The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  “Sleeping like a murderer.”

  The station was all aflutter over the arrival of Badiver. When the newly-delivered-Badiver-if-that-was-indeed-who-he-was finally turned over onto his other side, Sergeant Cups, who had relieved Corporal Smiles, who had relieved Officer Smogs—though Smogs and Smiles, instead of going home, were still hanging around, waiting to see how it would all end, which was rare, if not unprecedented, in their tenure as policemen; they didn’t go home, and were standing right next to Cups when he peered through the peephole and saw the above-mentioned Badiver turn over onto his other side … Sergeant Cups said, “Oh!” so loudly (and Smiles, who shoved Smogs, who had shoved Cups, so that he could crowd up to the peephole and see, too, said, “Oh, my!” even louder) that the newly-delivered-Badiver-if-that-was-indeed-who-he-was opened his eyes.

  * * *

  At that very moment the door groaned, and all three of them tumbled into the cell. Behind them, blocking the doorway, thronged all the other officers who happened to be on duty.

  Badiver-if-that-was-who-he-was sat up on the plank bed and stared at his visitors.

  “Badiver!” barked Cups, poking Badiver in the chest with his fat finger, in a tone that brooked no doubt. “Don’t try to get out of it!”

  “We know everything!” Inspector Glumet announced. He was referring to the wanted poster of the murderer from three days before, boasting a portrait that was strikingly unlike the verbal description of the suspect that appeared underneath it. “We know everything,” Glumet said logically, because Badiver didn’t look like either the portrait or the description.

  “Stand up, detainee!” shouted Lieutenant Homes from behind the throng in the doorway. He couldn’t see over their heads. He was short in stature, and he didn’t want to miss out.

  Overwhelmed by the confusion of the moment, the individual-suspected-to-be-Badiver started fidgeting on the plank bed and frowned. Then his face broke into a series of such hilarious, mutually exclusive expressions and grimaces, conveying at the same time such simplicity and goodness, that Smogs smiled, Smiles grinned, Cups burst out laughing, Homes roared with laughter, and even Glumet contorted his face so that he looked like he was suffering from a toothache. This was in fact the moment when the individual-who-very-likely-could-be-Toni-Badiver was dubbed “Gummi,” because of his resemblance to a toy that was all the craze following the hullabaloo surrounding Brazilian rubber. (The toy was modeled after an old Scottish tippler with a pipe between his teeth, and when you stuck your fingers in two holes at the back of his head and wiggled them around, the old geezer winked and smirked.) Gummi—such was the name bestowed on Toni-no-doubt-about-it-Badiver by our brave policemen, who were famed all over Taunus for being quick with the tongue if slow on the uptake.

  Embarrassed by the laughter at his expense, Gummi-who-else-could-it-be hung his head and rubbed the toes of his snub-nosed boots together—his feet didn’t quite touch the floor—and for some reason this was such a perfect complement to his most recent grimace that old man Samuelsen in the next cell longed to join in the gales of laughter and started banging on his cell door, shouting, “Let me see, too!”

  On Homes’s orders, the goodhearted Smiles sighed, then went over to give Samuelsen a good punch in the ribs. Then Gummi said, “Did he fall yesterday, too?”

  That was when it became clear beyond the shadow of a doubt where Gummi had come from …

  To give them their due, the clever Taunus policemen managed to put two and two together in no time. No one was reported to have escaped from an asylum within a two-hundred-mile radius. Inquiring at the Daruma Monastery, where Gummi’s earlier delirium suggested Badiver might have come from, didn’t seem sensible; all the more since, judging by his blathering, it might be located in Tibet, if not Cambodia. (Added to that, Gummi had clean forgotten about the monastery when he finally came to, and, indeed, remembered nothing at all except his last landing. Apparently, the blow had temporarily wiped out his memory.) Gummi was vouchsafed to the shy medic, who promised to take personal responsibility for him. Samuelsen, charged with riotous conduct, stayed locked up in his cell for two more weeks.

  * * *

  Dr. Robert Davin, Esq., made the acquaintance of Gummi in the train station.

