Twenty-sixth Entry

Topics: The World Exists. A Rash. 41° Centigrade

Morning. Through the ceiling, the sky – firm, round, ruddy-cheeked as ever. I think I would be less astonished if I had seen above me some extraordinary square sun; people in varicolored garments of animal skins; stone, untransparent walls, Does it mean, then, that the world – our world – still exists? Or is this merely by inertia? The generator is already switched off, but the gears still clatter, turning – two revolutions, three, and on the fourth they’ll stop…

Are you familiar with this strange condition? You wake at night, open your eyes to blackness, and suddenly you feel you’ve lost your way – and quickly, quickly you grope around you, seeking something familiar, solid – a wall, a lamp, a chair. This was exactly how I groped around me, ran through the pages of the One State Gazette – quick, quick. And then:

Yesterday we celebrated Unanimity Day, which everyone has long awaited with impatience. For the forty-eighth time, the Benefactor, who has demonstrated his steadfast wisdom on so many past occasions, was elected by a unanimous vote. The celebration was marred by a slight disturbance, caused by the enemies of happiness. These enemies have, naturally, forfeited the right to serve as bricks in the foundation of the One State – a foundation renewed by yesterday’s election. It is clear to everyone that taking account of their votes would be as absurd as considering the coughs of some sick persons in the audience as a part of a magnificent heroic symphony.

Oh, all-wise! Are we, after all, saved in spite of everything? Indeed, what objection can be raised to this most crystal clear of syllogisms?

And two lines further:

Today at twelve there will be a joint session of the Administrative Office, the Medical Office, and the Office of the Guardians. An important state action will take place within the next few days.

No, the walls are still intact. Here they are – I can feel them. And I no longer have that strange sensation that I am lost, that I am in some unknown place and do not know the way. And it’s no longer surprising that I see the blue sky, the round sun. And everyone – as usual – is going to work.

I walked along the avenue with especially firm, ringing steps, and it seemed to me that everybody else walked with the same assurance. But when I turned at a crossing, I saw that everybody shied off sideways from the corner building, gave it a wide berth – as if a pipe had burst there and cold water were gushing out, making it impossible to use the sidewalk.

Another five, ten steps, and I was also showered with cold water, shaken, thrown off the sidewalk… At the height of some two meters a rectangular sheet of paper was pasted on the wall, bearing an incomprehensible, venomously green inscription:

MEPHI

And beneath it, the S-shaped back, transparent wing-ears, quivering with anger, or excitement. His right hand raised, his left stretched helplessly back, like a hurt, broken wing, he was leaping up, trying to tear off the paper – and could not reach it, every time just short of touching it.

Each passerby was probably deterred by the same thought: If I come over, just I of all these others – won’t he think I’m guilty of something and therefore trying…

I confess to the same thought. But I recalled the many times when he was truly my Guardian Angel, the many times he saved me – and I boldly walked up to him, stretched my hand, and pulled off the sheet.

S turned, quickly bored his gimlets into me, to the very bottom, found something there. Then he raised his left eyebrow and winked with it at the wall where MEPHI had just hung. And flicked a corner of a smile at me, which seemed somehow astonishingly gay. But then, it was really nothing to wonder at. A physician will always prefer a rash and a forty-degree fever to the tormenting, slowly rising temperature of the incubation period: at least, the nature of the illness is clear. The MEPHI scattered on the walls today is the rash. I understood the smile.

Steps down to the underground, and underfoot, on the immaculate glass of the stairs – again the white sheet: MEPHI. And on the wall below, on a bench, on a mirror in the car (evidently pasted hurriedly, awry), everywhere the same white, frightening rash.

In the silence, the distinct hum of the wheels was like the noise of inflamed blood. Someone was touched on the shoulder; he started and dropped a roll of papers. And on my left, another – reading the same line in his newspaper over and over, the paper trembling faintly. I felt that everywhere – in the wheels, hands, newspapers, eyelashes – the pulse was beating faster and faster. And, perhaps, today, when I get there with I-330, the temperature will be thirty-nine, forty, forty-one degrees centigrade-marked on the thermometer by a black line…

At the dock – the same silence, humming like a distant, invisible propeller. The machines stand glowering silently. And only the cranes are gliding, scarce audibly, as if on tiptoe, bending down, grasping in their claws the pale-blue blocks of frozen a hand loading them into the tanks of the Integral: we are already preparing it for the test flight.

“Well, do you think we’ll finish loading in a week?” I ask the Second Builder. His face is like fine china, embellished with sweet pale blue and delicately rosy flowers (eyes, lips); but today they are somehow faded, washed away. We calculate aloud, but I break off in the middle of a word and stand there, gaping: high under the cupola, on the blue block just lifted by the crane – a scarcely visible white square, a pasted sheet of paper. And all of me shakes – could it be with laughter? Yes, I hear myself laughing (do you know the feeling when you hear your own laughter?).

