The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (44 page)

The word
even
kept repeating itself: she
even
came,
even
about Gora—the unusual was Mihnea Palade’s routine.

“She said she was cured. Short hair, very short, like a boy. A shock. A slender face, vibrating movements, the vibrations of her fragility, deepened eyes, same hands as ever, superb hands. She seemed taller, lighter. Illness is a mystery, it has its own magic, it brings you closer to the unknown and the mystical. Especially such a grave illness. .. you’re in transit. In between. Closer to death, you feel more intensely the mystery of life. Illness intensifies sensuality. Out of words and gestures I was guessing at the unperceivable, reprimanded by decency and fear, fear of the self, not just of others. Lu is more than a single woman, as I’ve said. That was how I first saw her long ago, and how I still see her now. It’s just that now, after her illness, she seems more accessible, open, freer, more thirsty …”

I was listening to him, I wasn’t listening, I craved more details, that was for certain, but I changed the subject, to escape my own self.

“Do you think that former Secret Service agents have special reasons to follow you here, as well?”

He didn’t answer right away, as I would have expected. It seemed that he needed time to decide how and what to say.

“I don’t know what they have in their files, I wouldn’t rule out any hypotheses, I am a man of hypotheses, I believe in secrets and secret needs. A double or multiple life. The imposture is only another embodiment, apart from the known, accepted one. See even here, in the United States of freedom and taboo, a politician slips into the whirlpool of a short erotic adventure now and then. An enormous scandal erupts, and the politician is ruined. In France he’d be admired. The old adulterer has been proof since the beginning that man lies in everything. Doesn’t he care about the poor, about religion, about his children, about America’s future? Of course he does!”

He was quiet for a moment and took a long look at me.

“No, I wasn’t an informant, if that’s what you want to know. That isn’t why the agents of yesterday and today would be following me.
I don’t know the reasons why they would. And maybe it’s better that way.”

He was saying that this would be our last conversation, so then, it was a confession.

“I was living in blasphemous, admired America, chaos obsessed with order and freedom, pragmatic and religious, corrupt and idealistic, hundreds of sects, thousands of armed racists, illiterates of all degrees, corruption and lunacy and spectacle. And grandeur! Imperfect, fortunately. Only a dictatorship is perfect.”

“What did she say about Gora? What did Lu say about Gora? Did she agree to talk about him? Why didn’t she follow him here?”

Palade searched my face, disappointed. He was smiling, with sly complicity, as if the questions had been a failed copout from the unmentioned question.

“It’s quite possible that Lu is abandoning, barely now, the place she never wanted to abandon. I asked her about Gora. Why hadn’t she followed him? ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know yet,’ was what she said. ‘We’re all irreplaceable and our ages are irreplaceable, we can’t be replaced even by our own selves, in another age and in changed surroundings,’ she said. ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know, I shouldn’t know.’ What’s certain is that she’s become less retractile and equivocal. Okay, we’ll end here, I’m in a hurry, I’m preparing three different books, I have publishing contracts to look at, a lot of work, until next May. The month of May is inscribed in my brother’s dream.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“A session with the Political Bureau. The former Political Bureau. Lilliputian marionettes made of straw and cotton and velvet. Just like in the puppet theater. The obese chef, the gardener with his rake, the stenographer with his small glasses. Generals, youths in the green shirts of the Legion, workers with caps and red bands, activists. A large banner across the entire wall.
Nationalism, Communism’s last refuge.
In our day there were others:
Workers, the Party’s golden foundation,
or,
Man, the most precious capital.
They were discussing my case, the date of my execution, waiting for a

sign, some indication. The Genius of the Carpathians seemed befuddled, turning toward one of the capped guides. This is what my brother Lucian told me. The dream.”

Palade wrapped his scarf around his neck. He was in a navy blue suit, as always, with a white shirt, open at the neck, red scarf made of soft wool.

“The marionette responded hoarsely, like a ventriloquist’s doll. The holiday of the Orthodox saints.’ The Genius smiled, he liked the crudity of the guide, he nodded his head and waved his hand in approval. The marionettes took out their notepads and noted the date, the holiday in May. This year I got off, nothing happened. Unfortunately, I don’t have that gypsy here to untangle the mystery.”

He tightened his scarf again around his neck, though it was warm and humid. His thick, woolen scarf around his neck like a kind of useless armor.

It was our last meeting.

Some time has gone by since then. Peter Ga
par might also have met with Palade again in the parallel worlds of the transmigrations, and he will communicate to us if the enigma of his disappearance is the same as Mihnea Palade’s.

Ga
par’s telephone message seems like a challenge. Had he guessed the whole time that he was the hero of the obituary on Gora’s desk? The message was promptly transcribed into Folder RA 0298. The funereal diversion requires professionalism! Gora had specialized, he’d learned to maintain the good disposition of those still living; the farce named biography became the obituary farce. He would select a fragment, then another, for those left on this side of the River Styx.

