The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (51 page)

After two days, Bar–El calls. Unsatisfied by the investigation.

“I don’t believe the results. I want to double check. The age of the patient requires precaution. Any age, for that matter. I’m going to schedule you for an angiogram. Call me and we’ll arrange the appointment.”

That was the morning message.

The beautiful winter landscape knew nothing about Bar–El. A photogenic stoniness, grandeur. The professor was watching the woods. Nearby on the couch, the large, heavy album
A Day in the Life of America,
HarperCollins Publishers. Blue cover. A black rider
with a black hat, a black horse, and a white half–moon, against the night’s blue sky. Underneath,
We are frenzied and happy and hopeful. We are zealots and zanies and high school kids just starting to wonder what the world is all about.
That was how the Yankees described themselves, with humor. The album of his new family.

The symbolic photograph, a blonde girl and a blond boy, dressed in white, dance, holding each other, with their eyes closed, transfigured.
This is May 2,1986.

Where was I on May 2, 1986? Lu was in our former country, Peter Peeperkorn on a page in a German novel, the future patient Gora knew nothing about the blocked arteries or about angioplasty.

Gusti Gora and Izy Koch remained friends even after the mysterious meeting in the basement. The controversy continued, Izy increasingly more irritated, Gora increasingly more bullheaded about the possibility, which he’d grown bored of justifying.

“Love isn’t necessary, Gusti,” Koch was saying, “We don’t need love, listen to me. In our madness, it’s what we’re always waiting for. Love. To be loved, imagine that! After ages of hate and disorienta–tion, the world will suddenly love us. Love your neighbor better than yourself? Your neighbor! Yes, I understand … but you can’t love your neighbor better than you love your own skin. It’s a lie. Never more than yourself. It isn’t possible. And if it’s possible, it’s too much. Why should they love us? Because we’re better, more beautiful? Impeccable? We’re not. So then, let them leave us alone. That’s all, that’s all! You hear? That’s all! Let them stop asking us to be better, more beautiful, impeccable. That’s all! We don’t need love, Gusti.”

Gusti was walling himself into the mountain. Soon after, he’d given up the disputes with Izy, or with anyone else, on the subject. When conflicts appeared on the taboo theme, or jokes about the side curls or the traditional insults, he’d simply leave the room. He’d go through years of school that way, and for a long time afterward,
when, an assistant at the university, he frequented an attic where there were heated debates about the most heated questions in the world. Lu was never to discover her husband’s juvenile obsession with the Apostle Peter, and Isidor Koch, was, by then, far away.

At the end of high school, Izy signed up for the Institute of Physical Culture and Athletics, no more, no less! Gora was stupefied. Koch had become a champion weight thrower, weightlifter, and rower. Isidor Koch, an athlete?! This wasn’t the image by which his people had gained their renown and antipathy. And, as if the exotic choice weren’t exotic enough, Izy had chosen Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, as the place where he would pursue his study.

“This program exists here, too. Why would you go so far away?”

“People are more serious there. I’m fed up with the jokes people make about me, as well as the jokes I make myself. And besides, there’s the unknown to consider! Anonymity! Just think, a place where no one knows you!”

Gora was smiling. Cluj was much smaller than Bucharest, the anonymity would evaporate fairly quickly. But he didn’t contradict the athlete, he just thought about his friend affectionately.

After a year, Izy came back home. Not for his studies, but for his departure. He’d been claimed by a wealthy uncle in Venezuela, he was abandoning the socialist paradise.

“Our Max has become an oil tycoon! Heaps of money. Remember that. When you want to escape, I will buy your freedom. Don’t expect a wealth of correspondence, but you will have my address very soon.”

The address from Caracas came late, on a spectacular postcard. A few words, “Here’s my address and my hello. Yours, as ever, your Holiness!”

Gora would send him regular bits of information about their classmates’ evolution, with no allusion to the Homeland or to Venezuela. No answer. After a few years, he received a photograph. Isidor Koch, in medical school, holding a tennis racket, near a group of supple, smiling young women. The address on the back was that of a studio apartment he’d bought in Caracas, near the university. Then,
after graduation, a photograph from New York. The wedding: Isidor Koch and Isabel Motola. An elegant synagogue, elegant grooms, elegant attendants. On the back, some brief words about the bride, a doctor as well, American, the daughter of a renowned rheumatolo–gist. “Today at our wedding on Fifth Avenue, my old friend Augustin Gora was also present. His place is here. Write to me.”

Gora didn’t respond. Correspondence with the outside could diminish his already uncertain chances of obtaining a passport.

He didn’t look for Koch immediately when he arrived in New York. He wasn’t ready for that meeting, there was too much to recapitulate, many things that couldn’t even be recapitulated. Izy would have found Lu’s refusal to follow him very irritating. In the letter where he’d described their first meeting, Gora had outlined her beauty, her intelligence, refinement without mentioning her ethnicity. Izy didn’t ask any questions. No, he wasn’t ready to convince Dr. Koch that the ethnicity hadn’t determined his choice, nor had it been the thing that destroyed their marriage … or that the separation from her hadn’t shaken his convictions.

When Peter Ga
par appeared, Professor Gora intervened, nevertheless, and asked Koch to hire his former wife. Izy responded with a long silence, waiting for details, didn’t get them, the silence continued, but he hired Madam Gora.

