Norman Manea - The Lair

Gora closes opens closes opens the album. He sips again, thoughtfully, from the tall cup. He closes his eyes, suspended in no place. It’s good to be in no place. Peter invokes the time of exile, the present. Gora glorifies the nomad’s geography, “Better to be nowhere than anywhere.” He lets fall a daily tear of joy and anguish for the good fortune of being nowhere.

Smitty’s in Orleans, Mississippi. The Hardstone brothers, John and Jimmy.

Twin bachelors, the old men dress the same and mimic each other’s gestures and words. They sit at the wooden table. J and J gaze toward the door through which Gora is entering. The topographic twins drink their coffee and Coca — Cola here every afternoon, abandoning their eighty — seven — year — old mother, together with whom they’ve always lived. The French photographer come to capture them sitting at Smitty’s in Orleans, Mississippi, for the collection A Day in America is no Monsieur Pierre Ga par. No, no, it’s not he.

Gora looks at his watch, to find out what hour the exile Peter is killing and in what time zone. Suddenly, he’s tempted by the old phantoms. There wasn’t more than a step from Peter to Lu. He looks for Ga par but keeps running into Lu. “I didn’t know her; I knew her,” confessed Gora, at one point. “She’d existed for a long time inside of me. An undreamed of rediscovery, too often imagined in dreams.”

The retrospective exercise had captured him again. His wife watched over his straying; he’d have invented her if she didn’t exist. Then, as now, he was searching for the torment of Lu.

The attraction between cousins, if that’s what it was, flouted convention differently from a marriage outside the ethnic community. Lu often protected herself through conventions, but she didn’t lack deviations from the norm. When everyone around her dreamed of emigrating, Lu refused to. Afterward, to everyone’s stupefaction, she appeared in the New World with a cousin who was younger than the suitors who had most likely stormed her. Her evasions couldn’t be found in the obituary that Gora had prepared for Peter Ga par.

A thin evening. The castanets of heels on the asphalt, the melancholy of the twilight. Augustin Gora was contemplating the unknown woman. As if the matter at hand weren’t the enchantment of beauty, but about other incidental gifts. All beauty did was to heighten those gifts, but it could also diminish them. He didn’t want to admit that coincidence that had sent him a stand — in.

“I wasn’t discovering her as much as revisiting her,” he’d said at one point. “She’d been inside me for a long time.” He wouldn’t have admitted, however, that “recognition” could blind him, impeding his discovery of what was beyond the momentary revelation. He watched, furtively, the shoe with the heel and the strap. The strap at the back left the ankle free, the stalk of her leg began at her delicate ankle and rose toward her bare knee, and the rest was lightheadedness.

Rendezvous, walks, exercises in intoxication. The world was departing. Fumbling, games, insomnia. The first night. He’d heard her murmuring, “I want it differently.” Removed from the stranger’s body, Gora remained stretched on his back, as if he hadn’t heard. Eventually he got up. Lu was balled up and curled. Resumed panting, rhythm and exhaustion.

Lu didn’t talk about the past. Not because she was withholding scandalous mysteries, but because she refused access to the intimacy that she considered simple, natural, but intangible.

Is that how it all was? There seemed to be too many detours. The unknown frightened her; it took some time before she grew accustomed to Gora. The unknown inside her, however, frightened her even more, and she was unable to touch that unknown in the presence of another, no matter how close he might be.

In Peter she found a relative; was that the prerequisite of the familiar? Was the familiar repetitive and boring, but safe; was newness aggressive and illusory?

“I wasn’t discovering her as much as revisiting her. She’d been inside me, she was waiting there,” said the husband, bereft.

What could possibly explain Lu’s steadfast refusal to follow her beloved husband? Had it been resignation … and not rebellion? Lu despised the theatrics of rebellions. Had she carefully weighed the alternatives before deciding that the safest solution was precisely the most unusual and risky, to stay put? The known, no matter how rotten, of one’s familiar surroundings? Wasn’t conjugal life also a known, familiar stability?

Did the night of the return from the train station, decades ago, portend the future alliance with Peter? Had she discovered herself then, unexpectedly? An obscure, ancestral predisposition, in the troubled depths of the past, of which he knew too little. Hosted suddenly by the chasm that had taken hold? Finding Peter again after Gora’s departure had perhaps rekindled the memory of that night. A confirmation. She related to him because they were already related to each other through a past about which neither of them knew enough, a past that didn’t even belong to Peter, though he was the product of its malformations. A past with which Lu communicated obscurely, primarily in moments of panic. Was that it?

As usual Gora was nurturing masochistic questions. For many hours he would aim right at the vulnerable place, the bleeding wound.

“You didn’t become an alien enemy, not even after your adored wife left you! That’s something, really something. Not in our little, idyllic country and not in more honorable places,” the phantom Peter taunted in nocturnal visits.

Some decades past, Peter’s appearance changed not only Lu’s perception of herself and the world around her, but also his own. In the caution with which he’d been surrounded in the house of relatives he was meeting for the first time, he’d felt something mysterious and bizarre. Once he’d gotten back home, he subjected his mother to interrogations. He discovered, gradually, what had been hidden from him. However, for him the effect was not in the least inhibiting, as it had been for his beautiful cousin, about whom he knew nothing except what was contained in his wet dreams. The tragedy that Eva related in too great a detail had, in fact, liberated him. Still absorbed by basketball and parties and mountain hikes among his happy circle of friends, he cared very little about his education, or his career, or his rejection from the architecture university on account of the former Party prosecutor David Ga par’s anti — Party records. He graduated easily from the architecture high school, was satisfied with sports, parties, women, and books. Yes, books appeared, too, among his preoccupations.

“Laughter, Professor. That’s the solution when there’s none other. Mynheer Peeperkorn is the solution, Comrade.”

Gora didn’t remember anything except for the title of the story by which Peter had conquered his socialist audience. Was it a deaf — mute Mynheer? That would be something!

“Laughter, that’s the solution. Not just during the day, but also at night. At night when the unwelcome visitors appear.”

Gora waved off the ghost with a bothered gesture. He hadn’t heard anything about the fugitive in a long time and he didn’t look for him anymore, except within himself.

“I can’t find him within myself, no matter how much I look for him.”

Was Peter’s interminable obituary his own lament, scored on a foreign manuscript?