The Lair

Part II

The old trees, the uncertain sky of spring: Dr. Koch is there. The narrow waiting room, the diplomas arranged on the office walls, the doctor among them. In the park, a trio of black puppeteers juggling the strings of the marionettes in the bombardment of music. The doctor among them. The playground, the swimming pool. Alleys to the left and right. Passersby of all ages and races. Dr. Koch cloned in dozens of hurried impersonators.

The kaleidoscope of the citadel and little Dr. Koch in the center.

The vise was squeezing his forehead and temples. Two expired sedatives from the old Gomorrah and a fresh, perfect aspirin from fresh, perfect Babylon. Night after night, gathered into one night.

Peter Gapar, thrown on the banks of a new morning. In the mirror. The little gnome Koch repeated the sentence, “Have you looked in the mirror? An elephant! An elephant. The scale doesn’t lie. An elephant.”

Soon the elephant finds himself on a bench, in the nearby park. He leaves the park; he looks at his watch. His gaze floats up, to the sky. The present, the motto of his new life: the present. That’s all. The unknown extends a small, white hand.

“A TV commercial. It pays well. The chess player concentrating on the match will slowly extend a hand toward the glass of Coke.”

The corner of Broadway and 63rd Street. One step to the left, then another. Taxi! The yellow cab brakes at the curb’s edge.

Above the steering wheel, the photo and the name of the driver. Russian accent. The hoarse voice of a smoker. A wide, gentle face, small eyes, large teeth, a brow furrowed with wrinkles. Lyova drives calmly, slowly. In front of the train station, he gently stops the motor and, simultaneously, the meter.

“Eight dollars.”

The passenger stammers, doesn’t stammer.

“Two dollars! That’s all I have, two dollars. My credit card is in my wallet, which I forgot at the library. In the cafeteria of the library. Or, maybe, at Dr. Koch’s office. Forgive me. I have a new MetroCard, worth twenty dollars. I will give you that. I bought it today.”

“Get out of here with your MetroCard! Get out, get out!” yells Lyova, swearing in Russian, or in Ukrainian.

The madman doesn’t move.

“Give me your address.”

“What address?”

“Your address. Your phone number. Your bank account.”

“You want my email, too? You can’t do anything without an email address these days.”

“Anything, just so I can find you and send you the money. The debt I owe you.”

Lyova looks the crazy man in the eyes, like those ophthalmologists who examine the retinas of paralytics. He pulls out the pad of receipts from the right of the steering wheel, tears a sheet and extends it to the passenger.

“Okay. I hope you won’t be back.”

“No danger of that.”

The crowd. The hubbub, the haze. After a while, after looking at the departure schedule, the traveler discovers platform number 9.

The present, that’s all there is. The city on the Moon. It’s not so bad, it could be worse, thinks the passenger. The Russian, that is the Ukrainian, that is the Soviet, was a decent man. A decent day, that’s the conclusion, Doctor.

The river travels gently along the left side of the train. You never wade twice in the same primordial water, which never ages, and which is never the same. A fluid horizon, a fluid, therapeutic sleep.

The conductor taps him gingerly on the shoulder. The sleeper quickly grabs his bag and his coat.

And now he’s off the train, addled, in the station, gazing at the wide and gentle river in front of him. The platform is deserted, mountains in the distance, the river a step away.

A cold, clear afternoon. The beginning of the world. The end of the world. In between them, a short armistice. The chronometer swallows the seconds of the calendar.

The day hasn’t surrendered to the black waters, it isn’t nighttime yet. Depleted, Peter moves from the old couch to the old armchair. He gets up, staggering on his long, old legs. One small step and a big step and another small one. To the vault of the bed.

Midnight. The rustling of the woods. Nocturnal waters surrounding the cabin. Murmurs, babblings. The numbed body, the mind besmirched. The body is our house, according to little Avicenna.

The day hadn’t started in front of Barnes & Noble, where the TV producer Mr. Curtis had appeared, nor in the office of Dr. Koch, but in the cabin in the woods, in the all-forgiving vault of the bed.

You wake up a mole, a mollusk, a roach. Like yesterday morning, like the day before that. In no rush to free yourself of the night’s tombstone.

You remember the chest pains of the previous night. The vise squeezes your forehead and the temples. Death? It isn’t eternal peace, but a stubbornly recurring nightmare.

It was late, he could no longer call the doctor. The doctors are bored; to prove to them that it’s a matter of life and death, you have to transmit a final whimper and die on the spot, and that’s it. He swallowed two expired sedatives from the old Gomorrah and a fresh, perfect aspirin from the fresh, perfect Babylon, where he found himself now. You have to learn to get used to yourself, you vagrant. Night after night collected into a single night. Neglect, the dilation of membranes and a shapeless shell. Anxiety, numbness, sudden awakenings.

No, he hadn’t died. Evidently, he was alive, thrown on the banks of the new morning by the alarm of the phone. He twists his pachyderm body from one side to the other, the bed whines; he rises, finally. In front of the mirror: an elephant! Not a mole or roach, but an elephant, unprepared for the day’s little tumbling routines.

He lowers himself onto his heavy legs and sighs. A buffoon, in front of the mirror. The phone. The phone is ringing. The voice of little Dora, the delicate Spanish woman with the thick voice.

“The doctor arrived ten minutes ago. He received your message and is waiting for you. Dr. Koch is waiting for you. Today, at one.”

“May I speak with Lu?”

Dora loses her patience, flustered.

“No, Lu isn’t here. And I’m in a hurry, my sister is here to see me. Okay, we’re waiting for you. One o’clock, today, Friday.”

Soft legs, belly hanging, puffed like a sack.

He shouldn’t have called Koch! He’s in no mood for admonishments.

“You’re in the strangers’ country, where no one is a stranger. Unhappiness isn’t the domicile of the chosen people, you should know! If you don’t believe me, return to rotten Denmark like Hamlet and your obituary will be written in your native language!”

An arrogant little gnome, Monsieur Koch! Made to give lectures, not consultations.

The patient comes to the office of rhetoric for Lu. The mystery is no longer a mystery; the doctor’s employee skips out every time. Ever since his stratagem was discovered, the pachyderm is no longer welcomed like an honored guest and admitted immediately into the office, as he had been previously. He must obediently wait his turn. So much the better! In a half an hour, who knows, a miracle might happen. What if Lu, hurrying to escape, accidentally forgets her purse? Maybe no sooner than she’s left, she will reappear, carelessly, in front of the stalker.

The door opens. Koch makes a weary sign.

The patient follows him into the office. Flustered, he collapses into Avicenna’s armchair. With an index finger, Koch sends him promptly to his own place.

“On the scale.”

The scale is unfriendly. There will be admonishments, therapeutic offenses.

Koch seems to have lost interest in the spectacle, however. He takes a long look at the patient, from top to bottom, straightens his little, freckled finger toward the red needle of the scale, then toward the patient, then again toward the scale.

“An elephant! You’re like an elephant. The scale doesn’t lie. An elephant!”

Soon, the elephant finds himself outside on a bench, in a nearby park. He considers the passersby and their impatience before their weekly rest.

He leaves the park and looks at his watch. He gazes up at the sky.

The present! The present, the pedestrian repeats the motto of his new life and enters Barnes & Noble, Broadway, corner of 66th Street.

“Do you, by any chance, have postcards of elephants?”

The young man behind the computer gives him a long and attentive look.

“I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any, I don’t think.”

“How is that possible? It’s the country’s political symbol. Are all the bookstores Democrats?”

The young man becomes more voluble.

“No, we don’t have the donkey, either… I don’t think we have postcards with elephants or donkeys. But you can look. Here, on the ground floor, to the left, there are albums, art prints, photographs. To the left, around the corner.”

Peter rifles scrupulously through the posters, albums, piles of postcards and. . finds more than he’d hoped for. A red sky, two elephants advancing, in the air, one toward the other, with immense burdens on their backs. Long, thin legs, from the sky to the ground. Dalí.

He leaves the bookstore with the print in hand, raises his gaze toward the sky; stupefied, he finds himself faced with an unknown man who stretches out a small, white hand.

James Curtis.

The day is over, Peter fills a glass full of water, and another. He doesn’t turn on the light, the headlights from the parking lot nearby are enough. He throws himself into the armchair, moves to the couch, now fully awake. On the table, the pile of letters from a week, or two. Envelopes, ads, fliers, magazines, postcards. Junk mail. He pushes the heap to the edge of the table. The present becomes the past; yesterday morning, P.O. Box 1079, ^me taxi to the station, the river, the train, the crowd in Penn Station, the library, Koch’s office where Lu was hiding, the consultation, the humiliation routine. The Dali sky, the Dali elephants. The producer Curtis. Lyova, the compassionate taxi driver from Babel’s Odessa.

He gets up, he walks toward the coatrack; he finds in the pocket of his coat the business card with the golden name James Curtis, and he throws it onto the pile of letters. The proof of the day that was and wasn’t.

The station, the train, the primordial waters, the small terminal station, another taxi. No longer Lyova Boltanski, but Red Hat Jerry. The throb in his left shoulder, the sickly hiss. Words barely get through. Nine dollars and fifty cents! If you have no money, be quiet until you reach the destination, the scatterbrained Peter Gaparhad learned. You ask the driver to wait, you’ll be back with the money in a minute. One minute, two, however long it takes to search the pockets of your pants and coats and shirts, where you forget your white money for your black days. In the end, you scrounge up fourteen dollars. The driver deserves twelve. Two dollars left. Two new dollars and two new dollars make four, four quarters make the whole.

The night follows, sleep, nocturnal turbulence. It comes again and again, the dawn, you wake up an elephant, unprepared for the day’s little tumbling routines.

He’d learned recently from the papers that Oliver the circus elephant was having a harder and harder time memorizing his tricks. One evening he simply abandoned the arena, completely disoriented. Initially prepared to punish him, the trainer found himself behind the scenes of an even more powerful show; defeated and collapsing on his four giant legs, Oliver sighed and sighed heartrending sighs. Tears poured down his ashen and wrinkled face. Peter gazed at him, troubled, in the mirror.

Another day, a new week under Dalí’s cupola, Dali the ringmaster.

He keeps reading books, magazines, letters. They accumulate, a year’s worth, collecting since the day he plunged into the college in the woods, books, letters from students and professors and the administration, scholarly journals and political appeals and juvenile announcements. Tara’s letter. He didn’t forget where he’d put it, this he didn’t forget. Any indictment should be preserved.

Dear Professor,

My mother called me with my midterm grades …

Why didn’t you give me a “Fail,” or at least an “Incomplete”??? I never handed in the final. Another professor treated me much better-he failed me! I respect him. It’s the first time that someone proved himself honest with me, in terms I’ve established. That’s a relief. Freedom. I was hoping for at least two shameful marks. So I can finally break down. You’ve deceived me.

The prologue described the tone of the rest.

I had even prepared my mother, warning her that I didn’t have much to show for this semester. In response, she sent me lingerie. I wrote to my brother. He responded with a confession: he’s gay. As in, what the hell do I know about depression?! He sent me a box of cookies and my stuffed rabbit from childhood.

Tell me honestly, do you ever fail anyone? Am I too vain to imagine this possibility?

“Careful, my dear vagabond,” says President Larry, “these days the universities are run by the students, their parents, their money, and their lawyers. Professors are just part of the decor. You wake up, when you least expect it, in a mess you couldn’t have imagined in that sweet penal colony that you escaped.” And if Larry One says this, it must be true.

The extempore professor should inform the dean of any studentrelation problems. That’s what President Larry advises.

Dear Rosemarie,

As I’ve mentioned, Tara Nelson was one of the best students in my class that semester, but she never handed in the final. I gave her a good mark anyway. She’d done extremely well on previous assignments and her oral presentation was very strong. The same with class discussion; she frequently gave a perfect performance.

She has just sent me her final. It’s very good. I am attaching her letter, as promised. Very unsettling! Just like the short telephone conversation I had with her yesterday, just like our short meeting last Tuesday, when she came to apologize for the letter. It is possible she is going through some kind of depression and may need help.

Tara didn’t drop out of college, as she’d planned, nor did she go home for summer vacation. She found a job in the library archives. He ran into her one evening, walking alone along the campus alleys. Then, another time, having a coffee, in the library hall. Then, more regularly.

The yellow envelope appeared one morning in May. Here it was again, even more yellow, on the dawn of a March morning, after almost a year! In the mess that consisted of his papers and memories, the student’s letter could have gotten lost. But it wasn’t lost.

I am sending the final late. The product of an obligation, not of thinking. Does it stink, or does it merely have an odor? It’s not a pedantic difference. A stink is repulsive, an odor merely unpleasant. Dirty lingerie stinks. Old food has an odor. Now that I really think about it, this paper is an inoffensive combination. A faint odor.

Five typed pages, in small font.

In his first year of teaching, Gapar failed six students in a class of fourteen. After another year, he learned generosity, tolerance, the humor of the multicultural. The marks varied among sufficient, good, very good, with a plus or minus here and there.

Here’s the final, rambling, banal, redundant. The final itself might not be insipid, but I am furious. And it’s clear with whom I’m furious. I was determined to obtain a beautiful bouquet of bad marks, a real cry for help. And then you come along and decided to be the Lord of Goodwill. A benevolent Hardnose. A kind man. “I’ll give the poor girl a very good, no matter what. She has nice legs, she shows potential, and I have no idea, in fact, where I misplaced her final. In any case, good marks all around.”

Freedom’s spoiled brats! They ask for understanding, politeness, and sympathy, and you get a kick in the ass in return.

I’m in a downward spiral of wretchedness and you offer me sympathy! “Sweet,” would be the right word. You’re sweet, and I hate you for this.

I don’t hate you, I detest you. I detest your sufficiency. You offer an undeserved mark, why? To command respect? Though you seem to be a distracted, absent dreamer, you have an unexpectedly profound relationship to yourself. You seem to be elsewhere, waiting, ready to intersect with the unexpected. Your adroitness and unhappiness seem precious to you. You flaunt your isolation, and that drives me crazy. The only conversation we could ever have would be on terms proposed by you. If those terms are violated, you become eloquent. In fact, the only thing I know about you is that you should shave more often.

What had remained with him from last year’s epistle? Nice legs. Yes, those legs are the same. You should shave more often. Yes, this is still valid.

The only way to explain the mark you gave me, and the reaction it produced, is to call it ridiculous. Have you ever imagined something like this? Do you care?

What does the beauty from the American woods know about the refugee who doesn’t shave regularly? And what does the wandering elephant know about the grief of the new generation in the New World?

My mother asked me to see a shrink. I slammed the phone in her ear; I cried, then I laughed. “How can you say you’re afraid of air?” Of air! Air! Yes, of nothing, of nothingness. Next week when she calls me, she’ll have forgotten what she said. I don’t want pity, or empathy, or to be evaluated, as you did. Who do you think you are, to be nice to me? You passed me one morning on the way to the library. You mumbled who knows what. I mumbled something, too. I swore at you! Who gives you the right to be kind to me? I hope it rains on your entire vacation!

Gapar folds the letter back up and puts it in its yellow envelope, on top of the paper pile. He retreats. The all-forgiving bed. A long and gentle sleep. Saturday, even the Great Anonymous One rests.

P.O. Box 1079. You open it by turning the little disk on the little window, forming the code. If you forget or mess up the code, you can’t open it. You take the little pink card out of your wallet, and you read the instructions. Did you forget or lose the card? The clerk behind the counter looks in her database, finds your name, you receive a new pink card, with instructions. Once, twice, three times. More than that would be too much.

In the end, Tara offered to manage Professor Gaspar’s mail. She was no longer his student, but they were seeing each other frequently. He’d entrusted her with the little card with the number and code, asked her to bring him his mail once a week, on Saturdays, after sorting it. Appeals from philanthropic institutions and commercial companies, invitations to conferences, shows, lectures, political demonstrations for a better world, the colloquium on terrorism, editorial catalogues, the new gym schedule, the list of student drivers, typists, gardeners, painters, IT instructors. The recipient is addressed by his first name, as among old friends. The lack of protocol reminds you that you are counted among the earth-bound, and that they, just like you, receive messages from the terrestrial family.

He wasn’t interested in the ads, and there was no one to send him personal letters. Tara would throw out the useless letters and keep the useful ones. It was the simple maintenance of junk. The final triage belonged to the addressee.

Saturday, at twilight, Tara knocks on the door. The door opens, Professor Gapar stands on the threshold and looks out at the snowy wood. He closes the door, turns on the radio. Mozart. Crystalline, like the winter.

Tara takes in the room with a single look, as she usually does, as if seeing it for the first time. A way of entering an event rather than a house. A couch, two armchairs. Bookshelves, folders. The calendar near the telephone. The curtain. The heap of old letters strewn on the table. Where is the imminent event hiding, waiting? The old yellow envelope is sleeping in the nightstand drawer.

Tara approaches the table, unloads the new pile on top of the old pile, throws her jacket on the couch.

Supple, pale, smiling. The youthful mane of her hair gathered into a tail hangs on her shoulder, over her sweater, which is as white as snow. Tight black pants, long legs, in boots. The red painted nail on the index finger points at the table full of papers.

“You didn’t sort anything. Everything I did last week and two weeks ago and this week was for nothing. Better to just throw everything out. We’ll tell Pegg at the post office to give your P.O. Box to someone else.”

“You’re right,” smiled Peter Gapar. “Done; we’ll decide together! It won’t take long. If I keep putting it off, this garbage will suffocate me.”

He lengthens himself out in the armchair. Props his legs up on the table, the way Americans do. Tara in the other armchair. Between them, the mail of the last two, three weeks.

Tara hands the professor an envelope. If it looks like garbage, he tears it and throws it on the ground, to the left. If it seems useful, he keeps it and throws it on the ground, to the right.

Through the window, the sleepy forest. On the radio, the crystalline child, Mozart. In the facing armchair, the young woman of the New World. The present’s tenant doesn’t quite feel up to the level of the surreal that is being offered him.

“A coffee?”

“Later. Let’s finish this first. You threw away the card.”

“What card?”

“The card with the text from the New York Times.”

“Was it important?”

“You didn’t even look at it, and you threw it out.”

“It didn’t interest me.”

“I sorted this mail! And I kept that postcard.”

“All right, let’s see it. If I haven’t torn it.”

“You didn’t tear it. I was watching you. You merely threw it away.” Peter bends down, rifles through the pile and recuperates the postcard.

“You’re right, I didn’t look carefully. And now that I’m looking, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see. The image is too small. A hammer and sickle? I can see that. A letter to the editor. I was amazed by the front page article of October 4, which talks about the State Hermitage Museum’s intention to exhibit Impressionist art considered lost during World War II. An old piece, from last October. We’re in a different year.”

“So much the more interesting. Read on to the end.”

“Okay, I will read on. In the mid 1970s, on a trip to Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, I visited the Hermitage. I asked the guide if I could see the French Impressionist paintings recovered from Germany and brought to the USSR at the end of World War II. Interesting? This seems interesting to you?”

“I thought you were going to read to the end.”

“Much to the delight of my mother… eh, same old story. Russian mother, probably came here sixty years ago, when she was eight. To my mother’s delight, and to the delight of the other six Americans in our group, the guide brought us to a separate room of the Hermitage. We then entered an elevator that seemed unused, which took us to the floor above. There were several rooms full of celebrated works. You want me to go on?”

“Yes, that’s what I want, go on.”

“We were allowed to walk around and look at the paintings. I wonder how many other foreign tourists benefited from a similar privilege while visiting the Hermitage. Neither the guide, nor the museum’s administration seemed surprised at our request.

“So, they were lucky; they were privileged; the mother will tell her neighbors all about it when she gets home. Is that all? I see there’s more. The end is in the interrogative. An admonishment addressed to the journalist. What gave you the impression that this collection was a ‘secret of the state’? Should I look for the article to which this refers? Male or female? Did you find it already for me, the October 4 New York Times?

“I didn’t look for it. The postcard has two sides. Text on both sides.”

The professor turns it over.

“So, then, the frontispiece of the New York Times, Wednesday, October 12. A collage.”

“Yes, a collage.”

“The postcard is divided by a vertical line. On the right, the address. My address, Professor, and so on, College, and so on, et cetera. On the left, the text. A direct address. First name. As though between old acquaintances who’ve never even met. My dear so and so. Dear Peter. That’s what the shops teach me. To dress elegantly, to buy cars, bathrobes and umbrellas, to frequent the gyms and the banks that offer loans and the magicians selling the castle I dreamed of in childhood. Next time. . Next time I kill you, I promise. The labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting. Yours truly, D. What’s this?”

“I don’t know.”

“A joke.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe something more?”

“I don’t know. You need to show it to the dean.”

“The dean? Nonsense like this must happen a million times a day. D? That’s how it’s signed. D-Death? Just like that, death?”

“Crimes are common in this country. We take jokes seriously. And you told me about a crime. It seemed like a farce, but it wasn’t.”

“That crime took place here, in America, but the cause for it was in a different place.”

“A compatriot. Another professor.”

“He actually was a professor. I’m just pretending.”

“An unsolved crime, you were saying. The victim was the author of many books and a few doctorates. He entrusted you to write the review that scandalized your former country. A scandal followed; you both knew that it would. The professor was killed, and the reviewer, the impostor, as you say, was bombarded with the press’s garbage.”

“I don’t see the connection. The assassination story was serious. Tied to the former secret police.”

“So you’ve mentioned. The former secret police and the new secret police.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“That’s what you always say. More complicated. When you talk about the past and when you talk about the present. Complicated. Here, we’re in the country of simplifications. For the masses’ consumption, that’s the rule.”

Peter Gapar feels infantilized again, groping about in the unknown. A year ago, Tara was addressing him, a maladroit Martian and stranger to the lay of the land and the rhythms of the times, with ferocity and impudence. Now she was protecting him!

Peter Gaparis quiet. He doesn’t look at his guest, he doesn’t want her to see his hands, feet, hair, lips.

“You have to give the dean that postcard.”

“The dean?”

“Yes, the sailor who conquered the oceans, became a doctor of psychology and is now the dean of a college. He trained the baseball team here, if you want to know. That’s America for you! Mr. Carey, the dean of the college, not Rosemarie Black, the dean of students. So then, Carey, P.C. for short.”

The professor listens attentively and is inattentively quiet.

“Or speak directly to Jennifer.”

“Which Jennifer?”

“Jennifer Tang, the head of security. An elegant and civilized woman.”

“How do you know?”

“I know a few things about a few things. Jennifer Tang is the widow of an extraordinary Vietnamese professor of Oriental cultures. He was wounded in the war the wonderful American forces lost. She cared for him to his death, like a nun. Then she got herself hired by the college and became the head of security. She’s worth meeting with. Elegant, delicate. Made of steel. Blonde, besides.”

“A blonde Vietnamese?”

“Dyed. Interesting, you’ll see. . So, Jennifer Tang, J.T.” “You know too much.”

For a second, Professor Gapar seemed animated.

“I’m not done. She likes girls. It’s known and it’s tolerated. You’ve probably noticed that there’s more tolerance now, for women and men with partners of the same sex. More than for others of us. In September, when classes start, there’s always competition among the boys and girls for the new girls. The old girls usually win. You didn’t know that.”

“No, that’s another thing I didn’t know,” the professor admits, modestly. “But I’m not going to go to the sailor, nor to the blonde Vietnamese. I don’t want to look any more ridiculous than I already do. The role I’ve been sentenced to is enough for me.”

“What role is that?”

“The refugee. The oddball. The weirdo. He connects, but he doesn’t connect. Communicates, but doesn’t communicate.”

“Not true. I know someone with whom he communicates.”

“But he doesn’t shave regularly.”

They both smile, but the mood doesn’t slacken. Peter no longer stares at his knees. He watches Tara, who understands that he doesn’t, in fact, see her.

“That’s it, we’re going to have a coffee. I’ve accomplished my mission; I sorted the mail, and I deserve a cup of coffee. If you want, I’ll check once more, after I leave. If not, I won’t. Now, coffee. Make some coffee.”

Gapar gets up. On the way to the kitchen, he turns off the radio. Mozart is finished, and Wagner can be quiet. He could really go for a glass of wine. But he’d better not. “Be careful,” President Larry had said, “and keep your office door open.” The girls walk around with their tits hanging out. If you look too closely and you also happen to have glasses, they’ll cry rape or God knows what. Keep the door open, or you’ll get into trouble.

The cottage wasn’t his office, though. The breasts of the student were covered by a sweater that went all the way up to her neck. Should he offer her a glass of wine? Better not. He’d bought Tara’s favorite apple pie from the library cafeteria.

The professor appears with the tray, the student is flipping through a book. She doesn’t help him, as she usually would; she waits to be served. She knows he’s not too dexterous, but she doesn’t get up to help him. She watches attentively how he arranges the plates and cuts the pie.

“I could really drink a glass of wine,” she says.

Silence. The tenant of the present is silent.

“If you have any, I’d like to drink a glass of wine. You won’t be arrested. I’m over twenty-one, I’m allowed. And it’s a winter evening.”

“In that case, vodka’s better.”

“No, no hard liquor. A glass of wine, if you have any.”

“I do. Red wine.”

“Perfect.”

They resume the conversation. The Eastern European professor’s assassin; the review published nearly two years ago; the famous compatriot’s and the victim’s memoirs.

Exotic subjects. Peter Gapar knows himself to be an exotic figure in the carnival of freedom.

Red sky. A burning bower. Two elephants on stilts approaching one another. Bodies in the sky, thin, infinite legs to the ground.

A fabulous dragonfly, with the body and aspect of an elephant. A primordial stork-turned-elephant. Delicate, transparent, diaphanous extensions, they barely touch the ground. Astral, archaic insects out of the prehistoric wilderness. Elephant bodies on implausible, celestial baguettes. Giant, velveteen ears, imperial tusks, silt oozing from their trunks.

The backs of the pachyderms are covered with carpets, and on each carpet, a funereal stone. Between the stone and the carpet, space; the stones are floating in the air. The trunk of the female to the left is turning like a crank. The male lowers his trunk apathetically, gazes down and faraway: smoky hills, the landing pad, the guard’s post, two scarecrows running with a flag and a torch.

The male and the female try, in vain, to get close to each other. The stilts move in place. The sky is striated with the arrows of their thin legs, which seem as though they might collapse under the weight of the bodies. The male on the right, the female on the left. The tombstones wobble; the eye painted on the carpet wobbles, about to fall into the abyss below, where the infernal alarm sounds.

