The Lair

Part I

A new morning, not yet opened. The long and powerful arm of a magician sets in motion the trick of the day. The yellow box stops at the curb’s edge. “Penn Station.”

Above the steering wheel, the mug shot and name of the driver: Lev Boltanski.

“Are you Russian?”

“I was.”

A hoarse voice. A wide face, small eyes.

“Where from?”

“Odessa.”

“I thought Odessa was in Ukraine.”

“The Soviet Union! Like me, Odessa is from the Soviet Union. Few people know the difference between Russia and Ukraine. You’re not American.”

“I am now. Just like you.”

No, it’s not exactly the beginning of the day … The day had started with the stranger whose small, white hand handed him an immaculately white card with gold letters.

“I wonder if you’d agree to appear in a television commercial. The pay is very good.”

And before him, the diminutive Dr. Koch. And before him, the thought of Lu, the failed attempt to see her.

The present! The present, mumbled the pedestrian. The new motto of his life: the present. That was all: the present! In his past life, there was the guilty past and the gleaming future forever deferred. Now, however … he stood bewildered in front of the stranger who was reaching out a small, white hand to him.

“Don’t be alarmed. One question, that’s all. Just a question.”

It was a sudden confrontation. The approach gentle, but guarded.

The intruder is about forty years old. Long, beige mohair over-coat. Immaculately white shirt. No jacket. Short, black hair; black, reckless eyes. Rounded movements, like those of a dancer or a jester. He pulls a black leather wallet out of his jeans. He unfastens the magnet clasp and pulls out the business cards. He extends an immaculately white card, with an address in gold letters: the code of happenstance.

The pedestrian isn’t paying attention, entranced by the aggressor’s footwear. Cowboy boots! The elegant gentleman is wearing cowboy boots under expensive, slim-cut jeans.

“I’m a producer. Curtis. James Curtis.”

That’s what it says on the business card: James Curtis, producer. “I wonder if you’d like to appear in a television commercial. The pay is very good.”

“Me, in a commercial? What kind of commercial?”

“For Coca-Cola.”

“Me? Coca-Cola?”

“As a chess player.”

“Chess and Coca-Cola?”

“Yes, something like that. A man concentrating on the game. At a certain point, he reaches for the glass on the table. Coca-Cola.”

“Aha,” says the chess player, smiling.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m no good for something like that.”

“The pay is very good, as I’ve said. The ads go into syndication and the royalties come automatically. When you least expect it.”

“No, that’s not my kind of thing.”

“Think it over. You have my card. Call me. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

“Thank you. I told you, I don’t…”

“Never say never, as we say here. You’re not American, isn’t that right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Do Americans not play chess? They drink Coca-Cola, in any case. And Pepsi. I don’t, but I’ve played my share of chess games. When I was younger.”

“See? I knew it. You look the part. Think about it. You have my number, call me. What’s your name?”

“Peter.”

“Peter what?”

“Peter.”

“Okay, Peter, I’ll remember. Give me a call.”

“You look the part!”

Peter the pedestrian mutters, abandoned on the corner of Broadway and 63rd Street.

That’s what the producer thinks, if he’s even a producer. A nice day, isn’t it, Dr. Koch? James Curtis, commercial producer, offered me the ad of the day, Doctor! And so, I looked into the Curtis mirror.

A step to the left, and another step. Once off the curb, he raises his hand. Taxi! The yellow cab stops at the curb’s edge.

“Penn Station.”

Above the steering wheel, the mug shot and name of the driver: Lev Boltanski.

“Are you Russian?”

“I was.”

A smoker’s voice. A wide, soft face, small eyes, large teeth, weathered brow.

“Where from?”

“Odessa.”

“I thought Odessa was in Ukraine.”

“The Soviet Union! Like me, Odessa is from the Soviet Union. Few people know the difference between Russia and Ukraine. You’re not American.”

“I am now. Just like you … Do you like it here on the Moon? The capital of the wanderers, lunatics, and sleepwalkers. Do you like it? A real wonder! One of 777 wonders of the world.”

Lyova is silent, but seems attentive.

“Manhattan Island, bought for a song in 1626 by a Frenchman, Minuit. For twenty-four dollars! He paid the Indians in glass beads. They were growing wild strawberries and grapes here, corn, tobacco. All around there were wolves and bears and rattlesnakes.”

Lev or Lyova listens, silently. He doesn’t ask anything, seemingly uninterested in the gregarious passenger. He drives slowly, relaxed, atypical for the New York taxi driver. He stops at 34th Street in front of the station, simultaneously turning off the engine and the meter.

“How much?”

“Eight dollars.”

The passenger rummages through his pants pockets: first the one, then the other. Next, his jacket. The two pockets of his pants, four of his jacket. He stammers; he doesn’t stammer.

“Two dollars! That’s all I’ve got.”

“What’s that? What are you talking about?”

The mirror above the steering wheel. Look at that, we have a mirror, Doctor. Fate gave me a real mirror.

“Did you say something?” the Soviet-Ukrainian Russian asks.

“No, nothing. But I have no money. Two dollars! That’s all I’ve got. Let’s go to the bank. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for the trip to the bank. There’s an ATM on 28th, right there on the corner. A couple of minutes from here.”

Lyova peers at his passenger in the mirror, mumbles something in Russian, or Ukrainian. The taxi takes off. The bank is close by, on the corner of 28th Street. The passenger says nothing and waits. Lyova turns around, taking a closer look at the lunatic in the back seat. The mirror’s not enough; he wants to see the crook’s face.

“What’re you doing? Not getting out?”

“I really screwed up. What a mess. My ATM card is in my wallet. I’ve only just realized that I left my wallet at the library. The cafeteria. Or maybe at the doctor’s. I went to see a doctor.”

“You lost your wallet, with your ATM card in it. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“I haven’t lost it. I left it somewhere. At the doctor’s or at the library.”

“Should we go there, then? Are you going to pay for this trip, too, with money you don’t have? Is that what you’re trying to do? Do we go to the library, or the doctor’s?”

The customer doesn’t answer.

“Was the doctor a psychiatrist? Actually, it doesn’t matter. Here they don’t ask you what your trouble is, just if you have insurance. That’s what they ask. Do you have insurance? Not what hurts or what you think hurts. He was a psychiatrist, wasn’t he?”

“He wasn’t a psychiatrist. I don’t know where I forgot the wallet. Maybe at the library. Let’s go back to the station. I’m going to miss my train.”

“And the train ride is free, huh?”

“I’ve got a ticket already. I bought a round-trip ticket.”

“Aha, so we’re going back to the station. A free ride, eh?” He mumbled something in Russian, or Ukrainian. “Ah, no, I forgot; you’ve got two bucks. You’ll give me your last two bucks to get me going. The rest in colored beads.”

“I’m really sorry. Please forgive me. Look, here’s my MetroCard, with twenty dollars on it. Take it. I only just bought it today.”

“When? When did you buy it? Before the doctor or before the library?”

“I got it when I arrived at the station.”

“What am I supposed to do with a MetroCard? I don’t ride the subway.”

“Maybe someone in your family can use it?”

“Ah, so now you’re subsidizing my family! It’s probably used up. Or there are only two dollars left on it. So I’d be better off taking the two dollars in cash. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just asking you to forgive me. Believe me, I am ashamed. But things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.”

“And what do we do when they happen?”

“Look, let’s go to the subway station. Right here, near the bank. We can check the card on the machine. It’ll show that it’s not used up. Twenty dollars left on it. It’ll only take a minute.”

“And who’s going to do that?”

“Well, I … or no, better you. You check it. I’ll wait here in the cab.”

“Sure, I go check it, and you take off!”

He whistles out a short phrase in Russian, or Ukrainian.

“Take my bag with you. Believe me, I won’t leave without my bag. It’s too important. Here, I’ll give it to you. I’ll wait here.”

The passenger struggles to get the bag over the divider. Lyova takes it and groans at its weight.

“What’ve you got inside, granite? Mercury? Mercury is heavier, isn’t it?”

“Books, stuff. Personal things.”

“Personal things! That’s why they’re so heavy!”

Lyova heads toward the subway station, with the bag in tow. He waddles like a potbellied duck. He comes back, slouching to the left, because of the bagful of mercury.

“Okay. It’s unused. Twenty dollars. I’ll take it.”

He goes to get back into the car but his door is blocked by a cheerful Italian. Jacket, pants, hat, all made of black leather.

“I have to get out to Westchester, fast. It’s very urgent. I’ll give you a hundred.”

“Westchester! I can’t. I’m in enough of a mess as it is. This jerk doesn’t have the money to pay for his ride.” “How much is it?”

“Eight dollars. Actually, twelve. Now it’s twelve.”

“I’ll give you eight bucks, twelve, whatever. I’ll give you twenty. A hundred and twenty bucks to Westchester. Let’s go. Right now.”

Lyova measures up the mobster, takes a step toward the car, raising his hands up in the air like a heavyweight.

“Look buddy, I’m not going to any Westchester! I’m taking this passenger to Penn Station. Penn Station! He’s going to miss his train.”

“Penn Station! Let the guy walk, it’s close enough! I’m offering you a hundred and twenty bucks!”

“I’m not going! I already told you.”

“You’re an idiot! An idiot!” yells the mobster.

Lyova doesn’t seem offended. He agrees, “Yes, sir, I’m an idiot.” He returns the bag to the passenger in the back, slams the door, spits some words in Russian, or Ukrainian, and sits behind the wheel. He doesn’t start the engine. He wants to calm himself. Distracted, he looks at the passenger in the mirror.

“Why were you at the doctor’s? Are you sick?”

The patient doesn’t answer.

“Is it serious?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Why did you go to the doctor? A checkup, as Americans call it? But you’re not American. What’s the matter with you?” “Nothing, I told you.”

“Here, we’re just numbers. Nothing more. Insurance, accounts, credit. Numbers. Why see a doctor? The wife? Is your wife sick?” “My wife?”

“Your significant other, as they say here? Wife, friend, partner, significant other. Is she sick?”

“No, she works at that doctor’s office. I go there to see her from time to time. She finds out when my appointments are and makes sure she’s not around. She knew this time, too, I’d bet on it. No sign of her.”

“Divorced? I mean, are you separated? You go to see her even though she doesn’t want to see you? Is that how it is?”

“We’re not divorced.”

“Okay. Let’s go to the station.”

Lyova turns the key, the cab sputters, and then they are at the station. The customer descends; the bag descends.

“Wait, mister! Take your goddamn MetroCard. Take it with you.”

“What’s that? I thought we agreed …”

“Beat it! Go on, get out of here!” Lyova shouts, swearing in Russian, or Ukrainian.

Crowd. Hubbub, commotion. The traveler eventually finds the timetables, then gets lost. Then finds track 9. Then the train.

The present, nothing else. Not too bad, not too bad, the train repeats in rhythm as it slowly leaves the metropolis behind.

It’s not bad, it could be worse, the exhausted passenger thinks, once in his seat. The bag next to him in the empty seat by the window. He considers the brand new MetroCard. Lyova’s gift. A good man, that Russian. Or, rather, that Ukrainian, er, Soviet. Solid. A solid, good man, that’s the conclusion of the day, Doctor. Lu wasn’t there, but it was better that way. I need to get used to it. She’s already gotten used to it, probably. No, she hasn’t gotten used to it. Otherwise, she’d be there. She wouldn’t care. She’s avoiding the past. As well as the present, of late. The present is the past; that’s why she wasn’t there. So that I’d have no mirror. She’s sparing me the mirror, the old as well as the new. She’s protecting me, the sweetheart.

No, that wasn’t how the morning had started … The irreversible chronometer of the day had been set off earlier in Dr. Koch’s office.

“Look in the mirror,” the doctor ordered.

The patient looked at his shoes. Giant. Surly. Mummies, prehistoric animals!

“Have you looked in the mirror recently? I’ve told you before, exercise. Exercise, diet, rest! In the old days, the plowman didn’t have neuroses. And neither did the forester, who worked in the woods whole days on end. The body is our home. If we don’t take care of the body, life becomes miserable. Have you looked in the mirror?”

Leaden back of the neck. Pain in his arm. Shivers, cold sweats, panic.

“Lose some weight! Get some exercise, avoid stress. Your head aches? Take an aspirin. Confusion? Apathy? This time, it wasn’t a crisis. Tics. Nervous tics. Neuro-vegetative, as we used to call them in the Old Country. Lazy stomach. The sedentary life.”

The doctor stares at the patient, the patient stares, thoughtfully, at his shoes.

“Ulcer? Maybe. Pressure 140 over 92. That’s not too bad. Pain in the back of your neck? From sitting still too much. Movement, man! Have you looked in the mirror? Have you looked in the mirror, recently? Electrocardiogram? Money in the garbage. Your heart’s not the problem. Exercise, diet, fresh air! That’s the prescription. Lifestyle. Did you look in the mirror? Did you look? An elephant!”

The patient abandons the doctor’s office, stumbling. He sits on a bench, in a nearby park.

Friday, after lunch. The rush before the break. The nine-to-fivers hurrying across the week’s river, toward the weekend. Before anyone is aware of what’s happening, another seven days and nights blow by. Spring’s uncertain sky; the doctor is there. Avicenna-Koch! A mirror, what do you know! The patient waves the image away. The trio of puppeteers in the park juggles burlesque marionettes on the ends of long, delicate fingers. Thundering music. Alleys to the left and right. Passersby of all ages and ethnicities. The doctor among them. The kaleidoscope of the city spins, with little Koch in the center of it all.

The river moves gently to the left of the train. You never step twice in the same primordial water. This is what the passenger sees out the window, along the length of the train tracks: water that doesn’t grow old and is never the same water. Nor the air. Nor the fluid, therapeutic horizon.

