The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  The priest who had broken with the Church, for example, we refused from the outset, and not because we were so devout. We simply didn’t like him or his novel. The Gospel According to the Tempter was its title, and it fully deserved it.

  According to the story, along with the canonical gospels, others were found in a secret cave. These were the gospels of Thomas, Phillip, and other apostles, including Mary Magdalene, and even Judas. Now, the Gospel of Judas suggested that Jesus was an ordinary extraterrestrial, an intelligence agent, and knew beforehand that he would either be saved or resurrected. He was certain of this. Judas knew that Jesus’ origins were extraterrestrial, rather than divine, and he sacrificed himself to maintain the authenticity of the myth of Jesus, not to undermine the Teachings, which he believed more implicitly than anyone else.

  In this sense, it was Judas who sacrificed himself and thus deserves the worship of all humanity. The author played up trivial contradictions and discrepancies in the canonical texts to substantiate and further develop his subject. Suddenly it became irksome and boring to listen to all of this. We advised the defrocked priest to repent before it was too late and return to the humble service in which he had been ordained. As for ourselves, we decreed that introducing an extraterrestrial into the plot was unworthy of a self-respecting author.

  The hope-inspiring politician did not live up to our standards, either, but for completely different reasons. (I’m afraid we may have envied him: he was wellborn and well-fed, like Hamlet, but was absolutely unconcerned with the problem of whether “to be or not to be.” He was—perhaps even too much so. He wore his suits well, he sipped his cognac elegantly, and he smoked his cigars with aplomb.) Although his unwritten novel, The History of the 2Xth Centuries, was, to be honest, not altogether bad, I couldn’t help but object to the fact that his novel, like mine, involved time travel.

  In his book, a schoolboy from the end of the twenty-first century disobeys his teacher during a history lesson. He plucks, and then eats, a forbidden fruit during a school field trip through the twentieth century. He begins to experience terrible abdominal pain (imagine the trouble a product that had outlived its shelf life by a whole century might cause), and strayed from the strictly regulated, neutral path for a moment to answer nature’s call. After relieving himself in the last century, he was forced to use the only thing that came to hand—namely, a page from the textbook in which everything about the twentieth century had already been revealed. This page was subsequently picked up by some secret service agent or other, and since they took an interest in the events at the end of their own century, they tried to deflect them. This unleashed catastrophes connected with the fracturing of time and gave rise to a host of undesirable regimes that might otherwise have been avoided. Trying like the best of them, the secret services thus managed to make the history of the twentieth century even worse. In other words, the novel made visible the polysemic vicissitudes of the future and the role of chance or blind Fate (though not Providence) in determining the subsequent incontrovertible course of events.

  I began to dispute this principle of indeterminacy, insisting on the role of Providence; the highly educated Barley supported me, prompting me with a corresponding term (determinism). Gerda, however, was the one who really rose to the occasion, saying that a subject that was so dependent on gastroenterology was sorely lacking, if only on aesthetic grounds, and that if history was really like this, then history as a subject was similarly dubious, aesthetically. (In hindsight, I think we rejected the hope-inspiring politician for another reason—for his recently published book, which enjoyed great success.) We advised him to devote himself to politics, which he did. (He was successful there, too, perhaps because he was so familiar with the laws of digestion.*)

  After such a charismatic politician, it became easier for us to dismiss the other candidates. The professor of physical chemistry wearied us with a concept about the concept—i.e., with the plot of how his plot refused to take shape (and that’s what the novel, dispiritingly, was called: The Plot). The professor tried to tell the story of how a Russian saw the Periodic Table of the Elements in a dream. The narrative was packed with detail—interesting primarily to the specialist—as well as with incomprehensible Russian jokes. We dozed off, and considered the whole dream to be highly improbable.