Gapar jumps, awakened by the rattling windows. He’s not in Lu’s room; it’s a different hotel, a different room, but the alarm has woken him up for good now.

The caravan of firetrucks in the Lunar City. At the fire station across the street, the sirens scream; the day’s fire-breathing mouth opens. He lies numbly in his bed. The minute hand approaches eight o’clock. He lifts the receiver, slowly dialing the number of the all-knowing Gora. Gora picks up the phone, but Gapar changes his mind; he puts the phone back in its cradle.

The city of wanderers; skyscrapers scrape Dali’s sky. Below, the throng of that particular moment. The ogre stares ponderously out the window. The gangster of the garbage cans is as punctual as ever, carrying his great leaden luggage in his right hand. Military pants, yellow work boots, the tight tank top pulled over the bulging, battle-ready torso. In his clay head destiny has hollowed out large red eye sockets. Beardless, clay cheeks. Long, blond hairs covered in mucus extend from his nostrils. Cracked lips, crooked grin, tooth-less mouth, two yellowed walrus fangs, a stony neck, a long, flat, massive nose. His arms are short and pudgy, just like his body; the vigor of an assassin.

Watch him on the street corner, dragging his suitcase full of meteorites. At every step, he sags with the effort.

The first garbage basket. He rummages, he pulls out the bag, opens it, pulls out the opened can, throws it back, takes another bag, opens his luggage, bends over, stuffs the bag back in. He crosses to the opposite sidewalk; he bends over the basket. In his hand, another bag. He pulls out the remains of a loaf of bread, throws the bag, stuffs the bread in his pocket, waits for the light to turn green, crosses toward the opposite post, stops, bends over the basket, opens the luggage, closes the luggage. He sits on a bench in the small square. Nearby, the luggage filled with lead or mercury or cadavers. He slurps from the plastic cup gleaned from the last basket, sinks his mammoth fangs into the bread.

Head upturned, looking into the infinite. The nose sniffs out the danger; the nostrils’ gelatin-covered antennae tremble. Mouth cracked open, exposing his prehistoric fangs. Passersby stop, then hurriedly move away.

Gapar can start his day. The void’s gatekeeper has reconfirmed reality. He abandons the hotel; the library is nearby. You bookish hunter, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, some decoy in the fog of memory, a quotation, known to you at some point, lost in the jungle of another language; you memorized it in your own tongue; you recognize it, it seems, but you don’t recognize it in the language into which you have migrated.

The mind rolls through the old refrains. Fragments unwinding, rewound. The threatening postcard! The quotation! The code of a different dictionary. The cadences of the past reject the language borrowed in this newer age. That was another time, inconvertible. Next time I kill you sounded different in the Gomorrah of juvenile jubilations. The look of the words themselves, their sound when read aloud; the hypnosis of the past won’t migrate into the substitutions of exile. A pent-up memory; a frozen flower that won’t open.

No, he couldn’t place the quotation. The new words didn’t bring back the old ones; yesterday’s sounds wouldn’t collaborate with today’s, and the night that separated them in time was starless.

He’d fallen again in the trap of hunting for words. Labyrinth? Invisible crime? A new, impenetrable code.

The beggar who is no beggar rotates the empty, heavy luggage on the surface of the planet; he is here, a step away, bent over the garbage basket, then the next garbage basket and the next, until he throws himself into the last basket.

The square in front of the modest hotel. Gapar collapses, humiliated, on the bench. His eyes turned up toward the foreign sky. He doesn’t have the courage to turn his gaze toward his neighbor; he sees only the military boots. Nearby, the guard of the grottos. Stubby, rough hands, legs of steel, the head of an ogre, bottomless eye sockets. Thin ropes running from his trunk, greasy hair. Symmetrical tusks, yellow mouth.

Peter sits on the bench for a long time after the soldier of futility leaves, taking up his garbage route once again. His head back, gaze toward the sky and the elephants hauling the funereal obelisk.

Irresponsibility. A need for irresponsibility, that was how Peter Gapar defined his landing in the New World. The game of hide-and-seek with Death, whether at the wheel or by falling off a ladder.

The potential suicide doesn’t seem frightened by death, except on the nights when the Nymphomaniac tortures him.

The large bell in the university chapel announces the lunch hour. The courtyard is blanketed with students and professors, hurrying to fill their stomachs. Shouting, singing. All of a sudden, the square is deserted, quiet. The hungry crowd has disappeared. A white, clean toilet is waiting for them. Palade meditates, smiling, sitting on the toilet seat. A look of Nirvana across his face, wide, childish eyes, enchanted by bookish temptations. The reptile climbs, without a sound, along the wall that separates the neighboring stalls; he climbs up to the top, stops, and from above, considers the squat body of the condemned, as he sits on the throne of waste, for one last moment. The killing shot rushes out from the mouth of the snake.

The assassin had stolen into the neighboring stall without a sound. One foot on the toilet seat, slowly, quietly, then the other foot; there, he’s up. He could see over the next stall perfectly, the professor on the relaxation throne. A short, identifying look. The shiny revolver aims at the temple of the condemned; the bullet releases, without sound.

As he wakes up, Peter Gapar tries to remember the faceless mercenary, his hands, his neck, his shoulders. He can only see his black mouth, the phosphorescent flash. Poor Peter is sweating.

Lined up among other skeletons, Eva Kirschner. From in between her pale legs, the head of a baby with a mousy face. The prosecutor David Gapar extends his left arm to the sentinel with the Red Cross armband. With a razor, the nurse cuts the number out of the dried skin. Slowly, patiently, digit by digit. Small squares of bloodied skin thrown to the floor, one by one. One digit, then another digit. Five digits; the pseudonym of the dead who didn’t die. The prosecutor is bilious, his eyes bloodshot, bulging out of their sockets, his head and hands trembling; the blood of the abattoir is draining from his arm.

After such a painstaking initiation, you wake up terrified. The Nymphomaniac has tested you again. Fear and insomnia don’t just exhaust; they humiliate you. Peter relives, endlessly, the moment before the fall off the ladder. He lifts himself up on his elbows, covers his eyes; the film rolls on. The ambulance, the operating table, the rods that slowly penetrate the crushed legs, while the pain penetrates the kidneys and brain. Sedatives don’t help. Mangled, sleepless nights; days dumbfounded by exhaustion.

He raises the receiver, slowly, slowly, dials Gora’s number.

“Professor? I have a question.”

Gora is silent, but he is there, listening, at the end of the world.

“You know that I was interested in deaf-mutes?”

Gora is silent, but he is there.

“Yes, I was interested in the deaf-mutes of deaf-mute socialism. I was one of them. Didn’t you ever read the little story that gave me my fame and nickname in socialism? My hero, Mynheer, was a deaf-mute, like all of us.”

Gora is silent, but his diaphanous breathing is audible.

“I don’t know if I told you this, but I’ve been in a real crisis with insomnia.”

“You didn’t tell me. What happened?”

“Nothing happened; my beautiful cousin is fine, though I haven’t seen her in a long time. You wanted to know that, I’m sure.” “No. I was asking about…”

“About me, you were asking about me; I’m enough of an idiot to believe it. Deranged by lack of sleep. Dreams, yes, dreams. No, drugs don’t help. The doctor? Avicenna? Only if I can see Lu, and now is not the time for that; I’m in no shape for it. So then, the deaf-mutes, that’s what we were talking about. Sometimes I sit all night long in front of the television, with the lights on. A few days ago, maybe yesterday, I don’t even know, I saw a movie about deaf-mutes. Yes, a documentary. It was good, good, the way things are done here, professional, very professional. It’s called, you won’t believe it, Sound and Furyl You can’t say that written madness isn’t sellable. Bill Faulkner, of course. Academy Award Nominee. Best Documentary Feature. Powerful. Insightful. . emotionally wrenching. That’s how it’s billed.”

Gora is silent on the other end of the line.

“So, then, I’ve found my old friends, here. And here, I’m one of them. Deafened and silenced by everything I don’t understand. Yes, there are plenty of things. Look, something happened recently, a threat, but never mind about that. So then, it’s a family, three generations of deaf-mutes. Not all, but the majority. Now, of course, Technology, today’s fairy godmother, offers remedies. The dilemma of Mr. and Mrs. S, both deaf, is whether they should take advantage of these advances for their daughter. Why so silent, Professor? You don’t understand how that relates at all to me? It does. I’ve been dropped from the moon, onto another moon. Another world, another language, another deafness, another muteness. Another code. I’m one of them, one of these deaf-mutes! But I don’t understand them, either. Not even them. So, now you see why the insomnia?”

Gora is silent, but he’s on the line; the connection is holding; he’s listening attentively, to be sure; he’s listening and taking notes.

“The child, Heather, is superb. Precocious, vivacious, excited by the saving implant. But what about her identity? What do you do about the great problem of Identity? How can you renounce the identity of the tribe, even if it’s a tribe of deaf-mutes? How, how? The sect is very proud, of the way it lives, compared with the so-called normals. Maybe they’re right. Solidarity, code, honesty, intimacy, everything you want! So then, Identity. With a capital I, with large, red letters. The magic key, sought by everyone, the one that opens any door, and all doors. I-den-ti-ty! That’s that, liquidated, finished. Fig-ure it out. Un-load.”

Peter no longer seemed interested whether Gora was listening or not. He’d given up on the pauses, he was merely chattering to himself.

“The child needs to choose between deaf parents and perfectly normal grandparents. They, on the other hand, can hardly wait to understand each other, at last, with the handicapped enchantress. Oh, I ought to slap myself; you can’t say things like that. Normal, abnormal, it’s not correct, it’s not polite and it’s not politically correct. Some time ago, there used to be a U.N. Day for the Handicapped. There was even a U.N. Year for the Handicapped, I remember. I was hoping that the United Nations would pull the handicapped East out of the socialist latrine. Now, we’re proud of any identity at all, isn’t that right, Professor? But what about me? I don’t have the magic key; or, if I ever had it, I’ve lost it.”

Gora’s silence continued. He was probably smiling. He had no idea about the threatening letter; Gapar had given up on telling him.

“Yes, I have a dilemma on my hands. Every day I am faced with a dilemma. Now, I don’t know if I should remain a deaf-mute, the way I was when I came here, or if I should throw myself, screaming, into the mouth of reality. I am going to call that child Heather; I abso-lutely have to call her. If she’s got her hearing aid in, she’ll answer, if not, I’ll go on living just as happy as I am.”

Gora was silent and still smiling, probably. The garrulous Gapar wasn’t done.

“Professor, is there a country more formidable than this one? It has everything, everything. Even I’m here. Do you know anything comparable with the Lunar City? That’s what I’ve wanted to ask you. You know everything, by the book; I’m sure you know the answer.”

Gora was silent.

“No answer, I see. Should I help you? There is, Professor, another country that’s just as formidable! Our quiet, faraway Homeland. A scholarly priest has managed to translate the Liturgy into sign language. A unique achievement in the Christian world! He followed the apostles’ sacred mission, to speak to everyone’s understanding. Now, barely now, there can be Mass for deaf-mutes. This is what’s happening in our magic, superrealist little country on the edge of the world. They don’t have the technological possibility to normalize the abnormal, but they have a spiritual one. And that’s superior, isn’t it? The sacred book is accompanied by photographs that explain every stage of the prayer in signs. The apostles of silence, that’s what the new blessed ones are called. They even have a choir. They sing in signs. What do you think of that? Which is better, our country here, or that one, there? That’s my dilemma. Should I go back?”

Gora was listening, silently. Probably smiling.

“Do you think I’m ranting? I’m talking about the Mavrodoiu Church in Pitesti. Do you still remember where Pites,ti is? In the south of the Homeland, not in the Habsburgian Transylvanian north that was home to the Gapars, nor the Habsburgian north of Bukovina, which had the honor of bringing into the world the mathematician and philosopher Mihnea Palade and my cousin Augustin Gora. We’re cousins, aren’t we? Through alliance and semi-alliance and discrepancy. In Pitesti, then, in the south, where there were Roman legions brought from Palestine, Hebrews who impreg-nated the local women and propagated the race. Did you know that? Of course, you knew it.”

Gora is silent.

“Anyway, that’s my insomnia, my dilemma. Do I go back to the church of the deaf-mutes, or do I stay here, in the exile hospital? I hope you understand, so that you can help me decide. And there’s something else. The new language of the deaf-mute church has facilitated two interpretations for some sacred texts. Parallel words, just as Palade had dreamed. What more can you ask for; what, what, tell me, Professor.”

Gapar isn’t waiting for an answer, he’s merely breathing deeply.

“Do you vote? I need to know, it’s important for my decision. You’ve been here for twenty years. Surely you’ve already voted a few times. Have you voted? With the elephant or the donkey? For whom does the bewildered citizen vote? Here voting is important, not like back in our homeland.”

“Yes, it is. Too few vote.”

“No one is interested in politics. The government is called the Administration. Wonderful! The building administration! And there are no identity cards, just drivers’ licenses! Whom did you vote for?”

“I didn’t vote. I’ve never voted in any election.”

“Why?”

“When the electoral campaigns begin, you have the sensation that you’ve stumbled upon a children’s playground. The voters cry, skipping, hugging each other, putting on masks, chanting. The candidates seem like robots, reciting slogans. It’s a little frightening. No skepticism whatsoever.”

“Democracy! All the rights in the world. The right to stupidity, as well, of course. It’s important! Very important. No one shuns you, no one eliminates you, you’re human. For-mi-da-ble!”

A long, narrow room with metallic walls and a floor made of silver metal. A long, metallic cage, without windows. In the back, at the far end of the office, a metallic table. Behind it, a rusted, metallic armchair. In front of the table, and on the sides, silver chairs.

At the table, the general. Tall, massive, white mustache and black hair. A brownish uniform; wide, golden epaulets with three large stars. Medals on his chest. The jacket and khaki shirt unbuttoned. Heat, as though from the inside of a kiln.

He presses the button on his desk; there’s a ring; the metal door opens; two guards introduce Lu, each one holding her by an arm. They cross the distance from the door to the metallic desk with light, small steps. The detainee is deposited into the chair in front of the general; the soldiers come to attention, salute, do an about face; the metallic door closes without a sound behind them.

The general considers the detainee. Like a Russian princess. Short, fur overcoat, long, black knee boots. A peasant’s kerchief, old and torn, covers her face.

Lu keeps her head down, holding herself in her short overcoat, shivering. Delicate green gloves protruding from the sleeves with the grayish cuffs. The gloved hands tremble; Lu clutches herself, clenching, in the fur that’s too short.

The bell rings long and violently, like a siren, three times. The general is stiff in his chair; the detainee, stiff in her own.

The door doesn’t open. The general stands up, waiting. He hurriedly buttons the front of his shirt and jacket.

At last, the metallic door opens gently to the side. A thin, little man in a silken, striped prisoner’s uniform, striped cap over his shaved head, enters stealthily into the room. Heavy, thick, silk, elegant pajamas, with a skullcap, the beret of a wealthy retiree. On his feet, slippers made of felted fabric.

The general clicks his heels in a military salute, comes out from behind the armchair, moves respectfully to the side, making room for his superior.

The little man sits hastily in the general’s armchair, and the general moves to the chair to the left of the detainee. The chief pulls a golden pen from the shirt pocket of his pajamas, extends it to the general, pushes a thick, black folder across the desk in the general’s direction.

He smiles at the detainee, who doesn’t raise her head. “We know each other, don’t we?”

She keeps her head down, her gaze on the metallic floor.

“I’d prefer it if you took off that stinking kerchief.”

Lu slowly pulls the kerchief off her shaved head and lets it fall at the foot of the chair. She stares, resigned, at David Gapar, the cousin of her mother, comrade Serafim. Eva Kirschner’s husband. Peter’s father.

“I think you know what this is about.”

Having gotten no answer, the prosecutor makes a quick sign to the general, who pulls a pack of Kent cigarettes and a golden lighter out of his breast pocket. He sets them on the desk. David Gapar pulls out a cigarette, the general lights it, David takes a deep drag, once, three times, with the thirst of someone who’s been kept far away from such pleasures for a long time. The general pushes the ashtray from the edge of the desk toward the center, to the right of the chief.

“You come from a trustworthy family. Your parents were on our Party’s side after, and maybe even before the war. In spite of their bourgeois origins and their wealth, comrades Serafim are people of confidence.”

The general makes notes, conscientiously.

“They’re not the ones in question. Nor their daughter. We’re talking about the fugitive Augustin Gora. The son of former exploiters, owners of vast forests in Bukovina. Your husband.”

Lu looks at him, unmoved, shivering in the too short fur.

The general unbuttons his jacket once again, as well as the buttons to the neck of his shirt.

“Have you divorced this man?”

“No.”

A prompt, whispered answer.

“Hm, that surprises me. I don’t think your parents were too happy with this marriage. Not that. . no, I’m not referring to ethnicity. The Party doesn’t discriminate among people; your family rid itself of the horrors of the ghettos and the arrogance of the chosen people, but I don’t think they approved of the choice. And I doubt they’re happy to have a son-in-law who ran away to the capitalists.

Lu looks at her relative, silently, trembling.

“Maybe Professor Gora thought that he’d received a passport on the merit of his intellect; maybe he hasn’t understood that we gave him the passport. Not because he deserved it, but because that was what we wanted.”

The prosecutor Gapar emphasized the word we, gazing at the general. The general was writing, concentrating on the paper.

“I hope you’re not intending to follow him.”

“No.”

“Very good. This doesn’t, however, excuse you from your duty to us. You’ve refused to answer the questions. You could be accused as an accomplice. Have you decided to answer?”

“No,” whispered Lu, clutching her fur.

Cousin David had filled half the ashtray.

“While he was here, Augustin Gora participated in clandestine meetings. In those meetings, books by Nazis, Legionnaires, Trotsky-ists, Liberals, and Masons were discussed. Even books by Quakers. Decadent and religious literature was read. We know exactly who participated and when …”

Lu was silent; the general was filling his pen with ink.

“Is your eminent husband a mystic? Or is Mr. Gora a liberal propagandist?”

“He isn’t,” whispered Mrs. Gora.

“Yes, he is! He is all of those things. He read the Bible. He commented on the Scriptures. Even in high school. He would perorate in favor of Saint Peter. ‘Peter’s sect,’ he would say. He debated The Rights of Man. He commented on Confucius. We have proof. Old and new. Not just from one, or a few of his former colleagues, but from many.”

The prosecutor Gapar makes a short signal; the general rises, pours something from the carafe on the desk into the interrogator’s glass; David sips the water of life, staring at the bareheaded detainee. Lu wets her burned lips with her tongue, clutching the short and expensive fur.

“And there’s another thing … He wrote a letter for a student, a letter to American senators. Regarding an American scholarship. We didn’t approve the passport. The student had dubious, idealist leanings. He talked too much, much too much. Conceited, arrogant, a know-it-all, he thought himself untouchable. We didn’t give him a passport. And we’re never going to. Your husband wrote the letter and gave him the addresses of the senators. And the address of a fugitive Legionnaire, who is now a celebrated professor of mystic studies. Moreover, Mr. Augustin Gora brought with him provocative, antisocialist, antihumanist documents, which were then played on Radio opirli{a. * You know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. The capitalist gossip station, Radio Free Europe. You know it, Ludmila Serafim, you know it! Or is it Ludmila Gora? Or maybe Gapar? I’ve heard you like your men a little wet behind the ears.”

The prosecutor slams his small fists on the metal table, once and again, and again, unable to hold back his anger.

“You know and you’re going to admit it! You’re going to admit it, Ludmila, I assure you.”

He leans toward the ashtray, the cigarette is out, he takes it, he throws it, hysterically, onto the metal floor.

He gets up. The general follows, officiously, a step away. The felted boots of the superior are silent while the general’s boots carry a deafening tread.

Lu takes her head in her hands, stiff, straight, in the metal chair, her shaved head, her narrow, pale face serried in between her green hands. She doesn’t move. An effigy. Her face hollow, head shaved, her gloves covering her ears. Petrified.

Gora shakes a fist in the air, the pillow falls over the lamp on the nightstand; the lamp falls with a crash to the floor; the somnambulist twists, dizzily, wet with transpiration, awake.

“Green gloves,” he murmurs. He sits, overwhelmed, he sits, worn out, on the edge of the bed, gazing down at the lustrous, wooden floor.

No, Lu had never worn green gloves!

He makes his way toward the bathroom, puts his head under the faucet. Wet, awake, he doesn’t reach for the towel.

Peter Gapar isn’t the only one having nightmares. The obituarist is also going through nocturnal trials.

Green gloves? Never… he pulls out the first-aid kit from under his bed, opens it, rummages around in it, pulls out Ludmila’s old, black gloves, brought over from the Homeland of his youth.

Tara calls Peter Gapar on the phone, to remind him about the postcard. Wednesday afternoon, Peter has a meeting with the dean. The tall, blond sailor with curly hair and large, stained, freckled hands, smiles. Protectively, encouragingly. Gapar produces the card. He retells the story about his compatriot’s assassination, about Professor Palade. Afterward, the biography of the mentor Dima, the author of an encyclopedic work. He summarizes the review that he wrote about the old man’s memoirs, the scandal provoked by the revelation of the scholar’s old political sympathies.

The sailor raises his blond eyebrows. He listens to the details of the scandal in the faraway country, the refugee’s suspicions, the biography of the deceased scholar, the assassination of his apprentice, twisted, Balkan tales … as if they were sailor stories from the time when he was setting a course toward Indonesia and Dahomey. He’s never reached the Black Sea (and that area’s history certainly wasn’t on the forefront of the planet’s psyche), though it would have been worthwhile.

He doesn’t have time for confusion. The decision is simple and prompt. Action! If one professor was assassinated without apparent motive, another could be assassinated for a minor motive. A mere review?! Just a review in a journal, and all this scandal on the other end of the world? It’s a bad joke, naturally. The threat might also be just a bad joke. Still, we must be careful. So, then: action.

Friday morning, the Eastern European professor presents himself to Ms. Tang, the college’s head of security. Small, amiable, elegant, precise, like a manager at a bank; laconic, determined, sparing in her gestures. Gapar can’t take his eyes off her sleek, golden hair, her black eyebrows, her black and sharp gaze. Her dress suit is white, her shoes, small and white, with heels, small, dainty hands, short nails without polish. The professor sums up the twisted details of the twisted story, expressing his skepticism about the threatening letter. Ms. Tang has two clear dispositions: prudence and action.

“This is a death threat, Professor! A joke? Even if mortals are jokesters, death doesn’t joke.”

Maybe a Vietnamese proverb, co-opted by the American police? Gapar wondered.

“A death threat!” Jennifer was satisfied by the European’s smile.

“We’re all threatened with death,” murmured Gapar.

Jennifer isn’t in the mood to philosophize. She’d already alerted the local police. She requests permission for a visit the following morning.

“Where do you live on campus?”

“A cottage lost in the woods. Hard to see from the street.” The silence of Ms. Tang signals that the Eastern European hasn’t answered the question clearly. So he describes the surroundings of the cottage.

“No one seems to know about it. Nonetheless, it’s on the campus map.”

Friday night. An agitated forest, neurotic animals, hysteric branches, whistles, rustling. The resident sleeps with interruptions.

At 11 in the morning, Jennifer Tang’s car stops in front of the cottage. J.T. is wearing a red tracksuit and red sneakers and is accompanied by a tall man in police uniform. Slow with questions, even slower in the transcription of the answers. He introduces him-self as Jim Smith, Trooper. J.S.T.? No, Trooper isn’t a name, but a title. State police.

Questions, answers. The semester had started Wednesday, February 1. The first class, Monday afternoon, from 3:30 to 5:30. P.O. Box 1079 was full. He closed it; he wasn’t in the mood for mail. Advertisements and information and letters asking for money didn’t interest him. When he was younger, yes, he was always waiting for the miracle, the magic message. Here, the mail is a garbage can. He’d hired a student to sort it.

“The name?”

“Of the student? Yes, of course.”

The policeman notes the information, makes a sign to Ms. Tang to note it as well. So then, he saw the mail only after a week? No, two weeks had gone by. The student had been busy; she’d brought the first batch only about the middle of the month. Then came another pile, and then another, and, then, the card appeared.

“Is it stamped, postmarked? Is there a date?”

No, you couldn’t see the postmark. Just the stamp and the address. The address of the recipient was clear. Might the sender have ties to the college? The college’s phone and address book wasn’t accessible except to professors and administrators.

The police officer looks at the criminal exhibit.

“It could be a foreigner. You don’t say ‘next time I kill you,’ but ’the next time.’ The next time I will kill you.”

“That’s important!” the invigorated J.T. intervenes. The professor’s compatriots had been outraged by an article he wrote. Might the author of the letter be a compatriot?

The professor doesn’t answer. Compatriot? Didn’t Ms. Tang also become his compatriot?

“Do you have anything to add?”

“Two days ago, in the snow on the patio … there were footprints. Boots.” Maybe some workman who’d come to check the plumbing or read a meter or something? Yesterday, there was sun, and the snow melted. The tracks weren’t really visible any longer. Still, something. The steps go in a single direction. As if someone had just crossed the patio, inspected the cottage and didn’t return to the patio. Someone inspected the area; that was sure. Now you could no longer see the tracks.

All three of them go out on the patio. Nothing special, says J. S. Trooper’s look. He puts the evidence in a plastic bag, the bag in a leather folder. The object will remain with the police and the professor will get a copy. J.T. will send the claimant a front and back copy on Monday.

“Ah, yes. One other thing,” the professor retorts. “I don’t know, in fact, if. . maybe this is stupid stupid, but…”

“Tell us everything,” Mrs. Tang insists, under the bored gaze of the state trooper.

“Yes, let’s hear it,” adds J. S. Trooper.

Gapar pulls out a crumpled paper from his pocket and hands it to the policeman.

“I found it taped to my door. Maybe it’s a stupid thing, I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore.”

“Lost cat needs help,” reads the Vietnamese over the shoulder of the policeman, who raises his eyebrows, taken aback.

A photograph, on a black background, of a striped cat. The cat sits, as if posing for the photographer, well behaved, has one blue eye and one white, blind eye. Gattino is a 6-month-old, slender gray male tabby with distinctive spots and stripes … Gattino is a 6-month-old tomcat, skinny, ashy gray, with spots and stripes. He is blind in his left eye. If you find him, please call 658.2704. He might seem confused because he is feeble. He has one sick eye and chronic respiratory problems. But he has a home and we’re beside ourselves that he’s lost.

