Книга - We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin


Чтение в оригинале (Каро)Russian Classic Literature
Предлагаем вашему вниманию роман-антиутопию Евгения Замятина «Мы». Роман, написанный в 1920 году, известен читателям благодаря гротескному исполнению идеи социализма, элементам блестящей сатиры, цель которого – заставить людей задуматься о том, к чему ведет слепое поклонение идеологии.

Действие романа разворачивается приблизительно в тридцать втором веке и описывает общество жесткого тоталитарного контроля над личностью.





Yevgeny Zamyatin / Евгений Замятин

We / Мы





© КАРО, 2019





First Entry





I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:



The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words.

In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State:

Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One State.

This will be the first cargo to be carried by the Integral.

Long live the One State, long live the numbers, long live the Benefactor!


I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent – an asymptote – a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight line – the wisest of all lines.

I, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, or, to be more exact, what we think (precisely so – we, and let this We be the title of my record). But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? It will. I believe, I know it.

I write this, and my cheeks are burning. This must be similar to what a woman feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I, and at the same time, not I. And for many long months it will be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at the feet of the One State.

But I am ready, like every one, or almost every one, of us. I am ready.




Second Entry





Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and every minute you pass your tongue over them. The lips of all the women you see must be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This interferes to some extent with the flow of logical thought.

But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love – I am certain I can safely say, we love – only such a sterile, immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations – you see them even in the most familiar everyday objects.

Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down in time to unheard music Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.

And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial, and we, in our present life, are only consciously…

I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. I looked up: O-90, of course. In half a minute she’ll be here, for our daily walk.

Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten centimeters shorter than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the round, all of her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to meet every word I say. And also, that round, plump fold on her wrist, like a baby’s.

When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still humming at full swing within me, and I began, by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the formula I had just established, which encompassed everything – dance, machines, and all of us.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, marvelous.” O-90 smiled rosily at me. “It’s spring.”

Well, wouldn’t you know: spring… She talks about spring. Women… I fell silent.

Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weather, the afternoon personal hour is used for an additional walk. As always, the Music Plant played the “March of the One State” with all its trumpets. The numbers walked in even ranks, four abreast, ecstatically stepping in time to the music-hundreds, thousands of numbers, in pale blue unifs[1 - Derived apparently from the ancient “uniform.”], with golden badges on their breasts, bearing the State Number of each man and woman. And I – the four of us – but one of the innumerable waves in this mighty stream. On my left, O-90 (if this were being written by one of my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he probably would have described her by that funny word “mine”); on my right, two numbers I did not know, male and female.

Blessedly blue sky, tiny baby suns in every badge, faces unshadowed by the insanity of thoughts… Rays. Do you understand that? Everything made of some single, radiant, smiling substance. And the brass rhythms: “Ta-ta-ta-tam! Ta-ta-ta-tam!” Like brass stairs gleaming in the sun, and every step taking you higher and higher, into the dizzying blue…

And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for the first time in my life: the straight, immutable streets, the glittering glass of the pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony of the gray-blue ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before me, but I – yes, I – who had conquered the old God and the old life. It was I who had created all this. And I was like a tower, I dared not move an elbow lest walls, cupolas, machines tumble in fragments about me.

Then – a leap across the centuries, from + to –. I remembered (evidently an association by contrast) – I suddenly remembered a picture I had seen in a museum: one of their avenues, out of the twentieth century, dazzlingly motley, a teeming crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, birds… And they say this had really existed – could exist. It seemed so incredible, so preposterous that I could not contain myself and burst out laughing.

And immediately, there was an echo – laughter – on my right. I turned: a flash of white – extraordinarily white and sharp teeth, an unfamiliar female face.

“Forgive me,” she said, “but you looked at everything around you with such an inspired air, like some mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It seems to me you are sure that even I was created by you, and by no one else. I am very flattered…”

All this – without a smile; I would even say, with a certain deference (perhaps she knew that I am the Builder of the Integral). But in the eyes, or in the eyebrows – I could not tell – there was a certain strange, irritating X, which I could not capture, could not define in figures.

For some odd reason, I felt embarrassed and tried, in a rather stumbling manner, to explain my laughter to her logically. It was entirely clear, I said, that this contrast, this impassable abyss between the present and the past…

“But why impassable?” (What white teeth!) “A bridge can be thrown across an abyss. Just think: drums, battalions, ranks – all this has also existed in the past; and, consequently…”

“But of course!” I cried. (What an astonishing coincidence of ideas: she spoke almost my own words, the words I had written down before our walk.) “You understand, even ideas. And this is because nobody is ‘one,’ but ‘one of.’ We are so alike…”

She: “Are you sure?”

I saw her eyebrows raised to her temples at a sharp angle, like the pointed horns of an X, and again I was confused. I glanced right, left, and…

On my right – she, slender, sharp, stubbornly pliant, like a whip, I-330 (I could see her number now); on my left – O, altogether different, all curves, with that childish fold on her wrist; and at the other end of our row, a male number I did not know – strange, doubly bent somehow, like the letter S. All of us so different…

That one on the right, I-330, seemed to have intercepted my flustered glance, and with a sigh she said, “Yes… Alas!”

Actually, this “alas” was entirely appropriate. But again there was that something in her face, or in her voice… And with a sharpness unusual for me, I said, “No reason for ‘Alas.’ Science progresses, and it is obvious that, if not now, then in fifty or a hundred years…”

“Even everyone’s noses…”

“Yes,” I almost shouted, “noses. If there is any ground for envy, no matter what it is… If I have a button-nose and another…”

“Oh, your nose is ‘classical,’ as they used to say in olden times. But your hands… No, let us see, let us see your hands!”

