Norman Manea - The Lair

This is the garden of the One and Only God. Full of the many and the varied. Multiple world, multiplying itself in the air and on the ground, as our friend Palade used to say. Multiple worlds in the garden of our Unique and Singular Master.

In the days and nights and months that followed, the anchorite Gora was in dire need of an interlocutor. There were so many things left to debate and discuss, and he grew weary of discussing them only with himself. And Eva’s silence depressed him.

On the table, the immense album A Day in the Life of America had been replaced with a pile of books about the rabbi Paul of Tars, the exile who sowed discord everywhere he went, like the rebel prophets before and after him. Propaganda and agitation for the unification of the world under a single banner! All will be admitted equally, the converts of the new, singularly valid religion. Let them accept that singular religion, let them form a column in the army of that singular religion. Jesus addressed only his own place and tribe, without ambitions to convert anyone; he was candid and holy, like the legendary idiot Mishkin and like Alyosha Karamazov and their brothers from other legends. Globalized modernity redeems itself from Paul.

The infidels are left behind and, heaven have mercy on them, they teach us about Lenin and Mao Zedong and all the ayatollahs and Fascist fervor. Was the poet Yussuma — Osama the new Saint Paul who decrees who is chosen and who is damned? The terrorists, the deaf — mutes follow his instruction, as if under hypnosis: tear down the sinful world to establish the Absolute and to shorten the road to Paradise.

Lost fools! Sin doesn’t lie hidden in the Pentagon or in the World Trade Center but in the Library! The poems of Yussuma rest alongside the immodest Beats and the Qur’an of the Ayatollah and the Epistles of Paul, neighbors to Einstein, Karl Marx’s Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Dante. Imperial cookbooks are near the manuals for decoding dreams in 888 languages and dialects of the world. War and commerce are nothing but games, in the labyrinth of games that animates the apathy of our kind.

This is what I’m up to, dear Eva, I’m conversing with the solitary Yussuma and with Paul the exile, while waiting for a telephone call from our dear Peter. Peter Ga par, not the Apostle Peter.

I spent the last few nights in useless controversies with the Apostle Peter and Saint Tara and the Apostle Paul from Cilicia, from the Greek Diaspora. I wanted to find out what would have happened if Peter from Galilee had won the dispute instead of Paul the Greek Jew.

What if is another game we use to kill time and boredom, the disease that spares no one, not even the Almighty, and which catapulted the nineteen knifemen in the belly of the September Bird. What if is the code of the sect that raises and devours libraries. The shelves are full of bibles and war manuals, legends of ants and dragons, maps of the sky, philatelic classifications, and the dialects of the world.

Eva Ga par rested during Gora’s long, afternoon naps. Now he was awake and protected again in the fortress of his books.

The groggy professor was thinking about libraries and books. And words. Saramago’s scribe was rewriting Portugal’s history with a single word; Shakespeare’s kings reign in the mind of the playwright; Dante exiled the pope of his time to the Inferno, like a merchant of spiritual goods; Napoleon becomes an understudy in a musical comedy, in the reviews of Tolstoy; Roth sits the Hitler — phile Lindbergh in Roosevelt’s presidential armchair; the sacred verses become satanic in the games of the infidel Rushdie; the atomic button ignites the word Start. Mynheer was born in The Magic Mountain of a book; Paul and Peter live the pages of the Evangelicals; the prophet Yussuma resides in the Qur’an and in the half — moon of the Holy War. Our dear Peter’s misfortune also started with books; I plunged him into the complicated biography and bibliography of the Old Man, an addict intoxicated by books, rattled by the library in flames, watching books and ages dissolve into the ether. I couldn’t forget this when I was summoned to unmask the erudite Dima for the sins that deserved to be unmasked, but I also never forgot the millions of Jesus Christs burnt in crematoriums, together with the books they carried in their souls, nor the rabbi Yehoshua of Nazareth, who carried in himself a book and provoked the writing of a thousand others.

I’m convinced that Peter Ga par is alive, but I don’t ignore his mother’s unease. She asks me, weekly, if I know anything about the fate of her disappeared son. Lu spoke to me often about Eva Kirschner — Ga par at the time when we ourselves were discussing the possibility of having a son. Even while irradiated by amorous affection, I didn’t avoid hard questions. Peter Ga par embodied a revival after death for the couple Eva and David Ga par; why shouldn’t our own progenitor be the seal of the enlightenment that had been given to us?

The nickname “Mynheer” came from a book and from a parody he himself imagined; the death threat named an author who had proclaimed himself the high priest of the library. Today’s and yesterday’s and tomorrow’s terrorists follow the words in books that they imagine were written by the Great Anonymous One. What are those poor offices of commercial transaction compared to the Temple of the Word? Nothing but vulgar and childish diversions! The grand adventures are all produced in the great, silent halls where Love invents codes of refuge, in science and lyricism and navigation, gastronomy and astronomy. Traces of ether and blood stain the pages of manuals and epistles gathered over the millennia; the recent invention of the little screen of offers and laconic dialogue also had its origins in the Library.

The days and nights that followed the days and nights after September 11, 2001, found Gora captivated by the same dialogue with the void.

There was day and night and the second day and the days and weeks and following seasons, the endless day and night of uncertainty.

The evening was darkening, and the light vibrated through the peaceful landscape in the window. The earth continued to turn on its axis and around the sun that was setting, melancholy; Lu’s gloves and the books on the shelf were in their places, alive, as ever.

Professor Gora waited, every day, for the assault on the Library. His library and all the libraries of the world. A simultaneous, decisive assault on all libraries, the likes of which would make the assault on the Towers of Transactions and Rockets seem like poor improvisations. A historic day, engraved in red and black.

The phone wasn’t working or the subscriber wasn’t answering on the historic day and the historic night, or any others. Once, at 11 o’clock in the evening, I managed to reach him.

“I’m all right,” the professor said softly.

He wasn’t expecting me to call, although he’d called me so many times with regard to Ga par and Marga Stern. He’d told me about Eva Ga par’s letters and about the hourly succession on September 11, 2001, hours he knew by heart, about Saint Paul and Saint Peter and Yussuma Ben Laden and about the target that all the stupid and illiterate terrorists had missed: the Library.