Norman Manea - The Lair

“Without even a word! A vowel, a comma. Nothing! The Ottoman Empire! Secrets, plots, traps. Perfidy, dear Professor Ga par, that’s what it is. Elegant, collegiate, brilliant, seductive, yes, yes, a joy, that’s our sweet Deste. The Oriental witch from the Oriental forest, in the next bed over. Right next to me! The American who believes in what she can see, not in the invisible labyrinth.”

“Did you find any letters from Deste among my mail last week?”

“Letter? I don’t know. A pile accumulated, I didn’t have time to sort it. I’ll do it, I promise. The letter from the conspirator? Let’s see what she has to say.”

“She called me on the phone.”

“On the phone? What nerve! After everything she did?”

“She said she didn’t realize. She didn’t expect the proportions it would take …”

“She expected it, you can be sure! Not only expected it, she was provoking it. To see what would come of the provocation. The Unknown! To become visible, to break out on the scene. She’s waiting for her big break. She’s waiting for it even now.”

“She wants to explain, to apologize. She proposed a meeting.”

“A meeting? What kind of meeting? After what she did? After everything she did to you?”

“Precisely. She wants to explain.”

“She should explain it to the police! Or to the judge, in court. I hope you didn’t accept.”

“I accepted.”

Silence. Not a sound. Tara had probably thrown the phone, out of outrage. No, she hadn’t thrown it.

“How could you do that? How? After all you’ve suffered. . did she hypnotize you? What did she do? Tell me, tell me. I’m curious. The Balkan enchantress has spells that are different from the little American girls. This, yes, I understand. Believe me, I understand. I don’t understand, however, how a man who’s just gone through the Balkan storm can concede so easily. He falls just like that, at the first breeze, the first lure? The first one! Or were there other conversations? Other phone calls?”

“No, there weren’t.”

The old, Balkan man takes advantage of the fact of not having been as yet confronted with the young woman’s presence, only her voice. He’d yielded, the geezer, at the first breeze of elixir, it was true, the elixir of youth without aging and life without death. Basta, liquidated, my girl, finished. No, no, he won’t yield any more. That’s a solemn promise. He’ll resist, the way he resisted the American young woman for so long. He’ll resist the Balkan as well, that’s all. Done, finished, he’ll resist. He promises that he will. Basta.

“You’re right. I made a mistake. Besides, she sent me a written explanation. I don’t know what else she’d have to add.”

Tara doesn’t seem impressed with the professor’s regrets. She’s silent.

“Yes, I should recant. I should call her, find a pretext for a permanent postponement.”

“You don’t need a pretext. You don’t need any more pretexts and labyrinths.”

“You’re right,” yammers the elephant.

They plan to meet that evening. No, not in the cabin. Professor Ga par prefers, this time, the library’s cafeteria. Tara’s not surprised. She accepts. Fair play American! Peter drops the receiver in the cradle, exhausted. He stretches out on the couch, with his eyes closed. Boredom, dear Jennifer Tang, the boredom of new information is even more oppressive than the void. He shouldn’t have accepted the meeting with the Mata Hari. And once he’d accepted, like an old, easily swayed dotard, to eat the poison that the Sarajevo spy would prepare for him, he shouldn’t have read the project. The Babylonic pages were boring. A cold shower, after which a bath of narcotics. Not cold, just lukewarm, banal, to allay his illusions. The antidote to the attraction is here, on paper. He just has to reach out his hand.

The second room is called the Library of Babel. The hexagonal space, Borges’ logic about the universe and mathematical order. Shelves, monitors, video, scenes from Citizen Kane, Grand Illusion, Ivan’s Childhood, Modern Times, Battleship Potemkin, Roma: Open City, The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura, Zorba the Greek. Scenes rolling on two monitors. A labyrinth of the images of history and our confusion.

Boredom, numbness, from top to bottom and from the bottom to the top and laterally. He ought to do something, call the ambulance, run to Borges’ grave, call Gora. Yes, he should offer the enigma’s answer to the professor. Saint Augustin deserved at least this much. Or better yet, he should call the former Mrs. Gora, to ask her if the letter from the young Bosnian woman has arrived at the miserable Hotel Esplanade. Or did no such letter even exist? A candid, voracious, and enchanting spider, my adorable Deste! En-chan-ting, pure and simple, yes, and candid and vo-ra-cious. Oho, he likes that word, he repeats it, syllabically: vo-ra-cious. Suddenly, a terrible, sickly longing for Lu. Family, his only family… He sees her, as if through a fog, in the divine moments of long ago. He closes, opens his eyes, waves the impossible away with his hand. Should he rather raise his eyes toward the burning sky, to watch his likenesses advancing in vain on their thin, infinite, in-fi-nite, stilts, the female toward the male, the male toward the female, without ever getting any closer? Delicate and transparent articulations. Long, diaphanous. Giant, velvety ears, vel-ve-ty. Prehistoric tusks. The funereal burden on their backs, the silt of tears pouring from the flaccid trunk. The female’s trunk turns, the twisted neck of a swan. The male apathetically lowers his trunk toward the ground below.

The third room is dedicated to the Book of Sands. In the middle, a large volume with canvas leaves, reproducing military documents, maps, statistics, weapons, clippings from old newspapers, diagrams, portraits, obituaries from right after World War I. The projectors in the ceiling often send different images to the pages of the book. No visitor sees the same page. I’m illustrating the individual’s perception and the collective perception of History.

Oof! He feels the need for some amusement. The urgency of some amusement. A voice. He needs a real woman’s voice. Lu’s inaccessible voice, which he hasn’t heard in ages.

In a few hours, Tara will appear, his young American comrade, but now, right now, he needs to hear Lu in the receiver. Maybe not, maybe even Lu wouldn’t save him. “I need irresponsibility,” the elephant says, finally.

An irresistible voice, Gilbert said, about Deste. The stiff phrases on the page don’t, however, make the best pleas for the mysterious dinner.

The last compartment, an obscure place. Death and the Compass — a favorite text from Borges. Detective Lonrot tries to untangle the labyrinth of crimes that will bring him to his death. The projectors cast images of enigmatic codes onto the walls, maps, obituaries, decorations, weapons, war craft, planes. Chasms and idyllic valleys, ski and vacation resorts. The modern labyrinth, one metropolis after another with hundreds of Babel Towers touching the sky. A large, phosphorescent banner from one end of the room to the other: NEXT TIME I KILL YOU, I PROMISE YOU THE LABYRINTH MADE OF THE SINGLE STRAIGHT LINE WHICH IS INVISIBLE AND EVERLASTING. On the floor, 40 envelopes to various addressees and, eventually, their responses. Sudanese, Americans, Russians, Latvians, Greeks, Nigerians, Armenians, jews, Chinese, Bosnians, Argentines, Rwandans, Australians, Italians, Cambodians. Short biographies of each. An enormous blue ribbon crosses the space. Large, white letters: Exiles of the world, unite!