The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Bartholomew, although he is only a king, is also a practical man. Earthbound.

  The cat, the lock, the thief, the truck crane, the pie, the wheelchair, the helmet, the scalpel, the foot, the hairdo, the ear in the bag, the ax, the bell, the surgeon, the fur, the wolf, the Christmas tree, the gauze, the surgeon’s bag, the honey barrel … What does it all resemble?

  Bartholomew recalled the Creator’s fatherly indulgence, when he walked with him hand in hand before the Encyclopedic Guard’s Regiment, each man at the ready. How He didn’t call him to order, didn’t pester him or take him to task. Bartholomew smiled to himself, and understood something he had understood many times before.

  Bartholomew was quite an inventor. He brought out a secret box in which he preserved—not so much from others as from himself—an assortment of memorabilia. Out of it he took two tiny tricorne hats—souvenirs from the island of St. Helena. One of them he put on his left index finger, the other on his right (Paul to the right, Napoleon to the left). Then he began acting out his own alternative history.

  The audience has transpired!

  In this version of history, Russian conspirators did not assassinate their underrated emperor, Paul I, the underrated emperor did not enter an alliance with Napoleon. As a result, the French didn’t go to war with the Russians, the Russians didn’t burn down Moscow but captured India instead. His favorite one-eyed Nelson did not perish but dealt a fatal blow to the one-eyed Kutuzov, thus recouping India for Britain. Ah, sweet dreams!

  As a professional encyclopedist he could not reverse the course of history, as Russians were in the habit of doing, trying to overtake it. One thing irritated him to no end: the popular opinion that the Britannica had been written following a precedent set by the French, although he admired both Diderot and d’Alembert.

  No, “to write only children’s books.” Where did that originate?

  The idea of an encyclopedia for children beckoned him. There he would have greater leeway. He would have quite a bit to throw overboard, and also to include. Perhaps he would even be able to promote a concept for an alternative history game that would make it easier to master a knowledge of real history. And whoever claimed that history was a science, that it reflected any semblance of reality, when every epoch, every regime rewrites it to suit its own tastes and interests?

  His dreams took him far away. Paris, however—here it was, its gray roofs spread out before him. The rain. But it was a far cry from London rain.

  And Bartholomew was far away, too. He was still upstairs in his imaginary castle. “Daddy, Daddy!” he seemed to hear the distant voices of children calling him.

  He sighed and replaced the tiny tricorne hats where they belonged.

  Bartholomew was no longer angry, but he had no strength to go downstairs and join the family.

  He put a clean sheet of paper in front of him.

  I wonder if there is a language in which the word “homeland” begins with an A, he thought. That was not the case in any of the languages he knew; but in all those languages, the letter A was the first letter of the alphabet. What does a book begin with?

  Why, with a cover, of course!

  Look at Bartholomew. He sits here, laughing and drawing. An illumination of the letter A. The future Britannica for children.

  Can you guess from each picture what language it is?

  In the middle of the page is a large A, standing like a pyramid on thick, sturdy limbs.

  In the upper-left corner of the page an aerostat floats near an automobile. Directly under them an Arab wearing a Bedouin’s garments is kneeling down and aiming a rifle, having tied up his donkey to one of the traceries, on a branch of which an eagle has perched. The Arab is aiming at an antelope, which is bounding away from him in fright to the other side of the A. On top of the letter a hoopoe is nesting. A jester leans with his elbow on the left side of the letter, a bee clinging to one point of his fool’s cap like a bell. Halberds, battle axes, lances, and pikes—a whole arsenal—rest against the right side of the letter. In the enclosed triangle of the A, a spider has spun its web. The antelope is afraid of the Bedouin and runs away, but next to him are an ostrich and a lamb, neither of which looks at all fearful. The jester looks through the letter at the mountain of weapons and seems to be smiling, as if he’s thinking: What is all this junk?… And at the foot of the letter is an anchor, an onion, a horseshoe …

  There seems to be some disequilibrium here …

  Someone was scratching and breathing behind the door. Was it Maggie? Bartholomew pressed his ear to the door: no one.

  He opened it, trying not to jangle the lock … and into the room slipped a white cat.

  Bartholomew sighed with relief and disappointment. He glanced at the sheet of paper: not bad. Not bad at all.

  Something else was needed to balance out the eagle on the left side, though.

  On the right side, from the same kind of branch, Bartholomew hung a lampshade. The lampshade shone down on an

  AARDVARK

  PART III

  EMERGENCY CALL

  (Doomsday)

  The end of the sentence must be marked by a period.

  —A rule of punctuation

  Urbino woke up and realized that it was already today. He looked at the button on the wall with equanimity.

  The crudeness with which it had been plastered into the wall was equaled only by the precision of the button itself. White, with a slight tinge of yellow, like a cue ball. He traced its outlines gently with his finger but didn’t press it. Instead, he examined his hand: nothing occurred to him but its likeness to an autumn leaf. Is not banality the ultimate form of exactitude?