  Another professor (an astronomer and closeted astrologist), with his “almost finished” novel The Centennial of Abolishing the Calendar (we nixed the title without a second thought as being too complex for a pun), tried to restore Kabbala to modern consciousness, reuniting letters with numbers again. We sensed that he was encroaching upon our monopoly of anagrams, and we made a feast of him, then spat him out like a bone, telling him he should finish his novel first, and then not come back to us.

  We grew sad.

  “It’s about time that one of us, at least, finished something.” Barley sighed.

  We bristled.

  “Have you perhaps become too exacting?” Gerda said acrimoniously.

  “Isn’t it time we lit the fire?” I suggested.

  “We need new blood,” Oneday insisted.

  “Aren’t we becoming too bloodthirsty?” My voice sounded strange in my own ears. “Because I have someone in mind.”

  “We need a charter!” we all said in a chorus.

  And so we charted new territory without budging from the spot, in our new …

  CHARTER

  1. Complete freedom of the word! (That is to say, no working on the word—let the word work on the author.)

  2. The responsibility of the author to his characters cannot be less than the demands he places on himself.

  3. An orientation toward authenticity of imagination—i.e., a ban on any subjects involving great people (there are already enough of them), and also on so-called science fiction.

  4. Difficulties in writing the text signify not laziness but the complexity of the task.

  5. Everyone is free not to write whatever they wish.

  6. One may write only what actually allows itself to be written.

  7. Books and manuscripts are not read, and not returned.

  8. An unpublished author who submits to an examination by any of the active members of the Club is considered to be a corresponding member.

  9. A member of the Club is permitted to publish a work only when all other members of the Club consider it to be finished.

  10. Upon publication of a work, the author’s membership in the Club is automatically annulled.

  11. The decision to admit a new member to the Club must be unanimous.

  12. The Club will dissolve itself if one of the members raises himself or herself to a level above the others.

  NB:

  a. The General Secretary does not have the right to vote.

  b. The President has a consultative vote.

  c. A decision may always be postponed until the next meeting.

  Points two and three inspired a great deal of argument.

  “Hold your horses!” Oneday said indignantly. “You mean to say I can’t kill my own character? Perhaps I’m not even permitted to let him lose his mind or to commit suicide? What are we supposed to write about, then? About ourselves? How can one discern a subject in the plotlessness of one’s own life? In that case, this vaunted ‘freedom of the word’ turns into a ban on writing anything at all!”

  Barley agreed and suggested that we banish from the ranks of literary protagonists all monsters and maniacs, who are too apt to unbind the hands of the author in constructing a plot.

  Gerda, sensible as always, suggested that the name of the Club be tied to its charter, and that it henceforth be called the Society for the Protection of Literary Protagonists from Their Authors, thus linking it to more socially conscious themes like the preservation of cultural heritage and environmental conservation. Somehow, things always came down to birds with Gerda …

  Numbers four, five, and six did not give rise to any controversy among us. It was, effectively, the same
idea, formulated in three different ways by each of the three founding fathers of the Club.

  We had the sense not to wrangle, and to judge each formulation on its own merits.

  This was not uppermost in my mind—I didn’t really listen, but pondered how I was going to rescue my work on Laurence Sterne from the prohibition on writing about great people.

  “But look,” I said, “how can Sterne be considered great if everyone has forgotten about him? He is better known in some backwater called Russia than he is in his native England. In the Britannica he got less than one column. Who’s running that outfit, anyway? I’m dedicating my novel, Rule Britannica, to the bureaucrat who two centuries later settles his personal accounts with a genius. Imagine, he called Sterne an ‘eighteenth-century English humorist and son of an officer,’ while some paltry Jerome K. Jerome was deemed worthy of being called ‘Author’! I happen to think that Sterne was the genuine forefather of our movement—after all, he never finished anything he wrote. He even succumbed to a self-induced illness and died, after demanding too much of himself so as not to have to finish anything … A tragic, heroic fate. I propose that we take this Nietzsche off the wall and replace him with a portrait of Sterne, and that our Club adopt his noble name.”

