The Symmetry Teacher (25 page)

“I mean what I say. You didn’t miss me at all. Give me a hand, will you? This stuff is heavy.”

“What about the midshipman?” he said, his voice cracking as he heaved canisters of kerosene onto shore.

“Oh, you mean Happenen?” Her voice betrayed alarm. “He wanted to come, but I said no.”

“Oh.” Urbino was equanimity itself.

“That kind of emotional strain is not good for Marleen.”

“I see, you were worried about Marleen.”

“If they renewed their relationship, blood would flow.”

“Are you saying”—Urbino knew he was saying too much, but he couldn’t stop—“that Happenen is not your lover but hers?”

“Well, well, well…” Now she sounded angry. “Did she tell you that? So you let her out.”

“She broke out herself.”

“How did she manage that?”

“She said she gnawed through the chain. I thought it was a joke, that you had set her loose in case of a typhoon, or who knows what.” Urbino was struggling to keep afloat in a morass of half-concealed lies, some of human nature’s muddiest waters.

He bobbed up for a gulp of air. “Do you know what the primary task of our intellect is?”

“What?”

“To hide our own natures from us.”

“The truth, you mean? Quit beating around the bush. Are you talking about Marleen?”

“She is quite a strange girl, I must say.”

“Strange? Girl?” Lili snarled. “So you slept with that bitch! How could you?” She was crying.

Her tears were her strongest argument. Urbino was defenseless against them. He tried to assuage his guilt by putting his arms around her. She tried to push him away halfheartedly, and refused to let him touch her head. Then she slapped him.

“What was that for?” he said. It was the weakest possible argument. Then again, the slap she had given him wasn’t all that hard.

The simplest solution now was to read her some of his new poetry.

I dreamed the naked truth

with a braid down to her naked rump,

and suddenly she was someone else—

with a wolf’s bared teeth, her braid a scythe.

All night she stalked me

with a curved blade of sleep,

now tempting, now repelling,

beauty and death in one.

“The one about Birdy was better. Is that about Marleen? Did you write it for her?”

“Marleen? With a braid? She’s bald! You’re the one with hair for braiding.”

“So I’m your death, then?”

The similarity in intonation startled him. Something pierced his brain like a stroke of lightning. He heard the sound of one hand clapping. Was a slap in the face the answer to the riddle of the Tao? Makes sense, he thought, their teachers are in the habit of striking their students for obtuseness.

“Is that the midshipman’s bandana? Take it off. Now!”

“It’s not his, it’s mine! I bought all three of us the same kind.”

“Oh, all three … Well, where’s mine?”

“I haven’t gotten around to getting you one.”

“But I’m the third. Give it to me!”

Lili tried to put up a fight but feigned weakness at the same time.

Finally, he managed to kiss her. His hand strayed over the bandana. The bandana was too tight, and the head underneath it was too smooth. His hand guessed what was wrong. He yanked the bandana off. It was Marleen, sans makeup. And yet it was Lili, her head shaved clean.

“Who are you now? Lili or Marleen?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is who you are now.”

“‘Whoever I was then, I still am now,’” Urbino quoted from memory.

“Precisely. You’ve always been alone. Good job, now keep it up!”

“Take your own advice!”

“Are you just pretending, or does your elevator not go all the way to the top?
*
Do you really not understand that there’s only one of us?”

“I’ve never had any experience with real twins. I heard that besides their physical likeness they can have a heightened affinity, be very close to one another—a spiritual bond, so to speak … But you are so different … Listen, if you and Marleen are really the same person, then there are only two of us!”

“What are you going to do about Marleen now?”

“Who’s Marleen? I only have you. You’re my Lili Marleen!”

“That’s a song, not a person. And I’m here alone; except for Marleen.”

“What Marleen?” Urbino was losing patience.

“The dog, of course.”

“Oh, thank God! Then we finally are alone, just the two of us. We’re happy, aren’t we?”

Lili didn’t speak.

“Two people in a boat, to say nothing of the dog.” The joke didn’t fly.

“The dog has nothing to do with it.”

“So there definitely are just the two of us. We are one whole, I mean…” Urbino mumbled.

