The Symmetry Teacher (20 page)

To wit, not a hundred years of the great tradition of Russian literature had passed (from the mature Pushkin to Alexander Blok) when the Revolution of 1917 erupted, drowning all the emerging literary subjects in the blood of all too real ones.

So we do not have a subject. It has never had enough time to crystallize into any sort of continuity over a span of even three generations. All our subjects are still contained in the dictionary of our “great and powerful, truthful and free” language. We are still living in language, and not in the subject (in the soup, and not in the main course), although we taste our bread and sip our vodka like truth. The subject for us is still a fairy tale, lies, falsehood—“that’s not the way life really is.” We always want more honesty. We’re waiting, sir. For the time being we prefer to read books in translation. Because they are allowed, because it’s not the truth; it’s not about us but about them. Though it turns out that they’re people, too. The same double standard.

Is our Russian language really so free? However many foreign words it has borrowed along the way, it is still lacking in terminology (the “term,” as a word, is also the end of a subject of thought; its distillation, its specificity, its very point). Thus, our plotlessness is also the absence of a certain final thought, or model. (Although the Western subject, elaborated upon until it has become automatic, a “stock” notion, is probably the absence of a thought model altogether.) Thus, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but not Tolstoy and Proust—because the former transferred models of life onto the stage, and the latter onto a spatial plane. Why
Hamlet
? Tolstoy fumed. One wants to extend one’s experience, and to accept the alien as one’s own. But although it is possible to translate prose, and to translate poetry very approximately, translating one mentality into another, the seventeenth century into the twentieth, is not possible. Again, Pushkin was the only one who managed to overcome this dilemma in his own era.

My lament about the difficulties of translating this chapter is concerned, above all, with terminology referring to what we call sex. This is a matter that people in all countries are more or less equally preoccupied with, and Russians all the more. “Everyone, who isn’t too lazy, f——ks,” as Barkov said. This is not amenable to translation into literary language.

Is our Russian literature really so true to life, then, if we permit ourselves all kinds of things in life that we do not allow ourselves to commit to paper? “The pen is mightier than the sword”—or is it? True, no one has inundated the reader with so much inner psychology as we have. Evidently, the complete absence of civilized notions of privacy and private property in our totalitarian society forced all private life underground. On paper we don’t carouse, smoke, lie, steal, or anything else (exactly what everyone is thinking just now). We don’t fawn, cheat, or die. Our life is free as a bird’s. (This is why, and for no other reason, we need relentless censorship, that selfsame “sword”—for fear the secret that nothing human is alien to us might, God forbid, be divulged.) And yet we’re surprised by the guarded attitude the rest of the world adopts toward us (though we are flattered by the notorious mystery of the “Russian soul”); we are filled with indignation at “double standards.” Say what you will, but hypocrisy is the main rudder of the powers-that-be.

Therefore, there is not a single Russian book (poetry not included), with the exception of the
Dictionary of the Great Living Russian Language
, written by the Dane Vladimir Dahl, that I would deem true to life. Verisimilitude is to be found only in the language as a whole.

I must conclude that Russian literary speech has not yet earned the degree of freedom achieved by our language. It is by nature as timid and chaste as a provincial young lady of the nineteenth century—which is why everything concerning our bodily functions is banished to a very specific and remarkable form of taboo speech or foul language known as
mat
. But it is censored. Thus, in our literature, too, you will not find anything about that which interests all of us most of all. A word like “stimulating,” in this context, already smacks of impropriety, like any literary substitution or euphemism. It bears repeating that
mat
is far more decorous and seemly than any substitute, that what is ugly is not its apt usage, but the pathological need to perceive a corresponding visual image behind every word. All these “intimate parts,” “laps,” “loins,” and “manhood”; all this “taking advantage of,” “penetrating,” and “knowing”—all this is far more unnatural than our
mat
, far more repugnant, and even bawdy (now there’s a word that stands as a sentinel between one and the other realm of language). In the case of Tired-Boffin, I derive comfort from the somewhat dated style of his descriptions. It remains for me, together with him and his hero, to peek under the skirt, and, together with the heroine, to offer myself (in the given instance, to whatever happens in the text).