I detest to have anyone look at my hands: all hairy, shaggy – a stupid atavism. I held out my hand and said, as indifferently as I could, “An ape’s hands.”

She glanced at my hands, then at my face. “A most interesting conjunction.” She weighed me with her eyes as on a scale, and the horns flicked again at the corners of her eyebrows.

“He is registered with me.” O-90’s lips opened rosily, with eager joy.

I wished she had kept silent – this was altogether out of place. Generally, this dear O… how shall I put it… her tongue is wrongly timed; the speed of the tongue should always be some seconds behind the speed of thought, but certainly not the other way around.

At the end of the avenue, the bell on the Accumulator Tower was loudly striking seventeen. The personal hour was over. I-330 was leaving with the S-shaped male number. His face somehow inspired respect, and now it seemed familiar. I must have met him somewhere, but where?

In parting, I-330 said with another of her X-smiles, “Come to auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.”

I shrugged. “If I am assigned to that auditorium…”

And she, with an odd certainty, “You will be.”

The woman affected me as unpleasantly as an irresolvable irrational member that has somehow slipped into an equation. And I was glad to remain for at least a few moments alone with dear O.

Hand in hand, we crossed four lines of avenues. At the corner she had to turn right, and I, left.

“I’d like so much to come to you today and let down the blinds. Today, right now…” O timidly raised her round, blue-crystal eyes to me.

How funny she is. What could I say to her? She had come to me only the day before, and she knew as well as I did that our next sexual day was the day after tomorrow. It was simply a case of her usual “words ahead of thought” – like the occasional (and sometimes damaging) premature supply of a spark to a motor.

Before we parted, I kissed her lovely blue eyes, unshadowed by a single cloud, two – no, let me be precise – three times.




Third Entry





I have just looked over what I had written yesterday, and I see that I did not express myself clearly enough. Of course, it is all entirely clear to any of us. But perhaps you, the unknown readers to whom the Integral will bring my notes, have reached only that page in the great book of civilization that our ancestors read some nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you do not know even about such elementary things as the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternity Norm, the Green Wall, and the Benefactor. It seems to me ridiculous yet very difficult to speak about all this. It is as if a writer of, say, the twentieth century had to explain in his novel the meaning of “coat,” or “apartment,” or “wife.” Yet, if his novel were to be translated for savages, how could he avoid explaining what a “coat” meant?

I am certain that a savage would look at the “coat” and wonder, “What is it for? It’s only a hindrance.” It seems to me that your response may be exactly the same when I tell you that none of us has been beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War.

But, my dear readers, a man must think, at least a little. It helps. After all, it is clear that the entire history of mankind, insofar as we know it, is the history of transition from nomadic to increasingly settled forms of existence. And does it not follow that the most settled form (ours) is at the same time the most perfect (ours)? People rushed about from one end of the earth to the other only in prehistoric times, when there were nations, wars, commerce, discoveries of all sorts of Americas. But who needs that now? What for?

I admit, the habit of such settled existence was not achieved easily, or all at once. During the Two Hundred Years’ War, when all the roads fell into ruin and were overgrown with grass, it must at first have seemed extremely inconvenient to live in cities cut off from one another by green jungles. But what of it? After man’s tail dropped off, it must have been quite difficult for him at first to learn to drive off flies without its aid. In the beginning he undoubtedly missed his tail. But now – can you imagine yourself with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself in the street naked, without a coat? (For you may still be trotting about in “coats.”) And so it is with me: I cannot imagine a city that is not dad in a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life that is not regulated by the figures of our Table.

The Table… At this very moment, from the wall in my room, its purple figures on a field of gold stare tenderly and sternly into my eyes. Involuntarily, my mind turns to what the ancients called an “icon,” and I long to compose poems or prayers (which are the same thing). Oh, why am I not a poet, to render fitting praise to the Table, the heart and pulse of the One State!

As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument to have come down to us from ancient days – “The Railway Guide.” But set it side by side with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same element – carbon – yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams! Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of “The Railway Guide”? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we – millions of us – get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for our walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor exercises, fall asleep…

I shall be entirely frank: even we have not yet found an absolute, precise solution to the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen, and from twenty-one to twenty-two, the single mighty organism breaks up into separate cells; these are the Personal Hours designated by the Table. In these hours you will see modestly lowered shades in the rooms of some; others will walk with measured tread along the avenue, as though climbing the brass stairs of the March; still others, like myself now, are at their desks. But I am confident – and you may call me an idealist and dreamer – I am confident that sooner or later we shall fit these Personal Hours as well into the general formula. Some day these 86,400 seconds will also be entered in the Table of Hours.

I have read and heard many incredible things about those times when people still lived in a free, i.e., unorganized, savage condition. But most incredible of all, it seems to me, is that the state authority of that time – no matter how rudimentary – could allow men to live without anything like our Table, without obligatory walks, without exact regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever they felt like it Some historians even say that in those times the street lights burned all night, and people walked and drove around in the streets at all hours of the night.

Try as I may, I cannot understand it. After all, no matter how limited their intelligence, they should have understood that such a way of life was truly mass murder – even if slow murder. The state (humaneness) forbade the killing of a single individual, but not the partial killing of millions day by day. To kill one individual, that is, to diminish the total sum of human lives by fifty years, was criminal. But to diminish the sum of human lives by fifty million years was not considered criminal. Isn’t that absurd? Today, any ten-year-old will solve this mathematical-moral problem in half a minute. They, with all their Kants taken together, could not solve it (because it never occurred to any of the Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, i.e., ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

And wasn’t it absurd that the state (it dared to call itself a state!) could leave sexual life without any semblance of control? As often and as much as anyone might wish… Totally unscientific, like animals. And blindly, like animals, they bore their young. Isn’t it ridiculous: to know agriculture, poultry-breeding, fish-breeding (we have exact information that they knew all this), yet fail to go on to the ultimate step of this logical ladder – is child-breeding; fail to establish such a thing as our Maternal and Paternal Norms.

