My friend who fell asleep at the New Year’s Eve sex party said the conversation there was lacking. “I didn’t expect it from an orgy,” she said. “So much talk about nothing.”

I told her the same problem plagues my field.

“So academics also wear cow costumes to have sex?”

I laughed.

“I was referring to all the talk about nothing,” I said.

“Ah, I see. So no cows, no pigs, no sheep?”

“Well, sometimes.”

“Yeah?” She leaned forward across the restaurant table.

I told her I hadn’t thought about that story in a very long time.

“What story?”

“Lamb curry,” said the waiter, approaching from behind me.

“You can put it in the middle,” I said. “Thanks.”

“What story?” my friend insisted.

So I told her the story of Professor Ciobanu, more or less as I’ll tell it now.

I was a postdoc at the time, without really knowing what that was. A postdoc fellowship in the humanities, I now know, is a way to linger in the shady corners of academia, hanging onto a stipend while continuously having to prove, usually in bad faith, that one’s research is necessary. A postdoc is an entirely superfluous category, professionally speaking, even in an environment that makes extraordinary allowances for uselessness.

But back then I felt proud. My father had been forced to drop out of high school at fifteen to help out on the family farm in the mountains of Subiaco. His life was spent raising chickens and sheep, but he had a passion for reading, which he passed on to me. One generation later, there I was, a paid researcher at a prestigious American university. And in New York — a city I’d only ever seen in movies.

I’d spent my first week in the city walking around aimlessly and gaping at eccentric-looking strangers, at groups of children on their preschool teachers’ leashes, or simply at the patches of horizon glowing at the ends of the far-reaching avenues. Even the white-and-orange plastic smoke stacks piping steam above street level, the uniforms of cops and mailmen, and the American flag itself held an uncanny, mysterious charm. How different from the medieval alleys of my hometown, deserted in the winter and crowded in the summer only with flocks of ambling tourists.

Finally, the time came to make an appearance at the department and meet Professor Ciobanu, whom I was supposed to assist in his research. I’d been in touch with Ciobanu via email, which is to say I’d sent him a dozen messages over the course of six months, and had gotten in return just three unconventionally formatted and extremely succinct responses that addressed none of my questions.

I made my way to the Upper East Side on foot, and found the street and the building which, according to my printed map (an affectation of mine at the time), hosted the department. It was a small and unassuming brownstone, with nothing but a discolored brass plaque by the entrance to identify it. I rang the doorbell and was buzzed in after a minute. The main hall was done in the American neoclassical style — a thicket of columns, scrollwork, wainscoting, all slathered with a layer of undiscriminating white varnish. The hall looked out onto a courtyard where a tall magnolia stood in flower. By the elevator I found a directory. There he was: Sorin Ciobanu, Room 206. The elevator itself was out of order. As I rushed up the stairs, I felt a surge of excitement. After months of applications, procrastination, and living in my childhood bedroom, I would finally meet the man whose scholarship had been nothing short of a revelation in my undergraduate years, so much so that my own final thesis — 110/110, summa cum laude — had consisted of a poor imitation of Ciobanu’s work. 

His first book had caused a minor sensation in the field of history. In Way of the Wool, written in 1976, when Ciobanu was only 25, he unearths the story of Liu Zhang, an enslaved textile worker from Suzhou, China, who, at the end of the thirteenth century, met Marco Polo during one of the explorer’s diplomatic missions. After converting to Christianity, Liu decided to escape and relocate to Venice. He had gathered from eavesdropping on Marco Polo’s tales that the city’s maze of canals, bridges, and stilt houses bore a close resemblance to those of Suzhou.

Marco Polo himself may have taken Liu back to Venice. What is certain is that, by 1296, Liu Zhang (italianized as Luigi Zanca in the Venetian records) was a free man, and had set up a small textile workshop on the banks of the Giudecca island. Thanks to the spinning wheel he brought with him from China, Liu quickly outpaced his competitors. European aristocrats fell in love with the exotic designs of his robes, and thirty years later, his enterprise had grown into a commercial empire spanning the whole Mediterranean. 

