THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF INVISIBILITY AT VARSBERG

Time was you wanted to learn invisibility you went to Varsberg Center in Onkaya. There you could learn the art from its masters: Horace Bijan, Sonia Lubel, Max Eisenstein.

But that was fifty years ago, when it meant something to be invisible.

Varsberg is gone. Onkaya is gone. The Center is a trade school now. “The center-right is the only Center left,” the old people say. And they laugh. From the mouth. Not from the eyes.

So.

The Center for the Study of Invisibility. The old Center, Varsberg Center. We were quartered in a clutch of repurposed Eastern Orthodox buildings. Our library was a tserkov, a foreshortened cathedral, converted into a common area. We studied whatever the Masters assigned, never complaining, never questioning.

We watched winter light cast mandalas on mahogany tables. We sketched those patterns the next day with the shutters drawn. We memorized entire books of archaic liturgy. We learned to describe precisely the feel under the hand of worn banisters that spiraled up to second and third balconies. We listened to the sounds of our fellow-students walking or simply breathing.

I recall a classmate, an Estonian, who asked, “What does this have to do with turning myself invisible?”

“You want to turn yourself invisible?” Master Horace spat at him. “Yourself? To float like a ghost through the corridors of influence? To walk without a sound, cloaked in darkness?”

We were silent.

“Leave,” he said. “Go to ninja school.” And he hobbled off, muttering Slovak obscenities.

By the second month we knew what we were trying to do, though none of us could do it. The trick was to be so attentive to the world that you exempted yourself from the equation. The Proctor was our first test.

The Proctor arrived during morning study, just after breakfast. He stamped his boots, tossed off his sable coat and walked the length of the tserkov for half an hour or so, until he felt he had made a thorough exploration of the place.

When he was satisfied he marked us present in a leather-bound book and called the roll: Masters first, if any were in attendance, then each of us by name. We tried to be invisible. It was an honor to be the first student marked absent.

Every September brought a new Proctor, chosen by an exhaustive test of memory from the Varsberg population. My first year it was a pockmarked, red-bearded man named Marcus Divec. The job required memorizing the faces of all the students, taking attendance, and calling the roll. That was the whole of it. One could be home for lunch. Still, the stipend was so generous that a Proctor needed no further employment. Master Max explained it to me: “We look for people with a great deal of self-importance to begin with,” he said. “Then we give them a tough test, and the winner gets a high salary and a title. ‘The Proctor.’ Big deals are the easiest to handle. He’s so filled up with himself. Reflect that fullness back to him, and his eyes will slide over you.”

“I cannot become invisible anymore,” he said. “So other people do it for me.” He was old and spoke freely.

The first time Marcus Divec turned me invisible it gave me such a jolt that he corrected his mistake immediately and marked me present. I had staked out a perch on the second balcony, in the “J” stacks: Juvenilia to my left; Justice to my right. The floor had a bright patch where another student had roosted years earlier. I remember that scrap of floor, and I remember the Proctor’s eyes “sliding over me” when I returned to him in full the reverence and adulation he expected from the world.

But my happiness intruded, and he noticed me. I could not get him to forget me again, not for a second, for many weeks.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Master Horace asked me that day at lunch. “Stop liking it. That’s bad.”

I knew he was right, intellectually, but one does not shrug off desire like a sable coat. There was a bit of doggerel, ancient even in my day, about what was taught at the Center:

First year: not to seek,

Second year: not to speak,

Third year: not to see,

Fourth year: not to be.

That first step, not to seek, that was a tricky one.

We practiced all the time, of course. We spent our waking hours in a fugue state of heightened attention and selflessness. I was paired for a while with a dark-eyed Polish girl, Hanka Kaminska. Three months we worked together, but eventually I stopped seeing her. She was an excellent student.

* * *

It happened the next year, my second year.

The entire Center gathered in the tserkov, usually in silence, every Wednesday evening. The Masters had chairs on a dais, where the altar had once been. Occasionally, an older student would rise and speak a few words, placing some thought or worry before the entire community. No response was expected.

This particular Wednesday only one altar chair was occupied, by Max Eisenstein. A third-year, Claudio Mircza, whose uncle was a noble of small import, rose from his seat suddenly and spoke.

“I’ve thought it over, Max,” he began. (Not “Master Max,” a familiarity bordering on rudeness.) “I’ve thought it over, and I won’t let you do to the others what you’ve done to me. Better to have the truth at the beginning.”

He turned slightly, widening his address to include us all.

“I know their filthy secret. Invisibility puts you so deep in the moment, so thoroughly part of the world, that you can’t recall later what you have witnessed. ‘Not to see.’ Do you wonder what that means? While invisible you are essentially blind, deaf.” He turned back to the dais. “You people! You are hopeless for espionage. What good is an invisible spy if he can’t remember the secrets he overhears?

“You are of no value to anyone. We need cameras, not mirrors! What use is it to be invisible — ”

“It is useless.” Sonia Lubel rose from the first Masters chair, a vacant chair, and we realized with a start that she had been present the entire time.

Sonia Lubel. Master Sonia. Invisibility, they said, was her natural state. Some of the first-years considered her a rumor, or a myth, or the rumor of a myth, but there she stood, eyes half closed, vellum in candlelight. I could almost see the outline of the proscenium through her body. “You are correct,” she said softly. We do not teach invisibility because it is practical but because it is possible. The student aims not to overpower others but to understand herself.”

Claudio seethed. “Spare me the homiletic,” he said. “My uncle tells me war is coming, and I’ve wasted three years of my life trying to learn a skill that turns out to be of no value whatsoever. Please, tell me I am wrong.”

“As you define ‘value’,” Master Max said quietly, “you are not wrong. And, as you define ‘wasted’, you are not wrong either.”

* * *

That night, walking the narrow corridor that led to our dormitory, I sensed a certain finesse, an artificial delicacy to the light.

“Master Sonia,” I said. I could almost see her. “Will there be war? What will happen to the Center?”

She transgressed into solidity. “We are at war already.”

I said nothing. Second year: not to speak.

“The war of the visible against the invisible, the measurable against the immeasurable. The war of historiography against history, of the smirk against the smile.” She smiled sadly, smirklessly. “We know which side will win. Who will dare to challenge fairness and equality? And yet, mercy is never fair, and love is famously unequal.”

She extended her left hand, palm up, the ring and pinky fingers together, the others splayed. Years ago, when she had been active in the life of the Center, this had been her signal gesture. Generations of students had copied it and conferred upon it the status of a shibboleth: Lubel’s sign. It was shorthand for, “I am still a student; there is much yet to learn.”

She turned her hand, and I said thank you to an empty corridor.

* * *

When Claudio Mircza left that spring he took twenty students with him, mostly third-years. The next fall saw only fourteen new first-years enrolled. The year after that, five. When my parents recalled me, I did not mount a strenuous or prolonged defense.

I attended agricultural college in Zagreb.

Since then, I have increased production at dozens of collective farms. I hold patents on two grain processing techniques. I have five grandchildren. At seventy, I retired to a suburb of Slavonski Brod. I tend a small garden. Some might say I am invisible, but I am not invisible.

We are all visible now.

Varsberg is gone. Onkaya is gone. The world is Claudio’s. The Center and its teachings have vanished, washed out in the magnesium glare of the obvious, like Lubel’s sign — an empty gesture, its meaning forgotten.

The war is won, the spoils divided. Nothing remains to be unseen.