It is so absurd, so unbelievable, that I am afraid, as I write this, that you, my unknown readers, will think me a malicious joker. I am afraid you may decide that I am merely trying to mock you, telling you utter nonsense with a straight face.

But, to begin with, I am incapable of jokes, for every joke contains a lie as an implicit function. Secondly, our One State Science asserts that this was how the ancients lived, and our State Science never errs. Besides, where would state logic have come from at a time when men were living in the condition of freedom – the condition of animals, apes, the herd? What could be expected of them, when even in our time the wild, apelike echo still occasionally rises from somewhere below, from some shaggy depth?

Fortunately, only on rare occasions. Fortunately, they are only breakdowns of minor parts which can easily be repaired without halting the eternal, grandiose movement of the entire Machine. And to expel the warped bolt, we have the skilled, heavy hand of the Benefactor and the experienced eyes of the Guardians.

And, by the way, I’ve just remembered. That number I saw yesterday, bent like an S – I think I’ve seen him coming out of the Office of the Guardians. Now I understand that instinctive feeling of respect I had for him, and the sense of awkwardness when the strange I-330 spoke before him… I must confess that this I-330…

The bell for bedtime: it is past twenty-two. Until tomorrow.




Fourth Entry





Until now, everything in life was clear to me (no wonder I seem to have a predilection for the very word “clear”). Yet today… I cannot understand it.

First: I was, indeed, assigned to auditorium 112, as she had told me. Although the probability was








(1500 being the number of auditoriums; 10,000,000, the number of numbers).

And, second… But let me tell it in order, as it happened.

The auditorium – an enormous, sun-drenched hemisphere of massive glass. Circular rows of nobly spherical, smooth-shaven heads. With a slightly palpitating heart I looked around me. I think I was searching for the sight of a rosy crescent – O’s sweet lips – over the blue waves of unifs. A flash of someone’s extraordinarily white, sharp teeth, like… No, but it wasn’t that. O was to come to me at twenty-one that evening. It was entirely natural for me to wish to see her there.

The bell rang. We stood up and sang the Hymn of the One State. And then, from the stage, the voice of the phono-lecturer, glittering with its golden loud-speakers and wit.

“Respected numbers! Our archeologists have recently dug up a certain twentieth-century book in which the ironic author tells the story of a savage and a barometer. The savage noticed that every time the barometer indicated ‘rain’ it actually rained. And since he wanted it to rain, he picked out exactly enough mercury from the column to leave it at ‘rain.’ ” (On the screen – a savage, dressed in feathers, picking out the mercury. Laughter.) “You are laughing. But does it not seem to you that the European of that period was even more ridiculous? Like the savage, the European wanted ‘rain’ – rain with a capital letter, algebraic rain. But all he did was stand before the barometer like a limp wet hen. The savage, at least, had more courage and energy and logic, if only primitive logic He had been able to discover that there was a connection between effect and cause. Picking out the mercury, he was able to take the first step on that great road along which…”

At this point (I repeat, I write these notes without concealing anything) – at this point I became as though impermeable to the vitalizing stream that flowed from the loud-speakers. I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I had come there for nothing (why “for nothing,” and how could I not have come, since I had been assigned there?). Everything seemed empty to me, nothing but mere husks. And when, by dint of a considerable effort, I managed to switch on my attention again, the phono-lecturer had already gone on to his main topic: our music, mathematical composition. (The mathematician as the cause, music as the effect.) He was describing the recently devised musicometer.

“Simply by turning this handle, any of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Yet think how much effort this had cost your forebears! They were able to create only by whipping themselves up to fits of ‘inspiration’ – an unknown form of epilepsy. And here you have a most amusing illustration of what they produced: Scriabin, the twentieth century. They called this black box” (a curtain parted on the stage, revealing their most ancient instrument) “a ‘grand,’ a ‘royal’ instrument, which only shows once more to what extent their entire music…”

And then I lost the thread again, perhaps because… Yes, I will be frank, because she, I-330, came out to the “royal” box. I suppose I was simply startled by her sudden appearance on the stage.

She wore the fantastic costume of the ancient epoch: a closely fitting black dress, which sharply emphasized the whiteness of her bare shoulders and breast, with that warm shadow, stirring with her breath, between… and the dazzling, almost angry teeth…

A smile – a bite – to us, below. Then she sat down and began to play. Something savage, spasmodic, variegated, like their whole life at that time – not a trace of rational mechanical method. And, of course, all those around me were right, they all laughed.

Except for a few… but why was it that I, too… I?

Yes, epilepsy, a sickness of the spirit, pain… Slow, sweet pain – a bite – and you want it still deeper, still more painful. Then, slowly, the sun. Not ours, not that bluish, crystal, even glow through glass bricks, no – a wild, rushing, scorching sun – and off with all your clothing, tear everything to shreds.

The number next to me glanced to the left, at me, and snorted. Somehow, a vivid memory remains: a tiny bubble of saliva blew out on his lips and burst. The bubble sobered me. I was myself again.

Like all the others, I now heard only senseless, hurried clattering. I laughed. There was a feeling of relief; everything was simple. The clever phono-lecturer had given us too vivid a picture of that primitive age. That was all.