On his travels through the Persian Ilkhanate, Liu had abandoned the Christian faith and briefly embraced Islam. After doing business with the Jewish community on Venice’s mainland, he also attempted to convert to Judaism. An unusually gifted man, he learned Venetian dialect and Latin, and, in his old age, he even translated fragments of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Cantonese, the language of his former master, a merchant from Guangzhou. What little survives of his translations, however, shows that Liu either entirely misunderstood the Latin text or deliberately retouched it to suit his imagination. In his translation, every character transforms into a sheep: Daphne, chased by Apollo, grows hooves, dangling ears, and thick white wool, and, to Apollo’s horror, begins to graze the very grass around his feet; while staring at his own image reflected on the water’s surface, Narcissus sees his features turn ovine and starts bleating in dismay; Minos’s labyrinth in Crete is haunted not by a ferocious minotaur, but by a human-headed sheep trotting jovially around the maze — and so on. Liu grew so obsessed with the poem that by the end of his life he espoused Greco-Roman paganism. In Liu’s testament, which Ciobanu retrieved from the archives of Venice’s Archivio di Stato, the self-made magnate entrusted his soul to Jupiter and Venus alongside Buddha, Christ, Noah, Allah, and the Venetian Doge.

On the surface, Way of the Wool merely demonstrated that the spinning wheel was brought to Europe by Liu Zhang. But in the nineties the book was translated into English and promptly picked up by American commentators. Liu’s westward journey towards the freedom and economic prosperity of cosmopolitan Venice, some argued, prefigured and even indirectly validated America’s own social experiment. Others recognized the role Ciobanu’s book had played in the broader critical reassessment of Western culture. “Now that even the spinning wheel, along with countless other Asian and African inventions, has been traced back to its non-Western origins,” an enthusiastic reviewer wondered, “is there a single European idea that will not turn out to have been imported, if not outright plundered during one of Europe’s military and colonial forays?” Readers fell in love with the story of a woolworker from Suzhou, the “Chinese Venice.” Way of the Wool spent six weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.

Ciobanu hadn’t written anything since, except for a 2003 article in which, after ravaging his own book, he attacked its admirers as much as its critics. Both camps, he felt, had perverted Liu Zhang’s story to fit their “depraved political agendas.” Now, though, it seemed another book was finally underway, and I was supposed to help him with it. As I climbed the two flights of stairs, I still knew nothing about the new project. “Read the Desert Fathers; Ioannes Cassianus above all,” was the only indication I had gotten from him. So I had picked up a copy of the Apophthegmata Patrum, and for months I read Jerome’s Vitae Patrum, Isaiah of Scetis’s Asceticon, and Athanasius’s Life of Antony; and I read the works of the American monk and poet Thomas Merton, and the English nun Benedicta Ward; but above all, per Ciobanu’s prescription, I read the work of Ioannes Cassianus, or John Cassian, a monk born in fourth-century Scythia Minor (modern-day Romania) who lived in Palestine and Egypt and died in Southern Gaul (modern-day France).

Half-starved hermits began to populate my dreams. But when, in another email, I informed Ciobanu about my studies and asked if he could specify how exactly they related to his book, his response was simply:

Great About The readings, For The spirit ,,,  – C.

I resigned myself to waiting until I was in New York to find out more.

I knocked twice on the door of Room 206, and immediately, almost in sync with the second knock, a voice said, “Come in!”

I didn’t quite know what to expect — in terms of the way he’d look, I mean. On the university’s website I had seen a black and white photograph of the man at his desk, tall, broad-shouldered, stuffed into a suit that didn’t fit him, surrounded by his books. But at least thirty years had passed since that picture was taken. 

“Buon pomeriggio,” I said. In person he looked even taller, and his desk, by contrast, seemed child-sized. The suit might not have been the same one as in the photograph, but it was similarly ill-fitting. His once ink-black hair had faded to gray. Ciobanu was bent over a notebook whose pages, at least from where I stood, appeared to be blank. I took a few steps closer. “Good afternoon,” I repeated, this time in English. For a few more instants, nothing. Then, suddenly, he raised his eyes from the notebook and looked straight at me. Or almost — he was cross-eyed.

“Behold the academies, like structures in a mist,” he said.

In response to which I said nothing.

“Do you know who wrote that, Mr. Lupini?” he asked. 

I told him that I didn’t know. “I’m sorry,” I added, to fill the silence that followed.

“That’s fine, Mr. Lupini,” said Ciobanu, “that’s perfectly fine. In fact it is I who should apologize for a habit so typical of this wretched field, in which everybody is always quoting someone else, as though stealing someone else’s words and fitting them to a particular situation were more valuable than inventing a phrase of one’s own, or, even better, keeping silent. But sit down, sit down!” he said, gesturing towards a chair across from his desk. He tried to smile as he watched me take my seat.

“Still, the academy’s a structure in the mist,” said Ciobanu, “Quite a line, no?”

To avoid eye contact, or the impossibility of eye contact, my gaze traveled from his desk to the books behind him (Ibn Jubayr, William of Rubruck); from his window, which looked out on the magnolia tree and the small courtyard, to an old brown leather suitcase in a corner of the room. 