  The doctor was seeing off his fiancée, who was traveling to Cincinnati to visit her parents. As soon as the train pulled away, the doctor realized how very weary the past week of unbroken happiness had made him. Only when it was clear that he could no longer be seen from the window of the train, even with binoculars, did he relinquish his smile. A pleasant sensation in his relaxing facial muscles made him realize he had been smiling the whole week nonstop, even in his sleep. (Thus, if his fiancée had happened to wake up in the middle of the night, she would have seen him happy.) This was not Joy’s fault, of course. She was a charming, kind girl, and he loved her deeply. Yet now, waving his handkerchief for the last time, he might have entertained the thought that since their betrothal, the inexorability of future happiness had become a burden. He didn’t think this, however, perhaps because of that habit of inner disingenuousness people call propriety.

  So the doctor didn’t notice the change that was about to pounce on him until the very moment he abandoned his smile and sighed, almost demonstratively, on the empty platform. And a thought came to him all at once, as though it had broken off a leash: How I miss my work! Such was the intensity of his sigh, and the determination in his first giant step along the platform, that he called it freedom. He managed to think about all of this in the space of a second—about the loss of happiness, the acquisition of freedom, about the subsequent emergence of that startling thought … It seemed to him that a thread of something else, something greater, attached to this triad. He immediately got carried away by the effort to determine the relations among these parameters (happiness, freedom, thought). Unable to find in his vocabulary the many terms now fashionable and known to one and all (“sublimation,” for example), he pondered: substitution, transfer of energy, disengagement—no, transference, i.e., distortion … displacement?… Oh, come now, not these stupid reflexes. Reasoning with considerable intrepidity for those times, Dr. Robert Davin, an outstanding young man of his epoch, to whom we ourselves are greatly indebted, discovered with all the literal force of that particular verb that he was standing in front of a stranger, and staring at him so fixedly that it was downright improper. That person was, of course, Gummi.

  * * *

  Before drawing Dr. Robert Davin, Esq., into our narrative, it would be well to say a few words about him. The narrator is particularly agitated, and his speech somewhat hampered, by the fact that he is already aware of the fame and notoriety that the doctor’s affairs, fresh and hardly raising an eyebrow at the time of our story, will gain in the not-so-distant-future. For the time being, suffice it to say that although the young man of science has fixed his gaze on the future and is doing everything possible to ensure his own recognition and immortality, he is not in the least preoccupied with it, and, unbeknownst to himself, it is the thought of outer space, something truly vast, and as yet unconquered, that has captured his imagination. He had not stopped yet. He did not even know that he already knew why his name would be celebrated, even reviled, in the future. And the fact that he didn’t know allows us to treat him with the maximum degree of objectivity, and sympathy.

  Dr. Davin was the scion of an ancient English family, one branch of which had bent outward and reached across the Atlantic. It then split off, and, despite the skepticism of the remaining tree, took root. (We will leave out of consideration the baseless claims of later biographers about the doubtful purity of his ancestry—a full quarter of Negro blood; the cruelty of his sham father; the various garret dramas of his sisters, which were allegedly a direct consequence of this cruelty. What we do know with a strong degree of certitude is that his father was one of the outstanding horse breeders of his day. And back then horsepower was still supplied by horses!) The future doctor received, it must be said,
a decent education, which he finished across the sea, in Heidelberg and Vienna. A brilliant future beckoned him. Maître Charcot invited him to work for him. But the young psychiatrist resisted the temptations of success and fashion, and returned to his birthplace.

  His homecoming was in part necessitated by, and certainly clouded by, the mysterious death of his father. As sole heir, the young doctor, who for a man of science was endowed with a surprising degree of shrewdness and practicality, disposed very profitably of his father’s horse-breeding enterprise. With the proceeds from the sale he was able to purchase a small clinic on the edge of Taunus, where he took up residence. The windows of his study commanded a beautiful view of an open field. The unusually small number of patients that our hidebound, old-fashioned town could provide him with (indeed, there weren’t many who lost their minds in the county, the state, even the whole of America in those simple and stable times) prevented Dr. Davin from being touched by the decadence that psychiatry, prematurely believing its recent history to be its Renaissance and Classical Era, had already fallen into. Dr. Davin based his system on truths—simple, sad, fundamental—like God’s Green Earth, and we are glad to have been able to contribute to the formation of these wholesome principles. In other words, his thinking was far from bourgeois, and it never resorted to pallid notions of “liberty.”

