The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  reminding me of dreams.

  I rummaged in the upholstery—

  flowers of a southern genus, perhaps Italian …

  how had they grown here?—

  on a small, neat, dusty glade

  the letter lay.

  III.

  As always, a carelessness may be observed in space:

  here is the chink in the floor where light squeezes through—

  what’s down below? An ominous, raucous feast;

  thank God they don’t have time for me.

  Suddenly—a spat, a quarrel, untuned voices

  rise, and doors are slammed!

  Then vulgar laughter:

  “Don’t mind him!”—and they leave forever.

  It’s fine this way, they say.

  My objects sleep,

  they borrowed shadows from the places of the past …

  Like light, extinguished, hurries into shade!

  A cry trembles somewhere near the throat!

  Your objects harbor so much inner horror,

  changing unaccountably:

  then return and take their seats again.

  There on the nail hangs my overcoat,

  there is no person in it, and yet,

  hostile velvet lines the collar

  and the shadow of the nail basks in the light …

  I fathom not the world of my salvations!

  Frightened so by various trifles that

  betrayed me imperceptibly and subtly—

  a mailbox, found all of a sudden

  instead of a bedside table

  did not surprise me in the least

  but rather touched me … I smiled

  and in the chink I stuck a finger,

  “That’s that,”

  I thought calmly,

  and, not taking off my shoes,

  flopped down on my back, arms folded:

  “Is it possible to spit up to the ceiling?”

  My head was filled with simple thoughts:

  whether to put the kettle on, or steam the postage

  stamps, a present for my daughter.

  “Yes, yes. Come in!”

  But no one’s there.

  The letter’s missing. Gone. Whereto?

  In the dust a flattened trace, a distinct letter-shape—

  but it’s not there. The subject, quite amusingly,

  lay down to sleep some more …

  It’s time for dawn to break,

  for me to yawn: how crumpled is the envelope of the bed!

  The lamp hangs like a seal

  from the envelope of the ceiling,

  the stove is closed up like a letter,

  the hardwood cracks form oblong letters …

  and a crazed pigeon sits atop the windowsill,

  where the return address of sleep is written.

  IV.

  A scientific fact: the epistolary genre

  gave birth to the novel in days of yore …

  Oh, there were ways in the Dark Ages

  to know the gift of life and understand the game:

  to perish or to die—

  and savor

  freedom of choice,

  while leaving it all up to chance …

  As if they knew it all, as if

  they read the book of life before their birth

  and knew the novel written about them

  during their lifetimes …

  Fortune is unique!

  The words FATE and PASSION are about them, them,

  and them!

  For us! For us!—the theater of their movements:

  an alcove destiny, the airy handwriting of swords,

  the fall—finality … the novel

  Notes of a Homing Pigeon—marvelous!

  V.

  A picture from my childhood: “The Unfaithful Wife

  Slain by the Final Kiss.”

  The shoulder is bared diligently,

  a blossom falls from the corsage

  and the waving of the captive’s handkerchief—

  for the future medium of film—

  here the “little bird flies” into a prison window,

  a dove, its wings beating feathery clouds …

  The convent wall, smothered with ivy,

  a wafer drops into the wine,

  and all grows dark before your eyes,

  but jealous steel sweats underneath the cloak—

  in the shadow of the wall, covered with ivy,

  the jangle of spurs and clatter of feet on stairs …

  The visuals here gain in strength

  (so our cameraman would have the time)—

  so long lasts the kiss of the parting lines …

  And life is worth the death! The gaze is worth the risk

  right now! right now! Then—obliging poison …

  What in this ritual is the life span?

  Oh, knowledge that life is happening right now!

  The impossibility of division into parts,

  happily called by the name of “passion,”

  which until now still makes you ache with woe:

  “You?” “Me.” “When? …” “Now!”—

  This is the buried root of the word happy.

  The time is nigh for me to leave for home, or from the same—

  the road is “happily” all too familiar.

  VI.

  We will live in the past! And this is Heaven—

  knowing in the future that the mistake of

  our lives we commit just once—

  and that is all.

  Life is rude and death is courteous

  if only in the sense that it does not

  leave us, like pain.

  Death is true to us, and our infidelity to it

  does not deter it. It is patient. It waits for us.

  How much longer before we meet? An eternal instant—

  to grow younger, back to the initial smack

  and become the nothing that looks at me …

  with such profound love …

  I will not be the worse for it.

  POSTHUMOUS NOTES OF THE TRISTRAM CLUB

  (The Inevitability of the Unwritten)

  FROM A Paper Sword, BY U. Vanoski

  Others rigged the sails …

  —Alex Cannon

  There were three of us. Together we didn’t row, together we didn’t finish Cambridge, together we didn’t make our careers, together we planned to become writers. Together we never became them. One of us received an inheritance that was too generous. Another received an education that was too fine (at Oxford) and then opened a shop in the tradition of a Dickensian curiosity shop, but the other way round—the same kinds of inconsequential odds and ends, only modern. However strange it might seem, this shop became fashionable, and business took off. Then the business expanded, he stopped going to the store himself, entrusting it to his managers and executives, and continued only to rummage through catalogues in search of his one-of-a-kind, sometimes outlandish wares: an umbrella cum chair, a nostril-hair trimmer, a bottle opener/cigarette lighter, and so on. Myself, I learned to live without everything except disorder—in other words, I didn’t do anything, either.

