The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Enter Salieri. It turned out that three days had passed like a single day, and now it was time.

  “Time for what?”

  “To hear that mass. You promised.”

  He had caught him at a moment of utter exhaustion.

  And Mozart followed Salieri as though on a leash. Like a sacrificial lamb.

  Salieri knew where he was taking him, but he had no idea what Mozart would hear, what he would drink in with his ears.

  It was the St. Matthew Passion.

  On the way home, Wolfgang had too much to drink and didn’t say a word to Salieri. He recalled how they, together with his friend Carl Philipp Emanuel—all of them carefree, clever, and ingenuous—drank up a trifling sum that they had received in exchange for some ancient and decrepit clavichord belonging to Philipp’s father.

  When he returned home, he plunked himself down at the clavier and started to compose, unable to accompany himself with his left hand, and hardly able to hold the pen in his right.

  But the ink ran out. He tried to call someone to replenish it … and slowly slumped down in the chair, then fell over and sank to the floor.

  And it is true—however brilliant Mozart’s mass is, it is the only piece in his whole oeuvre that bears the imprint of influence, and that influence is Bach’s.

  Two suns cannot rise at the same time on the horizon of our planet!

  Oh, if only he had known about this earlier! Such a thing might never have occurred.

  Now, however, we have both of them: Bach and Mozart.

  We were silent, waiting for someone to speak first.

  “In your hypothesis you claim that Mozart knew nothing about the elder Bach, but what about his Well-Tempered Clavier?” said Gerda. “After that piece, Mozart’s own music acquires a new impulse and develops apace, leading right up to his great mass.”

  (I never knew that she was so well-versed in music.)

  Viol looked defeated.

  “You’re right, there is that piece. Why didn’t I make the connection? That kills my subject.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Oneday with a flourish of the hand. “Such a novel is not even within the power of Dr. Mann. And you’re no Faustus, either.”

  And we decided, all the same, to approve this unwritten novel of his, on the strength of which we accepted Viol as an active member of the Club.

  Only on the condition, however, that the mediocre Salieri be promoted to main character, and that the genius, Mozart, be demoted to a minor character. As always, we spent more time deliberating over the title than anything else. The Man Who Never Heard Bach didn’t work for a number of reasons. First, it was a bit long, and already refuted by Gerda. Second, because of Chesterton.* Third (and everyone applauded the unexpected subtlety of this remark by Barley), the contents of the work are already revealed in the title. Another title, which Viol proposed at that point—The Seeing Ear—was categorically rejected by Gerda, giving me reason to suspect, yet again, her feelings for me: she knew very well how long and hard I had not been writing my novel The Talking Ear. In the end, a decision was made that Viol continue working on the title.

  He looked inspired by our decision, and we were satisfied.

  But that was not why he exulted.

  “You can’t begin to imagine,” he said to Gerda, his eyes burning with excitement, “how perfectly you have rescued my poor plot! Bach was belittled and abused by his children a bit too much, and Mozart, metaphorically speaking, was like Bach’s son born out of wedlock. But Mozart was the first of them to hear the authentic Bach already in The Well-Tempered Clavier—and then he went further, spurring himself on to catch up with him, and then to surpass him. What gardener had led him to this powerful trunk, that everyone already considered to be a dead tree! It was in the mass that they melded together and became completely conjoined. However tragic it may have seemed for Mozart to hear the Passion for the first time, he heard his own music, and no one else’s. He blended into it, coincided with it, never feeling the influence of his predecessor, because the Teacher of both of them was one and the same.”

  “Would you look at that!” Oneday burst out. “He has already crossbred both his novels. What about Rossini? Perhaps he abandoned music after hearing Mozart for the first time?”

  “That would be wonderful, if it were true.” Viol sighed. “Then I could unite all of them under the title The Three Masses!”

  * * *

  And so, we became Oneday, Barley, Earnest, Viol, Gerda, and Murito. A sextet.

