The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Norman Manea Read Free Book Online

beginning, not David’s. The basketball player can’t stand her maternal excesses, I’m sure.”
    They were coming back, after accompanying the guest to the station. Gora had been surprised by the ardor with which Lu invested the subject.
    In the months that followed, Lu seemed to be uncovering the mysteries of her own being. David and Eva Cşspar’s biographies provided the lost code. Through them she was beginning to come out of the unknown inside of herself.
    “It isn’t certain that Peter is David’s son. The delirium of liberation triggered … let’s say impulses, as the former detainees would say. The orgy of liberation, the orgy of pent-up senses. They say that everyone coupled with whoever was around. David might have seen his momentary partner only afterward. Peter was born in Belgrade, on their way home. Eva didn’t want to return, but David insisted on reestablishing the facts. To reinstate justice! It was among parents such as these that Peter grew up to play basketball.”
    Fragmentary information, gleaned from others, tied up in presumptions. It wasn’t mere gossip occasioned by the—till then-unknown cousin’s visit, but the reawakening of a dormant question. Warning signs, interferences, expectations. Lu seemed consumed.
    Gora felt excluded, relegated to the role of a spectator who had only part of the puzzle in front of him. Lu had had similar lapses previously, swift, imperceptible slips; all of a sudden, you could no longer reach her. It was like an affectionate and reversible kind of autism. An opportune touch was enough to call her back; a lethargic rippling movement would follow, and she was lifted out of the trance, reconnected to reality, with a heightened vitality. Sheinstantly electrified her partner. Her abandon had the same ardor as her absence; you weren’t sure whether the intense communion wasn’t just another form of estrangement. The dark embers in her eyes deepened, her hands trembled, her lips quivered, her mouth dilated, a voracious leech sucking the blood and pus of her prey.
    The magic of desire spurred his memory and brought him close to her. And the memory of desire never faded. An initiation, ever the same, and different every time. A lasting black void, murmurs of enchantment and melancholy.
    He’d tried, more than once, to stifle those memories, but they returned in waves, like the tides. The distance in which Lu had hidden herself made the obsession more acute and permanent, intolerable at the start, then magical and longed for.
    He’d accepted the highly improbable news, that Lu was Peter’s partner! The young cousin represented an unspeakably shrewd ruse, but also an exercise in humility. And a test, reinvented by the Gora couple—that was what the former and actual husband Au-gustin Gora believed.
    The beautiful Lu had no reason to pair up with Peter! There must surely have been more formidable suitors. To choose the young cousin was to show a dubious resignation, and a suspicious defiance of public opinion. While Lu didn’t necessarily champion social conventions, she wasn’t impervious to their implications either.
    Was it the masochism of humility? Gora was as happy to fantasize about Lu’s humility as he was to dream about the complicity between them.
    The castaway Augustin Gora had also found himself alone and free in the New and Free World, some years back. After a few days, he’d written to Professor Cosmin Dima. He’d gotten a prompt response, repeated phone calls and questions about their common Homeland. Dima offered immediately to help him; he invited Gora to see him and paid for the plane ticket. One of several similar trips over the course of the following months.
    Right away Gora was fascinated by the lucidity the Old Man (as he would call him) exhibited. The scholar experienced exile as a sort of adventure and initiation; he even succeeded in opening the world of the new arrival, who’d already wandered around in books and the worlds of