“So you’re from Subiaco, Mr. Lupini,” he said, “That’s good, that’s very good. I, too, was from a village — I am from a village. A certain provincialism of feeling is necessary. Here,” he said, opening a drawer and taking out a handful of foil-packaged candy. “Care for one?”

I told him I was fine, thank you.

“Szaloncukor,” he said. “With marzipan.” He unwrapped one, his hands trembling slightly, and began to chew on it. “So, how did you get here? You took the subway?”

I told him I’d walked.

“Ah, so maybe you haven’t seen all those advertisements.”

I wasn’t sure. Which ads did he mean?

“Any of them. But you will. And you must have seen, already, the salad shops with their banners giving away the recipe for bridging the chasm between body and soul, and the skin-cream stores handing out the antidote to the passage of time, and the motivational quotes glued against every gym’s window panes. It’s like being back in Romania, except instead of the words HEROISM and COMMUNISM and CEAUȘESCU written in giant characters, here it’s CHURROS and PERFECT SKIN, and sex of course, whether in the form of food or clothes. And there are people who will defend the advance of this language, this new world made exclusively of words — they will defend anything, as long as it allows them to be heard in the cacophony of talkers and opinion-givers.

“They will say that I’m conservative,” said Ciobanu, “an accusation I’ve received often, Mr. Lupini, one which I receive all the time, in fact, from people, my so-called colleagues, who have spent their lives polluting journals and libraries with the most opportunistic, the most feeble semblances of ideas. But I am the opposite of a conservative. You’ll realize very soon, if you haven’t already, that their progressive values amount to a pile, a mountain, an Everest of words.”

Here he paused and his face stiffened, then exploded in a sneeze.

“Bless you,” I said.

“You see,” said Ciobanu as he wiped his nose on his sleeve, “thank you, you see, it no longer matters to me whether they’re left or right, religious fanatics or atheists — atheists out of laziness, of course, not out of conviction — or whatever other distinction they like to make; even the way they distinguish between good and evil means nothing to me. ‘A conservative!’ they say, or at least they certainly think it, whereas what I really am is a conservationist, since my only aim is to preserve life in the face of this approaching army of death, which is incessantly shooting its arrows at me in the form of words. 

“In fact,” said Ciobanu, “to charge me with being conservative would be the same as charging a wildlife conservationist with being conservative, because he or she wants to keep, say, a population of two hundred rhinos from going extinct; it would be the same as criticizing him or her for getting in the way of a handful of poachers who would dispense with the rhinos in the span of a week. Of course, my colleagues are not the poachers — they would never have the daring that, after all, such a profession requires. No,” said Ciobanu, with one eye on me and the other on the window where the magnolia branches swayed lightly in the sunshine, “no, they’re the hyenas, who show up only when it’s time to feast on carrion, that is to say, when it’s time to write another book announcing the imminent collapse of capitalism, or the possibility of a fairer capitalist society, or a book against the book about the collapse of capitalism, or a book merging the so-called ideas of the book about the collapse of capitalism with the ones from the book about a fairer capitalism, or a book that problematizes the thesis of the book that merged the ideas from the other two books, and so forth. And not one of them has the humility to wonder whether they have any share of responsibility, whether the so-called knowledge they’ve been strafing us with for decades hasn’t, after all, gone hand in hand with the forces of destruction.” 

Again, as he spoke, my gaze traveled from his notebook to his books (Rochefoucauld, Spinoza); from his window, where the magnolia’s flowers sprawled their white petals in the afternoon air, to the old brown leather suitcase in the far corner of the room.

“And so our dear friend Angela Steiner here,” said Ciobanu, gesturing with his thumb at the office next door, “can write a so-called history book in which she marshals the last century’s least interesting ideas to prove that authoritarian leaders derive their ambitions from some childhood trauma. Case closed.

“Now tell me who is the conservative, me or this woman?” he asked, pausing just long enough to make me think he expected an answer. “She received a big grant to write her book,” he continued, “then, once she published it, it became a bestseller, a fact which in turn assured her a position on CNN as — as a what? — as a talker, an expert of some kind. And Mr. Rybak up here,” he said, a note of horror in his voice as he pointed at the ceiling, “why, it is almost exclusively to him that I owe my insomnia, my gastric reflux, my constant constipation. Excuse me, Mr. Lupini, or may I call you Raimondo, if you don’t mind? You will forgive me for speaking this way. You’re from Subiaco, after all, and you’re the son of shepherds, and that is the best assurance I can ask for, to know that you’re from the mountains of Subiaco and, I imagine, you’ve visited the abbey there countless times, haven’t you? And your spirit, I can tell, was measured against those humble stone walls, those devastating frescoes, wasn’t it? Devastating for their majesty and humility, of course. 