  But enough is enough. Suddenly, something ended. Something happened.

  Murito received urgent news from his homeland and had to leave us at once.

  Talking without a record of the proceedings had become dull. This was how we explained to ourselves the disappearance of Viol, although he himself explained it differently: he was returning to his project of running a little hotel.

  He promised to return as soon as he had found a suitable place for it.

  All of a sudden, Gerda found a convincing reason for which she had to leave us, as well: some matter or other in Poland.

  There were now just three of us in the boat again, under the portrait of Sterne, with the same names: William, John, and Earnest. We felt sad. At the same time we also felt how wonderfully pleasant everything had again become.

  “How about we finally finish writing something, at least?” William said solemnly, and we all burst out laughing.

  I was probably the only one who took his joke halfway seriously: I couldn’t understand why I was suddenly in such a rush … but things began to fall into place for me.

  I intended to get even with this so-called editor at the Britannica, the nonentity who wreaked vengeance for his personal failures on the reputations of great people; but the result was something very different. He turned out to be an honest and just ruler, burdened by his authority, governed by ultimate mercy and modernation (a good slip of the pen!) toward those creators tormented by their own powers into producing at least something in our world. He was a warrior against oblivion, a knight of immortality … I suddenly started to love my protagonist, and it all went like clockwork.

  * * *

  I don’t think that John and William betrayed themselves in the same way I did, but all it took was my putting the final period to it for a literary sensation to erupt. An unknown author from Kurdistan, or perhaps it was Pakistan, published a novel called Kill Wolfgang! that astonished the critical establishment.

  He even had the temerity to use one of our anagrams, ambitiously flaunting his authorship on the first page with only one name: Murito.

  * * *

  His star rose, and did not set. One after another, his novels appeared: The Gospel According to the Tempter, The History of the 2Xth Centuries, while we were still plowing through his novel about Mozart.

  It was ghastly, this intellectualism for the poor! In his book, Salieri saved up some money, dressed up like a Black Monk, and, concealing his face with the hood of his robe, commissioned a requiem from Mozart, already aware that Bach’s Passion would destroy his soul. He just had to wait for the moment when Mozart was at his apogee to shoot him down like a bird in flight.

  William tugged at the door of the safe. It was securely locked. Gerda had the keys.

  The thought that Gerda and Murito might be conspiring together against the rest of us was terrible! I imagined to myself the horror of Viol (Michael) when he found out he had been robbed, and rushed off in search of him. Even his parents did not know where he was, however: he had left with some girl to find a property for starting a hotel (this much, at least, seemed to be true), and had gone missing. I came back with nothing.

  Suddenly, Gerda appeared, it seemed, out of thin air, having returned from Poland, and without so much as a greeting she rushed over to the safe. She jangled the key around in the lock and opened it up. It was empty; no minutes whatsoever.

  “Bastard! Traitor!” she said.

  And it seemed to me that I hea
rd more than just curses in her rage.

  * * *

  The story has a happy ending, however.

  While all this was going on, William decided to sell his aunt’s dwelling, and no one tried to dissuade him. At that point I also ran into the elusive Michael-Viol. He was hurrying somewhere with a cake in his hand and greeted me as though nothing at all had happened. Without going into too much detail, he told me that he was taking the cake to the cleaning lady at his hotel on the occasion of her birthday, that he was not satisfied with the hotel accommodations and was looking for something else, but that he was satisfied with the cleaning lady, and intended to keep her on.

  I persuaded William not to sell his aunt’s property, and he agreed to lease it to Michael.

  Oh, if only William knew that Michael had come to us in the first place with the intention of renting the house, and not out of any love for literature! I was surprised to learn that he and Gerda were working together on the staging of his new opera, but was happy that she was with him and not with Murito. Well, it was my own fault I’d lost her. I take my hat off to her. (On second thought, I need to wear that hat.)

