Norman Manea - The Lair

One evening, he saw Lu at the theater, accompanied by a young man, who, as it turned out, was her cousin.

Peter. He was Lu’s only cousin. There could be no other. A youth, now grown up, good looking and loquacious? What, in fact, did he look like, cousin Ga par? Had he graduated from college? Had he become a great athlete? Was he still passionate about basketball, as he was in the old days? Did he write gallery and racetrack reviews? Had he been Lu’s companion on other occasions, as well?

Lucian Palade (Mihnea’s brother) and his wife had maintained an amicable relationship with the former Mrs. Gora. They’d seen her around at family gatherings and social occasions. Was anyone with her?

At the theater, with Peter! And so? They were cousins, weren’t they? Peter had probably come from the far corner of the country for a few days, and his cousin invited him to the theater. A simple courtesy. Lu couldn’t stand going to the theater or to the cinema alone, nor to concerts or on excursions, for that matter. It was no surprise that she used young Ga par as a companion.

Or, did Peter Ga par have a car, by any chance? On a visit to Bucharest, years back when he was only a high school student, Peter had been fascinated by the cars on the boulevard, few and pitiable as they were. Had he gotten hold of one of those famous Trabants, that plastic, socialist toy with the motorcycle motor? Prr-prr, pic-pic, smoke, the holy little spark plug that needs frequent replacing, the efficient and economic cocktail of diesel and gas, the low mileage, the poor man’s car — and despite all that, it was a five-year wait-list till it was your turn for this social advancement. Maybe Prosecutor Ga par was able to procure one such machine from his dear Party, to indulge his son? Had he become Prosecutor David Ga par again, or did he spend many years in prison, as had been rumored?

The past. Fragments appear and disappear when you least expect them. Look, for example; Lu was rejoining Gusti Gora, even though she’d previously said she wouldn’t. Even now, she was playing the role of his one and only wife! No, their marriage hadn’t been an illusion — their separation was the illusion.

“When I first met her, I didn’t just simply meet her; I found her again. She’d been inside of me for a long time,” Professor Gora whispered into the mute receiver.

She hadn’t agreed to accompany Gora to the wastelands of liberty and well-being, but she couldn’t let him go off on his own either. She joins him, unaware — or perhaps aware — that this is how she defies their separation.

The couple proceeded silently on the sidewalk in front of the station. Bound to each other. All of a sudden, Lu shook her black hair, looking at her husband.

“I don’t think that Peter knows the story of his parents. His father, once married to Liza, who was burned away, along with their little girl Miry … Peter represents Eva’s new beginning, not David’s. The basketball player can’t stand her maternal excesses, I’m sure.”

They were coming back, after accompanying the guest to the station. Gora had been surprised by the ardor with which Lu invested the subject.

In the months that followed, Lu seemed to be uncovering the mysteries of her own being. David and Eva Cşspar’s biographies provided the lost code. Through them she was beginning to come out of the unknown inside of herself.

“It isn’t certain that Peter is David’s son. The delirium of liberation triggered … let’s say impulses, as the former detainees would say. The orgy of liberation, the orgy of pent-up senses. They say that everyone coupled with whoever was around. David might have seen his momentary partner only afterward. Peter was born in Belgrade, on their way home. Eva didn’t want to return, but David insisted on reestablishing the facts. To reinstate justice! It was among parents such as these that Peter grew up to play basketball.”

Fragmentary information, gleaned from others, tied up in presumptions. It wasn’t mere gossip occasioned by the — till then-unknown cousin’s visit, but the reawakening of a dormant question. Warning signs, interferences, expectations. Lu seemed consumed.

Gora felt excluded, relegated to the role of a spectator who had only part of the puzzle in front of him. Lu had had similar lapses previously, swift, imperceptible slips; all of a sudden, you could no longer reach her. It was like an affectionate and reversible kind of autism. An opportune touch was enough to call her back; a lethargic rippling movement would follow, and she was lifted out of the trance, reconnected to reality, with a heightened vitality. She instantly electrified her partner. Her abandon had the same ardor as her absence; you weren’t sure whether the intense communion wasn’t just another form of estrangement. The dark embers in her eyes deepened, her hands trembled, her lips quivered, her mouth dilated, a voracious leech sucking the blood and pus of her prey.

The magic of desire spurred his memory and brought him close to her. And the memory of desire never faded. An initiation, ever the same, and different every time. A lasting black void, murmurs of enchantment and melancholy.

He’d tried, more than once, to stifle those memories, but they returned in waves, like the tides. The distance in which Lu had hidden herself made the obsession more acute and permanent, intolerable at the start, then magical and longed for.

He’d accepted the highly improbable news, that Lu was Peter’s partner! The young cousin represented an unspeakably shrewd ruse, but also an exercise in humility. And a test, reinvented by the Gora couple — that was what the former and actual husband Au-gustin Gora believed.

The beautiful Lu had no reason to pair up with Peter! There must surely have been more formidable suitors. To choose the young cousin was to show a dubious resignation, and a suspicious defiance of public opinion. While Lu didn’t necessarily champion social conventions, she wasn’t impervious to their implications either.

Was it the masochism of humility? Gora was as happy to fantasize about Lu’s humility as he was to dream about the complicity between them.

The castaway Augustin Gora had also found himself alone and free in the New and Free World, some years back. After a few days, he’d written to Professor Cosmin Dima. He’d gotten a prompt response, repeated phone calls and questions about their common Homeland. Dima offered immediately to help him; he invited Gora to see him and paid for the plane ticket. One of several similar trips over the course of the following months.

Right away Gora was fascinated by the lucidity the Old Man (as he would call him) exhibited. The scholar experienced exile as a sort of adventure and initiation; he even succeeded in opening the world of the new arrival, who’d already wandered around in books and the worlds of books. An essential experience. “Pushed into an extreme situation, you reinvent the strategy of renewal,” the feeble voice was saying.

He considered his relationship to his native country — full of so much collapse and nostalgia — with the same detachment, or apparent detachment. And lately, it was apparent, indeed. If you were up to date with the newspapers of the Library of Congress, you understood that it was only apparent.

He would say, ad nauseam, “Existence is a privilege! Immense and fleeting,” the timid voice repeated.