Gusti kept postponing the meeting with his former classmate and friend, under various pretexts. Koch understood, it seemed, that there were coded dilemmas at work, he didn’t insist. They agreed, during one of their rare telephone conversations, never to speak of it again. They’d kept their word until the September Bird invaded. He’d called to find out if Lu was all right, the most important piece of news that day. Then, silence. Then, the monster in his stomach appeared, and he needed a doctor. Had Izy become just like all the doctors in America, good interpreters of computers and statistics but not of patients? Otherwise he’d never have resisted the competition, Gora told himself on his way to the office of his former classmate.

“And where are you from,” the cab driver asked.

“From the Balkans. And yourself?”

“From the Soviet Union.”

“It’s big. The Soviet Union is a big place.”

“Well, ‘the Balkans’ are no village, either. I’m from the Soviet Union.”

The driver had been recommended to him by Peter, long before his disappearance. Ga
par had told him, “He’s from our youth.”

“Boltanski isn’t a Lithuanian or Kyrgyz name.”

“I’m a Soviet. That’s what I was, that’s what I’ve remained. I understand you’re going to the doctor.”

“Yes, a former schoolmate.”

“From the Balkans?”

“From the Balkans. He’s helping me find the specialist I need. And you, what did you do in the Soviet Union?”

“The army. I was in the army. The Red Army.”

“With that name?”

“With this name. Israel Lyova Boltanski. In officer training there were two of us. Out of four thousand students. Good marks, they had no choice. I’ve remained a Soviet. If a friend calls me at two in the morning and needs me, I’m there. No matter how tired, no matter how sick. And I’m sick. Kidneys destroyed. In your wonderful America I worked the first ten years driving a truck. A giant truck. Day and night. I know their doctors. They ask you about your insurance instead of your illness. What insurance do you have? We’re just numbers. Digits, statistics. No, sir, we’re very sorry, the doctor doesn’t accept this form of insurance, we’re sorry. Yankee politesse. Business! The salvation of this country.”

“How do you mean?”

“The economy! It maintains the rot. Greed and cunning, the wealthy getting wealthier, the lies of the politicians, the gossip on the TV. Democracy is a bigger lie than the hammer and sickle.”

“You really think so?”

“I do. You need millions of dollars to become a senator. You beg for those millions from others, and then you return the favors. A
single salvation: the economy. The manipulation of human defects! It maintains the rot. Work, business, money. Exploitation to the point of blood. If the boss wants, you’re done in two minutes’ notice. You lose your medical coverage, then your house, car, everything. So then you are careful not to lose those things. You work like a slave and slavery becomes dear to you. Where I come from, when you say something about the government, you’d say, “the motherfucking government.” Here they say
God bless America!
The mania of work. You work like an animal, to the half–hour before they take you to the cemetery.”

“So why did you come here?”

“Eh … for the children. For the children, as the story goes. A boy and a girl. We do everything for them. They have no idea and they don’t care. We work like mad, my wife and I. To give them everything, so they can have everything. A soulless generation, mister … My daughter, dear heart. Little Sofia. Sofia Boltanska. Boltanskaia. A college student. Beautiful, intelligent, spoiled, elegant, everything you want. This summer she’s going to a seminar at Syracuse University! She found God knows what on the Internet. Summer courses at Syracuse University. ‘You’re going to leave us now?’ I ask her. ‘Your mother doesn’t know what else to do for you, so that everything’s washed, ironed, starched, folded to perfection. And what about me, my little Sofia? How can you be so far away from me for the whole month?’ ‘A month, Papa?’ she says. ‘What’s a month? We’ll talk on the phone, Papa, we’ll talk on the phone.’ You hear that? The phone! I bet over email, too!”

Dr. Izy Koch had aged, but his memory was intact and he never forgot to let you know.

“You’ve arrived where you should have arrived a long time ago. I sent you the address, just as I’d promised, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you sent it to me.”

“And I updated it whenever it changed. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“You buckled! The apathy numbed you. Decades. Decades wasted.”

Gora was quiet, smiling. He was looking at Dr. Koch’s immaculate
lab coat, his small gold–rimmed glasses, his white, disheveled hair, his burgundy tie, the blue shirt, large, hairy hands. He looked and smiled and said nothing.

“I hope you kept the secret. Our secret from the basement.”

“I kept it.”

“You didn’t make any public declarations of fidelity to the socialist Utopia and the socialist terror, you didn’t betray the multitudes of gaping mouths, you didn’t sign any declarations of surrender. You did none of those things, isn’t that right?”

“No, I didn’t do any of those things.”

“And you didn’t provide any secret information to the police? Tell me you didn’t. I’ve heard that informants were everywhere, and that it was very difficult not to become one of them. You’ll have to recount it all sometime, won’t you? Now we’re going to go into the office, to see if you have the same body. We’ll deal with the soul another time.”

In his office Koch was meticulous, turning the patient over on all sides.

“We’ll take care of the stomach, but I don’t think that’s the only thing.”

And that was how Gora arrived at Dr. Bar–El. After the stress test and the NMR, he called Izy once again. For the angiogram Bar–El had referred him to Edward Hostal, an Australian doctor.

“Born and raised in Australia. A wanderer just like us. A great, great doctor. You’re in very good hands. Small, but good hands. I know him. Not to worry!”

“And … just as we discussed. Not a word to her!”

“My dear Gora, how long have we known each other? We know what a secret means.”

We know and we rediscover, every day, until death’s bludgeon wakes us.

The treadmill is connected to the heart–rate monitor and to the pulse of the soul. Abruptly, the red warning light. Alarm. The gong
announces the countdown. Eyes wide open to the vicinity, to see clearly what it is, will soon no longer see anything. The dead squirrel in front of the house, the rotted tree. The wear of the living, the inevitable that annuls everything that was, as if it had never been.