Twenty-second Entry

Topics: Congealed Waves. Everything Is Being Perfected. I Am a Microbe

Imagine yourself standing on the shore: the waves rise rhythmically, then, having risen, suddenly remain there – frozen, congealed. It seemed just as eerie and unnatural when our daily walk, prescribed by the Table of Hours, suddenly halted midway, and everyone was thrown into confusion. The last time something similar happened, according to our annals, was 119 years ago, when a meteorite dropped, smoking and whistling, right into the thick of the marching rows.

We walked as usual, in the manner of the warriors on Assyrian reliefs: a thousand heads, two fused, integral feet, two integral, swinging arms. At the end of the avenue, where the Accumulator Tower hummed sternly, a rectangle moved toward us. In front, behind, and on the sides – guards; in the middle – three people, the golden numbers already removed from their unifs. And everything was terrifyingly clear.

The huge clock atop the Tower was a face; leaning from the clouds, spitting down seconds, it waited indifferently. And then, exactly at six minutes past thirteen, something went wrong in the rectangle. It happened quite near me, and I saw every detail; I clearly remember the thin long neck and the network of blue veins on the temple, like rivers on the map of some tiny unknown world, and this unknown world was evidently a very young man. He must have noticed someone in our ranks; rising to his toes, he stretched his neck, and stopped. A click: one of the guards sent the blue spark of an electric whip across him, and he squealed thinly, like a puppy. Then – a series of distinct clicks, about every two seconds: a dick, and a squeal, a click, and a squeal.

We continued our rhythmic, Assyrian walk, and, looking at the graceful zigzags of the sparks, I thought: everything in human society is being continually perfected – and should be. What a hideous weapon was the ancient whip – and how beautiful…

But at this moment, like a nut slipping off a machine in full swing, a slender, pliant female figure broke from our ranks and with the cry “Enough! Don’t dare to…!” she threw herself into the midst of the rectangle. It was like that meteor, 119 years ago: the whole procession stopped dead, and our ranks were like the gray crests of waves congealed by a sudden frost.

For a moment I looked at her as a stranger, like everyone else. She was no longer a number – she was only a human being, she existed only as the metaphysical substance of an insult thrown in the face of the One State. But then one of her movements – turning, she swung her hips to the left – and all at once I felt: I know, I know this body, pliant as a whip! My eyes, my lips, my arms know it! At that moment I was completely certain of it.

Two of the guards stepped out to intercept her.

In a second, their trajectories will cross over that still limpid, mirrorlike point of the pavement – in a moment she will be seized… My heart gulped, stopped, and without reasoning – is it allowed, forbidden, rational, absurd? – I flung myself toward that point.

I sensed upon me thousands of terrified, wide-open eyes, but this merely fed the desperate, gay, exulting strength of the hairy-armed savage who broke out of me, and he ran still faster. Only two steps remained. She turned…

Before me was a trembling, freckled face, red eyebrows… It was not she, not I-330.

Wild burst of joy. I wanted to cry out something like “Right, hold her!” but I heard only a whisper. And on my shoulder – a heavy hand. I was held, I was being taken somewhere, I tried to explain to them… “But listen, but you must understand, I thought that…”

But how explain all of myself, all of my sickness, recorded in these pages? And I subsided and walked obediently… A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls downward, but on the way it whirls, catches at every familiar branch, fork, knot And I, too, was catching at every silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the blue spire of the Accumulator Tower piercing a cloud.

At that moment, when an impenetrable curtain was just about to cut me off from this whole, beautiful world, I saw nearby, swinging his pink ear-wings, gliding over the mirror-smooth pavement, a huge, familiar head. And a familiar, flattened voice: “It is my duty to inform you that Number D-503 is ill and incapable of controlling his emotions. And I am sure that he was carried away by natural indignation…”

“Yes, yes.” I seized at it. “I even cried ‘Hold her!’ ”

Behind my back: “You did not cry anything.”

“Yes, but I wanted to – I swear by the Benefactor, I did.”

For a second the gray, cold gimlet-eyes drilled through me. I don’t know whether he saw within me that this was (almost) the truth, or whether he had some secret purpose of his own in sparing me again for a while, but he wrote out a note and gave it to one of those who held me. And I was free again, or, to be more exact, was returned again to the regular, endless Assyrian ranks.

The rectangle, containing both the freckled face and the temple with the map of bluish veins, disappeared around the corner, forever. We walked – a single million-headed body, and within each of us – that humble joy which probably fills the lives of molecules, atoms, phagocytes. In the ancient world this was understood by the Christians, our only predecessors (however imperfect): humility is a virtue, and pride a vice; “We” is from God, and “I” from the devil.

And now I was marching in step with everyone – yet separated from them. I still trembled from the recent excitement, like a bridge after an ancient iron train rushed, clattering, across it. I felt myself. But only an eye with a speck of dust in it, an abscessed finger, an infected tooth feel themselves, are aware of their individuality; a healthy eye, finger, tooth are not felt – they seem nonexistent Is it not clear that individual consciousness is merely a sickness?

Perhaps I am no longer a phagocyte, busily and calmly devouring microbes (with bluish temples and freckles). Perhaps I am a microbe, and perhaps there are already thousands of them among us, still – like myself – pretending to be phagocytes…

What if today’s essentially unimportant incident… what if it is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a hail of thundering fiery rocks poured by infinity upon our glass paradise?

Twenty-third Entry

Topics: Flowers. The Dissolution of a Crystal. If Only

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never knew about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come only today?

Blissfully, drunkenly, I walked down the stairs to the number on duty, and all around me, wherever my eyes fell, thousand-year-old buds were bursting into bloom. Everything bloomed – armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark, shaggy eyes, the faceted columns of the banisters, a handkerchief someone dropped on the stairs, the table of the number on duty, and the delicately brown, speckled cheeks of U over the table. Everything was extraordinary, new, delicate, rosy, moist.

