The Keeper of Lies: The Whole Truth About a Mysterious Magic Trick

Emanuel Bergman, a mysterious fiction writer, reveals very little about himself. Growing up in Germany, his parents divorced at an early age and he now lives in California, where he works in publishing and film. In addition, there is no more information to look through the network. His biography is as good as gold, and his debut novel", "The Guardian of Lies", is written magnificently. The story in the book spanning a hundred years, born at the obscure junction of the old and new worlds, traveled from Prague in the early twentieth century, Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s, and California at the beginning of the twenty-first century, wrapped in the breath of different times and different cities, and transformed into a scene or brilliant, or strange, or terrible magic spectacle.

Written by | Liu Danting

Guardian of Lies, by Emmanuel Bergman, translator: Jing Liping, edition: Wen jing| Shanghai People's Publishing House, October 2021.

01

Old World and New World

Using the magic of words, Bergman leads us back and forth between two seemingly isolated worlds. It was Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and a boy named Mosher was born into a Jewish Orthodox family in Prague. His birth stemmed from a disgraceful affair, but was conceived as a blessing from God and a miracle like the advent of Christ.

At this time, Europe was moving from a golden age to a falling apart. The dawn of "modernity" loomed, with flush toilets, electric lights and trams shining as symbols of the advent of civilization; but it was also "modernity" that ushered in apartheid, the Holocaust, and the most brutal wars in history. Mosher never realized that his small self was standing at the crossroads of human history. He was more concerned with his own fate than with the situation of the Jewish people standing under dangerous walls.

A circus performance, let Moshe leave his hometown, turn his back on his origin and ethnicity, since then, he has been involved in mysterious adventures and absurd encounters. Bergman's whimsical spectacle narrative slowly unfolds a picture of the era of the "Persian Princess": the love at first sight for the "Persian princess" drove Mosche to abandon his Jewish identity and join the circus, and he was regarded by the police as a master of prophecy, shuttling through poor streets and alleys and morgues, looking for clues to the murderer; after several twists and turns, he became the underground lover of the "Persian Princess" Yulia, causing a sea of vinegar and waves, resulting in a devastating disaster; he fled to the cloudy Berlin, alias Zabatini, relying on a fake identity. He was even regarded by Hitler as a spiritual mentor in the upper echelons of the SS; but when all the false names dissipated, Mosche was beaten back to his original form and became an experiencer and witness to the suffering of the Jewish nation... The most good, the worst evil, the most beautiful, the most ugly, the supreme, the most despicable, are all condensed in the adventures of the first half of Moshe's life.

In stark contrast to the complexity and richness of yesterday's world is another world in the novel— California in the early twenty-first century, a flat and boring new world. In order to reconcile his broken parents, the little boy Max wants to find the magician "The Great Zabatini" to cast a love spell. Max had thought the world was full of wonders, but the real experience had disappointed him. He found that the nature of life was shallow and boring, magicians had no magic at all, love was born only in a sloppy one-night stand, the birth of a child was an irreparable mistake, everyone was unwilling to take responsibility for their own behavior and manners, and even food was terrible. Bergman deliberately caricatured the New World to a high degree, leaving the sublime and the sacred in no place, and it is hard to believe that there is a connection between it and the delicate, rich Old World. The twenty-first century was undoubtedly conceived in the twentieth century, and the new world was undoubtedly conceived in the old world, but the two worlds are as far apart as the Golden Age and the Black Iron Age in Greek mythology.

02

The meeting of two eras

There is always an invisible gravitational pull between two seemingly isolated planets. This gravity is incarnated in the novel as two old men connecting the old and new worlds, the magician Zabatini and Max's grandmother Roselle. They are survivors from yesterday, escaping from the Holocaust, whose souls were once three-dimensional and abundant, but they were also brutally and irreversibly changed in the journey from the Old World to the New World: the magician degenerated from a chaste, sensitive teenager Mosher to a dim-witted, greasy old man of "pornography"; Roselle was a little girl loved by everyone, a living monument to the best of human nature, and fell into a chattering, hated old lady. In the New World, they are forgotten, abandoned, and turned into a scar that no one wants to touch. People just want to bury their experiences in the Old World, forgetting the black hole left by the "Holocaust" and "concentration camps".

Emanuel Bergman.

