The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (30 page)

“You haven’t gotten to justice yet, you have a ways to go yet. It’s possible that…”

Peter, however, had hung up the phone.

“Officer Pereira confirms that two years ago you refused to write a certain article. Did then someone force you to write it?”

“I wrote it of my own free will. After much hesitation. And with little pleasure.”

“Did the president of the college convince you to do it?”

“I asked him for advice. He advised me to write it.”

“How long did it take?”

“Six months.”

“And the hesitation?”

“I don’t remember. Two, three months. I was doing research during that time. The bibliography wasn’t accessible. Some things are known; other things remain obscure. Or inaccessible. In secret archives.”

“Communist archives?”

“Probably. Not only. Maybe C.I.A.”

“C.I.A. documents?”

The eyes of the thickset Patrick flicker. He pulls the notebook in which he writes nothing closer.

“The entrance visa to the U.S., for example. As a member or sympathizer of an extremist political organization, the Old Man should have had a lot of difficulty obtaining a visa. His old political articles had appeared in a time when there were still democratic options. The C.I.A. is more lenient with the Germans who became Nazis after Hitler prohibited political parties than those who did so when there were still other options in Germany. This should hold true for all countries, don’t you think? Additionally, the Old Man had been a diplomat during the war. On the side of the Axis Powers. The C.I.A. knew all of these things. But he didn’t have any problems. Or maybe …”

“Maybe what?”

“The anti-Communists were useful during the Cold War. The past can be forgotten, if necessary.”

“A pact with the devil, then?”

“Not with the devil. With the C.I.A.”

“You hesitated to write the review because of the C.I.A. ?”

“No. I don’t even know if the C.I.A. hypothesis is valid. I hesitated because I don’t like public scandals. I’m tired of the just cause. Communism was a just cause. For my father, it was. And not only for him.”

“Shutting people up, confiscating the property they earned through hard work, you call that a just cause?”

“Not those
things,
necessarily, no. But opposing fascism, for example. To maintain the illusion of a more just future. The luminous, humanist future, that’s what the slogans promised.”

“So, then, what was the accusation against the Old Man? A valuable man allied with killers?”

“This, too. During a time when, let’s be honest, all of Europe had gone insane. But after the war? Amnesia. Immoral amnesia . . . amoral. He didn’t seem to care at all about his complicit involvement in the tragedy. He’d arrived, after all, in a pragmatic country, hadn’t he? What mattered was what he did, not what he’d once thought. America encourages change.”

“And had he changed?”

“I don’t know. Every man changes now and then. I don’t think he’d changed his mind about democracy, if that’s what you want to know.”

“What did he think about democracy?”

“Corrupt, vulgar. Infantile. Demagogic. Chaotic. Stupid. Decadent. Hypocritical.”

The police officer doesn’t seem at all discouraged by the avalanche of adjectives.

“Did he promote these ideas?”

“At one time. Now, it would have been idiotic. He discussed them, maybe, with his old comrades. He kept in touch with them.
Nostalgia for his youth, perhaps, when he believed himself to be part of the marching rank and file? Now he was doing his duty at the university, he was writing books and becoming famous. Would it have helped him to undermine himself with confessions? Self-indictment? Here, in your country, I mean, in our country, you can refuse to accuse yourself. Would it have made the world a better place? Would it have improved the future? No one was asking him to proclaim his own mistakes and guilt.” “Then why did you write the review?”

“I was asked to write it. Not to unmask Dima, who was dead. It was just the review of a book, in a weekly journal, not even a daily paper. The book had been published with the author’s approval. He had produced all kinds of memoirs, diaries, he liked looking in the mirror. A mirror ruined by flies and fogged up by the breath of the author. I wrote an honest review. No more, no less.”

“Without a moral subtext?”

“A review in a journal with modest circulation.”

A long silence followed . . . “Angels don’t write books,” the Eastern European had whispered. He didn’t know if it was part of his answer or if there was any connection at all. The inaudible thoughts of a mortal… Police Officer Patrick had heard, however. He stared, intrigued, at Ga
par’s face and was silent.

“Angels don’t write books…” Was that some sort of bitter and light conclusion about Dima, or about all the scribes delirious with the vanity and infantilism of uniqueness? Hard to say what Peter’s muttering had meant or if it had meant anything at all. The silence between the interrogator and the interrogated had grown.

“Mr. Murphy, I am ready to confess.”

Mr. Murphy was listening, imperturbable. The decisive moment had come, the interrogation was proving very efficient, because of the sleuth-hound, the guilty party was ready to confess to the villainous operation. Mister Murphy put his hands on the table, near Mister Ga
par’s large hands, and bent amicably over the table, to be closer to the miserable wretch.

