The Symmetry Teacher (16 page)

*   *   *

“Russia isn’t a backward country, by any means. It’s a country ahead of its time.”

“How can that be, since it already exists?”

“Maybe it exists, and maybe it doesn’t.”

“How do you mean?”

“Perhaps it is merely stored up for future use, not for present consumption.”

“The whole length and breadth of it?”

“Any way you slice it. Makes no difference. The main question is: Why did we seize so much land, if not for future use? We made it all the way to California! We could have snatched up your Canada along the way. Easy! Only we had already forgotten where we had come from, and then we turned back. And regurgitated Alaska. What a misfortune. Giving it to you wouldn’t have been so bad—but to the Americans?”

“And what are you going to do with this territory you have so much of?

“Look whose cow is mooing!”

“What do cows have to do with it?

“You grabbed half the globe, and now you’re stealing it black, blue, and blind!”

“Are you referring to the slave trade?”

“And that’s not all! The whole thing’s a disgrace. But we don’t do anything with all our land—we keep it on hand, just in case. That’s what I meant when I said ‘for future use.’ Just wait until we’ve panned enough gold. Then we’ll buy out Alaska along with India. We’ll overpay, of course; we’re profligate.”

“According to that logic, Anton, you’re the most calculating of all nations. Who are you Russians, anyway? Tartars? Mongols?”

“Not at all. I explained it to Scott this way: Russians are half-baked Germans, half-baked Jews, and half-baked Japanese. All rolled up into one. One and a half people.”

“Why Japanese?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because you didn’t ask me about Jews and Germans.”

“Fine. Let’s take them one at a time.”

“It will take too long. You’ll get tired.”

I took offense at this. “Don’t you think we’re speaking two different languages here?”

“You just noticed?”

I laughed out loud. He had caught me out.

“Where you use one word, we use two, and vice versa. An example? Well, ‘earth’; or ‘birthplace.’ Earth,
zemlya
, for us means both land and the planet Earth. But ‘birthplace’ means different things in Russian, depending on whether it’s written as one word or two. It’s either a mineral deposit (
mestorozhdenie
) or the place one was born (
mesto rozhdeniya
). Let’s say I was born in Fathers, in my father’s place. That’s my birthplace. But I panned for gold at a birthplace in Zabaikal. You wouldn’t talk about a birthplace of gold, would you? But that’s what we say.”

I liked Anton. And he sensed this. “Here’s the thing: the Russian is like a mineral deposit, like gold. You just have to prospect for him, dig him out, wash him off, and enrich him. Then there’s the language. We have one, of course. Quite a respectable one, at that. No worse than yours. You don’t have to dig it up, enrich it, or wash it off—only prospect for it. Our word is a nugget. It hasn’t yet decayed into synonyms. Ours is a word of unbroken ambiguity.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, what do you suppose is the most important thing in your language?”

“Umm…”

“Well, who governs whom? Who’s the boss?” It took me a while to realize he was talking about parts of speech. “Why, the verb, of course!” Anton was thrilled by my lack of acumen. “No wonder you have so many tenses.”

Say what you will, a compliment to your mother tongue is as pleasant to the ear as caresses to a cat. And I agreed that it was the verb.

“And what do the Germans have?” Anton said.

“Do you mean to say you know German, too?”

“I don’t even want to! I only know that every thing starts with a capital letter, and that they bow down before all their things: der Table, der Chair, das Book, das Ladle.”

“An interesting observation,” I said. I wasn’t offended on behalf of the Germans. “I quite like Russian, too. It’s musical, like Portuguese. Those shushing sounds alone…”

Now Anton was pleased.

“Yes, we have a good imagination.
Zhopa
(‘rear end’),
shchaste
(‘happiness’),” he said, savoring the sounds. “Strange that in this case we do take things to the end, bring them to a full stop. That’s the one thing that all languages have in common—a period. The end of the sentence must be marked by a period.
*
Do you sense the difference between a sentence
†
and a proposal? Here you have the fissure between freedom and the deed! Mohammedanism…”

“What do Russians have to do with all this?”

“I’m getting there.” Here he swung around like a boomerang. “With us it’s not verbs or nouns—just adjectives. Even the Russian word
russky
is an adjective; maybe it modifies the noun ‘man,’ but that word is missing.” Anton’s face grew markedly sad. “No man.” This “no man” sounded particularly tender and musical, almost like “knowmen” or “noumenon.” It almost seemed to me that it was accompanied by a sob.

