The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Now we are together again, all of us except you … We are sitting in the cozy lobby of My Aunt’s House hotel, watched over by the portraits of Sterne and Rossini and the gentle gaze of the landlady.

  Gerda pours us sherry or port, and tries to persuade William to rewrite his unwritten novel Hamlet’s Legacy (before Murito finishes it) as the libretto of a new opera for Viol.

  William proffers his empty glass with a puzzled look: What’s she going on about?

  We don’t discuss anything anymore.

  We are free, finally, not to write.

  I have already written.

  THE BATTLE OF ALPHABETICA

  (The King of Britannica)

  FROM A Paper Sword, BY U. Vanoski

  For time does not flow but amasses.

  —S. S.

  Bartholomew was a king. Not your everyday Sixth or Third—not even the First. He was the Only. His power was vast. Any other king of any other era would find it difficult to imagine how boundless it was. True, Bartholomew could not so easily decide to chop off someone’s head, say, or bestow half a shabby kingdom on someone else. But he was able to do something more: he could banish. And I speak not of ordinary banishment. Both banishing from a realm and curtailing a personal allotment of time by separating a head from a body will solidify someone’s place in history. No, this was something else: absolute banishment … from time itself. From human memory.

  His kingdom was neither larger nor smaller than others; indeed, he reigned over all possible worlds—even, to a certain degree, over the Universe. It was not, of course, within his power to extinguish the sun or take the Moon from the sky. Removing from the firmament a trifling little star, however, was something he could do; and he could make it shine a little more brightly for people, as well. He could not convince his subjects that the elephant or the lion never existed (the fable, after all, is the most firmly rooted element in the human mind). He was completely capable of eliminating an entire species of flora or fauna from the extra-fabular consciousness, however. And he succeeded in this.

  His authority was vast, though not without limits. Then again, no authority, except that of the Creator, is boundless. Any other power is subject to limitation. Even where the Creator is concerned, His power is not really power. For what kind of power can it be when it is equal to itself? It’s all one. We have always confused our unlimited dependence—our powerlessness—with the absence of limitless power. Bartholomew had no interest in such power. Perhaps because, in this sense, he had none. Here, however, it is hard to draw a line—was it that he didn’t have it, or that it didn’t interest him? Do we need less power if we possess it in sufficiently great quantities? If we endorse the widespread conviction (which we hold less strongly than Bartholomew) that power is one of the strongest human passions, exceeding (when it is present) other human passions (in our view, only because the others can be quenched); if we accept such a conviction as axiomatic, then, of course, we will easily sacrifice a lesser power for the sake of a greater power, and a greater power for omnipotence. Did Alexander the Great not forget about his little Macedonia when he had finally reached India?

  Speaking of Alexander, Bartholomew had a bone to pick with him—though in principle he sympathized with him, and was even favorably disposed toward him. In any case, he liked him much more than he liked Napoleon. Toward Bonaparte, truth be told, he felt considerable antipathy. And not only because Napoleon had cut short the brilliant career of his future wife’s ancient family, the Dukes de O. de Ch. de la Croix. Bartholomew was able to rectify this matter somewhat, not only by marrying into but also by devoting several vivid pages to the history of the family (for example, its involvement in the attempt to save the ill-fated Carl I).

  He disdained Napoleon above all for being the most sovereign of all historical figures, for his overweening autonomy (which amounts to the same thing), for his independence (which is quite another thing) from his, Bartholomew’s, power. Indeed, no one had been able to tame him, to this very day. Imagine how much fear he must have inspired—that they had to maroon him like Robinson on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, that for years on end Bonapartists argued with anti-Bonapartists, so that he had to be exhumed and buried again in five coffins like a Russian matryoshka doll, and covered with a Russian stone, lest he—God forbid!—return to life and spring out of his tomb like a jack-in-the-box!

  To this day, one has to bow down when entering his tomb—the ingenious architect designed the entranceway to match Napoleon’s stature, sans tricorne.

