The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  “‘Where could it have gone?’ A rare sampling of artistic ineptitude passed before my eyes: here was a client without a head, though wearing a coat of armor; then there was a single hand holding a glass; next there appeared a bush with one blurred branch, as if the picture depicted an attempt to photograph a bird as it flew away. ‘You are very observant,’ he said, continuing his search, ‘which is why I sat down beside you. It is uncommon for someone to spy a bird on that branch right off the bat. One has to be a born poet for that. And that happens no more than three or four times a century. Well, like you, for example, or … But you’re not an admirer of the Lake Poets, are you? By the way, it was precisely this bird that inspired … Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. What I mean to say is that these are all absolutely random shots. They mean nothing at all. This one, for example, is Shakespeare. And don’t think it’s the moment when he wrote his “To be or not to be” monologue. Nor is it a meeting with the Dark Lady, or with Francis Bacon. Here he is, looking tired after a performance.’ In the photograph was a faience basin with a broken rim, certainly outmoded in shape; but from it protruded two ordinary naked feet, either crooked themselves, or placed crookedly in the vessel. One toe stuck out in such a way that it looked like the legs it belonged to were busy at something down there in the basin, and a stream of water was pouring from the upper-right corner of the photograph into the mouth of the vessel. That was all.

  “‘No, I am not a madman, still less a photographer or dreamer, which you have just suspected me of being. These pictures are, in fact, capable of far less than the actual possibilities of fantasy allow. These things I’m holding in my hands are historical originals, believe it or not. Ah, now you have hit upon a wonderful thought: Why should historical fact appear more precise or attractive than what I have in my hands? History happens right in front of our eyes, I must agree with you there.’ He was quite deft at guessing all my thoughts, and he did this just when I was either about to call him out and put him in his place, or simply stand up and leave, thus throwing off his unbearable obtrusiveness. But his angle on things, which you would later call the close-up shot, was very amusing from a poetic point of view. Here a line of poetry pecked its way out with heady facility: mud under the hooves of Alexander the Great’s troops, waves closing down over the Titanic, clouds floating past above Homer’s head … What did that mud know about the triumphant hoof? What did the water care about the treasures of the Spanish Armada? What need had the sky of verse?

  “‘And here is the chink in the floor where the light squeezes through,’ the purveyor of pictures muttered to himself, but simultaneously with the line that had just before entered my head. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. You see? I knew you were the very one I could trust. Possibly the only one, in our day and age. No, this isn’t flattery. I am not your garden-variety medium or swindler. Honestly, what is so special about anyone’s head that it should be considered a miracle to guess what’s inside it? Then again, what would I gain from it? Indulge my own talents by leading astray a gullible mind? That is a consideration, of course, but I am not so petty in my conceit. I have more humble, though less romantic, models than a Mephistopheles or Cagliostro. Now science fiction is all the rage. H. G. Wells, for example—The Time Machine. No, you scoff because you are still young. His style isn’t bad at all. I would even go so far as to say its Englishness is quite pleasant to the ear. It’s rare nowadays. It’s a childlike pleasure … He’s no Dickens, of course. But then again, begging your pardon, you and I are no Dickens, either. What do you mean boorish, when it’s only the truth? But I must agree with you that there is always a tinge of vulgarity in the truth. Because not everyone has the right, although, not everyone has the gift, either …

  “‘Take a look, however, at this highly curious photograph: a box with the head of Mary, Queen of Scots. I can vouch for its authenticity. Both the box and the head. No, no, it’s not just the box for the head. At the moment it was photographed, the head was inside. Calm down, don’t get so upset! Just imagine, in the spirit of fantasy, albeit poor, of the H. G. Wells you do not approve of, that such a thing is possible, that I am the inventor of a time machine … Can you imagine the difficulties one runs up against before one achieves anything? A dearth both of parts and of finances. No livelihood. They kick you out of your apartment. On the pilot flight you don’t even have an amateur camera, let alone a professional one. No money even for a sandwich to take along for sustenance! Ah, at last. Here it is. But I warn you—no, on second thought, I’d rather you didn’t see it. I shouldn’t have insisted, you’ll take it the wrong way.’