I didn’t understand what he meant by Mohammedanism, and we parted, each returning to our different languages.
Na pososhok
.
*

*   *   *

Here’s what we spoke about the next day: the same thing.

When I expressed somewhat strongly my surprise at the paradoxes in his thinking, Anton reddened, slightly embarrassed, then looked at me with downcast eyes and muttered, “It’s not really me, it’s my Tishka.”

But “Tishka” was neither his double, nor his nickname; nor was it some intimate part of himself. It was his closest friend, Tishkin, a great scientist who had invented a contraption for flying to the Moon.

Although I was wary of not believing him by now, since everything he related had somehow turned out to be true, I wished to know a bit more—not about the Moon, but about the circumstances of the death of Robert Scott. Anton balked and clenched his jaw.

He said, “You’re the one who says that a live dog is better than a dead lion. And I say to you: if a lion were a fox, he would be cunning.” (As I have already said, Anton liked to flaunt his English, though in this case he had no idea he was paraphrasing William Blake.)

“I’ll kill him!” he announced.

“Who?”

“That Finn!”

It turned out he was referring to Roald Amundsen.

“What for?”

“He had better dogs. And he took advantage of it … Ah, Robert, Robert! Why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you take me along?” Anton burst into tears.

I had no choice but to believe in his sincerity, as well.

This is the story as I eventually came to understand it.

*   *   *

Anton purchased, very economically, the right horses, and Lieutenant Bruce recommended him for the expedition. Scott liked him, too, and Anton was taken on as a member. He was entrusted with the task of meeting and seeing off those setting out to the South Pole. He longed to follow them all the way but was left with the horses because of his youth. (“Again because I am Russian,” Anton moaned. “Though what kind of Russian am I, anyway, when I’m a
khokhol
?” I won’t belabor the distinction, but it seems that a
khokhol
is just a Russian with a different haircut.) Even with the horses in tow, he reached 84 degrees south latitude. “I just had six more degrees to cover!” he said. “Although I did climb a volcano. Almost made it to the top, but I got scalded.”

This also appeared to be the truth, though he did call Mount Erebus “Elbrus.” (There is a dormant volcano by that name in Russia.)

For his exploits he was decorated by Her Majesty. For these, too, he was barred from the next expedition and now had occasion to grieve the death of his idol Scott. News of the tragedy drove us to the counter of a pub that bore the name A Tired Horse.

“But where’s the plot?” you will ask. “
Tyoo-tyoo
!”
*
I answer, recalling my lost friend’s favorite little word. “I’m getting around to it.”

And that’s just what happened to Anton. Pfft! He disappeared just as suddenly as he had appeared, as though he had drowned in one of the mugs.

Anton had many favorite little words and expressions, some of them even English. Not only was there “knowmen,” but also “knowhow.” “Neekhuyaneeknowhow-knowhowneekhuya,” he intoned sadly, and this rang very pleasantly in my ear.

“
Neekhuyanee
 … means ‘nothingdoingness’?”

“More like ‘doingnothingness.’”

“A subtle difference! So, which one is more correct?”

“Both are worse than
neekhuja
!” (You can imagine my surprise when I learned some years later that his expression meant, more literally, “Nofrigginknowhow-nohowfrigginway.”)

“Again,” he said. “You have ‘network,’ together, but it’s separate for us: ‘net work. No work.’”

*   *   *

But if I had a fairly good grasp of everything he told me when I was on the bar stool, a grasp that increased the longer I was on it, that didn’t mean I understood even a smidgen of what he wrote me in a letter I received a few years later.

Deap fpehd! Raitin English fyurst taim in mai laif! I rite uyo in zaimke, haunting uan Amerikan. Zei a not rial soldgeps! Bat weri welll ekvipt! We a hauntin zem laik kuropatok—smol Rasshn vaild hens—uan prope shot end sri aurs ken bi dresst. Its raze kold tu veit—I dreem abaut a guud shot of Whiskey—luuk! I remembe hau it voz rittn on ze botel!—viz uyo, mai Dalink! Bat tuu fa iz yoz Anton! Drug (vor-frend) creep op tikhoi sapoi viz samogon (aue Whicky) …