  Bartholomew could, of course, cancel one or another of his insignificant battles, tinkering with history a bit, omitting and adding something here and there; but there was nothing he could do with the myth (something no less firmly rooted than a fable). Napoleon continued to stand on the Bridge of Arcole, and his flag still fluttered unhindered.

  While Bartholomew had once humbled Alexander the Great (an attractive and altogether nice fellow) and put him in his place, depriving him of one of his battles in favor of Darius, he had failed to cut Napoleon down to size, even if he had managed to take away a few such battles from him. Bartholomew was not content with the battles of the Nile, Trafalgar, and Borodino … The two Cyclopses, Nelson and Kutuzov … Even Nelson was not on par with Napoleon. What other commander could suffer such a great defeat, ending up with just the measly island of St. Helena after conquering all of Europe, and still remain the victor in everyone’s mind? Only this miniature hot-air balloon!

  To this day, his tricorne remains more royal than any crown. Napoleon’s fame turned out to be greater than itself—now that’s something to ponder! Was it all because of his Hundred Days? No, not only that. Bartholomew even took a liking to the Hundred Days. No, not because of Waterloo, not because the usurper lost unequivocally to Bartholomew’s fellow countryman, Lord Wellington. Who remembers now that Wellington even existed? Yet everyone remembers Napoleon.

  “Greatness is revealed by distance,” Bartholomew said with a sigh. “Is one century really any kind of distance?” The nineteenth century still surrounded the twentieth like an encampment: even the First World War had not managed to dislodge it. Oh, those countless beds in which Napoleon slept a single night! They reproduced by cell division like amoebas, providing income for provincial taverns and wayside inns.

  Despite his vast authority, Bartholomew was a broad-minded man. The futility of his efforts convinced him of one important thing—their vanity. And vanity, like emptiness, was beneath the dignity of a ruler of Bartholomew’s stature. It was true—it was ridiculous to sacrifice a greater power to a lesser one. For Bartholomew, battling Napoleon was the same thing as Napoleon reigning over the tiny island of St. Helena. Bartholomew grinned at this thought and shrugged: no, his power would not be overshadowed even by that of Bonaparte. Did Napoleon have the power to create even a single tiny bug, a single blade of grass? For these powers were within the reach of Bartholomew, and had even been tested: he was cultivating one enchanting plant from the umbelliferous family, and he was the one who had introduced the tiny moth Bartholomeus waterloous, unknown not only to science but to the Creator Himself, into Patagonia. He had done this only once, on the day of the longest night of the year, the usurper’s birthday. Who would dare say that Bartholomew had ever abused his authority? He did not raise himself to the level of the Creator—but that he could do what was possible only for Him was not to be gainsaid.

  So, Bartholomew’s authority ranked second only to that of the Creator. And insofar as it was not strictly about power for the Creator but rather about himself, Bartholomew, in his reign, possessed powers, the likes of which no one in human history before him had ever possessed.

  His authority was not onerous for his subjects, since it was absolute. One didn’t notice it, just as one doesn’t notice air, or water. This authority could not inspire doubt or suspicion, since no one was capable of sensing its coercive power—that’s how great it was. (After all, we don’t balk at the force of gr
avity, for it cannot be lighter or gentler—it is what it is.) Time submitted to Bartholomew. He wielded power over the Glory of the World, as its sole heir, its ultimate instantiation. He was the Result of everything. He always stood at the end of every line of petty czars and emperors, looking back from our day to the Sumerians. And not simply because a living dog is better than a dead lion but because the last in line is the Only one. There had been swarms of those who had come before him. Bartholomew pulled the entire world behind him by this string, and the world followed obediently in his wake, as though it had been headed there all along.

  Bartholomew awoke to the sound of a sudden banging. He was unable to account for either the noise or its source. It was dark. Of course, the somnolent Bartholomew thought, tonight is the longest night in the year. What time is it, anyway? He turned on the night light and scrabbled around for the alarm clock on the nightstand. The clock showed three, and had stopped ticking. It had been limping along for some time now. The king’s alarm clock held such delusions of grandeur that it deigned to show the time only when its axis was set exactly parallel to the axis of the Earth, which, as everyone knows, is itself at an angle to its orbit. Before going to sleep, Bartholomew spent a long time trying to achieve this astronomical accuracy for the proud mechanism. Now the device refused to revive in any position at all. It was absolutely dead. Evidently, it hadn’t been able to survive such a long night. The banging repeated, and Bartholomew, fully awake now, determined its source.