As a result of my own translation of all this foreignness, I arrive at the patriotic conclusion that Russian literature is unsurpassed, that no other literature offers itself with such sincerity of oft-mended chastity to its native tongue (like a houri in the Islamic paradise). Thus, the so-called untranslatability is dual-natured: it is untranslatable not because a language is incapable of conveying something in another language, but because one’s own language is not amenable to translation into any other.

(Yours forever … You see what my computer has just done? It’s guilty of co-authorship, like a true kindred spirit. I wanted to write “yours, and yours alone,” but it began to swallow letters at every turn, and finally prompted me, unasked: “yours forever.” These words were the furthest imaginable from my mind! Well, maybe the computer is right. Maybe it will be forever. Either I’m tired, or it is. Tiredness is also contagious.)

1. Ris

I thought the heart
forgot

the easy art of suffering.

I said of what had
been—

nevermore! nevermore!

      —Alex Cannon

Urbino Vanoski, twenty-seven, an English poet who had received some acclaim but was not yet well known, of mixed Polish-Dutch-Japanese ancestry (second, third, and fourth generations, respectively), who didn’t know a single one of these languages and had never once traveled to any of these ancestral homelands for any significant length of time; author of an almost sensational collection of poems titled
The Night Vase
(an untranslatable phrase meaning something approximating “The Vase in the Night”), which, however, found only a scanty readership, except perhaps for the poem “Thursday,” which was subsequently included in one of the respectable anthologies—a sad poem that seemed to express the personal experience of the author, in these lines, for example:

I’m a one-woman man

as a matter of fact

I’m on the lookout for a wife

(husbandless, of course)

to meet at the cinema,

under the marquee

in the rain

the past reveals no guarantees

we cannot say that what happened

truly did (happen) …

… and so on, and so forth, i.e., that same Vanoski who decided to end not simply life itself but his own life, rather than to endure infamy or drama, changing it at the very root, including his own name, in the manner of the Japanese poets, who, nearing forty, having achieved everything they wished to achieve, abandon everything, disappear, and, after assuming incognito and voluntary poverty, begin a poetic path from scratch as completely unknown, unsung, but indisputable geniuses. Enamored of Bash
ō
and quoting him right and left, Vanoski twisted his own name this way and that, until he finally reached a combination of letters that was more or less tolerable to the human ear: Ris Vokonabi. (It reminded him of the Japanese culinary arts.
*
) The first collection of poetry he published under this pseudonym enjoyed great success with select readers, and favorable reviews from the critics. He became a “discovery.”

And so Urbino became Ris.

One fine day (fine days are the weather of choice in our age; stormy days are already outmoded)—one fine day, or even hour, Ris’s life, which had until now seemed to be his life in spite of everything, i.e., its belonging to him was never in question, seemed suddenly like non-life. That is, it was not life in its unbroken and unconditional meaning but only a means of living through (reliving) one more clearly defined segment of time. Thus, life broke off and seemed now to be a remnant, a fragment. It experienced the tragic sensation of continuing in a void, as though it were an ellipsis. And this nonexistent continuity of a broken-off fragment ached—a peculiar case of causalgia, or pain experienced in a lost extremity.

*   *   *

Struggling over Dika’s death, oppressed by an ever-increasing sense of guilt, Urbino devoted himself to spirits with typical Slavic extravagance. He stopped washing, shaving, and cutting his hair for the forty days of mourning, and then for a whole year, so that he truly forgot who he was. After that, his friends forgot him, too. Bash
ō
became his sole drinking companion. He began to acquire notoriety under the nickname “Bash
ō
.” People had already started turning around to stare at him in the street.

At the same time, his publisher didn’t even remember that there was such a person as Vanoski.

