The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (60 page)

“You never told me.”

“Or that I met with him once, after he returned from his visit back to the Homeland, not long before he was assassinated?”

“Not that, either.”

“He told me that he’d seen Lu, I don’t know if he told you about it.”

This was the final bait. Gora hesitates, deciding whether to lie or not.

“He never told me.”

“At the theater.
The Master and Margarita.”

“Did he tell you what she was wearing?”

If that was an ironic question, then it meant he was mocking me and that I’d lost my last chance to challenge him.

“Was it a black, low-cut dress? Or something casual? Did she have her hair up in a bun?”

I didn’t answer. There was a stony silence. Then, abruptly, Gora flared up again.

“A great doctor, the Australian. He fixed me; I’m all brand new! I can just take it all from the top and repeat all the same nonsense. Are you still there, or have you gotten tired?”

He’d taken on the role of the senile, old man. He was probably enjoying himself, taking notes.

“I’m here. You’re right, I’m not so young, either. The invisible hag is waiting in the corner, with gifts of all kinds. Cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer’s, epidemics. Fires, terrorism. At your disposal.”

“Yes, it’s a huge offer. It comes when you least expect it. At night, when the forest darkens. It darkens, but it doesn’t sleep. Even here in the city, I still see woods outside my windows. Monkhood. Willy-nilly apparitions.”

A long pause. It gave me courage.

“And you really weren’t in touch?”

“We weren’t. I wrote to Lu when I arrived. She never wrote back. I wrote again. She never answered the phone, either. I didn’t insist. And I never really looked for my fellow countrymen. Even now, I avoid them, as you well know.”

“Because of this?”

“Not only.”

“And you’ve known nothing about Lu since you left?”

“I recapitulated, going over the past; I didn’t find much. Small trivialities, oddities, ambiguities, brief discrepancies. Trivialities. There were things to ponder, to be sure. Nothing important or drastic, however.”

“And then?”

“I was surprised by her arrival, but I didn’t see her. There was no point. We see each other in the past. The Iron Curtain was a good curtain, sparing us of a lot of things. You worry about what you left behind; you receive no news. You can’t simply board a plane and land in the locus of all that mystery, to see with your own eyes everything that’s being hidden from you. But it’s better this way, isn’t it? You’re spared all blame, aren’t you? What do you say to that? You’re an expert in fortunate and unfortunate and nonexistent faults; what do you think?”

This time he was attacking directly; he was asking questions and didn’t wait for answers. There were only questions boiling with his fury.

“In any case, now I understand. I’m armed; I’m renewed. With the circulation to my heart and brain so much improved, I can understand. These stents were a magical bargain! They restored the circulation to all of my organs, the major and minor ones; they gave me a second chance.”

He was speaking quickly, with fury and speed.

He was the winner alongside his pale Andalusian, under her young gaze, touching those gloves and her young hands. One moment was enough to bring you back; the skin shrivels, the body is dry, the arms livid. Long, old arms and legs. Fragile bones that powder at the first touch. The dust of the skeleton that had been your youth. But I wouldn’t have been able to break Gora’s spell, no matter what I might have said.

“I was turned back from the gates of heaven! It was a postponement. I returned to find out what was left to find out. After this, I’ll bet they’ll take me in. And now, I have to go. Excuse me but Boltan-ski is waiting for me.”

“The Russian?”

“The Ukrainian. The Soviet. You know him?”

“Yes, I know him. The chauffeur of all the Eastern European exiles. Where are you going?”

“He’s taking me to Penn Station.”

“But where are you going?”

“I’m going to meet Avakian. I’ve finally secured a meeting with Bedros Avakian. Always busy, always worried, that one, but he finally agreed to this one favor. I have some questions about Peter and Tara. And about Deste. Supposedly she’s started a fashion house in Sarajevo. I heard that or dreamed it, I don’t know anymore; I’m getting old. Senility. The interrupted story. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“As you can see, the New World is a great concern of mine.”

I remained on the line for some time, heard his voice again; he
was speaking normally, as if everything else that had been said until then had simply been swept away, or just wasn’t important.

All that was left was for me to ask him what he was reading.

“What book am I reading? I’m not reading anything. I can’t concentrate.”

“There’s not a single book on your table? I don’t believe it.”

“The news, some papers, folders. No books.”

“And on the nightstand?”

“What nightstand?”

“How should I know, the nightstand near your bed.”

“Ah, yes. Rilke. The readers’ sect is diminishing, but not dead. Thank God.”

“Rilke? Poetry? You still read poetry?”

“Not really. It’s a collection of selected works. Short essays, some verse. About love. The protection of one’s own solitude, and the protection of the other’s solitude! If you try to possess the other’s solitude, or try to give your own away, it all goes to hell. That’s the idea. You remember? A good marriage is one where each partner is the protector of the other’s solitude. Something like that.”

“But that’s referring to marriage, not to love.”

“Some say that love is an error of allocation; the poet is attempting to instruct the reader on how to maintain a contractual love. To watch over the other person’s solitude, to protect it, rather, or to leave the other person at the gate of his or her own solitude. A solitude dressed festively, one that comes out of the vast darkness. Not at all badly put. He was young, the old poet.”

He seemed to have reread the text recently, unsatisfied with what he’d found.

He was a winner; he had Lu and his friends on his shelves, who kept vigil over his aristocratic solitude, its civilized hypocrisies.

“Coupling means empowering the surrounding loneliness. When someone gives himself with complete abandon to someone else, it’s over; nothing remains, there’s nothing. Rilke was young then.”