  “Lord, have mercy,” he muttered mechanically. The Lord pardoned Urbino forthwith: He reminded him that he had to stand up on his left foot and at least try to make the bed (“to square off against the day”—as a monk he once chanced to meet had taught him). Looks like I didn’t come across the monk just by chance, Urbino thought blandly. Why should I square off against the day, if today has already arrived? He glanced again at the button. It was still there. Fate has converged on me at an unexpected point. This was no longer even a thought, just words. He looked over at his prison window. A little cloud, just like the one in the photograph of the sky above Troy, floated within the frame. Now that’s a sign of senility, to see a semblance in every resemblance, thought Urbino, grinning with the living half of his face.

  Today that journalist was supposed to come back with the interview transcript. Tomorrow, or today?

  Maybe the button is for calling him? Urbino grinned again at the vestiges of his creative imagination. What had he not imagined during these past two days of expectation—of fear, in other words! Not to mention the fact that this pimply-faced young man was in fact the devil who had tempted him in his own youth with the photograph from the future.

  Fine, say it is the ravings of a panic-stricken old man, but those two boors in uniform who had moved aside first him, then the bed, and then pried open the wall, pulling out its veins and tinkering with a little box … and after that had buried all their secrets under a layer of plaster so that only the button remained … One thing was certain: they knew what they were doing. They had done this before. They made him sign a paper saying the task had been carried out, and there were no complaints. What complaints could there be, if they hadn’t allowed him to open his mouth?

  What had he put his name to, and what had he agreed to do? To receive that journalist? Well, then, there’s no point in wondering about it now, is there?

  Yet again he grinned at the weak surges of his former imagination. To think that an insomniac like himself could even suspect that pressing a button might cause the end of the world, and that he was the one who had been chosen by someone (that very devil) to bear the responsibility and blame.

  For some reason he recalled a fat Asian boy on a train who was completely baffled by the toilet in the WC. “Do you know how to make it flush?” “Press the button.” A ki
nd smile still played across his face when he remembered this incident. “Just don’t be alarmed,” he had told the boy. The button looked exactly the same. A terrifying noise accompanied the flush.

  They have rules, I have habits. My habits are less aggressive than their rules. I simply exist, and I disturb no one. I am satisfied with the precepts that guide and instruct my experience of my own imperfection, my own sinfulness. They are satisfied with the rules, so they can always be right and never doubt anything, even their own faith. It’s easier to go to church than it is to believe. It’s easier to submit and obey than it is to discover and follow precepts. I could afford to move into a more comfortable apartment now, but my little shoebox suits me. Here I don’t have to pick up after myself, I can sleep late and smoke. No one else would ever choose to live here, anyway, because of the absence of amenities and the noise from the elevator. In what way did I threaten their social contract that they condemned me to this button?

  Why did they install the button in his room, if they are the ones who need to call him?

  Let’s assume it’s for an emergency call to the proprietor … although Urbino is already retired and works only on Sundays. Just so they would furnish him with this little hole in the wall … On the other hand, the proprietor had been flattered that his elevator operator was descended from nobility. That means it’s a bell.

  But what if it’s simply a light switch, so he can turn the light on and off without getting out of bed? Who would go to the trouble? Granted, the proprietor became very obliging after the announcement of the prize. People are strange, there are no two ways about it.

  If it’s only a light switch, I’ll just give it a try … But his hand didn’t dare.

  How is the installation of the button connected to the visit from the journalist?

  However, if it’s not the end of the world, and not a light switch, might it not be the end of himself? A rather bizarre means of suicide proffered to him … But by whom?

  A blue sky was peeping out today. Like a smile.

  And the Angels fly under the heavens / A grim purpose still reigns below / Where are you? You must be the judge—/ Until lightning strikes the brain blind / Until that moment, not a day without a line … / Ugh, what a graphomaniac!

  And what if pushing it brings not the end but a beginning? A simple way to exit this little coffin?

  One must shave and put on a clean shirt before the end. He still had a shirt, yellowed and dried, like an envelope. The razor? The razor had always been especially dear to him, even before he started shaving, as a memento of his father. His first Gillette, with the nickel plating rubbed off and the bronze showing through—you could actually whistle with it.

  He hadn’t been able to find it since yesterday. Who stole it? No doubt it was those workmen who nicked it. They have a soft spot for tools and instruments … Or was it the journalist?

  What would he need it for? A souvenir? Who does he think I am? A Joyce? That puffed-up, unreadable Irishman irritated Urbino no end. That’s right! Joyce stole the razor. The last thing that remained to him … Why did he have to take the last one? Back in the day, thieves were much kinder. They took only money, and then only because he hadn’t hidden it very well. Urbino remembered with particular warmth his personal court Thief. What is he up to these days? A rich man by now, I’m sure.

  Joyce … The only thing he didn’t steal from me was my last novel—Disappearing Objects—and that only because it wasn’t written yet. The novel floated up to the surface of Urbino’s consciousness, as monumental as the Titanic (if only that had stayed afloat).

