The Symmetry Teacher: A Novel Read online

  “I kept up my search, whether for another fleeting resemblance, or for another twist in the plot of my novel. I could no longer tell which took precedence—whether the literary concept modeled the events, or the events drove the novel. I only had to imagine something and it would happen, altering everything I had anticipated. When something happened, it would be mangled by my memory and assume fabulous shapes to suit the plot. I traveled a great deal. My travels were not so much long and unbroken as short and frequent. Flight and return. This was my narcotic. I thieved and collected days of departure and arrival: on these days I was happy, because I didn’t exist for anybody. Oh, the glorious last day—the first day that you are free!

  “Dika and I traveled to Greece together. This was the first time she had been to her ancestral homeland. In contrast to me in mine, she felt immediately at home in that place she had never before visited. How proud she was in my presence of everything around us! As soon as she alighted from the train, even her gait changed. We bought each other sandals right there on the platform. We exchanged them like rings. She was happy, and I suddenly felt that in Greece we were as we had been in our first room, when we had done no more than kiss. No more than…! Maybe we should move here, I caught myself thinking. Maybe we should just stay here, and everything will be as it was before.

  “We paid a visit to the local university. We thought Dika might be able to teach there someday, and I could have devised some special seminar. Dika posted a notice about me in a university publication, and on the eve of our departure for home I gave a poetry reading to a smattering of devotees. I don’t think anyone understood a word of it, but for some reason the reading was a success. And then I saw Her, coming down the aisle toward me, with a yellow flower in her hand. It was Helen again. The likeness was striking—the Dutch woman paled in comparison! This time, however, I realized it was only a likeness. Nevertheless, later that evening at a small restaurant, where Dika and I had gathered with friends to celebrate our imminent departure, the new Helen and I exchanged addresses and agreed to meet again. She had plans to travel to England. She promised to write me care of poste restante to let me know when. A soothsayer with a fortune-telling bird approached us. The bird picked out scraps of paper with fortunes that promised happiness to me; beauty to Helen—but Eurydice refused to tell us what her future had in store for her.

  “The mussel soup we ordered was marvelous. Surrounded by admirers, I was witty and jovial, and somewhat drunker than usual from the red wine and the heady proximity of the French Helen. I felt I was standing on the prow of some ancient galley ship like Odysseus, fanned by the wind, sailing through the night toward the stars, the sirens, and the waves. I sailed and sang. Suddenly we seemed to founder on a reef, and the galley split in half. I fell into the hold, which turned out to be a pub that I entered—I remember this well—with a large group of people, though I ended up alone with Dika. She had a swollen nose again. She often had a swollen nose in those days—a sure sign of jealousy. This time I was not sure whether my actions had triggered it, so I grew especially angry and went on the offensive. ‘What did your fortune say?’ I demanded savagely. She remained, as always, resigned and uncomplaining. She pacified me and spoke conciliatory words. Still, she didn’t produce the fortune and told me she had thrown it away.

  “How I made her suffer! I was in a foul temper because she prevented me from making definite plans with Helen. I would dash off to the post office in secret—there was nothing there, of course. I wrote impassioned letters to Paris, recounting them to Dika as rough sketches of scenes for the novel, and always returned from the post office empty-handed. I told Dika that my irritation was the result of writer’s block.

  “The novel, meanwhile, continued to grow in my head. It was called The Life of a Dead Man, and told of a man who lost his soul and blamed life itself for his ruin. He vowed to take revenge on life, destroying his useless, soulless body not by an ordinary act of suicide, but in the manner of a Japanese kamikaze, blowing himself up like a bomb. This bomb-man prepared long and hard for his final act, and his life acquired at least some semblance of purpose. He now achieved quickly and easily everything he had strived to achieve so unsuccessfully while his soul was still alive, while happiness and glory was still something he wanted. Now that he no longer wanted it, his career took an instantaneous and vertiginous upturn, because the only thing that attracted him was the success of his future detonation. He intended to blow himself up at the apex of his career, thus taking by surprise the prevailing evil. He had been hapless and weak when his soul was alive, but suddenly he became mighty, exacting, and impeccable in his attempts to achieve his soulless aims. He was afraid of nothing, he wanted nothing—his automatism overcame every obstacle. He got what he wanted. Now, after laying to rest all his worldly affairs, leaving no outstanding debts, he set out for a grand international affair as an invited guest, with two grenades fastened by a special strap (I borrowed the strap from Dostoevsky) under his genitals.