“No, listen…” I say. “Imagine yourself in an ancient plane; the altimeter shows five thousand meters; the wing snaps, you plunge down like a tumbler pigeon, and on the way you calculate: ‘Tomorrow, from twelve to two… from two to six… at six – dinner…’ Isn’t that absurd? But that’s exactly what we are doing now!”

The little blue flowers stir, bulge. What if I were made of glass, and he could see that in some three or four hours…

Twenty-seventh Entry

Topics: None – Impossible

I am alone in endless corridors – the same ones, under the Ancient House. A mute, concrete sky. Water dripping somewhere on stone. Familiar, heavy, opaque door – and a muted hum behind it.

She said she would come out to me exactly at sixteen. But it is already five minutes past sixteen, ten, fifteen – no one.

For a second I am the old I, terrified that the door might open. Five more minutes, and if she does not come…

Water dripping somewhere on stone. No one. With anguished joy I feel – I’m saved. I slowly walk back along the corridor. The quivering dotted line of bulbs on the ceiling grows dimmer and dimmer…

Suddenly, a door clicks hastily behind me, the quick patter of feet, softly rebounding from the walls, the ceiling – and there she is – light, airy, somewhat breathless with running, breathing through her mouth.

“I knew you would be here, you’d come! I knew – you, you…”

The spears of her eyelashes spread open, they let me in – and… How describe what it does to me – this ancient, absurd, miraculous ritual, when her lips touch mine? What formula can express the storm that sweeps everything out of my soul but her? Yes, yes, my soul – laugh if you will.

Slowly, with an effort, she raises her lids – and her words come slowly, with an effort “No, enough… later. Let us go now.”

The door opens. Stairs – worn, old. And an in. tolerably motley noise, whistling, light…

Nearly twenty-four hours have passed since then, and everything has settled down to some extent within me. And yet it is extremely difficult to describe what happened, even approximately. It is as if a bomb had been exploded in my head and open mouths, wings, shouts, leaves, words, rocks-piled, side by side, one after the other…

I remember my first thought was: quick, rush back! It seemed clear to me: while I had waited in the corridor, they had managed somehow to blow up or destroy the Green Wall. And everything from out there had swept in and flooded our city, which had long ago been purged of the lower world.

I must have said something of the kind to I-330. She laughed. “Oh, no! We’ve simply come out beyond the Green Wall.”

I opened wide my eyes: face to face with me, in wide-awake reality, was that which hitherto had not been seen by any living man except diminished a thousandfold, muted and dimmed by the thick, cloudy glass of the Wall.

The sun… this was not our sun, evenly diffused over the mirror-smooth surface of our pavements.

These were living fragments, continually shifting spots, which dazed the eyes and made the head reel. And the trees, like candles – rising up into the sky itself; like spiders crouching on the earth with gnarled paws; like mute green fountains… And everything was crawling, stirring, rustling… Some shaggy little ball dashed out from underfoot. And I was frozen to the spot, I could not make a step, because under my feet was not a level surface – you understand – not a firm, level surface, but something revoltingly soft, yielding, springy, green, alive.

I was stunned by it all, I gasped, I gagged – perhaps this is the most accurate word. I stood, clutching at some swaying bough with both hands.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing! It’s only in the beginning, it will pass. Don’t be afraid!”

Next to I-330, against the green, dizzyingly shifting latticework, somebody’s finest profile, paper, thin… No, not somebody’s – I know him. I remember – it is the doctor. No, no, my mind is clear, I see everything. Now they are laughing; they have seized me by the arms and drag me forward. My feet get tangled, slip. Before us – moss, hillocks, screeching, cawing, twigs, tree trunks, wings, leaves, whistles…

Then suddenly the trees spread out, run apart. A bright green clearing. In the clearing – people… Or – I don’t know what to call them – perhaps, more precisely, beings.

And here comes the most difficult part of all, because this transcended every limit of probability. And now it was clear to me why I-330 had always stubbornly refused to speak about it: I should not have believed her anyway – not even her. Perhaps, tomorrow I will not believe even myself – even these notes.

In the clearing, around a bare, skull-like rock, there was a noisy crowd of three or four hundred… people – I must say “people” – it is difficult to call them anything else. Just as on the platforms in our Plaza one sees at first only familiar faces, so here I first saw only our gray-blue unifs. A second more, and there, among the unifs, clearly and simply – black, red, golden, bay, roan, and white people – they must have been people. All were without clothing and all were covered with short, glossy fur, like the fur that can be seen by anyone on the stuffed horse in the Prehistoric Museum. But the females had faces exactly like those of our women: delicately rosy and free of hair, as were also their breasts – large, firm, of splendid geometric form. The males had only parts of their faces hairless – like our ancestors.

