The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (33 page)

Gora knew that bewilderment, its whirlpools. He knew the tears of joy of the reader in the corner of the library who, book in hand, suddenly untangled the riddle. Transformed all at once from a deaf-mute toad into the prince of youth without aging and life without death.
*
A god, in the magic of his language! Now, he could defy the anonymous crowd in which he was lost: no passerby could understand those words or understand the murderous quotation, hidden in the language unknown to anyone outside of himself, the crowned wanderer, the king of the world, at least for one second.

Professor Gora was left with the receiver in his hand. He waited for the gasps and fainting spells of the phantom. Nothing.

Folder RA 0298, on which the word
mynheer
was written, sat still near the white gloves, pushed to the edge of the table.

He listened for the noises of the house. Nothing. He retrieved the yellow folder. Stalled for a second, reopened it.

He instantly identified the passage discussed so often in the attic in Bucharest, a passage to which he referred regularly, then read Palade’s and Dima’s comments. Now, he confronted the variations of that conjuncture, while the buffoon ran to the library, exalted, to settle the question of the code.

After two hours, Peter’s voice:

“Purim! Purim! That’s the key. Perfect! I have the key. Fin-ished!” Gora taps on his computer, the word doesn’t appear.

“You don’t know what Purim is? You never learned? Even in the family of my Communist in-laws people knew what Purim was. I knew Lu’s grandparents. They went to synagogue on holidays. You knew them, too.”

“It’s been decades.”

“So you haven’t understood the millennial madness, either . . . Although, you stand by her captives, I know. No small thing, for someone born in our parts. And then abandoned by a wife who wasn’t exactly Christian. The poor woman was unsure if you had chosen her for a symbolic reason. She told me you were reluctant to write to your friend from childhood, Izy Koch, about the marriage. You were afraid he’d think you chose the otherness of her community, the otherness of her tribe, her ethnic identity, rather than the woman.”

A venomous comment, entirely unnecessary. Not at all necessary. Gora was boiling.

The voice stopped, Ga
par probably wanted to excuse himself, to correct himself through a sporting remark.

“There aren’t many reasons for us to be loved. Any irritation is enough, to stand as proof of our many defects. One of our many defects. Even one defect, just one, and it’s over with us… li-qui-da-ted. Fin-ished!”

He pants, just like Gora, and can’t regain his composure, just like Gora. He’d never before spoken with so much passion and bitterness. A long silence would follow. Gora gathers his strength, bracing himself for another avalanche.

“Purim is the holiday with masks. The people of the book don’t have joyful rituals. This one is fun, childlike. Haman, the guide of the king of Persia, an anti-Semitic Iago, plots the massacre of the sinners. Esther, the king’s concubine, saves her people. Maybe she was the favorite from the harem. And so the wandering people pardon the sinner and celebrate their salvation. They wear masks, enjoy themselves, eat triangular sweets named Hamantaschen, which means, “Haman’s pockets,” or “the monster’s hat,” as some others call them. They feast every year, for the whore who saved them.
Victory over the world’s Hamans. And there are many Hamans, the chosen people feel.”

Peter repeats, with pleasure and venom, “the chosen people.” The bitterness hadn’t disappeared, but the voice was growing thinner.

“Many wise people say that the Holocaust canceled the contract of the All Powerful with his chosen people. So, then, the Bible is no longer valid. Miracles, covenants devalued, expired. With one exception! The legend of Esther, where God is missing from the scene. A hellish tale, whose moral is that the mission of the exiles is to save themselves. Themselves! That’s all. Purim, the celebration of the masks, reminds us of that summons.”

Gora the all-knowing doesn’t know this story, doesn’t see the connection to the threat letter. His fingers run frenetically over the keys of the moment. Bent once again over the folder, he is ready to listen, to learn, to remedy the lacuna and document what he’s learned.

“Look, I bought
Ficciones
and
Labyrinths
from the bookstore, as you advised me to do, both editions. I found the text of the Great Blind Man. The first crime. The first letter of the sacred name was pronounced. The second crime. The second letter was pronounced. That’s what the great Argentine writes. A third crime follows. The third of February. The time for carnival. The festival of masks.”

“Does it say that there? The festival of masks?”

“It says that in both volumes . . . Carnival appears in both translations. Carnival in Argentina is in February. The message Tara brought me came at the beginning of the semester. Beginning of February. I discovered it late because I don’t get my mail in time. It had arrived at the beginning of February. So then, Carnival is the festival of masks. For the chosen, exiled people, the perpetually threatened, this is Purim. Purim in the lunar calendar . . . you know what the lunar calendar is.”

Gora knows, naturally, what the lunar calendar is. He knows at least this much, but the all-knowing Gora is silent.

“So then, in the calendar of the ancients, the calendar that follows the moon, not the sun, Purim should come shortly. The date of the crime. Purim is soon. Soon. So then, the countdown. That’s what the quotation is announcing. As you know, the three victims from the story are all members of the chosen people.”

A poisoned silence. Gora opens the folder.

“Have you notified the police?”

“I first called the distinguished Professor Augustin Gora, who was known, in my family, as Gusti. An all-knowing expert. To find out where the quotation came from. I haven’t been able to figure it out until now, though I thought I was smart, capable of untangling the riddle on my own. Somnambulant, lost, all the nocturnal wild beasts in my head, but I considered myself smart nonetheless. The professor saved me. He offered the solution, just as I’d anticipated. Saint Augustin knows everything. I found the source of the quotation.
Labyrinths
and
Ficciones.
I have both volumes. I read, reread, confronted. I hit on the Carnival. The festival of masks. Purim. Should I notify the police about Purim?”