  I sat down, my heart pounding, unable to see or hear anything in my agitation. And it was all for nought, for it was instead article C in the notes that resulted in the most lively discussion.

  Changing the Club to a Society was desirable, argued Gerda, from practical motives, as well: taxes, publicity, etc. (There was some suspicion that this proposal came at the instigation of Murito, who didn’t have the right to vote himself.)

  As a result, my point was not discussed at all (everyone had already read Tristram Shandy on my advice, and adjudged it favorably), and I was entrusted with the task of and that I was just one step away from transforming my friends from mere admirers of Sterne into true Sternians. Article C of the notes to the Charter was reformulated thus: To continue the discussion of the question of renaming the Club.

  * * *

  At the next meeting I brought in a portrait and hung it up. No one noticed.

  Insofar as the goal of the Society was now formulated as the “protection of literary protagonists,” it was decided to adopt the name not of Sterne but of Tristram Shandy for the Club. This suggestion originated with Barley, and no one objected, least of all me.

  We really had grown a bit tired of our bloodthirstiness. In spite of our rigorous Charter, the examination of my candidate went exceptionally smoothly.

  Everyone liked him immediately: a former musician, very flighty and fidgety, resembling a red-haired Negro, who had never read anything, he showed up without his instrument (the last thing we needed in the Club was a double bass), armed with not one but two unwritten novels, and another one that had just occurred to him, and thus was simply “premature.” We were won over by his fecundity; but the main thing was that a “fateful” anagram could be derived from his names. He started out as, simply, Michael, and became M. Viol de Clavier (thereafter simply “Viol”). His curriculum vitae suited the anagram, too.

  He was the beloved and stubborn protégé of a famous old organist, who had placed great hopes in him; but Viol managed to break his hand in a motor-racing accident. It lost its former flexibility, and Viol set off to study philosophy at a Swedish university in Uppsala, but never found anything pertaining to Swedenborg there, and so set out for Japan to learn the language, for which he very quickly had no time, and then returned home to his father, mother, and music, adapting himself to the double bass as an instrument that required less two-handed dexterity, though he still considered, nevertheless, the option of buying a small hotel in hopes that he could play before a select public. The fact that he was the author of three unwritten works could not help but appeal to us, but we advised him to focus on not writing just one of them.

  Viol chose the title Fathers and Sons—the father being Johann Sebastian Bach. The novel was rejected in compliance with rule number 3 of the Charter. However much Viol tried to prove, addressing his pleas for some reason to Gerda, that the novel was not about the greatness but about the disparagement of Bach, belittled by his own children, who shunted him aside as a has-been for more than a century, right up until his “discovery” by Mendelssohn, that the novel would be about the children, who flouted their father as God, and, thus, God as the father—for all of us, Bach remained God, and we declined to accept the novel.

  “Come on, I’m the organist, and not you!” Viol looked beseechingly at Gerda. “I’m the one who betrayed my old teacher, who was like a father to me, and not you. I know from my own experience what I am writing about: I’m the one who saw Bach alive, and not you!”

  “What do you mean, you saw him alive?” we all asked in a chorus.

  “That’s how I will begin my novel, I think.” And Viol took a sheaf of papers from his pocket.

  We were unable to stop him—he had already begun to read. That was not our way, but we were too late. We had no choice but to listen.

  A certain “I” (the author?) wanders through an old, unfamiliar city, and suddenly senses inexplicably that behind this little door lives Bach himself. Without any deliberation, he knocks, and a venerable old Frau opens and invites him to wait. He waits, and hears how behind the door fragments of the St. Matthew Passion are coming together. As he is himself a musician, one can imagine what he must have been feeling at that moment! Finally, the door opens, and a strange man emerges, completely bald—still not Bach yet. Then the narrator realizes that he doesn’t speak a word of German and starts repeating “Bach! Bach! Bach!” over and over again. “Ich bin Bach!” the old man says obstreperously, and this is when our hero realizes that this is indeed Bach, only without his wig. He wakes up in horror, and finds himself back in our own time; but he knows that he saw the living Bach, because that single detail—that he didn’t wear his wig at home—was not something he could have thought up himself.

