Free The Symmetry Teacher by Andrei Bitov Page B

dumbstruck, turning over these simple calculations in my mind, Helen emerged through the glass doors, dressed as she was in the photograph, with a shopping bag, like the one in the photograph … She glanced at me, as she had in the photograph, without registering any feeling, as though glancing at a thing, and walked on. I kept standing there, rooted to the spot. Then, in the display window, I saw my own ghastly face from the photograph, with snakes growing from my head instead of hair. I screamed, and rushed after her—to kill her. ‘Kill’ is not the right word here, though: I thought I could rip her to shreds, like a photograph, so certain was I that she was made of paper. It wouldn’t have been murder—just scraps of paper scattered about on the street. But SHE was gone. She had disappeared.
    “Ripping her up—that was nothing. It was still not the end. When she vanished, and I was unable to catch her, I understood that I had yet again fallen into temptation by the one with the briefcase, that I should have caught hold of her and held on for dear life. I should have urged myself on her and fallen in love with her at last, unto death. This was my last chance to revive fate, and I had missed it. Oh, how blind I had been my whole life: waves, mirrors, paper, photographs …
    “I embarked on a new quest then, though I knew it was doomed from the outset. I wrote something called The Burning Novel . It was a novel in which the characters didn’t say a word. No, you couldn’t have read that one, either, for the same reason … I don’t know what you’ve read of mine—I have been writing these two books my entire life, nor have I ever finished writing either of them. Perhaps they were in fact one novel and not two. In the sequel the protagonist returns to his first love and to his first, abandoned, novel … In that book it turns out he had a son, a grown-up boy who is a deaf-mute. His mother hasn’t spoken to him, out of solidarity with her son, for fourteen years. The protagonist settles down with them again and finishes writing his very first novel, amidst this embodied muteness. In this novel he…”
    I think Vanoski recounted his novel to me to the end; but he no longer saw me. I quietly slipped out of his little shoebox. My God! How wonderful life is! How sweetly the dusty urban lilacs smell of benzine! Of what use are success, money, and glory to him? Why do they come to those who not only have no more need of them, but who never needed them to begin with?
    And then I recalled Vanoski’s words, the ones he had spoken when I was feeling such antipathy toward him that I had stopped listening:
    “All the same, he didn’t conquer me. I know that for sure now. He only conquered me in this life; but in that one he can’t vanquish me. In that one I’m stronger. My Dika is there with me…”
    And I realized why I had turned against him: it was because of his Dika. Because she is his, and not mine. What good is my youth to me without her?

 
    O : NUMBER OR LETTER?
    (Freud’s Family Doctor)
    FROM A Fly on a Ship , A BOOK BY U. Vanoski
    “Did you fall from the Moon?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    His “yes” was calm and bore no trace of challenge. The laughter that followed in the wake of his answer no longer injured him. Had he been aware of it, this circumstance would even have gladdened him. But he wasn’t aware of it, and was somewhat abashed that he hadn’t fully lived up to their expectations. For some reason, though, they guffawed even more than usual. This put him on his guard. He stared in wide-eyed surprise at the encroaching, wobbling surface of unfamiliar faces—at the mounds of cheeks and foreheads, the chasms of eyes, the clefts between teeth. This carnival-mirror surface of faces reminded him of another surface, another landscape. Then he recalled where he had been going, excused himself, and set off down Sunday Street toward where it ended, merging gently and imperceptibly into a faded