  Here I faltered before the further development of the plot. The dénouement was still unclear to me. I knew that his plan wouldn’t fall through for some external reason. No one would catch him, unmask him, disarm him; but he might well be afraid to carry out his plan. There wouldn’t be anything to prevent him from reaching his goal, but for some reason he wouldn’t enact it. I balked at continuing, as though some insurmountable obstacle interfered. It was like a black mirror that cast my creative efforts back to me like my own dark reflection.

  “And then, when I no longer hoped, and had sat down before a blank sheet of paper as listlessly and mechanically as I asked for mail at the poste restante window, I received a telegram from Helen in Paris that named a rendezvous at the very same post office, at such-and-such an hour. As you might have expected, I arrived an hour early, with the emblematic yellow rose in my hand, the same kind she had once given me. She never appeared. I went to the information window at the station to inquire about the train—all the trains had already arrived, and there was no telegram from her that warned of a change in plans. Late in the evening, I returned home distraught, and only when I was face-to-face with Dika did I realize I still had the damn rose in my hand. I dissolved into rage. Another second and I would … ‘Did she come?’ Dika said, without a tremor of emotion. ‘No,’ I replied, suddenly just as calm as she was. ‘This is for you.’ I handed her the rose and embraced her, exulting. ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Now I know how it all ends!’

  “I rushed over to the table and scribbled away until sunrise, and all the next day. My hero didn’t blow himself up—and for a good reason. Because there wasn’t one. Every goal exists for the sake of continuity, to justify its own sequel; and there was no possible sequel here. He had accounted for everything—and there was nothing left. There was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t because he took fright, it wasn’t because someone interfered—it was because there was no more reason. So he doesn’t blow himself up, but quietly leaves the reception to wander through the night, finally on this side of life. I was especially pleased with the last scene. He goes down to the shore of the sea, the night is starless and moonless, thick with mist. Standing in front of the inky blackness, as though before an abyss, he unbuttons his fly, takes the grenades out one by one, and flings them into the sea. They burst out there in the mist like burned-out lightbulbs. This symbolism was very fine, I thought, because in fact he threw away his …

  “I collapsed fully dressed on the bed and slept for sixteen hours straight. I had a strange and beautiful dream in which I was in Japan with a group of tourists. The wonderful thing about dreams is their incongruity. Although it was Japan, we stood in front of a bay I had seen in Greece. The bay was surrounded by imposing cliffs, and we descended them in single file, making our way down to the sea. The path was extremely intricate and unpredictable, which, it seemed, proved that I was in Japan; although the reason it was Japan was perhaps because my great-grandfather had married a Japanese woman. The path evolved in such a way
that we gradually found ourselves jumping from stone to stone. It became clear that we were in a kind of Japanese garden, and that these artificial stones, placed illogically, in the Japanese manner, were tiles paving the pedestrian pathway. Leaping from tile to tile, now left, now right, sometimes even backward, one had to step very gingerly, because between the tiles there was not simply grass, or little bushes, but infinitesimally small Japanese gardens, living ikebana that it would have been a shame to destroy. Carried away by this task, I discovered that I had gotten lost. I was lost, to be exact, in one of the lilliputian gardens; because, suddenly, between two of the tiles, the one on which I was standing and the one onto which I was supposed to spring, I saw underneath me that very bay, that very sea we had been descending to … But ‘we’ was not the right word, because the whole group was down below already, scattered along the narrow strip of shore, getting ready, most likely, to take a dip in the sea, while I was still there above them on the cliff. I raced down after my companions at breakneck speed, in leaps and bounds—it was easy and pleasant, almost like flying. What was strange, however, was that I didn’t seem to get any nearer to them.