  Murito made it onto the Booker shortlist for the third time, and was now hard at work writing his next novel (I wonder whose?) to qualify for it. But time had run out for him to write The Battle of Alphabetica. That battle had been won by me. (And did I not deserve it?) And although according to the Charter I could no longer be a member of the Club, I deployed a powerful counterargument: that what I especially liked in my little piece was what I did not write about—namely, the battle itself. That what had at first appeared to me to be the greatest lacuna in the story turned out to be its greatest merit: the subject of revenge was not realized in it. And this was more likely a virtue of my protagonist than of me. It was my protagonist who rose royally above insult, and scorned his carefully planned vengeance, which consisted in making a laughingstock out of his antagonist (Adams, the viceroy, who was he again?… Sir Poluzhan). Sir Poluzhan, who promulgated his own hypothesis about the person of Shakespeare while promoting himself for a peerage. And it was my noble Bartholomew who could not sacrifice his love for Shakespeare, using him to settle accounts with all manner of nonentities, and instead pretended that he was too busy, that it wasn’t proper on Christmas … In short, that I was unable to write this. My speech made an impression, and they granted me the status of corresponding member until such time as I did not write something else. For this purpose, John passed on to me his unwritten novel A Doctor for Freud, and I scribble away at it now and then under the working title of O: Letter or Number? It’s all turning out to be shorter, and sadder.

  * * *

  I managed to see all three at the premiere of A Bundle of Herbs—“An Opera for a Trio and One Silent Singer,” as the poster announced. It was certainly worth it!

  There were no programs, and no one had any idea what was in store. The number of firemen in chef’s hats worn over their shining helmets was bewildering. The overture consisted of the very appetizing aromas of food being prepared.

  On the curtains, on an Italian background, was depicted a house. There was one illuminated window, through which it was possible to descry a large kitchen. The curtain rose, revealing the kitchen, which occupied the whole stage; the sumptuousness of its props was astonishing. A puffy, slovenly-looking man in an apron wandered about the stage, clearly upset with the servants, who were nowhere to be seen. Who was this? There was something familiar in his expression, but I am in no way, shape, or form a theater person, and I don’t know a single actor by face. The man was not only angry, he even cursed very colorfully, using musical terminology, such as “Crescendo-fortissimo-barbaro-furioso! Ta-ta-ta! Rum-pum-pum!” Right there on the stage stood a stove, in which he lit a real fire (hence the firemen), and began clashing and banging and rattling frying pans, cutting boards, and various other utensils, in order to shred, slice, boil, and fry. These random sounds of knives, spoons, ladles, hammers, frying pans, sauce pans, the hiss of steam, and the sizzle of oil, made the strange cook now sniff the air, then prick up his ears; or prick up his ears, and then sniff the air; and he had good reason for it. Suddenly, all this kitchen clatter and din settled into a distinctly deliberate rhythm, or the beginning of a musical theme, wafting out from the wings, now from one side, now from the other. It was possible to make out percussions, then strings or woodwinds. Once the music became more defined, the cook seemed to become particularly enraged, and he changed the culinary procedures; but to no avail, because the cacophony he created settled down into a pattern that repeated over and over again.

  This was the opera, and short it was not. If anything evolved and developed in it, it was the aromas of the unknown dish being concocted by the man incensed with the music.

  He stirred, tasted, and added spices, but each time something was missing, until it became clear that what was missing was a very particular something. The cook pinched samples from a bundle of herbs that hung picturesquely on the wall (string solo) but couldn’t find what he was seeking. Finally, he gave up with a dismissive wave of his hand. He grabbed a large sprig without even looking at it, and, cursing (percussion solo), tossed it into the cauldron. Now he began stirring and sniffing (woodwind solo), and then he tasted it … Oh, wonder of wonders!

  “Bravo! Bravissimo!” the cook exclaimed, savoring it (the entire trio began to work together), and at this moment, outside the window, a call rang out:

  “Signore Rossini! Fresh herbs! Celery, Signore Rossini! Basil!”