With what enjoyment I listened afterward to our present music! (It was demonstrated at the end, for contrast.) The crystalline chromatic measures of converging and diverging infinite series and the synthesizing chords of Taylor and McLauren formulas; the full-toned, square, heavy tempos of “Pythagoras’ Trousers”; the sad melodies of attenuating vibrations; vivid beats alternating with Frauenhofer lines of pauses – like the spectroscopic analysis of planets… What grandeur! What imperishable logic! And how pathetic the capricious music of the ancients, governed by nothing but wild fantasies…

As usual, we walked out through the wide doors of the auditorium in orderly ranks, four abreast. The familiar, doubly bent figure flashed past; I bowed respectfully.

O was to come in an hour. I felt pleasantly and beneficially excited. At home I stepped hurriedly into the office, handed in my pink coupon, and received the certificate permitting me to lower the shades. This right is granted only on sexual days. At all other times we live behind our transparent walls that seem woven of gleaming air – we are always visible, always washed in light We have nothing to conceal from one another. Besides, this makes much easier the difficult and noble task of the Guardians. For who knows what might happen otherwise? Perhaps it was precisely those strange, opaque dwellings of the ancients that gave rise to their paltry cage psychology. “My (sic!) home is my castle.” What an idea!

At twenty-two I lowered the shades, and at the same moment O entered, slightly out of breath. She held up to me her pink lips and her pink coupon. I tore off the stub – and could not tear myself away from her pink mouth until the very last second – twenty-two-fifteen.

Afterward I showed her my “notes” and spoke (I think I spoke very well) about the beauty of the square, the cube, the straight line. She listened with such enchanting pink attention, and suddenly a tear dropped from the blue eyes, then a second, a third, right on the open page (page 7). The ink ran. Now I shall have to copy the page.

“Darling D, if only you – if…”

“If” what? If… Her old song again about a child? Or, perhaps, something new – about… about the other one? But this would… No, really, it would be too absurd.




Fifth Entry





Again it’s all wrong. Again I speak to you, my unknown reader, as though you… As though, let us say, you were my old friend R-13, the poet, the one with the Negroid lips – everybody knows him. But you are – on the moon, on Venus, Mars, Mercury? Who knows where you are, or who you are.

Now, think of a square, a living, beautiful square. And imagine that it must tell you about itself, about its life. You understand, a square would scarcely ever think of telling you that all its four angles are equal: this has become so natural, so ordinary to it that it’s simply no longer consciously aware of it. And so with me: I find myself continually in this square’s position. Take the pink coupons, for example, and all the rest that goes with them. To me, this is as natural as the equality of its four angles is to the square, but to you it may be more of a mystery than Newton’s binomial theorem.

Well. One of the ancient sages said a clever thing – accidentally, of course – “Love and Hunger rule the world.” Ergo: to conquer the world, man must conquer its rulers. Our forebears succeeded, at heavy cost, in conquering Hunger; I am speaking of the Great Two Hundred Years’ War – the war between the city and the village. The primitive peasants, prompted perhaps by religious prejudice, stubbornly clung to their “bread”[2 - This word has survived only as a poetic metaphor; the chemical composition of this substance is unknown to us.]. But in the year 85 before the founding of the One State, our present food, a petroleum product, was developed. True, only 0.2 of the earth’s population survived the war. But, cleansed of its millennial filth, how radiant the face of the earth has become! And those two tenths survived to taste the heights of bliss in the shining palace of the One State.

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness? And what sense would there be in the countless sacrifices of the Two Hundred Years’ War, if reasons for envy still remained in our life? Yet they did remain, for there were still “button” noses and “classical” ones (our conversation during the walk); there were still some whose love was sought by many, and those whose love was sought by none.

Naturally, having conquered Hunger (algebraically, by the sum total of external welfare), the One State launched its attack against the other ruler of the world – Love. And finally this elemental force was also subjugated, i.e., organized and reduced to mathematical order. About three hundred years ago, our historic Lex Sexualis was proclaimed: “Each number has a right to any other number, as to a sexual commodity.”

Since then it has been only a matter of technology. You are carefully examined in the laboratories of the Sexual Department; the exact content of sexual hormones in your blood is determined, and you are provided with an appropriate Table of sexual days. After that, you declare that on your sexual days you wish to use number so-and-so, and you receive your book of coupons (pink). And that is all.

Clearly, this leaves no possible reasons for envy; the denominator of the happiness fraction is reduced to zero, and the fraction is transformed into a magnificent infinity. And so what to the ancients was the source of innumerable stupid tragedies has been reduced to a harmonious, pleasant, and useful function of the organism, a function like sleep, physical labor, the consumption of food, defecation, and so on. Hence you see how the great power of logic purifies everything it touches. Oh, if only you, my dear readers, would come to know this divine power, if you, too, would learn to follow it to the end!

How strange… I have written today about the loftiest peaks of human history; I have breathed all this time the purest mountain air of thought Yet within me everything is somehow cloudly, cobwebby, shadowed by the cross of a strange, fourpawed X. Or is it my own shaggy paws? And all because they have been so long before my eyes? I dislike to talk about them, and I dislike them: they are a relic of a savage epoch. Can it be that somewhere within me there is really…

I wanted to cross out all this, because it is outside the outlined topics for this entry. Then I decided I would leave it. Let my notes, like the most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant vibrations of my brain: for it is precisely such vibrations that are sometimes the forewarning of…

But this is entirely absurd. This really should be stricken out: we have channeled all elemental forces – there can be no catastrophes.

