The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  “It was me, only some seven years older—and I found myself quite appealing, like an object I might want to possess. During those seven years I had traversed a clear path as yet unknown to me, and by the end of that time I had a certain face—and not the kind of pleasant, unassuming countenance that might have appealed to anyone else but me. I was particularly impressed with the slightly sunken cheeks and sprinkling of gray in my hair. It’s nothing new, but it’s a fact: in our youth we rush headlong toward our final days, and, indeed, cover most of the distance toward death in a flash. Then, just before the finish line, we hit the brakes with all our might. But what chance do our doddering, old man’s brakes have against the momentum of the youthful energy we had when we threw ourselves into the race?

  “There could be no doubt that it was me in the photograph, and my future face was quite to my liking—but why on Earth was it so contorted? What could have shaken me so profoundly? For as far as my experience went, and insofar as I could imagine my future, there was no reason for me to wear such an expression. Indeed, even on other faces I had never seen the like—except, perhaps, in literature, in some children’s fare: ‘His face was contorted with indescribable pain and torment, despair and horror.’ But I scrutinized this photograph through and through, and grew convinced that the provincial stage set, the pretend scenery of the outskirts of town, were this time not in the least counterfeit. They were genuine. If something like this could happen to someone—and not just anyone, but to me—then what was it? Here there was no longer any uncertainty, anything equivocal, in the matter: it was She. Call her what you will: the woman of one’s dreams, or Fate itself. I didn’t like her. She was not to my taste. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I never thought about how lovely ‘my’ Dika was. I had no need to account for this to myself. I wasn’t aware of how very lovely Dika was; for everything about her was lovely. It didn’t matter to me what she looked like. One ‘looks like’ something for others, and I sought no comparison, for she existed only for me. An inability to judge is the benediction of love. It didn’t matter to me what she looked like. But oh, how it mattered what this Helen—who was not ‘mine’—looked like! For if Helen was not destined for me, then whom was she meant for? She must be somewhere, even though we had yet to meet. A sharp pang of jealousy gripped me. I didn’t know her, I didn’t like—much less love—her, but I was already jealous. I was certain I would meet her in the coming days. Because how much would one have to experience with another person before a chance meeting at a shop could unhinge one so? What could be so unimaginable that life without it would henceforth be impossible?

  “‘Did you mean for me to have it?’ Dika said, looking at the ‘cloud’ with a doomed expression.

  “Looking at her through the pale transparence of Helen, I suddenly saw an unfamiliar girl before me, not the one I had come to visit at all. Before this I had always come for Dika alone, and it was a source of happiness to me that she was always the one I found. Now I scrutinized her unfamiliar face, comparing it for the first time. The comparison was, without doubt, in Dika’s favor! The difference was to her advantage. Everything in her was tinged with vibrant hues, in contrast to the photograph—a downpour of light versus light stanched. Early summer, young leaves, clear wind, shadows of clouds passing over tender shoots of grass, splashes of sky through the dappled foliage—that kind of face. For the first time I feasted my eyes on it—when it was no longer mine. It belonged to no one, like that summer day. A forsaken Paradise. Tempter! It was no ordinary apple you slipped me …

  “I took a bite from it without noticing it. I could embrace and kiss Dika—she was right here, waiting for me. She wanted to be mine. But this paper Helen, who didn’t exist, was mine already. ‘Idiot! Madman!’ I cursed the fat stranger in the Garden Park who had started it all, and realized that these curses were directed at myself. How I dreamt of meeting him once more to shake a name and address out of him, or an admission that he had lied, or proof of his insanity, or his secret, or his soul—but he, of course, no longer ventured into the Garden Park.

  “He looked as much like the devil as a photograph of an apple resembled a real apple. I wandered through town in search of Helen, peering into all the faces and shopwindows, but I couldn’t find the one I was seeking—and my own reflection vexed me with its monotonous sameness. I had never come across it so frequently. I was sick of it, I didn’t recognize myself, I began to see myself as a faceless crowd.

