The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  “Maybe the bed was standing in a field?” Davin said.

  Gummi looked at him with alarm, then, brightening, said without a trace of irony, “Maybe it was in a field … I remember that kind of smell.”

  He could no longer recall anything about the Daruma Monastery, either. The memories had been wiped out. Before the monastery, he had probably slept with his eyes open, but in the monastery he had lived maybe a year, maybe two—maybe no more than a week.

  “Did you chop wood there?” the great diagnostician-to-be asked with surprising acumen. This was a pointed question, and it jolted Gummi’s memory.

  “No. There was no firewood there. There were mountains. I carried water.”

  That was all. Davin couldn’t come up with another, equally astute question. Instead, he brushed aside Gummi’s past. And he began asking him about the Moon.

  Gummi glanced at the doctor warily, but again caught no signs of anything but sympathy and genuine interest.

  “Yes, I’ve been to the Moon,” Gummi said.

  “But how did you manage that?” Davin said. He overacted, and even though he knew nothing about irony, Gummi picked up on it. He noticed, and grew glum.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “That’s not true,” Davin said with urgent sincerity. “As far as I can tell, you are incapable of lying. But you must agree that no human being has ever accomplished such a feat.”

  “You’re just like them,” Gummi said.

  “I assure you—”

  “You also say I’m not human.”

  “I never said that!”

  “You said ‘no human being.’ Carmen says the same thing: ‘You’re not human.’”

  “You have misunderstood me…” Davin began. Just at that moment he started thinking about the relationship between madness and the capacity for logical thought. Perhaps perfect logic is a sign, a symptom. Normal thought is, on the contrary, illogical. The mechanism of healthy thought boils down to knowing how not to notice, how to ignore or overlook, to change the sequence … skipping, shifting … There has to be a word for it … Maybe there already is … Thought flows on two levels, as it were, not suspecting its own parallel existence: in the depths is the mute knowledge of the ages, with a sheen of logic in the interests of self-delusion on the surface, like a garment … The ineffable is covered with an unruly layer of names, words … How empty it all sounds, indeterminate, all wrong. But there is something, a regularity, a mechanism … To name it, to announce it!… Think, think about this! he said to himself peremptorily, with an eye toward the future.

  “They just don’t know what flying means,” Gummi said. “Birds, of course, fly, too. But people are not birds. People fly differently. They are not equipped like birds. People don’t know how they are equipped, and think that only birds can fly. Of course, you shouldn’t think that people fly like birds. And so they laugh at me. But I don’t flap my arms like wings when I fly. That’s not how it’s done.”

  He’s remarkably subtle for an idiot, Davin thought. There is no equivalence … As always, there is no equivalence! What is equal to what? What is sense, what is nonsense? It’s just a conventional arrangement, the cynicism of which is obscured by yet another agreement, which in its turn is forgotten. Oh dear! Davin became angry with himself. Will I ever be able to get to the end of a single thought today?

  “It’s as easy as any other ability, if one has it. And just as impossible, if one doesn’t. It’s an ordinary ability, like any other. Is being able to smell something any less remarkable? Is there anything given by God that isn’t remarkable or wondrous?”

  Heavens! Davin thought. He can’t be saying this! Did he say that, or was I just thinking it? No, madness is positively contagious.

  “Well then, show me,” he said without softening his tone.

  “You don’t believe me.” The sorrow that suffused Gummi’s face in an instant was so deep that the doctor gasped and nearly howled in despair. This was more than he could bear.

  “How can you say that!” Davin said, losing his temper for the first time. “Of course I believe you!” he shouted, sharing in the delusion of many people, equal only to their guile, that rudeness is a display of sincerity. “I believe you!”

  “I see,” Gummi said with sad humility, nodding. “You believe me, but you don’t believe in me.”

  “Listen, Gummi, you are a remarkable person. I say this in all seriousness, I am not laughing—you are a remarkable person. You don’t even understand yourself how much you…” The more verbose and modulated his speech, the more confused he became: how many words did you have to resort to to make a person believe what you don’t believe yourself? Actually, the only thing required here was words. The rest just—was. Necessary and sufficient, he thought, and sighed. I should have become a mathematician rather than trying to pin down imprecise thoughts about life. “I assure you!”

  Gummi believed him and all but purred from joy. “I believe you,” he said.

  “Did you learn to fly in the monastery?” Davin’s perspicacity and abrupt about-face produced an unexpected effect. Gummi seemed to recall something. He stared, round-eyed, his gaze fixed in front of him, at something that was not there.

  “Yes … The Teacher … He drank water … I was supposed to grasp the empty…” Once again, words that had miraculously just found each other stuck together like warm candies in a pocket. “He drank the water, put me in a corner … Beat me a little with a stick…” Something seemed to burst forth out of Gummi’s eyes. “He said to me, ‘Where in this cup is that water I drank?’ I said that it was in him. Then he beat me hard. After that he put the empty cup in front of me and said, ‘Think about what is in it.’ Then he left, locking the door behind him. I was there for three days, and I thought.”

  “Hmm,” Dr. Davin said.

  Gummi’s face grew brighter. “You gave me a hint, and I remembered. That’s how it was. I looked at the cup for three days.”