Mrs. Tang and the police officer seem disoriented. The professor, however, provides some further information.

“There are also some lines written by hand. Under the typed lines, there are three handwritten lines.”

They’d seen them, of course, but they didn’t care. But now they had to care, there was no choice. He’s very short-haired & vulnerable. Please, please … if you see him call him by name, clearly and sweetly. If you have him in your home, please call us and we’ll come get him immediately.

“Yes, yes,” mutters the trooper and puts the paper in his pocket.

In the afternoon, Dean P.C. requests that the FBI be informed. They look for Officer Pereira, with whom Gapar had been in contact immediately after the appearance of his article on Dima, a year before, after the assassination of Professor Portland. The publication of the review coincided with the assassination, wasn’t that right? They’re waiting for a sign from Officer Pereira.

Saturday evening, Tara doesn’t show. Instead, she calls to excuse herself; she’s had an exhausting day; she has a migraine; even her workout has exhausted her. The professor retells the trials of the preceding days; the conversation lengthens. The subject animates her, she no longer seems tired.

Gapar goes to sleep late. Strong knocking on the door. Sleepily he weaves in between the bed and the nightstand. “Security,” announces the voice of the woods.

On the front step, with a flashlight in the eyes of the suspect, the young police officer Garcia. It’s a dream, that’s it; Gapar is smiling, not daring to wake up.

“The rounds, you know. We were told that you’ve been having some problems. We’re patrolling the grounds. We’ll check in every three hours after midnight.”

Every three hours? Could they check the grounds without knocking on the door? Gapar says he’ll leave the light on. The police officer agrees.

Night, forest, gusts. Wind and cold. Barbed wire, patrols, dogs, phantoms in rags, gathered one in the other. Eva Kirschner. Peter is balled up above the child that he was once, above the body riddled with wounds. Frozen rags, skin and bones, the child of different time. The patrolling guards, security lights, livid bodies.

He awakes with the pillow rumpled and wet in his arms. He hears, somewhere, the grinding motor of a car; he doesn’t want to go back to sleep, but he crashes into his pillow. Woods. Captives. Old, famished faces. Detainees. The frightened mob. The roll call. Patrol guards with dogs scrutinize the skeletons. The little boy easily became air, nothing to hold in your arms. The whimpering subsided, as well as the screaming of the sentinels. Heavy, leaden snow, not a single movement. A thick stillness; you can’t breathe.

The nightmare doesn’t belong to me, has nothing to do with me, it’s my parents’, Gapar decides in the morning.

Sunday he doesn’t come out of his den. He tries to remember the text on the card. A word, a comma. He’s not sure that he still has the phrase. He can’t remember the newspaper article on the other side either.

A good sign, he’ll sleep unhampered tonight.

Monday. The Security Office. J.T. sits in front of the computer, salutes with a nod, without shifting her gaze from the blue screen, extends her right arm toward a drawer, Gapar can see the large, thick, silver ring on the thin finger, she pulls out two sheets of paper, stapled to one another. The copy of the postcard, front and back.

“Don’t let anyone see these.”

Her gaze fixed on the screen. The small fingers caress the keys, and madam J.T. nods, bye-bye, see you soon.

After lunch, a walk around campus. The small cemetery on the hill. Gapar stops in front of every tombstone. Irish, Italians, Jews, a Portuguese, Germans, Dutch. The clan of the dead is disorganized, like nature itself. The pliant stone leaning slightly to the left is called Sabina. Nothing else. Sabina-Germany, and no other specification. The name of futility, like any name.

If the assassin is perfect, Professor Gapar will end up here, near Sabina, thankful for the brotherhood of exiles.

The library. Second floor, the magazine stand. Then, two hours of class. Calm and sarcastic, as in the glory days. In the evening at eight, the patrol car. Officer Garcia, fat, smiling. He will return in two hours. “Two hours? I thought we’d understood each other…”

“Yes, but Madame Tang thinks this is the right thing. At night we come every three hours, and we no longer knock on the door. Don’t pull the blinds, and leave the light on.”

The strangling of the invalid on channel 2. The debate about the rape on channel 4. The massacre in Rwanda on 9. Monsters on 11, vaudeville on 12, the jungle on 53, the basketball game on 22, shootings on 43. And back: 53, 2, 22. Alternative realities annul reality.

The New York Times. Wednesday, October 12. Postmark: Old Glory. The American flag. For U.S. addresses only. Stamp: New York. Yes, you can identify the stamp, the postal code, officer Jimmy Smith Trooper should have seen or actually saw the envelope’s stamp in the meantime.

Typed text, the address written out by hand. Big letters: N looks like W, A doesn’t have the unifying line, it’s like a rooftop. The address is precise, even the name of the cabin, Boumer House, which no one knows. The college, the town, the state, the ZIP code. Dear—typed. The first name of the addressee written out by hand. Toni, Philip, Susan, Norman, Rosalind, Peter, whomever. The way you’d fill out a form. A trick, evidently, so that the threat won’t seem individualized. Dear Peter…

Next time I kill you. Or the next time? Kill you or I will kill you? Next time! So then, a future date! Had there already been a failed attempt? A previous try? Signed: D. Devil? Dummy? Destiny? Deity? Death? Yes, Death! Ubiquitous whore.

A failed trick. No postcard was addressed to Larry or Madame Tang or the dean, only to an old and faithful target. Lady Death hadn’t forgotten Mynheer. An encoded love note.

The fragment from the paper on the back was just another trick. To divert the amateurs, not the addressee.

The car, the brakes, the headlights. There are no dogs, no, the Van Nest patrol is replacing the Garcia patrol.

“Don’t worry, we pass by here every hour.”

“Every hour? I thought it was every two hours.”

“Don’t wait up for us; you should sleep.”

“I wasn’t waiting. I go to bed late, anyway. As late as I can. And I get up often, even without you.”

“Routine check. You can go to sleep, the place is under surveillance.”

Wednesday morning. A warm day, sun, scents of spring. The professor seems listless in the conversation with the two students who wait for him in his office. At two in the afternoon, he gets a call from the FBI Officer Patrick Murphy. He knows about Officer Pereira and about the scandal following the publication of the review; he’s also heard about the card and the threat.

“Have you ever published anything on Rushdie?”

“Rushdie? The writer? The condemned? We’re back to books again? Where does it end? The whole thing is absurd! I wanted to throw out the card, believe me.”

“Please calm down and speak more slowly, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Police Officer Patrick requests a meeting. Next Tuesday. Yes, at the office. Gray building, faculty offices, façade covered in ivy.

“There’s no need for directions,” Patrick cuts him off quickly. “I’ll find the place. Tuesday, 1:30 p.m.”

The grumpy Patrick was more interesting than the formal Pereira, with his gentle, stupid advice.

Gapar is tired of his solitary cottage. He calls a taxi, quickly packs up some things and papers, checks the faucets, the stove, draws the curtains. At the train station, he scrutinizes the passengers attentively, one by one.

The City on the Moon. The public library. Encyclopedias and dictionaries, the stories of the world looking for another world.

Monday morning, the return train, banal passengers. Night, disordered woods. Noises. Tormented birds, barbed wire, the routine of the sentinels.

Tuesday, at 1:30 p.m., without knocking on the door, a stout, solid man enters the office. Thick lips, small brow, the look of a bully. Hairy. His checkered coat barely reaches around his body. Dark gaze. A business card thrown on the table: Patrick Murphy, Special Agent. Larry Number Eight, yes, yes, Larry Eight.

“I spoke on the phone with Mario. He no longer works in this area. He told me the story of Professor Portland’s assassination, about the scandal that followed. And your article, another scandal. How old was the professor?”

“Palade was young.”

“Palade?”

“Same person. He changed his name here.”

“Oh? No, not him. The Mentor. The celebrity.”

“Cosmin Dima had died some years before. He was over eighty.”

“Let’s start with your review. The press piece. Fascism, nationalism, those kinds of things. Why did it provoke such a scandal?”

“A reminder of unpleasant things.”

“New things?”

“No, they weren’t new. The context was new. Post-Communism. New beginnings, new icons. The confusion of freedom. For the East, just as for the immigrants here.”

“How famous was this Dima?”

“As famous as a man of letters can be famous. He wasn’t an athlete or a movie star, or a sexy escort doing two weeks’ time for drunk driving, whom the network is paying a million for an interview about her sadness in her jail cell. A million! Dima didn’t get that much from all his books that appeared all over the world. No, no, Old Man Dima was something else.”

“A nationalist?”

“In his youth. Maybe even afterward. In his country and mine he’s a real cult figure. He’s an icon, everyone used to say.”

“Why did you write the article? Why now?”

“A new edition of his memoirs appeared. I hesitated, but I wrote it. I was asked to write the review. First I refused, but then I wrote it.”

“Who approached you?”

“A journalist, a friend of the president of the college.”

“I see. It was good for the college.”

“Maybe. He argued that it would be good for me.”

“Was it good?”

“Not really.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.”

“My colleague Mario says you didn’t receive any threats following the review.”

“I did. In my former country, in the press there. I no longer live there. There were some here, too, a few, in the expat press.”

“Was your wife threatened?”

“Wife? What wife?”

“Or, your partner. . girlfriend.”

“Partner? Oh, my significant other, as you say. My cousin Lu wasn’t threatened.”

“So then, threats in the press.”

“Violent articles, insults, curses. There, far away. Here, just in the expat press.”

“I understand that Professor Portland. . rather, Palade, had received threats. Why? He wasn’t writing about nationalism.”

“He was. He had dissociated himself from the nationalists of his country. He published violently antinationalist texts.”

“Did your review refer to him, too? He was a disciple of Dima’s.”

“I only wrote about Cosmin Dima’s memoirs. I brought up his political affiliations of the thirties.”

“Did he conceal or manipulate the facts? You said they weren’t new pieces of information.”

“Old information, new situation. The anti-Communist post-Communism. Or anti-Communism after Communism. It’s easier to fight with a corpse … Dima didn’t discuss his secret. Why should he confess in public? What matters is what you do, not who you were, isn’t that right? Pragmatism!”

“Did he have followers? Other than Palade?”

“Probably.”

“And were they scandalized by your review?”

“Probably. Not just them. General indignation.”

“Mario told me that you avoid your former compatriots.”

“I lived among them. There weren’t only horrors; there, joys, too. But here, yes, I avoid them.”

“Why did you contact Officer Pereira?”

“The college contacted him. After Palade’s assassination. The president of the college was convinced that I might be in danger. Mr. Pereira didn’t manage well in the whole Balkan mess. The motives for the assassination weren’t very clear. . Even now they’re not clear.”

The FBI envoy doesn’t write anything down. He just scrutinizes the face of the interrogated.

“Why would the same group return after two years?”

“What group?”

“The group that threatened you then?”

“I don’t know of any group that would have threatened me.”

“Have you published anything else in the meantime?”

“No, nothing.”

“Does the postcard seem to have been sent by an extremist group?”

“I don’t know.”

“A group of mystics, for example? I understand from Mario that the extremists from the thirties were mystics. Those with ties to Dima were mystics. Orthodox terrorism, no? Are there mystics here, too?

“I don’t know. It’s an odd text. It could be a ruse, to distract the investigation. We don’t know who the sender was, we don’t know anything. Certainly there must be extremist groups among the exiles, but I don’t know anything about them.”

“Is there anything particular to note about the handwriting of the message?’

“Only the name and address are handwritten. The rest, typed or printed by a computer.”

“What do you think about the text?”

“I think it’s a quotation. I don’t know why. Just an impression.”

“Something familiar in the text?”

“Labyrinth. The word labyrinth. One of Dima’s obsessions. He wrote a lot about labyrinths. I spent a few days in the New York Public Library last week. I revisited his books. The obsession is there. The Greek labyrinth. Myth and ritual in the labyrinth. The world as a labyrinth. The city as labyrinth. The mystic spiral and the labyrinth of the cross. The Celtic labyrinth. The labyrinth of human viscera …”

Annoyed, the policeman stands up. Short, thickset, dumpy. Thick, black, wavy hair.

“We’ll see each other in a week. Same time and place.”

“Perfect,” answered the professor, impatient himself to leave the room. Humiliated by his lapses of memory. He knew, and he didn’t know the quotation. The past refused to render the bibliography accurately.

The moment has come to tell about the incident, to reveal the postcard to others, to get opinions, to solicit advice. Gora could replace an entire library, he might be able to offer the solution. Or to call Lu. If she learns about the threat, Lu will want to hear about the adventure, to listen attentively and with great concern.

Peter hesitates, with the receiver to his ear. He makes up his mind, dialing Gora’s number.

“Yes, it is I, the Eastern Mynheer. Yes, you’re right, we haven’t spoken in a long time. But here we are, talking now. A lot, I assure you, we will talk as the condemned talks to his oracle. The impeccable oracle. The unvanquished. For the professor who has read and committed everything to memory, no question is too difficult. And so, then, I have to ask …”

He has the postcard in hand, the mysterious message in front of his face. He is ready, and then he changes his mind again. And that’s how it goes, revulsion wins in the end.

“I’m asking you about the student uprising, which you witnessed. So that I can also understand the world into which I’ve landed. You’ve already told me about it, you’re right. You told me everything immediately after Larry One hired me at the college. You described the atmosphere in the college; you were protective, concerned, as ever. An innocent produced by the library. I don’t want to call you a mouse; a mouse isn’t innocent, but you are a little angel, a milksop of words. Eh, tell me again about ‘La Passionaria,’ how they spoke from the balcony, the famous Dolores Ibärruri, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin, Ana Pauker and comrade Kollontai. And Senora Perön. Yes, I know, you never mentioned these names.”

Naturally, there was silence. Hypervexed by Peter’s ramblings, Gora yields, as usual.

“A student of mine. Quiet, civilized, I would even say shy. She used to come to class with her boyfriend. A handsome, athletic young man. One day this boy shows up in my office to tell me that the girl would like to speak to me. Babbling, he can’t explain why she didn’t come herself. Yes, there is a problem. . Two years ago, after getting into the college, the girl went to a party for freshmen. She drank beer, she walked in the woods with a young man. And, and, and. . what happened? Seemingly something and seemingly nothing. An embrace and then, then, no one knows, the girl doesn’t remember exactly what happened. The only clear thing was that more than two years had passed.

“Yes, now I remember them. Then the girl came, troubled. It wasn’t clear what happened two years ago, but it was clear what had triggered the flashback. . Two years after the uneventful or half-eventful or a quarter-eventful or a fifth-eventful event, the aggressor passes by the new couple, on a clear, autumn afternoon. He smiles obliquely, as if with a certain understanding. The girl feels insulted; her partner persuades her to file a complaint. The student goes to the president of the college and explains what she can explain. The party, the beer, the woods, the embrace in the grass, the confusion in the dark. Larry One listens. It was around the time when you were charming Bedros Avakian’s students, no? So, then, Larry one listened attentively to the narrative. Any accusation must be heard and resolved in a democracy. The presumed aggressor is punished: he is not allowed to participate in rehearsals with the rock group The Blind Band for two months. He will also lose his privileged access to the gym and pool.”

“The victim is unsatisfied, isn’t that right?”

“The student feels that she’s been strung along. The accused would reappear from time to time, at rehearsals and at the pool. He was from a wealthy family that donated to the college, that’s what her partner maintained.”

“You advised her to forget everything. You asked her if she has a good relationship with her parents. Yes? Then, take advantage of your summer break, enjoy yourself, protected, relaxed, that’s what you told her. Don’t make this twisted episode the center of your unhappiness; you’re young, pretty, smart, your whole future ahead of you, not behind you. Is that what you told her, Saint Augustin? Like a retarded grandfather just out of the premodern cave, an Eastern European idiot. Misogynist, macho, without scruples.”

“Yes, but nothing came of it. The students liked me; that was why the girl came to me in the first place. Avakian liked me, too.”

“And the Uprising? It exploded the following spring. Slogans and posters everywhere, protesting the administration that encourages sexual harassment. The administration was under siege for three days. Speeches from the balcony of the besieged building. Demonstrations, reporters, negotiations, measures to be taken. And what happened to the erotic trio?”

“The female student received substantial compensation, transferred to a different college, and is now married. The boyfriend is now the president of an organization for the protection of immigrants’ rights in the Midwest. The perpetrator who didn’t perpetrate, or perpetrated a quarter of an act, graduated from the college, went to law school and now works on Wall Street.”

“And Professor Augustin Gora? Did he refine his grandmotherly advice? What advice does he offer to a castaway? Should I be careful? What should I be careful of? Of female students, of gossip, of jokes, of demagogues and suspects and intriguers and envious people? Or our phantoms from far away?”

“Is there trouble? Did something happen to you?”

“No, nothing, but I’m preparing myself. I want to know how to prepare myself. The story of the three-day revolution is instructive, but banal. There’s no mystery, not like Palade’s case.”

“Palade? What’s come over you? It wasn’t the students who killed him, that’s for sure.”

“Whoever acted knew the university perfectly well, the buildings, the schedule, the daily path of the condemned, his astrological and parapsychological and paranormal digressions. It’s not the case with me. I’m an earthling. I trip over chairs, as well as weeds, but no stars. I’m inattentive, but he was too attentive. There’s no connection, I hope, between us.”

“No, there’s no connection,” says Professor Gora, without conviction, probably taking up his reading once again.

Peter Gapar could also have started up again with his nocturnal visions: the killer Charles Manson and the terrorist Timothy McVeigh and the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer and other vanquishing experts, documentaries about deaf-mutes and cancer, about astronauts and populations in the jungle, American football, classical and box office film hits, chamber music, as well as jazz. After midnight, the games of distraction and pornography and karate videos or courses in exotic languages, everything an insomniac heart needs.

A long, vertical sign on a tall building. Dirty walls, dusty ornaments: the Hotel Esplanade. The corner of 48th Street and Eighth Avenue. Drug addicts, prostitutes, beggars, mystics, vagabonds of all races.

She stops, bewildered, looking for her companion. She sees him in the back of a sex shop. She moves toward the display with the sunglasses and plasters her palms on the glass.

A tap on her shoulder. “Here I am,” Peter whispers into her velveteen ear. Lu gazes down at the pavement.

“Do you want me to go back to the place I escaped from? You’re crazy with these sex shops! You can’t restrain yourself.”

Peter takes a step back.

“Crazy? This is mass culture! Therapy. The industry with the highest-grossing income. We can’t ignore the well-being of the country. It’s our country, isn’t that right? They’re our countrymen.”

Lu is silent. She swallows, gloomily.

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have told you about my dream.”

“What dream?”

“Last week, Friday. I was in a poetic state of mind. I was dreaming about a phallus. A child in the shape of a phallus. A tender form, it asked for protection, for tenderness. Like a child. And I was crying, emotional. It unsettles me even now.”

Peter feels dizzy looking into her big, tearful eyes, which she was wiping, ashamed, with her trembling hands. Lu backs away, her gaze to the ground. Peter runs after her, waving, laughing. They disappear.

The street remains. The storefronts, the sex shops, the Chinese vegetable cart, the Turkish restaurant, the Mexican umbrella store, the bustle of the hookers, the pickpockets with the sombreros, the Pakistani druggist’s shop.

A street, and another street. Clean, quiet, deserted. A solid building, stone and brick. An Anglican facade, gothic windows framed by wrought iron. Letters chiseled into the stone. The Young Men’s Christian Association.

On the threshold, Peter. White, sweaty shirt. Sleeves rolled up, his gaze on the hunt. He surveys left-right, looks at his watch. He’s waiting for someone, gives up, goes inside. Traffic, loud teenagers, suitcases and backpacks.

An immense black guard, an immense hand on the telephone. He watches the door and the elevator. The giant Peter in front of an even bigger giant, it’s hard to win these caricature competitions.

They look at each other, without curiosity. One of them tall, fat, bald with a mustache, the other taller, fatter, black, thick, curly hair and black skin. A discharged hussar and a black American, ready to take out his saxophone.

“Mr. Joe?”

The man nods his big, heavy head.

“Madam Beatrice Artwein called yesterday, to … “

“Ah, Beatrice! Betty. That’s what we call her. Yes, baby, the lady called. I have the key.”

He smiles. Large, immaculate teeth. Large, black eyes burning with the delight of complicity.

“Yes, baby, I have the key ready. Two hours. That’s it.”

Peter doesn’t return the smile, he’s somber and distant.

“Perfect. I’ll take the key and come back. I’ll be back quickly.” The great Joe Louis bends toward the drawer, pulls out the key tied with a blue cord. He’s no longer smiling, or looking at the client, he’s become somber and distant.

Lu. Supple, tall, elegant. Red jacket. Her face is hollow, white, matte. Hair pulled back in a bun, her forehead free.

“A small, simple room. A bed. A shower, toilet, mirror. Without towels, but cheap,” Beatrice had explained. “Without perfumes, creams, towels. You don’t forget where you are, nor what you’re there for. Promiscuity intensifies the promiscuous appetite. It defies conventions, sharpens pleasure.”

Fourth floor. The hallway. Precise directions: 401–411 to the left, 412–419 to the right. 416. A bed, an armchair. A narrow bed. On the sheet, a brown stain in the left corner. Lu in the doorway. Mute, immobile. From one second to the next, she’ll slam the door, abandon the room and her marriage.

Peter doesn’t forget the risk, not even in his dreams: Lu wasn’t made for squalor, it freezes her up.

In the middle of the room, prepared for shame and disaster, he records, attentively, the movements of the black plaits. Lu is no longer Lu … Slowly, she unbuttons the dress jacket, one button at a time. The red silk slips down. Nothing underneath. She holds her young breasts in her palms. She offers them to him! Smooth, bare shoulders, proud throat. She puts her long hands around her neck, like a coil. Velvety palms, thin fingers. She remains like that, exposed, looking at the narrow, dirty window. She pulls down the zipper of her jeans. She comes out of those blue pipes, naked.

Espadrilles. She looks at them with pity, first one, then the other, the left, right, she pulls out her foot slowly, the left, the right, she moves her legs away. Long toes, narrow foot of ivory. Her lips vibrate past the white stripe of her teeth. Lu isn’t Lu! In her hand she holds a small, black, plastic object. She presses the button. A dull sound can be heard coming from the ceiling. Lu points her index finger to the low, gray ceiling, showing her partner the little television in the ceiling.

On the screen an angelic face and a body of an adolescent: Beatrice Artwein! Betty … at that very moment she’s throwing off her golden bra, the golden leaf in between her thin, brown legs. Shaved head. Incipient breasts, prominent, electric nipples. Pink vulva warmed with the short fingers of a young girl. She’s kneeling in front of the bald giant with the mustache, slowly unbuttoning the rigid jeans of the hussar, button by button.

Peter sweats uncomfortably, frightened by Lu, who waits for him naked on the bed, wetting her fever-burned lips with her tongue. On the screen, Betty ecstatically caresses the naked, hairy thighs of her colleague Gapar.

Peter stretches out on the bed, Lu imitates the movements of Madam Artwein! Simulacrum! Betty and Lu turn their backs to their partners, who bend over Betty, over Lu.

Lost gaze on the screen. Lu is in the bathroom, the shower can be heard. On the screen Betty, bent under the man, receives the penetration, quivering. The bodies accelerate the rhythm, hands searching for each other, as well as mouths, the professional and the client panting and gasping. From the threshold of the bathroom door, Lu listens to the moaning, smiling. Now she’s wearing a red dress, short, very short. In her black bun there’s a small white bridal tiara. White gloves, a pearl choker at her throat.

A click to the ceiling and the copulation disappears. Peter is on his feet. Black suit, giant, patent leather shoes. White bow tie, white kerchief in the breast pocket of the lustrous jacket.

The couple arm in arm in the courtyard of the socialist town hall of Sector 4 in the capital. In the far end of the yard, alone, Madam Eva Kirschner-Gapar is waiting, diminished, seemingly lower in stature, drawn into herself, gray haired, with a grease-stained, wrin-kled and mottled apron over her golden dress. She lifts the hem and wipes her tearful eyes and dirty glasses with her apron. The festive couple passes by her, without seeing her. The entrance into the department of the city clerk’s office. The official charged with the union descends the stairs solemnly to meet them.

It’s Professor Augustin Gora! A little white beard, the gray goatee of a Slavic beadle. Nobility and the ridiculous in his timid manner, devoid of vigor.

The professor embraces the bride, kisses each cheek. He squeezes Mynheer’s hand discreetly. He looks at him insistently, fascinated by the famous character, whose acquaintance he finally has the privilege to make.

Gora wears a green dress coat and a wide band, red, yellow, and blue, over his shoulder and across his breast. He makes a cavalier gesture to the bride, then to her partner, inviting them inside the building.

The mother-in-law suddenly intervenes, shaking with sobs. The professor smiles at the uninvited, invites the trio inside. The bride and the mother-in-law climb the three steps, the groom stands still and stiff like a statue.

The professor repeats the gesture, he tips forward again, like a mannequin, but the groom shows no sign of life. Dead, but upright. Stiff, with glassy, phosphorescent eyes.

Professor Gora smiles, bows toward the bride and hands her a large yellow envelope.

Peter sweats, pants, moans, twisting, throwing off the flaming blanket and sheets. He holds on to the edge of the bed with clenched hands, jumps to his feet, frightened and determined to talk to Gora.

Professor Gora isn’t accessible. He sits for many hours in front of the computer, transcribing the agitated night from which he’s just escaped.

It’s not Saturday, it’s Friday. Tara isn’t bringing the mail, but reporting.

“I’ve become a suspect!”

“Who hasn’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“The investigation doesn’t exclude any hypothesis. Any suspicion. The easiest one: the reporter herself.”

“I didn’t report anything.”

“You brought the postcard. The threat. You triggered the action. You could be complicit.”

“That’s what Ms. Tang thinks. I went to see her. I understand that you didn’t like her either?”

“She was polite. As was Patrick Murphy, Special Agent FBI. Actually, I’m not supposed to tell you that I saw them.”

“You can tell me; I’m complicit. I’m going to see Patrick again, too, says Ms. Tang. With me she wasn’t polite. She asked me to transcribe the whole text from the postcard. In front of her. So she could compare the handwriting with those few words from the address on the card … All she had to do was get my file from the dean; she would have found handwriting samples there.”