I won’t try your patience or mine by copying out the whole missive. Even with the help of a friend of mine, a Slavist by profession, it was not easy to decipher. At first I thought that since Anton had been fighting the Germans he was mixing up the two languages: these “deep horses”
*
as a form of salutation were somewhat bewildering. The Slavist got stuck on
zaimke
and wandered around for a long time in his “castle” (
zamke
), until he was finally mired for good in
tikhoi sapoi
. Even when it was translated into something resembling English, it still didn’t make a great deal of sense:

Dear Friend, I’m writing in English for the first time in my life! I’m writing you from a pit, I’m hunting for an American. They are not real soldiers, but very well equipped! We are hunting them down like
kuropatkas
(small Russian wild hens): you can dress three with one good shot. It’s quite cold waiting here—I’m dreaming of a good gulp of Whiskey (look how well I can spell that—I remember the word from the bottle!) with you, my dear friend! But your Anton is too far away. My fighting friend (drug) crawled quietly into the trench with moonshine (Russian whiskey) … to your health!…

I was very touched when it was finally deciphered for me, and I immediately drank to Anton’s health, while trying to fathom the Russian turn of phrase “to hunt for an American.”

I sent him a concise and friendly reply, saying that I was awaiting a more detailed dispatch from him, and that he should rather write in Russian, since I had a translator on hand.

Ten years later I received a hefty parcel. Throughout its long years of wandering, it had accumulated multiple layers of torn wrapping paper, miles of twine, and pounds of sealing wax. Unsealing it and fishing out its contents, I felt like my friend Howard Carter when he entered the tomb of King Tut.

The letter was as long as it was incoherent. Some things, however, were more clear than others. It was almost as if, while not understanding the Russian language, I began to understand things in a Russian way. Now the initial incoherence took on the semblance of a plot. I lost the ability to understand anything in the English way.

The bulk of the parcel consisted of the manuscript of Dr. Tishkin, which was entrusted to my safekeeping, and which I was supposed to pass on to “the most scientific society in England.” Not only did I understand nothing of the Russian language and the accompanying scientific formulas, but the pages of the manuscript were mingled with Anton’s own notes on Dr. Tishkin and himself. I had no recourse but to sort through it all meticulously to find out what had happened to the two in Russia (or was it what had happened to Russia itself?).

I replied to Anton, assuring him that I had received everything and that I would do my best to carry out his request in regard to Dr. Tishkin, but that it might take some time. I never received an answer.

My Lord, how tired I am of all of this! Of these footnotes, of this whole pseudo-translation …

I did have a life of my own, after all.

It ended when I became a widower.

Now, during this forced, albeit sad, leisure, I will try to assemble a plot out of the bits and pieces of this veritable bird’s nest; to splice together our semi-drunken ramblings in the pub with the semi-coherent epistolary information. If a plot does not emerge, let it then be a sequence of events.

*   *   *

Before Lieutenant Bruce picked him up in Vladivostok, Anton spent quite some time in the city of Tobolsk, the birthplace of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907), whom the Russians consider to have been the first to discover the Periodic Table of the Elements. I checked the
Britannica
,
*
and it wasn’t quite true that he was the first. Ours, of course, were the first; but he was the seventeenth [
sic
] son in the family, and he received a whole column, which is a great honor for a Russian. In any case, he was finally able to complete the Table with the help of valencies (I haven’t the faintest idea what those might be). Anton, as far as I remember, revered him not so much for this, as for the fact that he determined unequivocally that Russian vodka must be forty percent alcohol (no more, no less). This scientific discovery of his is not even mentioned in the
Britannica
; therefore, it may turn out to be true.

*   *   *

Do not think that I am so besotted by Russia that I am again getting sidetracked. This time I am already grappling with the subject—for the subject concerns precedence. Anton and I argued a great deal over this. It turns out that Russians thought of everything first: the dirigible, the steam engine and the locomotive, the telegraph and telephone, the electric lightbulb, the radio, the airplane—only they never brought it to fruition (“drove it into mind”). (He named a few more inventors, but I never found one of them in the
Britannica
. “Our encyclopedia is different,” Anton parried breezily. “It’s newer.”) “Could someone with a name like Polzunov
†
[‘Turtleson’] really have invented the locomotive?” Anton once said indignantly. “Instead of rolling like an engine, he crawled like a turtle. That’s why we ended up sitting in front of the Russian stove and the samovar for years on end. Now, Stephenson
*
is another story altogether. A wise man.” At that point he became agitated and broke into a “Dubinushka.”
†
I liked the song immensely, especially the part that went: “Hey, green one, you go on your own!” What green one? Where is it going?