  The moneybags was called William; the shopkeeper, though he had the most aristocratic roots of all of us, was called, simply, John; and I am myself. Ernest, that is.

  Although we had not become writers, we did become—I am certain of this—very talented readers.

  I think that this was what united us: the more stringent our tastes grew, the less frequently we differed in opinion. Oh, I forgot to mention (and this may prove to be important in the future) that we were inveterate, dare I say committed, bachelors. I won’t try to account for how this happened to the others—those are their private affairs. Instead, I will tell you how it happened to me.

  Gerda Uvich-Barashkou (of Polish-Romanian extraction) was the epitome of beauty, and a highly intelligent epitome of beauty, I might add. I confessed my everlasting love to her, and s
he answered me in kind. Happiness and good fortune should not exceed their proper measure either, however. In her somewhat peculiar English she told me, “I will marry you”; yet I shied away from the suit, and hesitated to accept her hand right away. Moreover, John and William tried to talk me out of it. As a result, she later refused me thrice, even though we were living together all the while. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that John and William were not in love with her themselves, but by the time it had become awkward for me to bring up the subject of marriage a fourth time, she had already become my dearest friend—as she was John and William’s. She was the only one of us who had professional commitments: she translated all sorts of unlikely languages, including her native Romanian and Polish, wrote critical essays, and reviewed new books. So it was only natural for us to propose that she become the president of our Club.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to begin with an account of how our Club was born.

  The Club was born quite naturally, by means of degeneration.

  At first the three of us met at William’s to read each other what we had written.

  “Come on, you go first!” we told each other, and all of us balked. “Well, I only have fragments, just a few sketchy notes really.” “I just started on it.” “Mine is just a vague concept so far.” Those sorts of things.

  “Go ahead, we’re waiting,” two of us would say, ganging up on the third. “But it isn’t ripe yet, I’m afraid to read it out loud.” Or: “I’m superstitious. If I tell you the plot, it will dry up.” Or … In other words, there was always some excuse, until, after the second or third glass, one of us felt inspired, and, convinced that he was more talented than the others, began to regale us with another in a string of ingenious gambits. “I could never wrap my mind around how Shakespeare and Cervantes, clearly not knowing anything about each other, contrived to die on the very same day. Be that as it may, one day…” and he was off and running. The upshot was that it did not seem so improbable to us as it did to him, and the narrator retired, dispirited and perplexed, while the spirits of the other two, on the contrary, soared unaccountably. The unlucky fellow was dubbed “Oneday,” which thereafter became his nickname. It was all the more fitting since all the letters were contained in his middle name and surname. Who among us was Oneday? Why, William, of course!

  Our system was of a strictly closed variety, and outsiders were no less strictly forbidden entry.

  One day William Oneday ran into an old friend of his father’s, Jerome K. Jerome,* and invited him to dine with us. We revered the venerable old man for his wonderful book, the heroes of which we were wont to compare ourselves to. Among ourselves we also admitted that we admired him for the fact that he never wrote anything so outstanding again. So we could not refuse Oneday.

  Oneday coughed up the money for a lavish spread, and we ate our supper and sang away before the Maestro.

  * * *

  The novel that John was “writing” (Tea or Coffee?), and which he now recounted in a somewhat abridged version, was about an unhappy love affair between a man and two sisters, about the flaming jealousy of one sister for another, and the jealousy they triggered in him. The Maestro was digesting. Seated in a soft armchair, he snuffled quietly, his magnificent silver mustache hovering above the ivory knob of his cane, on top of which he propped his chin solidly. His face was frozen in a mask of unwavering benevolence. His opinion about John’s composition, however, was unequivocal.

  “You shouldn’t marry either one of them, not to mention both.”

  Then he heard out the next story.

  Oneday’s novella (Hamlet’s Legacy) was devoted to the idea of patronage as a vocation and purpose in life. Two prominent manufacturers meet at an annual trade fair in London and argue about why they are amassing money, and on whom they should spend it. One of them, who was from Barcelona, spends his on the architectural follies of young Gaudí, and the other, who was from Germany, spends his on the healthy, mature, and farsighted ideas of Karl Marx. Both of them consider their protégés to be geniuses.

  At the word “genius,” the old Maestro started:

  “First off, I’ve never heard of them. But then again, I’ve never understood a thing about economics, much less architecture. How about you, young man?”

  The young man in question was Yours Truly.

  “Not a word about music, though!” he warned categorically. “I’m tone-deaf.”