“Yes, you should, yes, notify them now, right now, immediately! Do you have a contact number, in case of emergencies?”

“Yes, of course I do. Little Patrick must be used to being snagged from his wife’s side or from the side of whomever or children or television. However, I’m not going to perform this kindliness. He’s going to come see me tomorrow, in any case. Routine meeting. Tomorrow I will tell Larry Eight. He’ll gape, eyes and mouth, like a crocodile. Convinced I’m pulling his leg.”

“You say what you discovered.”

“What did I discover? A course in fantastic literature? An Argentine author of fantastic literature? Should we go to Argentina, Patrick and I, on the tracks of Lonrot and Scharlach, Borges’ characters? Or should we go on a pilgrimage to Palade’s grave? Or, better yet, to Cosmin Dima’s grave? We wait, hidden, in the cemetery, to see who comes to bow at the sacred gravesite and who brings flowers and petitions? Dima’s zealots, Palade’s assassins, my stalkers? What
should poor Patrick do? Should he learn about the archaic calendar, the lunar holidays, the Purim rituals? Or about the tricks of Communist and post-Communist espionage? Or should we go to the little Paris of the Balkans, as Bucharest was called during the interbellum, grab a beer with the old and new informants who decided to murder Mihnea Palade while he meditated on the toilet throne? What should Mr. Murphy do? He will become increasingly suspicious of the Eastern European professor, that’s what he will do! Professor Peter Ga
par, hyperbored of the America of all possibilities, where he regrets he did not come twenty years earlier, in the example of the wise Professor Gora, the husband of his cousin Ludmila Serafim,
the significant other.
That’s some hypothesis, no? Here when they find a body, the first suspects are the poor people who mourn the dead. You start the investigation with them. Those who reported the crime. What should Patrick do? What would we do in his place? ‘Scrutinize the surroundings for anything unusual,’ the FBI officer advised me. I can’t. I am absentminded and neglectful. Is it ‘happy anxiety’ or ‘anxious happiness?’”

“Careful with the warning,” repeats Professor Gora, irritated. “Don’t forget that Lonrot dies because he’s too rational. He allows himself to be fascinated by a rational scheme, but the perfect reader eliminates logic and good sense and sufficiency and skepticism. He gives himself entirely to the will of the text, he lives it. There are warnings and there are warnings, you have to be vigilant.”

“Warning? They can kill me without warnings. To subdue me? Anyway, I’m subdued now. I’m not going to reenter the nebulas of the Homeland. I did it for Palade. He’d asked me. That’s it! I left the place, definitively. Ciao!”

“Palade was warned, then killed.”

“Because he wasn’t obedient. They repeated the warnings, and he still wasn’t subdued. He enraged them. And then, he was a renegade. Renegades are punished.”

“What do you mean ‘a renegade’?”

“Dima’s disciple had become antinationalist, offending the sacred
symbols. Paired up with a young, pagan witch, in love with America, where he changed his name, ready to change his religion. I’m the old nuisance. Fin-ished. Basta. One more blunder shouldn’t matter. The review was my only work. Li-qui-da-ted. A trifle.”

“There’s also the famous and well-known text
Mynheer
and your unknown masterpiece. That was the gossip.”

“Maybe the gossipers wrote it.”

“You received a threat, don’t forget. A condemnation.”

“To temper me. I’m tempered. Mute, the black swan. Deaf like the Buddha’s statue, mute like Moses’ sculpture. Deaf-mute like my deaf-mute brothers of anywhere and anytime. I don’t care about imbeciles allied with other imbeciles. They will forget about me, they’ll find some other targets. The threat is the joke of a semi-literate failure.”

“Failures can be very dangerous. Hitler was a failure.”

“Condemned to death? We are all condemned to death. Death, invisible authority? Invincible? A half-wit with cultural pretentions. The author of the letter wants to appear as something he’s not.”

When Gora heard his voice again after two weeks, something had changed.

“The woods. It invades at night. The patrols, the dogs, skeletons, barbed wire. My guilt, or the guilt of others, I don’t know. I sleep very little. I wake up sweating, terminated. At the door, at the window, the dogs of night, the patrols. Lucky that my mother can’t see me. I crash into sleep, into nightmare, I wake up exhausted.”

Had he notified the police? He’d notified the college’s administration. A student had advised him. “A student? How?”

A female student with whom he’d had some kind of conflict at some point.

“Beautiful?”

“It’s not Lu, don’t worry . . . she’s no double for Lu. I am talking to someone, that’s what’s important. W.A.S.P.
White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant,
that’s as much as I learned. She doesn’t have our neuroses. She has others.”

The student had persuaded him to notify the campus administration.

“It was worse.”

“How could it be worse? Why would it be worse?”

“The patrols. The night patrols. Every two hours. No …” Saint Augustin babbled something. Who knows what, but he was writing madly.

“I’d forgotten to tell you something, Maestro. I talked to Palade. His brother, I mean. Lucian, Luci. Luci Palade, who’s still back in the old country. He told me that the attacks against the foreigner that I am continue in all the papers. Only the cliche has changed, they don’t call me a foreigner, a traitor, but a failure. I never wrote anything, I have no talent, how do I dare speak out? They’re right. The universal vote gets suspended if you have no talent. You have no talent, you have no vote, no voice in the country of the talented. The idiots forgot the national proverb, ‘the mouth of the fool speaks the truth.’ Isn’t that right, they forgot?”