That was how he finally understood that fame is not achieved through hard work but through serendipity.

He decided to leave his beard and his shoulder-length hair as they were. It was the easiest way to conquer his past.

He began to flourish: an unanticipated but welcome surge in his creative powers, newfound success with women, a sudden passion for travel … After Vladivostok he made his way to New Zealand, where he stayed for a while, following the trail of Anton, his Russian drinking companion, who in his turn was trailing behind Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Actually, he refused point blank to follow Anton to the “island of penguins.” He needed some place that was warmer and more uninhabited.

In a private sanitarium where he attempted to rid himself of the “scent of death” that continued to haunt him, a certain baroness, who was also a psychiatrist, wrote him a letter of referral for a “virtually uninhabited” island.

“You’ll like it there,” she said. “Just don’t let anything surprise you.”

That was when Ris consented to become Urbino again.

*   *   *

In Taunus, a coastal fishing town, he met (as his letter instructed him to do) Midshipman Happenen, a veritable Hollywood Scandinavian with long blond hair tied with a pirate’s bandana and a scar across his forehead and cheek, who was building a yacht not far from the pier. With his taciturnity and sternly handsome looks, the midshipman immediately appealed to Urbino. He sized up Urbino at a glance, as meticulously as a carpenter sizes up a plank of wood.

“An inch shy of six feet,” he said.

“Do you build coffins here, too?” Urbino said, making light of the comment, and estimating the midshipman’s height in his turn. He exceeded him in all dimensions (he was at least an inch taller than six feet), not to mention in pounds.

“Well, it’s a straightforward craft.” The midshipman flexed his facial muscles so that his deeply etched cheekbones stood out and invited him into his boat. “And there was no one else around to do that kind of work here. They don’t die too often in these parts. Unless they drown.”

And he rowed silently across the strait. He pulled up onto a sandbar. A dog bounded up to them in greeting, splashing them from head to toe. Its behavior contradicted its appearance: excessive in size and coloring, like a mixture of a wolf and a sheep—a Baskervilles hound that whimpered like a puppy.

“Easy now, Marleen!” the midshipman commanded, and the dog obeyed, calming down immediately but still yelping now and then. “This man is our guest.”

The Scandinavian’s at home here, Urbino had just managed to think, when the Scandinavian scooped him up along with his rucksack, carried him from the boat, and set him down on shore as if he were as light as a feather.

“Show him around,” he commanded the dog. And without giving Urbino any chance to take offense or to settle the payment, he began rowing back. Thus, Urbino went ashore, to see what he could see.

The beach rose up at a sheer angle, the height of about two men, and obstructed the view. Marleen led him along a path trampled in the sand, overgrown with pleasant, fleshy grasses (he seemed to recall that as children they had called it saxifrage). The island spread out above and in front of him, appearing to be a single enormous sandbar covered with crooked, stunted trees, on the apex of which stood a sailing frigate sunk in the sand up to its waterline. It’s not for nothing the camel is called the ship of the desert, Urbino thought, staring in wonder.

This was in fact a hacienda. It resembled a camel, but it was called The Bermudas. Of which he was informed now not by Marleen but by the landlady.

2. Lili

“This is a present from the last tsunami.”

“It’s the best memento of the elements imaginable,” Urbino said ingratiatingly. “A monument to the sea. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

She stuffed his letter of introduction carelessly into the pocket of her apron.

“I know what it says. The Baroness has already told me everything about you.”

“How did she manage to get here ahead of me?” Urbino said. “I’ve been trying to reach the island for three days, and from what I understand, you have no means of communication here.”

“Are you so weary of communication?” the landlady said with a wry grin.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Come with me into the stateroom. I’ll feed you, show you around, and tell you about everything. Marleen, go lie down!”

Urbino was startled at the sudden change in tone, from polite and conversational to peremptory. The dog wasn’t surprised, but hurt: she obeyed, reluctantly but without hesitation.

*   *   *