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

the public eye, the fissure was indiscernible. Intimacy, however, revealed strange constrictions. The rational and pragmatic partner was being undermined by a sleepy double, loosed from a dark place. He no longer recognized the stranger who crouched in the corner as if she were being punished, who thrashed, unseen, among contaminated lianas. Her pride persisted, however. Lu had been taught not to complain, to avoid showing weakness or sorrow. She never lamented, except to herself, in solitude.
    These regressive reprises took a grave toll on the enchantment of their first years of living together. Gradually, that enchantment was replaced by the fascination of seemingly living with more than one person at once, each persona asserting its supremacy. He deciphered his wife’s codes slowly and never fully. Ever on the ready, he waited for the shocks, in cycles of shock.
    Looking back made him anxious even now, after so many years.
    The finery had evaporated, no one knew when or how; Lu would wake suddenly in the morning, robbed of her security, shattered, submerged in gloom. Suspicion would quickly reclaim her; the happy past would recede and cease to exist. There was no longer anything solid around her, just a dubious trap for what might still be. The captive felt herself flung into the void of the anonymous and the rejected, frightened by adverse winds, pushed toward a precipice that had in fact been waiting for her for a long time.
    She no longer knew how much love her past had contained, and she couldn’t name the enigma that separated that Lu from the present one. Everything seemed diluted and obscure. And still the confusion of this fraternization, this incest with the sister who didn’t resemble him, persisted.
    Was domestic love undermining actual love?
    The idea of exile, the humility of wandering, had always frightened her. Was her union with her younger, aloof cousin a kind of orphan’s shelter? Or was she looking for the familiarity of the tribe?
    The Dutchman’s Balkan successor was nothing but a simulacrum. And the age in which she lived was just a parody without posterity.
    Posterity? Here it was, a step away and all around. Camps of gossip and goods, the citizen plagued by publicity, an earthbound jumble. Mynheer’s laughter in the grave of the farce that celebrity had made of him.
    That was a venomous thought, one with which he could go to bed, our good friend Gora. This night was certain to be a garrulous one.
    Lu wasn’t yet employed at Dr. Koch’s office when Peter quit his fellowship at New York University. Was that the irresponsibility invoked in his first conversation with Gora?!
    An Italian colleague of Gşspar’s was touched by the ease with which the eastern refugee renounced the income of the fellowship, as modest as it was to begin with, and by his readiness to hurl himself into the unknown. She was a colleague with a legendary name, Beatrice, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, married to an elderly, wealthy American. She’d come up with a sensational solution; Peter would have breakfast with her husband every morning! After which, they’d discuss the headlines. The public service would be decently remunerated.
    To Mr. Artwein the name Peter Gapar inspired trust immediately. Peter was to bring and discuss the day’s newspaper. Only, not the current year’s. Mr. Artwein wanted the newspapers of the year in which he himself was born. January 5 became January 5 of 1920; June 22 was June 22,1920, and so on. The world came into being on the same day that Mr. Artwein did, on February 24,1920.
    Peter seemed excited by the bizarre preoccupation. He didn’t care that he was, evidently, the object of an act of charity. “Now that’s what I call an idea! Everyone says that Americans are
workaholics,
physically addicted to work; they can’t stop working and they can’t stop thinking about money—look, here’s one who’s made enough, who gives up working, who is ready to throw