The Symmetry Teacher (34 page)

This was the incarnation of all his exotic experiences! As a former expeditionary artist, he was not only the literary editor but also the art director. Although clearly underappreciated by the managing editors, this rare combination did put a crust of bread on his table (though he would have preferred it with butter, too). For this reason he occasionally visited the Chairman of the Editorial Board on Mount Olympus. The chairman, on the one hand, regarded Bartholomew’s merits as an employee very highly; on the other hand, he largely avoided him.

Bartholomew’s last name was a hindrance to him. Especially here, in France. It was not so much a name as a nickname. A London telephone book alone contained no less than thirty pages of others like him. Even in his beloved
Britannica
there were at least thirty of the greats with his name, from Adam (the economist) to Sir William (the admiral), whom Bartholomew particularly admired.

When he was still working at the
Britannica
—which gave him his first steady job out of kindness, in recognition of his father’s legacy after he passed away, and after Bartholomew had married, his brother had disappeared, and his mother had lost her legs—he promoted this admiral, who brought up the rear of this list of eponymous figures, to a place higher on the ladder of the encyclopedic hierarchy. He fostered a kinship between him and a minor religious philosopher, whom Bartholomew himself had included as one of his own great-grandfathers once removed. He had managed to devote almost an entire column in the encyclopedia to the admiral, and had achieved a convincing kinship with him, when he had suddenly found it necessary to cease this innocent abuse of power due to his brother’s Catholicism, which had acquired a scandalous, almost political, character. Thus, instead of a kinship with Sir William (the admiral), diligent colleagues on the editorial board discovered another undesirable relationship, besides that of his brother: an all but Irish relative (through the maternal line). Taken together, this was enough for him to feel unwanted in such a respectable and upstanding institution, and to deprive him of his crust of bread (still without butter). He was forced to move to his wife’s native France; one might even say, to emigrate.

Bartholomew sighed and banished this bout of nostalgia. Now he swapped the locknut for the fish: the fish became higher, and the locknut became lower than the military commander in rank, though strictly alphabetically it was the other way around.

How marvelous the alphabet is! Bartholomew thought. Everything submits to the letter. BARTHOLOMEW, Smith is a king, an admiral; SMITH, Bartholomew is a D student and a soldier. If you’re in the middle, fingers point at you more often, you get called to the board. The middle is much more densely populated, it’s harder to struggle free and make your way in the world. A Smith has to be a genius. A Smith needs a Wesson, otherwise it won’t shoot. How much better it is to be the letter
A
! You automatically head the list. They are less inclined to reprimand you. They hit you only when they miss someone else. An
A
is almost exempt from failure, thus facilitating an easy career. Who is better suited to be chairman than an Adams? (Bartholomew’s dissatisfaction with the vizier, as with everything else this morning, now grew.) But being the last in the alphabet has its advantages, too. Watch your back, Zuberg is sneaking up on you! In the shadows, tailing behind, closing out the list. He doesn’t have to watch his back; no one can get behind him. You can’t rise higher than the letter
A
, and you can’t turn back, either. But Zuberg can see the whole chain, from
Z
to
A
. When the flock turns around, the last sheep becomes the first! In the manner of revolution …

Bartholomew’s reasoning may seem somewhat haughty, but he had experience on his side. The view from on high, from his encyclopedic Olympus, on all of our earthly hustle and bustle, from ancient, prehistoric, and even pre-geological times, made certain things clear to him.

