The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (43 page)

I didn’t like to be addressed formally, but, like Mihnea, I was also drawn by contradictions and fissures and secrets and unexpected potentialities, only for me, people seemed more important than ideas.
“People are more important,
Mihnea,” that was what I wanted to tell Mihnea Palade. I didn’t get the chance.

“Imagine that, they didn’t allow me to see the archives! Me! I was his loyal admirer and apprentice. They didn’t let me see the archives from the moment that I began to ask questions. I advised him to stop seeing that old, fanatic doctor. The correspondent for the Iron Guard in the United States! Absolutely ridiculous! I assume you’ve heard of the doctor in question.”

My silence was a sign of consent. Palade wasn’t looking for consent, however, he merely wanted to spill his poisons. I’d become posterity’s witness.

“I hear that Gora saw the secret archive. I doubt that he saw it.”

He was jealous. He’d adored Dima, he didn’t expect someone else to be favored.

A good moment to attack. I asked him whether Gora could have been an informant. It was a way of asking him, indirectly, about himself.

“Could he have been? Anyone could have been. Not because he was predestined, but because destiny was enslaved to the Supreme Institution. The Devil had become a little intermediary, a bully and a bureaucrat, and man has unimaginable capacities. Integrity and duplicity, just as surprising. Think of the adulterer.. . parallel lives. Sometimes, for years, decades. Pent-up mysteries in the fragmented depths. Parallel worlds. Computers are going to perfect these opportunities, all the way to an absolute bewilderment. You’ve heard, I’m sure.”

I’d heard a little bit, but not much; I was prepared to hear anything and commit it to memory.

“You put on some special gloves and the computer program suddenly gives you access to the world into which you’ve entered. You operate in a different world. Through the gloves, the hands take hold of the objects of other worlds, they touch and handle and modify them.”

He digressed. Was it an allusion to Gora? It wasn’t clear.

“Ah, yes, but you asked about Gora. I was his student, we were close. He left before me, as you know. They say through the interventions of his wife’s relations. I don’t think so. It would have been too much if they’d wished to separate her from him. In any case, the suspicion remains. Just as in my case. The great victory by the system. Generalized suspicion has a longer life than the system itself. An unflinching, motionless posterity.”

He looked me straight in the eyes once again. Not to dispel suspicions, but seemingly, to fuel them.

“Gora is a civilized man, through and through. With all of the hypocrisy and lacquer that civilization implies, naturally. I wonder, is the obsession with Lu credible? There are plenty of erotic services available, with superb and costly young women fit for a solitary aristocrat. An aristocrat, yes, not by birth, but by erudition. Gora’s nights? Secretive nights, you can be sure. Books need the company
of women. Women, not just one woman. Lu isn’t just one woman, but many. What I know is that Gora left legally, with the approval of the authorities. He tried to bring Lu. Did he need the Institution’s help? I don’t know. Dima tried to help him. Gora was bitterly opposed to any visit by Dima to his Communist Homeland. No, no, no, not at any price, Gora would yell, red with indignation. Dima wasn’t as intransigent. Old as he was, he’d lost hope in the death of Communism. He was homesick for the places of long ago, he thought a visit would also serve his international prestige. The Institution’s propagandist alibis succeeded in convincing the Occident that our adored dictator, the Genius of the Carpathians, was building a special socialist democracy. A special democracy, within a special socialism. We were becoming, one would say, a special species.”

I’d heard of Dima’s intention to negotiate a compromise for a celebratory visit in his, that is, our country, and Gora’s opposition was proof of his integrity. None of this was news.

“Have you heard of the former Polish dictator of Free Europe? Great assets in the anti-Communist crusade. Have you heard about the latest discovery?”

I was all eyes and ears.

“A very cultivated man, of a great presence. The author of a very appreciated monograph about Joseph Conrad. The best, some say. The Polish Communist government, exasperated by the programs on Radio Free Europe, condemns the anti-Communist director to death. Condemned to death, in contumacy! But what do the archives of the Polish Secret Service show today, however? That the distinguished intellectual and anti-Communist had been an informant! Nicely worked over, don’t you think? How was it that they didn’t assassinate him? Some they killed because they refused, and others after they did their work.”

Palade was mixing up the chronology, in fact: the suspect had first been an informant for the Polish Secret Service, then refused to continue, then escaped and worked for the enemy.

“You were right to steer clear of the attic of suspects. Who was and
who wasn’t an informant? Me, Gora? You? Weren’t you questioned? Weren’t you visited by agents? Who knows what they wrote or modified in their reports. Even now they modify them, I’m sure … Those who might have forced us to become informants are in their mansions. The scribes who praised the Party and the genial Comrade Number One, who beat their breasts, in pubs or in safer places, with one, two, five Secret Service generals… they don’t have files saying they were informants. Or they had them but they’ve disappeared. Eh, what do you say? A good, Byzantine tradition found an alliance with a good, Communist tradition. Or a policing tradition. Or both.”

He was smiling, Mr. Palade, satisfied with the discourse. He’d come to divert my doubts, not to sweep them away. I had to ask the question that I kept postponing.

“But what about Lu? What do you think about her?”

He was increasingly hurried, he responded immediately.

“She was in the attic, as well.”