“She’ll find and compare them, don’t you worry. So you might be the author of the letter. Is that what she’s suggesting?”

“She’s not suggesting, she’s investigating. Patrick is going to threaten me, I’m sure of it. ‘Either you tell the truth, or I’ll aggravate your situation.’ Tang suspects me. ‘How is it, then, that you take the professor’s mail? It’s addressed to him, not you.’”

“She’s right.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Yes, it was.”

“When I saw how overwhelmed you get by the mountains of mail! Plus, I’m paid to do it! You pay me! I told that blonde. I was sure that it would shatter the suspicion.”

“The suspicion that you wrote the postcard?”

“No, that won’t go away too quickly.”

“Then, what?”

“That I sort the mail so I can come here.”

“She said that?”

“It’s a small college. If you try to hide, you just multiply the suspicions. My roommate sees me coming with the bag of letters for Professor Gapar. I sort the mail for the eccentric Peter Gapar.”

“Eccentric, yes… And what else did Tang ask you?”

“If I tell you, will I be able to sleep better?”

“Has sleep become a problem?”

“Not yet. I’m not the one with a death threat hanging over me.”

“We all have a death threat hanging over us.”

“You’ve said that before. Are you having nightmares? Insomnia?”

“Maybe. I’ve lived my whole life in the city. I don’t understand nature. I’m having a hard time adapting to nights in the woods.”

“So you’re alert. You’re prowling. That’s why you’re not sleeping.”

“Anxiety makes us childish. Only children are afraid of the dark. And the woods.”

“Do you want me to sleep here? On the couch.”

“Sleep here? No. Not in any event. It wouldn’t help me. Nor would it dissolve Ms. Tang’s suspicions. Why did the student provoke the professor’s neuroses? So that he’d become dependent on her? To get into his bed and blackmail him?”

“If she entered his house and his bed, she must care about the professor. She’d have no reason to torment him.”

“Maybe she’s a monster. Dracula.”

“A monster… it would bolster the attraction.”

Tara continues to scrutinize him, like a policeman. Gapar does the same. Tara smiles; Gapar smiles, too.

“Don’t be scared, there won’t be sexual aggression. The monster won’t attack the professor, and if the professor attacks me, I’ll defend myself. Don’t worry, I won’t denounce you. I know you need the salary.”

“No, you can’t stay. Small college. People talk.” “I don’t care.”

“I do. As you said, I need the salary.”

“You’d be less uneasy if there were someone here at night.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d be intimidated by another person. No, no. End of subject.”

“Even if the first hypothesis is true?”

“What’s the first hypothesis?”

“That I came up with the letter to make you need me, to make you dependent.”

“Precisely. I need to be careful. Youth is irresistible.”

“And if Patrick asks you to try? He offers you the plan of action: the neurotic who solicits the help of the student he took to bed. She’ll also become vulnerable and will confess to everything in the end.”

“ ‘She’ll also become vulnerable?’ What does Patrick know about her? We’ll wait until Tuesday, after the meeting with the FBI. I’ll tell you if I’ve changed my mind.”

“Now may I sit down?”

The professor makes a motion toward the chairs, the couch. He hadn’t noticed that they’d both been standing the whole time.

“Excuse me. I need to be at the office in fifteen minutes.”

He looks at his watch. Yes, fifteen minutes.

“Okay. I’ll come Saturday afternoon, as usual. Maybe, in the meantime, I’ll find another message in the mail. Something more explicit.”

Caspar looks at her, frowning.

“It wouldn’t be bad. Not bad at all.”

It sounded like a plea, or advice. He’d lost his humor. And it wasn’t midnight, just three in the afternoon.

“Have you thought about that phrase? I learned it, I know it by heart. It’s been in my head for a long time, I think. I’ve seen it before sometime, somewhere. I don’t know where. I’ve gotten old. I don’t remember.”

“You remember enough, too much. If it’s asleep in your memory, it will wake up. I know the phrase by heart, too. It doesn’t evoke any memories, however. I’m uncultured, just like my entire generation. Conspiracies amuse me.”

“We’ll talk on Tuesday, after Patrick’s interrogation. I’m in a hurry now.”

Peter’s in no hurry to get anywhere, the good-natured dialogue is putting him in a bad mood. He wants to go outside, to be alone. Tara retreats; the professor sets out apathetically toward campus. The wind is cold and wet. The library is warm and quiet. Books, magazines, newspapers from around the world. The sect of Saint Computer! At prayer, in front of the magic screen. Not even the Internet Generation, born from an electronic circuit instead of a woman’s womb, can retain the quotation. But Tara never found the magic button. If only there were some kind of a hypnosis to trigger the phosphorescent needle of memory’s magnet.

A fossil among the young servants to the God of Algorithms, that’s what I am, the professor decided, abandoning the temple.

Alone in his den. On the nightstand, under the pile of socks and tank tops, the yellow envelope. Tara’s old letter. Was that a different Tara, the one who was accusing professors of giving her too-high marks, while barely out of high school? A year ago, she’d confronted a professor who gave her a mark that was higher than what she’d expected. Now she was a gentle comrade. Was the past still part of the present?

In the envelope there was Tara Nelson’s essay on the novel Enemies: A Love Story. It had arrived a few days after her impertinent letter and after the end of the semester.

Unhappiness revolves around an inability to interact with unfamiliar circumstances. Losing old habits feels like losing the self. The solution isn’t to be found in the old habits, nor in a new identity, but in fantasy.

He’d read those pages on a July day, almost a year ago now. He’d discovered them, unexpectedly, in P.O. Box 1079.

Had Tara chosen the novel about the exiles to provoke him?

It isn’t possible both to remain in the old identity and to integrate into the new one.

Was that true? We are imperfect impostors at home and away from home, on Earth and on the moon.

From the war experience forward, the hero is receptive only to his own thoughts. The Christian woman who saved him and whom he is going to marry as a gesture of appreciation is an angelic Polish peasant woman, an illiterate saint, who, in the conversion to Judaism, becomes a sort of clown. The only escape from the real is the complicit relationship of mutual masochism, between the husband and the coreligionist, sexually voracious Masha.

What’s the connection to the threatening postcard? There’s no connection. No connection at all! Just the fact that both preoccupied him now, simultaneously.

The escape from the real, like sexual liberation. Mental fantasy connection. . the sex drive, the only labyrinth. Mental fantasy is their mutuality, physicality, sexual appetite, the only labyrinth that either of them can truly call his and her own.

Labyrinth?

A year ago, the word didn’t seem suspect. Now it has definition, phosphorescence, wile. Peter stops, asks himself what the woods have in store for the night, whether the patrol will be more discreet. He wants to sleep. The sex drive, the only labyrinth that either of them can truly call his and her own.

In the novel, the true enemy is memory, the trauma imposed on identity. The terms of the biography become the morbid impulse. To incorporate past trauma into the new system doesn’t require breaking down barriers, but rather to ignore its existence. To have a child, for example? Or to lose yourself in the labyrinth of sexuality?

Death. Lady Death! The Madame is gracing me with her imperial attention! Sleep, everlasting sleep, the somnolent Peter keeps repeating.

The red sky. The elephants on never-ending stilts. The insect-elephants, delicate cartilage. The astral giant from the prehistoric wilderness. Enormous, velvety mass, imperial tusks, indestructible ivory. Greenish silt draining from the trunk.

The female and male approaching, without ever getting close to one another. On the back of each, a carpet. On the carpet, the monument floating in air. On the trunk of the elephant on the left, an eye. On the female’s, the ocular globe is in between her lips, which are as red as a cosmetics ad.

Below, the infinite. Gray hills, the landing pad, the watch post, two forms running, with a flag and a torch.

The sky is orange then pink then red again. The elephants. A sky striped with thin legs ready to buckle. The arrows of transparent bone, bearing the weight of the bodies and their burdens and the vault. The blood of dawn. The stones are slipping from the Indian rug, they hang in the air. The painted eye. The eye of Special Agent Patrick. On the rug covering the quadruped’s spine, it says Patrick.

Sapped, Gapar twists his body toward the nightstand, braces himself up in bed, props himself against the wall. The car brakes in front of his house. It’s not nighttime, but another day. Dawn, thank God! He’d slept for many hours, hadn’t heard the patrol until now.

The great volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thin pages, thin signs, the cryptograms of the past. The reader is pushed to the past that came before the past.

The Minotaur can’t be killed, the Old Man argues in the chapter about the labyrinth. The Minotaur finds vengeance, transforming the modern labyrinth into a hell. The Minotaur, the Taurus constellation. The promise of rebirth, spring. Futile annotations.

The telephone; the taxi driver can’t find the hermit’s cabin. It’s not the driver but Madame J.T. Peter has only just realized that the Vietnamese woman has an unnaturally low voice. The head of campus security wants to know whether the professor is going to spend the next few days on the grounds. Madame Tang alerts the dean about everything that goes on, who leaves campus, when, to return when, and in whose company.

No, Professor Gapar won’t be on campus for the next few days; in fact, he was just waiting for the taxi to take him to the station. J.T. advises him to close his curtains before leaving, to leave the front light on, as if he were home. And especially, to let the college know in the future when he plans to leave and for how long.

Deserted train station, no followers. An almost empty train car, no one but a hunched, pale old grandmother, sinking into a book, her spectacled grandson fidgeting nearby.

Did the mysterious postcard come from admirers of the Old Man, the alchemist? The encyclopedic scholar used to talk about the invisible fires of Hades, the underground world of the dead, the labyrinth of the cross, the bloodied thread of Ariadne, the knot as labyrinth. The labyrinth as initiation. The nomadic, exile, the underground. The serpentine maze made of a single line. The world captive in the modern tunnel, the tunnel of the subconscious? The Minotaur will devour the people from the tunnel! The Minotaur, in the invisible center of fatality, the scholar would say. The labyrinth made of a single, straight line is invisible. A single straight line, which is invisible.

Fatality hidden in profane numbers: temperature, speed, kilometers, cholesterol, blood pressure, glycemia? You don’t need symbols to kill. Transcendent advertisements and trivial instincts, Maestro? Is that the secret of the proselytizers?

Mynheer raises his bored gaze to his notebook. In the window to the right, the river is keeping vigil. The winter fog. The majestic, imperturbable river. A single line. Single, straight line, everlasting.

He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes: the postcard. He reads the text on the back. A biomathematics professor at Cornell University is protesting against the State Department’s harassment of the Mexican senator Castillo Martinez, blocked from entering the U.S., where he’d been invited for a public debate. Under this passage, the letter from the reader in Long Island about the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. The middle of the seventies, trip to Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, the tour guide, the French Impressionist paintings brought back from Germany at the end of the war.

The postcard sits, aged, in Gaspar’s hand.

“What’s that got to do with me? What connection do I have with this nonsense? I’m neither Russian nor German, nor a museum specialist nor a tourist. I’m not even an amateur painter. And I don’t see the tie between the Hermitage, the State Department, and the labyrinth. Nor between the USSR, Ariadne, and the life of the Alchemist.”

Saturday evening, Tara comes without bringing the mail. A bored gesture, a trifle; it doesn’t merit attention.

On the table, two glasses and a bottle of red wine. The professor was prepared! Not just the bottle of wine and glasses, but even an apple pie. And a little delicate jar, and another delicate jar. A festive or ill-fated evening, or both?

He’d slept deeply and woke up revitalized. A clear mind, precise intentions: the Labyrinth! He will talk to Tara about the Labyrinth, he will show her his notes from the New York Public Library and the college library. “The Old Man, as we will call him, wrote a lot about the subject, including a chapter in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Tara had also come prepared: white shirt, low cut, long black skirt, elegant, tall boots. Her hair up in a small, black bun. Black eyes and mascara, intense brows. The professor is freshly shaven.

“The conspirators force us to talk about the labyrinth! The Old Man, that’s what we’ll call Dima, wrote much on the subject. Minos, the king of Crete, was punished with sterility because he didn’t sacrifice the bull he’d gotten as a gift from Poseidon, the god of the sea. The king’s wife will conceive a son with the bull. The monster Minotaur. Half man, half beast. Shut into a labyrinth by Minos.”

“Starts out well. . what more could an American student on the threshold of her education wish for other than a lecture on mythology?”

“It’s not a lecture. It’s a preamble. For conversation. The American student might be of use. Through her acuity and freshness. She’s neither uneducated, nor uncultivated, nor innocent.”

“I’ve learned not to turn down compliments anymore.”

“The labyrinth was designed by Daedalus, the king’s architect. Every eight years Athens, the vassal fortress of Crete, would send as sacrifice seven maidens and seven young men to be devoured by the Minotaur. One of them, Theseus, will kill the monster. He will come out of the labyrinth, with the aid of a ball of string, unwound behind him. The famous red thread, a gift from Ariadne. Theseus abandons her, however, in favor of Phaedra.”

“Sex, then. The red thread is sex. In antiquity, too.”

“Minos punishes Daedalus, the ineffective architect of the labyrinth. The labyrinth was imperfect! Daedalus is imprisoned in the labyrinth, together with his son, Icarus. The architect can’t escape his own creation. Icarus, who is obsessed with flight, fabricates a couple of wings, making himself into an artificial bird. And he flies. . ignoring the advice of his father not to fly too close to the sun. The wax in the wings melts. The flyer crashes into the sea. Then, the father Daedalus lands gently in Sicily.”

“An animated movie.”

“Let’s drink the first glass. To the innocence of the audience.”

The professor rises from the armchair, opens the bottle, pours the wine into the glasses, they clink, he sits back down into his seat.

Tara is docile and amused; the professor is in his new role.

“The Old Man wrote about such animated movies. Or the Alchemist. Should we call him that?”

“For the animated movies, the Alchemist is better.”

“All right, I’ll stay with the Old Man. The Old Man refers to modern interpretations, naturally. The urban reader. The solitaries of the city-labyrinth. The mythical Minotaur is the uninhibited part of man. The vital, prerational part.”

“The beast. The beast of joy inside us.”

“The modern city dweller wants to squelch this part of himself, says the passé-ist. Cosmin Dima is all for the inherent organic structure, he rejects modern artifice, the city labyrinth of modernity. Daedalus’ artifices, and those that follow, hide the monster in the subconscious. A fatal mistake, the nostalgic says. The Old Man is skeptical of reason, disgusted by progress. The Old Man gets stuck on … “

“The Alchemist.”

“For the Alchemist and for his friends, traditions, like pagan barbarism, are sources of energy and power. Civilization is forgetting. A lack of scope and center. The decline of the individual.”

“Referring to us! The city dwellers! The solitaries from the city labyrinth. But what about those who live in the country, at the college hidden in the woods? Does that revitalize the beast?”

“I don’t know what goes on in your dorms. Drugs, orgies? I wouldn’t be shocked. Youth. The test of limits. I never participated. Regretfully.”

“You can make it up. America offers you ways. You modify your look, body, mind, personality, anything. You can find the magic pill or the elixir invented only last week. You go to Arizona or Nevada or Antarctica under a different name. You’re someone else. The New World encourages the new. Newness. A new start, we say.”

“I was talking about the decline of the individual, not about impostures.”

Gapar looks at his knees, but he’s speaking clearly and audibly.

“It’s not an imposture, but a new start.”

“Substitution. A person who is a substitute for another person, that’s how the dictionary defines impostor. I know what I’m talking about, I’m an exile.”

“It’s not a new beginning?”

“A lot of mimetics. The first step toward change is mimetic.”

“So, then, you’re with the Old Man.”

“I don’t believe in the idealization of the past. Or in any idealization.”

“Skeptic.”

“The only decency. The modern decline of the individual means the decline of the Nation, the retronauts say. The decline of the individual, the disaster of the Nation.”

“Logical.”

“Logical and true, if the past were a golden reference. But it can’t be. It would defy human imperfection. Should we go back to the animated movies? The Minotaur can’t be stopped, the Old Man and his apprentices maintain. The nostalgia of myth, the pastoral, idealization. The Minotaur avenges the modern labyrinth. The happy and prosperous hell of modernity, or the totalitarian, mytho-maniacal colony. Should we drink to the modern inferno? It’s no worse than the infernos of the past.”

“I prefer to drink for no reason. Just because I like the wine. The student is a hedonist.”

“Not enough. I don’t like the Minotaur. I prefer the labyrinth. As a game. As artifice. Antidote to boredom. We drink for Saturday night. Rest. Relaxation.”

Gapar gets up. Big, massive. He is awake, as if no longer afraid to be awake.

“A sullen March evening. A sullen professor, a sullen lecture about a sullen labyrinth. The labyrinth as a game? It’s a game for innocents. An innocent audience. A complicit audience, nonetheless.”

“Complicit? Yes, I am here. The student is present.”

“It’s the present.”

“And the professor is also present.”

“Maybe. He’s not convinced. He should be convinced.”

They clink glasses, in a good humor both of them. The game prepares for the crime or for the solving of the crime. The killing of the Minotaur or the key to its action.

“Under what sign were you born?”

“What do you mean? I don’t know. I don’t bother with that nonsense.”

“Me, neither, but. . Taurus means vitality. Spring. But I don’t think …”

“But what.. ?”

“My cousin Lu is obsessed with signs, zodiac, astrology, fortune-telling. Some things even seem true, naturally. The rule of probability. I’m hopeless at this stuff. I am amused and then I forget.”

“Horoscopes are another joke. Any game is good. You don’t know how to play games, I suspect.”

“I haven’t for a while. Short amusement, that’s all. When were you born?”

“You want to know how old I am?”

“You couldn’t be young enough for an old man like me. It’s the month that interests me, not the year.”

“April.”

“And the day?”

“You said just the month, that’s all.”

“There are two signs for every month.”

“Okay, I’ll take them both. Whatever they may be. Both of them.”

“All right. A solar promise. Rebirth. The sun punished Icarus by melting his wings. Punished him for his arrogance in defying predetermination, for his faith in freedom, in options. For the ego’s ambition. The modern self-made man. That’s what you Americans say.”

“Imposture! Mimetics.”

“The first step to change. Some change, anyway.”

“The wine isn’t American, this time. The subject is Greek, the Old Man, Eastern European. The same as the host, an improvised professor, impostor. Targeted in the shadows by the phantom-killing ray.”

A moment of exhaustion. Gapar doesn’t know how to go on. He should probably consult Patrick, Larry Eight and the special agent, on how to manipulate the evening of the revelation. The stages, the pace, the surprises, the traps, the decisive moment when the coy and cunning fox will twist in the silk snare, unable to escape.

“Could you sleep here tonight?”

“Why? Do you have insomnia? Is it the rustling in the woods? Does the solitary city dweller feel the Minotaur close by? Bull, badger, owl. The night itself is a dark being. It seduces or kills. Do you have insomnia?”

“Last night I didn’t sleep at all,” the professor lies. That’s why I’m delivering speeches. To stay awake.”

“Take a sleeping pill. The wine is going to help, as well. You’ll sleep after drinking Eastern European wine. Old habits help. They pacify.”

The professor is waiting for an answer.

“I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Why? Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the sexuality of the elderly. And you don’t need to be afraid of yourself, either. As for me, I can fend for myself, if youth attacks. I’ll get by. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t report you.”

“You want me to sleep here? Here, on the couch?”

“Why not? I’d feel better.”

“No, absolutely not. My roommate is waiting for me. It’s a small college, everything gets out.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do. And you need your salary.”

“We’ll tell Patrick that we spent all night talking about the labyrinth. It took all night. We drank wine, you were tired, you stayed. We’ll see how he takes on the new cards, what hypotheses he offers.”

“We could tell him that, even if it’s not true. I like the game, I told you. The game, as a labyrinth.”

“Games with Dracula?”

“The professor is an eccentric, not a monster.”

Tara continues to prod him, like a policeman. Professor Gapar does the same. She smiles, he smiles.

“The game, as a labyrinth. That’s what Gilbert says.”

“Gilbert, which Gilbert?”

“Anteos. You don’t know Gilbert Anteos?”

“The guy with the shaved head?”

“Yes, professor of Greek, Latin, and ancient literature.”

“You’re in his class?”

“Yes, I took Greek Mythology and Modern Life. An eccentric type.”

“Like me?”

“He took refuge in America from the colonial dictatorship in Greece. He’s an exile, too. A nomad.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“About Anteos? You never asked what classes I’m taking.”

“You just let me go on and on, like a dilettante, about the Minotaur and Ariadne and Daedalus.”

“I don’t look down on dilettantes. America is full of dilettantes. They respect all hobbies. Among dilettantes, you discover clairvoyants and unexpected suggestions.”

“So, then, the expert with the shaved head talked to you about the labyrinth. Did he also quote Dima?”

“I don’t remember. Otherwise, yes, all the references, the entire inventory. The invisible fire transforms the bodies arrived in Hades in the underground dwelling. . the labyrinthine dwelling of the dead. The transition from the spiral to the cross. Christ, like Theseus, descending into the Inferno. Descensus ad infernos. The red thread of Ariadne, the bloodied memory.”

The professor is silent, gazing at his postal woman who didn’t bring the mail.

“I should check my notes. I didn’t retain that name, Dima. When you were talking about these Balkanic, sinister things, I didn’t make the connection. But Anteos, yes, Gilbert talked about the labyrinth and the rest. I took notes, I’m sure. What I didn’t write, I remember.”

“Meaning?”

“Gilbert told me, at some point, about the eccentricities of the refugee Peter Gapar.”

“Aha, you mean Dracula’s eccentricities.”

“Not quite. Maybe Gilbert didn’t have all the information. He was talking about childish, endearing eccentricities.”

“For example?”

“You eat every day in the faculty lounge, I understand.”

“Where else?”

“Greeted with happiness. There are amicable signs from all the tables, they call you over. They want you among them.”

“The advantage of the exotic stranger. He rouses curiosity. They want to hear stories from the Stone Age.”

“Especially when the stranger is generous. He tells stories, but he also brings gifts.”

Gapar doesn’t ask any more questions. He understands what she’s talking about.

“You bring them all kinds of wonderful things. The Belgian chocolate and Swiss chocolate impressed everyone.”

“That’s what I was after. The stranger is curious, too, wants to understand the robots of the postmodern millennium. I brought first-class chocolate. To see how diets and discipline and Protestant austerity get swept under the rug.”

“And did it get swept under the rug?”

“Yes. Truffles are magic. Demonic. I’m a fat foodie, as you can see. I wanted to see how the fitness fanatics would react. I watched deliriously to see the first truffle in the mouths of the ascetics. Just one, that’s all. After that, the drug takes its effect. Ir-re-sis-ti-ble. You want another and another, as many as you can, to fill you with happiness, until you choke.”

“Yes, Gilbert told me. After a few sessions of that kind of intoxication, you switched the drug.”

“I brought jars of pickles. Pickled in salt, not vinegar, as they’re done here. Amazing stuff. The wonder of the wild East.”

“And then, other wonders.”

“Roasted peppers. Eggplant salad. Divine.”

“I know. Gilbert hadn’t forgotten any of the temptations. He’s Greek. You floored him. Same with the postmodern natives. Robots, as you call them. Where did you find these things? How did you haul them here?”

“I found the chocolate at the Chocolatier. In the Lunar City. I ordered, they sent. It awoke my national ambitions. In Queens I found all the charms of the East. Serbian, Russian, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian. Stuffed grape leaves, stuffed cabbage, pickled herring, roe salad, stuffed chicken, lamb meatloaf, brains, kidneys, fries, feta cheese, burduf sheep cheese, eggplant salad, black pudding, Romanian and Serbian meatball sausages, preserves of all kinds. I couldn’t take everything. A jar at a time. Just to try. A taste of the East. The tongue that tastes and the tongue that speaks. The essential. The matrix, as they say.”

“You took care of everyone but me.”

“That’s not true. I took care of you, am taking care of you. I didn’t want to replace the American pie with a Carpathian pie; the comparison would be humiliating for a superpower. Apple pie, with cheese, doughnuts with sour cream, “poale-n brau” Danishes, pudding with raspberries, dumplings with prune jam or blueberries or cheese or rose preserves, crepes with ricotta, cinnamon buns, honey buns, Moldovan sweet bread, cheese bread, this is the gastronomy of my friends from the former Eastern Empire, from Bukovina, not mine, since I’m on the former Habsburgic Empire’s border! But today, however, next to the Yankee pie, we have a miracle. Mir-a-cle! The gift of the gods. Sour cherry preserves. A singular delicacy. From Bukovina, where a friend of mine was born. He was a mathematician, murdered by someone in a bathroom stall. My cousin’s husband is also from Bukovina. In fact, he’s my cousin, too, isn’t he? Small, sour-sweet, black and wily, inestimable cherries. The recipe of the gods. With no equal. Unearthly. Ce-les-tial!”

Peter shows Tara the small, black jar next to the small, yellow jar.

“Sour cherries from Bukovina. You should learn geography.”

“I will learn. I bet this is an aphrodisiac.”

“Naturally. I hope you won’t turn it down.”

“I won’t turn it down. I don’t think Gilbert would turn it down, either.”

Gilbert?! A venomous fly stings Professor Gapar’s viscera. It didn’t matter that he’d slept well and prepared himself for the Saturday night meeting. It didn’t matter one bit; he was losing the game.

“The thread that gets tangled. The knot, as labyrinth. Initiation,” continued Tara, putting down her glass, then the slice of pie, then the spoon with traces of the black and yellow miracle. “The serpentine maze leads to the center. Is the center the female sex? The arrow aims for the center, the sperm aims for the ovum. Regressus ad uterum. Is it the same as descensus ad infernos?”

The glass frozen at Gapar’s lips. He slurps it to the bottom. He puts the empty glass on the table. He’s regained his composure, ready to confront all banalities and surprises.

“So then, you want me to sleep here, on the couch? To make you feel better, less alone. So that I can be here when you get panicked and need a nurse. That wouldn’t intimidate you?”

“I’ve gotten used to the idea already.”

“You’re not afraid of becoming dependent.”

“I’ll be careful, that won’t happen.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. Let’s change the subject.”

“Very well. But we should still tell Patrick, no? We’ll tell him what we want?”

“It isn’t what I want. Not anymore.”

“Something has intervened.”

“Something has.”

“But you accept the game, the substitution.”

