The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (42 page)

“She’s beautiful, but there are times when she isn’t. When she can’t avoid or hide her timidity, her spark leaves her. She’s used to glowing, she’s unstable, fighting with her instability. Other times …
other times she’s happy, sociable, her thoughts elsewhere and nowhere. Liberated by absence, then drawn in deeper into herself. I felt her emotion, and her emotiveness. Just when she seems to be made of steel, perfect, in control of herself. In a familiar context, however, she’s irresistible. Sovereign and self-sufficient? Not at all, not at all! Fragile, with an unwieldy discipline for appearances. Emotion, then. An extraordinary sexual premise, no?”

Even later, Palade never hid his envy in relation to Gora, tied not only to the mysterious Lu, but also, once he arrived in America, to Dima. Even though he’d given the entitlement of his will to Palade, it seemed that Dima secretly preferred Gora. His wife in exile, Merrie, a distinguished Englishwoman, elegant and credulous and fashionable, also seemed to trust Gora more. After the Old Man’s death she allowed him to consult the secret
Green Notebook,
written during the war years. Gora promised not to tell anyone about it and never to write anything about the secret text. He never mentioned the
Green Notebook,
not in his meetings with Palade, nor in the bibliography he suggested to Ga
par for the review.

I was bewildered by Ga
par’s sudden disappearance, but also by the fact that after Gora related to me the sensational and troubling news, he moved on immediately to the subject of Dima, with no apparent segue. As if there had existed some connection between the two subjects that he wasn’t mentioning.

“Dima had access to all the information about the war, he knew the horrors committed by the Germans in the East, but… not a word in all his notes, no concern for the fate of Marga Stern, his lover in his youth. He’d shared her for some time, it seemed, with his predecessor, he’d become jealous, forced her to choose, and she’d preferred him. Then to read that he was horrified merely by Stalingrad! What about what would happen to Marga, and not
just
to Marga, if the Germans had won? Not a word about that in his diary.”

Was Dima’s admirer disassociating himself from the Maestro because of Peter Gaspar’s disappearance!? Because of the review that he himself should have written instead of guiding the neophyte
Ga
par according to his own designs? Was the Old Man worried for his people?! Wasn’t Marga Stern a citizen of his country? Wasn’t she a member of Dima’s people?

Gora didn’t suspect that I knew everything about Marga Stern the whole time that he was informing me about it; his pathos was amusing to me.

“It’s not a matter of a single person, but of all the people of which the world simply disposes. With indifference, no?”

Gora appeared ransacked by memories and resentments, fueled by Ga
par’s disappearance.

“People of which other people disposed, pure and simple. Ideas are ideas, abstractions, games of the mind. The real test of ideas is people, how people relate to people.”

For a loner such as Gora, this affirmation signaled serious trouble. I telephoned him after that, he called me, too, we kept debating Ga
par’s disappearance.

I was convinced that I was a mere replacement. He couldn’t talk to Lu about the disappearance or perhaps he’d tried and wouldn’t allow himself to try again, and he needed someone else from his former country. He would have preferred Palade, he didn’t know about my last meetings with Palade.

When he decided to return to his native country for a week to see his family and to introduce his fiancee, after two decades of being away, Palade called wanting to meet with me. I’d been here for only two years at that time, and I was dazed by the lessons of the unknown.

I’d written him that I’d arrived in the New World, he answered, we spoke on the phone several times, he put me in touch with Gora, and then the dialogue ended.

We met in Central Park, not far from the children’s playground, in front of the characters from
Alice in Wonderland.
He’d come to New York specifically, he alleged, for that unexpected rendezvous.

His oddities and extravagances were multiplying, I’d discovered, but I made no sign of surprise or protest.

It was spring, a superb day, neither hot, nor cold, nor rainy. We saw each other, smiled at each other, embraced. Palade seemed hurried, he went right to the point.

“I’m going home to our humorous little homeland. Maybe to die there.”