U took the pink coupon, and above her head, through the glass wall, the moon, pale blue, fragrant, swayed from an unseen branch. I pointed triumphantly at the moon and said, “The moon – you understand?”

U glanced at me, then at the number on the coupon, and I saw again that enchantingly modest, familiar movement of her hand, smoothing the folds of the unif between the angles of her knees.

“My dear, you don’t look normal, you look sick – for abnormality and sickness are the same thing. You are ruining yourself, but no one, no one will tell you that.”

That “no one” is, of course, equated with the number on the coupon: I-330. Dear, marvelous U! Of course you are right: I am imprudent, I am sick, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But isn’t blooming a sickness? Doesn’t it hurt when a bud splits open? And don’t you think that spermatozoa are the most terrible of microbes?

Back upstairs, in my room. In the wide-open calyx of the chair – I-330. I am on the floor, embracing her legs, my head in her lap. We do not speak. Silence, heartbeats… And I am a crystal, I dissolve in her. I feel with utmost clarity how the polished facets that delimit me in space are melting away, away – I vanish, dissolve in her lap, within her, I grow smaller and smaller and at the same time ever wider, ever larger, expanding into immensity. Because she is not she, but the universe. And for a moment I and this chair near the bed, suffused with joy, are one. And the magnificently smiling old woman at the gate of the Ancient House, and the wild jungle beyond the Green Wall, and some silver ruins on black ground, dozing like the old woman, and the slamming of a door somewhere, immeasurably far away – all this is in me, with me, listening to the beating of my pulse and rushing through the blessed second…

In absurd, confused, flooded words I try to tell her that I am a crystal, and therefore there is a door in me, and therefore I feel the happiness of the chair she sits in. But the words are so nonsensical that I stop, ashamed: I – and suddenly such…

“Darling, forgive me! I don’t know – I talk such nonsense, so foolishly…”

“And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.”

“Yes…” (It seems to me that she is right – how could she be wrong at this moment?)

“And for one foolish action – for what you did the other day during the walk – I love you still more, much more.”

“But why did you torment me, why didn’t you come, why did you send me your coupons and make me…”

“Perhaps I had to test you? Perhaps I must know that you will do whatever I wish – that you are altogether mine?”

“Yes, altogether!”

She took my face – all of me – in her hands and raised my head. “And what about your ‘duty of every honest number’? Eh?”

Sweet, sharp, white teeth; a smile. In the open calyx of the chair she is like a bee – a sting, and honey.

Yes, duties… Mentally I turn the pages of my latest entries: not a hint of a thought anywhere that, actually, I should…

I am silent. I smile ecstatically (and probably foolishly), look into her pupils, run with my eyes from one to the other, and in each of them I see myself: I, tiny, infinitesimal, am caught in these tiny rainbow prisons. And then again – bees – lips, the sweet pain of blooming…

In every number there is an invisible, quietly ticking metronome, and we know the time exactly to within, five minutes without looking at a clock. But now my metronome had stopped, I did not know how much time had passed. Anxiously, I drew out the badge with my watch from under the pillow.

Thanks to the Benefactor! We still have twenty minutes. But minutes, so ridiculously short, are running fast, and I must tell her so much – everything, all of me: about O’s letter, about that dreadful evening when I gave her a child; and also, for some reason, about my childhood – about the mathematician Plapa, about V-1, about my first time at the Day of Unanimity, when I cried bitterly because, on such a day, there turned out to be an inkspot on my unif.

I-330 raised her head, leaned on her elbow. At the corners of her lips, two long, sharp lines, and the dark angle of raised eyebrows: a cross.

“Perhaps, on that day…” She broke off, her brow darkening. She took my hand and pressed it hard. “Tell me, you will not forget me, you will remember me always?”

“Why do you speak like that? What do you mean? My darling!”

She was silent, and her eyes now looked past me, through me, far away. I suddenly heard the wind flapping huge wings against the glass (of course, this had gone on all the time, but I had not heard it until now), and for some reason I recalled the piercing birds over the top of the Green Wall.

She shook her head, as if to free herself of something. Again, for a second, she touched me with all of herself – as an aero touches the earth for a moment, springlike, before settling down.

“Well, give me my stockings now! Hurry!”

Her stockings, thrown on the table, rested on the open page of my manuscript (the 193rd). In my haste, I swept off the manuscript, the pages scattered, I would never be able to collect them in order again. And even if I did, there would be no real order; some gaps, some obstacles, some X’s would remain.

“I can’t go on this way,” I said. “You are here, next to me, and yet you seem to be behind an ancient, opaque wall. I hear a rustling, voices behind the wall, but cannot make out the words; I don’t know what is there. I cannot bear it. You are forever keeping something back, you’ve never told me where I was that time in the Ancient House, and what those corridors were, and why the doctor. Or, perhaps, this never really happened?”

I-330 put her hands on my shoulders, and slowly entered deep into my eyes. “You want to know everything?”

“Yes, I want to. I must.”

“And you won’t be afraid to follow me anywhere, to the very end – wherever I might lead you?”

“Anywhere!”

“Good. I promise you: after the holiday, if only… Oh, by the way, how is your Integral doing? I always forget to ask – how soon?”

“No, what do you mean, ‘if only? Again? ‘If only’ what?”

But she, already at the door: “You’ll see yourself…”

I am alone. All that remains of her is a faint fragrance, reminiscent of the sweet, dry, yellow pollen of some flowers from behind the Wall. And also – the little hooks of questions firmly stuck within me – like those used by the ancients in catching fish (Prehistoric Museum).

Why did she suddenly think of the Integral?