  “I was already clutching the photograph when he tried to snatch it out of my hand again. I grew really angry. I was on the verge of punching the lights out of this impertinent gentleman.

  “‘Oh, no, young man, let’s not succumb to brutality. Or else I might decide not to show you. But have it your way. I won’t go back on my promise, if you will be so kind as to hear me out and remember what I am about to say to you. And it is mandatory that you believe me. And I swear on I-don’t-know-what, since you seem to reject everything about me, that I am not deceiving you. I am holding a photograph of you. It is from your future, a not too distant one. When? I know, but I won’t tell you, for then you’ll be expecting it, and I don’t wish to spoil it ahead of time. You do have a future. I know both the year and the day. What do you mean, when? How impatient you young ones are! Well, not in five years, let’s say … You’re now just about twenty-one. You dream of love and glory. Oh, I know what kind! Top-notch. You have the right to it; and, what’s more, the opportunity is yours, now, and in the future. So, not in five years but fewer than ten, certainly … No, I’m not talking about success, I’m talking about this picture. It’s just as random and meaningless as the others you have seen. Just as authentic, but also just as random, as the others. You may consider me a poetry worshipper who was unable to hold out and depict you as you would one day become. All right. Here, take it … But mark my words. This is a random moment, not biographical fact. For your amusement, as it were…’

  “I no longer heard his admonitions. I fixed my eyes greedily on the image, which happened to be much clearer and sharper than Shakespeare’s legs or the Lake Poet bird. The face of an unfamiliar young man reflected in a shopwindow stared back at me. He was older than me by some ten years, perhaps a bit less, but he looked far more masculine. His face was attractive, albeit distorted by the kind of sorrow and shock that one rarely sees in a living face, much less one captured in a photograph. It was like a mask suited to a myth in which the hero turns to stone from an encounter with a monster. Perhaps even Medusa herself wore such an expression when she beheld her own reflection. In short, the reflection was striking, though it originated in the display window of an ordinary shop selling ready-made clothing, between two mannequins, male and female, who seemed to be striding toward one another with outstretched arms. Their arms, however, bracketed something horrible, something that the One Who Was Reflected saw, as well. The One Who Was Reflected saw Her. And She could not possibly have inspired that kind of horror. There was nothing horrible about Her. Nor was there anything benign.

  “Sometimes beauty can astound or shock. That’s what books tell us. That was not the case here. A pale moth—that’s what I said to myself in the first moments. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, however. What did He see in Her? Perhaps this is what it’s like to peer into Fate? Perhaps this is what Fate looks like? Her garments were unprepossessing, too—the clothes of a woman who was indifferent to her appearance: comfortable, but no more. On her arm she carried a shopping bag. Long, ash-colored hair, tousled, as though it was rearing up. A slattern. That’s what a slattern looks like, I said to myself. I was fascinated. Those eyes! I couldn’t unfasten my gaze from hers. A wide forehead, pale thick brows, eyes that were more gray than blue (the photograph was black-and-white)—but large, luminous eyes, eyes that were somehow rectangular, and spaced enchantingly, at an improbable distance fr
om either side of the bridge of her nose. Her cheekbones were also impossibly wide; but this you wouldn’t notice, so wide apart were the eyes. They almost looked out of different sides of her face, like a fish. A fish, I said to myself. A moth, a slattern, a fish, that’s what I said. But no one was as slender underneath her clothing as she was …

  “No. I can’t recount it. I don’t recall what I saw first, and what I only discerned afterward, in what order it happened … That’s very important, the order. The first thing I registered was the shocked expression on his face. Then there was perplexity about hers: it didn’t contain anything that would elicit such shock. Then her reflected face, more pallid and washed-out than his, but also surprised. Then his reflection, as though distorted from horror of itself—horror from witnessing its own shock. For a fraction of a second the photograph came to life and turned around, as if someone else entered or left the store at that moment, and the glass door swung open … But first he looked at her, and she looked at the window; then he looked at the window, and she looked at him.

