The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (6 page)

She wanted out of the aquarium! The family-aquarium? Marriage-aquarium? She’d dreamed of refuge in marriage and family; the familiar had both balanced and stimulated her. So, why this sudden other impulse?

She returned from the Ga
pars with horrific stories of the concentration camps. She was white, pale, as if she had returned from another world. Something essential seemed to have changed. She’d acquired something painful and powerful. She’d decoded, perhaps, mysteries of her own, which had been closed off from her until then. It could be a transfer of one premise to another, thought Gora.

Or had she absorbed something of which she wasn’t conscious, a premise not originally her own? Was she now convinced that it had always been there?

Gora didn’t hear about the bizarre union between Lu and her young cousin Peter until his friend Palade returned from a visit to the faraway country, then just barely out of dictatorship. Palade, called Portland in his adored America, had departed in order to present his fiancee to his family. He returned disgusted by the chaos, the corruption and demagogy that marked the transition from nowhere toward nowhere.

Gora had met Mihnea Palade a long time before that, at the beginning of his time at university, when he was a student. During the period of Eastern totalitarian “liberalization,” when the days and nights of the amphitheater were bloating from the yeast of hope. Exaltation and suspicion competed for supremacy. The mere mathematics student Palade, with his enormous lenses slipping down his fine nose, was quiet for a long time, and then spoke for a long time. No one knew who’d brought him to the attic of simmering controversies. He listened attentively, answered excessively. He was widely read, seemed to know everything, and conscious that he didn’t really know anything. Through the large windows of the university, he measured the horizon in the distance. He worked fastidiously, complained that the library hours were too short.

Having descended from the provinces like a conquistador, he immediately stood out among the students and professors, and was therefore immediately suspect. He was proud of that dubious honor. He wasn’t the only intruder in the group of humanists. The students from the medical and polytechnic schools, some still in high school, and even some former students, who now worked as laborers, or unemployed graduates, were experimenting with a salon of readings and open dialogue.

In that small circle of friends, they discussed books gotten through complicated subterfuges. A feverish, subterranean trade of inacces-sible
volumes, an interloping, bookish world. The dark magic of the forbidden and the unknown.

Expatriate authors took on a mythical aura. After the war, some made a name for themselves in the West. The great scholar Cosmin Dima had become the cult model. Palade managed to find his old books, and even some that had been published after the war, in the Occident.

News, books, rumors, debates. The urgency of days and nights. All of it was a mere respite. At any moment, illusions could become prohibitions, or crimes. The sense of the provisional and of impatience kindled the dialogue; no one could withstand impatience.

The French assistant professor Augustin Gora would often mingle with the students. The meetings took place in an attic, in the home of one of the members. An ample loft furnished with old couches and odd chairs. The immense window gave the impression that they were outdoors, on the roof.

Gora attended the discussion of Kafka’s
The Trial.
The groundless arrest of K. was loaded with connotations; anyone could be arrested, without justification; terror was a juggler of absurd games. Arrested without fault, K. didn’t pretend to be innocent. He seemed burdened by an obscure, metaphysical guilt.

The young tried to liberate themselves from the compromises of the aged, but they also understood their own cowardice in the face of the Authority. They learned to manipulate the official slogans to justify controversy. In shadow themselves, they prowled for spies; there was no shortage of informants disguised as rebels. You could readily identify intelligence, but not character.

Mihnea Palade asked Gora at the end of one night if he could accompany him on his walk home. Along ambling detours through the park by the lakes, Gora allowed himself to be both conquered by friendship and liberated from his own caution. And in the frenzy of this covetous torment, he let slip the fact that he’d received an invitation from an American university. In risking a real conversation, he was recovering his dignity.

The student grew quiet. Not just in response to the confidence
that was being entrusted to him, on a first meeting, no less, but also to the news itself. In those years and in that place, isolation was the thing that unified them. The captives of the reading room had a double pretext for their alliance to one another.

At the following meeting, they read Borges, translated by a student of Spanish among them. The fictional planet of Tlon, imagined places, the cosmos revealed through a cerebral game. In 1942 in France, in the apartment of a princess, a real artifact was supposedly found bearing an inscription in the Tlon alphabet (also the name of the fictitious planet). Some time later an unknown metal, also from Tlon, was found in the pocket of a dead man in South America. Then, just as unexpectedly, in 1944 in Memphis, Tennessee, forty volumes of the
Tlon Encyclopedia
surfaced.

Gora followed these captivating charades, watching the young man seated on the floor; he was quiet, ecstatic, at times opaque to the influence of controversy, absorbed in the pages he’d received from the translator after the reading. In the next Borgesian story, the enigma in question was an investigation, a series of entangled crimes. The detective, obsessed with the killer’s logic, comprehends too late that he has been ensnared by reason; he becomes aware that he himself will be the next victim. He submits nonetheless to the fatality and shows up at the established rendezvous. Before emptying his revolver, the killer pronounces the sentence and the explanation, “The world is a labyrinth from which it’s impossible to escape.” Victim and killer are caught in the logic of the same dark, codified past.

No sooner had the reading ended that Palade rose, electrified, in the middle of the room.

“It’s a complicated symbolism. Actually, the text focuses on a certain evasion. Is freedom the escape from the labyrinth, or the dissolution of the labyrinth altogether? And what’s the meaning of the word
labyrinth
when found in the context of an invisible and murderous trajectory? A single and eternal labyrinthine stroke … why labyrinthine? If it’s a single stroke, it should be rectilinear, and
swift. Like a mathematician, I should be able to understand the labyrinth of a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, even if situated at an infinite distance between them.”