In this regard, the teenager Moshe of the past and the old Zabatini now have a clear understanding, "He is different from them." His experience, both before and during the war, had turned him into an exile, and there was no place for him in the human family. "Among the living, no one seems to be able to understand and accept his experience anymore. The only time in his life he confided the truth about the camp was after taking psychedelic drugs, and he told other addicts about mass graves, corpses and the sweet and putrid stench they emitted. All of the people present present boasted of themselves as adventurers trying to push the limits of the human spirit and the flesh, but they only heard the beginning, and they vomited and shook their heads. Mosher's existence is indeed a sore engraved on the happiness and certainty of human life, and his unheeded pain, remorse and despair are the punishment given to him by his fellow human beings. He could only live if he remained silent.

Grandma Roselle refused to be silent. She harped on, as if her life were forever trapped in a concentration camp. She tells everyone about her slaughtered loved ones, about how she found a way to freedom from the "bag factory" that symbolized death. People responded with indifference to her story, her family avoiding her, and her grandson Max thought her experience was less interesting than the dead leaves in the dry swimming pool.

Just a few decades after the Holocaust, it took three generations to erase the most filthy, brutal, and memories of history that should be inscribed. Genocide, concentration camps, and universal evil have all disappeared from the collective memory of humanity. However, one of the true meanings that Guardian of Lies conveys to the reader is that nothing will disappear out of thin air, even if it is deliberately covered up and forgotten. Just as there is always truth behind a lie.

We think we have witnessed the magic of disappearance only because our eyes are blinded.

03

Disappear magic and the wonders of human nature

In the novel, "disappearing" is both a magic trick that Mosche is good at, and a survival strategy for him. When he was a fledgling, he eliminated his Jewish identity. Caught up in a serial murder and peach-colored dispute, he escapes from the circus. He was good at disappearing magic, and he also asked the master to make a suitcase, with which Moshe could make anyone invisible.

But all of this is actually a blindfold and a lie. It can make people turn a blind eye to the truth, but it cannot make the truth disappear completely. The Jewish boy Mosher became the Persian prince Zabatini, but his Jewish identity did not really disappear. Zabatini inherited the sermon gestures of Moshe's father, the Jewish rabbi, and copied the mysticism of Jewish teachings into his prophetic performances. His success stemmed from his Jewish roots, which he was unaware of, and even considered himself an Aryan. Witnessing the persecution of the Jews, he stood by; Hitler turned to him for help, and he made no attempt to reverse the fate of the nation. Like countless ordinary people who became accomplices of the Nazis, he was saddled with the evil of mediocrity, and as a result, he rose to prominence for a time. But the sins he committed will not disappear either. The evil he tolerated and indulged finally devoured him and dragged him into the abyss.

Fortunately, in hell, Moshe's humanity and kindness did not disappear, but awakened from ignorance. In the concentration camp, he used a magic box to become "no" to the little girl Roselle. Of course, little girls don't really disappear either. With the silver lining of life created by magic, she found the way to freedom and had the opportunity to enjoy a long life. In her heart, the great escape magic that Mosher performed never ended, and she told this magic over and over again in her life, even if there was no audience, even if no one understood. Her memories are passed on by the narration, and her narration reaches the end of it— in the last moments of Mosche's life, he learns that he has created an unparalleled miracle because of her narration. His magic show deceived death, and in a desperate situation, he created a way to live out of nothing, so that the little girl was lucky enough to become the only survivor of the whole family. And her life gave birth to seven new lives, creating seven completely different life journeys...

The best part of vanishing magic is not that something disappears, but that after it disappears, it reappears. In fact, the novel "The Guardian of Lies" can also be seen as a magic trick that disappears and reappears. In the story, the truth is obscured and rediscovered; the memory is dusted and carefully polished; the past is buried and re-summoned. For brutal wars and disasters, people can choose to turn a blind eye, but in the end, everyone has to go back to the source of life. Just like the little boy Max, only in the narration of Grandma Roselle's "thinking of the year", in the magician Zabatini's magic of recreating the past, can he realize the value of his life. That's something more grand than comic books and pizza, parents fighting over divorce, birthday parties making a splash. It stretched thousands of miles from The life of Mosher and the life of His grandmother to the life of Max, from the concentration camp seventy years ago to today's California. It dragged Max from his own little world to his own people and the history behind it, and showed before his eyes the courage and dignity that even death and the harshest atrocities could not defeat.

Max called it a miracle.

And I think it is a benevolent light that the world shows in the endless gap of absurdity and cruelty. In fact, human life is like a weed, no matter how many times it has been burned and trampled, as long as this light suddenly appears, life can seize the fleeting opportunity and grow vigorously. This is the magic of life —

"As long as it exists, as long as it lives, it is already a prayer." The great Zabatini said.