  “The photograph is fixed in my memory, I see it before me now, as we speak. Oh, I studied it as I never studied anything before in my life. But perhaps there were altogether three photographs, like frames in a film. Or for a fleeting moment the photograph became stereoscopic, so that you seemed to see behind the backs of the people in it …

  “‘Don’t attach any meaning to it … Pure chance … Just a detail … Don’t believe anything … I shouldn’t have … I didn’t think you’d…’

  “His prattle grated on my ears and forced me at last to unfasten my gaze from this admittedly rather insignificant picture. But the madman was gone.

  “I thought I caught a glimpse of his back at the end of the park, though perhaps it was no longer him. I wanted to run after him, but for some reason I remained sitting. I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at the end of the park, hypnotized by his disappearance; but when the photograph dropped from my hands onto the ground, I came to. So there was a photograph! I bent over mechanically and picked it up … It wasn’t the same photograph. But I had caught a glimpse of this one, too, when he was rummaging through his briefcase: a cloud … View of the Sky Above Troy. Yes, the very picture that hangs in my room.

  “Does it not seem to you that the plot of the Iliad is somewhat strange? Even contrived? I understand that now it’s beyond discussion. The Odyssey, as the follow-up to the story, is more recognizable to us. There’s nothing more to do there but sail and sail. Waves … But Helen … The paeans to Helen through the centuries are far more real than she is. No, it wasn’t her indescribable, or, rather, never yet described, never yet depicted, beauty that thrilled and still thrills poets, but the very fact of her existence, the fact that she lived at all. There has never been any proof of this, except that she was the reason the Trojan War was waged. The war must be explained somehow, don’t you think? The war happened, but was Helen the cause? And was there a Helen at all? It is not Helen whom the poets love, but the cause that resides in her. The reason her image can be summoned up ad infinitum is because she herself never really was. Naturally, I immediately dubbed the stranger in the photo Helen; but it was initially only because of the incomprehensible cloud. At that time I didn’t think about things in the way I am explaining them to you now. Not about the Iliad, nor about the Odyssey. I didn’t know that the war was already lost, that I was already sailing away … Isn’t it strange that you and I can see clouds that Homer couldn’t see? Have you ever imagined yourself blind? Everyone imagines it … What does a blind man see? Night? No. Endless waves.”

  Vanoski’s face went blank. I was no longer there in front of him. It even seemed to me that I saw waves in his gaze; but this was fear. He was again staring at that absurd white button on the wall. Was it the button he feared, or was he afraid I would ask him its purpose? In any case, that was precisely what I intended to ask him, but he made sure to interrupt me just then.

  “You ask what the upshot of all this was?” I hadn’t asked, but he seemed to want to bring the narrative to a close. “After that everything happened very simply, and too smoothly. Without a hitch. No, I didn’t fall in love with her immediately. I’m not a soldier, I don’t fall in love with pinup girls. Besides, I was already in love. I laughed at myself with the mockery of youth, which is the way youth tries to free itself from the embarrassment that someone might notice its ineptitude. No one noticed. And shaking off the devilish delusions as something so irrelevant to my charmed, resilient life that they could, therefore, never have happened, I thrust the ‘cloud’ carelessly into my notebook and hurried on to where I had been heading from the start—only I was running ahead of schedule, which is how I had ended up on the park bench. I hurried off to meet my Dika.

  “She was Eurydice. Eurydika—though Dika was what I called her. No, she was not yet mine. You think this is all too Greek? But her father actually was Greek, although she didn’t remember him, or her birthplace, for that matter. She had grown up with her mother in Paris. I didn’t remember my father, or my birthplace in Poland, either. Now we had both become dubious Britons. This bound us together. We studied in the same department. She first, and I joined later. She was younger but outstripped me by a mile in scholarship, while I was trying my hand at poetry. She coached me in the history of poetry so that I could pass from year to year, by the skin of my teeth. She liked teaching me, and I liked being her slow-witted student. Our own subject evolved slowly. We had already started kissing. Oh, we had a world of time back then!