Past, present, future, time at one with itself, was that the horizon? Mild waters, moments aging, rot and dejection. The water grows slowly, quietly, comfortingly, over the sleeping passenger. The conductor taps him gingerly on the shoulder. The train is stopped in the station.

He quickly gathers his bag, his jacket. He descends; he’s on the platform; look at him, poor lost sucker, in the station, gazing at the wide and quiet river in front of him.

Oof, he’s arrived! The empty platform, the mountains in the distance, the river only a stone’s throw away. A clear, cold afternoon. The beginning of the world. He doesn’t yet have a clue how close the end is. The end of his world.

The chronometer swallows the seconds of the armistice.

Peter appeared suddenly, as though in a dream, or in a nightmare.

“Peter. Gapar. Mynheer. Mynheer Peter Gapar here.”

A voice from the void. Professor Gora was no longer sure where he was. He took note of the walls lined with books and remained silent. He was in no mood to answer; it was an aggressive surprise.

Peter! Was it Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn, the popular protagonist from the great novel he’d read decades ago, once the novel of his world? Or Peter Gapar, dubbed Mynheer, from the socialist literary cafe in the Balkans?

Nothing was certain, except for the bookshelves, those in front of him and the ones in his mind.

Young Gapar’s only publication from the years of “legalized bliss,” as he used to call his former utopia, was titled Mynheer. The story behind the nickname was thin and bizarre; chance had conspired with the library.

How had Peter Gapar found the phone number of Professor Augustin Gora, who had vanished into the great United States of America?

“Where are you? Have you also made it to the other world?”

The ghost confirmed that, yes, he’d come some time ago, as a doctorate fellow at New York University.

“A doctorate? In architecture? Weren’t you …?”

“No, I wasn’t an architect. Just a technician-architect. A junior in college when they arrested my father again; they expelled me. Three years of architecture were equivalent to a midrange school.”

“There’s such a thing as a doctorate here … ”

“In art, Professor. History of art. Even in our tranquil Homeland, there were night classes. Art history classes. You couldn’t have known this.”

“No.”

Not true, but he wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation.

Gapar explained that he had no intention of becoming an expert in German abstract expressionism, as his scholarship promised. He simply wanted to remain in the New World.

Right now, when hope was being reborn in Eastern Europe? He wasn’t a young man anymore; nor had he come for the future of his nonexistent children. And so, then? Was he alone? No, Lu had come with him. She’d finished university with an English degree, as Professor Gora knew all too well. English would dull her in this land, where she’d moored, or run aground. Yes, she had initiated Peter in the New World’s native language, with underwhelming results; he couldn’t decipher the station names as they were announced in the subway. For the time being, he had no work permit.

Laconic answers to Professor Gora’s spare and weary questions.

“I’d had enough, that’s all. I’m not the adventurous type, and I’m not interested in tourism. But I’d never left my country even once. Not once! Forty years of legalized bliss, in the same place! But now I’ve left! For good, as you say here. I have an absolute, urgent need for irresponsibility. At least now, before the funeral processions. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.”

He accentuated this word, heavily, twice, as if he were talking to an idiot, or simply to himself. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.

He was speaking of an end, not a beginning, about getting out of a situation, not of entering another. About a departure, not an arrival.

“You’re right. I’m not staking my claim to a new place; I’m freeing myself of the old one. The same hide-and-seek game with death, somewhere new, outside of the old cage. For the time being, I need a job. A salary. It would be both dishonest and wearisome to keep up the charade of the scholarship. Lu’s a babysitter now. She’s always liked the children she never had.”

So, the adventurer had, in fact, come for the adventure … Gloomily, Professor Gora smiled, measuring with his eyes the shelves full of adventure.

“You’ve come for adventure.”

“I didn’t say adventure. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.”

Peter Gapar made sure to specify that Professor Gora wasn’t to send him money. He just wanted advice from time to time, or, at least, to be able to talk to someone familiar, that was all.

Familiar? Yes, they’d gotten to know each other when Gora was Ludmila’s husband.

“We’ll be in touch,” and that was all that the newcomer wanted to say.

Some time had elapsed since that nebulous conversation with Peter. Or had it been nebulous only in Gora’s mind? Peter maintained that though he’d arrived in America resolved not to look for Gora, he’d changed his mind without knowing why. Time passed between his arrival and this decision, and some more time passed after this first conversation, as well. Peter disappeared but continued to haunt Gora. The professor asked himself how he should define reality. He closed and reopened his eyes, looked at the bookshelves, the large and lustrous desk, the computer, the pair of red gloves on the edge of the table, the telephone, the big, open folder spilling a pile of blank pages.

Peter Gapar evoked memories about which he was no longer — and didn’t want to be — sure. He had increasingly more faith in books than in memories he didn’t want anything to do with. He believed in what survived in writing. The mind and soul of the interlocutor. The interlocutor that he was now belonged to the past.

A stranger among strangers, one may still reencounter friends from a previous life. In books! The books from his previous life were waiting for him. Hopeful comrades, they welcomed him in other languages. Loyal conversationalists, ready to restore his familiar habits, to humanize his wandering.

He wasn’t at all in the mood for Peter Gapar. Pieter Peeperkorn, yes. He was happy to encounter Mynheer Peeperkorn again, and immediately following the telephone conversation, he reread those three chapters about the Dutchman in the massive novel of the 1920s.

In the sanatorium of The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp is waiting wistfully for Clavdia Chauchat. The woman of his dreams appears on the arm of a fabulous companion. Tall and rosy brow, dense lines. Long, thin, white hair, thin goatee. Large mouth and nose, mangled lips. Wide, spotted hands, long, sharp nails. With his stature and accent, the Dutchman dominated the society of the sanatorium. Jerky, elliptical, incoherent discourse.

That set-ties it. And you must keep in mind and never — not for a moment — lose sight of the fact that — but enough on that topic … So then, Emchen my child, listen well: a little bread, my dear.

That’s what Peeperkorn called the booze that enlivened him: bread.

Bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread, of that we have a sufficiency, in all shapes and sizes. Not baked, but distilled, my angel. The bread of God, clear as crystal, my little Nickname, that we may be regaled … in light of our duty, our holy obligation — for example, the debt of honor incumbent upon me to turn with a most cordial heart to you, so small but full of character — a gin, my love!

The wide-breasted stranger with the tall brow, dingy eyes, and the strong head enveloped in the white flames of his hair was an imposing man. Seized at alternately by chills and by fever. An imposing force, a magnificent incoherence.

Life is short, whereas our ability to meet its challenges is but — those are facts, my child. Laws. In-ex-or-a-bilities.

Telegraphic, fractured missives, confused understandings. A personality! With the greatness of a tribal chief, his countenance and dingy gaze subdue his audience. The large hand of a captain, a clutched fist pounding the table.

Whatever is simple! Whatever is holy! Fine, you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirits — let us first measure up to and enjoy such things before we — absolutely, my dear sir. Settled.

An offbeat burlesque. Powerlessness, just like strength, devastated him.

It may be a sin — and a token of our inadequacies — to indulge in refined tastes without having given the simple, natural gifts of life, the great and holy gifts, their due … the defeat of feeling in the face of life, that is the inadequacy for which there is no pardon, no pity, no honor… If is the end, the despair of hell itself, doomsday …

The face and silhouette of Peter Gapar, whom he hadn’t seen for over twenty years, and not often even before that, remained obscure. Gora remembered only that he didn’t resemble Pieter Peeperkorn. This he remembered for certain.

There was another motivation behind that nickname. A story that Peter Gapar wrote, Mynheer, caused some ripples among the socialist literati. Slaves forced to praise their slavery are happily receptive even to the most furtive winks of complicity, or a fraction of mockery. Was there some secret gunpowder hidden within the story that spurred Peter Gapar’s notoriety among the socialist underground? It was just a story! Published in a provincial journal, what’s more. Forty years after the celebrated novel of the celebrated Thomas of Lübeck! Was there some codified allusion that escaped the censor’s eye? Such oddities did happen, quickly to be forgotten. Not long after the publication, the author was branded with the name of his protagonist. Not even a name, a formal address-become-name. Mister, Monsieur, Monsignor. Mynheer! The nickname circulated in the literary cafe, and then beyond it. The name fueled the rumors that surrounded Peter Gapar; the author never published anything again, but the halo wouldn’t be shattered. In the country that invented rumors, it was rumored that Peter had authored other literary charades, unknown to anyone. It was whispered that he worked, in secret, on a masterpiece. Rumors were the garlicky black bread of the dictatorship.

Nothing but a petty technician in a petty, socialist enterprise, Gapar contributed to cultural journals with short, ironic texts, eschewing the wooden, official language. Casual little columns on theater and art exhibitions, even on the races, or philately. He could be spotted at shows and gallery openings and cocktail parties. Em-barrassed (but not embarrassed enough) by his phantom and persistent prestige, obsessed with the spies that teemed all around.

Tall, lean, and ill at ease as a result of a lanky body, as if he’d borrowed it for too long and forgotten to return it.

Shaved head with a black moustache and goatee, he resembled a hussar employed by a musical theater producer. His intense, black gaze under his thick eyebrows of crude oil. Small hands, smooth brow. Straight nose, in defiance of his heredity.

The way he looked, his name could have been Hungarian or German. It was rumored, however, that he might be circumcised. So he was. The rumor proved sovereign, in keeping with tradition. Some even alleged that his biography contained certain dramatic details, though the facts were vague, just like those concerning his supposed masterpiece. He seemed like any other, though maybe he wasn’t. His comradely casualness, left over from when he played hockey and basketball and football in youth leagues, inspired sympathy.

His post-Habsburgian-Transylvanian education conflicted with the Balkan and Parisian mannerisms characteristic of metropolitan Bucharest. Could Transylvania be considered occidental? Mynheer Peeperkorn also conferred on his successor a second, convenient ennoblement, “The Dutchman.” His company took to calling him by that nickname; you could hear them yell loudly, “Hey, Dutchman!”

Gapar’s text defied the distorted “debates” of the Authority, the great words and the humanist catchphrases.

Incoherence was subversive. Is that what Gapar was suggesting? He appeared sometimes, donning Peeperkorn’s felt hat, and, after a few shots of vodka, recited his namesake’s lines, with an outstretched, imploring hand.

We’re cheating, my good men. This wind, this tender, fresh fragrance … presentiments and memories. Liquidated, my good men. I’ll stop. Li-qui-da-ted. The summit, a black and rotating point and a grand bird of prey. An eagle of the great solitudes. The bird of Jupiter, the lion of the air.

Was the story Mynheer, somehow, a codified plea in favor of the New World? A self-made man, the international Peeperkorn! The King of Coffee, a Dutchman with a residence in Java, near his lover with the Caucasian eyes. A plea for freedom and for the Statue on the Hudson? Liberty, vitality!

How well can you know a person lost among the consumers of illusions, along the meridian where the Orient meets the Occident? Professor Gora would not have had the courage to respond. Pieter Peeperkorn brought the page to life, while Gora waited in vain; Gapar would not appear.

In the book the giant Dutchman commits suicide, injecting himself with animal venom and plant poisons. The tropical fevers drain his power. “The failure to perceive life intensely is a cosmic catastrophe,” the letter says. Shame before God.

Gora hoped to understand, gradually, what he couldn’t understand previously. Could Mynheer Gapar become in America what everyone had said he was, after all?

Some years back, Peter, who was then a senior in high school, suddenly found himself on a visit to relatives in the capital.

Tall, pale, furrowed, and burdened with a mission disproportionately heavy for his age. He had only a few hours to go before the return train. He’d traveled overnight from the western corner of the country, for this bizarre family reunion, to relate what had happened to his father, or to warn his relatives about the consequences that could befall them.

The prosecutor David Gapar was entirely unaware of his wife’s initiative to send the adolescent — who was, at that moment, generally more preoccupied with basketball than with the shadows of politics — on such a mission. Eva Gapar arranged for the boy’s absence not to produce any suspicion. The son sometimes used to sleep at the house of a fellow student, Tibor, whose parents kept the secret.

Augustin Gora instantly registered the concern on the faces of Lu’s parents. They already knew, it seemed, about David Gapar’s dismissal and about similar cases. Comrade Serafim and Comrade Gapar were merely cousins, but fear was transmitted quickly, like a virus. Worried about their own situation, they didn’t discuss the news with their son-in-law, who was also asking himself, then — and continued to ask himself afterward — if they had confided in friends, and who these friends could have been. He preferred to believe that, if these friends existed, they would have counted him among them.

On that dusty July afternoon Peter was invited to sit in the large, red leather armchair in the living room, to relate the details of his message. Gora felt the danger migrating from the western borders of the country toward his new family.

The young athlete became instantly contaminated with the unease of those listening while he described the absurd and sudden raid of his parents’ house. The former watchmaker David Gapar was inexplicably dismissed from his function as a prosecutor of socialist justice! If the Party wants to, it sends a watchmaker to a one-year school and turns him into a prosecutor overnight; and if the Party wants to, the prosecutor, overnight, is no longer a prosecutor. He couldn’t be accused of dishonesty or politically iconoclastic actions, just for the excessive intransigence with which he served the Cause. The pretext of the dismissal remained obscure; the disgrace could have consequences just as absurd as the motivation. This was the message with which Eva Gapar entrusted her young son.

The silence was soon followed by the assurances with which the hosts overwhelmed the guest: it was nothing but a mistake or misunderstanding; David wasn’t the kind to take such an injustice sitting down; he’ll contest it, demand recourse and be exonerated in the end. Rivalries and intrigues exist everywhere people exist; the indignities and mistakes couldn’t go on forever; the young student will find out, and soon, because justice always prevails, after all. The guest was served with sweets. Lu showed him the family library and took him on a long walk through the capital. On the way back, the traveler was advised to rest, as he faced a sleepless night on the way home.

