The Symmetry Teacher (12 page)

“What about the Moon?” Davin insisted. Gummi’s cheeks quivered, as though he had jumped from a great height, and he wrinkled up his face. Gathering his wits, he went on, but now somewhat wearily, and his words fell from his tongue more and more listlessly.

“I woke up on the floor … beaten and bruised … There was a cup of water … I drank it.” And he stopped.

“The Moon,” Davin said harshly.

“I flew to it.”

“When?”

“After that.”

“After you drank the water?”

“Yes.”

“But how? You were drifting. That’s a very slow means of propulsion. It’s around four hundred thousand kilometers to the Moon. Ten times around the Earth.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Gummi said with difficulty, as though he couldn’t get his tongue around the words. “Soaring is pleasure, it’s an indulgence. You can also just find yourself there.”

Dr. Davin was tired, like Gummi’s tongue, as though it was he himself who could hardly find his way out of his mouth. “Well, what’s it like? The Moon?” he said offhandedly. Gummi’s eyes grew glassy and mute. Something was approaching him headlong, coming ever nearer, until it shattered his stare. He seemed to see something directly in front of him, so close and so clear that he lost the gift of speech, because he wasn’t remembering, he was truly seeing. For a moment Davin even imagined that something was reflected in Gummi’s irises that wasn’t there in front of them (they were walking through a field). He gave his head a shake. “So? What was it like,” he persisted.

“Brown,” Gummi said faintly, and a bubble of saliva appeared on his lips.

Good gosh, he’s epileptic to boot, the doctor thought.

… When Gummi came to, he saw the alarmed, guilty face of Davin bending over him. Davin rubbed Gummi’s temples. He was so relieved when Gummi regained his senses that he smiled with ingratiating tenderness.

“Please, Toni, forgive me. I overtaxed you with my questions. I believe absolutely that you were on the Moon that time.”

Gummi looked at the doctor with love and indulgence, as one looks at a child.

“But I was just there again,” he said, picking himself up off the grass.

*   *   *

Davin lay down to take a nap in his study and seemed to collapse. He woke up from the sun bearing down on his eyes. He felt unusually wide awake, and alarmed that he had slept so long. Nowadays the sun came to visit him on the couch when it was already after five, getting toward evening. He sat up abruptly, feeling out of sorts, and vibrating and ringing like the metal spring in the couch underneath him. He sat there for a moment while the sparks and black specks cleared away from his vision, then stood up just as abruptly. He stretched energetically, with a crunch. What kind of nightmare was I having? Rubbish! Time to
study
the nature of dreams, yet I’m experiencing them instead of working. He shook his head once more, laughing and chaffing himself: sensitive soul, beloved gone, Gummi, Toni, the Moon … Stuff and nonsense!

He sat down at his desk with confidence, ready to resume his manuscript on the nature of dreams. He loved the view from his window, loved to gaze out of it when he was concentrating. He looked—someone was out there, chopping wood. And that person was Gummi.

In the provinces in those days, everything fell easily into a rhythm. A random event today is, by tomorrow, already something familiar. By the day after tomorrow it is already expected, and by the day after the day after tomorrow it has become a ritual.

The residents of Taunus were used to meeting this strange couple walking along the Northern Highway, to town and back, toward the end of the day. What did they need to talk about that was so important? So as not to have to raise Gummi in their own estimation, the Taunusians lowered the doctor. The idea that the doctor also “had a few screws loose” returned everything to its proper place. Was it any surprise, when there were thingamajigs like
that
dangling in the sky? And they pointed at the dirigible. Here one should note that the provinces experience a paucity of events not because they don’t happen, but because they have no need for them.