“The imposture, you mean? There’s no point. It will complicate things. We won’t be able to sustain the lie through other interfacing lies. Patrick is no joke. Nor is Jennifer Tang. Here, the authorities are no joke, I don’t know if you’re aware of this.”

“Nor anywhere else.”

“I’d like more wine. Aren’t you afraid of losing your lucidity?”

“Or of you losing yours.”

“The student isn’t sure if the professor is speaking the truth.”

“I’m embarrassed, I don’t have another bottle.”

“It is possible that this is also a lie.”

“It isn’t. I don’t have another bottle of the same wine, I mean to say. I didn’t think it would be necessary. I wasn’t even sure it would be good. I have American wine.”

“California wine is excellent. Better than what we drank. No offense.”

“None taken. I wanted an exotic atmosphere, with wine from exotic places. But it’s not a good idea to mix the past with the present.”

“And between them, we eat pie.”

“American pie.”

“Yes, American. We are in America. American student, American professor.”

“Okay. Until the touch of invisible and perpetual death, the game continues.”

The evening extends past midnight. Tara proves herself to have quite a high tolerance to drink and to the dialogue’s traps.

“Professor, forgive a poor, ignorant wanderer. I need some guidance. I’m about to have a new meeting with the free world’s police department. Larry Eight. Mr. Murphy.”

Gora was silent, used to Peter’s casual entrances.

“Police Officer Murphy will again subject me to a long interrogation about Dima and Palade and the elite of our little elite homeland.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Palade remembered a certain Marga Stern, information received from Saint Augustin Gora. A lover from Dima’s youth, with whom he maintained an unclear relationship even after he was married, after her own marriage and divorce. I understand she was deported to Transnistria. I don’t know if she survived or not, the important thing for me is Dima’s indifference in relation to Marga Stern and other coreligionists. The real danger was imminent around that time. He didn’t look into her fate, didn’t send a single word of encouragement. Palade wasn’t sure about the information from the professor. He suspected that it might be a fabulous fabrication.”

“There was a rumor that Marga died in Transnistria, but it isn’t true. She survived, God knows how, and returned to the village where she’d tried to hide during the war, and there, two weeks later, she killed herself. There’s a short note about her in Dima’s Green Notebook, at the end of the war: Poor Marga, how much she must have suffered. That was all. A late tribute to youth, maybe a conjectural obligation.”

“Ah, so you know more about her.”

“I learned about it when I spent all that time in the attic room, where all the talk was about Dima. I researched it, looked into references and discovered the story of Marga Stern.”

“Would that interest Police Officer Murphy?”

“During the time of anti-Semitic laws, then later when the deportations started, Dima never once looked into Marga’s situation,” Gora continued, as if he hadn’t even heard the question. “He could have, even though he was far away and overwhelmed with his own problems. There would have been means of communication.”

“Did he have other friends from her community?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so. I only know about Marga. Immediately after Dima got married, she did, too, but she divorced quickly, after a few months.”

“Was she beautiful? Like Madam Gora? Like Ludmila Serafim, married to the eminent professor Gora?”

“It was said that she had no capacity for generalization and that she was proud of this. Never pathetic, scared of abstractions, concentrated on facts, objects, sensations. Good sense, moderation.”

“It’s as if you knew her directly.”

“Dima would call on her, alert with desire, then would retire from her, then call her again. A delicate, discreet, loyal partner. Biologically calm.”

“Biologically calm, is that what you said?”

“Yes, that’s what people who knew her said. She loved Dima. Marga Stern seemed to me a very memorable character. Absolute respect for the real.”

“Indeed, but maybe it’s a bit much for Larry Eight. Police Officer Murphy wouldn’t understand Marga’s chaste intelligence, nor Dima’s indifference, he’d call those things pragmatism, the only thing he understands. He has the head of an army officer and a notebook in which he doesn’t write anything.”

“I’m sure he recorded you on tape.”

“I didn’t see any recording devices.”

“You don’t need to see them. Maybe he doesn’t even have any, but has a perfect memory.”

“It’s not enough. He would have to provide a faithful report at the trial. Otherwise, it has no value in the face of justice.”

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

Peter, however, had hung up the phone.

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

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

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

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

“How long did it take?”

“Six months.”

“And the hesitation?”

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

“Communist archives?”

“Probably. Not only. Maybe C.I.A.”

“C.I.A. documents?”

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

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

“Maybe what?”

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

“A pact with the devil, then?”

“Not with the devil. With the C.I.A.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And had he changed?”

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

“What did he think about democracy?”

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

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

“Did he promote these ideas?”

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

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

“Without a moral subtext?”

“A review in a journal with modest circulation.”

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

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

“Mr. Murphy, I am ready to confess.”

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

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

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

“That’s true everywhere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But they defined the individual as a citizen.”

“Religion helps man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Through that female student?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The theories seemed to be tiring Peter out, as well as Patrick. Gapar sighed heavily at the final thought, as though after too long a toil.

“Was the president of the college hoping to help you gain prestige? He hired you in spite of a lot of opposition.”

“I don’t know that there was so much opposition. Larry — excuse me, President Avakian — was convinced that the review should be written. A just cause, he said. I have to cure myself of my Eastern European equivocation, he said. He’d been a student at the university where the Old Man became a great American professor. The coincidence irritated him.”

“Why did you refuse to be presented as a dissident?”

“I was never imprisoned. I didn’t even demonstrate.”

“You asked to have removed from the college’s guidebook the part in your bio where you’re described as a Holocaust survivor.”

“I was born after all that; I’m not a survivor. In my family, the use of that word was forbidden.”

“Why?”

“Humility. A friend of my father’s who came back from Auschwitz asked a doctor to remove from his arm the piece of skin that had his prisoner number. It was the first thing he did when he came back! He never again mentioned those years.”

“You made anti-Semitic comments at Club 84, at the first job you held in America.”

“The owners were wealthy Jews. I protested to their arrogance, not their Jewishness. The arrogance of wealth. They were throwing away massive quantities of food. I came from a country that was starving. I would have protested to a Chinese club, as well.”

“But in the end, why did you really write the article? That review.”

Peter is quiet. Not to find the appropriate response, but in order to look the interrogator directly in the eyes.

“I had a long conversation with Professor Palade before he was assassinated. Neither of us suspected what was about to happen. I went specifically to see him, to talk to him. He was an expert on the subject.”

“Did you know him? Were you friends?”

“A mutual friend made the acquaintance. Palade felt he was in danger, but I didn’t give it too much attention. I was obsessed with my review. I wanted information, advice.”

“And did he advise you?”

“The Old Man had been his mentor. He’d helped him come to America. He adored him. He knew all of his work and his life. He was the one who asked me to write the article.”

“Why?”

“After the Old Man’s death, a lot of old secrets were uncovered. Palade found himself implicated, without wanting to be. He began writing against nationalism in the exile journals. Violent. Incendiary. He’d discovered motes on the sun. His sun. He was suffering. The pieces he wrote were an announcement, perhaps, of a reevaluation of the Maestro. I’m not sure. In any event, they cost him his life.”

“Was he afraid?”

“I don’t know. He was an odd fellow. Obsessed by mental constructs. Presentiments, parapsychology, esoteric codes. I wasn’t. . I’m no good at these things. I’m blocked. I didn’t pay attention. Afraid, yes, I think he was afraid.”

“Was the meeting useful?”

“It was decisive.”

“Did he tell you things you didn’t know?”

“ Tour text will resurrect the Old Man,’ he said. ‘Even if as the result of a thrashing, he will live again. His postmortem prestige couldn’t be damaged any more than he damaged it himself when he was living,’ Palade said; ‘the reaction to the text will reveal the paltriness of his admirers, that’s all. The posthumous paltriness. The paltriness of sanctification.’ That public lynching was reserved for me, but Palade didn’t talk about this.”

Patrick was silent, waiting for the revelation, the true revelation, as opposed to trivial diversions.

“A minor, but real detail shocked me. It’s verifiable. The Mae-stro’s doctor.”

Patrick waits for the great moment.

“The drop that tips the glass. The small, but decisive drop.”

Patrick isn’t taking notes. The notebook and pen wait, humbly, at the corner of the table.

“The Old Man had hired a driver. Specifically for visits to his doctor. Frequent visits. He could have taken a taxi, but he wanted his own chauffeur, a man he could trust. He didn’t drive, of course.”

“Of course?”

“Palade didn’t drive, either. Neither do I, for that matter.”

“You don’t drive? And how do you get by? The campus is completely isolated, you can’t get to the city except by driving. Does that student, Tara Nelson, drive you?”

“Sometimes. Rarely.”

“So then, the scholar had a driver. He brought him to the doctor.”

“Hired just for these trips.”

“Having a driver is nothing out of the ordinary. And we all have doctors.”

“A special doctor. A comrade from youth. Immigrated to America after the war. Old himself, now.”

“Renowned?”

“Somewhat. Dima could have found someone better. He lacked neither money nor fame, he could have the best doctor at his disposal, but he chose his old friend with connections to Fascist circles, in America and South America. That doctor published a book. I own it. Propaganda. Terrorism. In the name of anti-Communism.”

“What’s it called?”

Gapar dictates and Patrick transcribes the title, year, publisher. “What kind of Fascist circles?”

“The World Anti-Communist League. The founder, Otto von Bolschwing, was convicted as a member of the SS. He collaborated after the war with the American Army’s Corps of Counterintelligence.”

“A just cause.”

“Maybe. American counterintelligence offered protection to people like the doctor or the former SS commander Bolschwing, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1961. Bolschwing lived here over twenty years, until his death. The doctor, Dima’s comrade, was just presenting the same old Nazi and Fascist slogans, repackaged in a new language. The wrapping of the present… and the League …”

“I don’t see what you oppose in an anti-Communist organization.”

“Its members. A former dictator of Guatemala. He was an official in Mussolini’s government. Eight former Republican members of American Congress.”

“American congressmen represent a free country.”

“Naturally, but they stand behind a former SS commander from Holland. A distinguished Englishwoman, a baroness who stood mil-itantly for European freedom, and a former minister in the Nazi government of Croatia. A former adjunct to the American Secret Service and a former Belgian general and a former founder of the Japanese Liberal Party and a former member of the Egyptian parliament, known for his ties to former Nazis.”

“A lot of formers.”

“Yes. And a member of the former Argentine junta. A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family. The leader of the Spanish anti-Marxist group. Two Yale professors. A varied team. Not without Nazis and Fascists.”

“The anti-Fascists were Communists.”

“There were some non-Communist anti-Fascists, as well. The Old Man Dima could have chosen a different doctor. The past should have made him circumspect. He visited his former comrade often. Was he complying with some kind of arrangement with the C.I.A.? The possibility is worth looking into.”

Patrick doesn’t seem at all interested in the suggestion, doesn’t take note.

“So then, Old Man Dima, as you call him, wasn’t just a great professor in a pragmatic world. He doesn’t seem very pragmatic. . but his apprentice? Mr. Portland.”

“Palade.”

“Okay, Palade. A scholar who was just as important, you say, a mathematician, parapsychologist, philosopher. And antinationalist. Why was he assassinated? By whom? By people involved with Dima and the doctor?”

“I don’t know. There was talk about cooperation between the secret police from the old country and American nationalist exiles. There’s no proof of anything. And there will never be, I’m sure.”

“Does the threat letter you received come from the same source?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were insisting that it might be a joke.”

“That was what I’d thought. Gradually, I entered the psychology of the stalked. The president, dean, and head of campus security convinced me.”

“Or the student who sorts your mail?”

“She, as well. She agreed with them. I am worried about the letter, I will admit.”

“Do you regret publishing the review?”

“I had reservations, as I told you. I published the text, and the reservations remained. It doesn’t mean I regret it. No, I don’t regret it. The facts I exposed were absolutely accurate. Then I had dreams about the Old Man. Several times. In front of his burning library. The flames were engulfing me, as well. Burning, without escape, on the pyre. I also dreamed about his apprentice, Palade. Conversations with a cadaver. A skeleton, a dead man.”

Patrick doesn’t seem interested in such digressions, continuing to suspect the Eastern European refugee.

“Do you trust Tara Nelson?”

Professor Gapar doesn’t respond immediately.

“Yes, I trust her. You’ve also suggested that she’s useful to my American reeducation. That’s not a negligible advantage.”

“Has she ever written you any letters?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“We would compare the handwriting style. Which can be faked, of course.”

“She’s never written me any letters.”

“Other students? Do you receive letters from students? Or anyone else?”

“Not really. And I don’t hold on to them.”

The interrogator appears to be finished with the interrogation. He closes his notebook and sinks into his chair, massive and relaxed. He needs a break, he gives the suspect a long, calm look. He puts his large hands on the notebook on the table.

“I’d like to understand a little better.”

Finished, but not finished.

“To understand where Palade and Dima intersect and then come apart. And how you relate to them.”

The policeman and the suspect look into each other’s eyes. Gag-par hesitates to answer, has too much to say, too much to explain.

“Dima’s political choices probably correspond to his philosophy. He seemed to prefer polytheism over the limitations of monotheism. He found the universal in nature and vegetation. Interested in myth, without being a mystic, he opted for an organic world, a return to nature, to the cosmic. An agrarian vision? It’s more complicated than that. Antimodern, probably. Palade was intoxicated by the mysteries, and he paid close attention to the theories of information and cognitive studies. He sees exile as an essential cosmic condition. Obsessed with parallel and permeable worlds, quantum physics and infinite universes. His death wasn’t natural like Dima’s, but abrupt and enigmatic. Horrible.”

“And you studied all of these theories before writing the review? Or did you discuss them with Palade?”

“With him, as well, but mostly with another mutual friend of ours. An erudite scholar. He explained everything I didn’t know and gave me a list of books that I don’t at all feel like reading.”

Patrick wasn’t interested in erudite scholars.

“I understand,” the policeman announces in closing, slapping the notebook on the table with both hands. We will talk again Friday morning.”

The interval is shortened! Neither the interrogator nor the interrogated comments on the change.

After two hours, in the library café, Tara Nelson informs Peter Gag-par about her meeting with Patrick.

“Did he ask about the student-professor relationship?”

“Yes, he didn’t forget.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That we’re friends. I help you, sometimes. Not just with the mail. On Saturday I slept on the couch in the hallway. So that you wouldn’t be alone. The woods scare you at night.”

“I asked you, that is, to sleep at my place? Is that what you told him?”

“Yes. Isn’t it the truth? Didn’t you ask me?”

“I made that mistake. You refused. Did you tell him you refused?”

“No.”

“You told him that you watched over my sleep?”

“Yes. I told him that I don’t ever make gestures of charity, but since receiving the letter you’ve been having insomnia. I think it’s good to have someone in the house.”

“A lie.”

“That’s not a lie. The lie is that I slept in Professor Gapar’s house. But you proposed playing games.”

“And you said it wasn’t worth it, it would mean going from lie to lie, we won’t be able to pull it off.”

“I changed my mind. It seems interesting.”

“Interesting? Patrick asked me as well if you do anything for me other than sort my mail. No. I answered no, nothing. He didn’t correct me. He didn’t point out that you said the contrary. So, he knows we’re lying. Or, at least, one of us. Or both. I lied, too … that you never wrote me a letter. The dean of students knows about Tara Nelson’s impertinent letter. I hope Patrick won’t come across that detail; he already seems bored with all of this nonsense.”

He wasn’t convinced that Tara had actually played the game with the cop, as she said. What if she was actually playing with him, rather than with the police officer?

Before saying goodbye, Tara hands him another envelope.

“Another message? Another death threat? With the date and the place where the assassin and victim should meet?”

“No. I brought you a little book, to amuse you.”

Gapar thanks her, he’s irritated, he doesn’t open the envelope. Once home, he pulls the small volume out of the envelope.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary — Unabridged, Dover Editions, Inc., New York.

A note at the beginning of the volume, “A sardonic partial lexicon of the English language. Ambrose Bierce (1842-ca. 1914), a Civil War Veteran. . recognized as one of the most influential American journalists of the end of the 19th century and a notable writer of short fiction and light verse. Two years after the publication of this volume, Bierce ventured down to revolution-riddled Mexico and was never heard from again.”

A marker in the book. Page 42. Geology, Ghost, Ghoul. Yes, Ghost. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear. The definition is worth re-reading. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear…

Even during the cold nights, when it’s pleasant to remain in bed, Augustin Gora would wake up early. Since he’d changed the country and language in which he lived, he slept only with the help of sleeping pills. Short sleep. He would wake up without any difficulty, would start working so as not to feel his exhaustion. He’d often find himself in front of his computer. He would look at the calendar: Thursday. He would turn the armchair to the left and look at the receiver. Turn the armchair to the right, bend over the desk, pull out the bottom drawer, place the folder titled RA 0298 on the desk. The phone would ring. He would look at it, without pleasure.

“Saint Augustin? Are you in your lair?”

“What lair?”

“Between book covers.”

Gora was silent, annoyed by the glibness of the intruder.

“Yes, between.”

“I’m looking for a bibliographical reference. You’re the authority, you know everything.”

Gora looked at the folder, smiling. The summary of his conversation with Bedros Avakian about Peter’s hiring.

“A quotation. I can’t place it. I know that it’s a quotation. I’ve seen it somewhere. I know it, but I don’t know it. It’s not in the language of my birth, but the language of my death. I’m counting on your speedy reaction.”

Gora listens and moves on to the second file in the folder.

“I know I saw this phrase somewhere. A long time ago, when we were young and bookish. In your English, I don’t have the key.”

Gora was silent, looking at the Avakian page.

“The author could, in fact, be Lady D. Madam Death. The whore with the scythe.”

“I see you know who the author is.”

“But I don’t know the pen name. I repeat the quotation daily to myself. Five, ten times a day. When I am awake and when I sleep. When I walk, and when I remember, while on the toilet, that I was young at some point. Then, I reread the black paper. The devil, the whore’s lover, sent it to me. Next time, says her Ladyship. Next time, I kill. I promise. . that’s what the goblin of the night says. Should I believe her? You never know when she’s joking and what the joke is concealing. Next time, I kill you, gurgles the filthy monster.”

Gapar stopped, then took up the entire text with a sigh.

“A quotation, no?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

“Madam Bordello reads literature! I was sure of it. A snob.”

What follows is a tangled story with digressions and parentheses: a few weeks back, Peter received a strange death threat. A joke. The authorities took it seriously. They ordered him to do the same.

“The review about Dima. . you remember. Then, I was under protection, without the protection of the FBI. These people make you give up your soul with all the questioning. After they are sure that you’re no criminal, they give you senile advice. Now, another investigator. You know what Larry Eight told me? Don’t relax. But that’s my nature, sir. That’s who I am, Mr. Murphy, I’m whistling all day long, but I can’t relax …”

Had he stopped or not? It wasn’t clear.

“I’m bothering you at this early hour in the morning because I’m under a lot of pressure. I can’t die illiterate. I have to find out what books the two lovers Mister Devil and Lady Death read at night before going to bed. Next time I kill. Next time I promise you. Next time, a single line. Labyrinth. Invisible labyrinth. Eh, what do you say to that?”

“I’m thinking,” Gora whispers. He’d moved the folder to the edge of the table. The Computer knows the answer, and Gora also knows the answer, and is dumbfounded.

“Assumptions. I am weighing things out, and thinking. It’s by. . so and so or so and so.”

He was smiling. How could you not think of the apprenticeship of exile: from the old typewriter, heavy and rusted, presented annually to the socialist militia for approval, to the American electric typewriter, then to the fax machine, the pages transmitted instantly to the other world, then the computer that often gives birth to another computer. Cosmic schism, the planetary uproar of banality. You are the same Gora who is no longer the same.

He pushed down on the piano keys, humming the magic phrase, the computer hesitated, then the confirmation appeared on the blue screen. He’d wanted to check if the robot knew as much as a professor educated in the old school. It did, look at that, it did.

Saint Augustin, the wizard, knows all the books in the world like the back of his hand, all the books that now a poor kindergarten computer also knows.

“The Old Man? Old Man Dima? Is he writing to us from the other world?” Peter Gapar asks excitedly. “These were all his concerns. . magic, the labyrinth, mysticism, the fantastic. It’s he, isn’t it? He wants me to meet him, he loves me, he wants to save me from our sinful world, isn’t that right?”

“That’s possible. I’m leaning toward somebody else. I’ve known what the Greeks didn’t know: uncertainty. Do you know the quotation?”

Silence. Gapar, the basketball player, doesn’t know this quotation. He has no idea about the suspects in the attic; around that time he was still playing hockey and turca* and basketball.

“I’ve known what the Greeks didn’t know: incertitude,” repeated Saint Augustin. A phrase once heard in the socialist attic.

Silence. The deathly silence of the grave and the illiterate.

“I’m leaning toward the blind guy. The Great Blind Man,” whispered Gora, more to himself, convinced that Peter wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Peter had no idea about the attic of the past. He allowed the intruder and himself a breathing pause, to allay his agitation and his memories. The attic! It was just too much. . Peter had no idea about the attic of suspects.

“Hello, hello!” the happy intruder exploded. “Perfect! That’s right, I knew you’d have the answer. Bull’s-eye, perfect. Li-qui-da-ted.”

That precious, cunning Augustin offered the magic key, Peter Gapar was surely mumbling to himself. Just like that, the sonorities of youth in Gomorrah reclaimed! The language of so long ago! The juvenile cadences! Jubilation. Memory reborn, triumphant, all of a sudden!

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

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

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

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

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

After two hours, Peter’s voice:

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

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

“It’s been decades.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A poisoned silence. Gora opens the folder.

“Have you notified the police?”

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

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

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

“You say what you discovered.”

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

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

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

“Palade was warned, then killed.”

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

“What do you mean ‘a renegade’?”

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

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

“Maybe the gossipers wrote it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Beautiful?”

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

The student had persuaded him to notify the campus administration.

“It was worse.”

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

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

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

“They consider you an enemy. Failures are dangerous, as I was saying, and vengeful, be careful that you don’t…”

Saint Augustin didn’t get to keep prattling on. Peter had disappeared, his voice had disappeared, the phantom had moved his tricks into the void.

The phantom, however, still sends riddles, suggestions, traps.

Left alone, Saint Augustin recapitulates. Could the basketball-star-turned-reader actually never have heard of the Borges story? Hard to believe. Lu might have told him stories about the attic of suspects where the suspect fable was read. She might also have reminded him about the evening when Palade debated Borges’ parallel worlds. Or even if Lu, discreet and dignified as she always was, avoided the past, Gapar would have found out about the story from Palade. Inevitably. They had talked so much about Dima, and Borges should have been an unavoidable reference; Dima and Palade had published exegeses about the blind man from Buenos Aires.

When he was speaking about the nights with Palade, however, Gapar had never mentioned Borges! Not a single allusion, not a whisper, nothing! He doesn’t even appear in the review about Dima’s memoirs. Was he already preparing the game with the masks and quotations back then? Animated for a short time by the Dima dilemma and Palade’s strangeness, was he already putting into motion future amusement? A death threat! Let’s be serious, criminals don’t need quotations from esoteric books.

Angels don’t write books. And what exactly is that, wise guy? They don’t write books, so then, neither do they write death threats borrowed from books. Gora had found the aphorism in the draft of the meeting between Patrick and Peter and was once again amazed by the buffoon’s conclusions.

And from where to where … a basketball star raised in the house of the Communist David Gapar and in the Communist schools of the Red era, and now so many sophisticated Talmudic speculations about a postcard with excerpts from the New York Times?

Professor Gora wasn’t convinced that Peter hadn’t just gotten bored of the New World and tried to regenerate his own irresponsibility. He’d announced from the start that he’d moved his game with death to foreign soil, and now he was staging his nocturne of threat.

He’d wasted time with this ridiculous farce, he had half a mind to call the police himself, to inform them that a good friend, a recent refugee from the East, has found his life in danger here, in the Country of All Liberties.

An obligatory paragraph in the obituary on which he was working at that very moment.

Life after death is nothing but a poor obituary, Gora says. Futility after futility has its scribes, professionals, intermediaries, clients, giant archives, and giant advertising agencies. Every story with a beginning and end is an obituary.

Because of the short time between the notification of a death and the next publication deadline, many press agencies have obituaries ready for the right moment.

The last validation of passing from the world can’t be brief and formal. The truth consists of fantasy and of potentialities, reality isn’t confined to facts, but also to hypotheses and enigmas, unfulfilled chances, expired within the unique that has itself expired.

He’d consulted editing guides for obituaries, from the Know How series, which gives instruction about gardening, marriage, electrical installation, diabetic diets, sexual appetites, and winter sports, as well as the inevitable funeral end. The last great event: copulation with the Nymphomaniac.

An obituary can be basic, with publically known facts about the life of the deceased, but also a very personal look at life, with details that probe the uniqueness of the loved, or of the detested, as the case may be. The obituary has evolved from a summary note of farewell to a multilayered and durable memorial. It can by a dynamic and illustrated biographical history. One can consult the National Archive of Obituaries. Millions and millions of examples can be found in The Daily Book of Obituaries, military and athletic anthologies, obituaries of heroes and impostors, refugees and adventurers, exiles, animators, courtesans, panderers, politicians, bankers, clowns and nuns and magicians and madmen. Modest and villainous and eccentric lives.

The obituary isn’t just a simple farewell note but the memorial addressed to posterity. The history of a life with everything that life contains and didn’t get a chance to contain. Unfulfillment can’t be ignored, what you wanted but didn’t get a chance to do or to be, the failures that never got second chances. Something apart from a recapitulation of the calendar, apart from the daily chaos.

He’d listened many times to the famous band Obituary, which had launched the death metal genre in Florida at the end of the eighties, he’d bought the album Cause of Death, made notes on the subsequent records, The End Complete, World Demise, Set in Stone, and Buried Alive.

“Do you know what Peter told me when I asked him about Eva?”

Lu had stopped, they were on the sidewalk in front of Gara de Nord, the central station in Bucharest, after dropping the high schooler Peter Gapar at the train heading to the north of the country.

“Eva is obsessed with him, not with her husband. The son isn’t too pleased, but he doesn’t protest, doesn’t pay attention, he only thinks about basketball. Eva told me about his visit to the cemetery in Sapinfa, the merry cemetery.”

Gora had no idea that such a cemetery even existed.

“The Merry Cemetery in Sapinta, near Maramure. The tombstones have colored, comical stories drawn onto them. Death isn’t comical, Eva said. I asked Peter about his mother. He said that David forbade any mention of the theme of death after Eva said at some point that from the concentration camp they came not home but to a cemetery.”

