The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel

by Andrei Bitov

  Bartholomew’s reasoning may seem somewhat haughty, but he had experience on his side. The view from on high, from his encyclopedic Olympus, on all of our earthly hustle and bustle, from ancient, prehistoric, and even pre-geological times, made certain things clear to him.

  The career ladder, for example. In his own eyes, Bartholomew passed as a great prognosticator. His experience as art director helped, of course. Glancing at a photograph of a newly formed government cabinet, he didn’t pay much attention to the central figure, pushed forward by history. His attention was drawn to the sidelines—those who were to the left and to the right. They were the ones who had a free shoulder. They leaned in from the margins, pushing out the central figure beyond the frame of the photograph like toothpaste from a tube. Bartholomew divined the future ten years ahead: the one on the left would move to the right, the one on the right would move left, and they would collide in the middle in a preelection struggle. They stood there, modestly and unobtrusively, hardly distinguishable from one another: the left somewhat younger, the right a bit older, but both still in their prime. They are dressed almost identically, like the central figure; it is barely visible, but if you look carefully you will see that the jacket on the left one is a bit narrower in the waist, and the trousers are flared (or the other way round, depending on the generation). Also barely visible, but in the latest fashion, the haircut is nearly the same, but not quite. The right one, on the contrary, though it is barely noticeable, clings to a style that is already out of date—the jacket is wider, the trousers narrower—and clings to a government that is already out of date. It would not seem to be to their advantage; they hang there in an uncomfortable pose on the periphery, at the farthest point of the pendulum. But in two years they’ll accelerate toward the center: now the second from the edge, now the fourth … faster and faster, until they knock heads in the middle. Bartholomew knew a thing or two, and he even understood it. Except …

  They overtook him, left and right. His concrete experience proved to be of no practical use to him. Ten years he had slogged away without a promotion. Bartholomew grew angry again, and again he flew up to the peak of Olympus, to Adams, in the glass elevator …

  And caught him. At the very last moment, when Adams was looking forward to his imminent lunch. Adams’s self-command prevented him from showing his vexation: his face beamed too cordially, he bent over backward to show how democratic he was. Who was Bartholomew, that Adams should try so hard to please him? Ah, a king, the salt of the earth. Undethronable and eternal. The entire encyclopedia—the entire universe, that is—rested on him. And who was Adams? Decay, dust, nothingness. One minute he’s here, the next he’s gone, in a puff of smoke. He knew his place; he trembled before Bartholomew. He was the cat that had swallowed the canary. Adams was afraid, though he wasn’t even aware of it himself. He wasn’t afraid of, say, Zuberg, but of something in a way more terrible. As though the future lit up Bartholomew’s face: only look into his eyes and you’ll see that you are doomed, that soon, very soon … That is why Adams averts his eyes and can’t look directly at Bartholomew. He only imagines that he can’t stand Bartholomew; but it’s himself he can’t stand. He only imagines he is able to conceal his confusion under a guise of simplicity, shyness, and sensitivity toward his subordinate. He wouldn’t want to show his superiority, or injure someone’s self-love inadvertently. But he’s the only one who imagines these things. All the others, the ones below, see him for what he is. And for the Adamses of this world, being seen is death.

  Bartholomew saw him, and Adams knew it (he was shrewd, you had to hand him that). He began to make excuses: how he had presented Bartholomew’s request, and had even gone all the way to the top, to the Man Himself. If he didn’t believe him, Bartholomew could ask the secretary, she’d show him the paperwork. “In a month, you can count on it,” Adams says, but in his own mind he is already going down in the glass elevator, and the door of his limousine opens, and he’s spreading the toasted bread with Russian caviar. “Come back in a month, and I will personally take care of it. I’ll go straight to Him.” And Adams was gone. Vanished.

  Well, what do you know! Bartholomew thought, overcome with admiration. By golly, it’s the very same thing. He’s just the Turk all over again. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The undeniable accuracy of his discovery buoyed him up. Adams, the Turk; the Turk, Adams … Could it be just by chance that he had combined them on the same day? No, it turned out there was a reason … and the reason was that they were one person! A thief and the Thief. Their gestures, the little expressions they let drop—they were from the same script. Only the Thief’s acting was better. More honest. Bartholomew’s heart warmed with the memory. And he became still more attached to his court Thief.

