The Symmetry Teacher (15 page)

He never told this to anyone. The selfless Joy came to fetch him, ready to wipe away his spittle till the end of his days. He rose from the couch in silence, stuffed his manuscript into a suitcase, and they left for Europe. The doctor’s departure made a deep impression on the Taunusians. Because nothing happened after that for a good decade and a half before it all began—and how!—and they found themselves suddenly in the true twentieth century, with its progress, wars, and crises, and the departure of the doctor, the only preceding event in living memory, marked the boundary between the good old days and the new. “That was before the doctor’s departure,” they sighed. Or: “That happened after he left.”

But they are not our concern here. Nor, indeed, is Robert Davin, who achieved global renown in Europe and produced students and theories galore, almost exceeding those of Freud, whom we will also not concern ourselves with here. We would not have remembered him at all, were it not for the fact that some materials came to our attention not long ago that were connected with the Shroud of Turin. This is not the time or place to recount the story, which boils down to the question of the authenticity of the cloth on which is imprinted, like a negative, the image of Christ. (Those who are interested may consult the widely known articles by Dr. P. Villion and Dr. D. Falk, et al., on the subject.) At around the time of our story the Shroud was photographed for the first time, and the negative revealed a positive image. This sensation led to numerous strictly scientific verifications of what people had not doubted over the course of almost two millennia. The discussions, research, and articles surrounding the controversy reached their apex in precisely the year that the Shroud was exhibited to the public. I will cite just two arguments in favor of the authenticity of the image depicted on the Shroud and the reality of the story of Christ. These arguments present an especially heady psychological challenge. The first argument was that the idea of a negative image became known only with the discovery of photography, and that no artist, even one familiar with the photograph, would be capable (technically) of creating a negative from the positive image. The second was that the Shroud itself, and the linen bands in which it was wrapped, were preserved in the shape of a cocoon. Their covering had not been touched, and no natural processes can explain the fact of their integrity and wholeness except the Ascension. Christ was not unwrapped. He disappeared from them.

Going over these materials, we came across a response by the well-known Dr. Robert Davin. It is strange that he descended from the heights of his authority and deigned to consider something that for scientists of his stature was extremely dubious and lacking in prestige, if not dangerous for his reputation (which every authority cultivates, the greater his authority). More curious still was that Dr. Davin failed to maintain his composure as a man of science and lashed out in a most inappropriate manner. Alluding to the classic “Gummi syndrome,” described by himself, he accused even such an absolutely skeptical and upright scientist as Dr. Howell, Professor of Anatomy, of abnormality. This expert had merely observed, in his capacity as an anatomist, that no attempt at extricating the body of Christ from the Shroud could possibly have left the cloth in the state in which it is preserved up to our day. Moreover, it was curious that logic—a tool that Dr. Davin had always deployed powerfully and irresistibly—seemed to betray him. His arguments are imposed on his opponent by direct, importunate pressure, and his deductions ring with a pathos that boiled down to the formula: “That cannot possibly be, because it could never possibly be.”

But we are not really concerned about his views on the infamous Shroud here. It was the fact that he took the matter of the Shroud so
personally
that gave us pause, compelling us to try to understand it.

THE END OF THE SENTENCE

(The Talking Ear)

FROM
A Fly on a Ship
,
A BOOK BY
U. Vanoski

IN MEMORY OF ANTON O.

When everything moves equally, nothing moves apparently; as, for example, a fly on a ship.

—Pascal

Yesterday was still sunny, and I witnessed a lush sunset. The sun dropped directly into the sea. It flattened out, became oval in shape, and all but sizzled. The birds, somehow joyous and panicky at once, chirruped and twittered about it. I know they do this each time, as if they don’t believe that the sun will rise again tomorrow. I know very well why they make such a racket; although how much more seldom did I witness a living sun than the birds did!

This is what’s hard to keep track of: what is the first time, and what is the last. People really have no true concept of time. It has set, but will it rise? We sink into sleep. Will we awaken?

