The Symmetry Teacher (3 page)

“Your supervisor is not going to trouble you anymore today,” I said to him as gently as I could, so that he would stop worrying and ignore the doorbell, though I already despaired of extracting anything useful from him.

“Thank you, I realize that,” said the old man. Heavens, how that gaze inserted into his face astonished me! I couldn’t help but think how sociologically predetermined perception is; for I had known very well whom I was seeking while my search was under way, but once I had found the object of my search, I lost track of the original. In this little shoebox I assigned to him a level of understanding characteristic of the lowliest rung on the social ladder. My God! If he had indeed written that, how clearly must things have appeared to him, how transparent must I have seemed to him all this time. I was suddenly so abashed about my own condescension that I leapt up out of my chair. To justify the abruptness of this action I pretended I had gotten up to read the inscription under the photograph. What I read was very peculiar. It said:
VIEW OF THE SKY ABOVE TROY
.

“Have you been to Troy?” I said.

“How could I have been there?” the old man said with a faint grin. “I wasn’t around back then.”

“Of course. I meant…” I muttered, stumbling over my foolishness. “I was referring to the spot where they recently discovered Troy had once been … I meant the modern-day Troy.”

“No, that sky is the one in the other Troy, the other sky,” the old man said in a monotone.

A chill ran down my spine. Like all young men, I had a horror of madness. What am I saying? I had never seen a single dead man in my entire life, not counting accident victims—and they aren’t true corpses, not like one’s own dead. And mad people? Only comical shadows amid the faceless crowd in the streets. But half-wittedness or dementia isn’t the same as madness. Now I grew afraid of Vanoski. I averted my eyes and stared at his clothes cupboard.

In
The Last Case of Letters
(a novel about a poem) he has a passage … Oh, what a passage it is! I can’t explain why it stirs me so every time; and I’ve reread it many times, playing it over and over like a favorite record, so … In it the protagonist is waiting for a letter to arrive from his beloved. It doesn’t come, and, consumed with fear and passion, he walks through a wasteland by the shore of the sea. Suddenly, on a dune, he sees a dilapidated plywood cupboard, apparently washed up by the surf. In his agitation and haste he opens the door, and there’s a letter. He frantically rips it open, fastens his eyes on it, sees that it begins: “Dear Urbino…” But it’s impossible to read it through to the end. The page is covered with what look like words, letters of the alphabet, in her handwriting, and he drinks it all in, but—he can’t seem to read it, and he tries to read the letter again and again, and can’t. Then he rushes home, takes a seat, and dashes off a reply. And now—my God, what a description!—the words swirl around, the ink smokes, the text into which he pours all his passion flows—but at the end of every line the text disappears. His passion hangs poised in midair and disappears without a trace beyond the margins of the page. Instead of the phrases he has just uttered, something entirely different appears on the page, some nonsense about Aunt Clara and her parrot. Poor Urbino sobs with helplessness and drenches Aunt Clara in his tears; and when he is comforted he raises his transparent, flowing head, and recovers his strength and equanimity and writes a letter, now calmly and quickly, efficiently, but in fact he’s just tracing out wavy lines—like a child painting the sea … Then his neighbor arrives, and they start conferring about a small mutual concern of long standing. They come to an agreement and go to the city of Taunus. And the passage that follows is so strong that I always make a singular effort to grasp the transition, but I just can’t manage—I can no longer find the passage in the book, however much I leaf through it.

And now it seemed to me that I was standing on the brink of his madness, which whirled around in a vortex, so smoothly, so imperceptibly and seamlessly—a funnel that consciousness pours into like sand—that you don’t even notice how you end up inside it, sliding along the breathtaking mathematical curvature, and peering out of a place from which there is no return …

“Yes, yes. I understand. That sky,” I said, as though backing up warily within his gaze.

The old man grinned. “I have grounds to believe that this is the case. You are young … Also, does not the very same sky cover that Troy and this one, and us, and all those who come after us? There you have it, at least in a metaphorical sense.”

“That’s the truth!” I said, nodding, overjoyed at Vanoski’s return to our mutually accepted stomping grounds of logic.