  * * *

  … Of course, the old man had known about the seventh room since childhood. His mother the Duchess … so he would fall asleep. The tighter he squeezed his eyes shut, the more awake he felt. When the colorful flies stopped flitting about under the expanding domes of his eyelids, a black space opened up. He tried to give it a rectangular shape, and the black space narrowed and turned into a corridor that he had to run down as fast as he could, as though he were being chased. Just don’t turn around! He squeezed himself through this tightness, he seemed to glimpse a door, or at least a window, a small ventilating pane … He found himself in the next empty space, but that wasn’t a room, either. He finally fell asleep when he was three or four levels down.

  Remembering his childhood intrepidity, the old man fingered the button warily. Today he must get enough sleep: it’s already tomorrow!

  Tomorrow that one would come again. His kind is never late. They’re always right on time.

  “Well, come on, then. Push!” he commanded his finger. His finger wouldn’t hear of it. The old man, by the way, approved. He smiled. “You have to hurry up and sleep…” The words made him laugh, then made him happy: one could begin a new life with these words—that is to say, a story could begin that way. What if they installed that button just so that I would write it? I’ll just push the button, then write a story! That’s what I’ll call it: “The Button.” There’s no escaping realism. My whole life I wrote pristinely, just as I saw things. Why was it that not everyone understood me?

  I’ll just push it. Take the leap, and start writing! And I’ll be more than ready when he shows up. He thinks I’m not capable of anything anymore … He only wants to stuff me into his own conception, into some sort of Proproustian bed … Well, all right, Proust I’m not. But I know how to do things he didn’t. (The old man’s imagination was fired up, along with his ambition.) And so the story will be called: “The Procrustean Bed.” “Bed” … A nasty word.

  He tossed and turned on it a bit longer, and removed his finger from the button. Yes, it now definitely reminded him of a cue ball, orblike and ivory yellow. That’s right! Let the hero of the story “hurry up and sleep” (that will be the beginning), before the deciding match of a world tournament.

  Out of some dormant habit, the old man’s words began to form a chain, reaching out toward the page. The page was rectangular, like a table, but suddenly it turned green. The protagonist was dressed in strict accordance with the code. He wore a tuxedo, black, like a fly. He rested his hand on the cue like a cane, focusing his gaze. A single ball lay on the baize cloth. You can’t play with one ball … And where was his opponent? The ball wasn’t a ball at all but a button for calling the referee. Angered, the player reached out to push it to summon the judge … and the old man woke up.

  “I’m not writing anything like that!” he said in vexation. “I don’t have enough flesh on me anymore to describe a game. At one time, perhaps, I knew how, so that that story of the two opponents diverged from the subject of the game itself … But what do I remember now? ‘Angle in’ equals ‘angle out’?… A stop shot, a sidespin … The best safety is to pocket a ball … Chalk your cue before the stroke, not after … That’s not enough! ‘Clueless,’ as my first teacher, Serge Wolf, said when I missed a shot. I always wrote better than I played, anyway.” The lucidity of this conclusion reassured him that he was in his right mind, in his proper place. In his bed. But the button, too—that ivory ball—was in its proper place.

  My writing was good, but my ideas were even better. Take Disappearing Objects, for example. I never got past the title … There may have been an epigraph, I recall … I’m not sure. Can’t remember. Perhaps lines from Edgar Poe: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.”

  Perhaps something from a Japanese (or Chinese?) ancient? It doesn’t matter. What matters is, where is my typewriter? It’s gone, too. Could the court Thief have taken it and left that unwieldy Underwood in its place? The other one was so compact, so dear to me … an Adler. How much writing I was able to get done on that one! It occurred to him that he might have left it behind in America. Maybe he had. In that case he was again wrongfully accusing his Thief. He thought about him again with fondness: all in all, he had loved the same things as his sovereign. How skillfully the Thief had taken advantage of his absentmindedness! Two rules sufficed for him to be able to trick his simpleto
n of a master: that “it’s not written all over his face,” and that “he’s not a thief until he’s caught.” It isn’t right to insult an honest man with unjust suspicions, is it?

  How could he demand something back that he had given away himself?

  Likewise, wasn’t he giving his life away to this journalist? The thought set off another bout of panic, and he glanced with renewed horror at the button: he had only to press it and the journalist would enter.

  Maybe the button opened up a hole into the invisible room?

  No, he wouldn’t press it! Let him wait for the elevator, Urbino thought spitefully, imagining the interviewer in the lobby, shuffling his feet and smelling of eau de cologne, and carrying a book in his armpit to be autographed.

  Maybe there is an invisible room, though? To press, or not? He stroked the ivory surface of the button again with tender caution. It’s his call. How could he not see that what attracted him to this game was not the ball, so like a frontal bone, not the green, roulette-table cloth, not the attempts to pocket the ball in the table’s scrotum, but choice! Choosing the right stroke. That’s what it was.

  The dream, however, was not about that.

  He was in a motorboat, accompanied by two lanky young naval officers—a captain and a lieutenant. He was seeing them for the first time in his life. It seemed that they were seeing him for the first time, too. In any case, the captain seemed to be scrutinizing him. The motorboat was full of other people, too—ordinary middle-aged men and women. They were traveling as a group of extras in the dream, a crowd, like a new shift at a sanatorium or a resort. He and the naval officers were the only ones who were seated; everyone else was standing.