The career ladder, for example. In his own eyes, Bartholomew passed as a great prognosticator. His experience as art director helped, of course. Glancing at a photograph of a newly formed government cabinet, he didn’t pay much attention to the central figure, pushed forward by history. His attention was drawn to the sidelines—those who were to the left and to the right. They were the ones who had a free shoulder. They leaned in from the margins, pushing out the central figure beyond the frame of the photograph like toothpaste from a tube. Bartholomew divined the future ten years ahead: the one on the left would move to the right, the one on the right would move left, and they would collide in the middle in a preelection struggle. They stood there, modestly and unobtrusively, hardly distinguishable from one another: the left somewhat younger, the right a bit older, but both still in their prime. They are dressed almost identically, like the central figure; it is barely visible, but if you look carefully you will see that the jacket on the left one is a bit narrower in the waist, and the trousers are flared (or the other way round, depending on the generation). Also barely visible, but in the latest fashion, the haircut is nearly the same, but not quite. The right one, on the contrary, though it is barely noticeable, clings to a style that is already out of date—the jacket is wider, the trousers narrower—and clings to a government that is already out of date. It would not seem to be to their advantage; they hang there in an uncomfortable pose on the periphery, at the farthest point of the pendulum. But in two years they’ll accelerate toward the center: now the second from the edge, now the fourth … faster and faster, until they knock heads in the middle. Bartholomew knew a thing or two, and he even understood it. Except …

They overtook him, left and right. His concrete experience proved to be of no practical use to him. Ten years he had slogged away without a promotion. Bartholomew grew angry again, and again he flew up to the peak of Olympus, to Adams, in the glass elevator …

And caught him. At the very last moment, when Adams was looking forward to his imminent lunch. Adams’s self-command prevented him from showing his vexation: his face beamed too cordially, he bent over backward to show how democratic he was. Who was Bartholomew, that Adams should try so hard to please him? Ah, a king, the salt of the earth. Undethronable and eternal. The entire encyclopedia—the entire universe, that is—rested on him. And who was Adams? Decay, dust, nothingness. One minute he’s here, the next he’s gone, in a puff of smoke. He knew his place; he trembled before Bartholomew. He was the cat that had swallowed the canary. Adams was afraid, though he wasn’t even aware of it himself. He wasn’t afraid of, say, Zuberg, but of something in a way more terrible. As though the future lit up Bartholomew’s face: only look into his eyes and you’ll see that you are doomed, that soon, very soon … That is why Adams averts his eyes and can’t look directly at Bartholomew. He only imagines that he can’t stand Bartholomew; but it’s himself he can’t stand. He only imagines he is able to conceal his confusion under a guise of simplicity, shyness, and sensitivity toward his subordinate. He wouldn’t want to show his superiority, or injure someone’s self-love inadvertently. But he’s the only one who imagines these things. All the others, the ones below, see him for what he is. And for the Adamses of this world, being seen is
death.

Bartholomew saw him, and Adams knew it (he was shrewd, you had to hand him that). He began to make excuses: how he had presented Bartholomew’s request, and had even gone all the way to the top, to the Man Himself. If he didn’t believe him, Bartholomew could ask the secretary, she’d show him the paperwork. “In a month, you can count on it,” Adams says, but in his own mind he is already going down in the glass elevator, and the door of his limousine opens, and he’s spreading the toasted bread with Russian caviar. “Come back in a month, and I will personally take care of it. I’ll go straight to Him.” And Adams was gone. Vanished.

Well, what do you know! Bartholomew thought, overcome with admiration. By golly, it’s the very same thing. He’s just the Turk all over again. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The undeniable accuracy of his discovery buoyed him up. Adams, the Turk; the Turk, Adams … Could it be just by chance that he had combined them on the same day? No, it turned out there was a reason … and the reason was that they were one person! A thief and the Thief. Their gestures, the little expressions they let drop—they were from the same script. Only the Thief’s acting was better. More honest. Bartholomew’s heart warmed with the memory. And he became still more attached to his court Thief.

Only when he had returned to his own office and assumed his throne did Bartholomew realize that Adams had again passed him over. The Turk and the fur coat? That was nothing by comparison! The Thief had halved his debt (again); but the vizier had doubled his. And as soon as Bartholomew had sat down, he realized that he had returned to his place. No, Adams had
put
him there, in his place. With empty promises, casual flattery—“You’re the only one … Only you have the qualifications … All my hopes rest on you … Help us out, rescue us, for God’s sake … [The Thief prays to the devil, and only in private, keeping it to himself; but this one appeals aloud to God, without so much as blushing] … A great responsibility … Only with your experience and expertise…” He foisted it off on Bartholomew, and Bartholomew didn’t notice that he had accepted it, and that the wool had been pulled over his eyes. That the burden had fallen on him alone, he was up to his neck in it, and now up to his ears … all the work on the entire supplementary volume!