“Well, every one of Mr. Rybak’s sentences, my dear Raimondo,” said Ciobanu with a tragic smile, “stands for the opposite of majesty and humility. For each true word ever written, people like him must pump out a thousand useless ones, they must dilute it in a river of superfluous talk. I could not tell you what his books are about,” he said, “because they are about nothing — fluff, smoke — yet lined with the most outrageous terminology. A tall boundary wall for a city that has long been abandoned. And to read one of these books with even an inch of honesty is to lay siege to it, to demolish a walled fortress of words only to find it encloses nothing, and indeed that’s exactly what it was meant to protect: nothing. Who could have been more deserving, then, of the MacArthur Fellowship — the Genius Grant, as they love to call it — than this man, this servant of any master?”

There was a pause during which I once again examined his office, from the old brown leather suitcase in the corner to the books in the library behind him (Manucci, Fan Shouyi, Al-Idrisi); from the thick white magnolia flowers framed by his window to the notebook open before him, on his desk. But he intercepted my gaze, or so I thought, and shut the notebook.

“Hear that?” whispered Ciobanu, pointing at the ceiling. I strained my ears but could not distinguish any sound other than that of a faraway siren. 

“It’s him,” said Ciobanu. “Whenever Rybak gets a phone call he starts pacing around his room like he’s marching off to war. His perambulations amount to a marathon a day. He can’t help it, and though it used to bother me, now I don’t mind so much. If only this man were half as honest as his steps, if only there were a tenth of that spontaneity in his words! When he marches up and down like that, I almost feel I could forgive him, Raimondo. I feel I could befriend him, even. But when I hear him speak…” Ciobanu closed his eyes and assumed the doleful expression of a martyr. 

“‘The academy’s not a structure in the mist,’ I once told Rybak,” said Ciobanu, “‘but the mist itself!’ And Rybak smiled at me politely with his Ceaușescu lips, the way one smiles at the village idiot. People like him, who mistook sophistry for sophistication the day they first set foot inside a university, think they believe in change, whereas what they really believe in is a change of vocabulary, nothing more. But the world belongs to people like Rybak, Raimondo — people who can smile politely at you while you call their bluff.”

Ciobanu looked at his watch, drew a sigh of exhaustion, and fell back against his chair. Now I could hear the steps and the muffled voice coming from above — the sound of Mr. Rybak pacing back and forth. 

“The academy!” Ciobanu burst out. “The mere mention of it makes me laugh, perhaps because I’ve only ever associated the word with that most ridiculous academy of all, the Accademia dell’Arcadia, made up of a handful of mediocre poets who called each other silly shepherd names and sang of ancient rivers and imaginary mountains, of Apollo and Hermes and Pan, while the world around them was changing drastically, forever! These are the true ancestors of today’s academy. They come to feed on the moneyed pastures this country promises to whomever can throw enough glitter in people’s eyes. And you may say I am guilty of this, too. Of course you might say that — except I did not come here for the money, but merely to test my spirit. But I did not pass the test, Raimondo. For this was the desert of my choosing.

There was, as you know, a terrible and soul-ravaging time in which a few lunatics, Christians desperate that no one would bother to martyr them any longer, chose to starve themselves into holiness inside a hole in the Egyptian desert. You might recall, if you’ve read your Desert Fathers, Raimondo, what the Abba Poemen once told the Abba Aguaras. “‘There is no desert left. Go in a populous place, in the midst of the crowd. Stay there and carry yourself like a man who does not exist. Thus you will have your supreme peace,’” said Ciobanu. “And this is precisely what I have done with my life. But I’ve found no supreme peace, not an hour of it, only a supreme torment.

“It took me thirty years of living in this city,” said Ciobanu, “to realize that the Abba Poemen might have just been an old fool, or at least that his prescriptions, meant for another man in another world and another time, did not necessarily apply to me. Because surely when the Abba Poemen spoke to the Abba Aguaras in such a way, he was not accounting for the existence of a man as lethal as Mr. Rybak.” 

The bells of a nearby church broke out in a long, lingering twang. Ciobanu paused and checked his watch again.

“There is a desert,” he continued, “in the northwest of China. It’s called Lop Nur, which should sound familiar if you’ve read your Marco Polo. And if you have, you’ll remember what he said about it: that if a traveler fell behind his company at night, he would hear his companions’ voices calling in the dark, and he would hear drums in the distance, too, and, so misled, he’d wander off to never be found again. My friend Peng Jiamu, bless his soul, was lost that way.”

A short silence followed, during which our glances seemed to lock in a new way, as though his eyes were straightening to match the seriousness of whatever he was about to tell me.