She mocked me, the whore! She made a laughing stock out of me. The Nymphomaniac . . . she’s in no mood for me.
Transcribed from the tape, the words rest obediently in the
Mynheer Folder.
Gora had listened to the message dozens of times, he knows it by heart. With
the transcription in front of him, he listens for the inflections in the voice, comparing the phonetics and the written page, looking for new meanings. He ignores the transmigration of the soul, in which Mihnea Palade believed.

Was Peter Ga
par going to take advantage of the postponement by continuing to play with the Nymphomaniac, as he’d promised when he first arrived in the New World? Or would he put an end to the game, embittered, proving that he decides the epilogue after all?

Suicide doesn’t seem likely.

The grump left a grumpy message and disappeared. Not a word afterward. Did this message preclude the kind of assault with which Mihnea Palade was honored? The telephone in the Eastern European professor’s shack rang and rang, while the college’s secretary maintained that the professor had solicited a leave of absence, an unpaid vacation. Was there a forwarding address? No answer to that question, the bureaucrats aren’t allowed to violate the professor’s privacy.

Had he taken off, in the end, with Deste? Or did he go with Tara to Nevada’s Nirvana, to discover the true America, the wilderness of freedom? Which Tara? The one who examined the relationship between underwear and moldy pasta, the difference between an odor and a stink, or the mailwoman who delivered threat letters? An easygoing, cordial, wise partner, no relation to the neurotic who yearned for bad marks?

Disappeared in America’s labyrinth, Peter doesn’t answer. Did he encounter the Blind Man from Buenos Aires at the Grand Canyon?

Gora considers himself an untrustworthy columnist. Revitalized by the alternative, he passes his hand over the folder, looking at the corner of the table, where the red gloves rest.

Before disappearing, Peter had a last meeting, with Lyova Boltanski.

Penn Station! He emerges from the crowd, his gaze up to the sky. The present! The present, the traveler was mumbling. The motto and prayer of his new life: the present!

The yellow cab brakes at the curb’s edge. Lyova was waiting for him, just as they’d agreed.

“Thank you, you’re a man of your word. The Soviet is a man of his word.”

“The American is, too, if he’s paid well enough. You paid me well. Too well.”

“Well, what do you think … I owed you.
Noblesse oblige,
say the French. What do the Ukrainians say?”

“Why the Ukrainians?”

“Well, aren’t you from Odessa?”

“I’m a Soviet. I told you but you didn’t understand.
Ein Man ein Wort,
this I know from my family. It’s not French, but I think it’s the same.”

“Almost the same.”

“Okay. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know the exact address, but I know where it is.”

“New York isn’t a village, we need an address.”

“Do you know how to get to Lenox Hospital? A major hospital. Near the hospital, there’s a doctor’s office.”

“Again to the doctor? The girlfriend moved to Lenox? The girl
friend or the partner or the wife who doesn’t want to see you and who disappears before you appear.”

“No, she didn’t move. It’s not for her I’m going.”

“Are you ill? Or is it a psychiatrist? I asked you last time, and you didn’t answer. A psychiatrist?”

“I answered last time and I am answering now. No, he’s not a psychiatrist. Dr. Koch is an internist, an unfashionable profession in America.”

“That’s right. Specialized doctors. For the left hand and for the right hand, for knees and tendons and for headaches or baldness aches. Ten digits in the hands and feet? A specialist for each one. Twenty specialists! And a specialist for each nail of each finger. Another twenty! Dentists who do only fillings and others who pull teeth, others who take care of gums, other who implant new, more durable fangs. The Ford method, the division of labor. Maximum output. Charlie Chaplin’s film. I saw it dozens of times in the Soviet Union.”

“Modern Times,
that’s what it was called, wasn’t it? Efficient and ferocious capitalism. So, you saw movies in your socialist country. What about books? Did you read books?”

“I read. Whatever I could get my hands on.”

“Whatever you could get your hands on? We all fell into that trap of books.”

“Why trap?”

“Oh, I’m just saying … it was a den where you could be alone, we had nothing else, just books.”

“Doctor Koch … Koch you said?”

“That’s his name.”

“So then, it’s the lungs. Bacillus Koch, that’s all I remember from school. Something wrong with your lungs?”

“Not a goddamn thing. I don’t call him Koch, I call him Avicenna. You know who Avicenna was.”

“I know, and if I don’t know I still don’t care. So then, you’re ill in general, not in the lungs. The nail of your little toe on your left foot?”

“I’m not going for a consultation. I am bringing him a present. This tube.”

“Aha, you don’t have that heavy briefcase, now you have a tube. So then, you’re not going to the library, or to the library cafe, and you’re not going to lose your wallet.”

“No I’m not going to lose it. And I have money, don’t worry.”

Peter holds a long tube made of blue cardboard, with a lid, under his arm.

“I’m bringing a message.”