The Symmetry Teacher (27 page)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to begin with an account of how our Club was born.

The Club was born quite naturally, by means of
degeneration
.

At first the three of us met at William’s to read each other what we had written.

“Come on, you go first!” we told each other, and all of us balked. “Well, I only have fragments, just a few sketchy notes really.” “I just started on it.” “Mine is just a vague concept so far.” Those sorts of things.

“Go ahead, we’re waiting,” two of us would say, ganging up on the third. “But it isn’t ripe yet, I’m afraid to read it out loud.” Or: “I’m superstitious. If I tell you the plot, it will dry up.” Or … In other words, there was always some excuse, until, after the second or third glass, one of us felt inspired, and, convinced that he was more talented than the others, began to regale us with another in a string of ingenious gambits. “I could never wrap my mind around how Shakespeare and Cervantes, clearly not knowing anything about each other, contrived to die on the very same day. Be that as it may, one day…” and he was off and running. The upshot was that it did
not
seem so improbable to us as it did to him, and the narrator retired, dispirited and perplexed, while the spirits of the other two, on the contrary, soared unaccountably. The unlucky fellow was dubbed “Oneday,” which thereafter became his nickname. It was all the more fitting since all the letters were contained in his middle name and surname. Who among us was Oneday? Why, William, of course!

Our system was of a strictly closed variety, and outsiders were no less strictly forbidden entry.

One day William Oneday ran into an old friend of his father’s, Jerome K. Jerome,
*
and invited him to dine with us. We revered the venerable old man for his wonderful book, the heroes of which we were wont to compare ourselves to. Among ourselves we also admitted that we admired him for the fact that he never wrote anything so outstanding again. So we could not refuse Oneday.

Oneday coughed up the money for a lavish spread, and we ate our supper and sang away before the Maestro.

*   *   *

The novel that John was “writing” (
Tea or Coffee?
), and which he now recounted in a somewhat abridged version, was about an unhappy love affair between a man and two sisters, about the flaming jealousy of one sister for another, and the jealousy they triggered in him. The Maestro was digesting. Seated in a soft armchair, he snuffled quietly, his magnificent silver mustache hovering above the ivory knob of his cane, on top of which he propped his chin solidly. His face was frozen in a mask of unwavering benevolence. His opinion about John’s composition, however, was unequivocal.

“You shouldn’t marry either one of them, not to mention both.”

Then he heard out the next story.

Oneday’s novella (
Hamlet’s Legacy
) was devoted to the idea of patronage as a vocation and purpose in life. Two prominent manufacturers meet at an annual trade fair in London and argue about why they are amassing money, and on whom they should spend it. One of them, who was from Barcelona, spends his on the architectural follies of young Gaudí, and the other, who was from Germany, spends his on the healthy, mature, and farsighted ideas of Karl Marx. Both of them consider their protégés to be geniuses.

At the word “genius,” the old Maestro started:

“First off, I’ve never heard of them. But then again, I’ve never understood a thing about economics, much less architecture. How about you, young man?”

The young man in question was Yours Truly.

“Not a word about music, though!” he warned categorically. “I’m tone-deaf.”

I decided to flatter the old man, comparing him to my beloved Sterne. My story was called “Sterne’s Laughter” and told about how an admirer of
Tristram Shandy
travels back in time in a time machine to record the jokes and laughter of the remarkable writer on a phonograph, and how he manages to meet him. But when he returns to his own time, the apparatus, instead of laughter, reproduces only snorting and unadulterated snoring.

At the word “snoring,” Jerome K. Jerome woke up with a start.

“Who is this Sterne? And where is he? Is it you?” he asked me.

I didn’t deny it.

“We’ve had enough of your Wellses and Conan Doyles,” he said, struggling out of the armchair with some difficulty. “You’re good lads … Go ahead and write, if you must.”

“Well, whose story do you think he liked best?” John snapped at me with unjustified venom.

“Yours, of course,” I retorted.

“We need new blood,” William said, when he came back after seeing the old man out. “I have someone in mind who inspires hope.”