That night, on the way back from taking his guest to the train, Gora learned the story of Peter’s birth.

The watchmaker David Gapar had succeeded in hiding during the first year of the war, and then the second year, as well, together with his wife and daughter; but in the spring of 1944, they were discovered and sent to Auschwitz by the Hungarian authorities who presided over Transylvania. His wife and daughter were gassed immediately after arrival. David survived, working first in a little workshop where the gold taken from the living and the dead was turned into jewelry. He was transferred to hard — brutal — labor. He was lucky to possess a vigorous constitution. After the death of his loved ones, he put aside sentiments, worries, and became alone and strong. Indifferent, calculated, determined to survive.

Liberated by the Soviets, he met his future wife in the triage hospital for former detainees. They were married on the long way back home.

Eva, ten years younger than he, didn’t want to return to the place from which she was sent to her death. She dreamed of the Promised Land, the land set aside for survivors. David proved unyielding, however. Determined to come home, to look into the eyes of his former friends and neighbors, the former policemen and politicians who’d erased his name from the roster of the living.

They returned in the fall of 1946, after detours through devastated Europe. David and Eva, his new wife, and the infant Peter, born in Belgrade, along the complicated detours of the return. Oti-lia Serafim, Ludmila’s mother, contended that Peter might not even be David’s son. “In the chaos of the liberation, copulation was general. Anyone with anyone. A great orgy to enliven the dead.”

“The story disturbed us all,” Lu confessed. “Even today the family is uncomfortable with it. We weren’t that well off either during the war. Filth, humiliation, danger, labor camps, daily panic. But David’s story is still something else entirely.”

Once back in his native town, the watchmaker David Gapar didn’t look into the eyes of former neighbors or policemen or politicians, as he’d sworn he would. He simply refused to remember the concentration camp. He called on his friends and family to do the same.

Lu’s face had become slender, as in old biblical images. His Madonna had paled. Gora was shocked at the effect those very words had had on her. Vulnerable to emotive excesses, she herself intensified them. Her fragility seemed like the visible face of a presentiment, suddenly alerted. She intercepted, or allowed herself to be intercepted by, vague signs; her incertitude prompted her unease.

She stopped, to calm her pulse. She looked increasingly pale.

“I can feel what you’re thinking. No, there was never any room in my family for religion, as you well know. Not in the past, and even less so now, when atheism has become opportunism. My parents were freethinkers before becoming Communists. They instilled in me their rationalism, and solidarity with the humiliated and oppressed. I had no access to mystical books or people, and I didn’t attend debates about the transcendent. And still, again and again, moments come when something obscure slips by me, or derails me. Something leaves me vulnerable. Susceptible to I don’t know what. Something unknown lives here, hidden, inside me.”

All of a sudden, she shook her rich, black hair. Her face remained white; her eyes burned like a fever. In the course of a brief and nervous spasm, she seemed to have shaken her burden loose, along with her hair.

“I was thinking of Peter. When the boy was born, David Gapar said to his wife, ‘He’s going to live in another world, and we, with him.’ And Eva told him, ‘He was born to marked parents. The New World contains the Old World, the past will live in him, as well.’ They never revealed to Peter that his father had been married before, and that he’d had another daughter, a sister who was never to be a sister. My mother doubts that David is actually Peter’s father. Only he and Eva know, maybe not even they.”

Lu’s voice and gaze had fallen.

And now that he was in the New World, how much had Peter brought from the past, and how much had Lu? Gora asked himself. What else did they bring?

Later, Professor Gora learned that Peter had refused the “survivor” status that the well-intentioned Americans were prepared to give him, just as he’d always refused any allusion to the tragedy out of which he was born. He distanced himself abruptly from any discussion about the horror that was responsible for his parents’ union.

Between the teenager who found himself unexpectedly in his relatives’ house and the exile who awoke like a phantom, twenty years later, at the sound of the phone (and in the mind of Professor Gora), was Lu, the wife of Augustin Gora, seen on a summer’s evening, on an abandoned sidewalk.

Old anxieties assaulted Professor Gora’s solitude once again. He would have liked to delay them, to remain in Lu’s story. It pained him and pleased him; it invigorated him; it retrieved him from the void.

He’d closed his eyes, to remain this way with Lu, suspended in the impossible.

After the adolescent’s return home, there was no more than the rare news from the Gapar family.

Lu had started to speak more and more about Eva Gapar. She didn’t know her personally, but she described her with a mix of admiration and apprehension. She called her on the phone. Eva’s anxiety was probably tied to Peter, not to her husband, or so it appeared to Lu. Some kind of maternal fervor. Eva seemed at last to have found, not through her husband, but through her son, some relief from the past. An obsession with Peter’s future had taken hold of her.

“Eva is possessive,” Gora decided, annoyed. “She’s uncertain about the resolution of her own life. And all too certain about the lives of others.”

Lu shuddered, shocked. She watched him. Frowning, hurt. Frightened, it seemed. The silence had grown, and Gora never brought up the subject of Eva Gapar again. He resigned himself to listen to the subsequent short bits of information, all of them selected, it seemed, with the aim of contradicting his interpretation.

Peter had been neither a predictable nor a natural choice for Lu. Was he the modest acceptance of the familiar? Lu didn’t value modesty, and didn’t accept psychoanalytical speculations. She considered them frivolous forays devoid of intimacy. She preferred to judge and to be judged on the basis of facts. Though, actually, she didn’t like at all to be judged.

Familiarity, then?

“I’m leaving for a few days, to see the Gaspars. I want to meet Eva. To understand what’s happening over there. Especially, what happened. In that past that wasn’t mine …”

Her husband didn’t hide his perplexity.

“Don’t you see? I live in an aquarium. I can’t, just like that, become a bricklayer on a construction site. Just to see what a wonderful existence our wonderful working class leads, an existence about which I know nothing, except the fairytales I read in the papers. But I can go to the Gapars. Not to find out why the prosecutor is no longer a prosecutor, even though the effort would be worth it. But to find out something else, something more painful, probably.”

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 Gapars 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.”

They spoke daily on the phone. Meanwhile, Gora had grown closer to Dima. Generous and affable with all compatriots, the Maestro agreed to meet Mihnea Palade, his admirer who had freshly arrived from the Homeland. When Gora later asked about his impressions of the young scholar, Dima confirmed that he’d found his apprentice in Palade.

The meeting had lifted Palade’s black cloud. The Maestro had sketched out a series of lectures related to his doctorate, promised him collaborations based on common exegetics. Even though he’d been forced to leave one university for another, Palade published intensely under Dima’s guidance, on myth and mysticism, the Renaissance and the Inquisition. He was following the encyclopedic model of his master.

Palade also first met his wife in Dima’s spectacular house. Gora knew her. Kira Varlam had been his student, and, as it would seem, something more. They’d also been colleagues, when Kira became an assistant professor in the Spanish department. In her junior year as a student, she had the lead in a film, no thanks to her relatively mediocre acting talent, but on account of her peculiar features, her slim, green eyes. She braided her long, flaxen hair into a braid that reached down to her waist and exposed her superb legs with short dresses. She’d married a sports star soon after the film’s premiere, divorced him after a year, was left with a little boy, with whom she’d emigrated to an aunt in Cleveland, immediately after finishing university.

Immediately, in fact, on their first night together, Palade put his love under the spell of ritual. In front of the bed, each of the lovers signed the eternal pact with their index fingers dipped in their own blood. “The traitor will die quickly and shamefully,” it said in a deep red at the bottom of the parchment placed in view near the bottle of red wine waiting to be sacrificed. A September night. On every anniversary, unto death, Kira would receive nineteen roses as red as the pyre that burns the promises. Kitschy little details, Peter Gapar and Professor Gora would both agree.

Maestro Dima evidently had a kind of hypnotic power over his apprentice, who was, anyway, already susceptible to magic and mystery.

The years after the separation from Kira didn’t slow Palade’s productivity, nor diminish his oddness. However, at a certain point, his relationship with Dima started to focus on a question without an answer. In those days, one would have been hard pressed to find factual information about the Homeland in its own (the Homeland’s, that is) libraries. It was only once they’d arrived in their new country, across the ocean, in the American Library of Congress, that Gora and Palade discovered their Homeland’s old newspapers, and in them, the bizarre political episodes from the 1930s. And, as it turned out, it was thus revealed that, as a young scholar, the Maestro was once particularly fascinated by a sort of fundamentalist Christian Orthodox terrorism.

Palade staggered from the blow. Dima wasn’t just an extraordinary scholar, a true library unto himself, but also a generous, altruistic conversationalist. His flaws were difficult to locate.

Gora tried, in vain, to provoke a dialogue with Dima on the subject. “He’s knitting! He’s knitting a little nightcap. If I ask him about that period and about what I found in those old newspapers, he picks up his knitting needles. He begins to knit, tacitly and absently, a little black nightcap, to warm him against the cold and against memories. That’s how I interpret the silence with which he honors me,” Gora told the former student during a phone conversation.

Utterly confused and desperate for new evidence to the contrary, Palade couldn’t work, divided as he was between adoration for his schoolmaster and the unanswered questions that sprang one from the other.

“Every lover is a cretin, that’s what he is!” he’d exploded over the phone. “On top of which, a disciple! My whole life I’ve dreamed about this meeting with the Teacher. Do I have to give up my critical sense at the schoolhouse gate, so that I can remain in love? The critical spirit is outlawed at the entrance to the Temple of Love.”

Exploding with attacks of self-indictment, Palade decided, gradually, to forget about the whole dilemma. Dima was the protector, in fact, and his friendship was invaluable. He couldn’t renounce him. Slips of intelligence and morality from half a century ago? They’re not the present. If the past wasn’t clear, the present was; the scholar was a man of books, not street disputes.

Gora wondered if Palade had joined the Party, which he hated, and which he would have needed, nonetheless, to be able to leave. He would have had some experience with compromise.

These irritations would reappear, cyclically. Despite everything, the Old Man and his apprentice continued to publish books together.

At the funeral service for the dearly departed Cosmin Dima, his successor bid him a heartrending farewell. The fervor of affection, as well as a public affirmation of his liberation. In just a few phrases, Palade announced that he had a different vision of the world, as well as of the field of study to which he and his illustrious predecessor had dedicated themselves. “My Master believed in organicism; I prefer the medieval ars combinatoria. I believe in today’s theories of information and cognition, where we begin from a point in a vacuum and move toward variations that dispute their own messages and logic. I believe in the idea of imperfection and I’m obsessed with the dynamism of the mind.”

Dima’s political blind spots, and even his arrogance in ignoring or denying them, couldn’t compete with the love of his apprentice. Palade himself confirmed this, publicly declaring his affection and admiration for his lost master once more. It was probably a form of therapy for his inability to forget or forgive those political deviations and the silence that surrounded them.

“After death, Dima continues to send me messages. I reject most of his ideas, I contradict him, but we continue the polemic.”

Palade aspired to influence cosmic as well as terrestrial events, after deciphering their codes. Obsessed with social prophecies, personal cataclysms, and sexual charades, he interrogated the heavens. He’d estranged himself from the community of exiles, publishing antinationalist texts in the exile press. He made weekly attacks on the ideologies of the Nazi and Communist patriots of post-Nazism and post-Communism.

That was when the threats started, phone calls, letters, assaults on the street. He knew he was being followed, but he didn’t know how to take precautionary measures, and he didn’t inform the police. The strange packages multiplied, and he refused to open them, throwing them away in the garbage bin in the backyard. He made public his wish to abandon Christianity for any other religion, or, even more, for the religion of the nonreligious.

There was a moment when Palade decided to return for a short visit to the Homeland, to see with his own eyes whether post-Communism looked like the year 2000 or 1930. He returned to America dejected and depressed. The news intended for Professor Gora wasn’t all too calming, as much as it was communicated with gaps and a kind of homeopathy.

One evening, he saw Lu at the theater, accompanied by a young man, who, as it turned out, was her cousin.

Peter. He was Lu’s only cousin. There could be no other. A youth, now grown up, good looking and loquacious? What, in fact, did he look like, cousin Gapar? Had he graduated from college? Had he become a great athlete? Was he still passionate about basketball, as he was in the old days? Did he write gallery and racetrack reviews? Had he been Lu’s companion on other occasions, as well?

Lucian Palade (Mihnea’s brother) and his wife had maintained an amicable relationship with the former Mrs. Gora. They’d seen her around at family gatherings and social occasions. Was anyone with her?

At the theater, with Peter! And so? They were cousins, weren’t they? Peter had probably come from the far corner of the country for a few days, and his cousin invited him to the theater. A simple courtesy. Lu couldn’t stand going to the theater or to the cinema alone, nor to concerts or on excursions, for that matter. It was no surprise that she used young Gapar as a companion.

Or, did Peter Gapar have a car, by any chance? On a visit to Bucharest, years back when he was only a high school student, Peter had been fascinated by the cars on the boulevard, few and pitiable as they were. Had he gotten hold of one of those famous Trabants, that plastic, socialist toy with the motorcycle motor? Prr-prr, pic-pic, smoke, the holy little spark plug that needs frequent replacing, the efficient and economic cocktail of diesel and gas, the low mileage, the poor man’s car — and despite all that, it was a five-year wait-list till it was your turn for this social advancement. Maybe Prosecutor Gapar was able to procure one such machine from his dear Party, to indulge his son? Had he become Prosecutor David Gapar again, or did he spend many years in prison, as had been rumored?

