The Symmetry Teacher (19 page)

It is still a mystery to me, this simultaneous openness and secretiveness of Russians. Anton inundated me with the most intimate details of his life, details that no one in his right mind would dare to divulge here, even to a friend. At the same time, he refused to show me his “gift from the Queen,” lest he “jinx it.” I found his use of this expression inappropriate and chose not to believe him. As it turned out, I had doubted not only him but Her Majesty herself. Now I am proud of both of them: Anton was awarded a lifetime retirement allowance, which he continued to receive until 1927, when the Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with our country.

That was when he had to return to his Fathers, where he assembled a bicycle out of an old sewing machine and some other mechanical device, and joined the local postal service as a mail carrier. Then he caught wind of the plan to organize collective farms, and he was the first to support such an idea. I answered his letter in the eager hope that his connection with the postal service would facilitate communications, but I never received a reply.

About a dozen years later, my own letter was returned to me. It floated up out of time, like a memory. It had been opened at least once, and seemed to have spent some time in a puddle. Still, all the pages, despite having gone for a little swim, were in the correct order. Pressed between them was a beautiful butterfly, preserved better even than the pages themselves. Someone had written a message in red crayon, slantwise across the first page, in big fat block letters. It looked like a resolution. The same Slavist friend helped me to decipher it:

MESSAGE ABROAD TCHK PERISHED ALONE TCHK KILLED BY LIGHTNING TCHK
*

(signature indecipherable)

Killed by lightning … No, Russians can’t have a subject! They can only have a fate.

The year was 1932. It was still just the beginning.

I remember that when Anton was asked, “Whither Russia?” he would just shrug. “A Russian is not capable of choosing between two things: he always chooses what is more, and not what is better. That’s why autocracy is easier for him to live with. But it has become dilapidated, so there will be a doubling of autocracy. It’s no coincidence that the two-headed eagle is split and looks in opposite directions.” He clearly meant something by this.

At the time, I didn’t understand.
†

Tishkin? Ah, yes, I completely forgot. I forgot about our protagonist. So the plot fell through.

Yet a good half of Anton’s letter was about him. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. In it he set out a new theory of time—my friend translated it the best he could on the fly, without understanding much himself. There were several beautiful, even lyrical, passages about the nature of time, which were somehow reminiscent of the conversations Anton and I had had in the pub. They concerned not only the celebrated boundary between time and space but also touched on the notion that the boundary is being moved about by a sort of piston, or a Higher Power—which is, itself, time. That the space behind the piston is rarified, and that’s what is called the past, or memory. That everything has memory: crystals, metals, water, and, to a lesser degree, people, who limit themselves only to a hole-ridden history and allow bandits and swindlers (that was Tishkin’s attitude toward the powers-that-be—he was a bombist, after all) to cheat them out of the present time. That there was, therefore, no future at all, because it was always being hollowed out of time.

At that point, it all becomes vertiginously incomprehensible: time was likened to some kind of membrane, like an eardrum, letting sound into itself but not reproducing it.

Even more interesting was the claim that time is not whole or unbroken but discrete. That it bursts, it sparks, so to speak, like a tiny garland of micro-explosions invisible to the eye, and that all this is a complete catastrophe, which we can only sense but never capture with our minds.

These ideas were also grounded in mathematical formulas appended to the manuscript, with many references to someone by the name of Forehead.
*
Tishkin attempts to deduce a formula of the crevice (“Tishkin’s Crevice”) as a part of a Universal Theory of Nausea—for the effort to work with time, as with infinity, results in no more than faintness, dizziness, and nausea.

How, may I ask, could I be expected to present this to the Royal Society? However, I did show the mathematical section of the work to a mathematician acquaintance of mine at the Club.

At first, he laughed out loud. Then he frowned, and cleared his throat, now approvingly, now with indignation. Then he perused it again, this time without betraying any emotion at all.