  “Rossini! ROSSINI!” the shouts resounded, now from the hall. It had finally dawned on them.

  “BASIL!” the maestro cried. “Where on Earth, barbaro furioso, have you been?”

  In the heat of the moment, he sipped too much from the ladle and leapt away, scalded …

  “Diabolo! But this time it was far better! What did I put in it? How can I ever repeat the performance? Woe is me, yet another recipe lost forever … What theme was playing just now?”

  * * *

  Rossini picked through the herbs in despair, unable to remember which it had been … The music in the wings of the stage, uniting the muffled fragments that had sounded during the preparation of the opera, grew and expanded marvelously. Rossini, tasting everything anew and remaining satisfied with the result, was no longer agitated by the music but even began conducting it with his ladle. He stepped out onto the proscenium, the curtain fell, and on it was written his culinary recipes. Reading them as though they were sheet music, Rossini conducted his pre-death mass.

  Oh, what splendid music it was! The audience went wild. The curtain rose and fell, rose and fell.

  From the wings, like apparitions, the musicians materialized—all of them in black. A trio: a percussionist with copper pots and pans, gleaming like timpani; a woodwind player with an unrecognizable wooden pipe that extended down to the floor (a bassoon! finally I’d seen one in person); and our Viol, with a limping double bass.

  “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

  And they did the same trick over and over again: they took one step back and disappeared, blending in with the black curtains, waiting for a new outburst of applause, and then took a step forward again, delineating black from black.

  At this point, the firemen came to life and started bustling about, extinguishing the stove and dragging out a long table, which they themselves began to lay with dinnerware. After that they placed in its center the gigantic steaming dish that had just been prepared by Rossini. The maestro directed the brigade.

  The audience crowded up to the proscenium, continuing to clap but uncertain about whether the performance had ended, or whether this was still part of it. Rossini was also puzzled, and had been so engrossed in playing his part that he had truly worked up an appetite. Here our author (Viol) stepped in and finally took control of his narrative. He invited all the participants, including the audience, who had “brought a little drop with them,” onto the stage to sit at the table. The audience surged up to t
he buffet and bought out everything that was on offer there (these proceeds alone paid for the entire cost of the performance). The table was covered in bottles, and the stage thronged with extras.

  Gerda finally passed out the programs, which were drawn up like menus, with the recipe of the main dish.

  Everyone ate and drank, and thus began the second act of the show: a discussion about why Rossini, at the peak of his talent and fame, suddenly ditched it all and took up cooking … And Viol told us about an incident that led directly to his idea for the opera.

  In his heyday, when he could write a new piece of music in a fair copy right off the bat (for example, on stage during a rehearsal, even while other music was playing), it so happened that he once needed to finish an overture by morning. Even then he had loved eating, and when he came home late that night, he scribbled down the overture. When he collapsed onto the bed in fatigue, his pages of notation were swept off the table, and they glided under the bed. He was awakened by the director of the opera, who demanded that he hand over the overture immediately. The sheet music was still under the bed. Bending over to pick it up was more trouble than writing a new overture that had nothing at all in common with the one under the bed, which was even more difficult to remember than to pick up.

  “And it’s the same way with culinary recipes,” the author explained. “Because cooking is also serendipitous. The most important factor is the freshness of the ingredients!”

  Everyone ate and drank copiously—and that’s the true measure of success!

  * * *

  So what is a finished work of art? was the question that gripped the collective consciousness of our Club so tenaciously. The work of art is not that which already was—but that which is (both written, and unwritten). There is, however, the debut performance (a musical term)! The opening night. There is no other definition! The thief will always be second, and the one who is fleeced the first. And the uncaught thief, as the loser, never forgives the one he has robbed: void, emptiness, anguish … Try and catch me if you can! But we won’t try to catch you. You lose, Murito!