The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  It would have been a bona fide prison cell, had it not been for the subservience of the surroundings: he was not the prisoner of the room, but rather the tiny room was the prisoner of his gaze. The room was the frame of its dweller’s face, and his face framed his own eyes. Their relationship to one another was somehow reversed—a face in a gaze, a room in a face. His little shoebox of a room nestled right under the roof, and through the slanted window neither the courtyard nor the roofs beyond were visible, just a scrap of sky with a cloudlet floating in the frame. I sat on a solitary bentwood chair, quite rickety. Vanoski sat on a narrow folding cot. His long, perfectly clean-shaven face was as spare as his room. He had a youthful expression that for some reason accentuated his age, lending depth to it. Ah, how empty, how pristine, how well-considered it all was, so that he could part with every moment of existence, leaving no outstanding debts to the world at large. This room accommodated nothing else but me—but my body, despite its robust plumpness and the impropriety of my health and desire to exist, felt a sensation like heat from a kitchen hearth, or maybe it was the coolness of a crypt. Either I had arrived here from another dimension, or my body was itself another dimension …

  Something in my perception had shifted. I kept confusing the external and internal planes of objects and phenomena—quite an unpleasant feeling. I stared with hostility at this maniac, who, nevertheless, had written The Last Case of Letters, a book so remarkable that only I could have written it, if I could have … With what enthusiasm I had thrown myself into this unenviable task—to seek out the grave of the mysterious Vanoski. And what do you know, I found it! Not the grave but the man himself. And alive, to boot. Or was he? I found him—only to freeze in the proximity of this minus-man, to marvel at the irony of the foresight that offered me the ability—or, rather, the opportunity—or even the hint of a possibility to create such a book … such power—in the dead loins of a moribund man … with hot, pulsing envy to stumble upon the futility of that envy, and to experience a painful awkwardness besides, because you are pestering someone who has consciously removed himself from life, as if this were your role—to cause him his last, living pain. Any movement of mine would rend his fragile, ashen-gray cocoon, like a child crushing an empty wasp’s nest.

  It now seemed to me that from the first glance, after I had stepped inside the elevator with him, the old man saw his executioner in me—his expression was so mournful, within the bounds of propriety and good breeding, yet nearly bursting these bounds. He couldn’t possibly have looked at every passenger in that way. In other words, he was expecting me. At the same time (I was aware of this), he couldn’t have been waiting for me, because he no longer expected anything to come from his books, no consequences thereof. He was anticipating someone who could have been me but turned out not to be—this much I understood by how quickly his fear left him when I explained to him why I had come. When it left him, however, I sensed that he felt not simply relief but disappointment, in the same breath. He seemed bored, agitated, and bereft, to a degree that I could only guess at but never quite grasp. I had no notion of that abyss of absence that swallows an author who has evoked things so intimate and familiar to us all.

  Vanoski said that he couldn’t spare any time for me until the end of his shift, so I decided to arrange for it to end immediately. Timid and frightened, he tried to stop me. I announced that it would not trouble me in the least. With the self-assurance of a young fool, I assumed that this impoverished, unsung genius of an old man would be pleased with the flurry of courtesy and servility his superiors would show upon learning of my mandate and credentials from Yesterday’s News. And, indeed, everything was as I had predicted: the supervisor began rushing around—Certainly, by all means!—and let the old man take the whole day off, finding a replacement for him without further ado. But the pangs of torment in the old man’s face from all this fuss and bother, from the fawning curiosity of others, from the cannibalistic lip-smacking at the gratuitousness of fame—the very anguish of his gaze—was something I didn’t expect. It was the gaze that meets visitors to the zoo from inside the cages. I had destroyed the old man’s balance of energy. The damage was done, and he knew it.