In recent years, a new journalistic genre has developed: the obituary as entertainment.

What is anything, if not entertainment?

Publicity, attraction, distraction. The merchandise has to be attractive: the book and the carrots and the shoes. Otherwise no one buys it and it rots and disappears. I buy, therefore, I exist, I sell myself to buy. If I don’t sell, I have no value. The obituary is evidence that I existed! If it’s not interesting, then I didn’t exist. I don’t exist because I didn’t exist.

It’s a new industry, a cavalcade of performers and healers, bachelors, spies, acrobats, sports stars, movie stars, jazz stars, eccentrics and killers and bureaucrats. Anecdotal, discursive products of a cynical frankness, touching and, of course, amusing.

De mortuis nil nisi bene doesn’t apply anymore.

Amusement, the lack of prejudices and restrictions, infantiliza-tion. What’s wrong with that, Professor? What’s wrong with it, the professor was asking himself.

Gora was smiling, tired, dreaming, fondling the blue gloves, on top of the folder, which he hesitated to open.

Thin, loose pants made of green satin. A sleeveless, transparent shirt. Sandals with a single strap, on a bare foot. Lu, pale Anda-lusian. Intense gaze, intense expectation. She’s thrown off her sandals, pants, small underwear, no bigger than a rusted leaf. Full breasts, hot belly, long arms and long legs, electrified. The supreme moment, supreme youth. Open the bottle, pour into the glasses. The clinking of old crystal. On the table, raspberries, cherries, wine. She is here and faraway, in the green of the great trees.

Dressed in a light, linen blouse of red, yellow, and white, she was meticulously cleaning the vegetables. Then she washed the fish and the fruit. She was wearing thin rubber gloves, like a surgeon. White, yellow, red. She cut the vegetables scrupulously, piece by piece. She was celebrating the silken morning, the alert ecstasy of the human fully alive. She breathed in the physical and metaphysical day, she loved concrete things and the sacredness they contained. Concentration and sensuality.

Old aphrodisiacs. Gora was watching the wood and glancing, now and then, at the screen that delivered the disasters of the day. After a while, he let himself fall back into the chair, covered his eyes with his palms, eager for relaxation.

The thin, loose pants, the linen transparent blouse. The sandals, the bare foot. You wake up, stupefied by wrinkled, old skin. The dried body, skin like parchment, white hair, like snow and like the pall of the dead. Long, quick tongue, long, livid, dried hands, long, dried legs: a skeleton with a lugubrious sound, swept away at the first touch: a heap of dust.

She threw off her sandals, her pants, her small, thin underwear, no bigger than a rusted leaf. Dried breasts, the skin of her belly purplish, old thighs, the burnt lips of her sex under the puff of white, curly hair. She takes your palm in her narrow, long, wrinkled palm. She folds it into a fist, which she pushes into her center, moaning. Her eyelashes tremble, just like her voice. A short cry, like an owl.

He opens the green bottle and pours into the glass. The clink of the past. The raspberries, the cherries, the wine. She places the cherry on the lips of the dying man. She pushes it delicately into his mouth. Deeper and deeper. Bitter, old fingers.

“What was your youth like,” she asks. “You started late, didn’t you?”

For a moment, she remains lost in the green of the great trees. A burned look in her eyes.

“Oh, yes, me, too. Late, much too late. I regret it, yes.” The lips lick, the teeth bite, the tongue caresses. The dying man pulled inside, into the deep, his gaze hungry, his body thin, senile, an exhausted moan, a scream. Hunger and satiety, copulation with death.

Old phantasms. From time to time, he raises his gaze toward the small blue screen: the chess player wipes his brow and bald head with his wide and hairy hand. There’s no visible adversary, just the board with green and red pieces. The red team and the green team. The king, the queen, the knights, the bishops, rooks, and pawns.

The bald hussar with the black moustache holds the red pieces. He touches the crown of the queen with his index finger, stops thoughtfully, gazing amazed at the battlefield. The kingdoms are no longer black and white, but colored, as the hypercolor era demands. He raises his hand, brings it to his brow, scratches his baldness, tousles his eyebrows, first one, then the other. The right hand holds a brightly labeled Coca-Cola can. Peter brightens, as if responding by a divine sign.

Gora smiles, also awake. The astringent liquor pours into the tall and narrow glass. Frothy, cold, fresh, an elixir. Salvation.

He sips once more. Drink your salvation! Salvation. It preserves memory, fortifies the present, defies the future, age and the obituary.

On the table, the folder. At the edge of the table, the gloves from the past.

Pale, unshaven, sleepless, Professor Peter Gapar — the stalked, in fact, the plaintiff — seems ready to accept the role of the guilty party. His gaze, his tone, the questions with which he opens the newest meeting all confirm the change. The discussion is unfolding differently from the preceding ones. Peter looks tired and slow, defeated by the guilt that he seems ready to admit, resentfully and out of sheer weariness. But after a few minutes, the scene changes: he puts his large hands on the table, next to the large hands of the policeman. He raises his hands. The index of the right hand points to the two volumes on the table.

He announces in a low voice, “I found the quotation and the author.”

On the table, a book with a hash-marked, colorful cover. Typed in three steps, with golden letters: fic-CIO-nes. Next to it, another book. A shiny, black-and-white cover. Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges.

Patrick writes. He doesn’t raise his eyes, bent over the spiral notebook. He pulls it out of the large, old bag made of cankered leather only for unusual circumstances. This time, he is writing. He measures up the suspect disguised as plaintiff, then begins, surprisingly, to write.

He transcribes the name of the publishing house, the year, while holding the book in his left hand. He takes a sheet of paper off the table. He tears it in half and puts one half in each book as a bookmark to the right of the text Death and the Compass. Page 129 in the first book, page 76 in the second.

“Argentine, you say?”

“Yes, a great Argentine writer. Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. Into a family of Spanish, British, and vaguely Judeo-Portuguese origin.”

“Dead, then.”

“He postponed his death in the hope that he’d receive the Nobel Prize. He was stretching the compass as far as possible, but death found him, finally, at eighty-seven years old. Old and blind.”

“Did he receive the prize?”

“No. Those awards are a lottery. The Great Prize so much the more so. He had the chance, but there appeared attacks in the press that he was a Fascist.”

“Was he?”

“Nonsense, he couldn’t have been a Fascist.”

“But the Old Man alchemist might have been?”

“You can’t compare the two. Even though Dima was fascinated by Borges. Just like Palade. Maybe the fanatic who is honoring me with the threat letter, too. Neither Borges nor Palade were Fascists. The case of Dima is more complicated, as I explain in the review. Anyway, he wasn’t a standard Fascist.”

“Meaning?”

Peter doesn’t answer, and Patrick stops writing. He gives the suspect a hostile look, the same as when he’d first appeared, very bristly and determined. The tangled cultural traps increase suspicion. Wearisome digressions, that’s what could be read in Patrick’s gaze. He rifles through the pages, retains a line from here and there, soured by the opacity of the sentences.

“A police story?”

“We could consider it a police story. The hero is a detective. The heroine is Death. A logician who works with a compass and a square.”

Annoyed, Patrick seems ready to draw his gun, to escape the pretender’s oblique language.

“Lonrot. Scharlach. What are these names?”

“I don’t know. Nordic names. Names from a story.”

“And the quotation? Where’s the quotation?”

“Here, page 141, The next time I kill you,’ said Scharlach, ‘I promise you the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.’ He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired. In the other volume, on page 87, The next time I kill you,’ replied Scharlach, ‘I promise you the labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and increasing.’ He moved back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired. My assassin used the first book. Published in New York, by Grove Press. Only he cut the article in front of the subject. Next time, instead of the next time. Your colleague Trooper was right.”

“Trooper? Which Trooper?”

“Mr. Jim Smith, from the state police. From the state troopers. He was saying that it should say the next time, so then the sender could be foreign. He sent the postcard to the investigations lab in Washington. For print analysis. Are there any results yet?”

“I don’t think so. It takes time. The lab is very busy.”

“Naturally. In the land of freedom, crime is a form of freedom. It doesn’t matter if my assassin uses proper grammar.”

“Your assassin?”

“The one who calls himself my assassin. The foreigner.”

“The foreigner?”

“That’s what Jim Smith said. It should have been the next time and / will kill you.”

Patrick is smiling. The state police officer doesn’t inspire any more trust than the professor he’s investigating.

“There are Americans of generations and generations who don’t write correctly.”

He looks at the foreigner in front of him once again, intensely.

“May I take these books? In fact, just the first, the one from Grove Press.”

“Of course.”

“Okay, I will read the story. I don’t think I’ll find anything, outside of that quotation. Is there anything else in the text that we should pay attention to?”

“The festival of masks.”

“And what’s that, now?”

“On the first page Doctor Marcel Yarmolinski is mentioned. A delegate to the International Talmudic Congress, from Podolsk. Podolsk is a place in Eastern Europe. The Talmud is… I think you probably know what it is.”

Police officer Patrick Murphy is silent. His black gaze is increasingly blacker. Larry Eight knows, doesn’t know, hard to guess.

“Yarmolinski endured three years of war in the Carpathian mountains. The mountains in my country, Old Man Dima’s country and Palade-Portland’s country. The story says that the third crime takes place in February, the month of the Argentine carnival. The letter arrived at the college in February. A month has gone by, maybe more. And now the Judaic Carnival is approaching.”

“The Judaic Carnival?”

“Yes. It is, in a way, a Jewish story. The three victims are Jewish. The author was obsessed with the old Judaic texts and the Kabbalah. And with …”

Gapar searches through his left pocket, then the right, out of which he finally pulls a crumpled page from a notebook. He un-crumples it.

“Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, written in Syria or Palestine in the sixth century and. . and the Tetrarch of Galilee. . who never even existed.”

Patrick scratches his head, Peter returns to the dialogue.

“Purim is a festive celebration, with masks. For children. In Borges’ story, the carnival forecasts the crime.”

The stupor proves beneficial, the policeman is struck by an idea.

“This writer, what’s his name …”

“Borges. Jorge Luis Borges.”

“Is he in the curriculum?”

“No. Maybe in the graduate studies, at a big university. But some students here would have heard of him, I’m sure.”

“Have you ever mentioned his name in your class?”

“No, never. I don’t think so. I’d have had no reason to.”

Patrick picks up the phone.

“Tang? Find out if anyone’s taught a course about the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the last three years.”

This time he pronounced the guilty party’s name perfectly.

“Yes, the name of the professor who taught the course and the list of students who took it.”

Patrick puts down the receiver, standing up now. He doesn’t extend his hand, just merely announces, gruffly, “I’ll call you. I will call. If something comes up, tell Jennifer.”

The grenade in the body. The hidden tumor, the knot of toxins. Death in a can, ready to explode. Postponement, postponement, hummed the obese body. The caricature in the mirror in front of the bed asks for compassion: belly swollen with rot, the shaved marble of his head, his thick, livid lips, his gelatinous eyelids.

“The effort isn’t worth it, dear Almighty One,” the condemned whispers. “It would be a ridiculous victory, Dulcissima, postpone the execution.”

After half an hour, fat Peter Gapar stops asking for postponement and tries asking for refuge. The wind swells under the stiff branches of the trees, the darkness advances fluidly around him and in the surrounding wood. This is the nocturnal tribunal from which he asks allowances. He hears the purling, the furtive whimpering of the night. He wanders around the shack, he’s in no mood to reenter the cage. He’s enraged less by the threat itself, and more by the people behind it. He doesn’t like martyrs, or heroes, and he detests the role of victim. He prefers a banal death, without drama. Illness, suicide. The appearance of normality or of an accident. He carries his flesh with difficulty. His body has dilated in exile. Perplexity and insomnia and ravenous eating.

The night will bring the acoustics of the hunt again. Skeletal shadows covering their ears to drown out the sound of the dogs, covering their eyes to block out the blaze of the sentinels. Shivering from cold and fear, Eva Kirschner is there, head shorn, in a striped uniform that hangs loosely on her skeletal body.

The message of the blind man from Buenos Aires had incited the pack of neuroses.

Peter ambles in a circle around the cabin. He ignores the forest and the cabin, both bewildered with anticipation. He tries to regulate his breathing. He breathes in deeply, holds the air in, one, two, five, more, exhales slowly, very slowly, a small, even dose of air, just like his inhalation. One, four, slowly, as slowly as possible.

In front of the door, Death. A smiling woman with whitened blond hair and the large teeth of a wild beast. A black dress that reaches to the ground. In her hand, a piece of paper. The death sentence. The Decree.

“Do you … live here?”

Peter looks at her, dazed, slow to answer. No, the assassin has no weapon, just the Decree.

“Please excuse me. . I’m sorry, this is the notice, the witch stammers. Excuse me … I came by before. But you weren’t home.”

Peter gazes at her mutely, happy that he hadn’t been home.

“I came by, but you weren’t here, I left a note. Gattino. It’s about Gattino. He’s blind, poor guy.”

Yes, the condemned had received the message, a month before. The Argentinian Blind Man, the morbid note.

“He’s only six months old. He’s gray, and blind in one eye. With a respiratory infection. Have you seen him? Have you seen him around by any chance? He has short fur. He’s shy, very shy. He needs to be called by name, quietly, sweetly. Gatti-Gatti-Gattino, pss, pss, Gat-ti.”

She extends a photo of the cat with the white, dead eye. The Old Woman smiles sweetly, with the large teeth of a wild beast.

“Yes, ma’am, I found your sign posted to my door. I haven’t seen the orphan. I mean, the wanderer. I promise, of course, yes, I know the number. Both numbers. Yours, Helene, and your brother’s, Steve. Yes, yes, I have them. I will call, I will call you immediately.”

The sky is darkening. Muted decor. The disoriented wanderer is also muted, and alive. He forgets about suicide and melancholy. Troubled by the fate of Gattino. Italian name, from Buenos Aires.

He gazes up to the illegible sky, then to the ground in front of the steps, a carpet of leaves and insects. He inhales deeply and exhales slowly, in small doses.

The headlights catch him in between two bands of light, the car stops in front of the shack. Jennifer! The elegant head of security, in an Armani trench coat and a Dior scarf, the color of the wind. She gets out of the car, alert and smiling.

“Taking a walk? It’s good for the sleep, it’s good. May I come in?”

The elegant Vietnamese woman ignores the disarray inside.

“I brought a list of the students. There was, in fact, a course on Borges! Two years ago. A professor from Spain. I brought the list of her students. We’re going to compare the handwriting of each of them with the cursive on the postcard. The question is whether any of these was also your student at some point.”

The professor looks down the list.

“No, I don’t think so. None of these names look familiar. I will check. Tomorrow, at the registrar’s office.”

J.T. leaves the list on the table. Tara is not on the list. He doesn’t remember any of the names in front of him. Did Palade’s assassins infiltrate the killer among his students? There would have been no need, the killer could easily enter the campus, find the hermit’s cabin, watch for his return, appear smiling out of the bushes and calmly unload four bullets, four for the four crimes outlined by the compass of Buenos Aires. Or the killer could repeat the Palade scene: after two hours of class, Professor Gaparhurries stiffly to the bathroom, his bladder demanding its rights. The stranger enters the next cabin. For some years now, the professor has risked soiling his trousers in the bathroom. Standing in front of the toilet, he moans quietly from the sting.

Climbed up on the seat in the next stall, the Messenger of Death targets the victim’s temple. It’s simpler than it was with poor Palade: he’s aiming at a standing victim, instead of sitting. It would be simple in the cabin, as well. It’s simple enough to duplicate the key. The nomad’s insomnias and nightmares would only help the killer. At two in the morning, Gaparis in the middle of a neurotic episode, at three, at dawn, he’s riding an elephant, out of whose trunk flow heavy streams of tears. From the sky to the earth. The cinephile watches on the screen to see the aggressor approaching, twirling the shiny toy in his fingers, turning it toward the condemned. A murderous trajectory, the invisible labyrinth, eternity.

Peter smiles. He’d dozed off smiling. The paper J.T. left behind was trembling on his ample chest. He inhales deeply, snoring slightly, like a fat and tired baby chick.

On his chest the list of students who took the Borges course. A white, thin shield.

“We have a suspect. We compared the handwriting from the postcard with that of the students in the Borges course. There’s a suspect.”

“The text was typed.”

“But the name of the sender is handwritten. As well as the address.”

“Well, then?”

“The suspect is from California. Appears to be Polish, is here on scholarship, studies political science and is the editor in chief of the Journal of Political Studies, which the college publishes. Very intelligent, very social, and with a very cultivated mind.”

“Very, very, very. What’s his name?”

J.T. pronounces the name from the sheet on her desk, syllable by syllable.

“E-rast. Erast. Lo-jew-ski. Erast Lojewski. Lojewski. Polish parents, most likely. He graduates this year.”

J.T. was satisfied; she’d worked quickly, and her makeup did her justice.

“Did you take him in for questioning?”

“We can’t. We sent the writing samples to the lab in Washington. If we get a positive match, we’ll ask the prosecutor for permission to question him.”

Gapar smiles, moved. The byzantine socialism that he was used to hadn’t prepared him for such scruples. The barbarian, I’m out of the cage. Captives and captors considered me a liberal buffoon, freethinker, good to let loose in the jungle of freedom. Yet I was a slave, just like everyone else. I had the mentality of a slave. More detached, maybe, longing for some kind of evasion. A barbarian, still. A real barbarian.

“Are you watching him?”

“We’re not allowed to. Not until we get the results from the lab. Would you feel more secure if he were under surveillance?”

“I don’t know… yes. I would. I didn’t sleep at home two nights ago.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“At a motel. On the main highway, not far from the college. I called a cab, I asked for the nearest motel, and the driver took me there. In the morning he brought me back.”

“Motels aren’t the safest of places.”

“I know. I’ve seen many American movies.”

“You should have called me. We would have figured something out.”

“I survived. I’m here. Honored both by the stalkers and the protectors. Excitement! I don’t have time to get bored.”

That same afternoon, J.T. — in a new, afternoon outfit — informs him that he wasn’t the only target. Two other professors had received the same threat! No, she couldn’t reveal their names. The information had surfaced during a discussion in the professors’ lounge; security had come by it accidentally.

One of the letters was written entirely by hand! The handwriting was identical to the other, and similar to Erast Lojewski’s writing. On the back the image of the Hermitage was replaced with a photograph from the New York Times, one image of Arafat and one of Pinochet.

The two American professors hadn’t notified the administration. The postcard had seemed a joke and didn’t warrant serious consideration. Was the Eastern European obsessed with specters and horrors? Is that what the Vietnamese American was suggesting? Hadn’t Professor Gapar tried to convince Larry One and the Sailor Dean and the taciturn Vietnamese J.T. that the threat was a farce?

The calming news did little to calm him. If there were more of the same letters, it means that he’s not the only target. The sender isn’t necessarily a compatriot, Dima’s admirer or Palade’s assassin. But it might be a simple diversion to calm the potential victim and misguide the police.

“Professor Gapar? I’m Gilbert. Professor Anteos Gilbert. Latin and Greek, ancient history. I hear that you’ve received a threatening letter.”

Aha, Tara’s professor! Tara’s letter? Yes, her letter, too, had been threatening at one point, in its own way.

Gapar understands just in time that another letter is in question. “I also received one,” the Greek continues, patiently. “I hadn’t known.”

“You’d have had no way of knowing. These robots at the police department don’t communicate among themselves. Three hierarchies. Federal, state, and local. The local police don’t inform the FBI, and those guys don’t care one bit about the state and local cops. It’s every man for himself. I went to the New York State police. On the very night that I got the letter in the mail. Valia, my wife, had panicked. She insisted that we go immediately to the police to show them the letter. Valia is Russian …”

“I didn’t know. And I don’t see …”

There were a lot of things that Professor Gapar didn’t know, a lot of things he didn’t see around him, blinded by invisible charades.

“There is a connection. Kosovo, the Serbs, Chechnya. You understand.”

The listener does understand, but he’s in no hurry; he waits.

“Valia was afraid that it was an Islamic extremist threat. Because of the Russian repression in Chechnya or the support that the Russians gave the Serbs in Yugoslavia.”

The Eastern European is no stranger to the complications of the region. He breathes heavily. The excess of news means more boredom. A dearth of events has the same effect.

“What happened? What happened at the police?”

“I spoke with a man named Martin. I told him the story, showed him the card. He questioned me for a few hours. He made me make a statement. I made it. I left the place in the middle of the night.”

“Did you locate the quotation? Did you tell him who the author was?”

“What quotation? That absurd proposition? A labyrinth! A labyrinth out of a single line. Invisible, eternal? One fell swoop! Next time I kill you with one fell swoop. . No, I’ve no idea if it’s a quotation. I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. That’s not what interests the police. I told them who wrote the card.”

“Who? You know? How do you know?”

“A student. A student in my seminar. I recognized the handwriting.”

“Tara? Tara Nelson?”

“Tara Nelson? No, not a chance. An international student.”

“Where from?”

“Sarajevo. She came here on a fellowship. Deste, that’s her name. D., signed on the card. Deste.”

“Sarajevo? You recognized the handwriting? How? Just a few words written by hand … it would be hard to say.”

“She used to write me notes before class. Asking for bibliographies, advice. I seemed to remember the writing, but I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t want to find out. I left my statement with the police, for them to beat their heads with it. The meeting had been decisive.”

“What meeting?”

“In the library. After about a week, I ran into Deste at the library. She was at the computer. I went closer. I asked her what she was doing. She showed me. She was typing a text. I froze. It was the text I knew too well. I told her that I received her letter. Tes, you got it?’ She asked me. Good, I’m glad. She was laughing. She has an irresistible laugh.”

“Did she explain? Did you understand? What follows?”

“I asked her if I was the only addressee. Not at all. Forty. Forty letters! She’d sent them to all corners of the country! I told her that such things were lawfully reprehensible. She seemed amazed. Amazed, amused. Candid. The girl is enchanting. Innocent, but ironic. Full of charm.”

Professor Gapar learned more than he’d expected to learn; there was nothing else to ask.

“I wanted to know how she’d chosen her addressees. Interesting people! That was the criteria. That’s what she said, candidly.”

“She doesn’t know me. She’s never met me.”

“She’d probably found some things about you. Your biography published in the college handbook, or she heard something from other students. Only four addressees from the college. That’s all. We’re among few, you must admit. . Who knows to whom and where she sent letters. I told her I have to inform the police. ‘The police? Why the police?’ I explained to her that there’s no knowing what kind of effects such a game could have. She was stupefied. This was, in fact, her intention. The unknown! I tell you, she’s enchanting.”

“What was? What was her intention?”

“An exhibit! An art project, a conceptual installation. Installation. That’s what it’s called now. Something about the Byzantine Empire. I didn’t really understand, and I didn’t care to. That night I called the police.”

“So you denounced the innocent…”

“To the contrary. I withdrew my statement.”

“Withdrew? But didn’t you say that in the end you gave the name of the person who …”

“In the end, but not then. Then, I withdrew the statement.”

“Why? The student represents the Byzantine Empire. Exactly what Valia, your wife, suspected …”

“Nonsense. Deste is not a nationalist. Nor a terrorist. She’s got nothing against the Russian. Dr. Gapar, you yourself know what it’s like to be an old man, bald and fat, in front of a young enchantress. You know?”

Dr. Gapar knows, and keeps silent.

“We haven’t even met yet, and look, I’ve started to babble. . I’m asking ridiculous questions. Forgive me! If we’re on the topic anyway about this letter and Deste, then. . Anyway, I withdrew the statement. There was no point in putting her through stupid questioning.”

“An old man in front of the young woman?” Professor Peter Gapar asked himself suddenly and out loud. “Frustration? That’s it, isn’t it? From timidity to frustration, to revenge, a quarter of a step … You changed your mind, and then you changed your mind again. In the end, you did denounce her, isn’t that right?”

The Greek Gilbert Anteos had come across a Balkan neighbor, was in the mood for gossip, all of which meant that the story had ended well. Happy endings, Hollywood; everything can be fixed. Peter had no reason to be impatient; he’d been given a happy ending as only someone as ridiculous as he deserved. The elephant guffaws, humiliated.

“A month passed, Professor. A month! The FBI doesn’t connect with the Trooper, and these guys don’t connect with the other guys. For a month, neither knew about the other’s existence! I withdraw the statement, and Officer Martin calls me. He asks for the name of the person who sent the postcard. Why should I give you the name, I said. I withdrew the claim, the case is closed. It was a joke, I tell you, a stupid joke, I withdrew the grievance. Police Officer Martin gets angry. ‘Tou’re not the only one involved!’ he screams. ‘There are others, awful things could happen. Either you give me the name or I’ll arrest you.’ Arrest me! We’re not in North Korea or Iraq, not in the Axes of Evil. Neither in Sarajevo, nor Saudi Arabia. But I yielded.”

“You gave her name?”

“No, I didn’t give her name. I refused. Again and again, I refused. Valia was desperate. You know how immigrants are, fearful of the police. I kept on refusing. In the end, however, I promised to send the person to the police station. He took my word and left me alone. I had to convince Deste to turn herself in.”

“The old man in front of the young woman,” mumbled Peter. Enchanting, irresistible. The old, fat man in front of enchanting youth. “Irresistible youth, isn’t that right?” Gapar asked himself, into the receiver.

“I explained to Deste that the story had taken on new proportions. There was no time to postpone. She must go to the police, explain everything, prove her innocence. She was questioned for eight hours. But this wasn’t why I called you.”

Ah, the bomb hadn’t exploded yet. The banter was just preparation for the shock. Gapar pulls in his knees, ready to take on a new hit.

“I’m calling you on Deste’s behalf. She wants to apologize. But she doesn’t dare. She asked me to bring you up to date with the events.”

“Of course, yes, of course,” stammers Peter, short of breath. “When was the whole thing settled? When did she go to the police?”

“About ten days ago. In the end, they contacted the college. Not the FBI, but the college. The college had had no idea. I don’t like Ms. Tang. She’s got her nose in every pot, and so I didn’t tell her anything. Other consequences. With the dean, the president. The poor girl finally understood that, in the land of jokes, there’s no joking allowed. She wrote you at the hotel where you live. The president asked her to write to you, to apologize. She wrote you. You didn’t receive anything, it would seem.”