  “So it’s a dream!” Oneday objected.

  “I quite liked it,” Barley said.

  “The wig part was very convincing” was Gerda’s response to Viol’s presentation.

  And we changed the wording of our judgment: the novel was not rejected, but—its state of unwrittenness was approved.

  The difference was significant, but Viol didn’t accept it.

  He was all the more persistent about his second concept, which was about Rossini.

  Which we rejected just as strenuously, in accordance with the same rule number 3 of the Charter.

  “Don’t you understand?” Viol fumed, now addressing himself solely to Gerda. “First, Rossini is certainly no match for Bach. Second, I am only interested in Rossini after he gave up music for good and devoted himself heart and soul to the culinary arts. Third, it’s not even a novel; it’s a libretto for an opera.”

  We were indignant about that. Bringing us some sort of libretto!

  It was decided that we would introduce an addendum to the Charter banning plays and scripts, to say nothing of librettos, from consideration.

  “And what are you going to serve us for dessert, what with your fascination with cookery?” Gerda said, smirking. “Mozart?”

  “How did you guess?” Viol turned a dark red.

  “The third one suggests itself,” Gerda said secretively.

  “Besides,” Barley said with a sneer, “can you really consider Mozart to be one of the Greats?”

  “Strictly speaking, the novel is not about Mozart but about Salieri,” Viol murmured.

  “The poisoner?” Oneday said. “But, then—poison and cookery are certainly related…”

  “Not at all! That is precisely why I had my doubts about the poisoning.”

  We sighed, and poured ourselves another glass of sherry. Since we had already listened to two, we might as well hear the third.

  Viol built his hypothesis-novel on two assumptions: the suddenness of Mozart’s death, and the reason for
that suddenness.

  The description of Mozart’s death is truly intriguing: he did not take ill, but suddenly and mysteriously lost the life force. He melted away like a candle, faded like a heavenly body, set like the sun (“deflated like a balloon,” as Viol put it), as though he really had been poisoned.

  Viol did seem to agree with the story that Salieri had been the poisoner, though not in the literal, dastardly sense that had been passed down in legend. Salieri’s poison was far subtler, far more refined and lethal than any alchemy: his poison was enlightenment.

  Mozart was more brilliant, but Salieri was more competent. For more than thirty years (beginning when he was four) Mozart had been without peer (and thus remained a four-year-old), never thinking about who he really was: whom he had surpassed, or who had gone before him. If you are the one and only, you have no need to compare yourself to anyone. Salieri, who admired Mozart more deeply than anyone else, understood the difference between first and second only too well. He enticed Wolfgang with various fashionable novelties, but Wolfgang knew everything beforehand: there could be nothing entirely newfangled to him.

  Salieri, however, was patient, and waited to seize his opportunity.

  Mozart really did accept the grim commission of a requiem mass from a mysterious stranger; as always, he was in need of cash and couldn’t resist the down payment. The task oppressed him; at first, work proceeded slowly and with difficulty, while the deadline loomed. Salieri got wind of a first performance of a certain mass by some forgotten composer, and lured Mozart out to hear it. “You’ll enjoy it; it will shake you out of your doldrums,” Salieri said. He was able to persuade him. And as soon as Mozart had agreed, he felt his mass begin to inch forward, and then to gather lightness and speed. He felt himself approaching the limits of his strength, and this always heralded the same inscrutable something: the singularity and uniqueness of creation! Either you die, collapsing onto the pages of your manuscript, or you soar ever higher until you reach the apex and finish by drinking away your joy in the first tavern. He desperately wanted a drink.