Norman Manea - The Lair

Professor Gora had an ever — increasing need for an interlocutor. The room had shrunken; the tenant had shrunken.

The meeting with Eva Ga par had been long. He spoke to her at length, she listened like a deaf — mute, barely out of the crematorium. He wasn’t at all sure that he’d diminished her panic. Nor would it have been normal for him to succeed in doing so. He was glad to return to his routine interlocutors.

Books, yes, that’s my refuge, dear Eva. Do you remember when Peter gradually began to prefer books over basketball? David, his father, was still a valid and lucid man then, not an invalid in an asylum, desperate and frantic over Peter’s metamorphosis. And with good reason. He was ever more bizarre, isolated, hungry for books. Peter wasn’t the same; no one remains the same after such an astral initiation.

Who’d heard of a death threat through a quotation from a book? What kind of person beats his brains to find out the code, and only after that, welds something together, ever to be haunted by inescapable phantoms? A code of the sect … The sect of readers sent our friend the encrypted missive, through a girl who also reads a few books herself. Sign of recognition and esteem and alarm. A quotation, find it and awaken it and unravel it, if you can! The threat didn’t come from the Nymphomaniac but from the cult, unless the Nymphomaniac is actually the cult’s deity. Peter had suffered not just from fear and loneliness but because he also belonged to the cult. He wanted, at any price, to decode the message. It was a matter of honor and pride.

We’re like dogs, dear Eva. We sniff each other and we instantly recognize each other in the language of citations and charades. Poor Peter couldn’t identify the source of the quotation! You could laugh yourself to death thinking about death’s invitation to an idle chat. The literary reference was within him, but in the language of his youth. He couldn’t transfer or locate it in the vocabulary of his new age. Youth was forever reminding him that it was never returning, no matter what he did.

In the end, I helped him, not only because you asked me in weekly letters to keep you posted on his progress after the breakup with Lu but because, at some point, that quotation became a mark on my calendar. I wasn’t a know — it — all, as Peter said, but I had lived that quotation, not only memorized it. I used to frequent a group of students for whom literature and readings had become the supreme drug. We looked endlessly for hidden meanings in the texts. Tyranny stimulates the necessity for hiding and esoteric dialogue. In the dubious loft of the dubious readers, the books that were discussed were hard to procure, old, and new, filled with codes and mysterious symbolisms. It was there that I first encountered the story Death and the Compass, from which, decades later, the enchanting student from Sarajevo would extract her citation death threat.

A coincidence spanning countries and seas and meridians! Who could have imagined it, outside of the devotees themselves?

Here on free turf, the sect is somewhat reduced, naturally, lacking the necessary nerve to spy and pry, but even here, exiles and sleepers in search of the North Star wade to their navels in the subterranean and supercelestial black holes of the esoteric. Palade and his great schoolmaster Dima and even Augustin Gora wrote about this enigmatic and overevaluated story that drove the playful Deste to distraction.

I knew the quotation by heart. Translated in all the languages of the world. That’s the truth, always simpler than we suppose.

I pulled Peter out of one labyrinth and threw him into a deeper one. “I know what the Greeks didn’t know,” declared the blind man from Buenos Aires. Uncertainty. I made the mistake to relate these words to Peter. After I indicated the source of the citation, the uncertainty grew. Peter made the connection with Palade’s assassination and Dima’s obscure past, in which the esoteric had played a fatal role. It was as if he were again living in the captivity of socialism or the terror of the swastika — branded archangels, haunted by ubiquitous shadows with impeccable eyes and ears and weapons. It was fortunate that the hell he’d entered had lasted only little while. Soon enough, the mystery was deflated. The death threat had been the game of a child! But the farce had hurt Peter deeply and had sent him into the great American emptiness.

Yes, there will be consequences, acts of vengeance and arrests and sieges. Maybe that’s why Peter’s reappearance is so late in coming; he’s waiting for things to settle. Either way, he is alive. And whatever unpleasant repercussions he may have to confront, they can’t compete with today’s massacre.

Today, today, today, repeated Gora in front of the screen that day and the days that followed, unified in the same, long and exhausting day.

So, dear Mrs. Kirschner, our dearest Peter had entered the game initiated by the pretty Bosnian, along with Tara and Avakian and Anteos. They will be investigated, naturally, like so many others, Muslims or Greeks or Armenians or Russians or refugees of all kinds — and, believe me, also Americans.

Days and nights pass quickly, months and years and also we mortals, but the attack of the September Bird continues, a bizarre astronomical paradox. Weeks and months and seasons in a single, dilated, and damned day.

Maybe you’ve heard, dear Eva, of the formidable Margarete, also known as Margot. American, not Iraqi or Iranian. Margot H. survived the disaster and found out that her fiance, David, had lost his life in the explosion. Traumatized, she decided not to let herself be defeated, but instead to put her American energy in service to the Cause. She arrives at the front of the Association of the Babel Towers Survivors, asks for and receives support from senators and bankers, from television networks and from philanthropic organizations. Her story reaches the anguished souls of the mourners, soothing their unsoothable pain. She’d lived through horrific scenes among corpses, had smelled burned skin, had seen human bits flying through the air. In the last moments she was thinking, naturally, about her fiance, David, about her wedding dress and their wedding vows. A fireman brought me out in his arms, the unhappy widow Margot would explain, recovered from the other world. He handed me over to someone else, who started to carry me toward the ambulance. We didn’t make it that far. We crouched under a truck, he covered me with his large, benevolent body, explained the faus — tian Margarete of the softened planet. The air was burning, we couldn’t see anything, I breathed through his gas mask, until help arrived. America and the world listened to her, petrified and tearing and drawing courage from her courageous words. She wouldn’t admit defeat, she fought with herself and destiny, to win and to help her kind win.

Only the words were strange, dear Eva. Heard so often and in various circumstances. Tired old cliches, in contrast to a circumstance so acute, personal, and extreme. Language, however, is everything, in the end! Style makes the man, as we’ve learned. Suspicion wasn’t too far behind, however, and it was discovered that the brave Margarete, with a burn extended over her entire left arm, wasn’t in New York on September 11, but in Spain, where she was studying at a Catalan university.

She conceived her narrative, with great care, about a year after Black September. David had, indeed, perished, even though he was among the chosen people. He’d been overlooked by the team conducting the secret rescue mission the night before. David’s poor family, however, had been warned through a special channel, though they declared to the cameras of justice and postcards that they knew of no such rescue conspiracy, and that they’d never heard of the famous Margarete. The first affirmation might make us doubt the second, had there not existed irrefutable evidence of the fantasy readily exploited by the impostor, and not for the first time.