“It was 1980,” he said, “and there I was, with my make-believe knowledge of Cantonese, which I had learned in Venice in my youth from Mr. Lau, whose parents had come straight from Guangzhou in 1949 without knowing a word of Mandarin, so that their son grew up speaking Cantonese and eventually taught Cantonese in a course that was merely labeled Chinese Language 1, for all those poor souls like me who, having never set foot in a university, and coming from parents who had never set foot in a high school, and from grandparents who had never set foot in a school, period, did not have the daring or simply the sense to ask whether we were learning Mandarin, as I thought, or Cantonese, which I discovered I had learned only after I arrived in China. And there I was with maybe ten or twelve biologists and geologists from the Academy of Sciences, none of whom spoke Cantonese, except for Peng Jiamu, who was in charge of the expedition. I met the group in Urumqi, on my way to Lanzhou, and asked Peng Jiamu if I could join them. To everyone’s surprise, my own included, he said yes. I had nothing to do there, of course — not in that desert, at least. I merely wanted to be in the desert. So I followed Peng Jiamu around as he collected soil samples, shrubs, insects, and the occasional snakeskin. He was twice my age, and we were worlds apart, but he liked me. We didn’t speak much,” said Ciobanu, as though the fact had just struck him for the first time. “Our friendship was simple, Raimondo. On paper, we had nothing in common. Quite unlike Mr. Rybak up here — a man with whom I have everything in common, at least so it would seem: same language, same field, same interests. Although fate has placed him in circumstances most favorable to becoming my friend — my best friend, even — this man and I have never been able become friendly, let alone friends, because I smelled him out on the first day I met him. 

“Whereas Peng Jiamu and I, though we sometimes struggled to understand each other even in our most basic interactions, since my Cantonese was far from fluent, became friends immediately, almost at a glance. He would pick up a stone, or the empty carapace of a bug, for example, and place it in the palm of my hand. Or he’d point at a rock formation, or at a strange shape in the clouds. The purpose of it all was to see the world with the same eyes, so to speak. Then one evening after we’d moved to a new camp he went out to look for water and never came back.” Ciobanu turned his head slightly towards the window to stare at the magnolia. “The search was endless. They even sent down the army with their planes, but they never found him. A sudden sandstorm, most likely. Not far from the camp we found a camel half buried in the sand, with only one leg sticking out. And on the following day it was gone. No camel, not even a hoof sticking out, and the dunes southeast of the camp had moved thirty degrees to the west. The desert there changes continuously. I left as soon as I could.”

The bells from the nearby church sounded again.

“The one friend I’d made in two months,” said Ciobanu, “or really in five years, and surely the only person I had spoken to in two months apart from asking for directions and ordering my meals, was buried somewhere under a dune. So you can imagine how I felt, Raimondo. But as I sat inside a pickup truck and rode across the desert with a stranger whose words I couldn’t understand, feeling sad, feeling foolish, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt up until then (but not since — oh, I’ve felt much more alone since, my dear Raimondo), as I sat there purposeless and friendless in a foreign land, I saw a darker spot against the white rocks in the distance, and I saw it move. Of course my first thought was of Peng Jiamu, who might have wandered this far after falling prey to some hallucination or mirage. I thought I had found him, which was of course impossible, since we were already over a hundred miles from the camp. But I did ask the driver to stop the truck, and as we got closer on foot, the darker spot against the rocks turned out to be not Peng Jiamu, but a boy, a little boy who’d sprained his ankle and couldn’t walk. He was eight, maybe ten; his doppa had fallen off his head and he bled a little from his forehead, but he was conscious. He spoke a language I couldn’t understand, different also from that of my companion, although he seemed to know a few words of it. Uyghur perhaps, or Kazakh. In any case, we lifted the boy up and laid him in the truck, and I rode with him in the open back so that he would have enough room to lay with his leg outstretched. And we brought him back to his village, maybe three or four miles away. Why the boy had wandered out into the desert I will never know – perhaps that dark attraction lonely children feel towards the boundaries of their seemingly endless solitude, something I know very well, my dear Raimondo, and you do too, I’m sure, lonely as you must have been growing up in those somber gorges in Subiaco. Quite unlike our Mr. Rybak here, who has not known solitude for one hour of his life, at least not since the day I first met him in the hall downstairs, surrounded as he always is, and as he was on that evening, by people greeting him, welcoming him, nodding and listening to what he has to say. I stood on the mezzanine like a gargoyle and looked down at the refreshment as it unfolded, the welcome party for the rising star that at the time he still was, before he definitively ensconced himself in that fraudulent firmament of which I, too, despite myself, was briefly a part, until I ejected myself from it. And it was with a weight on my heart that I descended from the mezzanine down into the main hall and strode towards Mr. Rybak. I walked right past everybody else, oblivious to any words or greetings or glances directed at me, assuming that anyone did indeed greet or speak to me, and I stepped right into the middle of his conversation and shoved him towards an empty corner of the hall. For an instant he looked up at me in terror, but he promptly regained his composure, and has never lost it since. ‘Why, nice to meet you. Mr. Ciobanu, isn’t it?’ he said with his multipurpose smile and his lips like Ceaușescu’s. I told him the same story I am telling you now, my dear Raimondo. ‘There is a desert,’ I said to him. And I told him about the Abba Poemen and the Abba Aguaras, about the dunes in Lop Nur where Peng Jiamu lies buried, about what I thought would have been the loneliest hour of my life riding inside a pickup truck with a stranger whose language I could not speak, and about the little boy with the sprained ankle whom we found, in shock, among the mounds of dry clay. And as I talked — talked not for the sake of talking, but for the sake of this man’s soul and intellect’s not getting lost the way my friend Peng Jiamu had gotten lost among the dunes — I could see Rybak’s impatience grow into sheer discomfort, sheer dismay for missing out on yet another chance to mingle, to pontificate. Even so, as the guests began to leave, I told him just what I am telling you now, dear Raimondo. 

