The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Downstairs would be his mother, wife, and children. He would go down only for meals. It would constitute the completeness of “simple human happiness.” Upstairs, even if it were just a modest attic, would lie the true realm of Bartholomew.

  He would order a long, T-shaped desk and bookshelves from a cabinetmaker. On these shelves he would place only the most carefully selected books, the ones indispensable for his work on the Britannica. Right next to the desk, so that he wouldn’t have to get up, he would have the cabinetmaker fashion him a revolving bookcase of his own design. It would house the complete works of Shakespeare and everything that had been written about him.

  To reiterate, downstairs they would live, prepare meals, clean up, do the wash … and he could rest assured that everything was happening in its proper time, in its proper order. Upstairs he would spin his revolving bookcase and take down just the book he needed, without even looking. There would be a staircase leading up to his realm, but it would be retractable, like the bridge over a castle moat. He would be the only one with the right to raise and lower it.

  This was King Bartholomew’s reverie about what constituted complete royal happiness.

  His imaginings induced in him a spiritual equanimity.

  Like Harun al-Rashid, indistinguishable from an ordinary official, King Bartholomew, hiding under his umbrella from the curious glances of passersby, glided swiftly along the glossy pavement as though on skates. Today His Majesty’s Thief was at long last either supposed to pay off his debt or at least to come clean and admit his wrongdoing.

  The Thief had been conferred with a courtly title about five years before, when he had robbed Bartholomew. The story looked simple, from any point of view except the royal one. Though he could rule historical destinies and move heavenly bodies, he was not at all fond of intervening in individual human fates. Because Bartholomew had a brother.

  Rather, Bartholomew was a brother.

  When had Fate mixed them up, so that his brother ended up with Bartholomew’s fate, and Bartholomew with his brother’s? His brother had been destined to rule, and Bartholomew to wander; but it turned out the other way round. They were both Twins, the sign of Gemini, but his brother was slightly older, and by the rules of succession to throne …

  The fact was, that from the time he was in diapers, Bartholomew had enjoyed the rights without responsibilities of the younger. His brother, from preparatory school onward, had borne upon his narrow shoulders the obligations of heir to the throne. By the time Bartholomew had become a C student, his brother had already excelled in school. His brother was the one with a photographic memory. He could multiply three-digit numbers in his head, memorize entire encyclopedia entries, knew by rote the genealogical trees of all the distinguished families of Albion. He learned by heart the schedules and routes of transatlantic liners from the fat reference manual. By the age of five he was already sounding the whistle blasts upon arrival in any port, right on time, by blowing into a toy horn. You only had to ask: Where are we? And he would answer: in Trinidad; or Majorca … You only had to look at the clock, and then at the manual—the hour and minute corresponded exactly, his brother was never late. But little Bartie no longer heard him. He was already standing in the very prow, staring out at the contours of an unfamiliar bay, and his heart leapt ashore before he himself did, although he jumped out before the entire ship’s company of mulattos, coconuts, and white trousers.

  When his brother was still in his stroller, he could read all the signboards on the street backward, without faltering: pohsrebraB! snosdnarevooH! Zeewhyexdoubleyou! He rattled off the ABCs, or, the deeceebeeay. But Bartholomew no longer heard or saw his brother, because in the thick jungle, amid the shrieking of parrots and the chattering of monkeys, he had been surrounded by savages. They were aiming their arrows and spears into his broad, bare chest, uttering threats in their incomprehensible native tongue: azneulfnI! niripsareyaB! Three fingers away from his heart, the cold, glittering blade of a thermometer plunged into his armpit. A caravan wended its way endlessly through the heat of Strepthroat, the Patagonian desert of death—Bartholomew rocked to the slow tread of the dromedary and the monotonous jingling of its bell. Through this unbroken din, a string of mirages emerged—palms in the ocean—Tangiers, Bangkok, Sydney … Now his older brother jangled the ship’s bells above his ear, announcing the departure of the Queen Elizabeth from Singapore at exactly 1:30 p.m., local time. A week later, the ship docked safely in the Bay of Health. Bartholomew jumped ashore, and his older brother climbed on board.