  “That’s strange, to say the least,” Davin said, sighing.

  “Let me try to explain it to you. I think that’s when it happened the first time. I became numb and cold. Then I warmed up all of a sudden, and everything became colorful. I was still in the same room, though. I began to feel curious, frightened, and cheerful. I was cheerful and happy, but I didn’t laugh. I looked around me, and the numbness in me began to heat up, and to buzz like a cicada. Everything was what it was, and at the same time not what it was. Suddenly I noticed that the cup was in the other corner. I didn’t believe it at first. I probably just hadn’t noticed that I had moved into another corner, away from the one with the cup. I went back to it—I had to obey my teacher. I knelt down before it. Again I felt that something wasn’t right. The only window—a small, narrow one—was directly above me, in the corner where my teacher had placed me. Now, after I had moved, it turned out to be right above me again—the very same window. I glanced at the corner I had just left to rejoin the cup, and screamed—for I was scared: there I was, still in the same position, kneeling. Little by little I recovered from my shock and grew bold enough to glance at him again. He was me, that was certain, and my fear began to melt. I looked at him more and more boldly, and sensed that he was waking up.

  “I don’t know how I understood that he was aware of my existence and was letting me get used to him. He made an effort not to look in my direction. I sensed that he avoided looking at me on purpose. I don’t know how he made me understand this. Finally, he turned to me and looked at me mockingly, then winked. And suddenly, when he got up off his knees after winking at me, it wasn’t him, but me. In a flash, he was standing over the former, empty me. Then I somehow leaned over to the side and tore myself away from the floor and for a short time floated above that self who stayed behind in the corner, timidly and without the least bit of interest in watching what was happening to me. He became boring to me, as though I realized that everything was all right with him. I hovered above him for a second, limp and bent over, then strai
ghtened myself out and soared up to the ceiling. And I was seized by intense joy! I knew that I had been flung wide open, and my incarceration in a rigid and heavy world was finished. Hastily trying out all my newfound possibilities, spinning around and turning somersaults through the room, and, somehow mastering all this instantaneously, I glided over to the little window. I remember noticing that it was dusty.”

  Typical drug-induced delirium, the doctor thought. Could he really have been in Asia?

  “What happened next?” Davin said with childish impatience, no longer surprised at Gummi’s narrative abilities. “You tell it marvelously well. Then what happened?”

  “I saw the monastery and the mountains from above. I fluttered about like a crazed butterfly, and suddenly I discovered that I had drifted off very far, that the sea was underneath me, and I began to fall. Just at that moment, the teacher burst into the cell with a shout: ‘Who gave you permission? How dare you?’ He began to beat the one in the corner, striking him on the head with a stick. That one didn’t budge, he was like an earthenware figure. The teacher kept beating and beating, saying, ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! It’s a sin! You’ll be punished!’ As though he wasn’t punishing yet, only beating. Slipping in unnoticed through the window, I returned to my corner in front of the empty cup and obediently refrained from looking at them. It seemed to me that once or twice, however, he threw a glance at me. And then beat ‘that other one’ with even greater fury. For some reason I didn’t feel sorry for him. Then the teacher left ‘that one’ abruptly, turned to me, and, staring directly at me now, said, ‘Have you regained your senses? Is it painful? Pain is empty.’ And he left.” Gummi again fell silent. He was far away.

  “What about the Moon?” Davin insisted. Gummi’s cheeks quivered, as though he had jumped from a great height, and he wrinkled up his face. Gathering his wits, he went on, but now somewhat wearily, and his words fell from his tongue more and more listlessly.

  “I woke up on the floor … beaten and bruised … There was a cup of water … I drank it.” And he stopped.

  “The Moon,” Davin said harshly.

  “I flew to it.”

  “When?”

  “After that.”

  “After you drank the water?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how? You were drifting. That’s a very slow means of propulsion. It’s around four hundred thousand kilometers to the Moon. Ten times around the Earth.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Gummi said with difficulty, as though he couldn’t get his tongue around the words. “Soaring is pleasure, it’s an indulgence. You can also just find yourself there.”

  Dr. Davin was tired, like Gummi’s tongue, as though it was he himself who could hardly find his way out of his mouth. “Well, what’s it like? The Moon?” he said offhandedly. Gummi’s eyes grew glassy and mute. Something was approaching him headlong, coming ever nearer, until it shattered his stare. He seemed to see something directly in front of him, so close and so clear that he lost the gift of speech, because he wasn’t remembering, he was truly seeing. For a moment Davin even imagined that something was reflected in Gummi’s irises that wasn’t there in front of them (they were walking through a field). He gave his head a shake. “So? What was it like,” he persisted.

  “Brown,” Gummi said faintly, and a bubble of saliva appeared on his lips.

  Good gosh, he’s epileptic to boot, the doctor thought.

  … When Gummi came to, he saw the alarmed, guilty face of Davin bending over him. Davin rubbed Gummi’s temples. He was so relieved when Gummi regained his senses that he smiled with ingratiating tenderness.

  “Please, Toni, forgive me. I overtaxed you with my questions. I believe absolutely that you were on the Moon that time.”