“You disgust me. Don’t you get it? We’re never going to forgive you for this. I’ll never forgive you about Marleen, Marleen will never forgive you about me, and neither of us will forgive you about Dika.”

“Leave Dika out of this. I’ve been waiting for you! You are my fate.”

“Fate is what you got, you slithering dirty reptile, you! You’ve never loved anyone. Your poems are trash. You’re a man split in half. Do you think you’re smack dab between Heaven and Earth? Well, like hell you are! Between the soul and the body. You know what you are? You are a callus. A callus doesn’t hurt, it only causes pain. Oh, how the dead cling to the living! You are an invalid. Your capacity for love is atrophied.”

“If I’m so bad, how come you seduced me?”

“Me? Seduce you? It required no effort on my part. If only … If only I had … It would have meant at least something to me. And to you, too. But no, you melted like wax from the word go. Never in my life have I seen such a milquetoast.”

“You haven’t seen much, then, I take it,” Urbino spat back at her, not without jealousy.

“None of your business what I’ve seen. To think that I had gotten my hopes up. The Baroness had wasted no words describing the power of your feelings, your inconsolable grief over Dika, and I thought: There’s at least one real man on Earth. I liked your looks. All is not lost, I thought. I’ll save him, I thought. I never suspected that the Baroness would saddle me with such a swine of a man!” She shook her head in disgust. “I should have guessed right away! Maybe she really is a good psychiatrist. She saw right through you, and for that reason, instead of going after you herself, she forwarded you to me. She spread out the net for me by painting a glowing image of you in her letter.”

“Stop it, you mutt!” Urbino said in a fury.

“Well, I may be a mutt, but right now I’m ready to barf, not bark. It hurts between the horns I’m wearing now because of what you’ve done to me!”

“Horns are also a kind of callus,” Urbino retorted.

“That’s right,” she continued, “because you’re a bull. It makes no difference to you whom you cover. What made you pass up the Baroness? Was that fine, upstanding woman not good enough for you?”

“She’s a psychiatrist. Their lot has dispensed with romance.”

“Perhaps it’s so they won’t go mad themselves. Yet she did…”

“How so?”

“Revenge is a kind of mania.”

“Revenge?”

“She was head over heels in love with Happenen.”

“What about him?”

“He was in love with me.”

“So whom did she want to avenge herself on by sending me, you or Happenen?”

“Both of us.”

“But why?”

“To separate us.”

“To separate you? Are you engaged?”

“Halfway.”

“Which of the two of you, you or Marleen?”

(Urbino hadn’t noticed that he had already chosen Lili over Marleen.)

“To him, I’m the only one.”

“And he to you?”

“I’m the one who persuaded him not to kill you. He sensed danger. He’s a real man, a pillar of support. Perhaps he was more aware of the danger to him than to me.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“It’s simple. He loves me. He needs only me, even if I don’t love him back.”

“So he allowed you to have me?”

“Why not? He said he’d kill you either way.”

“For what? It was his idea to begin with.”

“For me! Because you would cheat on me.”

“But you set it all up! Why did you pretend to be Marleen?”

“To prove him right.”

“Oh, so you conspired against me together.”

“No, he’s not capable of that. It was just me and Marleen.”

“But there never was any Marleen!”

“Yes, there was. And I’ll marry him.”

“Did you promise yourself to him?”

“Yes, but on one condition.”

“Do go on.”

“That he never be jealous of my infidelity again.”

“Again? You’re one lowdown scum. You’ve got quite the nerve to mistreat two men at the same time.”

“Why two? There’s just one. And he’s still the only one.”

“I’m speechless.”

“Don’t worry. He’s not going to kill you. Provided one condition is met.”

“You dare set the terms for him?”

“No, this time it’s him. He set the terms for me.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. And the terms are…?”

“That I marry him.”

“Damn you, Lili! You’re worse than Marleen. You’re a monster!”

“Go to your Marleen, then. Damn right I’m a monster. Because I’m a woman, and I know how to love. I’m bound to love one who does not love me back. You told me yourself that one can’t split the magnet into a negative and a positive pole. You can’t split me with love, either. Just like the magnet, just like Marleen and me. No, you didn’t say anything about a magnet, that wasn’t your idea. It was your lovestruck Russian scientist Tishkin, whose story you can’t finish writing. You know why you can’t finish it? Because you don’t know how to love.”