The past. Fragments appear and disappear when you least expect them. Look, for example; Lu was rejoining Gusti Gora, even though she’d previously said she wouldn’t. Even now, she was playing the role of his one and only wife! No, their marriage hadn’t been an illusion — their separation was the illusion.

“When I first met her, I didn’t just simply meet her; I found her again. She’d been inside of me for a long time,” Professor Gora whispered into the mute receiver.

She hadn’t agreed to accompany Gora to the wastelands of liberty and well-being, but she couldn’t let him go off on his own either. She joins him, unaware — or perhaps aware — that this is how she defies their separation.

The couple proceeded silently on the sidewalk in front of the station. Bound to each other. All of a sudden, Lu shook her black hair, looking at her husband.

“I don’t think that Peter knows the story of his parents. His father, once married to Liza, who was burned away, along with their little girl Miry … Peter represents Eva’s new beginning, not David’s. The basketball player can’t stand her maternal excesses, I’m sure.”

They were coming back, after accompanying the guest to the station. Gora had been surprised by the ardor with which Lu invested the subject.

In the months that followed, Lu seemed to be uncovering the mysteries of her own being. David and Eva Cşspar’s biographies provided the lost code. Through them she was beginning to come out of the unknown inside of herself.

“It isn’t certain that Peter is David’s son. The delirium of liberation triggered … let’s say impulses, as the former detainees would say. The orgy of liberation, the orgy of pent-up senses. They say that everyone coupled with whoever was around. David might have seen his momentary partner only afterward. Peter was born in Belgrade, on their way home. Eva didn’t want to return, but David insisted on reestablishing the facts. To reinstate justice! It was among parents such as these that Peter grew up to play basketball.”

Fragmentary information, gleaned from others, tied up in presumptions. It wasn’t mere gossip occasioned by the — till then-unknown cousin’s visit, but the reawakening of a dormant question. Warning signs, interferences, expectations. Lu seemed consumed.

Gora felt excluded, relegated to the role of a spectator who had only part of the puzzle in front of him. Lu had had similar lapses previously, swift, imperceptible slips; all of a sudden, you could no longer reach her. It was like an affectionate and reversible kind of autism. An opportune touch was enough to call her back; a lethargic rippling movement would follow, and she was lifted out of the trance, reconnected to reality, with a heightened vitality. She instantly electrified her partner. Her abandon had the same ardor as her absence; you weren’t sure whether the intense communion wasn’t just another form of estrangement. The dark embers in her eyes deepened, her hands trembled, her lips quivered, her mouth dilated, a voracious leech sucking the blood and pus of her prey.

The magic of desire spurred his memory and brought him close to her. And the memory of desire never faded. An initiation, ever the same, and different every time. A lasting black void, murmurs of enchantment and melancholy.

He’d tried, more than once, to stifle those memories, but they returned in waves, like the tides. The distance in which Lu had hidden herself made the obsession more acute and permanent, intolerable at the start, then magical and longed for.

He’d accepted the highly improbable news, that Lu was Peter’s partner! The young cousin represented an unspeakably shrewd ruse, but also an exercise in humility. And a test, reinvented by the Gora couple — that was what the former and actual husband Au-gustin Gora believed.

The beautiful Lu had no reason to pair up with Peter! There must surely have been more formidable suitors. To choose the young cousin was to show a dubious resignation, and a suspicious defiance of public opinion. While Lu didn’t necessarily champion social conventions, she wasn’t impervious to their implications either.

Was it the masochism of humility? Gora was as happy to fantasize about Lu’s humility as he was to dream about the complicity between them.

The castaway Augustin Gora had also found himself alone and free in the New and Free World, some years back. After a few days, he’d written to Professor Cosmin Dima. He’d gotten a prompt response, repeated phone calls and questions about their common Homeland. Dima offered immediately to help him; he invited Gora to see him and paid for the plane ticket. One of several similar trips over the course of the following months.

Right away Gora was fascinated by the lucidity the Old Man (as he would call him) exhibited. The scholar experienced exile as a sort of adventure and initiation; he even succeeded in opening the world of the new arrival, who’d already wandered around in books and the worlds of books. An essential experience. “Pushed into an extreme situation, you reinvent the strategy of renewal,” the feeble voice was saying.

He considered his relationship to his native country — full of so much collapse and nostalgia — with the same detachment, or apparent detachment. And lately, it was apparent, indeed. If you were up to date with the newspapers of the Library of Congress, you understood that it was only apparent.

He would say, ad nauseam, “Existence is a privilege! Immense and fleeting,” the timid voice repeated.

As if to amplify the enfeebled sonority of the voice, his small hands, which were stained by ink and disease, animated the words, vibrating above the piles of manuscripts.

And death? Gora asked himself. He’d read Dima’s celebrated texts about Death and the morbid labyrinths; he knew the slogans of Dima’s acolytes, who were armed for the Apocalypse of Purification. Just like his former comrades, the Old Man had made many pious bows to Death, with studies and exegeses.

After a short pause, Dima added melancholically and without having been solicited, “Supreme Death! Reigning over all, absolute Queen, and God Himself. It’s only through Death that we get to embrace Him.” He advised the newcomer to remain in touch with people back home, not to disavow anything, good or bad, from the past. “Our graves are there, in the past. More lasting than we are.”

Dima drew his pipe from the edge of the desk, embarrassed, and began to twirl it between his fingers. “I’m not allowed even this pleasure anymore,” he whispered, still turning his pipe. There was no tobacco in sight.

“Don’t forget the privileges of the past, and take advantage of the present!”

Empty rhetoric, thought Gora. After a few days, in a letter to Lu, he mentioned the conversation with the idol of those lost souls in the attic where they’d first met. The famous Dima seemed amenable to taking legal steps with the American authorities in order to secure a passport for the young Mrs. Gora, left behind on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The situation in the faraway country had worsened; Gora hoped that Lu had reconsidered her initial refusal. Her stupefying decision hung heavily. Without qualifying it, he evoked that night so long ago, that attic room full of tempestuous and juvenile debates, when one of the students victoriously put on the table three French volumes by Cosmin Dima.

The discussion surrounding the famous and exiled scholar ignited instantly, but, to everyone’s surprise, Gora was quiet and unengaged, answering the students’ questions with curt, paradoxical remarks. He didn’t need to remind Lu why he hadn’t managed to pay attention to those earnest and heady speculations — he was convinced that she hadn’t forgotten their first meeting, either, and that she’d understood, then, just like the others, the reason for his uncustomary silence. He wasn’t simply retreating into himself. He was distancing himself from the loquaciousness of the audience, which he generally dominated, in order to attract — through his sudden silence — the attention of the unknown newcomer.

No one knew who had brought Lu into their midst. But everyone noted the person who accompanied her out at the end of the night.

The following nights they came and left together, and then they were absent for a long time. When they returned, they no longer seemed very interested in subversive controversies. They appeared unexpectedly, disappeared for weeks on end, until they disappeared altogether. After a year, they were married. After the wedding, Lu looked more beautiful than ever. Now, she was also happy, voluble. Even while his marital responsibilities seemed to mature him, Gora infantilized himself. He intently followed his wife’s every gesture. A happy time, devoid of history.

Her refusal to follow him to the majestic United States of America represented for Gora an unfathomable enigma, even after so many years. In the public eye, the fissure was indiscernible. Intimacy, however, revealed strange constrictions. The rational and pragmatic partner was being undermined by a sleepy double, loosed from a dark place. He no longer recognized the stranger who crouched in the corner as if she were being punished, who thrashed, unseen, among contaminated lianas. Her pride persisted, however. Lu had been taught not to complain, to avoid showing weakness or sorrow. She never lamented, except to herself, in solitude.

These regressive reprises took a grave toll on the enchantment of their first years of living together. Gradually, that enchantment was replaced by the fascination of seemingly living with more than one person at once, each persona asserting its supremacy. He deciphered his wife’s codes slowly and never fully. Ever on the ready, he waited for the shocks, in cycles of shock.

Looking back made him anxious even now, after so many years.

The finery had evaporated, no one knew when or how; Lu would wake suddenly in the morning, robbed of her security, shattered, submerged in gloom. Suspicion would quickly reclaim her; the happy past would recede and cease to exist. There was no longer anything solid around her, just a dubious trap for what might still be. The captive felt herself flung into the void of the anonymous and the rejected, frightened by adverse winds, pushed toward a precipice that had in fact been waiting for her for a long time.

She no longer knew how much love her past had contained, and she couldn’t name the enigma that separated that Lu from the present one. Everything seemed diluted and obscure. And still the confusion of this fraternization, this incest with the sister who didn’t resemble him, persisted.

Was domestic love undermining actual love?

The idea of exile, the humility of wandering, had always frightened her. Was her union with her younger, aloof cousin a kind of orphan’s shelter? Or was she looking for the familiarity of the tribe?

The Dutchman’s Balkan successor was nothing but a simulacrum. And the age in which she lived was just a parody without posterity.

Posterity? Here it was, a step away and all around. Camps of gossip and goods, the citizen plagued by publicity, an earthbound jumble. Mynheer’s laughter in the grave of the farce that celebrity had made of him.

That was a venomous thought, one with which he could go to bed, our good friend Gora. This night was certain to be a garrulous one.

Lu wasn’t yet employed at Dr. Koch’s office when Peter quit his fellowship at New York University. Was that the irresponsibility invoked in his first conversation with Gora?!

An Italian colleague of Gşspar’s was touched by the ease with which the eastern refugee renounced the income of the fellowship, as modest as it was to begin with, and by his readiness to hurl himself into the unknown. She was a colleague with a legendary name, Beatrice, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, married to an elderly, wealthy American. She’d come up with a sensational solution; Peter would have breakfast with her husband every morning! After which, they’d discuss the headlines. The public service would be decently remunerated.

To Mr. Artwein the name Peter Gapar inspired trust immediately. Peter was to bring and discuss the day’s newspaper. Only, not the current year’s. Mr. Artwein wanted the newspapers of the year in which he himself was born. January 5 became January 5 of 1920; June 22 was June 22,1920, and so on. The world came into being on the same day that Mr. Artwein did, on February 24,1920.

Peter seemed excited by the bizarre preoccupation. He didn’t care that he was, evidently, the object of an act of charity. “Now that’s what I call an idea! Everyone says that Americans are workaholics, physically addicted to work; they can’t stop working and they can’t stop thinking about money — look, here’s one who’s made enough, who gives up working, who is ready to throw his money out the window. Unconventional pleasures! As for his wife’s being too young and available, that doesn’t bother him. He’s not obsessed with supervising or lording over her; he leaves her to the will of her unlimited appetite, hires a Balkan vagabond to conduct his morning conversations about the past among men, just like in the old days!”

He’d begun the gig with great enthusiasm. Every afternoon he went to the city’s central library and photocopied the old newspaper that he would present the following morning at work.

Breakfast would sometimes lengthen, but Mr. Artwein never exaggerated his courtesy; he never invited him to lunch. Not that he’d have had time, anyway. He had other things to do in the afternoons.

But destiny wasn’t to allow a long life to these meetings, unfortunately. Two months after the birth of Mr. Artwein, Beatrice appeared — elegant and distinguished, as ever — to inform her former colleague that her husband had suffered a stroke and was now semi-paralyzed.

“Semi? What does semi mean?”

The young Mrs. Artwein didn’t appear shocked by Gapar’s quick blunder and apparent lack of compassion for his patron’s state; she stared the lank Peter Gapar directly in the eyes, as she’d done many times.

“It would do him good, I think, if someone continued to read to him from the newspaper, in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evenings. However, in his case, semi-paralysis means absence. His body isn’t entirely paralyzed, but his mind is blocked, at least, for now. He may return, with time. In fact, now that I’m really thinking about it, I don’t see any problem with continuing to pay, a few months, a year, whatever, for the service from which you were so unexpectedly suspended. Seriously, not a problem at all. You could come every day. Read the paper, just as you’ve been doing until now, even without anyone to read it to. At whatever time suits you.”

Again she stared the hussar directly in the eye.

Peter declined the offer again and again.

After that, he found small paying gigs here and there. He even worked with a group that translated menus for transatlantic airline companies, domestic and international; and so, he was among Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Spanish, all sorts of Africans, Indonesians, Greeks, Turks, French, Japanese, the whole Babel brigade. The universal ingredients of feud and fraternization bored him; the pay was small and temporary.

By the time Gora heard her voice again after a long pause, he was on the threshold of a more extravagant endeavor.

Lu and Peter Gapar used to amuse themselves in the evening in the tiny, miserable hotel room where they lived by reading the phone book.

Find the rabbit hole—that was their game. They would try to guess from where the next rabbit would jump, so to speak.

And out of the forest of unknown names, a true surprise leaped out at them when they least expected it. Not from the phonebook, but from the illustrated magazine that Peter had bought on his way home, a long article about the Eastern European Mafia in New York. The central figure was someone named Mike Mark, described in biographic details that were none too banal: his studies in chemistry in Bucharest, his complicated emigration to America, with just one suitcase, his infiltration into the oil business. “No business like the oil business,” the sharp reporter had specified. Then there was the perfecting of the taxicab meter, selling the invention to the city clerk’s office, sensational alliances with the Russian and Albanian mobs, the growth of their wealth. Seen from the street in Queens, the two-story Mark house didn’t seem at all imposing, but it had three subterranean levels, a swimming pool, security cameras galore, six luxurious bedrooms, walls and ceilings made of glass. On the doors of the numerous rooms, in gold, were engraved the words: I love America. An FBI informant and counterinformant, the master embezzler had been captured countless times, and released just as many, due to lack of evidence. Mike Mark was the proprietor of two hundred gas stations and some large apartment buildings.