The student’s voice was shaking. A thin, timid voice, in opposition to the vitality of his argument and gesticulations.

“Do you remember the words of the blind man from Buenos Aires? ‘I know something that the Greeks didn’t know—uncertainty,’ says Borges. Should I repeat the quotation? I won’t repeat it, but it would be good not to forget it. Freedom is escape from the tyranny of a singular and rational system of thought, that’s what freedom is, an open, incomplete thought; it’s antidogmatic, the uncertainty, the nebulous nature of probabilities.”

His glasses had slipped down his nose, as often happened in agitated moments. He was mumbling, “Uncertainty! The imperfect allows for dispute and revelation.”

Gora was shocked. Palade’s words reminded him of something he’d read or heard, but he couldn’t locate it. He hoped that the student would repeat the idea.

On the way to Gora’s home, young Mihnea Palade’s glasses slipped down his nose again and again. In that neighborhood near the lakes, the more elegant periphery of the city, the spring evening conspired with mystery and enchantment.

Augustin Gora had now not only the invitation, but something even more improbable—a passport.

“Yes, people are talking about this,” the student muttered, sheepishly staring at the pavement. “You have relatives in high places.”

“My wife’s relatives,” Gora hurried to specify.

A naive reply. Despite the mild relaxation of things during that time, if you could come by a passport, you couldn’t exactly be trusted. Even children knew this for a fact.

“Are you leaving with your wife?”

The question was actually, “Are you leaving for good?” One passport alone was a dubious privilege; a couple with passports fueled more doubt.

“I hope. I don’t know yet.”

Gora didn’t feel like talking anymore. The silence lengthened and grew thick. It wasn’t easy to confess that Dr. Feldman, Lud-mila’s uncle, had been held captive in the same cell with the great Party and state leader when he was a young Communist. Or that Dr. Feldman had obtained the passports for the Gora couple.

“I was asked to join the Party,” whispered the now agitated student, the comment bearing an ambiguous relevance to the subject.

“I was, too,” said the professor after a while.

“The price of the passport?”

“I didn’t accept.”

With this, the already suspect Gora became, evidently, more suspect. Palade didn’t hesitate to raise the stakes.

“I was visited by an officer from the secret police.”

This time, the student was staring the professor directly in the eyes, looking to see what couldn’t be seen.

“Routine. Standard recruiting procedure. But this, you can’t do; don’t do this! Anything but this. Not at any price, whatever happens. You don’t need the red card. They’re no longer Stalinists; they won’t arrest you. All they can do is heckle you.”

“And never give me a passport.”

“Yes, this may be true. Let me tell you something …”

Gora was ready to offer a new proof of his trust, just to ease the tension.

“Today you were talking about evasion. Freedom as an escape from a singular, rational system of thought. Should we call it an incarcerating system of thought? The detainees are isolated from other people; that’s the punishment. At the cell window, however, at a certain moment, a cat appears. It passes from one window to another, from one detainee to another, curiously and playfully. The captives call it over, offering some of their food through the grates; they invent decoys; the feline slips through the bars sometimes, lets itself be petted. One of the detainees can’t stand these frivolities, the ease with which the comrades allow themselves to be won over by such stupid distractions. ‘Assholes, idiots, morons!’ screams the pris-oner.
He fights with them; he’s strong-headed, cruel, arrogant, vindictive. As he is well situated in the hierarchy of the party, they have no way of ignoring him. And they’re not up to contradicting him, either. In the end, the prisoner catches the cat and kills it, right there in the cell. And you know who the cat killer is?”

“The prisoner? It’s a true story?”

“Yes, it’s true. The hero is our great leader, the most beloved son of the people.”

“How do you know?”

“From a relative of my wife. He was imprisoned with that fanatic, who, by all accounts, was forever scowling, incurably serious. Without vice, deeply offended by any deviation from the supreme, final goal.”

The last conversation. In the end, Gora left, alone. He’d left his country and his wife, to whom he was more attached than to anyone or anything. To his surprise and despair, Lu had refused to accompany him!

A year after he arrived in the New World, he received a long, affectionate letter from Mihnea Palade, in which he mentioned the difficulties of finding his address, and in which he reported (as much as he could in a censored letter) on his academic projects. He intended to give up mathematics! For the time being, he was stalling, poring over mathematics, too, even though he was already preoccupied with medieval judicial systems of torture, the persecution of Joan of Arc, alchemy and astronomy. He’d already published some exegeses, had read the entire works of the erudite scholar Cosmin Dima, and he was wondering who might be able to act as an intermediary, who might be able to write to Dima on his behalf. Gora didn’t respond to the request, but tried to help him secure a fellowship in America. And just as he’d anticipated, his passport was refused. After two years, before graduating magna cum laude from the university, Palade received a new American fellowship, this time through the intervention of the great Dima himself. His passport was approved. Had the pressure of the Party subsided, or the secret
police? The matter was never addressed, not even on the night of the American reunion between Gora and his former student.

The new immigrant spoke about one subject only, the evasion. The miraculous opportunity, negotiated by the gods and obscure forces.

After the first months of euphoria, Palade was overwhelmed by depression. Estrangement, solitude. The refuge of the library no longer seemed to help him. He lingered in bed for hours, days, waiting for the miracle that would revitalize him.

“I’m desperate, but not lost. Despair is a sign of vitality, I hope. In the wilderness, free to be anything or nothing, I’m not going to try to decipher the confusion of my destiny. I haven’t been given the key code yet. I’m waiting in apathy and decay. I hear the steps of the former gatekeepers on the stairs, always nearby.”