  In the oceanic maternal bed, they were sick by turns—first his brother got A’s while Bartholomew was sick, then Bartholomew got D’s while his brother lay ill. Once, while they were sick, a children’s map of the British Empire had been hung above the bed. Actually, it was a map of the world, at that time still three-quarters green. After that it wasn’t removed again. His older brother covered it with routes and minutes, and that was how Bartholomew remembered him for the rest of his life: sick in bed, with a scarf around his sore throat, genuflecting before the Empire, multiplying inches by degrees in his head.

  The brothers grew, the Empire fell apart and faded: in the corner, by the pillow, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia became especially tattered. Until old age they would appear before his eyes as the first symptoms of the onset of illness. His gaze would venture farther and farther up as he convalesced, toward Europe, toward the Italian boot, and still higher, to the kneeling Baltic Sea, begging Russia to accept the Gulf of Finland from it … And on the last day—a pillow fight, slippers flying, head over heels and upside down: the New Zealand boot a perfect match for the Italian one, but flung into the opposite corner of the world as though in a fit of temper, as though in proof of the predetermined division of the world … The brothers didn’t get sick anymore, and their mother was aging under the weight of the Empire, now grown decrepit.

  O Empire!

  While his brother took precedence in this life, while he was finishing Oxford after Cambridge, language after language, degree after degree, stringing them together like a hunter strings his trophies, like a savage strings his beads, did I not string my own necklace of islands, in my own fashion, too, O Empire? Your Bahamas, your Philippines, your Antilles … Did I not collect your grasses in the savannas, and catch your snakes in the deserts? Was it not I who, saving up a little something on the grasses and snakes, tried to grow rich on your diamonds and emeralds, on your tusks and your gold? Was it not my habit to joke, when asked “Why do you need gold?” to answer “To find more gold”? Was I not the one who sank everything I had extracted from you into you again—into your bordellos, your taverns and opium dens, in Singapore, Melbourne, and Delhi? Was it not I who was stroked by your Negresses, your Malays, your Indian women? Where art thou, O Empire? What have you done, Brother? Why is your life mine, and my life yours? Or are the Japanese right, that life has two halves, and after forty one must change one’s name? Are these two halves of life sisters? And are they sisters in the same way that you and I are brothers? Why are you sick with fever on the outskirts of the fallen Empire? What do the liberated Zulus need with your Catholicism? Why are you chasing after my cross, having thrown your own onto my shoulders?

  Thus lamented the present-day Bartholomew, looking at the map of the world, already one-fourth less green in his time, and half as green in the time of Bartholomew the Middle, his already grown son, and reduced to almost nothing for Bartie the Youngest, by which time the mature emerald sheen of the Empire had faded to a pale, childish salad-green, and amidst its Cyclopean debris young states burst forth like tiny spring shoots. Only by its tatters did the map of the world remind Bartholomew of this world—the map of his childhood. But it was tattered now in the other corner, as well—the corner of the far-flung New Zealand boot, still slightly green; for the Crown Prince’s illnesses were of a different nature and his pillow lay on the other side.

  O Son! Three photographs hung side by side—the king’s pride and joy: the
first slightly more yellowed, and the last glossier than the middle one. All three of them looked like Bartholomew: the king, the prince, and the youngest … it was the same face. As if the king had not aged, only the sailor’s shirt he wore. No one wears them now. No one wore them then, either. It was a hand-me-down from the older to the younger.

  Bartholomew missed the youngest, looking at the son of the eldest.

  O Son! My curly-haired one in the faded photograph, from which you still look at me with such immense, astonished eyes, as though this world were too small for you. Why did you start balding so young, why did your eyes lose their luster, like the Empire? Why do you want nothing that I want, nor what your uncle wants? Was it not you I saw recently with our Turk? You sidled past me like a shadow, like smoke. You can’t fool me with that smell, I can pick it up a mile away! Is he palming off that folderol on you, is that the reason my books keep disappearing? Watch out, Turk, you ill-starred thief! Watch out that you don’t pay with your head! The books, don’t forget, aren’t just valuable, they’re priceless—they are my father’s—your grandfather’s—books.