  Only when he had returned to his own office and assumed his throne did Bartholomew realize that Adams had again passed him over. The Turk and the fur coat? That was nothing by comparison! The Thief had halved his debt (again); but the vizier had doubled his. And as soon as Bartholomew had sat down, he realized that he had returned to his place. No, Adams had put him there, in his place. With empty promises, casual flattery—“You’re the only one … Only you have the qualifications … All my hopes rest on you … Help us out, rescue us, for God’s sake … [The Thief prays to the devil, and only in private, keeping it to himself; but this one appeals aloud to God, without so much as blushing] … A great responsibility … Only with your experience and expertise…” He foisted it off on Bartholomew, and Bartholomew didn’t notice that he had accepted it, and that the wool had been pulled over his eyes. That the burden had fallen on him alone, he was up to his neck in it, and now up to his ears … all the work on the entire supplementary volume!

  Adams was still strong, after all; Adams was still Adams.

  Nevertheless, Bartholomew was still Bartholomew, too. The king grew irate. With one hand he extinguished a star, with the other he tore a tree out by the roots. On Osman Pasha he conferred a defeat in the nineteenth century. That was for his Turk the Thief, and for the Armenians to boot. The innocent Adamson was executed—abridged into oblivion—that’s for Adams. Take that, Sir Poluzhan!

  All those who had been summarily executed he buried immediately in crosswords (one of his drinking buddies gladly printed them, then stood him a bottle for a fee). All the crossings arranged themselves elegantly, without the least coercion on his part. The last one was carat, from an article about diamonds (“carat, see: diamond”). Now there were some job openings for disadvantaged concepts …

  On a liberated spot he was going to furnish a picture that hadn’t made the cut: a breaking wheel in fifteenth-century France. It was a good picture, very detailed: one criminal, already processed, already hung up on the wheel, his broken arms and legs dangling from it (that was Adams); another one, spread-eagled on a scaffold, is being bludgeoned by the executioner (that was the Turk: he could still beg for mercy, and Bartholomew could still pardon him). But that wasn’t all. He got rid of a picture of some kind of centrifuge, and in its place he set up a gallows so he could hang Adams, as well. The picture of the hanging man could serve as an illustration for a lesson on extreme disciplinary measures. And as his blood cooled and slowed down, the king didn’t even notice how he had suddenly adopted a more charitable frame of mind, carrying out more merciful acts—how he himself had begun to draw. He drew an invalid in the entry for INVALID, and it seemed that without any obligation he had drawn another unfortunate victim for the article on LEPROSY. On the chest of the invalid hung military honors and medals, and on the leper he had drawn—a heart. Both of them had the faces of good people. One had a crutch, the other a staff. They got by. They lived. They limped onward.

  Bartholomew got carried away, lost in his pastime. Who could have known what joy …

  Who could have known what joy it was, this supplementary volume! What fun. It was a cornucopia of shortcomings and oversights. The entire one hundred volumes of experience fit within its pages. All the provincial narr
ow-mindedness of our notion of the world. All the failures, all the victims of encyclopedic injustice, all the latest upstarts—from A to Z. What a motley, absurd throng! The ARC LIGHT (“Yablochkov’s Candle”), which helped earn Paris the name of “City of Light,” had been omitted before, as well as the absolutely innocent ÅLAND ISLANDS. Who had left them out of the first volume? Now, however, for moral compensation, Bartholomew even bestowed a map on them, an honor that even mighty archipelagos had not received. Here was someone else who would see his luck turn at the very end of the supplementary volume—JOSEF ZUBATY, Czech philologist. Bartholomew pushed out some newly hatched minister (he should have known his days were numbered). “Don’t be timid, Zubaty,” he said, nudging the philologist gently toward the volume. “Climb aboard.”

  Bartholomew was now completely absorbed in his work. The choices became ever easier and more mechanical; he replaced a gulf with a mountain peak, an exploit with an honor, a wrench with a cathedral—the index cards flashed through his hands like those of a cardsharp. He was never once tempted to hold the trump card behind his back. And all of this for the sake of harmony and justice, and all of it to the detriment of chaos and evil.