“I’m curious why figures of speech—an image, a metaphor—while distancing themselves from their object, seem to approach the truth, whereas the reality surrounding us seems to be senseless, littered with trivia, as though insufficiently generalized and abstract, and therefore untrue. It’s quite the opposite! I don’t think the time has come for you to understand this yet. I can only warn you—and, apparently, in vain. It is hardly likely that my personal experience will be of any use to you. Experience never is. And it’s unlikely that you will meet with such an open-ended fate. In any case, my advice to you is, never agree to any tempting offers. You are a simple and selfless man”—the first epithet jarred me, and I was about to take offense, but at the second I nodded benignly—“and for that reason you accept everything offered to you as a gift, or as an adventure, or as fate. You grab hold of it like an unselfish person who is usually left empty-handed. Refuse any offer—it’s always of the devil. That is why this is the real sky over Troy.”

This was when he repeated the words of the fat bald man in the Garden Park—and, once again, I failed to understand him. It was also when he said that sending someone packing was always the best bet, and on his face was that look of anguish, a look of “Why did I fail to do it this time, too?”

“There is something you need from me, for
I
am certainly not what you need. Rather, you desperately need something you suspect to be here, in my place. Everyone is a tyrant over reality nowadays, a practitioner of progress. Assume, therefore, that I’m no longer here. But since you want something from me (even though I’m not what you need, and this is precisely why I keep the life around me at bay, because I always feel answerable to it), I am now obliged to respond, insofar as you are life, since you have come to me. But since you couldn’t care less about me but are intent upon something you purport to need, I reserve the right to repay you in the only way I can. And this utter imbalance, albeit equal in weight, is the essence of the question and the answer.

“I will tell you about the picture. I have reason to want to draw closer to it now.” Here again he pretended not to be looking at the button on the wall. “I think about it now unceasingly, so it will be fairly easy for me to relate it to you. Whether you need me to or not is up to you. You came to me yourself, of your own volition, so it’s not at all surprising that I am the one here in front of you—though you are of no concern to me whatever.”

“So was he the devil?” I said, growing angry at this sermon.

“Must there always be horns?” Vanoski said, frowning impatiently. “And his eyes were as blue as blue can be—not burning coals. Even his baldness seemed intentional, as proof there were no horns to speak of. Fat. Corpulence disarms suspicion—that’s folk wisdom. Only later did I come to appreciate the extent of his good nature. He was not at all insistent. He didn’t try to deceive me in the least—temptation has nothing to do with deception. We are tempted solely through our own devices. Perhaps he really did sit down beside me just by chance—to take a breather, as it was so hot.

“The English, as everyone knows, are garrulous. Perhaps this is why we spread the myth of our reserve and taciturnity: we try to cover up that particular vice of ours. In any event, I didn’t fail to take exception to the stranger’s audacity, saying I didn’t believe we had met, and so forth.

“He seemed somehow unwelcome and out of place in every way—to me in particular. And, overall, that’s how he looked: unseemly and inappropriate. I was young, like you. I had strong notions about myself—the vaguer and more obscure they were, the more I fancied them. Especially when I didn’t have a farthing in my pocket. Notions of love … of fame and glory. I was quite carried away by my own thoughts. And it was all the more unpleasant to catch myself in the middle of them … At that particular moment some shadowy beautiful creature, for some reason dressed in an Indian sari, standing on the shore of a turquoise sea, was pressing my rose to her breast … And I took exception to him with the icy dignity of a true Brit.

“‘What do you mean—you’re not Urbino?’ the fat man blurted out. Only then did the awkwardness of the situation that my diffidence had created dawn on me. He had, however, already opened his shapeless, beat-up briefcase and dropped his fleshy thief’s paw into the contents. It seemed to me that he was rummaging around and stealing from his own briefcase.

“‘Perhaps this isn’t you, then?’ He plucked out a photograph like something from a flower bed, and thrust it under my nose in triumph.

“But it was
not
me at all! That is to say, it could have been anyone. Half the face was obscured by some apparatus that looked partly like a camera, partly like a fantastical weapon whose muzzle resembled a rifle. In any case, the character in the photograph seemed to be aiming at something, and the half a face that wasn’t obscured by the apparatus in his hands was wincing and distorted. And he was dressed queerly, in a whimsical, foreign style. I said, mastering my recent confusion, that it was certainly not me.