  O Father! I never understood you. Only now do I begin to guess, but you recede from me like a star the more I am able to surmise. You shine for me with a backward light, as though from that little seed out of which the light originally flashed for me. Now you are no longer here, and your light has finally reached me. If only you could see your Bartholomew Junior! Who was it who believed that the Milky Way was like God’s seed, that each of us comes from our own star in the firmament? I don’t remember. You would know the answer immediately. You remembered everything. Knowledge was your empire.

  These were the present-day Bartholomew’s tender thoughts, the same Bartholomew whose pranks had been such a trial for his father that he had suffered a heart attack. He took a volume of his father’s 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica off the shelf. His father’s favorite volume …

  O Britannica!

  Like a genuine king of the encyclopedic universe, Bartholomew’s father sat in state over the uppermost height of this lofty ridge of volumes stretching out along the entire shelf—over the “Sh” volume.* And Bartholomew had inherited from him this awe. He didn’t immediately open the volume just to the place where … where he … where the most … where the one who was found under “Sh” … He opened this, the most tattered volume, as though he had all the time in the world, as though he were ascending with measured tread the steps of words to the yearned-for summit.

  SHAGREEN … How strange that the path always began with this kind of leather, as though alluding to the profession of that doubtful father of the one under “Sh”—a butcher, or perhaps a glover …

  SHAH—the title of the King of Persia, the sham independence of which always concealed the cherished interests of the Empire, and from its root …

  SHAHABAD, SHAH ALAM MOGUL, SHAH JAHAN SHAHJAHANPUR, SHAHPUR, SHAHRASTANI, SHAHRUD, SHAH SHUJA … The long shadow of the Empire: a province, then a ruler of its province, then its sphere of interests, then its sphere of influence … And through this armored, impenetrable rampart, suddenly a weak sprout of the literary word, like a little chirp: SHAIRP, John Campbell, Scottish critic. How absurd! How ludicrous and presumptuous this proximity, this antecedence … As though they were in the same class, as though the Teacher might call him to the blackboard, with a finger hovering over the letters “SH,” and expect him to name this one first, not that one … Still, how lucky he was that the first three letters of their names matched, and brought them so close together … And following SHAIRP, out of the blue, as always with the Americans, these incongruous SHAKERS, intent upon jumbling up the whole world. That is the essence of independence, the only way were they able to free themselves from the Empire, as flesh of its flesh … Shakers, what nonsense! They’re only good at mixing everything up: communism with the second coming—some “children of truth” they are. Monte Cristo sandwiches, cheese with ham … The French were right—what can you expect from a nation that loves cheese with ham? But the SHAKERS, too, are in their place, for the rain cuts through, there’s a shiver in the air; one only has to turn over the already trembling page and … there he is, under “Sh” … WILLIAM!

  Here it stops making any sense, from the very first line. The 23rd of April. Is that the day he was born, or the day he died? And why at the same time as Cervantes, on the same day? And why did he die on his birthday? Or was he born on the day of his death? And who was his father, a butcher or a glover? And who were Bacon, Marlowe, Lord Southampton? Did they even exist? Were they not all one and the same William? And which of the twenty-six portraits is genuine? Well, of course, Jansen’s, the father would say. Why? Because it’s the handsomest. Certainly not the Hampton Court portrait: a sword, a belt, a ring on his finger, a glove in his hand—a Christmas tree, yes; but certainly not Shakespeare! It’s the glove that clinches the matter. They say it was his father who sewed it for him.