He’d refused the FBI’s protection against the threats of his former accomplices. “I don’t need the FBI, I’m better than they are. I’m not moving my family from my home, as I’ve been advised to do by the idiots who claim they want to protect me. My family is sacred and my house is sacred,” the reporter quoted. An exemplary father and husband, and the fanatically devoted son of Holocaust survivors, who had arrived in the Dreamland not too long ago. The magnate upheld the honor of the family above anything else.

Among those mentioned in the fabulous history of the immigrant Mike Mark there was a friend of this man, a neighbor from the street in the modest suburb of Bucharest where he’d grown up. Lu recognized the name of a former university classmate. Peter smiled. In the jungle of the unknown, here at last was the name of a real person. Professor Gora, the name they avoided mentioning, he was also real; you could call him on the phone; but he remained a ghost hidden among the literary ghosts.

“There’s no end to trying,” cried Lu. She was feverishly looking in the phonebook. There could be no other; it had to be Miu Stolz, or rather, the one and only Michael Stolz.

Peter was smiling; Lu was picking up the phone and, hop, there he was Miu-Michael, out of the woodwork, reporting for duty. It seemed as if it were only yesterday that he was tailing the beautiful brunette like a rabid dog. He didn’t explode with surprise. Phlegmatic but polite, Michael Stolz invited the couple to visit him in Forest Hills. A long way on the subway, then by foot, up to the doorbell to the right of the massive oak door.

The Chinese doorman welcomed them in with a bow.

Misu Stolz was waiting for them in the vast and elegant foyer. He himself was vast and elegant. Tall, massive, black suit, white shirt, it seemed as if he were just coming out of a business meeting, and he’d hardly had time to loosen his tie. He introduced himself to Peter, bowing ceremoniously, without directing any of his erstwhile charm toward the beauty.

The former colleagues looked at each other sympathetically. Mi,u, happy to find himself in a superior social position, and Lu, amused by the American incarnation of her admirer.

“I live alone. I’m celibate.”

He stared intensely and defiantly at the couple of cousins, if they were actually cousins, which he evidently did not believe they were.

“The Chinaman is my cook, butler, housekeeper, errand boy, everything. I’m not a wealthy man. I never accepted Mike’s offers; I smelled trouble and didn’t want to be mixed up in it. He helped me enormously at the start. Even with money. He’s merciless with his competitors, but generous with friends. A heart of gold. Gold wrapped in shit.”

While Miu interviewed the adventurers, the Chinese man arranged the sandwiches and bottles with a mastered condescendence.

At the end of the visit, with a glass of French cognac, he admitted that he also owned three gas stations, a few limo-taxis and an income a little larger than was entirely honorable. Of course, there was a lot of work, he’d never worked so hard in his life, with so much stress, of course, but money doesn’t come from hard work. He smiled, proud of the horse sense of his remark; the pronunciation of the remark, however, completed his smile with a short laugh completely devoid of cordiality, “In fact, money is never made through work. It’s not the workers or the drivers who make money, but the owners. I make it.”

At the end, the host gave the guests his card, saying to Lu, “If you need me, call. The third number on the card is less busy.”

The visit didn’t indicate there might be a sequel. But there was one. After a few months of unemployment and short, transitory gigs, Peter called Stolz, without warning Lu, and obtained an interview and a job. A dangerous move, as Professor Gora was about to find out.

He didn’t need a name to recognize her voice, which was inside of him, beyond good and evil, beyond space and time. He grew silent. Embarrassment on both sides. Lu had certainly arrived with great difficulty at this decision, he knew too well. Despair had provoked the call.

“Chauf … chauffeur! Chauffeur … listen. The great Stolz. He.. hired him! Chauffeur. I didn’t know that Peter.. that Peter had wanted to commit su … su.. suicide. He doesn’t admit it. Or he does, but only as a joke,” the suave voice from long ago said.

“Suicide. It’s no longer about walking ten dogs in the park at five dollars an hour. Or triage at the post office. This is something else altogether.”

Lu paused to gather her strength. The couple had obtained drivers’ licenses, before leaving for America. They didn’t have a car, but they knew that it would be impossible to get by in America without driving. They took driving lessons; they took the test, theoretical and practical, and there was also, of course, the inevitable Balkan socialist bribe. Nothing was possible without it. Gora knew this well, as he’d gone through the same ritual himself. The examining officer took home a private bonus for every license obtained. Conscientiously, Lu took the exam and received the license that had already been paid for. Peter didn’t even show up. He received the license in an envelope, in the mail. For the same fee, of course. Yes, Gora remembered the procedure well.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing. At all. He has no driving experience, at all. But he says he’s fascinated by the Lunar City. As a chauffeur, he’ll scour the cosmos. ‘The lunar monster is made for us somnambulist wanderers,’ he keeps saying.”

Silence. She seemed as frightened by her own words as by the potential digression into another subject. Silence. Gora didn’t feel capable of deviating, either.

So as not to prolong the danger, Lu began to string together the wonders to which Peter aspired, quickly, like a labored recitation from a touristic guide: the Brighton Beach’s Moscow, Little Italy’s Naples, Queens’ Balkans, Pakistan and India, Chinatown, Harlem’s Senegal, Hasidic Brooklyn.

The iceberg of silence that spanned two decades wouldn’t thaw. Gora promised to talk to the potential suicide. To no effect, of course.

He was left only with the echo of Lu’s voice. That wasn’t nothing.

On his first day of work, Peter was to present himself at the house of a certain celebrity, driving one of Stolz’s limousines. A top-level university personality, a politician, a diplomat, it wasn’t too clear. A VIP, that was all, and the rest didn’t matter. He was to take the celebrity to the airport. After that, the taxi-limousine was to arrive at another address, and another, the schedule established by Stolz’s dispatcher.

The novices had trained for two days, three hours per day, in a car that belonged to the porter of the small hotel where they lived.

“Key in the ignition, foot on the gas. Brake. Left, brake. Mirror! Mirror, watch the mirror,” warned the Mexican, sweating in panic. “Slow. Not that slow. Not enough gas. Back! That’s it, left. Your foot, your foot, yes, on the brake. Foot on the brake! Gas, yes. Left. Mirror! Right, mirror on the right. Check the mirror. Always check the mirror.”

The Mexican’s hair was greasy now from perspiration and fright; his small, grimy hands were trembling, his eyes popping; he was crossing himself; he was gripping his small head between his small hands, covering his face so as not to see the next moment. Peter, on the other hand, was perfectly calm, grateful for the training; he liked the wheeled dragon.

He muttered the same word over and over, “Slow, slow…” He’d found his prayer and motto: slow. That was all he needed to keep saying; the mantra would mollify the gods. Slow, go slow, you have time to correct your mistakes. The death race, the burlesque horror movie.

The car engaged, but the driver didn’t. Slow commands, demonic, left, slow, stop, foot, brake, like that, gas, brake, foot, slow, left, too much, too much, now right, slow, mirror, watch the mirror, left, that’s it, stop. Red light, stop.

The prehistoric driver at the wheel of the modern car remained calm and absent. Slow bouts, short commands, the prayer slow. He didn’t hear the apocalyptic uproar of the road; the prayer was protecting him. Slow, slow, as the prayer says.

“The suicidal syndrome,” whispered Lu at one point, in the back seat and in Gusti Gora’s dream.

That’s it, left. Foot! Foot on the brake. Gas, that’s it. Right, the right-side mirror. Slow, stop. Red light! Stop! Collision, stop. A miracle! Arrival! Slow, slow, easy curbs, calm changes of direction, the blare of horns, the despair of drivers who passed alongside like comets, their fists raised to the sky. Happy ending: stoplight.

The gods had spared him; the stoplights had spared him; he believed in salvation. Slowly, terror-stricken, he’d arrived! When, how, who knew but here he was downtown. Little Italy, the celebrity’s residence.

He’d closed his eyes, exhausted, bent his head over the steering wheel, to sleep forever, to pass long minutes of dizziness and elation. Should you kill yourself? Dance every second, in front of the sacrificial altar. The pagan altar. The unknown around you and within you. Above the eagle of destiny, around, life, the primordial wedding. Fear, too, he felt fear, a gothic, luxurious horror. Gas, brake, mirror, horn. Left, right. Slow. Red. Stop. Saved! Short, unpredictable. Liquidated! Saved.

He woke up, smiling, in the mirror, over the wheel, kissing the complicit wheel; enlivened, he looked again at the wheeled monster. It was as if he were perceiving the magical machinery of death for the first time.

He climbed out of the car, rang the bell at the celebrity’s door. A short, agile gentleman. White moustache, a brush of white hair on his calabash of a head, blue bow tie, large hands, large nostrils, hurried, well disposed. He introduced himself quickly, threw the small valise on the backseat, and sat in the front passenger’s seat, near the hussar.

“How … what did you say your name was? Kaspar? Kaspar Hauser? The famous character? Is that it, Kaspar Hauser?”

The driver stared at him, lost at sea. He’d hit on a talker! He was ready for any conversation, if only it could be long, long, so that he’d never need to start that engine. He’ll talk about Kaspar Hauser until nighttime with this fabulous client, and he’ll forget all about the death race.

“My name isn’t Kaspar Hauser. That was a joke. Karl, that’s my name.”

“Karl? Marx? Karl Marx?”

“No. Rossmann. Mynheer Karl Rossmann.”

Peeperkorn would have been too much, Rossmann seemed all right.

“Mynheer? As in, mister? Monsieur Rossmann, Herr Rossmann?”

The passenger stared at him for a long time. Smiling. Ready to burst into laughter, smiling; he liked the game; he liked his playing partner. He was no longer hurrying to the airport. He’d found himself a talker, too!

“Rossmann, you say? Karl Rossmann? Kafka? The American novel? America seen from Prague?”

The driver smiled, too, convinced that the voluble gentleman could even have talked to Peeperkorn. It wasn’t easy to interrupt him, he was jumping out of his seat to find out the immigrant’s biography, his country, his profession, the languages he spoke. He knew a few languages, wasn’t that right? That was the fate of little countries, many languages, wasn’t that right?

“And your name? What’s your name, in fact?”

“RA0298.”

“What’s that you say?”

“My name has become a number. It’s engraved on my arm, just like … would you like to see?” The passenger’s eyes widened.

“You mean to say … no, no, you’re too young. That’s a bad joke. Auschwitz is a bad joke.”

“Okay, okay. It’s a bad joke, I’ll give you that.”

“So then, what is it? Your driver’s ID?”

“Resident Alien. RA 02987896. RA 0298, for short.”

They spoke endlessly, that is, for five minutes. Little Italy, like America, was hurried, pragmatic, energetic, hurried. The engine needed starting.

The driver started the engine. He stepped on the gas, repeated the magic formula of the devil that had brought him to Little Italy and that will take him further. Slow, slow.. Gas, and so on. Foot, yes, foot on the brake, left, mirror.

He stopped. No more than a few meters, and he stopped. Happily, he stopped. A stoplight. A divine, red light. The talkative passenger had stopped talking. Stupefied, he watched the taxi driver. The driver waited a second, the light turned green, he waited another second, “Slow, slow.” Another one-two-three seconds. He could hear the horns behind him, but he had the magic formula. Slow. There was no other solution. That was how he’d gotten to Little Italy, and that was how he’d get to the cemetery of the airport. Slow, this was the only password the devil understood.

He started again, cautiously, was just about going.

“No, no!” The mustached gentleman yelled. “Enough. This isn’t working. No, no, it’s not working,” the VIP was screaming, exasperated. “This isn’t working,” or, “this isn’t working anymore,” or whatever he was jabbering. Red in the face, on the brink of apoplexy.

“Stop! I’m getting out.”

The driver stopped, waited for the elegant gentleman to ask for his valise and for the scandal to start. The celebrity forgot about the bag, however; he didn’t even look in the backseat.

“Get out! You get out, too!”

The driver didn’t understand. He watched the client in a daze; he didn’t understand; he lacked the courage to understand. “Get out. We’ll change places.”

He got behind the wheel, and by the time they arrived at the airport, they were friends.

Before heading over to the departure corridor, Larry forced Peter Gapar to call Stolz, to say that he’d gotten sick at the airport and he’d left the car in the parking garage, and someone should come and get it.

“Here’s my card. I run a college. It’s small, bizarre, but vibrant; I don’t have open positions right now; I can’t offer you anything. If you can’t get by, call me and we’ll figure something out. Give up driving. Choose poison or a bullet. Death at the wheel is trivial, and you’re a sensible man.”

Peter stared, bewildered, at the card. Bedros Avakian! Professor Bedros Avakian. That was all it said. It meant that he was famous, there was no need of other details. Bedros Avakian. So then, Larry! Peter the Driver, alias Kaspar, alias Karl, had decided to call him Larry.

That’s how he’d met Larry. In later retellings, the immigrant Peter would identify through the same generic name, Larry, all the harbingers of his American destiny.

After the failed meeting with Death, the improvised taxi driver was hired by Stolz at one of his gas stations. Lu became the assistant to Dr. Koch. The couple’s situation improved somewhat.

Peter never forgot the first Larry’s advice. Any other kind of death is better than death at the wheel. Even falling off a trampoline.

He’d become friends with the manager at the gas station, a Syrian with his own network of schemes and shady earnings. Cars came and went; it was the sexual hum and hub of the city. A city with no equal, muttered Peter, in love with the Lunar City, unique and unifying.

A seasonal observer of the sky, Peter Gaparobserved, without actually taking in, the red sky. The Hamletian clouds, astral and archaic symbols, birds of every color, elephant bodies riding the improbable batons of their legs. A drizzly twilight. The new Babylon was brashly raising the arrows of its buildings. Pylons stuck into the sordid subterranean depths, where rats, vagabonds, roaches, beggars, moles, and murderers — the fauna of the metropolis — teemed. “A marvelous city,” the wanderer murmured, dumbfounded in the face of the impassable Syrian. A mountainous cheek made of clay, secular whetstones, wilderness in full view.