  He was poised for a predetermined spectacle: the sensation of a new star—launched from the penury of nonexistence into the august ranks of great artists—overshadowed both the artist and his poverty. The hoopla was the content. Thus, the poor old man could not become himself in any sense of the word but had to remain that Vanoski whose legend had been born without him. The legend had to develop and grow while there was still time, but only according to the simplest rules of a fixed plot. The masterpiece created in poverty presupposes the poverty that creates a masterpiece—and positivism triumphs. I asked him how he had been able to write The Last Case, and he answered, “I don’t know.” I asked him what he would do with twenty thousand dollars and he answered, “I don’t remember.”

  I might have called it quits then and there, because the old man couldn’t be of any use to me. He had no needs himself, so he wouldn’t appease me for our mutual advantage; and the newspaper wasn’t interested in anything close to the truth. The truth might have intrigued me personally, but truth was far to seek, and time was short. There wasn’t even anything to hold the gaze, not a thing for it to rest upon, in this clean-swept grave. There was only one object that ornamented the room, and a rather strange one at that, if one paid proper attention. It was a large-format photograph behind glass in a thin metal frame. For all intents and purposes, the photograph depicted nothing. It was empty, save for something that resembled a small cloud in one corner. The picture hung above the bed over the old man’s head on the wall opposite the little window—like a second little window I could look out of, at the same time that the old man, sitting across from me, looked through the real one. This photograph could also have served as evidence of the oddity of genius: placing above the bed a view of one’s own window, from which, in its turn, nothing is visible except a scrap of sky. Under the picture frame was a bronze nameplate with a florid engraved inscription. Would some vainglorious photographer really want to take credit for such a paltry work, I found myself wondering. Another object that would not have interested me in the least, had it not been for the behavior of the old man toward it, was something resembling a doorbell, also located above the bed, but slightly lower than the “picture.” The doorbell was set flush into the wall so that only a button protruded from it—round, smooth, white, and fairly large for a doorbell. Apparently, the device had been installed just recently, because the patch of plaster encircling it was still slightly moist. Now and then the old man glanced at the button with something like trepidation, at the same time trying to conceal this from me by awkwardly pretending it was only by chance that his eyes had strayed to that place. I easily satisfied myself with the explanation that the doorbell was actually some sort of intercom, a means of summoning the old man to the elevator that required him to answer back. I interpreted his sidelong glances at it as the sign of a downtrodden wretch with a self-abasing nature.

  “Your supervisor is not going to trouble you anymore today,” I said to him as gently as I could, so that he would stop worrying and ignore the doorbell, though I already despaired of extracting anything useful from him.

  “Thank you, I realize that,” said the old man. Heavens, how that gaze inserted into his face astonished me! I couldn’t help but think how sociologically predetermined perception is; for I had known very well whom I was seeking while my search was under way, but once I had found the object of my search, I lost track of the original. In this little shoebox I assigned to him a level of understanding characteristic of the lowliest rung on the social ladder. My God! If he had indeed written that, how clearly must things have appeared to him, how transparent must I have seemed to him all this time. I was suddenly so abashed about my own condescension that I leapt up out of my chair. To justify the abruptness of this action I pretended I had gotten up to read the inscription under
the photograph. What I read was very peculiar. It said: VIEW OF THE SKY ABOVE TROY.

  “Have you been to Troy?” I said.

  “How could I have been there?” the old man said with a faint grin. “I wasn’t around back then.”

  “Of course. I meant…” I muttered, stumbling over my foolishness. “I was referring to the spot where they recently discovered Troy had once been … I meant the modern-day Troy.”

  “No, that sky is the one in the other Troy, the other sky,” the old man said in a monotone.

  A chill ran down my spine. Like all young men, I had a horror of madness. What am I saying? I had never seen a single dead man in my entire life, not counting accident victims—and they aren’t true corpses, not like one’s own dead. And mad people? Only comical shadows amid the faceless crowd in the streets. But half-wittedness or dementia isn’t the same as madness. Now I grew afraid of Vanoski. I averted my eyes and stared at his clothes cupboard.