  This argument about the authenticity of the portraits was the last thing that Bartholomew remembered about his father. For his father died of heart failure, unable to cope with Bartholomew’s most recent escape, while Bartholomew was sitting up to his neck in a swamp on the isthmus of Panama, happier than he had ever been in his entire life. O Wife!…

  This time Bartholomew had fled on a large-scale oceanographic expedition. Commissioned as an artist to draw grasses, skulls, and nests, he was especially absorbed in the task of drawing cephalopods (or was it Hymenoptera?) for a charming naturalist. And so they were sitting together in the pitch-black night, up to their necks in a Panamanian swamp, straining to hear the mating call of a unique frog, in order to record it on a phonograph for her professor, one of the world’s foremost experts on Coelenterata—a professor who was far less excited by arthropods than by his hobby: the mating calls of precisely this frog, who sings once every hundred years, at that very hour, in that very pond. In other words, the entire future of the budding naturalist depended on this mating call, which was synonymous with the happiness that occurred at just such rare intervals, on which depended the entire future of the budding naturalist, both professionally and on terms that Bartholomew could set. Nine months later she gave birth to a son, but refused to take Bartholomew’s name, as she hailed from a patrician family with three lilies in its coat of arms. And on the next day, Bartholomew received the news of his father’s death.

  After WILLIAM, Bartholomew didn’t close the volume right away but descended the steps of words to the bottom, more quickly this time, as happens when going downhill. SHALLOT (Allium ascalonicum), already cultivated in the early Christian era, widely used in the preparation of meats (his father had most likely been a butcher, after all, not a glover), of which there are two varieties—the common shallot, and the Jersey, or Russian, shallot (somehow we can never stray too far from Russia). SHAMANISM—the religion of the Uralo-Altaic tribes (Russia again). SHAMBLES—an abattoir for the preparation of kosher meat (well, perhaps a butcher, but certainly not a Jew). SHAMIL—leader of the Caucasian tribes in the war with Russia (again!). SHANGHAI, finally (out there, beyond Russia).

  Today was the day of the Thief and the vizier. Bartholomew didn’t realize right away that he had tried to combine these two burdensome affairs into one. The Thief was supposed to pay off the remainder of a sum he had stolen from Bartholomew, and the vizier was supposed to increase the budget of Bartholomew’s court. Bartholomew was supposed to find time to see both of them, and at least not miss his audience with Paul I.

  In the space allowed by this sheet of paper, it is difficult to explain at all clearly how Bartholomew had formed such an uncommon relationship with his Thief. Though that, perhaps, is another story. For the sake of coherence, suffice it to note that on that day, when news came of the tragic disappearance of his older brother, and the Queen Mother took to her bed in grief, Bartholomew decided to renovate her room to create an atmosphere conducive to recovery. Amid such dramatic family circumstances Bartholomew was not
quite himself, so he hired the first person who showed up, a Turk without references, and left him alone in the apartment. In Bartholomew’s absence, the Turk stole from his grandfather’s desk, which was never locked, a small number of securities (shares, to be exact) that Bartholomew had received as an inheritance from his father, and which he, only for that reason, had not yet sold. That was, in fact, the whole, and the sole, family fortune. He robbed Bartholomew, but he was not caught red-handed. Only on the following day, and then only by chance, did Bartholomew discover that the papers were missing.

  Distraught over the excess of calamity, Bartholomew neglected to alert the police, for whom he had had no special liking since his roving days, but summoned the Turk, and two of his own friends for moral support. One was an Orientalist, who (he thought) would be able to speak to the Turk in his own language. The other was more experienced, a comrade who had taken part in his youthful journeys, and who would be able to deal with the legal side of the matter. The Orientalist was of no help, because the Turk turned out to be a Yezidi; the experienced friend intervened just at the right time and threatened to hang the Turk or the Yezidi (or both at once), privately, with no interference from the police; and, moreover, to hang them not by the neck, nor by the feet. The Thief, however, stood firm and wouldn’t spill the beans, retreating into a deep sulk. It would have been impossible to extricate him from that state, were it not for that same Britannica. Looking up “Yezidi,” Bartholomew came to understand a peculiarity of theirs, namely that they were considered to be devil-worshippers, and that the most terrible thing one could do to them was to curse the Evil One in their presence. That was precisely what Bartholomew did, and, most unexpectedly, this experiment had an immediate effect.