“I realize, talking to you, that I’m the product of my country.

This I want to say. I circle around certain ambiguities, I cultivate them, through all kinds of copouts that are nothing but copouts. I avoid the essential. I thought I’d healed myself. I haven’t. Over there, there’s a difference between the sins of a beggar and a celebrity. A big difference. They are treated differently, very differently.”

“That’s true everywhere.”

“Probably, but I feel infected. There, the question that takes priority is who are you, not what have you done. I’m not immune, I’ve realized, specifically in the case of Dima. It’s probably that it intrigues me, contradictions appeal to me, as well as ambiguities, secrets, subterfuges, subtleties, everything that is more than the essential. That’s it. That’s my confession, so that you know whom you’re dealing with. An infected man. Maybe, not totally. No, not totally.”

Mister Murphy gazed at Mister Ga
par and for the first time smiled. Mister Ga
par gazed at the large hands of the interrogator nearby on the table, smiling himself.

“I only want to understand. Your fellow countryman dreamed of a better world?”

“All preachers say that. He thought that we lived in a desecrated world. That’s nothing new, nor is it altogether wrong.” “De … what? De-se-cra-ted?”

“A world where there’s nothing sacred. Desecrated. But the sacred is hiding in the profane. That’s what he would say. So then, it’s hiding . . . around us, inside us. Whoever is hiding can’t show himself in the light of day. He’s not allowed, he’s in danger, expelled from the light. The sacred is expelled, but hidden, persistent.”

“Why is it hidden? The world is full of churches. And synagogues and mosques. And Buddhist temples. I go to church. I’m a believer.”

“I’m not. I hear that in Los Angeles there are 250 sects. Two hundred and fifty gods? Maybe that’s better than a single god and a religious tyranny. I don’t know exactly what Dima was trying to propose. Ideas aren’t dangerous until they become reality. I don’t
think a sanctified world is exactly sacred. I would be afraid of a world like that.”

“The founding fathers of America were people of faith. They read the Bible.”

“But they defined the individual as a citizen.”

“Religion helps man.”

“Maybe. But the state? Iran isn’t the only example.”

“The fact that you were asked to write the review doesn’t mean you had to do it. Was there some kind of revenge?”

“Revenge? Toward whom, and why? I never even knew Dima.”

“It’s not about Dima. People like Dima. Your family has suffered.”

“My family? Yes, they’ve suffered, but I was born after the war. My parents wanted to forget those horrors. And besides, they were deported by the Hungarian administration. Dima isn’t Hungarian.”

“It’s not about Dima, but about people like him.”

Peter is quiet, frowning. His family? So then they know everything about Dima and Palade and about him. Now the police officer will ask for details about the watchmaker who became a Communist prosecutor and the wife he met at the door of the crematorium. He shouldn’t have written the review! He’d foreseen the suspicions. All of his circumspection, allowances, ambiguity, in vain. Just listen to that! Revenge, resentment, rancor.

“No, it had nothing to do with revenge. The review was gentle, the American papers say. They say I was paying homage to Dima. Is that true, I wonder? I’m not immune to the culture that formed me, to its sophistication and affectations. Provincial elitism from the other end of the world. Anyway, Communism cured me of the need to unmask sinners.”

“You said it was nothing new. Then it wasn’t unmasking.”

“Well, yes … I was formed by a culture of ambiguities and copouts. America is reeducating me.”

“Through that female student?”

“Maybe. I hadn’t thought of that. I should have.”

Yes, he should have. Murphy’s suggestion was welcome.

“Students have something to teach me, too, yes. Tara, as well, probably. I am curious; I want to understand the place where I’ve arrived. And you want to understand the place I left behind.”

“In the review, you mention that he was fascinated by tyrants. Did Dima admire tyrants? Why? Didn’t he also live in a tyranny?”

“The military dictatorship was established only after his political engagement. Military, but Balkanic. Not German or Chinese. The advantages of corruption.”

The police officer opens his eyes wide at the praise of corruption, but he doesn’t comment.

“He was to know a Western dictatorship, as well. During the war he was working at an embassy, in a Western, authoritarian state. The “national, unitary, sacred state,” as he used to call it, didn’t bother him. God’s involvement in the administration of society, sacrifice, and decency and Christian redemption, the reintegration of man into the cosmic rhythm, the organic family, all in opposition to degenerate individualism. I read those things here and there, superficially, as I tend to do.”