And so we introduced the post of corresponding member, appointing Jerome K. Jerome our Honorary Chairman. (I can’t vouch for whether he would have agreed, had he known about it.) We hung his portrait on the wall (though to this very day I’m not sure we didn’t confuse his picture with that of Nietzsche). The number of corresponding members increased, but our hopes did not.

First a physical chemist joined our ranks, then a defrocked priest, then there was either an astronomer or an astrologer, and once we even had a hope-inspiring politician. That was when we came up with the idea (lest all our discussions be in vain) for our Club to sponsor something called the GNRP: the Great New Reader’s Prize. Everyone was in favor of it, this cockamamie idea.

“It’s getting crowded,” Oneday said morosely. “We need to expand.”

He had just come into another inheritance from an aunt, who left him a small house, and he was faced with the difficult choice of either selling it or keeping it for his own use.

As a consequence, the idea of moving to his aunt’s until such time as the legal rights to the inheritance came into force presented itself. The prospect of a dedicated space could not but bring with it questions about the organizational structure, that is, who would be in charge of all of this.

I proposed our mutual lady friend as a candidate for acting president, and the motion was carried with as much unanimity as enthusiasm.

Gerda agreed, but in view of the large volume of work that would be expected of her, she demanded there be a position of executive secretary created (she had someone in mind for the job). Murito Pilavut was also of mixed ancestry, but with Asian roots: he hailed from one of the countries squeezed between the English and Russian colonies with the commonplace ending of “-stan.” He wrote and spoke English even better than Gerda herself, and agreed to the most paltry compensation, with the proviso that we rename his post general secretary. We acceded to this small demand, and so he was appointed. His responsibilities, in addition to the unavoidable official ones, included recording the minutes and preserving confidentiality (for which we acquired a safe, the only key to which remained in Gerda’s hands).

*   *   *

And so, we moved our base of operations to the aunt’s residence in a quiet, leafy part of London. After we lit a fire in the fireplace, as well as in our pipes, we began to discuss, over port and sherry, what was new on the literary translation scene (so as not to become embroiled in the local literary process), with the aim of choosing the worthiest candidate for the Best Foreign Book award. During our deliberations we again veered off into a discussion about the prospects for our future unwritten works.

It all ended, invariably, with our getting out a jigsaw puzzle, solving a crossword, or playing a game of charades, and before long we had hatched a new game that was a version of anagrams.

The point of departure was:

THERE IS NO IDEA THAT CANNOT BE EXPRESSED MORE SIMPLY.

The principle boiled down to this: every complex word consists of many simpler words that together contain its letters. The first example we came across was so convincing that we
got personal
. It turned out that a great person was embodied in the letters of his own name (given name and surname)—thus, his entire fate and character are encompassed in one or several key words derived from it. (How delighted I was to discover that both
sense
and
sentence
were contained in Laurence Sterne!) Leaving the ranks of the great, we had the temerity to start right in on ourselves. Now we wrestled with our own names, trying to discover the various ways in which they could be twisted and rendered.

Our own names didn’t yield such a bountiful harvest as the names of the famous and celebrated: we had to content ourselves with simple nicknames.

Oneday already had one. John had become Barleycorn—Barley for short. I plucked a suitable one for myself out of
Tristram Shandy
: Shydream. The others were envious and objected, however. Ernest
must know the vital importance of being Earnest
! Thus, Wilde’s verdict prevailed.

And so we became Oneday, Barley, and Earnest. “We are alive until fate
falls into place
,” we concluded. Whether to use the results of our tinkering as pseudonyms in our writing was still a hotly debated topic among us.

Everyone was satisfied, however. After all, that’s what the Club was for—so we could feel like gentlemen, rather than half-wits.

Murito carefully recorded the progress of the performance, then hid the minutes in the safe as we looked on, locked it up, tugged the door to make sure it was fast, and handed the key to our president, Gerda. (I should note that these two, as official personages, appear under coded names in our minutes. These code names mean nothing from the perspective of anagrammatical Fate.)

