The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Going over these materials, we came across a response by the well-known Dr. Robert Davin. It is strange that he descended from the heights of his authority and deigned to consider something that for scientists of his stature was extremely dubious and lacking in prestige, if not dangerous for his reputation (which every authority cultivates, the greater his authority). More curious still was that Dr. Davin failed to maintain his composure as a man of science and lashed out in a most inappropriate manner. Alluding to the classic “Gummi syndrome,” described by himself, he accused even such an absolutely skeptical and upright scientist as Dr. Howell, Professor of Anatomy, of abnormality. This expert had merely observed, in his capacity as an anatomist, that no attempt at extricating the body of Christ from the Shroud could possibly have left the cloth in the state in which it is preserved up to our day. Moreover, it was curious that logic—a tool that Dr. Davin had always deployed powerfully and irresistibly—seemed to betray him. His arguments are imposed on his opponent by direct, importunate pressure, and his deductions ring with a pathos that boiled down to the formula: “That cannot possibly be, because it could never possibly be.”

  But we are not really concerned about his views on the infamous Shroud here. It was the fact that he took the matter of the Shroud so personally that gave us pause, compelling us to try to understand it.

  THE END OF THE SENTENCE

  (The Talking Ear)

  FROM A Fly on a Ship, A BOOK BY U. Vanoski

  IN MEMORY OF ANTON O.

  When everything moves equally, nothing moves apparently; as, for example, a fly on a ship.

  —Pascal

  Yesterday was still sunny, and I witnessed a lush sunset. The sun dropped directly into the sea. It flattened out, became oval in shape, and all but sizzled. The birds, somehow joyous and panicky at once, chirruped and twittered about it. I know they do this each time, as if they don’t believe that the sun will rise again tomorrow. I know very well why they make such a racket; although how much more seldom did I witness a living sun than the birds did!

  This is what’s hard to keep track of: what is the first time, and what is the last. People really have no true concept of time. It has set, but will it rise? We sink into sleep. Will we awaken?

  I woke up again to the chirping of the birds, which sounded not so much happy as surprised, or even frantic: no sun, no sea, no sky. The gray walls of the fortress and the other ruins merged with the absence of everything else, and dissolved like salt. Only the barely delineated mass of the Church of Our Lady floated in front of my window, like the prow of a ship running up against a reef. Like a ship’s bell, the belfry announced the damp morning hour—five o’clock. And with each stroke, the outline of the branch of a tree with indecent young foliage and a fat non-songbird grew more clearly defined. Songbirds, on the other hand, were always smaller, and stayed hidden in the foliage.

  At seven bells the birds ceased their morning work, and silence returned.

  I am on an island, albeit a Swedish one, and here I understand everything. I sailed here to be closer to my Russian subject. Russia is directly in front of me.

  * * *

  I just don’t seem to be able to come up with the plot. Perhaps it’s because it’s Russian? Russian—or from Russia?

  Russia has no plot—only space. It’s the same with the ocean. The ocean has no plot, either. Defoe or Stevenson notwithstanding—they marooned their plots on islands, like us Britons. The ocean has no subject, just as Russia has no subject: there is no experience to rest on. There are no edges. It’s an abyss. For a subject, the first thing one must do is close off space. Like theater. Like Shakespeare. True, recently we discovered a remarkable American writer. That’s where there should be no literature by definition, and yet … He yearned to make it to England, but never did. So they browbeat him at home, never recognized him, those Yankees. Now he knew how to write about the ocean!

  That’s because he divined a protagonist—the hero of his story is a whale; a white one, no less.* As huge and solitary as an island. A sort of living, floating island that one must destroy, because such a thing simply cannot be allowed to exist. Truly, an island is a must! A ship is also a floating island, though a female one, so all our pirate literature is not about the ocean, but about islands torn away from Great Britain.

  In Russia there are no islands. Out there where the islands begin, it breaks off, this Tartaria Magna. Somewhere in Japan. That is why Russia lost the war.†

  Admittedly, I have never been to Russia, so it’s not for me to judge. Maybe nomads view their steppe as an ocean, and their horses as boats? That would mean they are always sailing, and all their literature, if it exists, is also of the pirate variety—or at least about bandits. I haven’t read it, I admit. I did read War and Peace, an unparalleled book, of course; but very big. Like Russia. They say the women there are beautiful. Helens and Natashas everywhere. But why do they keep speaking French?

  I’ve never been to Russia, but I spent some good times with a certain Russian. He told me so much about it that the country coalesced in my mind into a little island, drifting along in a still unfathomable space. This memory troubles me, and I wish to unburden myself of it, turning it into a more or less ordinary plot.

  My narrator—let’s call him Anton, after the Chekhov who is suddenly all the rage in these parts—disembarked on the eve of the First World War, and made his way to a London pub that I also used to frequent when I managed to write at least something to the end, and where I would take a drop or two as my heavenly reward.

