The Symmetry Teacher (11 page)

he continued, submitting the delicacy and purity of these ideas to the benevolent judgment of Joy.

We are capable of destroying a primitive ideal, but are not capable of erecting in its stead a more capacious one that would include what we have ruined. If a person were paid money for what is characteristic of him, and not for those distortions and aberrations by which he accommodates himself to success, the prime minister and great scholar would experience the comfort of their places, and so their happiness, like Gummi out there chopping wood. If everyone, having discovered his inmost secret wish, could be allowed to engage in the simple pastime that made him happy, the world would descend into idiocy and a golden age would reign on Earth. It is only due to the fear of loneliness that people are not all mad—and they are all mad because they accept the conventionality of social existence while failing to examine it in their minds. The therapy of real work is possible only in Paradise. The only explanation for what I as a person have done is that it is “peculiar-to-me”; but this peculiarity can be ascribed to me by myself alone. Otherwise, why is it so difficult for me, why does it take such effort, to do all those things I consider it not only my duty but also my vocation to do? Only because other people are doing things just as uncharacteristic of them in a worse manner than I? But doesn’t this mean that they are simply more normal than I am in their inability to act uncharacteristically with enthusiasm, that they, the loafers and hangers-on, are closer to Gummi in this sense, truer to their own natures, even though they refrain from coercing those natures? The inertia of the philistine is natural. And the clarification of the world, that higher “naturalness” that I justify through my purported genius, is vain poppycock, depraved nothingness.

He reread what he had written, and was surprised by it. “What a poetaster I’ve become!” he said, and frowned in chagrin. “What drivel! I’ve become an A-1 bumpkin. How shameful … No, Joy is right. We’re leaving. To someplace in Europe, if only to St. Petersburg. How, in my wildest dreams, could I ever have supposed I’d experience a creative breakthrough here, that isolation and solitude, the removal of all distractions, would be conducive to my work? Balderdash! Outside the small circle of those who take an interest in my work, all my efforts are senseless and truly futile … Back! Albeit to Monsieur Charcot, and his harebrained douche…”

*   *   *

Finally, Gummi’s good-natured character had delivered him happiness. Life wasn’t all about caressing logs, after all. Now he had a why, a whom, and a for-whose-sake—not to mention a where and a wherefore. His life had acquired a purpose, as they say. He was able to share his loneliness, thereby halving it. He was happy.

He didn’t notice himself how, from the first time he accompanied Dr. Davin from the station to the doctor’s yellow house, he managed to tell him everything: his whole life, everything he knew, and even everything he thought about. This surprised him, too. Even more surprising was how quickly he recounted it all, how small his own life was—like a newborn’s. He felt stunned, and his jaw dropped when, halfway down the road, he caught up with the present moment in his story, and the two synced up: here he was, walking with the doctor down this very road … And that was where his story ended. It was crowned with success. He shook his head, laughing at himself, and closed his mouth.

The doctor took an interest in all that Gummi had to say. He believed him implicitly. Why, otherwise, would he have begun asking him so many questions?

Truly, the case fascinated Davin. He explained the ease of interaction, the novelty and unexpectedness of his own thoughts and insights in Gummi’s presence, in purely professional terms. He didn’t know how to explain it otherwise, and the sense that it was simply and inexplicably pleasant to be in his company mounted, until the cumulative vagueness of it all suddenly irritated him, and he was surprised at himself. What was wrong with him? On what was he wasting his precious genius? But here his thought turned back on itself, drawn by the good nature and ingenuousness of his interlocutor, and was reborn before he was able to understand it—a feeling of exuberance and joy. And the conversation flowed on.

He had never been able to discover anything about Gummi’s past. Gummi himself seemed sincerely baffled about it. He didn’t even know his exact age. He was not much older, but certainly no younger, than Dr. Davin. Of this span of years, he could remember only the part of it he had spent in this small city of Taunus. But how to account for the rest of the time?… Gummi’s eyes grew wide from strain, as though he saw something in front of him, but this something was so unutterable that words had yet to be found for it. His own words, at times smooth and mellifluous, at times even eloquent, tangled into a ball, crumpled, melted, and turned into a characteristic idiotic mush. All that Davin was able to gather from Gummi’s strained mumbling was that he had spent his whole previous life lying down, rolled up like an embryo in some sort of large membrane, through which the sky was always visible and was never obscured by anything. Sometimes Gummi said he was swaddled; sometimes he said that he had lain on something like a bed, a sofa, with his eyes open, under a transparent bell jar without a roof.

