Norman Manea - The Lair

“Like love?”

The question irritated him, I realized, hearing the angry shuffling of papers and eyeglasses hitting the table.

I retreated from the necrology with a kind of childhood sadness.

Even during the conversation with Gora, I bore inside me a ten-year-old boy, or maybe a slightly older adolescent, although I remembered perfectly the hesitations and the exaltations and the failures from eighteen, from twenty-five years old and those that came later, much, much later. The boy, or adolescent, persisted, even if in another body that was the same, with another mind, which was also the same. It was as if everything had happened yesterday. When did it all come apart? Has it all really come apart, with no possibility of prolonging what was there?

When Lu asked me a week ago if I want to allow, through a testament, the pulling of the plug from the machines that maintain artificial life, the way that she intended to do, I answered no, no matter what. She won’t be able to disconnect her last victim from the sinister torture-preservation machines; my testament will deny this redemption. Not because I would hope for a miracle that would block extinction through some new miraculous medicine, or through who knows what incredible natural redress of the organism, but because the disease, even in its extreme form, an unconscious state, still seemed to me to be life. Who could specify with all certainty how absolute is the apparently total amnesia of a dying man? Palade would say I was right, he actually believed in a codified world, in mysterious formulas, in open, unresolved transitions, in magical and unpredictable metamorphoses. Izy Koch would also say I was right; he often said that nothing existed except life and that was all; this was the belief of the elders; this motivates our neuroses, our restlessness, those of us who are denied second chances, exiled unavoidably and without recourse into a predictable direction.

Lu appeared troubled by my insistence, but categorical about her own disappearance, when and how it will come. We accepted each other’s every wish, formulated in legal terms and with notarized signatures.

That following morning, I showed her the imprint that our heads left in the pillow during the night, and I suggested that she imagine the pillow with the imprint of the one who suddenly died and was removed from the room. The one with whom she’d shared her bed and her time. All at once time is deserted; the room is deserted, and only the pillow preserves the trace that cannot be preserved.

“Can you imagine it?”

“I can, but I don’t want to. It was too great a detour until we found each other.”

Her look confirmed that the latecomer had no escape. No, I had no escape and didn’t want any.

She’d remained receptive to the ambiguous warnings and to the dark foreboding, but she lived a juvenile regeneration. She came out of the illness and the first ailments of the exile as if emerging from convalescence; that’s how she described it. Her beautiful hands were waiting for the novice that I was.

Liberated from the Baroque anguish of maladjustment to the real, she became more real, in her fortifying ardor, more beautiful in her acuity, now free of tension.

Time was patient with our detours and now slyly slowed its pace. We each ignored the loneliness of the other and found ourselves in the solitude that bound us and vitalized us. The longed-for danger felt after that first and last visit to the suspects’ attic.

The ephemeral didn’t scare me. I looked at the imprint left on the pillow, after the night that had died. Lu was showing me our shadows alongside each other on the white wall, both of us happy for the daylight that would scatter them. We beat the disheveled pillow, to make the trace disappear.

We didn’t want imprints and memories. Lu had accepted the captive’s decision to defend herself against herself, and himself against himself, even if in vain.

* “The word opîrli a means “the gossiping lizard” [trans.].

* A Romanian children’s playground game, the point of which is to toss a short stick with the use of a longer stick [trans.].

* Folk tale by the Romanian writer Petre Ispirescu [trans.].

* In Romanian, glove is m nu , pl. m nu i [trans.].