No, Professor Peter Gapar hadn’t received anything but the labyrinthine threat of an eternal and invisible strike. Ten days? Poor little Deste. . she’s been putting up with consequences for ten days? What was happening with Gapar the elephant during this time? He remembered only the nights. Intense nights. An exile can’t hope for more than ephemeral intensity. The days and nights had been intense, and, as it turned out in the end, also ephemeral. He couldn’t remember a lot, and didn’t even want to remember when and how he’d spoken with Jennifer Tang and Larry One and Larry Eight and Tara and the Sailor Dean and so and so; he wanted to forget everything quickly, to sweep it away, as if it had never been.

After half an hour, the old man who wasn’t quite that old, just fat and bald, speaks on the phone with the enchanting assassin. This he would remember, for sure. He’s determined not to forget anything about this, to speak to his erudite friend Gora about the burlesque Commedia dell’Arte; Saint Augustin will quickly find the bookish cross-references, enchanted by the farce’s finale.

An irresistible voice. A child with an irresistible voice. The specialist on the ancient world was right. The assassin wants to invite Professor Gapar to dinner, to talk to him. More specifically, to cook for him a special meal. Balkan cuisine. Does Professor Gapar have a kitchen? Yes, the kitchen could be set up. Perfect. She’ll take care of everything. He should just tell her when she should arrive with the ingredients. She’d prefer not to disturb him. That is, to cook while the professor isn’t home.

“Yes, of course, that can be arranged, why not …” mumbles Gapar.

“There’s something else, something important,” adds the child. Is the professor on a diet? It wasn’t that… she doesn’t want to … you understand, don’t you? Yes, the elephant understands and sweats, reeling from the most recent blow. How should the old, fat, bald man speak to an enchanting young woman about diet? How? He must admit the truth: it hurts him here, and there, every morning and sometimes in the middle of a seminar, gastritis, colitis, ulcer, hemorrhoids, kidney stones… are these subjects to discuss with the young woman from war-torn Sarajevo?

Deste waits; her enchanting voice allows itself an enchanting pause. All that can be heard is the sound of her breathing. Her breathing is diaphanous, like a summer’s night.

“What did you say? What was that?”

“I didn’t say anything, no, nothing,” the elephant burst out. “Nothing.”

“So then, nothing. No diet. Perfect!” decides the homemaker, victorious. “See you soon!” Professor Gapar hears the flutter of the girl mirage.

That very afternoon, he finds an envelope blue as the sky under the cabin door, bearing the name and delicate handwriting of the Sarajevo Siren. Within, some typewritten sheets.

Dear President Avakian,

Following our meeting in your office with the Dean and Ms. Tang, I sent Professor Gapar another letter. I reformulated the first letter, with an addendum. It seems strange that Professor Gaparhas not received any of my previous letters. I will send this one with Express Mail. As I’ve told you, it wasn’t my intention to provoke misunderstanding and trouble. I thank you for your help in calming the tensions.

Yours,

Deste Onal

Another letter, this one on blue paper.

Dear Professor Gapar,

This is the third letter I am writing regarding my tortured art project, The Lottery of Babylon. I regret the unease that I’ve caused. The first letter, sent to the campus address, contained nothing but apologies. During the conversation with President Avakian and Ms. Jennifer Tang, I understood that you never received that letter. A second letter was addressed to the hotel where you live with your wife. President Avakian told me that this letter also didn’t make its way to you. Annexed, I expedite the copy of the letters, as well as the proposed project.

With deep respect,

Deste Onal

And stapled to this letter, the previous letter. The paper was white, like the soul of virgins.

Dear Professor Gapar,

In the framework of the artistic installation entitled The Lottery of Babylon, I sent you, as well as other intellectuals, journalists, artists, writers, professors, and politicians, a postcard written by me containing a quotation from the short story “Death and the Compass,” by J. L. Borges, “Next time I kill you, I promise you the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.” I found out that the letter made some of the addressees very uneasy. I neglected to consider such a possibility. It wasn’t my intention to threaten or frighten anyone. Please accept my apologies for the trouble I have caused.

With all of my respect,

Deste Onal

To the two pages, the white and the blue, another four typed pages were attached with a paper clip as red as the fires of hell. Thick, yellow paper.

I’m a Bosnian citizen, with Balkan, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian roots. My olive skin and green eyes make me look downright Ottoman, which is what I consider myself, in fact. My generation asks itself why Ataturk — Mustafa Kemal (without being Jewish, as some claim) abandoned his home in Thessaloniki. I ask myself why my grandfather, my aunts and uncles, had to leave their entire histories behind in Srebrenica. If the Berlin Wall could fall, why wouldn’t other walls fall? And even if they were to fall, I doubt that hatred would disappear. Hatred always conquers new captives. Even though they drank the same bitter, black coffee and ate the same mutton over centuries, and suffered together the brutality of modernity, Serbs and Greeks and Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Azerbaijani, Shiites and Sun-nis, who eat the same salted cheese, inject into their children’s blood the traditional hatred. The dignity of hatred! The time has come at least for us Ottomans to define our failures. The installation The Lottery of Babylon will illustrate this conviction. I use texts from Jorge Luis Borges, his obsession with maps and labyrinths. A labyrinth of compartments and maps, held together and still independent. The red wall of the first room represents Glory, Heroism, Hatred. The bottles of booze and slivovitz and the cups with the half-moon belong to the nations assaulted by modernism.

The telephone. Startled, Gapar drops the papers. He grabs the receiver, drops the receiver, picks it up again.

“Did you hear? Surely, you’ve heard. Miss Deste! Polyglot and cosmopolitan. She didn’t make a peep. Not a whisper. Nothing. Nothing. I had no idea about her great artistic conspiracy.”

“You know Deste? Deste Onal.”

“Know her? She’s my roommate! She’s the reason I didn’t want to stay nights, so that she wouldn’t get suspicious. She blocked me from soothing the insomnia of the exiled Peter Gapar. Exile, the exiled … I hear this story all the time. Displacement, dispossession, death. What about rebirth, and freedom? You run from one place because it isn’t good for you, isn’t that right? So then, what’s all the nostalgia about? Explain it to me. I’m a dutiful American. I want to understand. Miss Deste! She was scheming, without anyone’s taking notice, the great aesthetic-political experiment of the century! She kept asking me who were the most interesting, most bizarre professors? People with a code. I’m quoting her, a code! That’s what she said. With a code, listen to that! Peter Gapar, Gilbert Anteos. Mr. Avakian? Did she also send President Bedros Avakian a threat? Maybe there’s something going on between them? She’s capable of it. Now I think she’s capable of anything! Pent up and craving admiration and dubious connections.”

Peter didn’t get a chance to interrupt the avalanche, bent over to pick the papers off the floor. The receiver at his ear, not to miss a single word from the indictment.

“Without even a word! A vowel, a comma. Nothing! The Ottoman Empire! Secrets, plots, traps. Perfidy, dear Professor Gapar, that’s what it is. Elegant, collegiate, brilliant, seductive, yes, yes, a joy, that’s our sweet Deste. The Oriental witch from the Oriental forest, in the next bed over. Right next to me! The American who believes in what she can see, not in the invisible labyrinth.”

“Did you find any letters from Deste among my mail last week?”

“Letter? I don’t know. A pile accumulated, I didn’t have time to sort it. I’ll do it, I promise. The letter from the conspirator? Let’s see what she has to say.”

“She called me on the phone.”

“On the phone? What nerve! After everything she did?”

“She said she didn’t realize. She didn’t expect the proportions it would take …”

“She expected it, you can be sure! Not only expected it, she was provoking it. To see what would come of the provocation. The Unknown! To become visible, to break out on the scene. She’s waiting for her big break. She’s waiting for it even now.”

“She wants to explain, to apologize. She proposed a meeting.”

“A meeting? What kind of meeting? After what she did? After everything she did to you?”

“Precisely. She wants to explain.”

“She should explain it to the police! Or to the judge, in court. I hope you didn’t accept.”

“I accepted.”

Silence. Not a sound. Tara had probably thrown the phone, out of outrage. No, she hadn’t thrown it.

“How could you do that? How? After all you’ve suffered. . did she hypnotize you? What did she do? Tell me, tell me. I’m curious. The Balkan enchantress has spells that are different from the little American girls. This, yes, I understand. Believe me, I understand. I don’t understand, however, how a man who’s just gone through the Balkan storm can concede so easily. He falls just like that, at the first breeze, the first lure? The first one! Or were there other conversations? Other phone calls?”

“No, there weren’t.”

The old, Balkan man takes advantage of the fact of not having been as yet confronted with the young woman’s presence, only her voice. He’d yielded, the geezer, at the first breeze of elixir, it was true, the elixir of youth without aging and life without death. Basta, liquidated, my girl, finished. No, no, he won’t yield any more. That’s a solemn promise. He’ll resist, the way he resisted the American young woman for so long. He’ll resist the Balkan as well, that’s all. Done, finished, he’ll resist. He promises that he will. Basta.

“You’re right. I made a mistake. Besides, she sent me a written explanation. I don’t know what else she’d have to add.”

Tara doesn’t seem impressed with the professor’s regrets. She’s silent.

“Yes, I should recant. I should call her, find a pretext for a permanent postponement.”

“You don’t need a pretext. You don’t need any more pretexts and labyrinths.”

“You’re right,” yammers the elephant.

They plan to meet that evening. No, not in the cabin. Professor Gapar prefers, this time, the library’s cafeteria. Tara’s not surprised. She accepts. Fair play American! Peter drops the receiver in the cradle, exhausted. He stretches out on the couch, with his eyes closed. Boredom, dear Jennifer Tang, the boredom of new information is even more oppressive than the void. He shouldn’t have accepted the meeting with the Mata Hari. And once he’d accepted, like an old, easily swayed dotard, to eat the poison that the Sarajevo spy would prepare for him, he shouldn’t have read the project. The Babylonic pages were boring. A cold shower, after which a bath of narcotics. Not cold, just lukewarm, banal, to allay his illusions. The antidote to the attraction is here, on paper. He just has to reach out his hand.

The second room is called the Library of Babel. The hexagonal space, Borges’ logic about the universe and mathematical order. Shelves, monitors, video, scenes from Citizen Kane, Grand Illusion, Ivan’s Childhood, Modern Times, Battleship Potemkin, Roma: Open City, The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura, Zorba the Greek. Scenes rolling on two monitors. A labyrinth of the images of history and our confusion.

Boredom, numbness, from top to bottom and from the bottom to the top and laterally. He ought to do something, call the ambulance, run to Borges’ grave, call Gora. Yes, he should offer the enigma’s answer to the professor. Saint Augustin deserved at least this much. Or better yet, he should call the former Mrs. Gora, to ask her if the letter from the young Bosnian woman has arrived at the miserable Hotel Esplanade. Or did no such letter even exist? A candid, voracious, and enchanting spider, my adorable Deste! En-chan-ting, pure and simple, yes, and candid and vo-ra-cious. Oho, he likes that word, he repeats it, syllabically: vo-ra-cious. Suddenly, a terrible, sickly longing for Lu. Family, his only family… He sees her, as if through a fog, in the divine moments of long ago. He closes, opens his eyes, waves the impossible away with his hand. Should he rather raise his eyes toward the burning sky, to watch his likenesses advancing in vain on their thin, infinite, in-fi-nite, stilts, the female toward the male, the male toward the female, without ever getting any closer? Delicate and transparent articulations. Long, diaphanous. Giant, velvety ears, vel-ve-ty. Prehistoric tusks. The funereal burden on their backs, the silt of tears pouring from the flaccid trunk. The female’s trunk turns, the twisted neck of a swan. The male apathetically lowers his trunk toward the ground below.

The third room is dedicated to the Book of Sands. In the middle, a large volume with canvas leaves, reproducing military documents, maps, statistics, weapons, clippings from old newspapers, diagrams, portraits, obituaries from right after World War I. The projectors in the ceiling often send different images to the pages of the book. No visitor sees the same page. I’m illustrating the individual’s perception and the collective perception of History.

Oof! He feels the need for some amusement. The urgency of some amusement. A voice. He needs a real woman’s voice. Lu’s inaccessible voice, which he hasn’t heard in ages.

In a few hours, Tara will appear, his young American comrade, but now, right now, he needs to hear Lu in the receiver. Maybe not, maybe even Lu wouldn’t save him. “I need irresponsibility,” the elephant says, finally.

An irresistible voice, Gilbert said, about Deste. The stiff phrases on the page don’t, however, make the best pleas for the mysterious dinner.

The last compartment, an obscure place. Death and the Compass — a favorite text from Borges. Detective Lonrot tries to untangle the labyrinth of crimes that will bring him to his death. The projectors cast images of enigmatic codes onto the walls, maps, obituaries, decorations, weapons, war craft, planes. Chasms and idyllic valleys, ski and vacation resorts. The modern labyrinth, one metropolis after another with hundreds of Babel Towers touching the sky. A large, phosphorescent banner from one end of the room to the other: NEXT TIME I KILL YOU, I PROMISE YOU THE LABYRINTH MADE OF THE SINGLE STRAIGHT LINE WHICH IS INVISIBLE AND EVERLASTING. On the floor, 40 envelopes to various addressees and, eventually, their responses. Sudanese, Americans, Russians, Latvians, Greeks, Nigerians, Armenians, jews, Chinese, Bosnians, Argentines, Rwandans, Australians, Italians, Cambodians. Short biographies of each. An enormous blue ribbon crosses the space. Large, white letters: Exiles of the world, unite!

The papers tremble in the trembling hand. Weary, he lets them fall to the floor. He dials Gora’s number. A long ring, once, three times. He puts down the receiver. He raises it again, dials the number again. A long ring, once, three times, four times.

Recorded on the tape, Gora’s voice invites the caller to leave his name and number where he can be reached.

“Important news, your Holiness. The whore with the scythe mocked me. She rejected me, the Nymphomaniac. She made a fool of me. She refused me, humiliated me. She made a laughing stock out of me, Saint Augustin. She’s leaving me to wander, she’s in no mood for me. She insulted me, rejected me, as you’d reject a sickly runt.”

Click, the receiver. In the mirror, Oliver the Elephant, the tightrope walker, tosses and turns, powerless and overcome.

Peter collects the papers from the ground, lays them on his chest. His certificate of immunity. Exhausted, he closes his eyes.

The meeting with Deste took place in three stages, during his afternoon nap.

The gong rings: the agreed upon hour. Peter knocks lightly on the golden door. He doesn’t wait for it to open. He turns the charmed key in the charmed lock. Courageously, he enters the room. Brief courage. Only a moment’s worth. He stiffens on the threshold.

The conspirator had swept the floor of the cloister cell and washed the dishes in the sink. She’d rearranged the books on the shelf, the carpet on the floor, the cover on the bed. The windows were no longer dusty, the giant shoes and boots and slippers were aligned, obediently, all in a row in front of the coat rack. The clothes put neatly in their place, as if in a dream. On the table, clean plates and glasses, napkins as yellow as lemons, an immaculate tablecloth. Fairy tale. Red wine, black bread.

Destiny had thrown the die. No, Death hadn’t abandoned him. She was, evidently, positioned on the ramp, cloaking herself conscientiously, in order to maintain the game and the tricks. She’d improved the decor, prepared the range and the oven for the fatal supper. Picturesque, tasty morsels, a Byzantine dinner party. Perfect decor, perfect Deste, perfect Death.

Peter takes off his windbreaker, hesitates, turns his back on hell for a moment to hang his windbreaker on the coat rack, keeps his back to the table and the peril.

“I’m going to wash my hands, I’ll be back in a moment.”

Immaculate bathtub, towels folded on the stool. The yellow glass with the brushes and toothpaste. The red robe on the hook. The cabinet behind the mirror. Neatly aligned, razors, deodorants, the green aftershave bottle.

The mirror above the sink shines, hostile. Deep, blue rings under his eyes.

Nearby, he feels the presence of a woman’s body, the hysteria of desire, he twists in his sleep, tortured by the aged Nymphomaniac in the guise of a virgin.

He writhes. Lubricous, a lubricous old man in his sleep.

“Done, I’m ready!”

Professor Peter Gaparin the frame of the door.

The salad bowl, the basket full of sliced black bread. Individual clean pieces of cutlery and glasses. The carafe full of water and the small, empty carafe. The yellow paper napkins.

“No, I didn’t bring candles,” the student explained.

She unties the short, white apron over the short, black skirt, pulled up over her knees. Round, pale knees. Three-quarter black socks. She’s no Ottoman missionary, but more of a Parisian lady’s maid serving Donatien Alphonse Frangois, Marquis de Sade. Blackness, just like at the cinema, interrupting the scene. Interrupted, yes, Peter is sleeping and isn’t sleeping, yes, he’s asleep, then again, sapped, asleep and unharmed, back in the scene.

“I made eggplant salad. Couldn’t go wrong with that one.”

“The salad of nostalgia.”

“I asked an American friend to take me to the organic grocer. The cooking and peeling of the eggplants weren’t easy. An operation at a low flame. And where was I to find a mallet? The little, wooden yataghan, absolutely of wood, otherwise the taste is altered. I tasted it over and over, a hundred times. We make our salad with garlic, you with onion. I diced the onion, mincing, mincing.”

“Let’s have a drink. Where I come from, we start with hard liquor. Tuicd, plum brandy.”

“I know, it’s like libovia, but more subtle. Even though, where I come from …”

“Yes, yes.. religion …”

“The family I grew up in wasn’t very religious. Bosnia went through a socialist secularization. Then de-Titoization, desecular-ization. But not in our house.”

“I understand, we’ll have wine, then.”

“I prepared a carafe! A small one, for wine. That’s how I like it,” the assassin chirped.

“You prepared everything perfectly, like a crime.”

Interruption, snoring, pitch blackness, whimper, Peter motions with his large hands like shovels, swimming to escape.

“I forgot to give you money for the groceries.”

“I made the invitation. I have money from my husband.”

“Ah, he’s here, in America.”

“He left. Austria. He has a cafe in Linz. He orders flowers over the phone and sends money. The beast! Just like all the rest from where I come. But I prefer those kinds of men. I can’t stand a Mr. Know-How. Mirko is complicated, insufferable. Serbian. The Bosnian conflict destroyed him.”

The story from Scheherazade’s thousand and one nights. The victim’s large body unwinds. An old, bloated child, in his cradle once again.

Scheherazade looks straight into the eyes of the victim. Peter cowers.. the small pale fingers massage his temples.

“My American ennui has embittered me, provoked me. The exhibit, the demented letters, I wanted to see what would happen, to detonate the void, the discipline, the naivete of the Yankees.”

Peter looks down at his shoes, prehistoric fossils sheltering old ghosts.

Hearing annihilates sight, the old man doesn’t raise his gaze, and he avoids the green ray. He tries, finally, to raise it. His leaden lids heavy, impossible to budge them. The student has the head of a boy, hair cut short in a French bob, thin Tibetan brows, hemlock green eyes, a delicate neck, a silk eyelet T-shirt, the skirt too short. A nymphet.

He gets up, he doesn’t get up, the chaos is starting. That’s how the chaos of youth used to start so long ago.

Unhurried, he raises the burden of his body. He feels the green arrow in his chest cavity, in his brain, in his kidneys, which are crushed by the belt that digs into his skin.

A last effort, the movement flips him out of bed and onto the floor. Shaken, awake, happy, a miracle!

Didactic guidelines. Smiles to the left and right. A polite greeting and a polite smile, left to right and all around. The door of the office wide open for any visit. Lower the gaze, so you don’t see cleavage, bare breasts, bare legs hanging casually on the back of the chair to the left of the table. Embracing couples in the alleys of the campus. The nocturnal moans of orgies. The screen. TV commercials. Fresh vegetables and toothpaste. Water skis. A nude young woman, smiling at the amateurs. Avalanches of libertine, apocalyptic images, defying the rhetoric of the moralists. Bare breasts must be ignored, the same with the nymphs’ belly buttons pierced with colored rings, Gauguin’s nymphs, bare feet shuffling through wet grass, knees springing out rhythmically on the bicycle, the mane of blue, green, and orange hair.

The carnival of final copulation before life’s end. The teachings of the Lord and proletarian ethics and political correctness. The indecent, public announcement of the moralist public debate.

It’s the end of the world, my dear old vagrant! Nero’s Rome, the Athens of the end. Prudence rules without the rule of capitalist pragmatism, the contrasts of freedom in the free world.

Instincts don’t die, however. Brutal and living impulses persist. Professor Gapar sees himself as a blind and naked recluse along the college alleyways! The male instrument shudders in the fog. An empty weapon in plain sight. A maniac escaped from the exile of the hypocrites, liberated at last from the therapy of convention. Irresponsible, just as he’d wished. The eyes of a hungry wolf, hands trembling impatiently around his prey.

Afternoon, at the library cafe, the professor no longer has the eyes of a wolf, and his hands don’t shake. He watches Tara calmly, smiling, waiting for the questions and advice.

“Did you call off the Oriental soiree? Did you have the courage to refuse hypnosis?”

The guilty party gives no response, just smiles indulgently.

“If you haven’t done it already, it will be very difficult to back out. The conciliatory supper is fatal! She’s going to anesthetize you. My delicate roommate knows what she wants and will persevere. She’ll entrance you and then will deposit you, her trophy, into her biography, under the chapter “In Case of Need.” You don’t know what a plotter she is, you don’t know her at all.”

“Why are we here? Last night we decided to meet in the city at a restaurant.”

“I have no appetite when I’m confused. I want us to clarify things. To know if you called off the interview.”

“Don’t worry. Nothing disastrous will happen.”

“You already saw her, or you’re planning on seeing her? When?”

“I’ll cancel the date. I shouldn’t have accepted. She took me by surprise, and I was curious. Curious and childish.”

“You’ve said this before. Meaning you haven’t canceled the fairy tale soiree.”

“I don’t understand why you hate her. She poisoned a few months of mine, not yours. I’m entitled to refuse her offer.”

“Entitled, yes, but you’re curious. You want to see the phantom who sent perfumed letters from the other world up close. I have no reason to be curious. I know the conniver.”

“You thought you knew her. Then your image of her was upturned and proven false. Once again, you think you know her, but maybe she’s someone else. Let’s get dinner. You have your car, I assume.”

“Yes, let’s go. After dessert we’ll escape. To the wilds of Nevada. I hope that appeals.”

“Impressive and frightening.”

“American girls are all about fair play. They announce their intentions, not like the slaves of the Orient, who surrender only to dominate.”

“American girls are more dangerous. Insufferable, in fact. They always feel entitled, vindictive. No misgivings, no melancholy. No flirting. Flirting is ambiguity, isn’t it? Unacceptable, incorrect?! Politically, morally, and religiously incorrect. The American suffragettes have very just and personal criteria, and they respond promptly when ignored or offended, or when they think they are ignored or offended.”

“Oho. . now that’s going too far. I invited you to run away to Nevada where we can live like savages for a few months. The adventure compensates for the flaws. A regimen of freedom and primitiv-ism. We’ll retreat to my little provincial hometown. Full of convention and good sense. I’ll introduce you to my aunt. My mother’s unwed sister. You’ll like her. She contradicts the cliche. She has both misgivings and melancholy. Just like I do, besides… but also a sense of fair play. Clarity, humor, vitality. Wisdom. And she’s attractive. America is offering you an American partner.”

“So then, we’re going out to eat.”

“We’re going, but first we’ll go to the bear’s den. So that I can get the scent of the betrayal. I parked the car in front of Professor Gapar’s cabin. Let’s go to the bear cave first. Just for a second, no need to stay longer. I can sniff out foreign tracks very quickly.”

The red car in front of the cabin. Gapar opens the door to the den, wide open.

“You want to come in? Come in and pick up the scent.”

Tara hesitates. Smiles and hesitates. Concentrating. You can tell by the furrow in her brow, above her nose. When thoughtfulness becomes worry, that furrow becomes visible.

The professor on the threshold, in front of the wide open door. He makes the grand gesture of a hotelier.

“No, I’m not coming in. I’m not with the police. I’m not even Professor Gapar’s student any longer. Nor the mailman. I have no entitlement, to use Sir Gapar’s term.”

The restaurant is empty, Tara is direct and full of fair play, even if not always sincere, while Peter is no Pieter, Gapar is no Mynheer Peeperkorn, doesn’t have the ease, the Dutchman’s irresponsible grace, nor the vitality to sweep away his blunders. The interbellum character multiplied himself, all around, not just in the pages of long ago, in the picturesque variations of the present: a man married for the fifth time, to a woman younger than his daughter from marriage number two, husband renewed by Viagra — the new Peeperkorn.

The quiet Italian restaurant, lit discreetly by a single candle on each table, promises a good premise for the Nevada experiment. First glass of wine. Silence, the tick-tock of thoughts, hesitations flickering in the gaze. The professor extends his hand, the student doesn’t withdraw it, nor does she yell or seem appalled at the touch. No talk of morality or Protestant Puritanism.

The professor squeezes the student’s fingers and leans toward the playful curls. He allows himself to be won over too quickly instead of becoming, through purely his presence, the possessor of the prey. Tara appears grateful for what Peter had changed in her over the course of the last few months. Natural, alive, more present and stronger than the cliches that overwhelm the vocabulary and imagination of so many of her generation, she’d learned to protect her companion with the naturalness of a comrade. A comrade who was deepening their intimacy that evening.

Tara’s car remained parked in front of Professor Gaspar’s cabin over the following weeks. Gossip was kindling and intensifying, but President Larry One impeded the indictment. He frowns wearily when Jennifer Tang informs him laconically and dutifully during the pause of a routine check-in that Professor Gapar was seen walking aimlessly and negligently around campus, his pant legs dragging on the ground, his fly down, restive and bored, and a car parked outside his house, precisely the car of the suspect tied to the letters.

At the end of year celebrations, Tara receives her graduation diploma, Deste announces that she’s transferring to another university for her last year of study. Gapar disappears from campus not long after that.

No one knows whether it’s merely a temporary leave, for the duration of the summer, or if he’s disappeared forever.

A temporary absence or gone forever? No one can answer, not Gora’s obituaries, which compete with destiny, nor the disloyal narrator, as Palade used to call me. The narrator who manipulates reality.

During those dizzying days, Gora called me. We’d known each other for a long time, through Mihnea Palade, the Bukovina native who’d finished high school a few years after me, in our little town of trees and idylls. He was the one who introduced me to the suspects’ attic.