“Maybe the bed was standing in a field?” Davin said.

Gummi looked at him with alarm, then, brightening, said without a trace of irony, “Maybe it was in a field … I remember that kind of smell.”

He could no longer recall anything about the Daruma Monastery, either. The memories had been wiped out. Before the monastery, he had probably slept with his eyes open, but in the monastery he had lived maybe a year, maybe two—maybe no more than a week.

“Did you chop wood there?” the great diagnostician-to-be asked with surprising acumen. This was a pointed question, and it jolted Gummi’s memory.

“No. There was no firewood there. There were mountains. I carried water.”

That was all. Davin couldn’t come up with another, equally astute question. Instead, he brushed aside Gummi’s past. And he began asking him about the Moon.

Gummi glanced at the doctor warily, but again caught no signs of anything but sympathy and genuine interest.

“Yes, I’ve been to the Moon,” Gummi said.

“But how did you manage that?” Davin said. He overacted, and even though he knew nothing about irony, Gummi picked up on it. He noticed, and grew glum.

“You don’t believe me.”

“That’s not true,” Davin said with urgent sincerity. “As far as I can tell, you are incapable of lying. But you must agree that no human being has ever accomplished such a feat.”

“You’re just like them,” Gummi said.

“I assure you—”

“You also say I’m not human.”

“I never said that!”

“You said ‘no human being.’ Carmen says the same thing: ‘You’re not human.’”

“You have misunderstood me…” Davin began. Just at that moment he started thinking about the relationship between madness and the capacity for logical thought. Perhaps perfect logic is a sign, a symptom. Normal thought is, on the contrary, illogical. The mechanism of healthy thought boils down to knowing how not to notice, how to ignore or overlook, to change the sequence … skipping, shifting … There has to be a word for it … Maybe there already is … Thought flows on two levels, as it were, not suspecting its own parallel existence: in the depths is the mute knowledge of the ages, with a sheen of logic in the interests of self-delusion on the surface, like a garment … The ineffable is covered with an unruly layer of names, words … How empty it all sounds, indeterminate, all wrong. But there
is
something, a regularity, a mechanism … To name it, to announce it!… Think, think about this! he said to himself peremptorily, with an eye toward the future.

“They just don’t know what flying means,” Gummi said. “Birds, of course, fly, too. But people are not birds. People fly differently. They are not equipped like birds. People don’t know how they are equipped, and think that only birds can fly. Of course, you shouldn’t think that people fly like birds. And so they laugh at me. But I don’t flap my arms like wings when I fly. That’s not how it’s done.”

He’s remarkably subtle for an idiot, Davin thought. There is no equivalence … As always, there is no equivalence! What is equal to what? What is sense, what is nonsense? It’s just a conventional arrangement, the cynicism of which is obscured by yet another agreement, which in its turn is forgotten. Oh dear! Davin became angry with himself. Will I ever be able to get to the end of a single thought today?

“It’s as easy as any other ability, if one has it. And just as impossible, if one doesn’t. It’s an ordinary ability, like any other. Is being able to smell something any less remarkable? Is there anything given by God that isn’t remarkable or wondrous?”

Heavens! Davin thought. He can’t be saying this! Did he say that, or was I just thinking it? No, madness is positively contagious.

“Well then, show me,” he said without softening his tone.

“You don’t believe me.” The sorrow that suffused Gummi’s face in an instant was so deep that the doctor gasped and nearly howled in despair. This was more than he could bear.

“How can you say that!” Davin said, losing his temper for the first time. “Of course I believe you!” he shouted, sharing in the delusion of many people, equal only to their guile, that rudeness is a display of sincerity. “I believe you!”

“I see,” Gummi said with sad humility, nodding. “You believe me, but you don’t believe
in
me.”

“Listen, Gummi, you are a remarkable person. I say this in all seriousness, I am not laughing—you are a remarkable person. You don’t even understand yourself how much you…” The more verbose and modulated his speech, the more confused he became: how many words did you have to resort to to make a person believe what you don’t believe yourself? Actually, the only thing required here was words. The rest just—was. Necessary and sufficient, he thought, and sighed. I should have become a mathematician rather than trying to pin down imprecise thoughts about life. “I assure you!”