And now all is entirely clear to me. The odd feeling within me is simply the result of that same square position I have described before. And the troubling X is not within me (it cannot be); it is simply my fear that some X may remain in you, my unknown readers. But I am confident you will not judge me too severely. I am confident you will understand that it is far more difficult for me to write than it has been for any other author in the history of mankind. Some wrote for their contemporaries; others for their descendants. But no one has ever written for ancestors, or for beings similar to his primitive, remote ancestors.




Sixth Entry





I repeat: I have made it my duty to write without concealing anything. Therefore, sad as it is, I must note here that even among us the process of the hardening, the crystallization of life has evidently not yet been completed; there are still some steps to be ascended before we reach the ideal. The ideal (clearly) is the condition where nothing happens any more. But now… Well, today’s One State Gazette announces that the day after tomorrow there will be a celebration of Justice at the Plaza of the Cube. This means that once again some number has disturbed the operation of the great State Machine; again something has happened that was unforeseen, unforecalculated.

Besides, something has happened to me as well. True, this was during the Personal Hour, that is, at a time especially set aside for unforeseen circumstances. Nevertheless…

At about the hour of sixteen (or, to be exact, ten to sixteen) I was at home. Suddenly the telephone rang. A female voice: “D-503?”

“Yes.”

“Are you free?”

“Yes.”

“This is 1, I-330.1 shall call for you in a moment – we’ll go to the Ancient House. Agreed?”

I-330… She irritates and repels me, she almost frightens me. But this is exactly why I said, “Yes.”

Five minutes later we were already in the aero. The blue majolica of the Maytime sky; the light sun in its own golden aero buzzing after us, neither falling behind nor overtaking us. And ahead of us – a cloud, white as a cataract, preposterous and puffed out like the cheeks of an ancient cupid, and somehow disturbing. Our front window is up. Wind, drying the lips. Involuntarily, you lick them all the time, and all the time you think of lips.

Then, in the distance, blurred green spots – out there, behind the Wall. A slight, quick sinking of the heart – down, down, down – as from a steep mountain, and we are at the Ancient House.

The whole strange, fragile, blind structure is completely enclosed in a glass shell. Otherwise, of course, it would have fallen apart a long time ago. At the glass door, an old woman, all wrinkled, especially her mouth – nothing but folds and pleats, the lips sunk inward, as if the mouth had grown together somehow. It seemed incredible that she would still be able to speak. And yet, she spoke.

“Well, darlings, so you’ve come to see my little house?” And the wrinkles beamed (they must have arranged themselves radially, creating the impression of “beaming”).

“Yes, Grandmother, I felt like seeing it again,” said I-330.

The wrinkles beamed. “What sunshine, eh? Well, well, now? You little pixy! I know, I know! All right, go in by yourselves, I’ll stay here, in the sun…”

Hm… My companion must be a frequent guest here. I had a strong desire to shake something off, something annoying: probably the same persistent visual image – the cloud on the smooth blue majolica.

As we ascended the broad, dark staircase, I-330 said, “I love her, that old woman.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps for her mouth. Or perhaps for no reason. Just like that.”

I shrugged. She went on, smiling faintly, or perhaps not smiling at all, “I feel terribly guilty. Obviously, there should be no love ‘just like that,’ but only ‘love because.’ All elemental phenomena should…”

“It’s clear…” I began, but immediately caught myself at the word and cast a stealthy glance at I-330: had she noticed it or not?

She was looking down somewhere; her eyes were lowered, like shades.

I thought of the evening hour, at about twenty-two. You walk along the avenue and there, among the bright, transparent cells – the dark ones, with lowered shades. And behind the shades… What was behind the shades within her? Why had she called me today, and what was all this for?

I opened a heavy, creaking, opaque door, and we stepped into a gloomy, disorderly place (they called it an “apartment”). The same strange “royal” musical instrument – and again the wild, disorganized, mad music, like the other time – a jumble of colors and forms. A white flat area above; dark blue walls; red, green, and orange bindings of ancient books; yellow bronze – chandeliers, a statue of Buddha; furniture built along lines convulsed in epilepsy, incapable of being fitted into an equation.

I could barely endure all that chaos. But my companion evidently had a stronger organism.

“This is my favorite…” and suddenly she seemed to catch herself. A bite-smile, white sharp teeth. “I mean, to be exact, the most absurd of all these ‘apartments.’ ”

“Or, to be even more exact,” I corrected her, “their states. Thousands of microscopic, eternally warring states, as ruthless as…”

“Of course, that’s clear…” she said, apparently with utmost seriousness.

We crossed a room with small children’s beds (the children at that time were also private property). Then more rooms, glimmering mirrors, somber wardrobes, intolerably gaudy sofas, a huge “fireplace,” a large mahogany bed. Our modern-beautiful, transparent, eternal – glass was there only in the pathetic, fragile little window squares.

“And then, imagine! Here they all loved ‘just like that,’ burning, suffering…” (Again the dropped shades of the eyes.) “What stupid, reckless waste of human energy – don’t you think?”

She seemed to speak somehow out of myself; she spoke my thoughts. But in her smile there was that constant, irritating X. Behind the shades, something was going on within her – I don’t know what – that made me lose my patience. I wanted to argue with her, to shout at her (yes, shout), but I had to agree – it was not possible to disagree.

She stopped before a mirror. At that moment I saw only her eyes. I thought: A human being is made as absurdly as these preposterous “apartments”; human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows in them – the eyes. As though guessing, she turned. “Well, here are my eyes. Well?” (Silently, of course.)