  In short, Dr. Davin could not help but occupy a prominent position in our town when he settled here. He stood out head and shoulders above the rest of us, as they say. Indeed, he was a tall fellow; refined as a European, illumined slightly by the far-off glimmer of his future glory, he was a magnet for the gaze of the prosaic, dock-tailed townspeople, who were preoccupied with getting rich, and burdened by good health that was even greater than their riches. The latent power his every glance and gesture held for the Taunusians, however—the only semblance of intuition that they could have been said to have developed—forced them, by way of exception, not to hate the young doctor, but to step aside and make room for him, hoping (it was possibly Davin who first introduced the term “the unconscious,” though he wouldn’t dispute its origins with the one to whom it is ascribed) that it was the first and only time they would have to.

  And so, Dr. Davin was twenty-eight years of age, tall, somewhat lean, with a fine build. He had a large, pallid countenance framed by an extremely black beard—that rare combination of the pale and the dark that is attractive in its own way. The hearts of the local young ladies came to a standstill under his stern gaze. A glance from those enormous and also very dark eyes, sharp as anthracite, made their little hearts skip a beat, and—oh, but if only our young ladies could grow pale! There is, however, much that is unknown to our small town, and pallor is one of those things. You might say that Robert Davin was, in this sense, the first white man in these parts. Having finished with their trembling, the young ladies confess to one another, in a whisper, that he frightens them. One of them, just a smidgen paler than usual, corrects them by sighing and remarking that he is “frighteningly handsome.” (She was our town’s first intellectual of the fair sex.)

  But his gaze, however penetrating, was not malicious. Dr. Davin seemed extraordinarily attentive, as though he could look into your soul, which made some people take heed and draw back from him. This attentiveness was nevertheless also something of an illusion. In essence, the doctor didn’t notice anything except that which he intended (perhaps in spite of himself) to see, wherever his gaze happened to fall—which also boded well for his future greatness. Maybe it wasn’t so much that he actually saw “through” people as that his vision accommodated and made room for each person. This inspired others to be on their guard, while fascinating them at the same time. And they were right to be cautious: he was drawing up a verdict. For about a hundred years he would dictate his own insights about who they really were, deep inside. Again—shh!—for the time being, no one was aware of this; not even the doctor himself.

  The doctor stared straight at Gummi. He might well have been the first person in Taunus who had looked at Gummi without tittering. The doctor, who found nothing laughable in his appearance, stood there immobile, while one thought drove out another, edging out the one before it. Something in Gummi’s appearance captured the doctor’s attention. He wasn’t able to pin down Gummi’s cast of mind with his perspicacity, and, funnily enough, the quotidian appearance of this simpleton just did not fit within our hero’s established frame of perception. The doctor’s professional persona got down to work before his conscious mind did, but, flipping through his vast mental card index, he found no corresponding card for anyone like Gummi. There were certain constitutional alterations in Gummi (though the doctor did not yet know this was he) that were not entirely in keeping with the classical interpretation of this type of underdevelopment. It appeared that if he were indeed an idiot, he had not been one from birth, but had been reborn one, regenerated, so to speak, and that the constitution of an idiot was an acquired trait in him. In this case, however, the regeneration had been very strong, quite improbable; something he had never before encountered in his practice.

  Gummi, surprised, obeyed some internal imperative and raised his head, fixing a gaze of blue-eyed simplicity on Dr. Davin (though Gummi did not yet know that this was he).

  * * *

  Now a few words, if you will allow me, about Gummi, whom we left behind at the police station.