  It was the Queen Mother (a widow, of course), banging her scepter on her bedpan.

  Despite all his power, Bartholomew never forgot his filial duties. For the epitome of royal duty is the ruler’s obligation to his subjects, to his children: What kind of father could he be if he didn’t carry out his own filial duties? Bartholomew lowered his feet down to the floor. He groped around with his foot and found one slipper right away. The other one was missing. Then he remembered what day it was. Today was a very important day, one of the most important in the year, and, who knew, perhaps in a whole lifetime. In any case, do we not prepare the whole year for tomorrow, amassing strength, saving up every second to spend on it? And since we also prepare for the year itself, living through our prior life leading up to it, you might even say that our whole lives we prepare precisely for that day which yesterday we called “tomorrow.” Is today not the culmination of everything? Today it was within Bartholomew’s power to overthrow a small kingdom, or dry up a sea, or dethrone a hero, for today was the day when the annual General Map of the World approached completion and would remain thus for millennia and beyond … Today was the day when he did not intend to amuse himself with his power in such a way, for today the moment had finally arrived to settle some personal scores that had long burdened him, casting a shadow on his past—scores with one person who had once rashly gotten in the way of his authority, a certain Sir Poluzhan. And on such a day! Where had that accursed slipper got to? The devil of annoyance overcame him when he discovered it on the nightstand, right by the clock. Groggily, at a loss as to how to get the clock working again, and unable to find anything else, he had stuffed his slipper under the clock, at last achieving the proper angle for it. The memory amused him and cheered him up. His irritation evaporated and he took away the Queen Mother’s bedpan, demonstrating the diligence of filial respect.

  Shuffling down the hallway with the bedpan in one hand, he heard more unaccountable noises, coming now from the kitchen. They sounded like sobs. Who could be weeping in there? Passing the bathroom and the WC, still holding the same sloshing bedpan in his hand, wearing only his underwear, King Bartholomew, naturally, glanced into the kitchen, where he saw a long-haired, barefooted maiden in a short nightshirt guzzling down cold milk with greedy sobs, drinking it straight from the bottle. (The refrigerator door was still wide open.) The maiden gave a little squeak, like a rat, spewed out milk, and darted off down the hallway to the Crown Prince’s chamber. (This was Bartholomew Junior—or Bartholomew the Younger, because there was still another Bartholomew, Bartholomew the Youngest … but he wasn’t here—he had left with the Duchess for Opatija so she could take a cure for her back.) Bartholomew the king sighed. The girl was another one of the prince’s numerous amours, whom he could no longer tell apart. The king sniffed the air shrewdly, and caught a whiff of the sweet pungent scent that reminded him he also had some accounts to settle with Alexander the Great—whom he generally viewed with sympathy, but whom he nevertheless blamed to a certain degree. For during his wars, which eventually degenerated into wanderings, Alexander had conceived a liking for narcotics, and he had blazed a trail for this heady folderol, a direct route all the way to Europe. The Crown Prince had recently taken a superficial interest in the Orient, smoking up all manner of truth serums to the point of stupor. Once again Bartholomew remembered what this day was, and the devil of annoyance at the hindrance his kith and kin posed to this Great Thing entered him with new force. What time was it, anyway? His wife’s family heirloom, a clock in the guise of the Trojan Horse—pre-Napoleonic, from the heyday of the Dukes of O., a clock whose punctilious striking had given rise to a fierce, unceasing battle for inheritance that had been waged for generations—this clock had also stopped.

  He kicked it spitefully. The clock began to strike with its little hoof. Restive after its inactivity, it struck its allotment for the whole night at one go. Bartholomew counted thirty-seven strikes—that couldn’t be the time. Bartholomew laughed out loud (say what you will, but the king had a healthy sense of humor). He looked out the window and saw that it was already a dusky gray. That meant that it was after nine! The Great Morning had dawned, and Bartholomew was running late.