Palade had stopped me in the center of the capital, in front of the Italian church. We hadn’t seen each other since his arrival at the university. On a long walk around the beautiful Ioanid Park, not far from where he’d found me, I shared with him my elation over the anonymity of a large city, and he told me all about his new circle of friends with whom he debated literature and religion and philosophy and art. He seemed vitalized and enthusiastic, happy that the same temptations appealed even to a polytechnic man such as I was. He was studying mathematics himself, not quite born with Leo-pardi’s milk bottle in his mouth, either. And he sought to forge a sort of cultural solidarity between us, not just a geographic one. He gave me the address of the attic, adding maliciously, “It’s not like drinking with women. It’s much, much worse.”

A few boys, a couple of girls. The excessively esoteric discussions, and the juvenile assurance by which those discussions were amplified, bored me, and the open anti-Communism seemed suspect. Blowhard interventions, like some spoken essays, irritated me. I don’t have any special recollection of that night, except for my obsession with Lu.

Neither Gora nor Palade forgot the bizarre state of embarrassment and skepticism of the bibliophile that I was. Gora had participated — with increasing fervor, as I was to find out — in the heated controversies, which he himself directed gradually away from politics and toward literature. That was where Mihnea Palade expounded on Borges’ Death and the Compass and Kafka’s The Trial or Orwell’s allegory, Dima’s books and life. That was where he reen-countered Lu, whom he’d known from some Saturday night parties with other young people captivated by music and dance. I still haven’t forgotten his first descriptions of her.

“She’s beautiful, but there are times when she isn’t. When she can’t avoid or hide her timidity, her spark leaves her. She’s used to glowing, she’s unstable, fighting with her instability. Other times … other times she’s happy, sociable, her thoughts elsewhere and nowhere. Liberated by absence, then drawn in deeper into herself. I felt her emotion, and her emotiveness. Just when she seems to be made of steel, perfect, in control of herself. In a familiar context, however, she’s irresistible. Sovereign and self-sufficient? Not at all, not at all! Fragile, with an unwieldy discipline for appearances. Emotion, then. An extraordinary sexual premise, no?”

Even later, Palade never hid his envy in relation to Gora, tied not only to the mysterious Lu, but also, once he arrived in America, to Dima. Even though he’d given the entitlement of his will to Palade, it seemed that Dima secretly preferred Gora. His wife in exile, Merrie, a distinguished Englishwoman, elegant and credulous and fashionable, also seemed to trust Gora more. After the Old Man’s death she allowed him to consult the secret Green Notebook, written during the war years. Gora promised not to tell anyone about it and never to write anything about the secret text. He never mentioned the Green Notebook, not in his meetings with Palade, nor in the bibliography he suggested to Gapar for the review.

I was bewildered by Gapar’s sudden disappearance, but also by the fact that after Gora related to me the sensational and troubling news, he moved on immediately to the subject of Dima, with no apparent segue. As if there had existed some connection between the two subjects that he wasn’t mentioning.

“Dima had access to all the information about the war, he knew the horrors committed by the Germans in the East, but… not a word in all his notes, no concern for the fate of Marga Stern, his lover in his youth. He’d shared her for some time, it seemed, with his predecessor, he’d become jealous, forced her to choose, and she’d preferred him. Then to read that he was horrified merely by Stalingrad! What about what would happen to Marga, and not just to Marga, if the Germans had won? Not a word about that in his diary.”

Was Dima’s admirer disassociating himself from the Maestro because of Peter Gaspar’s disappearance!? Because of the review that he himself should have written instead of guiding the neophyte Gapar according to his own designs? Was the Old Man worried for his people?! Wasn’t Marga Stern a citizen of his country? Wasn’t she a member of Dima’s people?

Gora didn’t suspect that I knew everything about Marga Stern the whole time that he was informing me about it; his pathos was amusing to me.

“It’s not a matter of a single person, but of all the people of which the world simply disposes. With indifference, no?”

Gora appeared ransacked by memories and resentments, fueled by Gapar’s disappearance.

“People of which other people disposed, pure and simple. Ideas are ideas, abstractions, games of the mind. The real test of ideas is people, how people relate to people.”

For a loner such as Gora, this affirmation signaled serious trouble. I telephoned him after that, he called me, too, we kept debating Gapar’s disappearance.

I was convinced that I was a mere replacement. He couldn’t talk to Lu about the disappearance or perhaps he’d tried and wouldn’t allow himself to try again, and he needed someone else from his former country. He would have preferred Palade, he didn’t know about my last meetings with Palade.

When he decided to return to his native country for a week to see his family and to introduce his fiancee, after two decades of being away, Palade called wanting to meet with me. I’d been here for only two years at that time, and I was dazed by the lessons of the unknown.

I’d written him that I’d arrived in the New World, he answered, we spoke on the phone several times, he put me in touch with Gora, and then the dialogue ended.

We met in Central Park, not far from the children’s playground, in front of the characters from Alice in Wonderland. He’d come to New York specifically, he alleged, for that unexpected rendezvous.

His oddities and extravagances were multiplying, I’d discovered, but I made no sign of surprise or protest.

It was spring, a superb day, neither hot, nor cold, nor rainy. We saw each other, smiled at each other, embraced. Palade seemed hurried, he went right to the point.

“I’m going home to our humorous little homeland. Maybe to die there.”

I wasn’t expecting such a direct approach, I was determined to intervene as little as possible.

“You might ask why I chose precisely you. Very few know that we’re from the same town. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. Since that memorable evening when I tried to introduce you to the literary youth of the moment. You retreated. The group seemed suspect to you.”

I hadn’t remembered being quite so expressive. He was, however, exactly right about the motive for my disappearance from the enchanting attic. The wisdom of cowardice. I avoided risky situations, which, in any case, were many.

“Unfortunately, you were right. The Secret Service files that remain and that weren’t forged show that you were right. Yet another reason for this meeting.”

He watched me, frowning, and lit a cigarette.

“Maybe you’ve heard that I occupy myself with esoteric adventures. I read the coded signs of destiny. The signs around me, as obscure as they are, signal danger. . They can liquidate me here, too, naturally, but also there.”

I waited for him to clarify. He didn’t.

“In our past, everything was about compromise and complicity. The very fact of breathing that air. . all compromise and complicity. Why did they give me a passport? Usually, it was a bargaining process. You gave them something, they gave you something. There were all kinds of schemes, as well. A Byzantine country, life under the table as opposed to on the table. Relations, interests, the chain of weaknesses. Don’t ask me any more about it.”

I had no intention of asking anyone anything, except myself.

“Language wasn’t my essential loss. I left that place a young man, I wrote here from the very beginning. I’ve published books, I have more in a drawer… It’s a great danger always to be asked for manuscripts and to have everything you write be accepted. Dima, for example. . published too much. Apropos, the sentinels were, of course, interested in my relation to him. They wanted to organize his festive return to the Homeland. They didn’t care about his anti-Communist past. The masquerade would have legitimized their regime. As a young man, Dima imagined himself as a reformer, only the reform was reactionary.”

He’d stopped, to think, or to remember.

“Have you heard about Heal, the physician? And his group? They walk on burning embers without feeling anything. We were also walking on burning embers in that attic, weren’t we? However, we were afraid, suspicious, sensing the duplicity. In California they do research about the technical modification of consciousness. What do you think about this country? It would be more worthwhile to talk just about the New World, the old one has gotten old for good; it was always old. There, in the old attic of the old country, I started the cult of Dima. But neither of us knew about Marga Stern. I think that Gora invented her. Potentialities become realities in his obituaries. I agree that life isn’t made solely from the real and visible. But potentialities are codified. Gora is under the trance of books… though he also has some revealing insights.”

A long, long silence. Endless. Palade had grown silent and was no longer looking at me. I had disappeared for him.

“Indifference is human, isn’t it?”

He didn’t hear me.

“Estrangement, human, as well. Human. Isn’t that right, Mihnea? We’re human.”

“Yes, yes. . the Nazi horrors in the East weren’t Dima’s priorities. He wasn’t vilifying the people of Marga Stern’s religion. They just weren’t his priorities, that’s all.”

He lit his cigarette and was seeing me again.

“Soon the last survivors will disappear. Do we forget or do we retain the symbol without which we won’t understand ourselves?”

He shook the ash and angrily tossed the unfinished cigarette.

“Yes, indifference, estrangement. Self-obsession. Still, he was generous, eager to help, sensitive. He was like that in the past, too, when he was propagating nightmares wrapped in green foil, with saints’ faces. I believe in parallel worlds. Multiple worlds. Then, also duplicity. Not always a negative thing. Man isn’t an unequivocal being. He has fissures and secrets. Obscure potentialities. You think I’m an obnoxious sophist, don’t you?”

He’d lit another cigarette in the meantime, he’d remembered to offer me one, too; I was happy that I’d quit smoking. He watched me with excessive attention.

“You, sir, ought to understand Dima’s ambiguities. People always expected you to be perfect, and you couldn’t be. Angels don’t write books.”

Only after many years I was to discover that Gapar had used that aphorism, which evidently wasn’t originally his own.

I didn’t like to be addressed formally, but, like Mihnea, I was also drawn by contradictions and fissures and secrets and unexpected potentialities, only for me, people seemed more important than ideas. “People are more important, Mihnea,” that was what I wanted to tell Mihnea Palade. I didn’t get the chance.

“Imagine that, they didn’t allow me to see the archives! Me! I was his loyal admirer and apprentice. They didn’t let me see the archives from the moment that I began to ask questions. I advised him to stop seeing that old, fanatic doctor. The correspondent for the Iron Guard in the United States! Absolutely ridiculous! I assume you’ve heard of the doctor in question.”

My silence was a sign of consent. Palade wasn’t looking for consent, however, he merely wanted to spill his poisons. I’d become posterity’s witness.

“I hear that Gora saw the secret archive. I doubt that he saw it.”

He was jealous. He’d adored Dima, he didn’t expect someone else to be favored.

A good moment to attack. I asked him whether Gora could have been an informant. It was a way of asking him, indirectly, about himself.

“Could he have been? Anyone could have been. Not because he was predestined, but because destiny was enslaved to the Supreme Institution. The Devil had become a little intermediary, a bully and a bureaucrat, and man has unimaginable capacities. Integrity and duplicity, just as surprising. Think of the adulterer.. parallel lives. Sometimes, for years, decades. Pent-up mysteries in the fragmented depths. Parallel worlds. Computers are going to perfect these opportunities, all the way to an absolute bewilderment. You’ve heard, I’m sure.”

I’d heard a little bit, but not much; I was prepared to hear anything and commit it to memory.

“You put on some special gloves and the computer program suddenly gives you access to the world into which you’ve entered. You operate in a different world. Through the gloves, the hands take hold of the objects of other worlds, they touch and handle and modify them.”

He digressed. Was it an allusion to Gora? It wasn’t clear.

“Ah, yes, but you asked about Gora. I was his student, we were close. He left before me, as you know. They say through the interventions of his wife’s relations. I don’t think so. It would have been too much if they’d wished to separate her from him. In any case, the suspicion remains. Just as in my case. The great victory by the system. Generalized suspicion has a longer life than the system itself. An unflinching, motionless posterity.”

He looked me straight in the eyes once again. Not to dispel suspicions, but seemingly, to fuel them.

“Gora is a civilized man, through and through. With all of the hypocrisy and lacquer that civilization implies, naturally. I wonder, is the obsession with Lu credible? There are plenty of erotic services available, with superb and costly young women fit for a solitary aristocrat. An aristocrat, yes, not by birth, but by erudition. Gora’s nights? Secretive nights, you can be sure. Books need the company of women. Women, not just one woman. Lu isn’t just one woman, but many. What I know is that Gora left legally, with the approval of the authorities. He tried to bring Lu. Did he need the Institution’s help? I don’t know. Dima tried to help him. Gora was bitterly opposed to any visit by Dima to his Communist Homeland. No, no, no, not at any price, Gora would yell, red with indignation. Dima wasn’t as intransigent. Old as he was, he’d lost hope in the death of Communism. He was homesick for the places of long ago, he thought a visit would also serve his international prestige. The Institution’s propagandist alibis succeeded in convincing the Occident that our adored dictator, the Genius of the Carpathians, was building a special socialist democracy. A special democracy, within a special socialism. We were becoming, one would say, a special species.”

I’d heard of Dima’s intention to negotiate a compromise for a celebratory visit in his, that is, our country, and Gora’s opposition was proof of his integrity. None of this was news.

“Have you heard of the former Polish dictator of Free Europe? Great assets in the anti-Communist crusade. Have you heard about the latest discovery?”

I was all eyes and ears.

“A very cultivated man, of a great presence. The author of a very appreciated monograph about Joseph Conrad. The best, some say. The Polish Communist government, exasperated by the programs on Radio Free Europe, condemns the anti-Communist director to death. Condemned to death, in contumacy! But what do the archives of the Polish Secret Service show today, however? That the distinguished intellectual and anti-Communist had been an informant! Nicely worked over, don’t you think? How was it that they didn’t assassinate him? Some they killed because they refused, and others after they did their work.”

Palade was mixing up the chronology, in fact: the suspect had first been an informant for the Polish Secret Service, then refused to continue, then escaped and worked for the enemy.

“You were right to steer clear of the attic of suspects. Who was and who wasn’t an informant? Me, Gora? You? Weren’t you questioned? Weren’t you visited by agents? Who knows what they wrote or modified in their reports. Even now they modify them, I’m sure … Those who might have forced us to become informants are in their mansions. The scribes who praised the Party and the genial Comrade Number One, who beat their breasts, in pubs or in safer places, with one, two, five Secret Service generals… they don’t have files saying they were informants. Or they had them but they’ve disappeared. Eh, what do you say? A good, Byzantine tradition found an alliance with a good, Communist tradition. Or a policing tradition. Or both.”

He was smiling, Mr. Palade, satisfied with the discourse. He’d come to divert my doubts, not to sweep them away. I had to ask the question that I kept postponing.

“But what about Lu? What do you think about her?”

He was increasingly hurried, he responded immediately.

“She was in the attic, as well.”

“Well, they weren’t all informants…”

“Not at all! It would have become a theatrical cast. No, no. I wanted to say only that we saw each other there. That was where Gora met her, and he hasn’t left her even to this day. It isn’t just some sort of bookish delirium, as one would think, nor the claustrophobia or agoraphobia of those lost in books. That would be understandable, we’re not far from that disease ourselves. But with him it’s something else. Lu isn’t a woman, but rather many women. Not a negligible opportunity! I know her from the evenings in the attic, but also from the nights of dancing in the more fashionable circles. A beauty. She would appear in groups and dance to rock music and do the twist and the shake and the hula-hoop. Serene, happy, pleasant. With certain abrupt reactions, as if from a shock. I recall one evening in particular. After midnight, after hours of dancing and flirting, the atmosphere had become propitious for the act that might follow. Some couples retreated to rooms, many of them, children of state officials. Sometimes there were even homes of former noble families that had somehow succeeded in holding on to their properties, through God knew what arrangements. Dance and love. Couples would swing partners, some orgies would commence. Lu took notice of the movement. She became instantly pale. She grabbed her purse and bolted. I called her the following morning, worried. She told me that she walked by herself for an hour, in the middle of the night, from the neighborhood by the lakes all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. It was only then that a taxi appeared. She had no money on her, so she offered the driver her bracelet. That was how she got home, finally, around dawn.”

I understood that I wasn’t to expect clearer responses from the inhabitant of parallel worlds.

Palade wasn’t assassinated in his Homeland, from where he returned more troubled than when he’d left. He informed me that he had a few hours free at Kennedy Airport, where he was changing planes on his way toward Middle America.

A murky day, torrential downpours and storms before the unexpected arrival of Mynheer Peter Gapar and his cousin in America.

The flights had long delays, some were canceled entirely. I waited many hours at the airport.

“It was a good trip. That is to say, bad, but beneficial. It woke me up, as if there were further need for that. That revolution, if we can call it that, was postmodern. That is, it is postmodern. It continuously produces its own parody. The impostures, the codifications, the relativities, the uncertainties. A postmodern revolution in a superrealist country, what do you say?”

I wasn’t saying anything. A superrealist country in a postmodern revolution described by a researcher of the esoteric and the paranormal deserves attention.

“They’re proud of the revolution, they invoke thousands of martyrs, but they’ve told me of massive infiltrations of terrorists, KGB conspiracies, as well as the involvement of the Occident and the Orient, the South and the North. They’re talking about a transition, but more toward the year 1938 as opposed to toward the year 2000, modeled after Dima’s thinking. We’ve passed through the moments of daze and fury.. They were looking at Ayesha, my dear Indian, as if she’d just walked out of a cave.”

I was trying to guess what, nevertheless, had been the benefit of the visit. Palade didn’t wait for the question.

“It made me happy to see certain friends. I returned to my youth, the places we both loved. And the attic of the great polemic debates. Their dreams and ambiguities.”

The word ambiguities was promising, I was hoping some confession was to follow. It didn’t.

“And then, I received signs. Signals. Calls. I didn’t decipher all of them. My brother. . you know, my twin brother. Twins with the same cosmic premise. Well, he began to dream odd things, while I was there.”

I was afraid, I had been afraid in the previous meeting, as well, of such immersions in the world of magic and the phantasmagoric.

“Fiction is a part of reality, as you well know, as you yourself manipulate reality. An unreliable narrator, as they say here. Gora does the same thing, but he pretends it isn’t fiction. Fiction is created by and received from the real, from people, but also from the imaginary. Dream and imagination and presentiment, these things are human. Even science can’t advance in any other way. To discover something, you must be able first to imagine a new possibility.”

I raised the cup of coffee to my lips, I sipped, without looking at Palade. The sickly pallor of his face had struck me when he first came out of the gate, and would preoccupy me long afterward. He understood that I wasn’t interested in complicated theories, but in the experience of his journey.

“You believe, then, in these signs…”

“I know, I look for adventure, even in or through objects. Ads lure me, their lies, their successful bankruptcy. Their cipher! If I go out to buy an ice cream, I return with a load of other useless things. Just because I saw them along the way. Or, at least, with eight ice creams of different flavors and colors. Just as if I were forcing an encounter with the unforeseen, the unseen. I disturb the sleep of things. Just now, when I was home, my mother asked me one day to look for some knitting needles in the city. Thick gauge needles, for a woolen vest she was knitting. I was lured by the encounter with the knitting needles. It had been two hundred years since I’d made such a banal and fantastic trip, to buy knitting needles for my old mother. On my way back, on the corner of the street, a gypsy. Young, enticing. She was begging for money. She stopped me, I looked at her, I gave her money, more than she’d dreamed, she looked at me with flames in her eyes. ‘Want me to read your palm?’ I stretched out my palm, I looked at her again and again, at length, disbelieving, she hesitated to speak, she seemed horrified. You’re born in the same month as me, she mumbled. Not the year, just the day and the month. And she told me the day and the month.”

“And when is your birthday?” I asked, to break the tension.

“The beginning of January,” Palade hurried to return to the story. “’Capricorn. I see blood. Blood on your temple,’ the witch said. Tou’re on a kingly throne, and blood is pouring from your temple. A bad omen. Guard yourself from enemies, young man. From enclosed spaces, from strangers,’ said the oracle.”

“So, then, you believe in these signs, you read the ads.”

“The life of the mind has its own dangers. Not just the apparent truth, but also the hidden, dangerous one. Coincidences, errors make up a codified game.”

“And whom else did you meet from the attic?”

“Ah, you’re thinking of Lu, you seemed to be interested in Madam Gora. . you asked me last time, too, what I think of her. I ran into her. At the theater, The Master and Margarita, actually. A mystical play, isn’t it? Or magical? I remembered the play from when we were there. Imagine that, it was still being produced. Lu, yes, with a younger cousin, or that was how she presented him. A tall, bald, solid man with a moustache, very quiet, but ready, it seemed, to let himself go at any moment. Lu intimidated him, and I intimidated him. I asked her to a coffee. She even came. We talked a while. About Gora, as well. Even about Gora.”

The word even kept repeating itself: she even came, even about Gora — the unusual was Mihnea Palade’s routine.

“She said she was cured. Short hair, very short, like a boy. A shock. A slender face, vibrating movements, the vibrations of her fragility, deepened eyes, same hands as ever, superb hands. She seemed taller, lighter. Illness is a mystery, it has its own magic, it brings you closer to the unknown and the mystical. Especially such a grave illness.. you’re in transit. In between. Closer to death, you feel more intensely the mystery of life. Illness intensifies sensuality. Out of words and gestures I was guessing at the unperceivable, reprimanded by decency and fear, fear of the self, not just of others. Lu is more than a single woman, as I’ve said. That was how I first saw her long ago, and how I still see her now. It’s just that now, after her illness, she seems more accessible, open, freer, more thirsty …”

I was listening to him, I wasn’t listening, I craved more details, that was for certain, but I changed the subject, to escape my own self.

“Do you think that former Secret Service agents have special reasons to follow you here, as well?”

He didn’t answer right away, as I would have expected. It seemed that he needed time to decide how and what to say.

“I don’t know what they have in their files, I wouldn’t rule out any hypotheses, I am a man of hypotheses, I believe in secrets and secret needs. A double or multiple life. The imposture is only another embodiment, apart from the known, accepted one. See even here, in the United States of freedom and taboo, a politician slips into the whirlpool of a short erotic adventure now and then. An enormous scandal erupts, and the politician is ruined. In France he’d be admired. The old adulterer has been proof since the beginning that man lies in everything. Doesn’t he care about the poor, about religion, about his children, about America’s future? Of course he does!”

He was quiet for a moment and took a long look at me.

“No, I wasn’t an informant, if that’s what you want to know. That isn’t why the agents of yesterday and today would be following me. I don’t know the reasons why they would. And maybe it’s better that way.”

He was saying that this would be our last conversation, so then, it was a confession.

“I was living in blasphemous, admired America, chaos obsessed with order and freedom, pragmatic and religious, corrupt and idealistic, hundreds of sects, thousands of armed racists, illiterates of all degrees, corruption and lunacy and spectacle. And grandeur! Imperfect, fortunately. Only a dictatorship is perfect.”

“What did she say about Gora? What did Lu say about Gora? Did she agree to talk about him? Why didn’t she follow him here?”

Palade searched my face, disappointed. He was smiling, with sly complicity, as if the questions had been a failed copout from the unmentioned question.

“It’s quite possible that Lu is abandoning, barely now, the place she never wanted to abandon. I asked her about Gora. Why hadn’t she followed him? ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know yet,’ was what she said. ‘We’re all irreplaceable and our ages are irreplaceable, we can’t be replaced even by our own selves, in another age and in changed surroundings,’ she said. ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know, I shouldn’t know.’ What’s certain is that she’s become less retractile and equivocal. Okay, we’ll end here, I’m in a hurry, I’m preparing three different books, I have publishing contracts to look at, a lot of work, until next May. The month of May is inscribed in my brother’s dream.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“A session with the Political Bureau. The former Political Bureau. Lilliputian marionettes made of straw and cotton and velvet. Just like in the puppet theater. The obese chef, the gardener with his rake, the stenographer with his small glasses. Generals, youths in the green shirts of the Legion, workers with caps and red bands, activists. A large banner across the entire wall. Nationalism, Communism’s last refuge. In our day there were others: Workers, the Party’s golden foundation, or, Man, the most precious capital. They were discussing my case, the date of my execution, waiting for a

sign, some indication. The Genius of the Carpathians seemed befuddled, turning toward one of the capped guides. This is what my brother Lucian told me. The dream.”

Palade wrapped his scarf around his neck. He was in a navy blue suit, as always, with a white shirt, open at the neck, red scarf made of soft wool.

“The marionette responded hoarsely, like a ventriloquist’s doll. The holiday of the Orthodox saints.’ The Genius smiled, he liked the crudity of the guide, he nodded his head and waved his hand in approval. The marionettes took out their notepads and noted the date, the holiday in May. This year I got off, nothing happened. Unfortunately, I don’t have that gypsy here to untangle the mystery.”

He tightened his scarf again around his neck, though it was warm and humid. His thick, woolen scarf around his neck like a kind of useless armor.

It was our last meeting.

Some time has gone by since then. Peter Gapar might also have met with Palade again in the parallel worlds of the transmigrations, and he will communicate to us if the enigma of his disappearance is the same as Mihnea Palade’s.

Gapar’s telephone message seems like a challenge. Had he guessed the whole time that he was the hero of the obituary on Gora’s desk? The message was promptly transcribed into Folder RA 0298. The funereal diversion requires professionalism! Gora had specialized, he’d learned to maintain the good disposition of those still living; the farce named biography became the obituary farce. He would select a fragment, then another, for those left on this side of the River Styx.

She mocked me, the whore! She made a laughing stock out of me. The Nymphomaniac. . she’s in no mood for me. Transcribed from the tape, the words rest obediently in the Mynheer Folder. Gora had listened to the message dozens of times, he knows it by heart. With the transcription in front of him, he listens for the inflections in the voice, comparing the phonetics and the written page, looking for new meanings. He ignores the transmigration of the soul, in which Mihnea Palade believed.

Was Peter Gapar going to take advantage of the postponement by continuing to play with the Nymphomaniac, as he’d promised when he first arrived in the New World? Or would he put an end to the game, embittered, proving that he decides the epilogue after all?

Suicide doesn’t seem likely.

The grump left a grumpy message and disappeared. Not a word afterward. Did this message preclude the kind of assault with which Mihnea Palade was honored? The telephone in the Eastern European professor’s shack rang and rang, while the college’s secretary maintained that the professor had solicited a leave of absence, an unpaid vacation. Was there a forwarding address? No answer to that question, the bureaucrats aren’t allowed to violate the professor’s privacy.

Had he taken off, in the end, with Deste? Or did he go with Tara to Nevada’s Nirvana, to discover the true America, the wilderness of freedom? Which Tara? The one who examined the relationship between underwear and moldy pasta, the difference between an odor and a stink, or the mailwoman who delivered threat letters? An easygoing, cordial, wise partner, no relation to the neurotic who yearned for bad marks?

Disappeared in America’s labyrinth, Peter doesn’t answer. Did he encounter the Blind Man from Buenos Aires at the Grand Canyon?

Gora considers himself an untrustworthy columnist. Revitalized by the alternative, he passes his hand over the folder, looking at the corner of the table, where the red gloves rest.