“Well, they weren’t
all
informants…”

“Not at all! It would have become a theatrical cast. No, no. I wanted to say only that we saw each other there. That was where Gora met her, and he hasn’t left her even to this day. It isn’t just some sort of bookish delirium, as one would think, nor the claustrophobia or agoraphobia of those lost in books. That would be understandable, we’re not far from that disease ourselves. But with him it’s something else. Lu isn’t a woman, but rather many women. Not a negligible opportunity! I know her from the evenings in the attic, but also from the nights of dancing in the more fashionable circles. A beauty. She would appear in groups and dance to rock music and do the twist and the shake and the hula-hoop. Serene, happy, pleasant. With certain abrupt reactions, as if from a shock. I recall one evening in particular. After midnight, after hours of dancing and flirting, the atmosphere had become propitious for the act that might follow. Some couples retreated to rooms, many of them, children of state officials. Sometimes there were even homes of former noble families that had somehow succeeded in holding on to
their properties, through God knew what arrangements. Dance and love. Couples would swing partners, some orgies would commence. Lu took notice of the movement. She became instantly pale. She grabbed her purse and bolted. I called her the following morning, worried. She told me that she walked by herself for an hour, in the middle of the night, from the neighborhood by the lakes all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. It was only then that a taxi appeared. She had no money on her, so she offered the driver her bracelet. That was how she got home, finally, around dawn.”

I understood that I wasn’t to expect clearer responses from the inhabitant of parallel worlds.

Palade wasn’t assassinated in his Homeland, from where he returned more troubled than when he’d left. He informed me that he had a few hours free at Kennedy Airport, where he was changing planes on his way toward Middle America.

A murky day, torrential downpours and storms before the unexpected arrival of Mynheer Peter Ga
par and his cousin in America.

The flights had long delays, some were canceled entirely. I waited many hours at the airport.

“It was a good trip. That is to say, bad, but beneficial. It woke me up, as if there were further need for that. That revolution, if we can call it that, was postmodern. That is, it is postmodern. It continuously produces its own parody. The impostures, the codifications, the relativities, the uncertainties. A postmodern revolution in a superrealist country, what do you say?”

I wasn’t saying anything. A superrealist country in a postmodern revolution described by a researcher of the esoteric and the paranormal deserves attention.

“They’re proud of the revolution, they invoke thousands of martyrs, but they’ve told me of massive infiltrations of terrorists, KGB conspiracies, as well as the involvement of the Occident and the Orient, the South and the North. They’re talking about a transition, but more toward the year 1938 as opposed to toward the year 2000,
modeled after Dima’s thinking. We’ve passed through the moments of daze and fury .. . They were looking at Ayesha, my dear Indian, as if she’d just walked out of a cave.”

I was trying to guess what, nevertheless, had been the benefit of the visit. Palade didn’t wait for the question.

“It made me happy to see certain friends. I returned to my youth, the places we both loved. And the attic of the great polemic debates. Their dreams and ambiguities.”

The word
ambiguities
was promising, I was hoping some confession was to follow. It didn’t.

“And then, I received signs. Signals. Calls. I didn’t decipher all of them. My brother . . . you know, my twin brother. Twins with the same cosmic premise. Well, he began to dream odd things, while I was there.”

I was afraid, I had been afraid in the previous meeting, as well, of such immersions in the world of magic and the phantasmagoric.

“Fiction is a part of reality, as you well know, as you yourself manipulate reality.
An unreliable narrator,
as they say here. Gora does the same thing, but he pretends it isn’t fiction. Fiction is created by and received from the real, from people, but also from the imaginary. Dream and imagination and presentiment, these things are human. Even science can’t advance in any other way. To discover something, you must be able first to imagine a new possibility.”

I raised the cup of coffee to my lips, I sipped, without looking at Palade. The sickly pallor of his face had struck me when he first came out of the gate, and would preoccupy me long afterward. He understood that I wasn’t interested in complicated theories, but in the experience of his journey.

“You believe, then, in these signs…”

“I know, I look for adventure, even in or through objects. Ads lure me, their lies, their successful bankruptcy. Their cipher! If I go out to buy an ice cream, I return with a load of other useless things. Just because I saw them along the way. Or, at least, with eight ice creams of different flavors and colors. Just as if I were forcing an
encounter with the unforeseen, the unseen. I disturb the sleep of things. Just now, when I was home, my mother asked me one day to look for some knitting needles in the city. Thick gauge needles, for a woolen vest she was knitting. I was lured by the encounter with the knitting needles. It had been two hundred years since I’d made such a banal and fantastic trip, to buy knitting needles for my old mother. On my way back, on the corner of the street, a gypsy. Young, enticing. She was begging for money. She stopped me, I looked at her, I gave her money, more than she’d dreamed, she looked at me with flames in her eyes. ‘Want me to read your palm?’ I stretched out my palm, I looked at her again and again, at length, disbelieving, she hesitated to speak, she seemed horrified. You’re born in the same month as me, she mumbled. Not the year, just the day and the month. And she told me the day and the month.”

“And when is your birthday?” I asked, to break the tension.

“The beginning of January,” Palade hurried to return to the story. “’Capricorn. I see blood. Blood on your temple,’ the witch said. Tou’re on a kingly throne, and blood is pouring from your temple. A bad omen. Guard yourself from enemies, young man. From enclosed spaces, from strangers,’ said the oracle.”

“So, then, you believe in these signs, you read the ads.”

“The life of the mind has its own dangers. Not just the apparent truth, but also the hidden, dangerous one. Coincidences, errors make up a codified game.”

“And whom else did you meet from the attic?”

“Ah, you’re thinking of Lu, you seemed to be interested in Madam Gora . . . you asked me last time, too, what I think of her. I ran into her. At the theater,
The Master and Margarita,
actually. A mystical play, isn’t it? Or magical? I remembered the play from when we were there. Imagine that, it was still being produced. Lu, yes, with a younger cousin, or that was how she presented him. A tall, bald, solid man with a moustache, very quiet, but ready, it seemed, to let himself go at any moment. Lu intimidated him, and I intimidated him. I asked her to a coffee. She even came. We talked a while. About Gora, as well. Even about Gora.”