“‘We lifted the boy up very carefully,’ I told Rybak, ‘And we drove him to his village, maybe three or four miles away, the first village bordering on the desert, or the last village of the inhabited world. But when we pulled in I did not see something out of this world, not the bulwark or gate of some remote civilization, but something like home: all of a sudden I was back in Poiana, my own village in Romania, which we had to leave one day in a hurry, never to return again, not even after Ceaușescu’s fall — out of shame, at that point, for what my people gave up on that Christmas Day, when they murdered the man who had almost taken their dignity, and televised the farcical trial and execution. To be sure, I hated Ceaușescu, but when his hat fell, as the firing squad emptied its magazines on him and on his wife Elena, for a moment I just saw an old man and an old woman standing against a wall with their hands tied behind their backs, being murdered: yes, it was something about the way his hat fell off his head that made me realize I could no longer set foot in my own land without feeling I would be walking and eating and sleeping among accomplices to murder. It was too comical, and therefore too horrific, that his hat should fly off of his old gray head like that once the rifles started rattling.’ 

“‘Everything was different in this village at the border of Lop Nur, of course: different colors, different people, different houses. And yet everything was the same: the same feeling behind the colors, the same thinking behind the people, the same meaning behind the houses. I felt as if I had never fled, never moved to Italy and never known anything else of the world. As if I had stayed in my village and herded sheep upon those mountains just like my grandfather and my father had done, until we had to leave overnight, like thieves. Until they said he was a chiabur, because he exceeded the limit of 120 sheep. They said that Constantin Ciobanu was an exploiter, dear Rybak! Lowlifes, prăpădiţi, ignorant men who until a week earlier could be found getting drunk or slouching around their villages, and now had suddenly been fished out of their mud puddles, been given pins and uniforms and put in charge of overseeing the so-called collectivization process. My father could, of course, have simply bribed the officers, which was what everybody else did, but no, it took this particular set of historical circumstances for my father to discover that he was unable to evade the laws concocted by whatever faraway, abstract entity ruled or claimed to rule over the land. But although he was not shrewd, my father understood that without this one skill, without the ability to reach into one’s pocket and hand over whatever sum of money was required to bribe whatever little despot the state had appointed as a town functionary, he was doomed. So he decided to leave, and was helped in expediting his decision when one of the village’s craftsmen, a shoemaker who would spy my father coming down the gravel path that led to his unregistered sheep, reported him to the Local Council — out of jealousy, since twenty years earlier my father had snuck into the craftsmen’s dance hall and had danced with the woman who later became the shoemaker’s wife. So my father, whom I had seen for a total of perhaps three years in my ten years of life, since he was so often gone with the flock, decided we were leaving. But the shoemaker must have merely been the cue he was waiting for, the decision itself having been long in the making, since my father seemed to know exactly where to go, and had perhaps simply delayed our departure as much as possible, the way one waits to see how far the gangrene is likely to reach before deciding to amputate the limb on which it spreads. He showed up on our doorstep at dusk one summer evening, holding Mădălina, the lamb I had picked out of the flock to love above all the others, and he ordered me to bid her goodbye. By dawn the house was empty, and we were walking single file over the ridge of the mountain, following the routes my father had learned in 25 years of shepherding. But as I was telling you, dear Rybak, are you listening? As I was telling you, we stopped the pickup truck in the first village at the edge of Lop Nur and carried the boy out of the car, careful not to hurt his leg further. And as we approached his house — a small, bunker-like shack made out of baked earth — an old man flung the blue-painted wooden door open and ran toward us, screaming. It was the boy’s father. He ran towards us wielding one of his wooden-soled slippers at his son, threatening him with words I couldn’t understand. But at the sight of the bleeding leg he halted, fell to his knees, and covered the boy’s face with kisses. He guided us inside the home and together we laid the boy on a mat. A small crowd of villagers who had seen us arrive followed us in, so that the one-room house was now completely occupied and filled with a stream of frenzied talk. In the midst of the confusion I began to look around. The walls were lined with red, patterned draperies; a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling on a loose cable; sun-dried peppers and eggplants were strung along a plaited twine and hooked to a nail on the wall. Just like home, I thought, although in a way home looked nothing like this. Peasant civilization, dear Rybak, is the only true international community there is.’ 