I woke up again to the chirping of the birds, which sounded not so much happy as surprised, or even frantic: no sun, no sea, no sky. The gray walls of the fortress and the other ruins merged with the absence of everything else, and dissolved like salt. Only the barely delineated mass of the Church of Our Lady floated in front of my window, like the prow of a ship running up against a reef. Like a ship’s bell, the belfry announced the damp morning hour—five o’clock. And with each stroke, the outline of the branch of a tree with indecent young foliage and a fat non-songbird grew more clearly defined. Songbirds, on the other hand, were always smaller, and stayed hidden in the foliage.

At seven bells the birds ceased their morning work, and silence returned.

I am on an island, albeit a Swedish one, and here I understand everything. I sailed here to be closer to my Russian subject. Russia is directly in front of me.

*   *   *

I just don’t seem to be able to come up with the plot. Perhaps it’s because it’s Russian? Russian—or from Russia?

Russia has no plot—only space. It’s the same with the ocean. The ocean has no plot, either. Defoe or Stevenson notwithstanding—they marooned their plots on islands, like us Britons. The ocean has no subject, just as Russia has no subject: there is no experience to rest on. There are no edges. It’s an abyss. For a subject, the first thing one must do is close off space. Like theater. Like Shakespeare. True, recently we discovered a remarkable American writer. That’s where there should be no literature by definition, and yet … He yearned to make it to England, but never did. So they browbeat him at home, never recognized him, those Yankees. Now he knew how to write about the ocean!

That’s because he divined a protagonist—the hero of his story is a whale; a white one, no less.
*
As huge and solitary as an island. A sort of living, floating island that one must destroy, because such a thing simply cannot be allowed to exist. Truly, an island is a must! A ship is also a floating island, though a female one, so all our pirate literature is not about the ocean, but about islands torn away from Great Britain.

In Russia there are no islands. Out there where the islands begin, it breaks off, this Tartaria Magna. Somewhere in Japan. That is why Russia lost the war.
†

Admittedly, I have never been to Russia, so it’s not for me to judge. Maybe nomads view their steppe as an ocean, and their horses as boats? That would mean they are always sailing, and all their literature, if it exists, is also of the pirate variety—or at least about bandits. I haven’t read it, I admit. I did read
War and Peace
, an unparalleled book, of course; but very big. Like Russia. They say the women there are beautiful. Helens and Natashas everywhere. But why do they keep speaking French?

I’ve never been to Russia, but I spent some good times with a certain Russian. He told me so much about it that the country coalesced in my mind into a little island, drifting along in a still unfathomable space. This memory troubles me, and I wish to unburden myself of it, turning it into a more or less ordinary plot.

My narrator—let’s call him Anton, after the Chekhov who is suddenly all the rage in these parts—disembarked on the eve of the First World War, and made his way to a London pub that I also used to frequent when I managed to write at least something to the end, and where I would take a drop or two as my heavenly reward.

Anton spoke English quite well, and he delighted me with the strange music of his accent, as well as, it turned out, his mind. Listening to him over a pint was magical. It was like entering a universe that was not so much Russian as Carrollian. If truth is realized as fiction in Lewis Carroll, with my Russian friend it was the opposite. Every untruth was confirmed by his own life, and fiction suddenly became reality. I will attempt to expand upon this incoherence. Perhaps out of the resulting kasha (Anton loved the expression “to boil kasha,” i.e., “porridge,” apparently a Russian calque) it will be possible through patient and steady stirring to boil up a nonexistent Russian plot.

At the time of our first meeting, this Siberian who hailed from the village of Fathers (Batki, in Russian) announced himself as a member of Captain Robert Scott’s expedition.
*
Oh, the yarns people spin in pubs! The whole of Britain was shocked by the circumstances of his death and the arrival of the remainder of the expedition. I didn’t believe my drinking mate; and I was a fool not to. At our next meeting, Anton modestly showed me a medal that had just been presented to him by Her Majesty. “And she gave me a valuable gift, too!” he said, now with pride. He refused to show me the gift, however, or to elaborate on its value. “Otherwise I’ll drink it away and never make it back to Fathers,” he explained. But by that time I no longer doubted that the gift existed.