*   *   *

Thus, there were five of us: Gerda, Oneday, Barley, Earnest, and Murito (not counting the corresponding members). A quintet, as it were. We had now become far more demanding with regard to the choice of corresponding members.

The priest who had broken with the Church, for example, we refused from the outset, and not because we were so devout. We simply didn’t like him or his novel.
The Gospel According to the Tempter
was its title, and it fully deserved it.

According to the story, along with the canonical gospels, others were found in a secret cave. These were the gospels of Thomas, Phillip, and other apostles, including Mary Magdalene, and even Judas. Now, the Gospel of Judas suggested that Jesus was an ordinary extraterrestrial, an intelligence agent, and knew beforehand that he would either be saved or resurrected. He was certain of this. Judas knew that Jesus’ origins were extraterrestrial, rather than divine, and he sacrificed himself to maintain the authenticity of the myth of Jesus, not to undermine the Teachings, which he believed more implicitly than anyone else.

In this sense, it was Judas who sacrificed himself and thus deserves the worship of all humanity. The author played up trivial contradictions and discrepancies in the canonical texts to substantiate and further develop his subject. Suddenly it became irksome and boring to listen to all of this. We advised the defrocked priest to repent before it was too late and return to the humble service in which he had been ordained. As for ourselves, we decreed that introducing an extraterrestrial into the plot was unworthy of a self-respecting author.

The hope-inspiring politician did not live up to our standards, either, but for completely different reasons. (I’m afraid we may have envied him: he was wellborn and well-fed, like Hamlet, but was absolutely unconcerned with the problem of whether “to be or not to be.” He
was
—perhaps even too much so. He wore his suits well, he sipped his cognac elegantly, and he smoked his cigars with aplomb.) Although his unwritten novel,
The History of the 2Xth Centuries
, was, to be honest, not altogether bad, I couldn’t help but object to the fact that his novel, like mine, involved time travel.

In his book, a schoolboy from the end of the twenty-first century disobeys his teacher during a history lesson. He plucks, and then eats, a forbidden fruit during a school field trip through the twentieth century. He begins to experience terrible abdominal pain (imagine the trouble a product that had outlived its shelf life by a whole century might cause), and strayed from the strictly regulated, neutral path for a moment to answer nature’s call. After relieving himself in the last century, he was forced to use the only thing that came to hand—namely, a page from the textbook in which everything about the twentieth century had already been revealed. This page was subsequently picked up by some secret service agent or other, and since they took an interest in the events at the end of their own century, they tried to deflect them. This unleashed catastrophes connected with the fracturing of time and gave rise to a host of undesirable regimes that might otherwise have been avoided. Trying like the best of them, the secret services thus managed to make the history of the twentieth century even worse. In other words, the novel made visible the polysemic vicissitudes of the future and the role of chance or blind Fate (though not Providence) in determining the subsequent incontrovertible course of events.

I began to dispute this principle of indeterminacy, insisting on the role of Providence; the highly educated Barley supported me, prompting me with a corresponding term (
determinism
). Gerda, however, was the one who really rose to the occasion, saying that a subject that was so dependent on gastroenterology was sorely lacking, if only on aesthetic grounds, and that if history was really like this, then history as a subject was similarly dubious, aesthetically. (In hindsight, I think we rejected the hope-inspiring politician for another reason—for his recently published book, which enjoyed great success.) We advised him to devote himself to politics, which he did. (He was successful there, too, perhaps because he was so familiar with the laws of digestion.
*
)

After such a charismatic politician, it became easier for us to dismiss the other candidates. The professor of physical chemistry wearied us with a concept about the concept—i.e., with the plot of how his plot refused to take shape (and that’s what the novel, dispiritingly, was called:
The Plot
). The professor tried to tell the story of how a Russian saw the Periodic Table of the Elements in a dream. The narrative was packed with detail—interesting primarily to the specialist—as well as with incomprehensible Russian jokes. We dozed off, and considered the whole dream to be highly improbable.