“Where did you get all this gibberish? Ah, Russia. Well, that explains it. Although, come to think of it, they have quite a reputable school of mathematics there now. But what you have shown me here is a very peculiar porridge.” That’s what he said—porridge—and I immediately thought of Anton. “On the one hand, this is stuff that every schoolchild knows; on the other hand, however, the approach taken to these truisms is stunning in its originality. Do you know what all this reminds me of?” he said, rejoicing. “Naïve painting. I am a great admirer of Henri Rousseau … Is Rousseau from Russia? Of course not, he’s French. Mathematics in France was also quite good … None of this”—he tossed the manuscript carelessly on the table—“has the slightest bearing on science, however. Only the last part. What did he call his theory?”

I read out the title and translated it as faithfully as I could.

“Hmm,
durnota
 … Nausea, you say? Yes. Figures. When did you say he wrote it? In 1905? But that’s impossible! Why, you ask? Because it was in 1905 that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity.”

I would be hard-pressed to explain why, but I was truly upset.

“Porridge,” I muttered. “Stone soup. Or, as they call it,
soup iz topora
,” I said, recalling another of Anton’s favorite expressions.

“What is ‘
soup iz topora
’?” the mathematician said.

“
Topor
,” I said with vulgar cruelty, like a Russian, “is what they used to cut off the head of our Charles, in the seventeenth century. An ax. Hence, ‘ax soup.’ It’s full of surprises.”

*   *   *

Ah, yes, Tishkin. I keep forgetting about him. In that same letter, the last one Anton wrote, the one I am spinning this tale out of, there was something else about Tishkin. The last thing.

The Soviet authorities impounded Tishkin’s rocket ship, and sent him away somewhere under convoy, even farther than Tobolsk. Anton (Toshka), crushed by sadness and emptiness, set out for his native Fathers to join a
kolkhoz
(collective farm).

When I think about Anton now, I realize that however strange it may seem, he loved his homeland deeply. He liked England, true, but primarily for its pubs and Robert Scott (Robert Falconovich, as he called him affectionately, insisting that he was just like a Russian. Why? Because he arrived too late, then perished). “Scots,” he used to say, “are different. They’re similar to us, though we don’t have red hair. Don’t you understand, you wise men who know so much, that people want to live not only in their own country but in their own time? In their epoch. And so they struggle: not the strong with the weak, the backward with the advanced, the old and the new, the white and the red, the Catholic and the Protestant—but the age with the age! All the epochs at once, simultaneously. Time wages war on time before our very eyes, the living with the dead, seizing us up and leaving us in its wake like dust.” Tishkin claimed that time is a single instant, the instant of a blast, an explosion drawn out and delayed many billions of times. And Russia has been time’s firing range.

*   *   *

After writing this “thing” (I don’t know what else to call it), I looked out the window and discovered that the weather had cleared up a bit, though it was still as gray as ever. I began waiting for the dawn. But instead of the sun, a cargo ship appeared, enormous, like the
Britannica
, moving at a rapid clip, as though an invisible thumb was pushing it along the horizon from north to south. This incongruity of scale prompted me to think that I had mixed up the ends of the Earth, and, where I had assumed I was getting nearer to Russia, I was in fact sitting in front of a window that looked out toward Sweden, the West, my England; and not toward the East, toward St. Petersburg, toward Russia … As though I had turned my back on them. Suddenly I realized how cold and numb it was, my back. (The landlady who rented me the room warned me not to smoke in the house, and I had flung open the window … This, it seems, is how
Moby-Dick
begins.) While I was writing, the cold crept in and now I was frozen stiff like Anton at the South Pole, or even in Siberia … Siberia had somehow arrived here: we had not had such a cold May since, I daresay, the Battle of Poltava ([
sic
], Fathers is in Poltavshchina [
sic
], the Tobolsk Kremlin, not unlike its Moscow counterpart, was built by Swedish prisoners captured by Peter the Great at Poltava—cf. the
Britannica
[
sic
], this cold was driven here by a powerful cyclone from northeast Siberia [
sic
], wasn’t this island considered to be Russian not so very long ago? [
sic
] And what if there is in all of this a glimmer of something—if not of a subject, then at least a temporal cross-connection?).

“Go ahead and smoke,” the landlady said, slamming the window shut fiercely. “We’ll never have enough firewood for you.”

Then she smiled tenderly. Instead of the sun.

No matter what I had written, my mood lifted.