  “Everything around me reminded me of something else. I made an effort but couldn’t recall what it was. Every something took on the likeness of another something. The whole world rhymed and multiplied its reflections. Everything conjured up some other thing, and it was never the right thing. I wandered around like a nearsighted man who had misplaced his spectacles, like one blinded by mist and fog. The asphalt stretched out before me like a smooth sheet of water, and waves fell away into the distance behind me. What kind of deck was this, what kind of stern? Where was my vessel bound? Waves, photographs, mirrors … Oh, how blind I was! Blind man, blind singer. I stumbled across my own reflection and shuddered, as though it reflected someone else, and was surprised by a poem unknown to me—penned, nevertheless, by my own hand.

  “What I had heretofore only dreamed about while scribbling my paltry verse came to pass: I became a Poet. You can’t fool yourself: it’s either poetry or it isn’t. I had always had an unerring sense for it, and for this reason was never flattered by my own attempts. Now there could be no doubt about it. I wasn’t aware of how the verses arrived. They were alien to me, as if written by someone else. I could evaluate and judge them as words that were not my own—and they were deserving of admiration. But, my God, how little comfort they brought! The price of those lines was too dear, however beautiful they might be—a price too dear for Dika, for me, for Helen …

  “My jealousy over Helen knew no bounds. At first this virus assumed only light, Proustian forms. Unable to find her among passersby, I ventured into museums, bookstores. I discerned the outlines of her face through the strata of centuries in portraits, in the dust of the Renaissance. On my walls at home, in my student digs, I hung up successive pictures of my elusive Helen’s predecessors: a Botticelli replaced a Ghirlandajo.

  “Poor Dika. She was eaten up with jealousy at these reproductions. Then she would make peace with her rival, and even approve of my choice. But no sooner had she done this than another picture would take its place, one whose resemblance seemed to me even more striking. Dika accepted my poems, however, without a murmur.

  “She would come to visit me in a new dress—‘Pretty, isn’t it?’—wearing new bracelets … Always breezy and carefree, as though nothing had happened, chirping on about some university nonsense. She brought flowers, and went searching for a vase … and found a page of verse. ‘It’s remarkable how little you understand your own poetry.’ Tears of what appeared to be ecstasy welled up in her eyes, and her voice trembled. And through her ecstasy I glimpsed some deep torment that she would never have survived had she realized that the muse of these poems was not herself but another.

  “But Dika didn’t betray so much as a hint of this. I couldn’t bear it: her expression, her voice, her ecstasy, her feigned nonchalance—and the better she kept it up, the more it smacked of fortitude, self-denial, meekness. I couldn’t bear her suffering and became gruff. I didn’t need her praise, her favors, her urge to put things in order. Could she not understand that there are times when a person has a right to be alone? She paid no heed to my gruffness but instead asked me to forgive her, and slipped away, snatching the page up off the floor as she left. She was the one who salvaged them all, else they would have been lost. I could appreciate them but never attach value to them—and, indeed, I almost hated them, as I hated Helen when I finally drove Dika away. Oh, I hated Helen so intensely at that moment when the door shut behind Dika that if I had chanced to meet her then, I would have strangled her, like Othello. I hated Helen perhaps even more for the torment I ca
used Dika than for her absence.

  “But Dika did leave, and I diligently banished her from my mind. I was alone again with the absence of Helen. I ripped the current reproduction off the wall. Where had I seen a resemblance? Again I wandered through the streets, studying every stranger I met, until weariness and poetry felled me again at night. Waking up in the morning, I gave the poems their due and tossed them away. Then Dika would collect them again, surreptitiously and lovingly.

  “Oh, I knew Helen’s face by heart. I knew it as only someone lost in the woods knows the trees he circles round and round; as someone dying of thirst knows the desert. I can’t describe its fatal charm. Even then I couldn’t, even though, at the time, the ineffable easily succumbed to my words. In my verses anyone can sense her but will never see her—she was here one moment and gone the next. Slattern, fish, moth … Her face was paler than the most washed-out photograph. It was not just a matter of the poor quality of a botched print—only the most unskilled photograph could convey her characteristic vagueness, that elusiveness of expression and feature, and then only partially. Some Polish women look like that, I believe.