“‘Not you?’ the fat man said, finally taking a good look at the photograph. ‘Drat it, what an old fool I am!’ His disappointment was unfeigned. ‘I do beg your pardon.’ Here he began to cringe in annoyance, as if giving himself a slap in the face with the photograph.

“‘Stop this improper clownery,’ I said coldly.

“‘You cannot imagine what an unpardonable mistake I’ve made, and how I will have to pay for this!’ he wailed. ‘Never in my life has this happened to me before. Truly, this is not you. This is a photograph of one of your future acquaintances. But yours is here, too. Honestly … I swear it … None other than the devil has mixed everything up.’ Again he gestured toward himself, but more gently now. ‘Don’t be angry. Just give me a moment.’

“He rummaged and rummaged through his briefcase, pulling out thick piles of photographs of various sizes and eras, as though they had been purloined from myriad amateur photographers and family albums—underexposed and overexposed, stained with developer, with jagged blobs of glue stuck to them and torn-off corners.

“‘Where could it have gone?’ A rare sampling of artistic ineptitude passed before my eyes: here was a client without a head, though wearing a coat of armor; then there was a single hand holding a glass; next there appeared a bush with one blurred branch, as if the picture depicted an attempt to photograph a bird as it flew away. ‘You are very observant,’ he said, continuing his search, ‘which is why I sat down beside you. It is uncommon for someone to spy a bird on that branch right off the bat. One has to be a born poet for that. And that happens no more than three or four times a century. Well, like you, for example, or … But you’re not an admirer of the Lake Poets, are you? By the way, it was precisely this bird that inspired … Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. What I mean to say is that these are all absolutely random shots. They mean nothing at all. This one, for example, is Shakespeare. And don’t think it’s the moment when he wrote his “To be or not to be” monologue. Nor is it a meeting with the Dark Lady, or with Francis Bacon. Here he is, looking tired after a performance.’ In the photograph was a faience basin with a broken rim, certainly outmoded in shape; but from it protruded two ordinary naked feet, either crooked themselves, or placed crookedly in the vessel. One toe stuck out in such a way that it looked like the legs it belonged to were busy at something down there in the basin, and a stream of water was pouring from the upper-right corner of the photograph into the mouth of the vessel. That was all.

“‘No, I am not a madman, still less a photographer or dreamer, which you have just suspected me of being. These pictures are, in fact, capable of far less than the actual possibilities of fantasy allow. These things I’m holding in my hands are historical originals, believe it or not. Ah, now you have hit upon a wonderful thought: Why should historical fact appear more precise or attractive than what I have in my hands? History happens right in front of our eyes, I must agree with you there.’ He was quite deft at guessing all my thoughts, and he did this just when I was either about to call him out and put him in his place, or simply stand up and leave, thus throwing off his unbearable obtrusiveness. But his angle on things, which you would later call the close-up shot, was very amusing from a poetic point of view. Here a line of poetry pecked its way out with heady facility: mud under the hooves of Alexander the Great’s troops, waves closing down over the
Titanic
, clouds floating past above Homer’s head … What did that mud know about the triumphant hoof? What did the water care about the treasures of the Spanish Armada? What need had the sky of verse?

“‘And here is the chink in the floor where the light squeezes through,’ the purveyor of pictures muttered to himself, but simultaneously with the line that had just before entered my head. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. You see? I knew you were the very one I could trust. Possibly the only one, in our day and age. No, this isn’t flattery. I am not your garden-variety medium or swindler. Honestly, what is so special about anyone’s head that it should be considered a miracle to guess what’s inside it? Then again, what would I gain from it? Indulge my own talents by leading astray a gullible mind? That is a consideration, of course, but I am not so petty in my conceit. I have more humble, though less romantic, models than a Mephistopheles or Cagliostro. Now science fiction is all the rage. H. G. Wells, for example—
The Time Machine
. No, you scoff because you are still young. His style isn’t bad at all. I would even go so far as to say its Englishness is quite pleasant to the ear. It’s rare nowadays. It’s a childlike pleasure … He’s no Dickens, of course. But then again, begging your pardon, you and I are no Dickens, either. What do you mean boorish, when it’s only the truth? But I must agree with you that there is always a tinge of vulgarity in the truth. Because not everyone has the right, although, not everyone has the gift, either …