  Anton spoke English quite well, and he delighted me with the strange music of his accent, as well as, it turned out, his mind. Listening to him over a pint was magical. It was like entering a universe that was not so much Russian as Carrollian. If truth is realized as fiction in Lewis Carroll, with my Russian friend it was the opposite. Every untruth was confirmed by his own life, and fiction suddenly became reality. I will attempt to expand upon this incoherence. Perhaps out of the resulting kasha (Anton loved the expression “to boil kasha,” i.e., “porridge,” apparently a Russian calque) it will be possible through patient and steady stirring to boil up a nonexistent Russian plot.

  At the time of our first meeting, this Siberian who hailed from the village of Fathers (Batki, in Russian) announced himself as a member of Captain Robert Scott’s expedition.* Oh, the yarns people spin in pubs! The whole of Britain was shocked by the circumstances of his death and the arrival of the remainder of the expedition. I didn’t believe my drinking mate; and I was a fool not to. At our next meeting, Anton modestly showed me a medal that had just been presented to him by Her Majesty. “And she gave me a valuable gift, too!” he said, now with pride. He refused to show me the gift, however, or to elaborate on its value. “Otherwise I’ll drink it away and never make it back to Fathers,” he explained. But by that time I no longer doubted that the gift existed.

  * * *

  In Vladivostok, Lieutenant Bruce hired him to purchase Manchurian horses for the expedition in Harbin, then a Russian city. He was knowledgeable about the sturdy, compact, frost-resistant horses, since he had spent several seasons herding sheep—either to or from Mongolia … Mongolia—is that in Siberia?

  “No, it’s in Poltavshchina,” he said, and the irony of the joke was lost on me. So Mongolia is in Poltavshchina? “He doesn’t know where Poltavshchina is!” Anton guffawed. “It’s in the same place as Fathers!” My head started spinning, and we drank to Fathers. “Well, all right,” he said graciously. “Now, Mongolia isn’t China. Understand?” “All right.” “Alright? You mean okay, fine?” “Okay is American. We prefer all right.” We clinked glasses.

  * * *

  My God! Where is the subject? Every subject should begin with a portrait. But just try to describe my Anton … His portrait has no subject, either. He resembles no one else, and nothing else. Just a towheaded lump. An extremely smart one, by the way.

  He seemed to lack even the slightest reserve; but the more he open
ed up to me, the blurrier his image became, blending with the image of the country he came from.

  Everything seems to lose its substance in Russia, to become insubstantial,* spilling its contents in the course of the discourse (the more one expounds on it, the more weightless it becomes). And as it reaches its conclusion (in Russian, the word for conclusion and imprisonment is the same: zakliuchenie), it becomes so insubstantial that it disappears altogether.†

  Some of Anton’s observations and tales remain fixed in my mind, as though he nailed them there. Now, the whole of that exorbitant and excessive country of Russia seems to be hanging on those nails like a bedsheet, with far-flung stations of destiny, where yet another pint marked a thought, or a thought gave birth to yet another pint: conclusion as the end of thought, and conclusion as imprisonment.

  “If prison is an attempt to exchange space for time and then foist it upon an individual, Russia is an attempt by God to exchange time for space.”

  I liked this formulation; but I began to object, citing Newton’s laws.

  “Right, next you’ll be recalling Archimedes and his bathtub,” Anton said, interrupting me. “That’s just what I mean: there is a boundary between space and time. And this is nowhere more clear than in Russia.”

  This kind of scholasticism unnerved me utterly. “Well, where exactly is this boundary of yours to be found?” I said.

  “That’s the thing, it moves. Like a piston, or a membrane. It’s most stable in the Urals or the Caucasus. Although sometimes it runs through Moscow, too … But then it’s a crack that time falls into.”

  “What? How can that happen?”

  “Easy. A century or two just disappears.”

  “I beg your pardon, but this contradicts all common sense, not to mention the laws of physics.”

  “The laws of physics don’t apply everywhere.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Because I saw Lieutenant Evans vanish before my very eyes! Have you ever seen how ice cracks? Who knows, maybe time is a lump, and not a current.”

  Here I lost my composure altogether, which is fairly distressing for an Englishman.

  Anton calmed me down and said, “The laws of physics operate here because human laws are also observed, pulling everything into shape. You drive everything into mind.”

  How I loved these literal turns of phrase from Russian! To “drive into mind,” to “drive forth from mind” … He drove me out of my mind, but without any coercion—that was what astonished me.

  “Yes,” he said, conciliatory. “It’s a misfortune for a country when the law doesn’t operate but is still imposed.”

  “Who are you talking about now?” I was ready to parry the blow.

  “Russia, of course. Everything is in order with you. Here, pre-ce-dent reigns.”

  “There are no precedents in Russia?”

  “In Russia, everything is a precedent. That’s why you defer to it.”

  “Who imposes it on you, in that case?”

  “Which who would that be?”

  “The law.”

  “Oh, I see. You mean whose side is the law on? On the side of the power.”

  “But what is this power?”

  “The most unbridled form of passion.”

  “Passion?”