“‘Surely I must have been a strange sight to them, so tall, so pale, or rather so sunburnt. But just as I was about to take my leave, the boy’s father, whose cheeks were still streaming with tears, gestured toward a low, wooden stool. Naturally I sat down. He then ventured into a brief, passionate speech, of which I understood nothing. But as he spoke and I observed his ageless face, which, like my father’s face, had been carved by the sun and the wind and the work into a tangle of lines, so that he looked 90 whereas in fact he was more likely to be 40 or 45 at most — I began to feel as though I understood every word he’d spoken. At the end of his speech, he got up and disappeared into an enclosed backyard. Gradually, the room had emptied. The boy and I stared at each other in silence. When the father reappeared on the doorstep, he was carrying something in his arms. He handed it to me. It was a lamb, no more than a week old. A little white lamb, with a patch of black fur around one eye. Lambs are not dogs, dear Rybak, but they’re not all white, either. And the creature was scared, of course, and it dared not look at me directly, but rather fixed its gaze somewhere behind me, shyly. It even trembled a little, the poor, innocent thing. At the sight of this lamb, dear Rybak, and at the sight of my father handing me this lamb, my spirit crumbled, and I broke into tears.’

“And here, dear Raimondo,” Ciobanu continued, “Rybak smiled his multi-purpose smile and said to me: ‘Well, as Lacan would say —’ But he immediately stopped, because I interrupted him, not with any intelligible word, since there was no breath left in my lungs, but with a gasp that must have echoed through the hall, which by now was completely empty. I gasped so loudly at the mention of Lacan, that he reined in whatever absurdity he was about to utter. But I gasped not only at the mention of Lacan, but at the realization that all along, as I spoke to him, Rybak had been preparing, searching, contriving, dying to pronounce some clever response, some witticism that would prove his erudition and establish his intelligence.

“Before giving all my hopes up, before letting this man fall into spiritual ruin and pull me down with him, I resolved to make one last attempt. I grabbed him by the wrist and whisked him away to the courtyard,” said Ciobanu, who was now standing by the window and looking down into the same courtyard. “I dragged him along without leaving him the time to protest, and I showed him Peng Jiamu.”

“Wait,” said my friend who had fallen asleep at the New Year’s Eve sex party. Neither of us had touched the lamb curry, which now appeared cold and grim in its ceramic bowl. We were the last patrons in the restaurant, and the waiters had started turning chairs on top of tables.

“Yes,” I said.

“Peng Jiamu, the guy who got lost in the desert?” she asked.

“I’m telling you the story the way he told it,” I said. “I, too, thought: Wait. Because in his fury Ciobanu had never finished telling me what happened in 1980 in the house at the edge of the Lop Nur desert.”

So that afternoon in Ciobanu’s office I thought: Wait, and immediately after I thought the same thing I’d been thinking from the very first sentence of his long speech: This man is crazy. Which I had already been told, by the way: by the faculty at the University of Rome, where Ciobanu had briefly taught at the height of the popularity of Way of the Wool, before he accepted an offer from his current institution and moved to the States; by Alice, the department’s administrator, who had helped sort out my visa; and by Rybak himself. Because I had met Rybak at a conference in Milan a couple of years prior, and he was not half the menace Ciobanu now portrayed him to be, although I’ll grant that his lips did look like Ceaușescu’s. Even if, at times, his manners could come off as rehearsed, he was overall a very polite man, and one of immense erudition. His books, though undoubtedly a little abstruse, were by no means vacuous: Deconstructing Deconstructivism: Derangements of Derrida’s ‘Différance’, in particular, I found fascinating, and his Lacanian reading of the Divine Comedy, Mirror Stages in the Middle-Ages, raised several novel problems about Dante’s text.