“‘The less we love a woman, / The more the woman loves us. / And thereby we destroy her.’”

“Now, that’s good. Did you write that?”

“No, it’s by another Russian. Pushkin.”

“Someone else’s stuff again. Tishkin, Pushkin … Do all Russians have the same names?”

“No, not all of them. Just Pushkin. That’s a joke. Mine.”

Lili laughed, and Urbino attempted to draw her to him again. No go.

“It’s my translation, too. My Slavist friend translated it differently: ‘The less we more a woman, the more she lesses us back.’”

“Are you saying that you’re more and I’m less?”

Urbino sensed the change of tone and changed his tack. “If you and Marleen are the same person, it means you stayed on the island the whole time and couldn’t have gone to see Happenen. Where did the kerosene come from, then? Where’s the logic in that?”

“Logic is all that’s left. I have a storehouse on the other part of the island, behind the woods.”

“Okay, fine. But how on Earth did you manage to transform yourself into Marleen?”

“That one is even easier. When we were being brought up in the monastery, we put on wonderful puppet shows at Christmas. I always got the role of angel, and Marleen played the devil.”

“Oh, come off it. You’ve told too many lies for just one person.”

“There isn’t just one person. There are two.”

“What?”

“Marleen and me. Which one do you prefer?”

“Lay off.”

“No way! What if we both like you?”

“You’ll take turns, then,” Urbino said, scoffing.

“Wrong again. Make a choice. I won’t settle for less.”

“And this is why you shaved yourself head to toe?”

“I planned to do it long ago, before you got here,” Lili said in Marleen’s voice. “Besides…”

“What?”

“I was embarrassed.”

“In front of whom?”

“You. Myself.”

“Yourself meaning Lili or Marleen?”

“Obviously it’s all the same to you. But I’m ashamed!”

“Just ashamed?”

“Yes; but not ‘just.’ Idiot! Shyness is the foundation of feeling. It is the bedrock of …
s-s-s
 … I can’t bear that word.”

“Sensibility?”

“No, of course not!
S-s-s
 … No, I can’t.”

“Oh, you mean sex?”

“Well, yes. Except that men and women express shyness differently. For us it’s embarrassment, for you brutality.”

“Brutality, eh? So it’s Happenen. Fine, but where’s the embarrassment? In your tattoo?”

“What tattoo?” (Innocence itself.)

“The tattoo. The one you have down there.”

“Oh, that? That’s Marleen. She did it when she was a kid, a silly prank. What is it, by the way? I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

“Talk about shyness. You’re two of a kind.”

“So, two?” (Another clapping of one hand.)

“Well, let’s take a look, shall we? Maybe it’s a fleur-de-lis, like Milady de Winter’s brand!”

“Milady? What Milady? What are you talking about?”

“You must have read
The Three Musketeers
. Go on, show me!”

“No way!” Lili said, spurning his readiness.

“Yes, way!” Marleen screamed, grabbing it roughly.

Suddenly, everything in Urbino seemed to go limp.

“Why don’t both of you just go f——k yourselves!” he shouted. “I’m going to get my things.”

“No, you go f——k yourself!”

“Enough! I’m not Happenen. You’re a monster. This isn’t Hollywood. There are just two of us. You and me. No Marleen, no Happenen, no Baroness, no…” He broke off.

She understood.

“Oh, so there’s no more Dika, either? You see, now you’ve betrayed her, too.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Thank goodness, you still have some feelings left.”

“I didn’t betray her while she…” He broke off again, and again she understood.

“While she was alive?” She finished his sentence. “But you did betray her while she was still living.”

“How would you know? Who could I have betrayed her for?”

“I just know. Otherwise the snake wouldn’t have bitten her. You betrayed her for the snake that stung her in her heart.”

“With a snake? You are so cruel! You’re a snake yourself!”

“Finally! Now you’re getting it. It was me. I was that very one.”

“I’m going to strangle you! No, I’m going to see your tattoo! What have you got there? A snake?”

Urbino threw the full weight of his body on her, all the while continuing to grope and fondle her … Before they realized it, it was all over.

“How could you! You rapist! I’ll never forgive you for this!”