Gummi believed him and all but purred from joy. “I believe you,” he said.

“Did you learn to fly in the monastery?” Davin’s perspicacity and abrupt about-face produced an unexpected effect. Gummi seemed to recall something. He stared, round-eyed, his gaze fixed in front of him, at something that was not there.

“Yes … The Teacher … He drank water … I was supposed to grasp the empty…” Once again, words that had miraculously just found each other stuck together like warm candies in a pocket. “He drank the water, put me in a corner … Beat me a little with a stick…” Something seemed to burst forth out of Gummi’s eyes. “He said to me, ‘Where in this cup is that water I drank?’ I said that it was in him. Then he beat me hard. After that he put the empty cup in front of me and said, ‘Think about what is in it.’ Then he left, locking the door behind him. I was there for three days, and I thought.”

“Hmm,” Dr. Davin said.

Gummi’s face grew brighter. “You gave me a hint, and I remembered. That’s how it was. I looked at the cup for three days.”

“That’s strange, to say the least,” Davin said, sighing.

“Let me try to explain it to you. I think that’s when it happened the first time. I became numb and cold. Then I warmed up all of a sudden, and everything became colorful. I was still in the same room, though. I began to feel curious, frightened, and cheerful. I was cheerful and happy, but I didn’t laugh. I looked around me, and the numbness in me began to heat up, and to buzz like a cicada. Everything was what it was, and at the same time not what it was. Suddenly I noticed that the cup was in the other corner. I didn’t believe it at first. I probably just hadn’t noticed that I had moved into another corner, away from the one with the cup. I went back to it—I had to obey my teacher. I knelt down before it. Again I felt that something wasn’t right. The only window—a small, narrow one—was directly above me, in the corner where my teacher had placed me. Now, after I had moved, it turned out to be right above me again—the very same window. I glanced at the corner I had just left to rejoin the cup, and screamed—for I was scared: there I was, still in the same position, kneeling. Little by little I recovered from my shock and grew bold enough to glance at him again. He was me, that was certain, and my fear began to melt. I looked at him more and more boldly, and sensed that he was waking up.

“I don’t know how I understood that he was aware of my existence and was letting me get used to him. He made an effort not to look in my direction. I sensed that he avoided looking at me on purpose. I don’t know how he made me understand this. Finally, he turned to me and looked at me mockingly, then winked. And suddenly, when he got up off his knees after winking at me, it wasn’t him, but me. In a flash, he was standing over the former, empty me. Then I somehow leaned over to the side and tore myself away from the floor and for a short time floated above that self who stayed behind in the corner, timidly and without the least bit of interest in watching what was happening to me. He became boring to me, as though I realized that everything was all right with him. I hovered above him for a second, limp and bent over, then straightened myself out and soared up to the ceiling. And I was seized by intense joy! I knew that I had been flung wide open, and my incarceration in a rigid and heavy world was finished. Hastily trying out all my newfound possibilities, spinning around and turning somersaults through the room, and, somehow mastering all this instantaneously, I glided over to the little window. I remember noticing that it was dusty.”

Typical drug-induced delirium, the doctor thought. Could he really have been in Asia?

“What happened next?” Davin said with childish impatience, no longer surprised at Gummi’s narrative abilities. “You tell it marvelously well. Then what happened?”

“I saw the monastery and the mountains from above. I fluttered about like a crazed butterfly, and suddenly I discovered that I had drifted off very far, that the sea was underneath me, and I began to fall. Just at that moment, the teacher burst into the cell with a shout: ‘Who gave you permission? How dare you?’ He began to beat the one in the corner, striking him on the head with a stick. That one didn’t budge, he was like an earthenware figure. The teacher kept beating and beating, saying, ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! It’s a sin! You’ll be punished!’ As though he wasn’t punishing yet, only beating. Slipping in unnoticed through the window, I returned to my corner in front of the empty cup and obediently refrained from looking at them. It seemed to me that once or twice, however, he threw a glance at me. And then beat ‘that other one’ with even greater fury. For some reason I didn’t feel sorry for him. Then the teacher left ‘that one’ abruptly, turned to me, and, staring directly at me now, said, ‘Have you regained your senses? Is it painful? Pain is empty.’ And he left.” Gummi again fell silent. He was far away.