Rare objects are thus brought together because of their lack of utility. (It’s the same story in museums.) Gummi and the doctor developed a need for each other, as though they were lying side by side in the same display case. That Gummi adored Davin, for his handsome looks, his astute mind, his humaneness, we can understand. But what did the doctor see in Gummi besides a curious clinical case? It is easiest to believe that the doctor’s progressive mind was trying out particularly humane methods of treatment, unprecedented in the asylums of the day, on Gummi. Methods such as kindness, respect, attention, trust, an effort to inspire self-confidence, and so on—a whole array of them. This is most likely how it appeared to Davin himself, and this is what he wanted to see. But we have already mentioned that he was sharp, and observed the behavior not only of others but also his own. In so doing, he did not find this explanation of his relationship with Gummi to be fully exhaustive. He seemed to be unable to find a satisfactory answer to the problem, or to avoid it altogether. A simple explanation of this reciprocal attachment as a feeling of satisfaction from the righteous fulfillment of his doctor’s duties (when it comes right down to it, people like acting kindly, otherwise it would be completely disadvantageous), and even the assumption of a certain degree of normal human attachment to a weaker, more innocent creature (a dog or a cat) didn’t quite explain the phenomenon. Davin wasn’t
attached
to Gummi; he
needed
him. He himself didn’t know why. He tried not to understand, because in some way his contemplation of the matter turned against him: accepting Gummi’s love for him, he understood that he didn’t love back. And if it had been only about Gummi! But catching the reflection of Gummi’s love, he began to understand that he was unable to love, as if it was impossible to love anyone
on principle
. Joy was no exception. In and of itself, this would not have devastated his soul so profoundly, had he not caught himself thinking that with Joy he didn’t experience the same inequality of feelings that he experienced with Gummi. Did that mean that Joy didn’t love him, either? No, that was not at all acceptable to the ingenious doctor.

So it won’t do to think that their relationship was cloudless and serene. Only Gummi was cloudless and serene.

On top of everything else, Gummi had fallen in love with Joy. He was, it seemed, not in love with her portrait, as the doctor assumed, given Gummi’s passion for cheap postcards; he was in love with
her
. The photograph had been taken on Joy’s last visit and had turned out well—though it was rather a failure, technically speaking. It was Davin’s first experiment with photography. He had adjusted the focus improperly, and hadn’t kept the negative in the developer long enough, and the result was … a miracle. It was a bright white blur of hair and smile, merging with the dazzling foliage of a bush behind her. “Don’t you dare move! Do not stir an inch!”—but that made her laugh and turn her head, and this motion and her smile were captured even as they slipped away. The moment was not stayed, but what remained was beautiful. It seemed as though Joy would turn back again any moment now, and happiness would ensue. Because her face looked like happiness at that moment. Not in the sense that it was “beaming with happiness”—if you looked closely, that certainly was not what you saw. There was even some sort of alarm visible in the blur amidst this flood of light. She herself was happiness. That which exists only now, but not at the very next moment; what exists somewhere, but not for you, and is not within your reach.

“Gummi? Come in, come in. Don’t hover in the doorway like that. Come in and take a seat. What is it, Gummi?”

“I wanted to say that I can’t find another stone like the first one.”

“What stone?”

“You liked that stone I brought you yesterday so much, I wanted to find another one for you.”

“Never mind, Gummi. You’ll find another.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Don’t be sad, Gummi.”

“I realized that you can’t do it on purpose … You can’t find something on purpose, because finding happens by chance … You can’t find what you want—”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Finding something—you can’t set out to do it … it’s—” Here Gummi’s voice began to tremble, then broke off. Davin’s fountain pen came to a standstill. What was going on? “I would give my life.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Davin said, perplexed. Gummi blinked as if he were staring directly into a bright light somewhere above the doctor’s head. Davin turned around and saw Joy. It was Joy he saw, and not her portrait. She was there, in the garden, in the bright sunlight, as though he had a window there above his head and she was smiling because her Robert didn’t know this yet. Davin rotated his head back around and was again confronted with Gummi’s prayerful gaze—
he
illuminated Joy. The portrait dimmed.

“What would you give your life for?” The doctor’s voice was dry.

“For such beauty I would give my life,” Gummi repeated in an unsteady voice, his words turning to mush again in his mouth.

Davin remembered the postcards at the station and smiled disagreeably.

“All right, Gummi. That’s enough. You’re keeping me from my work.”