  I decided to flatter the old man, comparing him to my beloved Sterne. My story was called “Sterne’s Laughter” and told about how an admirer of Tristram Shandy travels back in time in a time machine to record the jokes and laughter of the remarkable writer on a phonograph, and how he manages to meet him. But when he returns to his own time, the apparatus, instead of laughter, reproduces only snorting and unadulterated snoring.

  At the word “snoring,” Jerome K. Jerome woke up with a start.

  “Who is this Sterne? And where is he? Is it you?” he asked me.

  I didn’t deny it.

  “We’ve had enough of your Wellses and Conan Doyles,” he said, struggling out of the armchair with some difficulty. “You’re good lads … Go ahead and write, if you must.”

  “Well, whose story do you think he liked best?” John snapped at me with unjustified venom.

  “Yours, of course,” I retorted.

  “We need new blood,” William said, when he came back after seeing the old man out. “I have someone in mind who inspires hope.”

  And so we introduced the post of corresponding member, appointing Jerome K. Jerome our Honorary Chairman. (I can’t vouch for whether he would have agreed, had he known about it.) We hung his portrait on the wall (though to this very day I’m not sure we didn’t confuse his picture with that of Nietzsche). The number of corresponding members increased, but our hopes did not.

  First a physical chemist joined our ranks, then a defrocked priest, then there was either an astronomer or an astrologer, and once we even had a hope-inspiring politician. That was when we came up with the idea (lest all our discussions be in vain) for our Club to sponsor something called the GNRP: the Great New Reader’s Prize. Everyone was in favor of it, this cockamamie idea.

  “It’s getting crowded,” Oneday said morosely. “We need to expand.”

  He had just come into another inheritance from an aunt, who left him a small house, and he was faced with the difficult choice of either selling it or keeping it for his own use.

  As a consequence, the idea of moving to his aunt’s until such time as the legal rights to the inheritance came into force presented itself. The prospect of a dedicated space could not but bring with it questions about the organizational structure, that is, who would be in charge of all of this.

  I proposed our mutual lady friend as a candidate for acting president, and the motion was carried with as much unanimity as enthusiasm.

  Gerda agreed, but in view of the large volume of work that would be expected of her, she demanded there be a position of executive secretary created (she had someone in mind for the job). Murito Pilavut was also of mixed ancestry, but with Asian roots: he hailed from one of the countries squeezed between the English and Russian colonies with the commonplace ending of “-stan.” He wrote and spoke English even better than Gerda herself, and agreed to the most paltry compensation, with the proviso that we rename his post general secretary. We acceded to this small demand, and so he was appointed. His responsibilities, in addition to the unavoidable official ones, included recording the minutes and preserving confidentiality (for which we acquired a safe, the only key to which remained in Gerda’s hands).

  * * *

  And so, we moved our base of operations to the aunt’s residence in a quiet, leafy part of London. After we lit a fire in the fireplace, as well as in our pipes, we began to discuss, over port and sherry, what was new on the literary translation scene (so as not to become embroiled in the local literary process), with the aim of choosing the worthiest candidate for the Best F
oreign Book award. During our deliberations we again veered off into a discussion about the prospects for our future unwritten works.

  It all ended, invariably, with our getting out a jigsaw puzzle, solving a crossword, or playing a game of charades, and before long we had hatched a new game that was a version of anagrams.

  The point of departure was:

  THERE IS NO IDEA THAT CANNOT BE EXPRESSED MORE SIMPLY.

  The principle boiled down to this: every complex word consists of many simpler words that together contain its letters. The first example we came across was so convincing that we got personal. It turned out that a great person was embodied in the letters of his own name (given name and surname)—thus, his entire fate and character are encompassed in one or several key words derived from it. (How delighted I was to discover that both sense and sentence were contained in Laurence Sterne!) Leaving the ranks of the great, we had the temerity to start right in on ourselves. Now we wrestled with our own names, trying to discover the various ways in which they could be twisted and rendered.

  Our own names didn’t yield such a bountiful harvest as the names of the famous and celebrated: we had to content ourselves with simple nicknames.

  Oneday already had one. John had become Barleycorn—Barley for short. I plucked a suitable one for myself out of Tristram Shandy: Shydream. The others were envious and objected, however. Ernest must know the vital importance of being Earnest! Thus, Wilde’s verdict prevailed.

  And so we became Oneday, Barley, and Earnest. “We are alive until fate falls into place,” we concluded. Whether to use the results of our tinkering as pseudonyms in our writing was still a hotly debated topic among us.

  Everyone was satisfied, however. After all, that’s what the Club was for—so we could feel like gentlemen, rather than half-wits.

  Murito carefully recorded the progress of the performance, then hid the minutes in the safe as we looked on, locked it up, tugged the door to make sure it was fast, and handed the key to our president, Gerda. (I should note that these two, as official personages, appear under coded names in our minutes. These code names mean nothing from the perspective of anagrammatical Fate.)

  * * *

  Thus, there were five of us: Gerda, Oneday, Barley, Earnest, and Murito (not counting the corresponding members). A quintet, as it were. We had now become far more demanding with regard to the choice of corresponding members.