Adams was still strong, after all; Adams was still Adams.

Nevertheless, Bartholomew was still Bartholomew, too. The king grew irate. With one hand he extinguished a star, with the other he tore a tree out by the roots. On Osman Pasha he conferred a defeat in the nineteenth century. That was for his Turk the Thief, and for the Armenians to boot. The innocent Adamson was executed—abridged into oblivion—that’s for Adams. Take that, Sir Poluzhan!

All those who had been summarily executed he buried immediately in crosswords (one of his drinking buddies gladly printed them, then stood him a bottle for a fee). All the crossings arranged themselves elegantly, without the least coercion on his part. The last one was
carat
, from an article about diamonds (“
carat
, see:
diamond
”). Now there were some job openings for disadvantaged concepts …

On a liberated spot he was going to furnish a picture that hadn’t made the cut: a breaking wheel in fifteenth-century France. It was a good picture, very detailed: one criminal, already processed, already hung up on the wheel, his broken arms and legs dangling from it (that was Adams); another one, spread-eagled on a scaffold, is being bludgeoned by the executioner (that was the Turk: he could still beg for mercy, and Bartholomew could still pardon him). But that wasn’t all. He got rid of a picture of some kind of centrifuge, and in its place he set up a gallows so he could hang Adams, as well. The picture of the hanging man could serve as an illustration for a lesson on extreme disciplinary measures. And as his blood cooled and slowed down, the king didn’t even notice how he had suddenly adopted a more charitable frame of mind, carrying out more merciful acts—how he himself had begun to draw. He drew an invalid in the entry for INVALID, and it seemed that without any obligation he had drawn another unfortunate victim for the article on LEPROSY. On the chest of the invalid hung military honors and medals, and on the leper he had drawn—a heart. Both of them had the faces of good people. One had a crutch, the other a staff. They got by. They lived. They limped onward.

Bartholomew got carried away, lost in his pastime. Who could have known what joy …

Who could have known what joy it was, this supplementary volume! What fun. It was a cornucopia of shortcomings and oversights. The entire one hundred volumes of experience fit within its pages. All the provincial narrow-mindedness of our notion of the world. All the failures, all the victims of encyclopedic injustice, all the latest upstarts—from
A
to
Z
. What a motley, absurd throng! The ARC LIGHT (“Yablochkov’s Candle”), which helped earn Paris the name of “City of Light,” had been omitted before, as well as the absolutely innocent ÅLAND ISLANDS. Who had left them out of the first volume? Now, however, for moral compensation, Bartholomew even bestowed a map on them, an honor that even mighty archipelagos had not received. Here was someone else who would see his luck turn at the very end of the supplementary volume—JOSEF ZUBATY, Czech philologist. Bartholomew pushed out some newly hatched minister (he should have known his days were numbered). “Don’t be timid, Zubaty,” he said, nudging the philologist gently toward the volume. “Climb aboard.”

Bartholomew was now completely absorbed in his work. The choices became ever easier and more mechanical; he replaced a gulf with a mountain peak, an exploit with an honor, a wrench with a cathedral—the index cards flashed through his hands like those of a cardsharp. He was never once tempted to hold the trump card behind his back. And all of this for the sake of harmony and justice, and all of it to the detriment of chaos and evil.

That was just the beginning—the main battle still lay ahead. There, between
A
and
Z
, was his favorite letter. There, he and the enemy were going to clash …
Ta-da-da tum-ta-da!
Bartholomew hummed a victory march, savoring the triumph to come and rubbing his hands together. This was not the first year that Bartholomew had cherished this hope. In England it wouldn’t have happened. Here, among the frogs’ legs, why not? A supplementary volume, this crude appendage, but of the
whole
world, gave Bartholomew a freedom not available in the regular volumes, orderly and predictable. Bartholomew had prepared himself. Bartholomew was ready. The bookshelves were finished, the cannons were loaded, the trumpet was about to sound. He merely had to light the fuse.