I wasn’t expecting such a direct approach, I was determined to intervene as little as possible.

“You might ask why I chose precisely you. Very few know that we’re from the same town. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. Since that memorable evening when I tried to introduce you to the literary youth of the moment. You retreated. The group seemed suspect to you.”

I hadn’t remembered being quite so expressive. He was, however, exactly right about the motive for my disappearance from the enchanting attic. The wisdom of cowardice. I avoided risky situations, which, in any case, were many.

“Unfortunately, you were right. The Secret Service files that remain and that weren’t forged show that you were right. Yet another reason for this meeting.”

He watched me, frowning, and lit a cigarette.

“Maybe you’ve heard that I occupy myself with esoteric adventures. I read the coded signs of destiny. The signs around me, as obscure as they are, signal danger. . .
They
can liquidate me here, too, naturally, but also there.”

I waited for him to clarify. He didn’t.

“In our past, everything was about compromise and complicity. The very fact of breathing that air . . . all compromise and complicity. Why did they give me a passport? Usually, it was a bargaining process. You gave them something, they gave you something. There were all kinds of schemes, as well. A Byzantine country, life under the table as opposed to on the table. Relations, interests, the chain of weaknesses. Don’t ask me any more about it.”

I had no intention of asking anyone anything, except myself.

“Language wasn’t my essential loss. I left that place a young man, I wrote here from the very beginning. I’ve published books, I have more in a drawer… It’s a great danger always to be asked for manuscripts and to have everything you write be accepted. Dima, for example . . . published too much. Apropos, the sentinels were, of course, interested in my relation to him. They wanted to organize his festive return to the Homeland. They didn’t care about his anti-Communist past. The masquerade would have legitimized their regime. As a young man, Dima imagined himself as a reformer, only the reform was reactionary.”

He’d stopped, to think, or to remember.

“Have you heard about Heal, the physician? And his group? They walk on burning embers without feeling anything. We were also walking on burning embers in that attic, weren’t we? However, we were afraid, suspicious, sensing the duplicity. In California they do research about the technical modification of consciousness. What do you think about this country? It would be more worthwhile to talk just about the New World, the old one has gotten old for good; it was always old. There, in the old attic of the old country, I started the cult of Dima. But neither of us knew about Marga Stern. I think that Gora invented her. Potentialities become realities in his obituaries. I agree that life isn’t made solely from the real and visible. But potentialities are codified. Gora is under the trance of books… though he also has some revealing insights.”

A long, long silence. Endless. Palade had grown silent and was no longer looking at me. I had disappeared for him.

“Indifference is human, isn’t it?”

He didn’t hear me.

“Estrangement, human, as well. Human. Isn’t that right, Mihnea? We’re human.”

“Yes, yes . . . the Nazi horrors in the East weren’t Dima’s priorities. He wasn’t vilifying the people of Marga Stern’s religion. They just weren’t his priorities, that’s all.”

He lit his cigarette and was seeing me again.

“Soon the last survivors will disappear. Do we forget or do we retain the symbol without which we won’t understand ourselves?”

He shook the ash and angrily tossed the unfinished cigarette.

“Yes, indifference, estrangement. Self-obsession. Still, he was generous, eager to help, sensitive. He was like that in the past, too, when he was propagating nightmares wrapped in green foil, with saints’ faces. I believe in parallel worlds. Multiple worlds. Then, also duplicity. Not always a negative thing. Man isn’t an unequivocal being. He has fissures and secrets. Obscure potentialities. You think I’m an obnoxious sophist, don’t you?”

He’d lit another cigarette in the meantime, he’d remembered to offer me one, too; I was happy that I’d quit smoking. He watched me with excessive attention.

“You, sir, ought to understand Dima’s ambiguities. People always expected you to be perfect, and you couldn’t be. Angels don’t write books.”

Only after many years I was to discover that Ga
par had used that aphorism, which evidently wasn’t originally his own.