter, the previous letter. The paper was white, like the soul of virgins.

Dear Professor Ga par,

In the framework of the artistic installation entitled The Lottery of Babylon, I sent you, as well as other intellectuals, journalists, artists, writers, professors, and politicians, a postcard written by me containing a quotation from the short story “Death and the Compass,” by J. L. Borges, “Next time I kill you, I promise you the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.” I found out that the letter made some of the addressees very uneasy. I neglected to consider such a possibility. It wasn’t my intention to threaten or frighten anyone. Please accept my apologies for the trouble I have caused.

With all of my respect,

Deste Onal

To the two pages, the white and the blue, another four typed pages were attached with a paper clip as red as the fires of hell. Thick, yellow paper.

I’m a Bosnian citizen, with Balkan, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian roots. My olive skin and green eyes make me look downright Ottoman, which is what I consider myself, in fact. My generation asks itself why Ataturk — Mustafa Kemal (without being Jewish, as some claim) abandoned his home in Thessaloniki. I ask myself why my grandfather, my aunts and uncles, had to leave their entire histories behind in Srebrenica. If the Berlin Wall could fall, why wouldn’t other walls fall? And even if they were to fall, I doubt that hatred would disappear. Hatred always conquers new captives. Even though they drank the same bitter, black coffee and ate the same mutton over centuries, and suffered together the brutality of modernity, Serbs and Greeks and Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Azerbaijani, Shiites and Sun-nis, who eat the same salted cheese, inject into their children’s blood the traditional hatred. The dignity of hatred! The time has come at least for us Ottomans to define our failures. The installation The Lottery of Babylon will illustrate this conviction. I use texts from Jorge Luis Borges, his obsession with maps and labyrinths. A labyrinth of compartments and maps, held together and still independent. The red wall of the first room represents Glory, Heroism, Hatred. The bottles of booze and slivovitz and the cups with the half-moon belong to the nations assaulted by modernism.

The telephone. Startled, Ga par drops the papers. He grabs the receiver, drops the receiver, picks it up again.

“Did you hear? Surely, you’ve heard. Miss Deste! Polyglot and cosmopolitan. She didn’t make a peep. Not a whisper. Nothing. Nothing. I had no idea about her great artistic conspiracy.”

“You know Deste? Deste Onal.”

“Know her? She’s my roommate! She’s the reason I didn’t want to stay nights, so that she wouldn’t get suspicious. She blocked me from soothing the insomnia of the exiled Peter Ga par. Exile, the exiled … I hear this story all the time. Displacement, dispossession, death. What about rebirth, and freedom? You run from one place because it isn’t good for you, isn’t that right? So then, what’s all the nostalgia about? Explain it to me. I’m a dutiful American. I want to understand. Miss Deste! She was scheming, without anyone’s taking notice, the great aesthetic-political experiment of the century! She kept asking me who were the most interesting, most bizarre professors? People with a code. I’m quoting her, a code! That’s what she said. With a code, listen to that! Peter Ga par, Gilbert Anteos. Mr. Avakian? Did she also send President Bedros Avakian a threat? Maybe there’s something going on between them? She’s capable of it. Now I think she’s capable of anything! Pent up and craving admiration and dubious connections.”

Peter didn’t get a chance to interrupt the avalanche, bent over to pick the papers off the floor. The receiver at his ear, not to miss a single word from the indictment.