He’d stopped speaking for the moment; he had probably also picked up one of the many colored folders, bringing it near, the way
you might bring your ear to the ground, to listen for the oncoming train; he listened for a second to the nocturne of the lunatics, then leisurely put the folder back in its place, reconnecting with the wanton world.

“When two people give themselves entirely to one another, when they no longer belong to themselves … ”

I realized that now he was reading, either from a book, or some notebook of his own.

“When the two give themselves entirely, in order to belong entirely to each other, their feet leave the ground. And living together becomes a continuous failure. A continuous failure, what do you think of that?”

He was reading only because he’d been asked about his reading, and, as usual, he was addressing himself to someone absent. His voice was calm, normal.

The following weeks and months, I spoke at length with Augustin Gora about old age.

The subject didn’t strike him as somber, not even after the confirmation, albeit in dubious circumstances, of the death of our younger friend, Peter Ga
par. He didn’t respond, either, when I confessed to him my suspicion that, after this recent and belated news, he would write his own obituary, who knows how true to his actual biography. It would have been presumptuous to assume, I added, that after our increasingly frequent conversations following Peter’s death, I myself would have become the hero of a similar composition. He didn’t answer; he returned to the subject of old age.

“Until the shock with the angioplasty, I never felt my age coming on. Without children, I ignored the speed of the calendar. Forty-and fifty-year anniversaries were registered and forgotten. The meeting with the doctors, with their machines and their hospital rooms, brought me to my senses. What followed was a tough year, a really tough year. The Nymphomaniac, as the departed called it, kept
taunting me; I was living in constant tension. I felt, then, that the disease was a warning. That’s what old age is, isn’t it? Ever more acute awareness of fragility. Initiation in exhaustion, initiation in dying. Alert and hurried time pushing us every day and night closer to that beyond that horrifies us. As if all of life didn’t come down to just that. Every new morning is a threshold to an unknown that could be anything, including the end.”

He was right; illness prepares one for extinction. Without such preparations, you think you can prolong the ambiguity for as long as you want.

“Melancholy and the abyss? You look into the distance into which you’ll splinter just as if you’d never been here at all, but routine is stronger. It returns you to the here and now. Your instincts are still alive and intact. You reenter the chaos that consumes time imperceptibly and ruthlessly.”

“Just when the verdict is clearly pronounced, perception changes. The end of your journey is announced to you. Expiration. Just like with any product. The term of expiration, twenty-three years, thirty-four years, sixty-one years and three months and two weeks and five days. The tumor is incurable; you have six months to live. The last postponement. Today’s doctors don’t have the liberty to lie to you about the prognosis.”

“Yes, and every day becomes a gift, ignored up to that point. You become aware of every moment, every leaf, every breeze, every page. You’d like to sip them, to hold them like this, endlessly, inside you. Were you scared? Are you still scared? Of the void, of the nothing that you become?”

“Then, yes. The surprise found me unprepared, it ravaged my insides. Now, less so. A little less. I’m calm.”

“Bitterness helps, in the end? Fury, disillusionment, exhaustion, contempt for everything, not least of which for disgusting death?”

“Maybe. But fury is vital; it’s not acceptance.”

“And kindness? Serenity and gratitude. Resignation, surrender to destiny.”

“Like an enlightenment? Candor, abandon? Like faith?”

“Faith promises hope. Unverifiable hope. Maybe we’ll get to a point when we can verify hope.”

“Palade wasn’t a man of faith, but he believed in the transmigration of souls. Successive reincarnations.”

“He’s not alone. He claimed that he received coded signs. Those who don’t receive them can’t contradict him,” said Gora, quietly.

I asked Gora to tell me what he saw out the window. He announced, first, what time it was: eight past four in the afternoon.

“We can’t ignore the hour. We’re talking about old age, death, and so, about time. The time of expiration.”

After a pause, he added: “July. July 19.”

I was waiting for him to announce the year, but he didn’t. What did the nineteenth of July look like out his window, when so many people are born while others die, just like any other day?

He described a garden to me, then a green valley. A vital, vigorous green. And then further, a tall, verdant forest. In the garden facing the window, a family of wild turkeys. A mother and nine chicks, the father absent, at the library. Squirrels. Two young and timid deer. A fat, lazy cat.

“Paradise! Paradise, right?”

“Yes, but I’m not getting bored. I have my books on the shelf and my words inside me.”

“They’ll disappear.”

“They’ll no longer be my books? Or I will no longer be among them? Is that what you mean?”

“Do you envy those you’ll leave behind? Are you sorry to leave?”

“Envy? Those who remain aren’t immortal. They remain provisionally. When they disappear, they’ll also be mentioned for a while. By relatives and friends, in books and photographs. Until the last trace is gone. It doesn’t matter when. Yes, it makes you lightheaded to think about your loved ones. Even if you haven’t seen them for a long time. You know that they are still here, somewhere. Our tiring sun will also disappear, won’t it? Terrible, right?”

“Is there someone over there that you’d like to see again?”

“Oh, yes. My parents. From time to time. And others … in the same way, from time to time. If we keep them in mind, it’s enough and it’s more certain. Without depressing changes.”

I asked him how he imagines the final moment. Extended to infinity, or brief, brief, like a spasm.

I believed myself resigned, calm, biologically calm, the way an interlocutor from the faraway land used to say, but it so happens that the thought of the final hour overwhelms me. Impotence, regret, the insurmountable, drained my vital energy instantly. Like in a sensual and doomed atonement, with no way out.

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about the moment; it’s an unbearable thought,” Gora said, unconvinced.

We weren’t talking about old age, actually, but about life. Old age was life slowed down, but still life. Enfeebled, diminished, but life nonetheless. Death doesn’t exist without life.