The Symmetry Teacher Read Online Free PDF

the first moments. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, however. What did He see in Her? Perhaps this is what it’s like to peer into Fate? Perhaps this is what Fate looks like? Her garments were unprepossessing, too—the clothes of a woman who was indifferent to her appearance: comfortable, but no more. On her arm she carried a shopping bag. Long, ash-colored hair, tousled, as though it was rearing up. A slattern. That’s what a slattern looks like, I said to myself. I was fascinated. Those eyes! I couldn’t unfasten my gaze from hers. A wide forehead, pale thick brows, eyes that were more gray than blue (the photograph was black-and-white)—but large, luminous eyes, eyes that were somehow rectangular, and spaced enchantingly, at an improbable distance from either side of the bridge of her nose. Her cheekbones were also impossibly wide; but this you wouldn’t notice, so wide apart were the eyes. They almost looked out of different sides of her face, like a fish. A fish, I said to myself. A moth, a slattern, a fish, that’s what I said. But no one was as slender underneath her clothing as she was …
    “No. I can’t recount it. I don’t recall what I saw first, and what I only discerned afterward, in what order it happened … That’s very important, the order. The first thing I registered was the shocked expression on his face. Then there was perplexity about hers: it didn’t contain anything that would elicit such shock. Then her reflected face, more pallid and washed-out than his, but also surprised. Then his reflection, as though distorted from horror of itself—horror from witnessing its own shock. For a fraction of a second the photograph came to life and turned around, as if someone else entered or left the store at that moment, and the glass door swung open … But first he looked at her, and she looked at the window; then he looked at the window, and she looked at him.
    “The photograph is fixed in my memory, I see it before me now, as we speak. Oh, I studied it as I never studied anything before in my life. But perhaps there were altogether three photographs, like frames in a film. Or for a fleeting moment the photograph became stereoscopic, so that you seemed to see behind the backs of the people in it …
    “‘Don’t attach any meaning to it … Pure chance … Just a detail … Don’t believe anything … I shouldn’t have … I didn’t think you’d…’
    “His prattle grated on my ears and forced me at last to unfasten my gaze from this admittedly rather insignificant picture. But the madman was gone.
    “I thought I caught a glimpse of his back at the end of the park, though perhaps it was no longer him. I wanted to run after him, but for some reason I remained sitting. I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at the end of the park, hypnotized by his disappearance; but when the photograph dropped from my hands onto the ground, I came to. So there was a photograph! I bent over mechanically and picked it up … It wasn’t the same photograph. But I had caught a glimpse of this one, too, when he was rummaging through his briefcase: a cloud … View of the Sky Above Troy . Yes, the very picture that hangs in my room.
    “Does it not seem to you that the plot of the Iliad is somewhat strange? Even contrived? I understand that now it’s beyond discussion. The Odyssey , as the follow-up to the story, is more recognizable to us. There’s nothing more to do there but sail and sail. Waves … But Helen … The paeans to Helen through the centuries are far more real than she is. No, it wasn’t her indescribable, or, rather, never yet described, never yet depicted, beauty that thrilled and still thrills poets, but the very fact of her existence, the fact that she lived at all. There has never been any proof of this, except that she was the reason the Trojan War was waged. The war must be explained somehow, don’t you think? The war happened, but was Helen the cause? And was