The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (15 page)

His audience didn’t seem to remember his story
Mynheer
from long ago, nor the nickname, nor its motivation, nor the old rumors of a mysterious masterpiece hidden in his mind or in his cupboards.

Larry One, alias Avakian, the president of the college where the
traitor was operating, had found out about the hysteria in the press across the sea. He’d found the headline under the American review very provocative. The college informed the FBI about the potential danger to the reviewer, and about his relationship with the assassinated.

Ga
par turned sleepless and irritated, and Gora felt guilty for opting out of writing the text about Dima himself. One of the epithets with which Ga
par had been overwhelmed would not have been there. Ashamed, he tried to forget.

In the meantime, Peter was receiving letters from American readers who were shocked by the ambiguities of the review. So much attention and so much scruple afforded to an extremist who sided, along with his country, with Nazi Germany? The reviewer seemed to excuse him—or worse, in fact—to actually admire the Nazi, one professor of ethnic studies from California said. A young poet posed the question, “How do you separate one being into two separate ones? You maintain that the political writings should be held apart from the scientific and literary works. Do they belong to another person? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to find this other person? To see what he has to say? Aren’t you implying a kind of censorship, somehow? Where do we stand on the unity of the contraries mentioned by the illustrious deceased?”

Ga
par didn’t appear affected by this kind of correspondence. The good, the true, and the beautiful? His new compatriots ignored the beautiful, the good had to be evident and canonical, and the truth without stain. Always this need for coherence and for churches! They don’t care at all about aesthetics. Scared of contradictions, they don’t understand that incoherence is their greatest realization, the triumph of their democracy.

How had he let himself be “cheaply bought” by the glory of a “disgusting, fascist library rat?” asked a political science student from Kansas.

The wryness with which he took in the calumnies of his own country showed, however, that he had failed to emigrate. The past was still alive in the present. His wounds coexisted with the illusions
that provoked wounds. He was dragging his native terrain with him everywhere he went.

“I have in front of me one of our respectable cultural journals. From some time around Easter. Christian iconography. The Savior on the cross. The title is:
The Crucifixion of Dima.”

“Where did you get that journal? Who sent it to you?”

“Palade’s brother. Lucian. It would seem that I’m the one who upholds the vigilance and good humor of the Nation, week to week. The spy across the ocean,
c’est moi.”

After this intermezzo, Gora didn’t want to hear anymore. When some new information came, he refused to comment, accepting Ga
par’s aggression mutely.

“Lu forced our coming to America. They’d taken the cap off the bucket of slops. Freedom. Poisoned, daily,
poisoned.
Filth that had been hidden for decades on end exploded at every step, just like the day when Lu had parked the car belonging to the driving school. She was just getting out of the car, when the angry man yelled, ‘Why don’t you all leave and go back to your Arab cousins!’ The unknown man had tried, probably, to find a parking spot and the car with the big driving school sign was in the way. Surprised, Lu turned around to see whom he was addressing. She’d never seen that brawler before. There was no one else around, as you might guess.”

Gora listened, silent.

“Was it her Oriental beauty? Yes, but not the one praised by King Solomon. Romanian, Hungarian, Armenian, one as good as the other. Russian, German, Italian, Peruvian, it didn’t matter. No, Lu is no typical Sulamite beauty. Is that important? It is. Not to mention the fact that she was raised on the lullabies of humanism. Indiscriminate citizens of the world. Universalism, humanism. Colored tags on jars of expired preserves. The guy had probably followed her, he could recognize a beautiful woman who wasn’t ashamed to go out at a particular time in an old, beat-up car, while putting on the mask of a common receptionist. ‘Tou brought us Communism! The comedy is over, get out of here!’ The guy was yelling at her, ‘Invent another
mission, another Messiah, somewhere else.’ Lu gave up on going inside the building. She returned home, overexcited.”

Heated discussions followed. The one who’d previously refused the departure now wanted it. We’re getting out of here! We should have done it long ago, we could have done it long ago. “I’m a joker in love with the baroque,” cousin Ga
par had replied. “Does anyone need me there? Will anyone feed me?”

Surprisingly, Lu replied, “I will.” She spoke English and was willing to do any kind of work. A juvenile impulse, wanderlust and change. It was hard to imagine Lu doing “just any kind of work.” It was just her impatience to abandon the place that she’d refused until then to abandon. She’d separated from her husband, turned down the great adventure and the unknown. Liberation had come, the Communist morass was receding, reasons to leave seemed to be disappearing. Why push into the unknown
now?
The curses of a Mercedes owner seemed providential.

Professor Augustin Gora hadn’t forgotten his own embroilments with Lu; destiny’s new joke didn’t amaze him one bit.

“Larry One is on his third wife. They’re all subalterns of his at the college. Larry Two, though younger, is on his third, too. The energy of renewing oneself! Infantility? Humor? Imposture? Courage? The right to happiness! The constitutional right to happiness! Here, no speech starts without a joke. Even a funereal speech. Was Mynheer Dutchman a forerunner of all this?”

He’d changed the direction of the dialogue. The author of obituaries Augustin Gora had become pensive. The question was addressed, as usual, to no one in particular.

“Palade found himself a new wife … You’re the only one left without one. You’ve got plenty of choices here. Chinese, Irish, Arab, whatever your heart desires. Even immigrants from our former country, if you can’t break away from the native cuisine.”

Gora was no longer sure if this was Gaspar’s final account of
Palade. After Palade’s death, he returned often to the subject of the Palade-Ga
par meeting. The way you reminisce about friends while keeping vigil by their coffins, when only the imagination can modify everything that was never meant to be.

Palade knew too much, and it bored him to take up the tortuous enigma of Cosmin Dima once again. For years on end, he’d struggled on his own, agitated, down the serpentine and darkened roads of the Maestro; he never fully recovered. But Peter’s own life, in turn, was curious. Here was a survivor! The survivor child in the belly of survival. And then there was his rejection of the Communism upheld by his prosecutor father. Curiosity probably overcame the hangover.

“Did he make you tell him the story of his life?”

“He proposed something like that, without saying it, a kind of exchange. I offer him my story, he gives me Dima’s. In spite of all his bitterness, he’d been, and still was at the time, fascinated by Dima, his attraction to modernism, then myth, transcendence, mystic nationalism, extremist politics, defeat, his refuge in mystery and masks, then his academic career. Was it all Dima’s inability to examine himself? His narcissism empowered his evasions. He couldn’t admit his guilt or his mistakes; he didn’t have time; his great projects were subjugating posterity. Though often at the pulpit of spirituality, he declined to debate on moral themes and condescended to the babbling mob.”

“The Dima capsule contains modernism, nationalism, mysticism, diplomacy, and brothels. Narcissism, exile, isolation, esoteric evasions, academic excellence.”

Gora was listening, absolutely unconvinced that Ga
par was relating the meeting honestly.