“Change those bulbs,” a hoarse voice said.

He found the bulbs, grabbed the ladder and went out. He’d been putting off changing them for a few days. One step, and another, hands on the ladder, a rung, then another, left hand holding the side, the right hand outstretched toward the post to unscrew the burned bulb. Hand in the air — boom! Explosion. Not the bulb, but the ground. The mammoth mass hits the earth like a meteor, shaking the pavement.

In the ambulance, the dead hallucinated, “Hauser. Finished, liquidated. Airways. Kennedy.” Kennedy and Airways were easy to distinguish. “Hauser. So little. Liquidated.”

The dead tossed around over the steering wheel in his dream. Those dear, red lights. “Irres … ir-re-sponsible. Liquidated.”

He leaned the evening up against the wall. The burned bulb on the post in the front of the station. The new bulb in his right pants pocket. He’d gotten to the top, and the rain was hammering down. His hand extended toward the post, his hand and his mind up in the air. Wet pavement. Twisted ladder, the elephant toppled to the ground that once bore him. Boom! The cadaver on the pavement.

Emergency visits don’t require insurance, the hospital has to receive anyone who arrives in an ambulance, this much the Syrian knew, as well as Stolz the proprietor, who didn’t offer the immigrants he employed any health insurance. The doctors woke the victim from his blackout to inform him that he’d crushed the bones in both of his legs. He urgently needed surgery, the soldering of crushed bones, implantation of metal rods to make them straight again. The Pakistani surgeon relayed the miracle: Stolz paid a spectacular sum out of the pocket of his former friend Mike Mark, the sensitive shark.

Once revived, Peter Gapar was spared all further medical costs, but the incident aggravated the misunderstanding between the cousins, it would seem.

After his return from London, Dr. Avakian inquired about the chauffer Gapar. Professor Augustin Gora, once given an honorary title by Avakian’s institution, received a call from the president’s secretary. She was asking if he knew anything about that bizarre compatriot of his.

“So then you know Gapar,” the historian exclaimed after a second. “Gapar! RA 0298! Peter Gapar.”

“Yes,” Gora responded, stammering. “I know the name … and more, believe me, much more!”

“No, no, we’re not just joking around. There’s more, believe me. Death is the matter at hand. The paradoxical messenger of death.”

Gora was silent, suddenly overwhelmed.

“Death! That’s the institution your compatriot represents. At first I thought he didn’t know the city, that he was mixing up addresses, that he’d gotten confused. I was trying to divert his attention from the madness of driving, I talked about Little Italy, the neighborhood where he was hunting for death, who was hunting for him, and about Kaspar Hauser, about Brecht, the troupe from Vilna, Kafka, anything. I’m a historian, but I’m also a reader, of course, and not only that. How to distract his attention from driving? No one else could do a better job of this than he himself. His eyes opened wide to the chaos through which he was navigating, but his mind somewhere else, in hell, in heaven. Intangible! He groped around blindly, slowly, extremely slowly, meticulously, horrified. His feet fumbled for the pedal, his eyes electrified, in prayer. Pure terror. Pure, my good man!”

Gora was preparing his questions, in his mind, but Avakian didn’t allow any pause.

“Should I keep him talking about things that he knows? Should I try to steel him up? This wasn’t a time for conventional solutions.”

President Avakian was laughing heartily, happy that he’d beaten Death.

“You know that Gapar, as a man, is quite …”

“Miraculous! You mean miraculous? He’s a miracle, no more, no less. I escaped with my life only through a miracle. He didn’t care at all. About me, about himself, about the car, New York, it was all just a spectacle, that’s all. The spectacle before the catastrophe, and the spectacle of the catastrophe.”

The historian couldn’t forget that experiment, and wouldn’t allow himself to be interrupted from recounting the morbid screenplay, which he’d probably already recounted many times over.

“The business card he gave you represented …”

“A letter of thanks! A reward. He was about to hand it over, the next occasion, to his boss: Death. A cash reward, no matter how big, would have been merely trivial.”

“You’d be disposed to see him again, then? To … ”

“To see him again? As a pedestrian … as a pedestrian, Mr. Gora! As a pedestrian, anytime! Disposed? Obligated! That’s how I see it. A matter of conscience, I can’t forget that. A miracle can’t be repaid in any other way.”

No one could have pleaded Peter’s cause better than Bedros Avakian himself. There was nothing to add; you simply had to let him exhaust his inexhaustible discourse.

“I was, you understand, in the heart of Experimental Theater.. Experimental History. The great experiment of the other world. Martyr and guinea pig. In less than a half an hour, death had kissed me everywhere. I was powerless. But I escaped, after all! The madman at the wheel has no escape, however, that’s for sure! Now or in an hour or tomorrow, the holocaust, an atomic bomb, a worldwide earthquake, or a cosmic hurricane will meet him. That’s certain! Should I call the police or the taxi company, or should I hire him instantly at the university? You know how people are, always in a hurry — I was in a hurry to arrive in London, at a conference about the Armenian genocide in Turkey, I was presiding over the conference. Not even after I eluded death did I forget that I didn’t have time to spare, I needed to get to London. And I did.”

“So, then, Gapar could … I wonder if he might call you,” Gora ventured to say. “He kept your card, this I know. I could, eventually …”

“If he’s alive! If he’s still alive. If the miracle revalidated itself. It would be beyond my understanding, as well as the understanding of any rational being. I’d do anything, Professor, for such an intangible being, anything. I’ll hire him to teach the occult! Spells and magic and astrology?”

Dr. Avakian was laughing, quite pleased with himself. At the height of his frenzied monologue, probably to perfect the dark humor of the incident, he asked for a letter of recommendation for Peter Gapar.

In the folder on Gora’s desk, there was a heap of documents related to Peter. Yellow, white, blue sheets; Gora liked to jot notes quickly, on colored paper, details, whether real or imagined, thoughts, information that might someday be useful to him. He collaborated, under a pen name, with the journals of the exiles; he also wrote brief, ironic obituaries. He prepared them carefully, while the dead were still alive. Then he would thin out the compositions, without giving them up all together. The passages seemed too short, as the results of such extended research. How to make a simple, ephemeral inscription out of a biography that accumulates and burns through so much? A cynical frivolity, a bow in the face of unavoidable ferocity.

The deceased deserved more than the bureaucratic summary of visible existence! One should capture not just what was, but also what could have been, the potentialities that dissipate at once with the deceased. What he endeavored only in his mind, what he sketched out only in thought but never brought to fruition or had the courage to admit, even to himself. The secret life, often unconscious, surrounding and stemming from the heart of the ephemeral, time and space extended beyond the immediate present.

This was the start of Professor Gora’s gradual dedication to a laborious project.

The file on Peter Gapar RA 0298 didn’t begin immediately following the conversation with Avakian. Gora preferred small deferments: if in two weeks Peter is still alive, then, yes, he will be honored with the yellow folder that he very much deserved.

The first notes were older accounts, then the conversation with the historian Avakian. There was also, already, the copy of the letter of recommendation that he sent to Avakian.

It didn’t suffice to say that Peter Gapar had been, in a superrealist country, the author of a minor work (because it was a parody) and an unknown masterpiece (because he never wrote it) adored by a gallery of admirers. The work existed while the literary cafe intelligentsia said it existed, but couldn’t be proven to exist, and perhaps this wasn’t even necessary. Gapar’s bylines about sports and shows and philatelic exhibits and horseraces were worth mentioning only in the obituary, but not in the letter. Gora underscored Peter’s lucidity in hard times and even slipped in a wave of sympathy for Ludmila’s bewildered cousin, referring to that first encounter when the chauffeur had attempted to bring Avakian to the Other World instead of to John F. Kennedy airport. He didn’t forget to include a paragraph about Gaspar’s parents, survivors of the most infamous of all the Nazi concentration camps, a chapter that the son — a survivor of socialism — refused to discuss. As president of the Conference on the Armenian Genocide, Avakian was certain to be sensitive to such a detail. He mentioned, finally, the intellectual and pedagogic potential of the immigrant.

Once out of the hospital, Peter found himself unemployed. He inspected the business card of his partner in the race of death. There was no point in calling, he wouldn’t be able to access the celebrity. He consulted the train timetables; he’d arrived in the idyllic mountain setting and the college run by the ancient European historian.

While he waited to be received, the secretary informed him that the president wasn’t just a historian but also an authority called to testify in scandalous human rights violations cases, and a translator of ancient Greek.

“America!” Peter bumbled ecstatically. Universities hidden in the woods, like in the Middle Ages. University professors ready for adventure! Historians who plead in famous cases, musician chemists, psychologist bankers, athlete film directors, mathematicians blocking the mise-en-scene, actors turned senators, governors, presidents.

“The baroque? The baroque was your thesis? The baroque and the Dadaist derivation, you say? Fine, just fine. I’d like to hire you on this subject. But I can’t. Be a little more modest. Something else. Something else?”

The candidate was silent; his imagination balked.

“Something else. Something more exotic. Less academic. We have a lot of American literature doctors. As historians, I admit. Something more exotic, another subject?”

The candidate was silent; he couldn’t think of what might be exotic enough for such an exotic country.

“Communism? Could you talk about Communism?”

“No. Not exactly. But if there’s no other way …”

“The Holocaust?”

After the letter from Augustin Gora, President Avakian wasn’t surprised that Gapar wasn’t answering the question.

“You know what this is about. You come from damaged territory. You have a lot to say, I imagine.”

“I don’t. I prefer not to. No.”

Larry gave him a long look and shrugged, dejected.

“Anything else? Another subject. Something unusual.”

“Circus,” muttered Peter to himself, considering the meeting in which he was participating.

“The circus, you say? Did you run a circus?” Gaspar’s former passenger became more animated.

“Not exactly. Somehow, out of curiosity. I’ve read a lot. I was passionate about the subject. I planned a scholarly work, but I never finished it.”

“The history of the circus? The baroque in the circus, the Dada-ism of the circus! Bread and circuses? That’s what the ancients said, right? Panem et circenses. The people need bread and circuses. We’re a popular democracy, we need circus, too, not just bread. And we have it. Circus after circus. Maybe you have another idea.”

Larry hired Peter Gaparas a visiting assistant professor after evaluating the needs of the college and establishing the subject of the new colleague’s first course.

Peter Gapar responded to the prospect of his picaresque American debut without too much astonishment. He expected such unexpected adventures. For those who knew him in his faraway country, the indulgence with which he received the extraordinary and the detachment with which he assimilated intermittent shocks were not at all surprising.

Still, Gora suspected something irregular in this fatalistic submission to chance. Was this the irresponsibility to which he aspired? He’d also dreamed of a similar emancipation, more than once. To be able to be anything, to simulate anything. The freedom of improvisation, metamorphosis and availability. At a certain age, and with an Eastern European background, it seems preferable to confront just about anything, rather than have nothing else happen to you ever again.

Peter reappeared at unexpected moments. Long monologues followed by long absences. Gora’s silences didn’t discourage him. He didn’t limit himself to practical questions — quite natural for a newcomer — he offered intimate and sometimes embarrassing details.

Exile brings together people who previously moved in different circles; Gora was well aware of this state of emergency and indulgence; now it seemed like a substitution, the progressions and surprises of which he measured with some embarrassment.

Reasonably social in his home country, a good comrade and friend in a time of need, Peter seemed to codify his exuberance in small, incidental passages. Some thought him brash. Now he was punishing the listener through aggressive questions and revelations. Was it a suicidal vitality? A kind of trance that defies the normality; it was hard to know anymore whether it was benign or malignant. Was he finally experimenting now, in the American wilderness, with his own narration? Was he accepting his reeducation, the simplifications called for by the pragmatism of his new residence?

“Peter on the phone. I hope the name still means something to you.”

And voila, the ghost returned. Urgency granted it a victorious and superior air.

“Larry was lying in bed. He’d fractured his leg. His apartment was relatively banal, but in the wealthy neighborhood. A long body, in a long bed, the harsh face of a martyr. White plaits, tied in the back like a rat’s tail.”

“You said that Larry was short, with bristly hair, a mustache and exotic goatee.”

“Ah, no, that’s Larry One. We’re talking about the newsman Larry Two. Larry One brought me to Larry Two. A real celebrity, this man! I had no idea. I was seeing him for the first time, and his name didn’t mean anything to me yet.”

Enchanted by what he had to share, Peter allowed himself vast pauses in between sentences, mastering the rhythm of provocation.

“Friday. I was at Dr. Koch’s office again. I was hoping, of course, to run into Lu. And, of course, in vain.”

There was no need for a pause. It was enough that he’d mentioned Lu, their game of cat and mouse, or dog and cat. No, there was no need for such an aggressive silence, no need at all. The silence only emphasized the aggression with which he assaulted the husband.

“On the street, I ran head to head into Larry. Larry One, the president, the historian. I’m used to it. Coincidences hunt me here; they could never find me in my former life. And so, then, Larry, Larry One, the president, the client from the taxi. ‘How are you? Where are you headed? How are things? I haven’t seen you in ages. Are you busy? On your way to meet someone?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Come with me, I’m going to see a friend who’s bedridden.’ We arrive. It’s Larry Two. The famous newsman. The famous intellectual. ‘The Phosphorescent,’ as Avakian calls him.”

Silence. He was waiting for a reaction from Gora, who savored his silences.

“I had the Times Literary Supplement in my hand. I still bother with this nonsense; I haven’t found a cure yet. In the paper, a review of our great Dima.”