  That was just the beginning—the main battle still lay ahead. There, between A and Z, was his favorite letter. There, he and the enemy were going to clash … Ta-da-da tum-ta-da! Bartholomew hummed a victory march, savoring the triumph to come and rubbing his hands together. This was not the first year that Bartholomew had cherished this hope. In England it wouldn’t have happened. Here, among the frogs’ legs, why not? A supplementary volume, this crude appendage, but of the whole world, gave Bartholomew a freedom not available in the regular volumes, orderly and predictable. Bartholomew had prepared himself. Bartholomew was ready. The bookshelves were finished, the cannons were loaded, the trumpet was about to sound. He merely had to light the fuse.

  Bartholomew reached out for the trump card, the sacred folder … Suddenly, instead of the ace he was counting on, he pulled something else out of the deck—a fresh joker. Someone in a red leotard, a regular jester. Illustrating the article on ARLEQUIN.

  He examined it. Something was not quite right. Instead of a cap with bells, it had horns; instead of pointed elfin shoes, there were little hooves. “Ugh!” he exclaimed. What a blunder! He had pulled out the wrong card, D instead of A. Or maybe even S? But who believes in him anymore, anyway, dressed up in that red leotard? Now he wears a three-piece suit … Adams!

  “Ugh!” said Bartholomew again, starting to get worked up. “The devil’s on the loose!”

  He looked up. Outside it was dark, and the building was suspiciously quiet. Was he burning the midnight oil again? His watch had stopped. “I wonder what time it is?” Bartholomew thought, alarmed, and straightaway his royal cares beset him again. They thronged around, grimaced and pulled faces, winked at him and nudged him, then scattered, like a deck made up entirely of jokers. Bartholomew spasmodically stuffed the one in the red leotard back under S and started to hurry, shuffling things in his hands, juggling his umbrella and his galoshes, and headed downstairs. The glass elevator was stuck between floors, and it shed the only light there was on the dark stairwell.

  “You’re the last one here,” the doorkeeper mumbled with kindly disapproval, sweeping Bartholomew out together with the sawdust from the lobby. “Telegram for you. Have a good holiday!”

  “What kind of telegram? What holiday?”

  “Christmas, of course.”

  “Christmas!?”

  BARTIE HURT. HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. CALL SURGEON.

  “For Christ’s sake!” A sluggish wave of cold washed over Bartholomew. “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What kind of nonsense is this, you dunderhead?” Bartholomew exploded. “How is that possible—tomorrow?”

  “It just is,” the doorkeeper said indignantly. “Tomorrow is Christmas.”

  “I’m talking about the telegram!”

  “Today, of course.”

  “Yes, yes, the telegram came today, but when are they arriving?”

  Bartholomew turned around and left with a dismissive wave of the hand.

  Bartholomew was, of course, a great military commander. But, what with the disarray on the front lines …

  For some reason we don’t allow great people to give in to weakness or fall into despair. Yet that’s their right, too. In depriving them of this most paltry and basic of rights, we don’t notice that we are also depriving them of sensibility and humanity; and we are the ones to suffer the consequences. We should assume that the great ones of the world experience both great despair and boundless weakness. For where is the guarantee of victory, if not at the bottom of the abyss? We assume that Napoleon lost a single battle because he happened to have a cold. We cannot even begin to imagine how he could have contracted the cold, however.

  Fear for little Bartie threw a pall over everything. How could such a heap of misfortune land upon the poor king all at once? This king, who raised mountains, swept away islands, and scattered stars, was, after all, just an unlucky son and an unlucky father, no greater than us. The despair that gripped King Bartholomew defied the ordinary meaning of the term—it was infinite. Wet snow mixed with rain lashed his face, and his whole body was racked with a vile, hungry, feverish shivering. Everything in his head became a jumble: micro and macro. Bartie—the Christmas tree; the Thief—Adams; the surgeon—a wheelchair; the devil—the non-devil …

  How had he so miscalculated? He thought that he would have time for everything tomorrow, and suddenly today morphed into yesterday. That was all he needed …

