After the night we spent together, Matej began avoiding me. When I confronted him about it, he said that my obsession with him—it was true that by that time I, like everyone else, was obsessed with him—was a sign of sickness. “I can’t cure your metaphysical lack,” he told me irritably. “I can’t do anything for you. All I can do is make you miserable.” He paused and started patting his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. “You think I’m different from you; you think I have something you lack. But there’s no difference between us. You and I are very similar—we’re exactly the same.”
Matej often brought up the subject of our supposed similarity, which struck me as frankly ludicrous. What about us was the same? He had spent his high-school years drinking coffee in basements during bomb scares, reading Max Scheler, becoming convinced that he was a member of the zoo commission and had to inspect the living conditions of every elephant in Europe. He believed that the only way to be good was to imitate Jesus, that Kant’s categorical imperative represented a dilution of the Sermon on the Mount, that suicide was immoral because human life doesn’t belong to the individual. What did it mean to say we were the same, when all our experiences and beliefs were different?
In the final analysis, this is what was so hurtful about Girardianism: it made love totally worthless. The curiosity and empathy engendered by love, which I found so valuable, were redescribed as flaws of human nature. The drive to commit generous errors, which I thought of as the only possible egress from the prison of self-interest and inertia, was made out to be a form of egotism. “The characters in The Possessed offer themselves as sacrifice, and offer to Stavrogin everything that is most precious to them,” Girard writes, and such sacrifice is understood to be shameful, vain, the opposite of generous.
Furthermore, the entire Girardian enterprise began to strike me as hypocritical. If Girard was right about the human condition, the only appropriate course of action was to stop what we were doing, all of us, right now. If novels were really about what he said they were about, then their production should cease. All we really needed was one novel, and we would all read it and realize, like St. Augustine, that the basic premises of literary narrative—love and ambition—could bring only misery. Renouncing our desires, we would give ourselves up to spiritual contemplation. We would abandon our program of becoming scholars: what use were scholars in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?
The mood in our circle became increasingly strained. Keren dreamed that the Turks had taken over the world, and that she herself had been complicit: she had had a job in Jerusalem interviewing people about their fears, and now the Turks were using this information to terrorize people into submission.
Fishkin, who was also in the Girard class, dreamed that he was beating up Matej, in a fight over the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans. Fishkin hit Matej in the face, and Matej, bleeding from his nose, kept saying: “We just can’t forget.”
I dreamed that Matej and I were in the Rose Garden in Konya, immobilized by swarming hordes of pilgrims. Matej wanted to go inside the mausoleum of Mevlana Rumi, which filled me with inexplicable dread. I tried to discourage him, but he dodged me in the crowd. I hurried up the steps after him, but couldn’t go inside—I didn’t have a head scarf. I asked the custodian to lend me one of the scarves they keep there for tourists. In my haste, I posed the request in an undiplomatic way, not bothering to hide that my aim was only to get my friend, and not to pay my respects to Rumi. The custodian drew himself up. “If you really want to get in,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “you have to tell me one thing: do you know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost?”
I said I did.
“Oh? Then you can’t go in!”
“But—but I don’t really know the difference. I mean, I know they’re two separate parts of the trinity, but then they say the trinity is the same as the godhead . . . I hear that even for Catholics it’s supposed to be a big mystery. Anyway, if I’m not allowed in,” I added, “you should definitely send someone in there to get my friend, because he really does know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost.”
“Not my problem,” said the custodian, blocking the door. I tried to look around him, but all I could see was the tomb itself, covered with its green cloth.
Matej spent the summer in Croatia, and I managed to stop thinking about him. In fact, I ended up dating one of his best friends, Max, who had formed the deep conviction that he and I belonged together.
“I think it’s an illusion,” I told Max when he explained to me his views. “I can’t actually cure your metaphysical lack.” But I didn’t have it in my heart to turn away what looked to me, and what turned out really to be, love.
Nonetheless, when school started again in September, Matej and I found ourselves living in the same on-campus single-student residence, and somehow immediately lapsed into our old habits, meeting several nights a week, staying up half the night, talking about Proust (whom we were both reading for the first time), and making sentimental declarations to each other. “But what will become of us?” I remember asking.
“You’ll become a writer,” he replied.
“But what about you?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about me.”
The idea that I had fallen prey to Matej’s Onegin-like Byronism had meanwhile become a joke between us. One day as we were leaving his apartment, he picked up a scarf that Keren had forgotten there, and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans.
“OK, let’s go,” he said. I started to laugh. “What? Do I look ridiculous?”
“No—you look jaunty and Byronic!”
But then one night it happened again. We were talking about the problem of the person: “If you’re stroking someone’s hair, is that a sign of affection, or is that the affection itself?” We spent the night together, and I somehow even thought things might work out this time—I would just have to find some way of explaining it to Max. But the next morning, over stale English muffins, Matej informed me that he was thinking of joining a Carthusian monastery he had seen in Slovenia, where the monks grew some kind of herbs. Staring at him in disbelief, I said the first thing that came to my head: “But they take a vow of silence, and you can’t be quiet for two minutes straight!”
“That’s the point,” he snapped. “It would be hard for me.”
I threw out my half-eaten muffin and left, feeling like someone had kicked me in the stomach, like I had hit the bottom of some kind of abyss and had lost touch with everything real.
“There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.