Before me, two eerily dark windows, and within, such a mysterious, alien life. I saw only flame-some fireplace of her own was blazing there – and shapes resembling…

This, of course was natural: I saw myself reflected in her eyes. But what I was feeling was unnatural and unlike me (it must have been the opressive effect of the surroundings). I felt definitely frightened. I felt trapped, imprisoned in that primitive cage, caught by the savage whirlwind of the ancient life.

“You know what,” said 1-380. “Step out for a moment to the next room.” Her voice came from there, from within, from behind the dark windows of her eyes, where the fireplace was blazing.

I went out and sat down. From a shelf on the wall, the snubnosed, asymmetrical physiognomy of some ancient poet (Pushkin, I think) smiled faintly right into my face. Why was I sitting there, meekly enduring that smile? Why all of this? Why was I there – why these ridiculous feelings? That irritating, repellent woman, her strange game…

A closet door was shut behind the wall, the rustle of silk. I barely restrained myself from going in and… I don’t remember exactly – I must have wanted to say very sharp words to her.

But she had already come out. She wore a short, old, vivid yellow dress, a black hat, black stockings. The dress was of light silk. I could see the stockings, very long, much higher than the knees. And the bare throat, and the shadow between…

“Look, you are clearly trying to be original, but don’t you…”

“Clearly,” she interrupted me, “to be original is to be in some way distinct from others. Hence, to be original is to violate equality. And that which in the language of the ancients was called ‘being banal’ is with us merely the fulfillment of our duty. Because…”

“Yes, yes! Precisely.” I could not restrain myself. “And there is no reason for you to… to…”

She went over to the statue of the snub-nosed poet and, drawing down the blinds over the wild flame of her eyes, blaring within her, behind her windows, she said a very sensible thing (this time, it seems to me, entirely in earnest, perhaps to mollify me). “Don’t you find it astonishing that once upon a time people tolerated such characters? And not only tolerated, but worshiped them? What a slavish spirit! Don’t you think?”

“It’s clear… I mean…” (That damned “It’s clear” again!)

“Oh, yes, I understand. But actually, these poets were masters far more powerful than their crowned kings. Why weren’t they isolated, exterminated? With us…”

’Yes, with us…” I began, and suddenly she burst out laughing. I could see that laughter with my eyes: the resonant sharp curve of it, as pliantly resistant as a whip.

I remember, I trembled all over. Just to seize her, and… I cannot recall what I wanted to do. But I had to do something, anything. Mechanically I opened my golden badge, glanced at the watch. Ten to seventeen.

“Don’t you think it’s time?” I said as politely as I could.

“And if I asked you to remain here with me?”

“Look, do you… do you know what you are saying? In ten minutes I must be in the auditorium…”

“… and all numbers must attend the prescribed courses in art and sciences,” she said in my voice. Then she raised the blinds, looked up; the fireplace blazed through the dark windows. “I know a doctor at the Medical Office, he is registered with me. If I ask him, he will give you a certificate that you were sick. Well?”

Now I understood. At last, I understood where that whole game of hers was leading.

“So that’s it! And do you know that, like any honest number, I must, in fact, immediately go to the Office of the Guardians and…”

“And not ‘in fact’?” – sharp smile-bite. “I am terribly curious – will you go to the Office, or won’t you?”

“Are you staying?” I put my hand on the doorknob. It was brass, and I heard my voice – it was also brass.

“One moment… May I?”

She went to the telephone, asked for some number – I was too upset to remember it – and cried out, “I shall wait for you in the Ancient House. Yes, yes, alone…”

I turned the cold brass knob.

’You will permit me to take the aero?”

“Yes, certainly! Of course…”

Outside, in the sunshine, at the entrance, the old woman was dozing like a vegetable. Again it was astonishing that her closegrown mouth opened and she spoke.

“And your… did she remain there by herself?”

“By herself.”

The old woman’s mouth grew together again. She shook her head. Evidently, even her failing brain understood the full absurdity and danger of the woman’s conduct.

Exactly at seventeen I was at the lecture. And it was only here that I suddenly realized I had said an untruth to the old woman: I-330 was not there by herself now. Perhaps it was this – that I had unwittingly lied to the old woman – that tormented me and interfered with my listening. Yes, she was not by herself: that was the trouble.

After half past twenty-one I had a free hour. I could go to the Office of the Guardians right there and then and turn in my report. But I felt extremely tired after that stupid incident And then – the legal time limit for reporting was two days. I would do it tomorrow; I still had twenty-four hours.




Seventh Entry





Night. Green, orange, blue. Red royal instrument. Orange-yellow dress. The bronze Buddha. Suddenly he raises his heavy bronze eyelids, and sap begins to flow from them, from Buddha. And sap from the yellow dress, and drops of sap trickling down the mirror, and from the large bed, and the children’s beds, and now I myself, flowing with sap – and some strange, sweet, mortal terror…

I woke: soft, bluish light, glimmer of glass walls, glass chairs and table. This calmed me; my heart stopped hammering. Sap, Buddha… what nonsense! Clearly I must be ill. I have never dreamed before. They say that with the ancients dreaming was a perfectly ordinary, normal occurrence. But of course, their whole life was a dreadful whirling carousel – green, orange, Buddhas, sap. We, however, know that dreams are a serious psychic disease. And I know that until this moment my brain has been a chronometrically exact gleaming mechanism without a single speck of dust. But now… Yes, precisely: I feel some alien body in my brain, like the finest eyelash in the eye. You do not feel your body, but that eye with the lash in it – you can’t forget it for a second…

The brisk crystal bell over my head: seven o’clock, time to get up. On the right and the left, through the glass walls, I see myself, my room, my clothes, my movements – repeated a thousand times over. This is bracing: you feel yourself a part of a great, powerful, single entity. And the precise beauty of it – not a single superfluous gesture, curve, or turn.