  He had no Christmas tree, no wheelchair, and, worst of all, no surgeon. And what was wrong with little Bartie? Poor Bartholomew, horrified, pictured the Duchess rushing home, carrying a bleeding child in her arms. What could it be? His hand? His leg? His eye, God forbid? His ear? The thought of the ear comforted the unhappy king somewhat: without an ear one could still live. Forceps! It suddenly dawned on Bartholomew. But of course—Forceps! How could he have forgotten? Forceps, the brilliant Forceps, famous throughout the world for sewing back torn-off fingers, detached hands, feet, not to mention ears …

  He dashed over to a pay phone. Forceps was at home, and he was happy as always to hear from Bartholomew. Bartholomew had to come by this instant! Ears, fingers—that was all nonsense, easy as pie. Put it in a cellophane bag and stuff it in the freezer. Tomorrow we’ll sew everything back on … Scary to you, but to us doctors it’s not at all scary. What’s scary is taking a knife out of someone’s heart, if the man is still alive; but if he’s already a corpse, no, that’s not scary anymore …

  “A knife? A heart? What are you talking about!” Bartholomew was horror-struck once more and broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Remember how we sailed on The King of Something? I was just a humble ship’s doctor, can you believe it? Relax, everything will be A-okay! Remember how you and I cleaned out the whole ship’s pharmacy? And by the end of the journey I was treating everything with kerosene. And we didn’t lose a single crew member, nobody got seriously ill. They were all in the pink of health when they went ashore. True, they were inedible … Why? Because they all stank of kerosene!”

  Forceps roared with laughter. “Get over here this instant! What do you mean, your mother, what are you going on about? A fracture? We’ll put her on her feet, too. Tomorrow we’ll do it … Wheelchair? What do you mean, a wheelchair? I’ve got thousands of them, they’re all yours, take as many as you want! What, do you think I’d begrudge someone that kind of crap? Listen, I never thought you were such a fusspot. You’ll get your Christmas tree. From where? I’ll cut it down on my grounds here. Just settle down—it’s my land, I can do whatever I want with it.”

  Forceps was completely drunk. Bartholomew was trying to wrest away the ax, which Forceps kept aiming at his leg. “Listen, why did you ever marry?” Forceps said, brandishing the ax. “To save you,” Bartholomew said, still not managing to liberate the ax. “I w
asn’t ever really in love, was I?” “Yes, you were.” “How lucky I am that I never married, and especially not for love…” And thus, while aiming at Bartholomew’s leg, with one stroke, professionally, at one fell swoop, Forceps removed a splendid fir tree from the grounds in front of his splendid house built in the Elizabethan style—a little island of Great Britain in the land of frogs’ legs. “My home is my castle,” he announced to his valet, who wore a slight frown underneath his impenetrable mask of equanimity. “I can burn it down, if I want to. See if I can’t. Show His Majesty to the telephone so he can call his residence.”

  And—oh, joy!—the widowed Queen Mother sounded very pleased about everything: Maggie was back! You can’t imagine how wonderful our Maggie is! She washed and set my hair. Charming!… No, my voice is fine, it’s just inconvenient for me to talk … No, they haven’t returned. Were they supposed to? I assure you, it’s only Maggie … It’s just inconvenient to talk with a mirror in my hand. No, no telegram, and no one has arrived. Are we having more guests for Christmas, then? Splendid! Come home as soon as you can, you’ll never recognize me! Do you want to speak to Maggie?

  The situation with Maggie was a bit unclear; or, rather, almost clear. She had found out that the Duchess wouldn’t be home for Christmas. The Duchess couldn’t bear her, and Bartholomew couldn’t understand why. She was by far the loveliest of all the prince’s favorites. The Queen Mother adored her, however; and Bartholomew was of one mind with his mother. The Duchess couldn’t understand what they all saw in her. Bartholomew, in his turn, couldn’t understand something either: What did Maggie see in his son? Such rare disinterestedness! She came just at the right moment, as always; she knew just what to do, as always; as always, she rescued them. Sweet Maggie, Bartholomew thought fondly. But were she and that rascal up to some other kind of monkey business, Bartholomew wondered all of a sudden. No, she’s not that type …