  In The Last Case of Letters (a novel about a poem) he has a passage … Oh, what a passage it is! I can’t explain why it stirs me so every time; and I’ve reread it many times, playing it over and over like a favorite record, so … In it the protagonist is waiting for a letter to arrive from his beloved. It doesn’t come, and, consumed with fear and passion, he walks through a wasteland by the shore of the sea. Suddenly, on a dune, he sees a dilapidated plywood cupboard, apparently washed up by the surf. In his agitation and haste he opens the door, and there’s a letter. He frantically rips it open, fastens his eyes on it, sees that it begins: “Dear Urbino…” But it’s impossible to read it through to the end. The page is covered with what look like words, letters of the alphabet, in her handwriting, and he drinks it all in, but—he can’t seem to read it, and he tries to read the letter again and again, and can’t. Then he rushes home, takes a seat, and dashes off a reply. And now—my God, what a description!—the words swirl around, the ink smokes, the text into which he pours all his passion flows—but at the end of every line the text disappears. His passion hangs poised in midair and disappears without a trace beyond the margins of the page. Instead of the phrases he has just uttered, something entirely different appears on the page, some nonsense about Aunt Clara and her parrot. Poor Urbino sobs with helplessness and drenches Aunt Clara in his tears; and when he is comforted he raises his transparent, flowing head, and recovers his strength and equanimity and writes a letter, now calmly and quickly, efficiently, but in fact he’s just tracing out wavy lines—like a child painting the sea … Then his neighbor arrives, and they start conferring about a small mutual concern of long standing. They come to an agreement and go to the city of Taunus. And the passage that follows is so strong that I always make a singular effort to grasp the transition, but I just can’t manage—I can no longer find the passage in the book, however much I leaf through it.

  And now it seemed to me that I was standing on the brink of his madness, which whirled around in a vortex, so smoothly, so imperceptibly and seamlessly—a funnel that consciousness pours into like sand—that you don’t even notice how you end up inside it, sliding along the breathtaking mathematical curvature, and peering out of a place from which there is no return …

  “Yes, yes. I understand. That sky,” I said, as though backing up warily within his gaze.

  The old man grinned. “I have grounds to believe that this is the case. You are young … Also, does not the very same sky cover that Troy and this one, and us, and all those who come after us? There you have it, at least in a metaphorical sense.”

  “That’s the truth!” I said, nodding, overjoyed at Vanoski’s return to our mutually accepted stomping grounds of logic.

  “I’m curious why figures of speech—an image, a metaphor—while distancing themselves from their object, seem to approach the truth, whereas the reality surrounding us seems to be senseless, littered with trivia, as though insufficiently generalized and abstract, and therefore untrue. It’s quite the opposite! I don’t think the time has come for you to understand this yet. I can only warn you—and, apparently, in vain. It is hardly likely that my personal experience will be of any use to you. Experience never is. And it’s unlikely that you will meet with such an open-ended fate. In any case, my advice to you is, never agree to any tempting offers. You are a simple and selfless man”—the first epithet jarred me, and I was about to take offense, but at the second I nodded benignly—“and for that reason you accept everything offered to you as a gift, or as an adventure, or as fate. You grab hold of it like an unselfish person who is usually left empty-handed. Refuse any offer—it’s always of the devil. That is why this is the real sky over Troy.”

  This was when he repeated the words of the fat bald man in the Garden Park—and, once again, I failed to understand him. It was also when he said that sending someone packing was always the best bet, and on his face was that look of anguish, a look of “Why did I fail to do it this time, too?”

  “There is something you need from me, for I am certainly not what you need. Rather, you desperately need something you suspect to be here, in my place. Everyone is a tyrant over reality nowadays, a practitioner of progress. Assume, therefore, that I’m no longer here. But since you want something from me (even though I’m not what you need, and this is precisely why I keep the life around me at bay, because I always feel answerable to it), I am now obliged to respond, insofar as you are life, since you have come to me. But since you couldn’t care less about me but are intent upon something you purport to need, I reserve the right to repay you in the only way I can. And this utter imbalance, albeit equal in weight, is the essence of the question and the answer.