  “On my way down I came across a strange contraption that vaguely resembled a reflecting telescope. It was blocking my path. I clambered up its trusses, slid down a short flight of steps, and came to a stop when I hit the mirror. It reflected the very same bay, the same shore, the same sea, but my companions were already walking along, farther down the shore. I realized I really had to hurry to catch up, turned away from the mirror, looking for a passage leading out of the contraption, and stumbled across another mirror. I started to run, searching for an exit, but everywhere there were mirrors blocking my path. I kept rushing about and running into them, until I noticed with horror that I was circling around and around in one spot that was lined with mirrors. I was immured in a prism of mirrors.

  “I woke up with a sense of panic, thinking that I had been left behind and would never catch up, and then I saw Dika. She kissed me, and congratulated me. Why? I had forgotten everything. She had read the novel. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  “What a blockhead I was! I had forgotten about everything. I slapped myself on the forehead, saw that I was already dressed, and, without washing, ran down to the post office. There was a telegram for me from Helen. She wrote that she had waited for me the whole day, then left, and that I shouldn’t write her anymore. When I reread the first telegram, I realized I had mixed up the dates, that in my impatience had gone to meet her a day earlier than she was to arrive. Thus, she had been waiting for me all the next day, while I was finishing my novel … For some reason I resigned myself quite calmly to the loss, telling myself that she wasn’t the real one anyway, and hadn’t even resembled her very closely. I rubbed my chin—it was overgrown with three-day stubble. Have you ever noticed that when you write through the night your beard grows twice as fast? It was positively improper to appear in public like that—now I understood the perplexity on the face of the postmistress. I set off for the nearest barbershop.

  “Not paying attention to anything around me, I simply plunked down in an empty chair, threw back my head, and closed my eyes. ‘Are you asleep?’ a gentle voice said. I opened my eyes—I had lost track of whichever dream I was now in. There in front of me was a mirror. Well, no wonder, it was a barbershop! But at the same instant I was so unnerved by it, it was so unexpected, that I couldn’t fathom it. In the mirror I saw a crumpled, unshaven face that seemed to belong to a stranger. And this strange face reminded me very urgently of someone. Everyone has experienced this exasperating tickle of incomplete recollection. All of this happened, mind you, in the first fraction of a second, which was pulverized by the second; for, to the right, above my head, hovered HER face. Not once more, not all over again—because this one matched the original completely. It was an exact replica. And since nothing can match something completely, it could only have been HER.

  “Two things confirmed this beyond the shadow of a doubt. First, my own face. Talk about an expression! It was just like the one in the photograph. Second, when I shifted my gaze away from my own likeness, I saw that both of us were being reflected from the back, in the mirror behind us. The mirror that we were facing revealed a regressive series of reflections. This was my morning dream! A dream—come true. Prophetic. I looked at her. She was smiling brightly and tenderly, almost laughing. I only had to turn my head to the right to see her in the flesh! My neck grew stiff, my heart was pounding, I couldn’t take my eyes off her reflection for fear she would disappear.

  “It didn’t disappear—it changed before my eyes: it smiled, looked amazed, perplexed … It came to life! I heard my neck crunch as I turned to her—she didn’t disappear. I can’t say what I felt at that moment. Relief? Devastation? Joy? Disappointment? Freedom?… That was it, I felt freedom. We were surrounded by mirrors, repeating hundreds of times, one inside the other, an endless chain into eternity. Our reflections laughed, because we laughed. At first I was moved to laugh by the very word ‘freedom’; and she, for some reason, laughed in response. Perhaps she really did find it amusing. I laughed at myself, she laughed at me, the mirrors laughed at both of us. Well, so what if she was wearing a white robe instead of a dress? She was a hairdresser! So it wasn’t a store, but a barbershop. So what? A barbershop is a kind of store. It wasn’t a shopwindow, but a mirror. So what? It’s still a reflection. Both these arguments led to a fresh bout of laughter. The photograph matched like a parody. But what was a parody of what? I doesn’t matter, I thought with relief. There’s a third corroboration here: she’s the third. The magic of the number three was self-evident. I burst out laughing one last time, and it seemed to me that she responded to me with laughter that was not only cheerful, but happy. That meant that it was not just me laughing at myself, but her laughing at me—WE were laughing! Together.