  “And now, half a century later, when I need nothing but dull, unremitting calm, I suppose that there is such a thing as happiness. Because that’s what it was! With our heads buried in our books in Eurydice’s tiny room, time had no ending and no beginning—it simply was. It lived in this room like a warm, languid cat, and had no intention of leaving. It was true, I had no special liking for the Lake Poets. I remember we struggled over them for a long time—but nobody had lips or voices sweeter than our own. If only we had known then how precious it all really was! They were the most minuscule living quarters I had ever seen. Believe me, it was half the size of this little shoebox of mine! The apartment was located right next to my old grade school, and I felt that we had grown up together. We remembered childhood games we had both played: tic-tac-toe, kick the can, battleships … We got lost in our games until long past midnight. ‘Sleep! Sleep!’ her beloved African gray parrot shrieked. How did he get here? I wondered. Where did he find room to fit? The room was piled high with books of erudition I couldn’t grasp, and small souvenirs, impossibly naïve. They had a habit of spilling over and spreading. I threw myself into the task of picking them up, but she tried to discharge me from my duties. She said I mixed everything up. We would crawl around on our hands and knees, gleaning together, though crawling there was difficult. Between the table and the bed there was no room to pass each other, and we bumped heads. That was what led to our first kiss.”

  Vanoski was overcome with emotion. Witnessing his childlike raptures, I felt uncomfortably aware of my own youth, of the freshness of yesterday’s kisses on my lips.

  “Bookishness and tenderness,” he babbled on. “Oh, she was the most enchanting bluestocking that ever lived. Though, incidentally, she didn’t like blue. She liked all kinds of red—roomy sweaters, long skirts … beads, bracelets; at home she even wore them on her ankles. I crawled around on the floor and picked up books whose very titles made me cringe, and I loved them—as long as they were closed. I gathered up this debris: a jumble of castanets, bast shoes, African masks, tea tins, generic greeting cards and postcards she loved receiving from distant parts of the world, and photographs of herself that were very dear to her, because she felt she looked better in pictures than in real life. But how wrong she was! I picked it all up, then let it drop and scatter again, pretending to pluck a volume out of the middle of a pile by mistake, only to cause another avalanche. Then she would tear herself away, flushed and lovely in her shy emb
arrassment, and begin to make coffee for us. She prepared it over a camp stove in some forlorn Turkish—not Greek—saucepan, and I sneaked up behind her. The coffee boiled over, of course, and she was angry with me, because she was especially proud of her secret coffee-making method, which she always bungled.

  “She was rather lofty with me whenever we met, and we continued to address one another formally. The books were arranged in neat piles up to the ceiling, poised for their next tumble. We were sitting sedately at the desk, which doubled as a dinner table.

  “‘What is that stone?’ she said, opening up my notebook. I had completely forgotten about it!

  “‘That isn’t a stone. It’s a cloud.’

  “I wanted to tell her all about the recent episode, but I couldn’t. Another photograph took shape before my very eyes, and there was the face of the stranger looking out at me.

  “‘Hello,’ Eurydice called to me. ‘Anybody home?’

  “‘Oh, you mean that photograph,’ I said, turning red. ‘That’s your homeland, by the way. A view of the Trojan sky.’

  “‘You are a true poet,’ Eurydice said. ‘Did you mean for me to have it?’

  “‘Of course it’s for you,’ I rushed to say. Yes, she was the one who had it framed. That’s how it all began. Or, rather, how everything eventually ended, too.

  “Believing in the impossible is the easiest thing of all for us. It starts out as a bluff, an absurdity, mere delirium—and then it becomes an enticing mirage, a seductive vision. At the same instant that I wrote off the ridiculous meeting in the park as something that had never happened, I believed unconditionally in the authenticity of the photograph I had seen. The cloud may not have been the same cloud, but it was without doubt my reflection in the shopwindow, so the one who was reflected in the window was also me. Consequently, the woman who had been reflected in the window was the one I had seen. And it was She! Because it was undeniable that it had been me. The longer I stared at the picture—and it was pinned to the inner side of my forehead, as though on a screen—the less doubt there was about it. Even the slightest shadow of one.