  “I will tell you about the picture. I have reason to want to draw closer to it now.” Here again he pretended not to be looking at the button on the wall. “I think about it now unceasingly, so it will be fairly easy for me to relate it to you. Whether you need me to or not is up to you. You came to me yourself, of your own volition, so it’s not at all surprising that I am the one here in front of you—though you are of no concern to me whatever.”

  “So was he the devil?” I said, growing angry at this sermon.

  “Must there always be horns?” Vanoski said, frowning impatiently. “And his eyes were as blue as blue can be—not burning coals. Even his baldness seemed intentional, as proof there were no horns to speak of. Fat. Corpulence disarms suspicion—that’s folk wisdom. Only later did I come to appreciate the extent of his good nature. He was not at all insistent. He didn’t try to deceive me in the least—temptation has nothing to do with deception. We are tempted solely through our own devices. Perhaps he really did sit down beside me just by chance—to take a breather, as it was so hot.

  “The English, as everyone knows, are garrulous. Perhaps this is why we spread the myth of our reserve and taciturnity: we try to cover up that particular vice of ours. In any event, I didn’t fail to take exception to the stranger’s audacity, saying I didn’t believe we had met, and so forth.

  “He seemed somehow unwelcome and out of place in every way—to me in particular. And, overall, that’s how he looked: unseemly and inappropriate. I was young, like you. I had strong notions about myself—the vaguer and more obscure they were, the more I fancied them. Especially when I didn’t have a farthing in my pocket. Notions of love … of fame and glory. I was quite carried away by my own thoughts. And it was all the more unpleasant to catch myself in the middle of them … At that particular moment some shadowy beautiful creature, for some reason dressed in an Indian sari, standing on the shore of a turquoise sea, was pressing my rose to her breast … And I took exception to him with the icy dignity of a true Brit.

  “‘What do you mean—you’re not Urbino?’ the fat man blurted out. Only then did the awkwardness of the situation that my diffidence had created dawn on me. He had, however, already opened his shapeless, beat-up briefcase and dropped his fleshy thief’s paw into the contents. It seemed to me that he was rummaging around and stealing from his own briefcase.

&n
bsp; “‘Perhaps this isn’t you, then?’ He plucked out a photograph like something from a flower bed, and thrust it under my nose in triumph.

  “But it was not me at all! That is to say, it could have been anyone. Half the face was obscured by some apparatus that looked partly like a camera, partly like a fantastical weapon whose muzzle resembled a rifle. In any case, the character in the photograph seemed to be aiming at something, and the half a face that wasn’t obscured by the apparatus in his hands was wincing and distorted. And he was dressed queerly, in a whimsical, foreign style. I said, mastering my recent confusion, that it was certainly not me.

  “‘Not you?’ the fat man said, finally taking a good look at the photograph. ‘Drat it, what an old fool I am!’ His disappointment was unfeigned. ‘I do beg your pardon.’ Here he began to cringe in annoyance, as if giving himself a slap in the face with the photograph.

  “‘Stop this improper clownery,’ I said coldly.

  “‘You cannot imagine what an unpardonable mistake I’ve made, and how I will have to pay for this!’ he wailed. ‘Never in my life has this happened to me before. Truly, this is not you. This is a photograph of one of your future acquaintances. But yours is here, too. Honestly … I swear it … None other than the devil has mixed everything up.’ Again he gestured toward himself, but more gently now. ‘Don’t be angry. Just give me a moment.’

  “He rummaged and rummaged through his briefcase, pulling out thick piles of photographs of various sizes and eras, as though they had been purloined from myriad amateur photographers and family albums—underexposed and overexposed, stained with developer, with jagged blobs of glue stuck to them and torn-off corners.