  Anton launched into a homily about the hierarchy of senses (the power vertical), but I had already had enough. I refused to understand and went off to sleep without having grasped why we have not five senses but seven, like musical notes or colors in a spectrum.

  * * *

  “Russia isn’t a backward country, by any means. It’s a country ahead of its time.”

  “How can that be, since it already exists?”

  “Maybe it exists, and maybe it doesn’t.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Perhaps it is merely stored up for future use, not for present consumption.”

  “The whole length and breadth of it?”

  “Any way you slice it. Makes no difference. The main question is: Why did we seize so much land, if not for future use? We made it all the way to California! We could have snatched up your Canada along the way. Easy! Only we had already forgotten where we had come from, and then we turned back. And regurgitated Alaska. What a misfortune. Giving it to you wouldn’t have been so bad—but to the Americans?”

  “And what are you going to do with this territory you have so much of?

  “Look whose cow is mooing!”

  “What do cows have to do with it?

  “You grabbed half the globe, and now you’re stealing it black, blue, and blind!”

  “Are you referring to the slave trade?”

  “And that’s not all! The whole thing’s a disgrace. But we don’t do anything with all our land—we keep it on hand, just in case. That’s what I meant when I said ‘for future use.’ Just wait until we’ve panned enough gold. Then we’ll buy out Alaska along with India. We’ll overpay, of course; we’re profligate.”

  “According to that logic, Anton, you’re the most calculating of all nations. Who are you Russians, anyway? Tartars? Mongols?”

  “Not at all. I explained it to Scott this way: Russians are half-baked Germans, half-baked Jews, and half-baked Japanese. All rolled up into one. One and a half people.”

  “Why Japanese?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because you didn’t ask me about Jews and Germans.”

  “Fine. Let’s take them one at a time.”

  “It will take too long. You’ll get tired.”

  I took offense at this. “Don’t you think we’re speaking two different languages here?”

  “You just noticed?”

  I laughed out loud. He had caught me out.

  “Where you use one word, we use two, and vice versa. An example? Well, ‘earth’; or ‘birthplace.’ Earth, zemlya, for us means both land and the planet Earth. But ‘birthplace’ means different things in Russian, depending on whether it’s written as one word or two. It’s either a mineral deposit (mestorozhdenie) or the place one was born (mesto rozhdeniya). Let’s say I was born in Fathers, in my father’s place. That’s my birthplace. But I panned for gold at a birthplace in Zabaikal. You wouldn’t talk about a birthplace of gold, would you? But that’s what we say.”

  I liked Anton. And he sensed this. “Here’s the thing: the Russian is like a mineral deposit, like gold. You just have to prospect for him, dig him out, wash him off, and enrich him. Then there’s the language. We have one, of course. Quite a respectable one, at that. No worse than yours. You don’t have to dig it up, enrich it, or wash it off—only prospect for it. Our word is a nugget. It hasn’t yet decayed into synonyms. Ours is a word of unbroken ambiguity.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, what do you suppose is the most important thing in your language?”

  “Umm…”

  “Well, who governs whom? Who’s the boss?” It took me a while to realize he was talking about parts of speech. “Why, the verb, of course!” Anton was thrilled by my lack of acumen. “No wonder you have so many tenses.”

  Say what you will, a compliment to your mother tongue is as pleasant to the ear as caresses to a cat. And I agreed that it was the verb.

  “And what do the Germans have?” Anton said.

  “Do you mean to say you know German, too?”

  “I don’t even want to! I only know that every thing starts with a capital letter, and that they bow down before all their things: der Table, der Chair, das Book, das Ladle.”

  “An interesting observation,” I said. I wasn’t offended on behalf of the Germans. “I quite like Russian, too. It’s musical, like Portuguese. Those shushing sounds alone…”

  Now Anton was pleased.

  “Yes, we have a good imagination. Zhopa (‘rear end’), shchaste (‘happiness’),” he said, savoring the sounds. “Strange that in this case we do take things to the end, bring them to a full stop. That’s the one thing that a
ll languages have in common—a period. The end of the sentence must be marked by a period.* Do you sense the difference between a sentence† and a proposal? Here you have the fissure between freedom and the deed! Mohammedanism…”

  “What do Russians have to do with all this?”

  “I’m getting there.” Here he swung around like a boomerang. “With us it’s not verbs or nouns—just adjectives. Even the Russian word russky is an adjective; maybe it modifies the noun ‘man,’ but that word is missing.” Anton’s face grew markedly sad. “No man.” This “no man” sounded particularly tender and musical, almost like “knowmen” or “noumenon.” It almost seemed to me that it was accompanied by a sob.

  I didn’t understand what he meant by Mohammedanism, and we parted, each returning to our different languages. Na pososhok.*

  * * *

  Here’s what we spoke about the next day: the same thing.

  When I expressed somewhat strongly my surprise at the paradoxes in his thinking, Anton reddened, slightly embarrassed, then looked at me with downcast eyes and muttered, “It’s not really me, it’s my Tishka.”