This didn’t elicit amazement, either; Gora just gazed at the folder in front of him, the computer and the white gloves on the edge of the table.

“Who could have guessed that Cosmin Dima was Larry Two’s professor! At the same university frequented by the historian Larry One.”

Pauses, breathing, shock; Gora accumulated shocks.

“The beginning of a passionate discussion. Enlightened by the devil, Larry One suddenly proposes that I review the last volume of Dima’s memoirs. Me? Me! I’m speechless. I refuse. No, not me! He feels that he’s pressed a tender point. He’d read the TLS review that scorches Dima. Fascist, Nazi, reactionary, hypocrite beneath the mask of a man of culture. He looks askance at Larry One and insists. I make excuses, I stammer. I find my way out: I can’t write in English. ‘No problem, we’ll find a translator.’ ‘Dima’s biography is complicated,’ I say, ‘the review needs a historian of complicated times.’ I look desperately at the historian, for his confirmation, his help, his salvation. My boss is silent. ‘My man,’ says the invalid, ‘there’s no better historian than life itself, and you have the best qualifications.’ Again he looks at Larry One, who remains silent. ‘Careful, Bedros, make sure your man sends me the review next month, not later than next month.’ Done! Liquidated!”

Gora should have muttered something, at least after this scene, something to himself, should have hummed a song, something, anything. Nothing. Niente.

“And there you have it, Professor Gora; it’s a disaster. Will you save me? Will you write this review instead? It’s great for your curriculum! Larry Two’s journal is important. Plus, you know Dima’s life and work better than I do. I’ll call the journalist and tell him that I found the perfect replacement. The distinguished Professor Augustin Gora will write a better review than I could. Out-stand-ing, that’s Saint Augustin.”

Gora was looking at the lustrous table, full of papers. He rifled through the scribblings and, yes, finally found what he was looking for, pulled the document closer, inspecting it ecstatically, as if it were the transcript of the conversation he was just having with Peter.

“It’s you they asked. I can’t see why you won’t write it.”

“Yes you can; it’s impossible not to. You know the Old Man’s life better than I do. You know what I’m getting into.”

Old Man Dima had died a few years back, at a venerable age, but only Gora had used such familiarity before and after his death.

In the end, the newcomer started to prepare the review. He referred often to Gora’s acquaintances and to the bibliography that Gora recommended. Soon he would change his mind, he didn’t want to write it anymore; then, he would change it back. Gora ad-vised him to ignore the details and periods that would provoke unpleasant reactions on the part of many, including the Gapar family.

But this was exactly the impulse that mobilized Peter! Like a masochist, he solicited ever new information, maintaining all along that Gora was better suited to write the text, deploring his dubious caution in long, furious phrases. Even coming to America, despite real risks, seemed more cautious than remaining in the socialist underground, wasn’t that right, Professor Gora? Prudence was just an elegant term for cowardice, wasn’t it?

Gapar knew that kind of prudence himself; he wasn’t so different among the underground socialist duplicities. And he was still the same now while experimenting with a different metabolism for survival. Evidently, he avoided conflicts with his former country. Just like Gora. Caution prevailed in Gora’s refusal to make a public statement about Dima, but also in his acknowledgement of the Old Man. Ever ready to help a compatriot, Dima had recommended him to some universities. He also couldn’t forget the Old Man’s encyclopedic culture, his books, books, books, his extraordinarily prolific intellect, his kindness. After the scholar’s death, he’d remained in contact with the widow who sanctified his memory. The unsavory episodes of his past would surely have shaken her.

He encouraged the neophyte to confront the risk, guiding him toward an accessible bibliography. Uncomfortable conversations, Peter increasingly more aggressive.

“Who’s writing this review? Am I? Am I to reveal — or rereveal, to be exact — Polichinelle’s secret? Am I to be the one who turns the distinguished deceased over to the public’s vengeance?”

He asked, really asking himself. He wasn’t waiting for an answer, but the interrogated became an accomplice to the interrogation. An indirect complicity.

“Wasn’t this what our ancestors taught us? An eye for an eye. I crucify Saint Dima, the way they crucified the Savior. You recognize this language, sir Gora, you’ve heard it so many times. Did you recoil? You did, I know it, there was a reason you were suspicious. You’re the sinners’ and pagans’ accomplice, just as I am. Did you know? Of course you knew … what you didn’t know is that Judas, precisely Judas, understood the need for martyrdom in the beginning of any new religion! So then, the sinful Judas is a hero. Marriage outside of religion is no blessing, nor is it charitable, but you’re a Christian hero, Saint Judas. You had that nickname long before you met Lu. But I’m not interested in Judas. I’m interested in hearing you tell me why I, specifically I, should be the one to write Saint Dima’s indictment.”

The speaker was exposing himself frenetically; one moment he directed his aggression toward Lu, then toward her parents, her former husband, the whole world.

“And why should I be the one to sympathize with him, to show tenderness toward the great Dima? Because I, too, am exiled, crucified; so I should stand by him in solidarity, no? I should understand what it means to be dispossessed of your country, right? A country like the sun in the sky, right? Or like the moon? You remember? Dima’s comrades glorified collective death. ‘Sweet deliverance,’ they cried. The nation is a compact alliance of believers and martyrs. Democracy means corruption, demagogy, decadence, impurity and disorder and disaster, you remember? Then came the Teutonic defeat, the superior race turned to shit, while their Balkan allies were living their own apocalypse. The revolution of the crooked cross started an industry of death, on the pavement and in the furnaces, underground and in water and in the air, millions of dead. Then followed exile, loneliness, the terror of the moralizers who could unmask the Master’s past. And I’m the one who’s supposed to understand all this? I understand, without effort, Professor.”

He stopped, but only to take a breath of air.

“Yes, the great scholar is worthy of admiration. The work, yes! Without the biography. Why, then, did he publish his memoirs and journals? He couldn’t put down the mirror, not even when it was cracked and dishonest. Of course, I know what the Old Man felt when his library burned. Trembling, isolated, he watched the flames from the street. The ashes of a life about to be swept away forever. Believe me, I know what fire and ash mean, what burning and ash mean.”

He addressed his virtual audience; he couldn’t stand to be his own and only listener.

“Do you know, Professor Gora, how much I hoped to be nothing, finally? I’m a wanderer. A happy and ir-re-spon-si-ble wanderer in the land of wanderers.”

He wasn’t drunk, and there was no sign of any other distress except the frenzy of his tortured mind. He’d rifled through his memory, finding wounds he’d never shared with anyone and which, obviously, he was still sickened to share. He was sickened by the vehemence into which he’d sunk.

A whimper of powerlessness. Self-pity was the less than honorable mark of powerlessness.

It was harder and harder for Gora to accept the punishment to which he was being subjugated.

“You should meet Palade.”

“Portland? I heard he changed his name. Out of anger toward his former country as well as devotion to the new one.”

“Yes, Palade-Portland. He was close to Dima. His admirer. He came to America for him. He knows many things about his Maestro, he could tell you a few things. In fact, I think …”

Professor Gora wiped the sweat off his brow and throat with his palm.

Gapar refused to widen the circle of listeners. After another two phone calls, however, he suddenly became obsessed with the idea of visiting the apprentice wizard. Until then, he’d known the eminent Palade only from his books.

A week of conversations, not so different from the one with Gora some years back.

“The case of Dima has implications that go beyond Dima, that’s why it’s important. Can we ask anyone to admit his own sins in public? We can’t. Especially in death and rebirth and the imposture named exile. You don’t introduce yourself in your new residence by exposing your former filth, you want a clean start, you present yourself clean and new, isn’t that right? Is that imposture? Maybe. You own it, you embody it, until you can’t tell it apart from your former impostures or those to come in the future. It’s the routine of life itself, isn’t that right, Professor? Did you ever imagine such banality? In love and cheated, poor Palade … he can’t let go of that disenchantment. Angry and envenomed. Still, we’ve arrived at the same conclusion. Dima is merely a man, like so many men. The context, the history, the mentality that he represents, yes, it’s worthwhile to aim for this. In the past and in the present. The griping and confusion and crimes of the Nation. Nation, with a capital N. With all the letters large and black. There and anywhere. Yes, yes, he told me about the little hat, as well. About the knitting, as you say.

“Dima hadn’t spoken to Palade about his former comrades, and he couldn’t attack his Communist adversaries. He was in their hands, they could at any point pull out the old documents from the archives … The good Granny hears and sees and says nothing, Palade would say, just like you. The Old Man responded to any difficult question by cracking his boney knuckles and taking up the knitting of his little hat, that’s what your friend Palade, the unrequited lover, would say.”

Days and nights of controversy. Gora anticipated a harsh review. Would Peter Gapar verbalize his hesitations, or the rhetoric of justice?

And what if it’s an admirable text, muttered Gora to himself. It would revive the rumors that had circulated after Peter published Mynheer, when people began to regard him as the author of who knew what masterpiece. That’s all we need!

That’s all we need, not just a poor story or a poor review, but a masterpiece, babbled Gora to himself, assaulted by another attack of Peter’s loquaciousness.

“Should I write in the name of truth, or memory? Do you have any other cliches to offer me?”

Gora held his head in his palms and scrutinized the matte surface of the table, on which the yellow folder entitled RA 0298 was left visible and open.

He didn’t want to listen and couldn’t escape the voice of the phantom. He already knew the variations in the score.

“The Maestro refuses to judge himself, but what about us? What do we know about the Old Man? That he wrote some idiotic articles, after he was enraptured by the vitality and piousness of idiots determined to change the world. Why should that interest me? Because those idiots gassed a sister of mine or because I wouldn’t have been born if she hadn’t died first?”

Ach, Peter’s long lamentations! The listener felt that something was slipping past him in this interrogative fervor.

“I know, I should have written it,” babbled Professor Gora, gripping his head with his hands; he wanted to smash it, to release the worms from his gelatinous brain. “I couldn’t do it! Dima showed me some of his highly improbable generosity, you can be sure. Nor could I harm his wife, that innocent Englishwoman; Merrie would have been devastated if my name were to appear with that review. Yes, Dima is guilty; even Palade confirmed it. He would have been forgiven if he’d asked for forgiveness, I agree with you. Was it a definitive, ideological guilt, a lapse in intelligence? Indirect evil, yes, he could have asked to be forgiven for that, too. But he believed himself to be brilliant, it didn’t matter if he admitted his guilt or asked for amnesty, for his sins to be forgotten. But to ask forgiveness, he’d have had to believe in something. And he only believed in himself! In his supreme endowment, his supreme eminence. The genius, comparable only with other geniuses, but incomparable! Intangible, generous, above everything, in the ether. It would have meant to ask forgiveness of himself. The drunkenness of vanity. The amoral, above the profane! In the stratosphere of the occult, in the illusory Olympic realms.”

“So was he an idiot, a child, an affable monster? That would all be fine, but why also militant?”

This time, Professor Gora sighed, tired of Peter’s wailings.

“Why do I feel pity for him?” cried the newly exiled. “Pity, pure and simple! He lived his life among books and produced books. The idiot, that’s what he believed was essential. It was the game of an aged child. Posterity, immortality, all of that nonsense. I wonder what he felt when his library burned? As if he himself were burning, piece by piece, book by book. The books, arranged so carefully, for Judgment Day. Yes, I’m sorry for him. The idiot that I am is sympathetic and will write sympathetically about your and Palade’s idiot.”

The ghostly guest stopped, but not really. Gora was listening to him but heard himself.

“Was the Utopian joke innocent? Was he getting bored in his lonely cell? Was he tired of isolation, of the futility of words? Was he vitalized by the staging of the vitalists who sing, convert, and kill in the name of God, dreaming of Death’s embrace? And why should I, specifically, understand that? The cannibal beast is waiting for me, too, in the corner of the room, unseen. Cancer, stroke, at your command, ladies and gentlemen. The stateless exile found his revenge, that’s what they’ll say … He wrote the indictment in the blood of the sister that was never to be his sister. That’s what both my detractors and defenders will say.”

He was panting, poor Peter, suffocating with the passion and joy of listening to himself.

“With the blood of his sister, no? Good publicity title. I’m not a magistrate, Professor, I’m not writing in anyone’s name, not even to avenge those who deserve much more than vengeance. Don’t worry, Professor, I’ll be moderate, and careful. I’m a former relative of yours, isn’t that right? By association, of course, by alliance, semi-alliance, discrepancy. Relation by alliance … what kind of alliances can exist between us? Are you afraid, maybe, that I might compromise your position? Don’t worry. The obituary must be honest; it’s enough that the life was protected by lies.”

The word obituary had been uttered with a well-disposed sarcasm. Peter Gapar seemed to intuit more than he knew and to know more than he let on about the obituary dedicated, by Gora, to Maestro Dima.

Gora was gripping his head in his hands once more. “You don’t even know the whole story, my boy. You haven’t heard of Marga Stern, the love of the scholar’s youth. During the war, the Maestro lived in a neutral country, where rumors and spies intersected. He had access to newspapers and information. He knew about the horrors being committed by the Germans and their acolytes, but he was working, day and night, on his Magnum Opus. The shaking brothels allowed him to forget that Germany was losing and that the world was falling into the hands of the Russian beasts and the idiots in the West.”

The phantom continued to yell while Gora continued his own mute monologue. Neither heard the other anymore.

“I read his private journals. I understood his duplicity, his loneliness, his drugs, his lectures, his fascination with death. His literary experiments and his political bedevilment. I also know about Marga Stern.”

A long pause, just like last time. Gora was groaning; Peter Gapar had exhausted the evening’s discourse. Quietly, Peter had disappeared, while Gora continued his own lamentation, “You don’t know everything, my boy, you don’t know. Marga remained in her native country, and the Maestro forgot her name. He was taking a special substance, similar to morphine. A drug he’d gotten from German Nazi soldiers from the front.”