  Gummi looked at the doctor with love and indulgence, as one looks at a child.

  “But I was just there again,” he said, picking himself up off the grass.

  * * *

  Davin lay down to take a nap in his study and seemed to collapse. He woke up from the sun bearing down on his eyes. He felt unusually wide awake, and alarmed that he had slept so long. Nowadays the sun came to visit him on the couch when it was already after five, getting toward evening. He sat up abruptly, feeling out of sorts, and vibrating and ringing like the metal spring in the couch underneath him. He sat there for a moment while the sparks and black specks cleared away from his vision, then stood up just as abruptly. He stretched energetically, with a crunch. What kind of nightmare was I having? Rubbish! Time to study the nature of dreams, yet I’m experiencing them instead of working. He shook his head once more, laughing and chaffing himself: sensitive soul, beloved gone, Gummi, Toni, the Moon … Stuff and nonsense!

  He sat down at his desk with confidence, ready to resume his manuscript on the nature of dreams. He loved the view from his window, loved to gaze out of it when he was concentrating. He looked—someone was out there, chopping wood. And that person was Gummi.

  In the provinces in those days, everything fell easily into a rhythm. A random event today is, by tomorrow, already something familiar. By the day after tomorrow it is already expected, and by the day after the day after tomorrow it has become a ritual.

  The residents of Taunus were used to meeting this strange couple walking along the Northern Highway, to town and back, toward the end of the day. What did they need to talk about that was so important? So as not to have to raise Gummi in their own estimation, the Taunusians lowered the doctor. The idea that the doctor also “had a few screws loose” returned everything to its proper place. Was it any surprise, when there were thingamajigs like that dangling in the sky? And they pointed at the dirigible. Here one should note that the provinces experience a paucity of events not because they don’t happen, but because they have no need for them.

  Rare objects are thus brought together because of their lack of utility. (It’s the same story in museums.) Gummi and the doctor developed a need for each other, as though they were lying side by side in the same display case. That Gummi adored Davin, for his handsome looks, his astute mind, his humaneness, we can understand. But what did the doctor see in Gummi besides a curious clinical case? It is easiest to believe that the doctor’s progressive mind was trying out particularly humane methods of treatment, unprecedented in the asylums of the day, on Gummi. Methods such as kindness, respect, attention, trust, an effort to inspire self-confidence, and so on—a whole array of them. This is most likely how it appeared to Davin himself, and this is what he wanted to see. But we have already mentioned that he was sharp, and observed the behavior not only of others but also his own. In so doing, he did not find this explanation of his relationship with Gummi to be fully exhaustive. He seemed to be unable to find a satisfactory answer to the problem, or to avoid it altogether. A simple explanation of this reciprocal attachment as a feeling of satisfaction from the righteous fulfillment of his doctor’s duties (when it comes right down to it, people like acting kindly, otherwise it would be completely disadvantageous), and even the assumption of a certain degree of normal human attachment to a weaker, more innocent creature (a dog or a cat) didn’t quite explain the phenomenon. Davin wasn’t attached to Gummi; he needed him. He himself didn’t know why. He tried not to understand, because in some way his contemplation of the matter turned against him: accepting Gummi’s love for him, he understood that he didn’t love back. And if it had been only about Gummi! But catching the reflection of Gummi’s love, he began to understand that he was unable to love, as if it was impossible to love anyone on principle. Joy was no exception. In and of itself, this would not have devastated his soul so profoundly, had he not caught himself thinking that with Joy he didn’t experience the same inequality of feelings that he experienced with Gummi. Did that mean that Joy didn’t love him, either? No, that was not at all acceptable to the ingenious doctor.

  So it won’t do to think that their relationship was cloudless and serene. Only Gummi was cloudless and serene.

  On top of e
verything else, Gummi had fallen in love with Joy. He was, it seemed, not in love with her portrait, as the doctor assumed, given Gummi’s passion for cheap postcards; he was in love with her. The photograph had been taken on Joy’s last visit and had turned out well—though it was rather a failure, technically speaking. It was Davin’s first experiment with photography. He had adjusted the focus improperly, and hadn’t kept the negative in the developer long enough, and the result was … a miracle. It was a bright white blur of hair and smile, merging with the dazzling foliage of a bush behind her. “Don’t you dare move! Do not stir an inch!”—but that made her laugh and turn her head, and this motion and her smile were captured even as they slipped away. The moment was not stayed, but what remained was beautiful. It seemed as though Joy would turn back again any moment now, and happiness would ensue. Because her face looked like happiness at that moment. Not in the sense that it was “beaming with happiness”—if you looked closely, that certainly was not what you saw. There was even some sort of alarm visible in the blur amidst this flood of light. She herself was happiness. That which exists only now, but not at the very next moment; what exists somewhere, but not for you, and is not within your reach.

  “Gummi? Come in, come in. Don’t hover in the doorway like that. Come in and take a seat. What is it, Gummi?”

  “I wanted to say that I can’t find another stone like the first one.”

  “What stone?”

  “You liked that stone I brought you yesterday so much, I wanted to find another one for you.”

  “Never mind, Gummi. You’ll find another.”