  After assisting the Queen Mother at her ablutions, and serving her coffee and toast, the “Poor Knight” carefully seated her on the wheelchair-throne, wrapped her in her ermine mantle (which was so tattered and ancient it had lost its tail and paws and now looked more like a mole, though it was still very warm), and wheeled, or, rather, dragged the throne (the chair was lacking a wheel, and had been reequipped with half a broken ski) out onto the terrace, where a little birch tree was withering away in a tub in the corner, and where a view opened up over the damp roofs of Paris, the capital of Bartholomew’s place of exile, and the birthplace of his wife, who at the present time was accommodated in his residence. “Ah, the life of an émigré.” Bartholomew sighed. He didn’t like this city. “If it weren’t for my marriage…” He sighed again, sending a puff of steam into the damp air in the direction of his homeland, where the shores of Albion were said to lie wrapped in mist.

  Now, in his raincoat, and holding an umbrella, he looked into his son’s chamber. The prince was sleeping on top of the blanket, fully dressed. Why had the maiden been disrobed, then? the king wondered with a sad grin. But the girl was already gone; she had slipped away when the king wasn’t looking. The chamber was stuffy and smelled strongly of that spicy folderol. The king cringed, opened a ventilation window, and covered the prince in an afghan. The prince didn’t even stir. He lay there almost lifeless, his sharp nose turned to the ceiling. His nose was followed by his sharp Adam’s apple, and then his sharp rib cage. Bartholomew felt as though he were wrapping up a little bird in the blanket. The king heaved a sigh, placed five French francs on a little table, then sighed again and added another five.

  The king was just getting ready to leave the house when Basil the Dark saw fit to wake up (he was named after a fifteenth-century Moscow prince, largely because Bartholomew had not yet been able to discover why that prince had been nicknamed “the Dark”). Basil padded toward him with deliberate, demanding steps, yawning and meowing—an enormous, frosty white cat, blind since birth; not so much a cat as a bear (hence his dark, Russian name). Dropping the umbrella, the king bestowed a little fish on him, stroked him with the hand of a tyrant exhausted by his own power, and sighed once more. Who on Earth possesses more power than a king? His beloved cat.

  Now he could leave. The cook would arrive toward
noon, and all three of the others would survive until his return.

  The king descended via the stairs (the elevator only went up). When he was downstairs, he checked the mail. There was no letter from his wife, but there was a pile of new bills, which occasioned his last sigh.

  “Enough!” he said, irate. “It’s time I stopped doing this.”

  “Doing what?” a voice seemed to say.

  “Sighing.”

  “Don’t ask the impossible of yourself, Your Majesty.”

  As we can see, his sense of humor, of which he was so proud, did not desert him. He had already grown to like the new mailboxes that had been installed three days before: the camouflage color, with nickel-plated locks, reminded him of the Ministry of Defense and the Periodic Table of the Elements (many people claimed the Periodic Table was a Russian invention). All the numbers were in the right order, the boxes and the letter openings had been organized and evened up, and only the royal mailbox number stood out, royally disrupting the prevailing order in accordance with its sovereign privilege. The boxes all followed in proper sequence up to number thirty-two, and then came his—twenty-eight. Today, too, he would have to sort things out with Russia. At noon he had an audience with Paul I of Russia himself, and with a prominent Russian military commander. And so, preoccupied by the thought that he would never again have to insult his own dignity by skirmishing with Napoleon,* Bartholomew was running late for work.

  He didn’t like Paris, either. If it weren’t for his wife … Well, here history had no alternative: children.

  He dreamed of wrapping up his work here (a professional exchange between two great encyclopedias) and returning home to England, to get a promotion and begin work on an abridged Britannica for children.

  No! Never again would he live in an apartment house, nor in the ministry (even if they offered him a whole floor). He would return to his homeland. His pay would suffice to rent a small house in a leafy suburb, for starters. Then … then he would furnish it as he had dreamed of doing his whole life.