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

he’d beaten Death.
    “You know that Gapar, as a man, is quite …”
    “Miraculous! You mean miraculous? He’s a miracle, no more, no less. I escaped with my life only through a miracle. He didn’t care at all. About me, about himself, about the car, New York, it was all just a spectacle, that’s all. The spectacle before the catastrophe, and the spectacle of the catastrophe.”
    The historian couldn’t forget that experiment, and wouldn’t allow himself to be interrupted from recounting the morbid screenplay, which he’d probably already recounted many times over.
    “The business card he gave you represented …”
    “A letter of thanks! A reward. He was about to hand it over, the next occasion, to his boss: Death. A cash reward, no matter how big, would have been merely trivial.”
    “You’d be disposed to see him again, then? To … ”
    “To see him again? As a pedestrian … as a pedestrian, Mr. Gora! As a pedestrian, anytime! Disposed? Obligated! That’s how I see it. A matter of conscience, I can’t forget that. A miracle can’t be repaid in any other way.”
    No one could have pleaded Peter’s cause better than Bedros Avakian himself. There was nothing to add; you simply had to let him exhaust his inexhaustible discourse.
    “I was, you understand, in the heart of Experimental Theater . .. Experimental History. The great experiment of the other world. Martyr and guinea pig. In less than a half an hour, death had kissed me everywhere. I was powerless. But I escaped, after all! The madman at the wheel has no escape, however, that’s for sure! Now or in an hour or tomorrow, the holocaust, an atomic bomb, a worldwide earthquake, or a cosmic hurricane will meet him. That’s certain! Should I call the police or the taxi company, or should I hire him instantly at the university? You know how people are, always in a hurry—I was in a hurry to arrive in London, at a conference about the Armenian genocide in Turkey, I was presiding over the conference. Not even after I eluded death did I forget that I didn’t have time to spare, I needed to get to London. And I did.”
    “So, then, Gapar could … I wonder if he might call you,” Gora ventured to say. “He kept your card, this I know. I could, eventually …”
    “If he’s alive! If he’s still alive. If the miracle revalidated itself. It would be beyond my understanding, as well as the understanding of any rational being. I’d do anything, Professor, for such an intangible being, anything. I’ll hire him to teach the occult! Spells and magic and astrology?”
    Dr. Avakian was laughing, quite pleased with himself. At the height of his frenzied monologue, probably to perfect the dark humor of the incident, he asked for a letter of recommendation for Peter Gapar.
    In the folder on Gora’s desk, there was a heap of documents related to Peter. Yellow, white, blue sheets; Gora liked to jot notes quickly, on colored paper, details, whether real or imagined, thoughts, informationthat might someday be useful to him. He collaborated, under a pen name, with the journals of the exiles; he also wrote brief, ironic obituaries. He prepared them carefully, while the dead were still alive. Then he would thin out the compositions, without giving them up all together. The passages seemed too short, as the results of such extended research. How to make a simple, ephemeral inscription out of a biography that accumulates and burns through so much? A cynical frivolity, a bow in the face of unavoidable ferocity.
    The deceased deserved more than the bureaucratic summary of visible existence! One should capture not just what was, but also what could have been, the potentialities that dissipate at once with the deceased. What he endeavored only in his mind, what he sketched out only in thought but never brought to fruition or had the courage to admit, even to himself. The secret life, often unconscious, surrounding and stemming from the heart of the ephemeral, time and