The pause had been a mere illusion, just as last time. A cheap trick for catching his breath and reclaiming his audience. Peter found his rhythm once again and his sonority, and Gora recovered his hearing.

The fury of the phantom gradually covered a whole world, but the world it covered was incomplete.

“Nonsense! The Party editorials that comrade prosecutor Gapar, my loyal father, used to read us in the evenings, at the table, weren’t any better; they were merely promoting opposing cliches. On the one hand, there was the Party of comrade Gapar, and Dima’s saintly bodyguards, on the other! Sure, comrade Gapar paid in advance, at Auschwitz, so he was entitled to error, to foolishness. Was he, I wonder? Did he have the right to believe in commissars who promised paradise?”

Another pause for air, his voice lowered, a sigh.

“And what about us, in this tiresome democracy? Are we following the script? What do you say, Professor? Do we get a new car every few years, a new wife, a new look? Do we renew our organs and our cheek, go daily to the gym and the bank, to our modern temples? Do we buy a vacuum, a hairpiece, spare kidneys, new hearts, second homes? We’re joking, right? Here, any funereal discourse begins with a joke, isn’t that right? That’s what you told me; you were trying to explain the New World to me, Mynheer’s world, isn’t that right?”

Gora didn’t answer. Even his groaning had grown quiet, he seemed to have dozed off.

“Could I revive my unknown sister, I wonder? Or will I obtain immortality from the Great Assassin in the sky? Do you think the Almighty forgot about me, somehow, among his post-Auschwitz projects?”

Gora unclasped his palms from his cheek, pressed them on the edge of the table, strained to raise himself up, pressed the switch on the desk lamp.

The light found him upright, stiff. The glass in the window reflected his wrinkled face and grizzled hair.

The moon was retreating from the sky, defiantly. The dawn was coming, the fires of a new day.

Gora’s face had frozen in the mirror of the window.

The American papers barely mentioned Professor Palade’s assassination. Some articles in the local press, but echoes and rumors continued only within the university.

The stir in his native country was incomparable. In the chaos of post-Communism and the crush of the capitalist emissaries, the East writhed with bitterness and resentment. The wonder that had toppled the dictatorship, and the less wonderful wonders that fol-lowed, intensified the disorienting transition toward something indefinable. The crime happened somewhere far away, in a multicolored gangster’s America; even in his death, the victim mobilized contentious opinions.

A crime with a bizarre aim, perfectly executed, by a professional. Those who’d planned the execution couldn’t have had more than an ideological motive. It was said that Palade’s publications were increasingly critical of the nationalism that Dima had served, and of the ever-active Communist secret police. A Sicilian execution, though not for money; he was an ideological adversary. Was there a connection between extreme right-wing expatriates in America and his native country’s former Communist secret police, which infiltrated everywhere? Palade represented a disturbing voice for both camps.

While he was rewriting the review of Dima’s memoirs for the tenth time, Peter feverishly followed the university news, the police investigations, and speculations drawn from coffee cups and stars by friends of the parapsychologist Palade. He never withdrew the review sent to Larry Two; neither did he supply an addendum about the assassination of Dima’s infidel apprentice.

By the time the text appeared, nearly a year after the assassination, the American police had long given up the investigation due to lack of funds. And yet Larry Two didn’t hesitate to mention the sensational slaying on the cover of the magazine. It would be hard to say whether or how much it helped sales. It certainly perpetuated the rumors in the faraway country. The guilt of the traitor Palade had been connected to the conspiracy against Dima. Gapar had become associated with Palade. Who is hiding behind the name of this Peter and who is this Gapar? Were they code names of the Masons of wherever and everywhere? Or, a strung-out fugitive traitor serving obscure antinationalist interests!

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.

Gapar turned sleepless and irritated, and Gora felt guilty for opting out of writing the text about Dima himself. One of the epithets with which Gapar 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?”

Gapar 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 Gapar’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 Gapar 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-Gapar 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 Gapar was relating the meeting honestly.

“And the refusal of a naive democracy, naturally! The Anglo-Saxon world won’t ever accept him, Dima said, right before taking advantage of the New World’s freedom. Narrow-minded to the rhetoric of progress. Democracy and debate were for the masses’ consumption. It was hard for Palade to move from the unlimited admiration he had for the Guru to suspicion. He’d uncovered documents, he’d scrutinized the gaps in his biography, the coded allusions in his work. He still adored him. An extraordinary spirit, a lucid conversationalist, erudite, childlike, adorable. I didn’t have the unrequited lover’s disappointment to contend with, as he did. I only had to decide if I would write the review.”

“Have you decided?”

“Yes. We’re not going to untie these knots that are so tightly tangled! That’s what Palade yelled. Freedom and spectacle? To hell with that. The sacred and the profane, narcissism and hypocrisy and so on? He was no less fascinated than Dima himself had been fascinated by his esoteric adventure. The revolt was against himself; he was suspicious of himself, suspicious of his own revolt, just as he was suspicious of his admiration for Dima.”

Did the voice of the intruder come from the void or from inside of Gora himself? He himself knew the whole story all too well, and then Palade had told him the same things, as well, and more than once. Dima’s widow had entrusted him with access to the Green Notebooks of the deceased. Him, Gora, but not Palade. In the yellowed pages of a school notebook, an isolated man was struggling with erotic frustration and the frenzy of writing, furious that Germany was incapable of defeating the Communist beast and the democratic chameleon.

“I recalled the novella about the comrades who were tried for terrorism in 1938; I imagined the night when the Movement mobilized; I saw the photograph of the virile Leader, the moral and mystic guide. Was the sacred hidden inside the profane? Did the Maestro still believe that secrets remain confined in the soul’s memory of previous lives? Was it a camouflaged message? Camouflaged in writing, in fiction? These things nagged him to the point of intoxication. There was always ample intoxication of words and alcohol among us. There was no end to questions. What need did Dima have, after the war, for his old obsessions? Why did he continue to see an old, fanatic doctor who still endorsed the slogans of the Movement? Was it the intensity of idolatry, its magic? Drugs, bordello, Utopia, even writing … He would smile like a baby, no longer seeing.”

Gora remembered Palade’s smile. It was no longer clear whether Gapar was quoting Palade or had moved on to his own questions.

He recognized Palade’s discourse, but also Gapar’s seasoning.

“At some point I mentioned to him a former lover of Dima’s, one who stayed behind in the country, in danger,” replied Gora, apropos of nothing. Deported to Transnistria, she’d survived and returned to the village where she’d been hidden for a while, until the authorities found her. After her return, she committed suicide, in the same village. Dima never even looked into her fate.

Gapar wasn’t asking questions any longer, and Gora couldn’t guess if Palade had talked to him about Marga Stern.

“When Palade grew enraptured again with the great Dima, I would intervene. When he would dissect esoteric mysteries or dubious incidents, I would let him be. I watched Ayesha, his Indian fiancee and former student. They both wanted to become Buddhists. ‘Any disorientation was better than orthodoxy,’ Palade cried. ‘Better than any orthodoxy.’ And he gazed, adoringly, at his fiancee. ‘We’re both looking for a religion that’s not a religion. We’ll be Buddhists or Martians or polytheist pagans.’ The girl was laughing; we were all laughing. Those were long days and even longer nights. I didn’t know I’d be representing him postmortem. ‘Write the review,’ he said, ‘it will be useful for the book I’m writing. If our countrymen don’t kill us.’ That’s what he said. He’d received threatening letters, phone calls. He was assaulted on the street by an unknown man who told him that the hour of judgment was near. Bad signs in his horoscope. He was anxious, obsessed. He was living out his destiny intensely. He was working on three books at once, unloading. Students swarmed around him.”

“Had he won them over?”

“He exalted the juvenile imagination with extravagant lectures. An encyclopedic mind and memory, just like Dima’s. He’d enchanted the Indian girl. ‘We’re all searching for Ithaca, exiled just like Odysseus/ that was his leitmotif. We discussed exile often, Dima’s exile, Palade’s exile, yours, mine. Lu’s…”

Gora lay in wait, as usual, for the moment when the phantom would utter the explosive name. He was silent, waiting.

“Often, often we talked about exile, the second chance that becomes the only one. Was it an imposture? We’re the same and we’re different, we rid ourselves of ourselves, we change without changing. Palade was head over heels in love, vitalized. The right to change, to happiness! The opportunity wasn’t about truth, but about love.”

Love, happiness, the pathetic words were preparing the attack, and Gora waited.

“Palade had found a new wife; you’re the only one left without one. Here you can choose. Whatever your heart desires. Choose your heart. That’s all.”

Palade had also spoken with Gora about threats and stalkers. The professor didn’t diminish the gravity of the danger, only its mystique. “You receive the results from some medical tests. You have cancer, an incurable kind. Everything changes around you. You’re condemned! You look behind you with bitterness and ahead with terror. This I understand. Terror of death provoked by a medical test, not by some vague premonition.”

Palade had called him the night before the assassination.

“This time, it’s serious. I can feel it. Don’t ask me what or how.”

Gora advised him to tell the police. He refused, as he’d refused many times before; he didn’t trust the police.

“She’s not here. Ayesha isn’t here. When she leaves, I’m vulnerable. She went to see her mother who isn’t well. She’ll be gone for two days. They know. This time it’s for real. I can feel it.”

He was quiet, but not for long. He wanted to add something.

“Dima asked me at one point to recommend a student to help him rearrange his library and archives. I suggested a student of mine, Philip Mendel. You could distinguish his ethnicity by his name and his nose. ‘I don’t want this young man to be going through our papers,’ said Mrs. Dima. ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t feel comfortable with him,’ she said. An adorable woman, as you know. Refined, cultured, aristocratic. They were worried about indiscretions.”

Gora wasn’t interested in these asides; he kept repeating that the police needed to be alerted. He suspected that Palade hadn’t revealed all the ins and outs of the danger, but the police should be alerted. Something needed to be done.

“A kitsch farce,” retorted Gapar. Death is no farce, it has a doomed compass and no sense of humor. Palade had no way of being sure that destiny was drawing out the fatal circle. How could he be sure? No one can be sure. Premonitions, that’s all.

Climbed up on the toilet seat in the bathroom, the mercenary leaned toward the victim, over the top of the short and thin wall that separated them, with a small weapon, like a toy. A victim on a toilet seat!

The face of the deceased aged unexpectedly in the moment when the game abruptly stopped time.

Gapar ignored Dima’s and Palade’s obsession for the occult. “I don’t have an organ for perceiving the invisible. The occult is a comic subject. A farce,” Peter would say, with the firmness belonging to a man of conviction.

The occult occupied a central place in Dima’s and Palade’s lives.

Palade’s death remained sealed with mystery; this couldn’t be ignored. Even if you refused to tie the assassin to the coded games of fatality.

From the sociable and charming immigrant defined by confused, first attempts to adapt to a new place and time, Gora had turned into a sullen and bizarre hermit. Just when he’d gotten past the initial hardships and regained the social status to which he was entitled.

At the start, everything had enchanted him. The inhibitions long exercised in his old byzantine socialism were dissolving effortlessly, as if through magic. He was rapidly liberating himself from the self that had inhabited him in the closed and perverted society of compulsory bliss. He was fascinated by the contrasts and the expansive-ness of America, the joviality and innocence, simplicity, the indiscriminate cordiality. He was hopeful, waiting for news that his wife had decided, finally, to follow him.

At the end of the Fulbright scholarship, he promptly asked for political asylum. He was hired at the Voice of America. His intellectual prestige was an advantage over other collaborators, and he’d found himself the head of the department that dealt with his far-off country. Those who worked with him then recalled his curiosity and competence. His lack of any overbearing managerial tendencies, his luminous camaraderie. The collective harmony was shattered, however, by the arrival of an arrogant and rigid dissident.

“The Jap,” as they called him, incited tension. He was abrupt, full of himself and full of the frustrations of a timid employee who wants to be Boss. He would defy the rules and the work schedule, would go missing for days on end, reappearing serenely and sarcastically, wearing the armor of a celebrity. Gora’s efforts to temper the conflicts failed; the pedagogy of moderation couldn’t subdue the rancor and volatility of the newcomer. In desperation, he called on Dima, who could facilitate his temporary engagement at a state university. Readily welcome and quickly distinguished as a widely read polyglot, Gora was hired permanently. He transferred afterward to Avakian’s college, and from there, to a big university. He frequented circles of immigrants; he seemed to have some vague, budding, amicable (or downright amorous) ties; as an experiment, he began the column “Necrology” in a journal for exiles. He wrote only about the deceased, whether these were deceased ideas or books or ideological or religious movements.

Those who knew him knew him as the brilliant scholar, the former participant in secret debates in an attic refashioned as intellectual redoubt; they expected more from him. It seemed that he himself hadn’t forgotten the large attic with the enormous skylight, where we’d met for the first time.

Mihnea had brought me there, curious to watch my reaction to the heated discussions. I was silent and attentive among the participants; I didn’t comment and I didn’t inform anyone, not even Mihnea, before taking leave of that feverish company. Bookish discussions with long lines of dialogue, like essays read out loud. I was intrigued by those people, their way of speaking as if they were writing, instead of the other way around, which is a much more common occurrence. In the end, their tirades bored me, though I never forgot them. They were excessive and bizarre, not just for the promiscuous intellectual that I was then; but I never again frequented troublesome attics.

Neither Mihnea Palade, nor Augustin Gora, nor Lu, suspected that they would meet me again, sometime. As for Peter Gapar, he wasn’t there. At that time he was still a teenager in the province.

None of us suspected, then, that we’d see each other again in exile, across decades and meridians.