Yes, this Taylor was unquestionably the greatest genius of the ancients. True, his thought did not reach far enough to extend his method to all of life, to every step, to the twenty-four hours of every day. He was unable to integrate his system from one hour to twenty-four. Still, how could they write whole libraries of books about some Kant, yet scarcely notice Taylor, that prophet who was able to see ten centuries ahead?

Breakfast is over. The Hymn of the One State is sung in unison. In perfect rhythm, by fours, we walk to the elevators. The faint hum of motors, and quickly – down, down, down, with a slight sinking of the heart…

Then suddenly again that stupid dream – or some implicit function of the dream. Oh, yes, the other day – the descent in the aero. However, all that is over. Period. And it is good that I was so decisive and sharp with her.

In the car of the underground I sped to the place where the graceful body of the Integral, still motionless, not yet animated by fire, gleamed in the sun. Shutting my eyes, I dreamed in formulas. Once more I calculated in my mind the initial velocity needed to tear the Integral away from the earth. Each fraction of a second the mass of the Integral would change (expenditure of the explosive fuel). The equation was very complex, with transcendental values.

As through a dream – in that firm world of numbers – someone sat down, next to me, jostled me slightly, said, “Sorry.”

I opened my eyes a little. At first glance (association with the Integral), something rushing into space: a head – rushing because at either side of it stood out pink wing-ears. Then the curve at the heavy back of the head, the stooped shoulders – double-curved – the letter S…And through the glass walls of my algebraic world, again that eyelash – something unpleasant that I must do today.

“Oh, no, it’s nothing. Certainly.” I smiled at my neighbor, bowing to him. The number S-4711 glinted from his badge. So this was why I had associated him from the very first with the letter S: a visual impression, unrecorded by the conscious mind. His eyes glinted – two sharp little drills, revolving rapidly, boring deeper and deeper – in a moment they would reach the very bottom and see what I would not… even to myself…

That troubling eyelash suddenly became entirely clear to me. He was one of them, one of the Guardians, and it was simplest to tell him everything at once, without delay.

“You know, I was at the Ancient House yesterday…” My voice was strange, somehow flattened out I tried to clear my throat.

“Why, that’s excellent. It gives material for very instructive conclusions.”

“But, you see, I was not alone, I accompanied number I-330, and…”

’I-330? I am delighted for you. A very interesting, talented woman. She has many admirers.”

But then, perhaps, he too? That time during the walk… And he might even be registered for her?

No, it was impossible, unthinkable to talk to him about it; that was clear.

“Oh, yes, yes! Of course, of course! Very.” I smiled more and more broadly and foolishly, and I felt: This smile makes me look naked, stupid.

The little gimlets had reached the very bottom, then, whirling rapidly, slipped back into his eyes. With a double-edged smile, S nodded to me and slid away toward the exit.

I hid behind my newspaper – it seemed to me that everyone was staring at me – and instantly forgot about the eyelash, the gimlets, everything. The news I read was so upsetting that it drove all else out of my mind. There was but one short line:



“According to reliable sources, new traces have been discovered of the elusive organization which aims at liberation from the beneficent yoke of the State.”


“Liberation?” Amazing, the extent to which criminal instincts persist in human nature. I use the word “criminal” deliberately. Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as… well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man’s freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. And now, just as we have gotten rid of it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, no more than “just”), some wretched halfwits…

No, I cannot understand why I did not go to the Office of the Guardians yesterday, immediately. Today, after sixteen o’clock, I shall go without fail.

At sixteen-ten I came out, and immediately saw O on the corner – all pink with pleasure at the meeting. “She, now, has a simple, round brain.

How fortunate: she will understand and support me… But no, I needed no support, I had made a firm decision…

The March rang out harmoniously from the trumpets of the Music Plant – the same daily March. What ineffable delight in this daily repetition, its constancy, its mirror clarity!

She seized my hand. “Let’s walk.” The round blue eyes wide open to me – blue windows – and I could step inside without stumbling against anything; nothing there – that is, nothing extraneous, unnecessary.

“No, no walk today. I must…” I told her where I had to go. To my astonishment, the rosy circle of her lips compressed itself into a crescent, its horns down, as if she had tasted something sour. I exploded.

“You female numbers seem to be incurably riddled with prejudices. You are totally incapable of thinking abstractly. You will pardon me, but it is plain stupidity.”

“You are going to the spies – ugh! And I have brought you a spray of lilies of the valley from the Botanical Museum…”

“Why this ‘and I’ – why the ‘and’? Just like a woman.” Angrily (I confess) I snatched her lilies of the valley. “All right, here they are, your lilies of the valley! Well? Smell them – it is pleasant, yes? Then why can’t you follow just this much logic? Lilies of the valley smell good. Very well. But you cannot speak of smell itself, of the concept ‘smell’ as either good or bad. You cannot, can you? There is the fragrance of lilies of the valley – and there is the vile stench of henbane: both are smells. There were spies in the ancient state – and there are spies in ours… yes, spies. I am not afraid of words. But it is clear that those spies were henbane, and ours are lilies of the valley. Yes, lilies of the valley!”

The pink crescent trembled. I realize now that it only seemed to me – but at that moment I was sure she would burst out laughing. And I shouted still more loudly, “Yes, lilies of the valley. And there is nothing funny about it, nothing at all.”