Dear Joy
, he wrote.
You can’t imagine what an impression you’ve made, or, rather, your portrait has made, on my Gummi …

*   *   *

“Look, there goes the doctor with his idiot!” the Taunusians said the first time they saw them together. “Look, there goes the doctor with his idiot!” they said the second time.

And if they had overheard (and they did overhear) what this small, bald Don Quixote and his tall, passionate Sancho Panza were saying—what they would discuss with one another, this arrogant bookworm and a bona fide idiot—their assumption that the doctor himself could have used some treatment would have been borne out so unequivocally that no other confirmation was needed.

“So you suppose”—for every two and half steps made by the doctor, Gummi made four blunt-nosed steps—“that it isn’t the outer surface, but the inner?”

“Always the inner,” Gummi said with conviction. “It’s just that people only look at the outside.”

“But if we turn everything inside out?”

“Exactly,” Gummi said, beaming. “That’s what you’ll get.”

“I see,” the doctor said, deliberating the matter. “In other words, people’s vision is inverted—they perceive the outer as the inner, and vice versa? Just as newborns see the world the other way round?”

“Almost, yes. Only nothing is really outside at all.”

“I can agree with your argument, but not with your certainty about it, Gummi. So, there’s an interior, and that is all?”

“That’s the way I see things.”

“But when you look at a steam engine, for example, isn’t it outside you? Do you really see the boiler and the firebox?”

Gummi groaned, voicing an inexpressible chagrin.

“You wish to say that I have again muddled the argument? That you were talking about another spatial dimension?”

Gummi nodded vigorously, visibly relieved. “You said that on purpose. But I see the firebox, and I see steam—it doesn’t have enough room.”

“You simply have a rich imagination, Gummi.”

“I don’t have any imagination. I can’t make up things that don’t exist.”

“Fine, I withdraw my example. You’re right, it was a primitive one. Let’s move on to a more complex machine. Let’s talk about ourselves. You and me.”

“I think the machine is less primitive than you think,” Gummi said sadly.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” the doctor exclaimed. “You were just arguing the contrary, I thought. That there is nothing complicated about human inventions, that they are lower than living things by several orders of magnitude.” Gummi couldn’t get any words out, and chewed his lip. “Did you not understand? Orders, Gummi … That is to say, levels…”

Gummi nodded. “I understand order. Order is when things are right. And right is when things are in their proper places. Machines, human beings, and the sky … I said that a machine was more complicated because it isn’t on the outside. It isn’t itself. It’s more complicated than it seems to us on the outside, because … part of our complexity is inside it. We are not more complicated than it is; it is simpler than we are.” Gummi was puffing like a steam engine from the effort of speech. “I can’t express it in words.”

“You can’t deny that a human being became human because he evolved—learned, invented, gained knowledge? A person is the most complex of all things on Earth, precisely because he began from what was simple. Without the wheel, the lever, the sail, he would have remained at a very primitive level.”

Gummi was straining. They seemed to be digging a tunnel from two ends, unable to see each other. The doctor sought words that were simpler from his side, and Gummi was unable to find words for what was already clear to him.

“They’re even more complicated,” he murmured.

“In what sense? I don’t understand you, Gummi.”

“The wheel, the lever—they’re more complicated.”

“More complicated than a steam engine?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll try to understand … This is interesting … Doesn’t your idea suggest that the brick is more complex than the house, the atom is more complex than the molecule, the cell is more complex than the organism, that any single element is more complex than a combination?” Gummi nodded enthusiastically. “But
how
are they more complex?” the doctor blurted out.

“There is more mystery in them.”

“Ah!” Davin was struck by this. He even seemed to understand, but couldn’t quite trust himself. Gummi couldn’t possibly be expressing ideas of such complexity, could he? Surely that strange idea—wherever it had come from—had simply flitted into his mind and then flitted out again.

“But a steam engine, a camera, a telephone … you don’t understand how they work, do you? It’s a mystery to you, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a mystery, it’s a secret. Because someone knows. A mystery is something no one knows.”