All this was so incredible, so unexpected, that I stood calmly (yes, calmly!) and looked. It was the same as with a scale: you overload one side, and then, no matter how much more you add, the arrow won’t move.

Suddenly, I was alone. I-330 was no longer with me – I didn’t know where or how she had disappeared. Around me, only those beings, their furry bodies glowing like satin in the sun. I seized some-one’s hot, firm, raven shoulder. ‘For the Benefactor’s sake, tell me – where did she go? Why, just now, just a moment ago…”

Stern, shaggy eyebrows turned to me. “Sh-sh! Quiet!” And he nodded shaggily toward the center of the clearing, toward the yellow, skull-like stone. There, above the heads, above everyone, I saw her. The sun shone from behind her, directly into my eyes, and all of her stood out sharp, coal-black against the blue cloth of the sky – a charcoal silhouette etched on blue. Just overhead, some clouds floated by. And it seemed that not the clouds, but the stone, and she herself, and with her the crowd and the clearing were gliding as silently as a ship, and the earth itself, grown light, was floating underfoot…

“Brothers…” She spoke. “Brothers! You all know: there, in the city behind the Wall, they are building the Integral. And you know: the day has come when we shall break down the Wall – all walls – to let the green wind blow free from end to end – across the earth. But the Integral is meant to take these walls up there, into the heights, to thousands of other earths, whose fires will rustle to you tonight through the black leaves…”

Waves, foam, wind against the stone: “Down with the Integral! Down!”

“No, brothers, not down. But the Integral must be ours. On the day when it first rises into the sky, we shall be in it. Because the Builder of the Integral is with us. He has come out from behind the Wall, he has come here with me, to be among you. Long live the Builder!”

A moment, and I was somewhere above. Beneath me – heads, heads, heads, wide-open shouting mouths, arms flashing up and falling. It was extraordinary, intoxicating: I felt myself above all others. I was I, a separate entity, a world. I had ceased to be a component, as I had been, and become a unit.

And now – with a dented, crumpled, happy body, as happy as after a love embrace – I am below, right near the stone. Sun, voices from above, I-330 smiling. A golden-haired, satiny-golden woman, spreading the fragrance of grass. In her hands, a cup, apparently of wood. She takes a sip from it with scarlet lips and hands it to me, and greedily, with closed eyes, to quench the fire, I drink the sweet, stinging, cold, fiery sparks.

And then – my blood and the whole world – a thousand times faster. The light earth flies like down. And everything is light, and simple, and clear.

And now, I see the huge, familiar letters, MEPHI, on the stone, and for some reason this is right and necessary – it is the strong, simple thread that links everything together. I see a crude image – perhaps on the same stone: a winged youth with a transparent body and, where the heart should be, a dazzling, crimson-glowing coal. And again – I understand this coal… Or no: I feel it – just as, without hearing, I feel every word (she is speaking from above, from the stone). And I feel that everybody breathes together – and everybody will fly together somewhere, like the birds over the Wall that day…

From behind, from the densely breathing crowd of bodies – a loud voice: “But this is madness!”

And then it seems that I – yes, I believe it was I – jumped up on the stone. Sun, heads, a green serrated line against the blue, and I shout, “Yes, yes, madness! And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential – I know it.”

Next to me, I-330. Her smile – two dark lines: from the ends of her lips – up, at an angle. And the coal is now within me, and all this is instant, easy, just a bit painful, beautiful…

After that, only broken, separate fragments.

Slowly, just overhead – a bird. I see: it is alive, like me. Like a man it turns its head right, left, and black, round eyes drill into me…

Another fragment: a back, with shiny fur the color of old ivory. A dark insect with tiny, transparent wings crawls along the back, and the back twitches to drive it off, then twitches again…

Another fragment: the shadow of the leaves-interlaced, latticed. In the shadow people are lying and chewing something that resembles the legendary food of the ancients – a long yellow fruit and a piece of something dark. A woman thrusts it into my hand, and it is funny: I don’t know whether I can eat it.

Again – a crowd, heads, feet, hands, mouths. Faces flash momentarily and disappear, burst like bubbles. And for a moment – or did it merely seem to me? – transparent, flying wing-ears.

With all my strength I press the hand of I-330. She glances back. “What is it?”

“He is here… It seemed to me…”

“He? Who?”

“S… just a moment ago – in the crowd…”

The coal-black, thin eyebrows rise to the temples: sharp triangle, a smile. I do not understand why she is smiling; how can she smile?

“Don’t you see – don’t you see what it means if he or any of them is here?”

“Silly! Would it occur to anyone there, inside the Wall, that we are here? Try to remember-did you ever think that it was possible? They are hunting for us there – let them! You’re dreaming.”

She smiles lightly, gaily, and I smile. The earth-intoxicated, light, gay – floats…