  “Have you ever had the chance to visit Poland? They are renowned for their beauty, Polish women. Their beauty is distinctive. That’s it—distinctive. And this notion alone was enough to lead me on a journey to the land of my ancestors, a place where I had never before set foot, and had never felt drawn to in the past. Really, I thought, what made me think that the shopwindow in which we were both reflected had to be located in the place I lived? That shopwindow could be anywhere. The world grew in my mind to dimensions that only despair can assume. Only the ocean and the desert offered me solace—places where there were no stores, no shopwindows, no reflections to be found. But I knew that in seven years this shopwindow would appear, all the same: I would hear the faint click of the diaphragm, the magnesium would flare, and a shot would result. I knew, and nothing could stop me. Wasn’t it all the same, what end of the Earth I sought her in? It is a commonplace that beginners win in the game of roulette, and experienced players, who have built a system from their experience, lose. Why not Poland?

  “I traveled its length and breadth. There were thousands of them like her. This is how it is with Polish women. At first you feel puzzled. Where are all those renowned beauties? Their faces are astonishingly inexpressive, impassive. You are geared up, you are ready to behold them, you focus your crystalline lens again and again, reproaching yourself for being inadequately perspicacious. Finally you leave, disappointed. You leave—and then they come to you. You begin dreaming about them at night. Independence and deference, compliance and proud inaccessibility: the essence of womanhood. They submit; but, as it turns out, not to you. They remain, but you are no longer there. An odd sensation. I saw thousands of them like her, but she was not among them. I would have recognized her out of a million—but out of a thousand she was nowhere to be found. I would have stayed there forever for her, if she had been there. But she wasn’t there, since I had already departed …

  “By now it had become clear to me that she was not in Poland. With my return ticket in my pocket, not knowing how to spend my final day there, I wandered into the celebrated municipal cemetery. Perhaps I wanted to justify my defeat; but in the cemetery I sensed that I had made this journey to find my ancestral homeland, and for no other reason. The beautiful September day was waning into evening. The cemetery was not a haunted graveyard but an ancient, well-tended park. The leaves of two-hundred-year-old oaks and maples blazed like national banners. The trees stood tall, but the nation lay in the ground underneath them. Little flames flickered among the tree trunks—women in black mantles carrying candles in their hands moved toward the graves that I could not yet make out. All at once, the trees thinned, and ancient, moss-covered stones began to appear. They stretched out in an endless line like a glacial moraine. Then the trees closed ranks again, only to give way before the gravestones one more time: the eighteenth century had arrived. Little candles burned here and there on individual gravestones, but the rest continued to gleam up ahead. I followed close behind the candles, aware of the emptiness in my hands. The silence thickened and the sense of expectation grew. I seemed to hear a roar in the distance ahead of me. It swelled—and the next long ridge of graves lay down at my feet like the last breaker of the surf. I was in the nineteenth century. War, uprising, war, uprising—defeat, defeat, defeat … And again—uprising and war. It was just like a sea; history was frozen here in undulating billows of common graves—somewhere up ahead, not yet visible, boomed the ninth wave … Its time was due in my own, our own, century. Now more candles burned and guttered on the gravestones, more flowers had been laid on them, more often a solitary figure was to be seen standing nearby.

  “I didn’t notice right away that my hands were no longer empty—they grasped neither a candle, nor a flower, but the flaming banner of a maple leaf. The copse grew younger before my eyes; an expanse opened up in front of me. It was a timid, childlike undergrowth—but the future already seemed to be digging in, making preparations there. I turned to go back, now and then stopping to read the name of a young officer. In one common grave, in an alphabetical list of names, I read out my own: U. Vanoski. I had no knowledge of this legionnaire of the Polish forces, First World War. That was where I laid my leaf. Suddenly it seemed to me that I wasn’t seeking a woman at all, but my homeland in her image. A strange feeling of delight in defeat gripped me: my homeland, the people, had not vanished.

  “Someone was watching me. I sensed this from behind and for some reason felt frightened. ‘Pan polak?’ a throaty woman’s voice addressed me. I didn’t know any Polish, but I knew she wasn’t Polish, either. I could make out a distinct accent. At last I turned around—it was HER! We met on the Day of Remembrance of the Deceased by the grave of my possible relative.