*   *   *

In Vladivostok, Lieutenant Bruce hired him to purchase Manchurian horses for the expedition in Harbin, then a Russian city. He was knowledgeable about the sturdy, compact, frost-resistant horses, since he had spent several seasons herding sheep—either to or from Mongolia … Mongolia—is that in Siberia?

“No, it’s in Poltavshchina,” he said, and the irony of the joke was lost on me. So Mongolia is in Poltavshchina? “He doesn’t know where Poltavshchina is!” Anton guffawed. “It’s in the same place as Fathers!” My head started spinning, and we drank to Fathers. “Well, all right,” he said graciously. “Now, Mongolia isn’t China. Understand?” “All right.” “Alright? You mean okay, fine?” “Okay is American. We prefer all right.” We clinked glasses.

*   *   *

My God! Where is the subject? Every subject should begin with a portrait. But just try to describe my Anton … His portrait has no subject, either. He resembles no one else, and nothing else. Just a towheaded lump. An extremely smart one, by the way.

He seemed to lack even the slightest reserve; but the more he opened up to me, the blurrier his image became, blending with the image of the country he came from.

Everything seems to lose its substance in Russia, to become insubstantial,
*
spilling its contents in the course of the discourse (the more one expounds on it, the more weightless it becomes). And as it reaches its conclusion (in Russian, the word for conclusion and imprisonment is the same:
zakliuchenie
), it becomes so insubstantial that it disappears altogether.
†

Some of Anton’s observations and tales remain fixed in my mind, as though he nailed them there. Now, the whole of that exorbitant and excessive country of Russia seems to be hanging on those nails like a bedsheet, with far-flung stations of destiny, where yet another pint marked a thought, or a thought gave birth to yet another pint: conclusion as the end of thought, and conclusion as imprisonment.

“If prison is an attempt to exchange space for time and then foist it upon an individual, Russia is an attempt by God to exchange time for space.”

I liked this formulation; but I began to object, citing Newton’s laws.

“Right, next you’ll be recalling Archimedes and his bathtub,” Anton said, interrupting me. “That’s just what I mean: there is a boundary between space and time. And this is nowhere more clear than in Russia.”

This kind of scholasticism unnerved me utterly. “Well, where exactly is this boundary of yours to be found?” I said.

“That’s the thing, it moves. Like a piston, or a membrane. It’s most stable in the Urals or the Caucasus. Although sometimes it runs through Moscow, too … But then it’s a crack that time falls into.”

“What? How can that happen?”

“Easy. A century or two just disappears.”

“I beg your pardon, but this contradicts all common sense, not to mention the laws of physics.”

“The laws of physics don’t apply everywhere.”

“How can that be?”

“Because I saw Lieutenant Evans vanish before my very eyes! Have you ever seen how ice cracks? Who knows, maybe time is a lump, and not a current.”

Here I lost my composure altogether, which is fairly distressing for an Englishman.

Anton calmed me down and said, “The laws of physics operate here because human laws are also observed, pulling everything into shape. You drive everything into mind.”

How I loved these literal turns of phrase from Russian! To “drive into mind,” to “drive forth from mind” … He drove me out of my mind, but without any coercion—that was what astonished me.

“Yes,” he said, conciliatory. “It’s a misfortune for a country when the law doesn’t operate but is still imposed.”

“Who are you talking about now?” I was ready to parry the blow.

“Russia, of course. Everything is in order with you. Here,
pre-ce-dent
reigns.”

“There are no precedents in Russia?”

“In Russia, everything is a precedent. That’s why you defer to it.”

“Who imposes it on you, in that case?”

“Which who would that be?”

“The law.”

“Oh, I see. You mean whose side is the law on? On the side of the power.”

“But what is this power?”

“The most unbridled form of passion.”

“Passion?”

Anton launched into a homily about the hierarchy of senses (the power vertical), but I had already had enough. I refused to understand and went off to sleep without having grasped why we have not five senses but seven, like musical notes or colors in a spectrum.