But after he told me he had taken Rybak to the courtyard to show him Peng Jiamu, whatever that meant, Ciobanu said no more. The bells from the nearby church began to ring, and Ciobanu once again looked at his watch.

“It is time, my dear Raimondo,” he said, turning around. “It is time. Help me if you don’t mind, will you?” He gestured at the brown leather suitcase in the corner. “Come,” said Ciobanu, “just two floors if you don’t mind.” I picked up his luggage and followed him as he limped down the stairs and through the hall and out into the street. “My taxi should be here any minute,” he said.

We stood in silence on the sidewalk, basking in the honeyed late summer light. I didn’t know where he was going, and I didn’t know what I was doing there anymore, in a city that suddenly seemed devoid of promise. I wanted him to leave. I wanted to leave.

He must have been observing me as I thought all this, because he spoke again, and this time, his voice was no longer the exalted blare I’d heard in his office. Suddenly, it had turned tender and reassuring.

“I am going where words have weight, Raimondo. Where they sink, instead of being swept this way and that with every gust of wind. But I’m entrusting you with what I hold dearest in this world, Raimondo. I knew I could. I knew right away. But I had to see for myself.”

I stood there dumbly, still confused, drunk from all that listening. Finally I spoke, or tried to: “The book…” meaning his new book, the book I was supposed to help him write, which, I suddenly remembered, was the reason I’d walked into his office earlier that afternoon, the reason I’d crossed an ocean and moved to New York. That was what he was referring to, wasn’t it, when he spoke of what he held dearest in this world? The book, surely the book.

“What book?” asked Ciobanu. But then he smiled and said, “Ah! The book is yours, if you want it. It’s all upstairs. You will find all the material, so to speak. It’s my greatest book, Raimondo, and it’s finished. I finished it long ago. It’s ready, it’s all in here.” He tapped his index finger against his temple and winked. “It’s all in here. But what you have to take care of, Raimondo, is what you’re best prepared to take care of, and I trust that you will be able to.”

A yellow taxi pulled up. The driver, a bearded man wearing a tall, dark, fur hat, waved at us. Ciobanu gestured back. I carried his suitcase over and placed it in the trunk. Once in the backseat, Ciobanu exchanged a few words with the driver. The car started. As it drove away down the sunset-flooded avenue, Ciobanu rolled down the window. Leaning out, he yelled: “I’m going where words have weight, Raimondo! I’m going.…” But a truck’s horn drowned out the rest.

I ran back into the building and up the two flights of stairs and burst back into Ciobanu’s office. I went to his desk, opened his notebook: empty. Not a single scrawl on a single page. I turned his computer on (no password prompt) and opened the “Documents” folder (empty) and the “Recent” folder (empty). I entered his email into the Google Docs login page. I clicked on “Forgot password?” but no account corresponded to the address. I clicked on the trash bin icon on his desktop (empty), then looked in the trash bin under his desk (empty). I noticed a row of notebooks on top of a cabinet opposite his desk. I opened one (empty, save for his name on the first page), then, furiously, a second one (empty), and all the rest (empty, empty, empty). No sign of the new book.

I began to search through his library, hoping I would find at least some slips of scribbled paper, marginal notes, underlined passages — anything. I began, naturally, with The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, yet not only did I find no slips of paper in it, no notes on the margins, and no underlined passages, but the entire book, page after page, line after line, had been blacked out with a marker, erased. I looked for Marco Polo (blacked out), John Mandeville (blacked out), Dante (blacked out!). Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Heidegger, Lacan, Kristeva — all blacked out. And every single one of Rybak’s books, including his latest one (Rhizome Rome: Resistance and Hybridization in the Roman Empire), had been blacked out. There were books in Romanian and in Chinese that had been blacked out, and books written in alphabets I’d never seen that were blacked out. Even Ciobanu’s own Way of the Wool was completely blacked out. Half an hour later, the floor was covered with books, but not a word was to be read inside any of them.

I walked back to Ciobanu’s desk and sank into his chair. The sun had set. I let my head fall into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that, staring at the unbearably blank pages of his notebook.

Then, a ball of fluff floated softly past my nose, carried by the warm evening breeze that blew in from the half-open window. I looked up and saw Peng Jiamu. It fixed its gaze somewhere behind me, as though it was too shy to look at me directly. Its worn-out hooves sank slightly into the moquette rug. It had bony, fragile legs poking out of its old fleece, and pink ears drooping along the sides of its head. And a patch of black fur around one eye. There followed a long silence, in which neither of us moved, both cast in the advancing darkness that was turning everything blue and would soon turn everything black. And then it broke the silence with a sound, the only sound it could possibly have made: Baaaaa!