  The times about which we are speaking were still uncomplicated times. A person who lived in them, of course, believed them to be modern and unprecedented. They used the word “progress” and were surprised by the rapidly accelerating tempo of change. The Age of Steam was reborn as the Age of Electricity before their very eyes. But although they thought they lived in the most modern of ages, we, of course, know that they lived in the good old days, which are, alas, gone forever. We believe that they were able to live their lives without much ado, in concert with one another, not yet departing from the dictates of nature with regard to humankind. Life fit fully and neatly into the time allotted to it—that is, time still managed to catch up with life.

  As we have already said, the youthful blush had not yet faded from the century in this nature reserve of time. There was enough room in life for children, weddings, deaths, visitors, a tiny prison and simple crimes, the church, and the city cemetery. A cow or a sheep could still wander down Main Street, and people still knew whose cow or sheep it was. In this life there was a place for a town idiot, a vacancy that was not filled until the moment Gummi “fell” into our midst.

  He managed to surprise the town only once—when he was asked where he had fallen from, and he said “the Moon.” This set them laughing, and also reconciled them to him. When the police had become convinced that Gummi (the presumed Toni Badiver) wasn’t a wanted man, nor was he on the run, they decided that he couldn’t be suspected of having any other secrets worth knowing and stopped questioning him. People asked, got the same answer, and were satisfied. So Gummi from the Moon became Gummi from Taunus, and assumed his proper place among us, a place that would otherwise have gone empty.

  He was given shelter by Carmen, a fat, old Spanish woman with a mustache. This was accepted as something completely natural. Carmen lived on the outskirts of town and gathered herbs, and she had a glowering and inhospitable countenance. But however hard it might have been in a small town such as Taunus for each person to choose a tailor-made and congenial fate, loose ends still managed to get tied up in those days. And although Carmen did not really treat Gummi like a human being, all the same she was thoroughly humane toward him. She did his washing and kept him fed. Moreover, it must be said that insofar as Old Woman Carmen didn’t treat anyone like a human being, she was more humane toward Gummi than she was toward anyone else.

  Toni soon became renowned as a first-rate woodchopper and as such justified his existence with a vengeance. He conversed with the firewood, and was so persuasive that it seemed pleased to split itself at his slightest touch. Then he arranged the logs in stacks that wer
e a beauty to behold in both size and elegance. He was quick-witted and agile when it came to the firewood, but decidedly inept at any other task that was even slightly more demanding.

  Gummi’s existence was thus settled and serene. He was mocked only with moderation. The cruelty of the Taunusians was as straightforward as their humanity. They couldn’t think of more than one joke, and laughed at this one with unfading delight. “Did you fall from the Moon?” And he answered “yes,” affording the Taunusians sincere merriment and pleasure. It upset him very much that they didn’t believe him, and that their disbelief remained as adamant as it had been the first time. This was in part what prevented the joke from going any further. He tried to elaborate, to explain to them that he really could fly, that he had even been to Tibet, where he carried water for half a year for the Daruma Monastery; but no one listened to his words. People saw in them only an unsuccessful elaboration of the joke that had incited their laughter the first time. Thus, the Taunusians were quick to edit Gummi’s tales, pruning them down to the laconic and precise formulation: “Did you fall from the Moon?” And he answered, “Yes.”

  Gummi was a meek man, and although it saddened him that these people didn’t want to believe him, he understood that it would be useless to grumble and argue about it with them. This was an example of how an awareness of one’s inferiority can, in some respect, make even an idiot wiser than normal people.

  In his spare time, when he wasn’t working (and in those days there was less spare time, but what there was was truly spare, nearly a void), Gummi loved walking to the Taunus Railroad Station, where there were always a few newcomers who had not yet learned to run their jokes into the ground. He loved looking at the steam engine, which he found very amusing. He watched how it snorted and thrashed its knees rhythmically, and spewed out sparks from under its wheels, which spun around but wouldn’t move an inch. Its temperamental nature and lumbering heaviness appeared ridiculous to him, and he seemed to want to show it a thing or two, but then thought better of it and turned away with a sigh.