“I’m going to a pub to warm up,” I told her, somewhat shamefaced.

“Good for you,” she approved. “Otherwise, what you’ve written there might end up…”

And that’s the truth. It’s good that on some islands there isn’t any time, either. Only weather.

*   *   *

The wind shifted in exactly the opposite direction, from north to south, and it became much warmer after my third … Today it might even be possible to see the sunset, and I left the pub to watch the sun go down. But the clouds were now floating in another direction, from the west, gulping down first the sun, then the sea, then the town, then my little house, then me, leaving only the last stroke of the bell to melt away.

“They can’t prevent you from living well,” I said into the void.

“Or poorly, either,” from out of nowhere, in a thick accent, came the reply of the Talking Ear.

PART II

THE ABSENTMINDED WORD

(A Couple of Coffins from a Cup of Coffee)

TO SEÑORA SIMONE N.

The verses stalled, and then gave way;

But what a price I had to pay!

—H. H.

… And here I break off the translation and begin my recollection of the forgotten text.

*   *   *

The prose in the original left something to be desired, too, and I’m afraid I can’t improve on it in my own narrative. Evidently, Tired-Boffin also wrote his now forgotten book absentmindedly, taking long breaks (in much the same manner as I’m translating this, which gives me a convenient excuse). There is too great a difference in the thickness of plot between “The View of the Sky Above Troy” and “The Absentminded Word.” (“Absentminded”—yet another justification of the Russian penchant for renaming, and not just the untranslatability of the dubious English pun.)

It seems that in this chapter, Mr. (or was it Mrs.?) Tired-Boffin was bent on taking revenge on all women, not just his protagonist, for Dika’s death. However difficult it is for me, as well, to reconcile myself to her death, it is in this part of the book’s rather intricate structure that I am particularly annoyed at its professionalism—at the “plotfulness” and “belletrism”
*
so alien to the tradition of the best Russian prose. Here the translator cannot help but heave a bitter sigh.

For the alleged Russian plotlessness itself prods you to think. I will not take it upon myself to discuss the merits of non-Russian belles lettres, of the endless dialogues with allusions to subtext (for what sort of subtext can there be in the absence of a text?), the alterations with a view to a potential screen version, the adjustments for ease of reading and translation—this is commerce, the marketplace (fee by the word, or the page?). All of this uproots belles lettres from its native French soil and removes it an infinite distance away.

Narration without the slightest nod to a plot is impossible, however—the text would have neither end nor beginning. The Russian subject is feeling (Chekhov); the fantastic (Gogol); and, more infrequently, thought (Pushkin). Hence, the shimmer of mystery that a careful reader cannot help but discern in it; not to mention the vaunted impossibility of translating it into Western languages (with the notable exception of Chekhov, for some reason). Only Dostoevsky, perhaps, that universal Russian “brand” (along with vodka and bears), excelled altogether in plot, in literariness, in readability, and in translatability. Then again, he was the only one who took instruction from the West: from Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and even Eugène Sue, though he didn’t know much French, and wrote haphazardly in Russian—whichever way the spirit moved him (which not only facilitates translation but also accounts for the charm his style holds for the Russian reader—despite the jealousy of Turgenev and the envy of Nabokov).

I have tripped over Dostoevsky, too, however … What I’m saying is that we have no subject in our classical Russian literature, at least in the sense that it exists in English literature. Those infamous three hundred years of the Tatar-Mongol yoke can never compete in significance with the fact that our Pushkin emerged two hundred years after the death of Shakespeare. Yet it was Pushkin alone who narrowed the gap between us and Europe by at least a hundred years. It was Pushkin who attempted to cultivate a European plot on Russian virgin soil, if one understands a plot to be a certain elemental, even ultimate, product of experience—a grasp of the structure of life. Was Pushkin merely hurrying to catch up, or have we not yet fully understood him?
The Queen of Spades
is an opera,
The Captain’s Daughter
a children’s story … (Children’s stories! I had forgotten about fairy tales. That’s where plots are developed. It is only fitting that Pushkin was so enamored of fairy tales. What if “The Gingerbread Man” or “The Giant Turnip” predated the Tatar-Mongol yoke?)