  “But, no, it wasn’t her. I realized this only the next morning, waking up in a strange bed, staring at a strange ceiling. Dressed for travel, she was sitting in an armchair and examining me. I even had the impression that there was a packed suitcase standing in the corner. ‘Dzień dobry,’ she said with an accent. ‘Kawa [coffee]?’ Those were the only words she knew in Polish. I drank coffee, she rolled one cigarette after another and smoked them. She was from Holland, and besides her native Dutch knew only German and French. I only knew English and Italian. So we maintained an eloquent silence, as though we knew everything already. The Dutch woman was considerably more beautiful than my Helen, and it was difficult for me to recognize the resemblance that had seemed so obvious to me the day before. She was darker, stronger, with a richer color, I suppose. There was a certain heaviness, a seriousness in her pose and movements. This monumental being smoldered and percolated, smoking in silence. Her enormous eyes were in the habit of changing color, or, rather, light—they lived a stormy life of their own amidst her bulk; for, suddenly, I was able to see her. She was huge! She sat there like a cast-iron kettlebell. Her eyes grew dark in their depths; she kissed me awkwardly and said in broken English: ‘I want be your husband.’ I burst out laughing, and she was offended. I promised to come visit her in Amsterdam.

  “But I was already in a hurry, rushing back home to my Dika. Begone, phantom!

  “For this was the devil’s plan—to plunge me into incessant expectation, deprive me of real time … that is to say, real happiness. And Dika was the most real happiness to me. How delighted she was at my return! How glad I was … Here, under the blows and the dull thud of scholarship falling all around us, through the parrot’s shrieks of ‘The coffee’s boiling over! The coffee’s boiling over!’ amidst the frenzy of our kisses, it all happened. Suddenly, Dika grew somber, tore herself from my embrace, went into her diminutive bath-kitchen-hallway-toilet, brushed her teeth long and furiously, came back, marching like a soldier, pushed me into a corner behind a curtain, covered the parrot’s cage with a skirt, restored the books to their places, then folded out the bed with abrupt, angry motions I didn’t recogn
ize, skillful and unattractive, like those of an elderly charwoman, made the bed, and began to undress with fierce and deliberate abandon.

  “She removed everything from herself, then folded it up on a chair—timidly, as though she had hated the clothing that covered her, then regretted its loss. After folding everything and placing it on the chair with the utmost accuracy and care, as fastidious as a schoolchild in a German primer or a soldier in his barracks, she lay down. I remained standing in the spot to which she had banished me, merging with the curtain, evaporating into the darkness, almost unaware of myself. It was a strange sensation—I wasn’t there. Dika was lying motionless under the white sheet; next to her, the pile of her clothes, like someone else’s, like the clothing of a dead person that has been returned to the relatives. The light from a streetlamp pierced through a slit in the curtains, pouring over everything like moonlight. Such was the silence, the stillness, the absence, and the dearth of feeling, that I didn’t know how many ages, minutes, seconds had passed before I heard from over there, from the white blur, someone else’s lifeless voice: ‘Where are you?’

  “The following morning we had coffee and hurried to the university as if we had done this every morning for many years. And never again did we kiss each other as we kissed then.

  “How I tormented her! The ruse was that it was my creative quest, some grand conception, that gripped me—and this was tormenting me, not I tormenting her. I told her everything, but not as the truth—rather, as the plot of a novel that was born in me suddenly when I chanced to come across that photograph of the cloud (which was now hanging over our bed). I told her about the quest of my protagonist, about his experiences, everything just as it was, except for one detail: my protagonist did not have a Dika. He was solitary, alone with the image he pursued. There was no betrayal. It would be a new tale of chivalry, I told Dika, like the Knight of the Mournful Countenance. Through his fidelity and love, this knight triumphed over the devil who had tempted him with the image. The knight overcame temptation by believing in it as the truth, by not calling it into question. Dika was shattered each time I enriched the plot with some fresh detail, or unexpected but convincing twist. She disguised her jealousy with flights of rapture over my creative mastery, and found parallels in world literature through her philological erudition, thus refining and honing my mythology.