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

devastated him.
    It may be a sin—and a token of our inadequacies—to indulge inrefined tastes without having given the simple, natural gifts of life, the great and holy gifts, their due … the defeat of feeling in the face of life, that is the inadequacy for which there is no pardon, no pity, no honor
… If
is the end, the despair of hell itself, doomsday …
    The face and silhouette of Peter Gapar, whom he hadn’t seen for over twenty years, and not often even before that, remained obscure. Gora remembered only that he didn’t resemble Pieter Peeperkorn. This he remembered for certain.
    There was another motivation behind that nickname. A story that Peter Gapar wrote,
Mynheer,
caused some ripples among the socialist literati. Slaves forced to praise their slavery are happily receptive even to the most furtive winks of complicity, or a fraction of mockery. Was there some secret gunpowder hidden within the story that spurred Peter Gapar’s notoriety among the socialist underground? It was just a story! Published in a provincial journal, what’s more. Forty years after the celebrated novel of the celebrated Thomas of Lübeck! Was there some codified allusion that escaped the censor’s eye? Such oddities did happen, quickly to be forgotten. Not long after the publication, the author was branded with the name of his protagonist. Not even a name, a formal address-become-name. Mister, Monsieur, Monsignor. Mynheer! The nickname circulated in the literary cafe, and then beyond it. The name fueled the rumors that surrounded Peter Gapar; the author never published anything again, but the halo wouldn’t be shattered. In the country that invented rumors, it was rumored that Peter had authored other literary charades, unknown to anyone. It was whispered that he worked, in secret, on a masterpiece. Rumors were the garlicky black bread of the dictatorship.
    Nothing but a petty technician in a petty, socialist enterprise, Gapar contributed to cultural journals with short, ironic texts, eschewing the wooden, official language. Casual little columns on theater and art exhibitions, even on the races, or philately. He could be spotted at shows and gallery openings and cocktail parties. Em-barrassed(but not embarrassed enough) by his phantom and persistent prestige, obsessed with the spies that teemed all around.
    Tall, lean, and ill at ease as a result of a lanky body, as if he’d borrowed it for too long and forgotten to return it.
    Shaved head with a black moustache and goatee, he resembled a hussar employed by a musical theater producer. His intense, black gaze under his thick eyebrows of crude oil. Small hands, smooth brow. Straight nose, in defiance of his heredity.
    The way he looked, his name could have been Hungarian or German. It was rumored, however, that he might be circumcised. So he was. The rumor proved sovereign, in keeping with tradition. Some even alleged that his biography contained certain dramatic details, though the facts were vague, just like those concerning his supposed masterpiece. He seemed like any other, though maybe he wasn’t. His comradely casualness, left over from when he played hockey and basketball and football in youth leagues, inspired sympathy.
    His post-Habsburgian-Transylvanian education conflicted with the Balkan and Parisian mannerisms characteristic of metropolitan Bucharest. Could Transylvania be considered occidental? Mynheer Peeperkorn also conferred on his successor a second, convenient ennoblement, “The Dutchman.” His company took to calling him by that nickname; you could hear them yell loudly, “Hey, Dutchman!”
    Gapar’s text defied the distorted “debates” of the Authority, the great words and the humanist catchphrases.
    Incoherence was subversive. Is that what Gapar was suggesting? He appeared sometimes, donning Peeperkorn’s felt hat, and, after a few shots of vodka, recited his namesake’s lines, with an outstretched, imploring hand.
    We’re
cheating, my good men.