  “No, her name was not Helen. That would have been too uncanny. Then she might as well have been called Calypso. What was her name? Have I forgetten it? Her boss gave her permission to leave, and we took off for the country. I don’t think we conversed about anything at all—we were as happy and playful as children. We swam and ran about naked, chasing after each other like we were in Eden, like Adam and Eve. That’s it! Her name was Eve. Definitely. Or was it…?

  “I had never felt so comfortable with anyone before. And never would again (I know that now). We didn’t have a penny to our names. We didn’t have to live by the sweat of our brow, though: her numerous admirers supported us. No, of course not! I wasn’t her pimp. Perhaps it wasn’t very proper, but believe me, it was absolutely pure. In Italian jargon there is even a word for it: dinamo. And so we hoodwinked others. She would make plans with someone, saying that she wanted to drink and was absolutely famished. The admirer rolled up in a car packed with wines and delicacies. She set the table, lit candles—and then I made my presence known. She was terribly embarrassed, took me off to one side and whispered to me guiltily (the admirer didn’t know what she said). Then she took the admirer aside and whispered to him in secret. (I knew what she was saying: he’s just a boy, a greenhorn—Italian blood. And the most persuasive argument: I had promised to marry her; but the admirer hadn’t.) Then we sat down to dinner together.

  “No one is as obliging as the man next in line to his predecessor, or the deceiver to the deceived. It was very amusing to watch. At first I would sulk and scowl, but I didn’t play the part to the end. I was too hungry. You should have seen how courteously I was served—you can’t find a better waiter than a happy rival! He also regaled me with conversation to dispel any awkwardness … The longer I remained silent (my mouth was full), the more he talked, trying indirectly to convince me I wasn’t a cuckold. Oh, it was the sweetest sort of vaudeville! Such delicate word choice, it was like dancing between knives. I would eat my fill, then fall into a sulk. The rival left at the first opportunity, usually without even tasting his own offerings—and we fell into one another’s embrace.

  “I must
admit, they were pleasant people, and I wasn’t at all jealous of her past. (Funny how I fell into the same logic as my rivals.) They seemed to acknowledge us as a couple. Only one of them saw through us—and we became friends with him, since we all liked each other so much. Fat, bald, lively, he perspired constantly. He had a strange profession: he was a master of ceremonies. He was always on the move. Prone to boasting, he never demanded that we believe him. A good man … There was only one thing he kept insisting on—he said he was a close friend of Charlie Chaplin’s, which he tried to prove by fishing around in an abyss of tattered receipts and documents. In the end, he never found the calling card. So we didn’t believe him; and he was genuinely upset.

  “I don’t know how many days passed—probably as many days as there were admirers. We started on a Sunday, that much I know for sure. Either the admirers grew fewer, or the days grew longer. Suddenly I had a dream about the novel. A new ending. A new version. My hero, before he went to commit ‘the deed,’ after he had paid all his debts and destroyed his receipts, after he had carefully washed, shaved, and strapped on the grenades … Just then, right before the banquet, he goes to discharge one more duty. He goes to say goodbye to the only person on Earth who wasn’t indifferent to him: naturally, to the woman who is devoted to him. (You have already guessed that my solitary avenger, who considers himself very callous and unfeeling, is secretly very sentimental—but the one does not exclude the other.) He enacts a scene in which he takes leave of her forever, confesses to his own heartlessness, says that he has the right, etc., and then, won over by the honesty and persuasiveness of his arguments, she finally believes him—this is it, this is the end—and sets him free. And when he decides not to blow himself up, when he has flung his burned-out lightbulbs into the dark expanse of ocean, he ends up, finally and absolutely, alone. He has nowhere to go. He no longer even has a home. He has sold it. He doesn’t even have money: he gave it all away. What need would he have for money after blowing himself up? He has no one to turn to. He has no relatives, and he has just parted ways forever with the only woman who could put up with him. His soul is gone, but he still has a body. And so, having wandered the whole night through, shivering and hungry, he finds himself standing at the abandoned woman’s door, unable to decide whether or not to ring the bell. Suddenly the door opens of its own accord. She is not at all surprised that he has returned. She expected him. Dinner is still warm …