The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read Free

him.
    Oof, he’s arrived! The empty platform, the mountains in the distance, the river only a stone’s throw away. A clear, cold afternoon.The beginning of the world. He doesn’t yet have a clue how close the end is. The end of his world.
    The chronometer swallows the seconds of the armistice.
    Peter appeared suddenly, as though in a dream, or in a nightmare.
    “Peter. Gapar. Mynheer. Mynheer Peter Gapar here.”
    A voice from the void. Professor Gora was no longer sure where he was. He took note of the walls lined with books and remained silent. He was in no mood to answer; it was an aggressive surprise.
    Peter! Was it
Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn,
the popular protagonist from the great novel he’d read decades ago, once the novel of his world? Or Peter Gapar, dubbed
Mynheer,
from the socialist literary cafe in the Balkans?
    Nothing was certain, except for the bookshelves, those in front of him and the ones in his mind.
    Young Gapar’s only publication from the years of “legalized bliss,” as he used to call his former utopia, was titled
Mynheer.
The story behind the nickname was thin and bizarre; chance had conspired with the library.
    How had Peter Gapar found the phone number of Professor Augustin Gora, who had vanished into the great United States of America?
    “Where are you? Have you also made it to the other world?”
    The ghost confirmed that, yes, he’d come some time ago, as a doctorate fellow at New York University.
    “A doctorate? In architecture? Weren’t you … ?”
    “No, I wasn’t an architect. Just a technician-architect. A junior in college when they arrested my father again; they expelled me. Three years of architecture were equivalent to a midrange school.”
    “There’s such a thing as a doctorate here … ”
    “In art, Professor. History of art. Even in our tranquil Homeland, there were night classes. Art history classes. You couldn’t have known this.”
    “No.”
    Not true, but he wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation.
    Gapar explained that he had no intention of becoming an expert in German abstract expressionism, as his scholarship promised. He simply wanted to remain in the New World.
    Right now, when hope was being reborn in Eastern Europe? He wasn’t a young man anymore; nor had he come for the future of his nonexistent children. And so, then? Was he alone? No, Lu had come with him. She’d finished university with an English degree, as Professor Gora knew all too well. English would dull her in this land, where she’d moored, or run aground. Yes, she had initiated Peter in the New World’s native language, with underwhelming results; he couldn’t decipher the station names as they were announced in the subway. For the time being, he had no work permit.
    Laconic answers to Professor Gora’s spare and weary questions.
    “I’d had enough, that’s all. I’m not the adventurous type, and I’m not interested in tourism. But I’d never left my country even once. Not once! Forty years of legalized bliss, in the same place! But now I’ve left!
For good,
as you say here. I have an absolute, urgent need for irresponsibility. At least now, before the funeral processions. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.”
    He accentuated this word, heavily, twice, as if he were talking to an idiot, or simply to himself. Ir-re-spon-si-bil-i-ty.
    He was speaking of an end, not a beginning, about getting out of a situation, not of entering another. About a departure, not an arrival.
    “You’re right. I’m not staking my claim to a new place; I’m freeing myself of the old one. The same hide-and-seek game with death, somewhere new, outside of the old cage. For the time being, I need a job. A salary. It would be both dishonest and wearisome to keep up the charade of the scholarship. Lu’s a babysitter now. She’s always liked the children she never had.”
    So, the adventurer had, in fact, come for the adventure … Gloomily, Professor Gora smiled, measuring with his eyes the shelves full of