On the same subject, Proust writes of a moment when, “after a certain year,” extremely close friends, as if by agreement, “cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.” These lines occur in a passage about old age—about how death insidiously seeps into life toward the end, enveloping the stillliving subject in its chrysalis. But who knows how these things really happen? Maybe death didn’t separate those friends at all. Maybe they had to will themselves to stop seeing one another, precisely in order to let death in.
The last time I saw Matej was on a beautiful September afternoon in San Francisco. His eighteen-year-old brother, Luka, was visiting from Zagreb, and the three of us went to the zoo. I remember that Matej treated me with a certain extra gentleness—he had always opened my car door, but that day he also closed it after me. Luka turned out to be a younger and impossibly skinnier copy of Matej, with the same narrow, slightly squinting eyes. It was like meeting a Matej from the past, one lost to me forever. In the zoo we spent a long time watching the penguins, the varied saucereyed creatures of Madagascar, and the primates, Matej’s favorite: “Human, all too human,” he sighed before the longfaced patas monkey. Luka had never seen an anteater before, and squinted at it with almost frightening intensity. Last of all we visited the koalas. “ ‘Blind, helpless, and smaller than a nickel, the tiny embryo must find its way to its mother’s pouch,’ ” I read from the educational display, and Matej and I both started laughing at the joke before he said it: “Such is the nature of life on this earth.”
Shortly after our trip to the zoo, Stanford comp lit held a departmental lunch for students and faculty. At this lunch, which I was unable to attend, Matej sat next to my adviser and told her, inaccurately and unaccountably, that I blamed her for my poor performance on the university orals exam the previous year, which I had passed, but just barely. (The exam had taken place at the height of the demonic period, during a record-setting heat wave, and I had delivered an apparently very weird talk on conspiracy theories in the nineteenth-century novel.)
To this day, I have no idea why Matej would have said such a thing to my adviser, with whom he wasn’t even acquainted; that was their first conversation, and was later relayed to me independently by both Luba and my adviser. I wrote Matej a caustic e-mail. He didn’t reply. A few weeks later I heard that he was dating an Israeli linguist who had been to high school with Keren; that Keren had passed her exams but had fallen into a depression and put on an improbable amount of weight; that the homeless guy, Bobby, had colonized Daniel’s bedroom and was using it to run a bicycle repair shop.
We were all living in San Francisco by then. Keren and Ilan were sharing an apartment with Matej and Daniel in Noe Valley. I had moved to Twin Peaks, where winds howled all day and all night, and giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere, occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made fun of me for moving there—Ilan called it Wuthering Heights—but I didn’t care. I barely saw any of them anyway, once I stopped talking to Matej.
That spring, Keren wrote me an e-mail announcing that she was pregnant. Several months later, she invited me to a going-away party for Matej: he was apparently moving back to Croatia for good. “I know you guys still aren’t speaking, but it seems absurd not to invite you,” Keren wrote. I didn’t go to the party.
Nearly a year passed before I next saw Keren. She and Ilan had moved back to Stanford when the baby was born, and we met for lunch one day when I was on campus to use the library. We walked from her apartment to a French café on California Avenue, the kind of bourgeois establishment we never used to frequent. It was one of the almost oppressively perfect days that succeed one another at Stanford in the spring and fall, so uniform that they might have been manufactured on an assembly line. We sat outside at a table in the sun. Conversation turned to the subject of René Girard, who had recently been elected to the French Academy.
“Good for him, I guess,” I said.
“Yeah,” Keren said unenthusiastically, picking at her salad. “But part of me thinks it’s grotesque and obscene, given what happened to Matej.” As I was debating whether to ask what she meant, Keren’s daughter, Malka, who was teething, began to make discontented noises. Keren absentmindedly stuck a finger in her mouth. As Malka was happily sucking at Keren’s finger, an unknown middle-aged woman descended upon us, beaming: “What a beautiful baby! Whose is she?” Not waiting for an answer, she peered into my face: “Is she yours?”
What weird people there are in the world, I thought. Why would Keren’s finger be in my baby’s mouth?
Keren identified herself as the mother, which made it her turn to have her face peered into. Finally the woman walked away across the street, still beaming. Curiosity overcame my reserve: “So what’s Matej doing now, anyway?” I asked.
That was when I learned that Matej had dropped out of Stanford more than a year ago. He had given up first drinking, and then smoking. He had sold or given away all his belongings, and applied to a theology program in Zagreb. Upon the conclusion of this program, he had entered a monastery on a small island in the Adriatic. Keren and Ilan had received one communication from him, an e-mail describing the scenery on the island.
“He says it’s beautiful,” Keren said.
I found myself thinking back to a long-ago conversation, when I had told Matej that he was a destructive element in the lives of others. He had surprised me by not objecting. “What can I do?” he had asked, and it sounded like a real question.
Now he had done something—like a novelistic hero, he had achieved a deathlike conversion, renounced narrative. There was a chapter in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel that explained it perfectly, a chapter on the secret affinity between the novelistic vaniteux and the religious ascetic. The “strange strength of soul,” which enables Julien Sorel to scale such brilliant heights in his romantic and political life, Girard writes, is exactly the same as the strength called upon by the man of God to resist his worldly desires. One renounces insincerely, to get what he is renouncing, while the other renounces sincerely, to become closer to God, but the motion is identical. This kinship also links the demonic Stavrogin and the saintly Myshkin: “Like Stavrogin, Myshkin acts as a magnet for unattached desires; he fascinates all the characters in The Idiot,” Girard writes. “We can understand why the Prince and Stavrogin have the same point of departure in the author’s rough draft.”
I was still in a daze when I got to the library. It was a day for surprises: sitting at the front desk, larger than life, was Miguel, who was supposed to have died of cancer at least four years ago. “Long time no see,” he said, beaming.
“It’s fantastic,” I stammered. When I got to the stacks I kept staring dumbly at the call numbers, unable to determine whether PG 3776.B7 came before or after PG 3776.B27. Eventually I found myself back downstairs, logged into a computer terminal, writing a pointless e-mail to Matej. I told him that I had been strongly impressed to learn that he was in a monastery, and that I wished him luck. To my amazement, a reply arrived the following day. “Dear Elif,” Matej wrote,
Thank you for your kind wish. I wish for you all the things I wish for myself. I have been living at the monastery for about four months now. I joined the order of discalced Carmelites, whose full name is: the Order of Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. In the monastery I’m in charge of setting the tables and cleaning the dining hall. Until a few days ago I was the substitute, but now I’m already the main mess boy. You can see that, as usual, I make quick progress . . .