The smooth round spheres of heads floated by and turned to look. O took me gently by the arm. “You are so strange today… You are not ill?”

The dream – yellow – Buddha… It instantly became clear to me that I must go to the Medical Office.

“You are right, I’m ill,” I cried happily (an incomprehensible contradiction – there was nothing to be happy about).

“Then you must see a doctor at once. You understand yourself – it is your duty to be well. It would be ridiculous for me to try to prove it to you.”

“My dear O, of course you are right. Absolutely right!”

I did not go to the Office of the Guardians. It could not be helped, I had to go to the Medical Office; they kept me there until seventeen.

And in the evening (it was all the same now – in the evening the Office of the Guardians was closed) O came to me. The shades were not lowered. We were solving problems from an ancient mathematics textbook: it is very calming and helps to clear the mind. O-90 sat over the exercise book, her head bent to her left shoulder,’ her tongue diligently pushing out her left cheek. This was so childlike, so enchanting. And within me everything was pleasant, clear, and simple.

She left. I was alone. I took two deep breaths – this is very beneficial before bedtime. Then suddenly, an unscheduled smell, and again something disturbing… Soon I found it: a spray of lilies of the valley tucked into my bed. Immediately, everything swirled up, rose from the bottom. No, she was simply tactless to leave it there. Very well, I did not go! But it was not my fault that I was sick.




Eighth Entry





How long ago it was – during my school years – when I first encountered V-l. A vivid memory, as though cut out of time: the brightly lit spherical hall, hundreds of round boys’ heads, and Plapa, our mathematics teacher. We nicknamed him Plapa. He was badly worn out, coming apart, and when the monitor plugged him in, the loudspeakers would always start with “Pla-pla-pla-tsh-sh sh,” and only then go on to the day’s lesson. One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, “I don’t want V”!! Take V-1 out of me!” This irrational number had grown into me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me – it was impossible to conceive, to render harmless, because it was outside ratio.

And now again V-1. I’ve just glanced through my notes, and it is clear to me: I have been dodging, lying to myself – merely to avoid seeing the V-1 – It’s nonsense that I was sick, and all the rest of it. I could have gone there. A week ago, I am sure, I would have gone without a moment’s hesitation. But now? Why?

Today, too. Exactly at sixteen-ten I stood before the sparkling glass wall. Above me, the golden, sunny, pure gleam of the letters on the sign over the Office. Inside, through the glass, I saw the long line of bluish unifs. Faces glowing like icon lamps in an ancient church: they had come to perform a great deed, to surrender upon the altar of the One State their loved ones, their friends, themselves. And I – I longed to join them, to be with them. And could not: my feet were welded deep into the glass slabs of the pavement, and I stood staring dully, incapable of moving from the spot.

“Ah, our mathematician! Dreaming?”

I started. Black eyes, lacquered with laughter; thick, Negroid lips. The poet R-13, my old friend – and with him, pink O.

I turned angrily. If they had not intruded, I think I finally would have torn the V-1 out of myself with the flesh, and entered the Office.

“Not dreaming. Admiring, if you wish!” I answered sharply.

“Certainly, certainly! By rights, my good friend, you should not be a mathematician; you ought to be a poet! Yes! Really, why not transfer to us poets, eh? How would you like that? I can arrange it in a moment, eh?”

R-13 speaks in a rush of words; they spurt out in a torrent and spray comes flying from his thick lips. Every “p” is a fountain; “poets” – a fountain.

“I have served and will continue to serve knowledge,” I frowned. I neither like nor understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.

“Oh, knowledge! This knowledge of yours is only cowardice. Don’t argue, it’s true. You’re simply trying to enclose infinity behind a wall, and you are terrified to glance outside the wall. Yes! Just try and take a look, and you will shut your eyes. Yes!”

“Walls are the foundation of all human…” I began.

R spurted at me like a fountain. O laughed roundly, rosily. I waved them off – laugh if you please, it doesn’t matter to me. I had other things to think about I had to do something to expunge, to drown out that damned V-1.

“Why not come up to my room,” I suggested. “We can do some mathematical problems.” I thought of that quiet hour last evening – perhaps it would be quiet today as well.

O glanced at R-13, then at me with clear, round eyes. Her cheeks flushed faintly with the delicate, exciting hue of our coupons.

“But today I… Today I am assigned to him,” she nodded at R, “and in the evening he is busy… So that…”

R’s wet, lacquered lips mumbled good-humoredly “Oh, half an hour will be enough for us. Right, O? I don’t care for your problems, let’s go up to my place for a while.”

I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or rather, with that new, foreign being who merely by some odd chance had my number – D-503. And I went with them to R’s place. True, he is not precise, not rhythmical, he has a kind of inside-out, mocking logic; nevertheless, we are friends. Three years ago we had chosen together the charming, rosy O. This bound us even more firmly than our school years.

Then, up in R’s room. Everything would seem to be exactly the same as mine: the Table, the glass chairs, the closet, the bed. But the moment R entered, he moved one chair, another – and all planes became displaced, everything slipped out of the established proportions, became non-Euclidean. R is the same as ever. In Taylor and in mathematics he was always at the bottom of the class.

We recalled old Plapa, the little notes of thanks we boys would paste all over his glass legs (we were very fond of him). We reminisced about our law instructor.[3 - Naturally, his subject was not “Religious Law,” or “God’s Law,” as the ancients called it, but the law of the One State.] This instructor had an extraordinarily powerful voice; it was as though blasts of violent wind blew from the loud-speaker – and we children yelled the texts after him in deafening chorus. We also recalled how the unruly R-13 once stuffed his speaker with chewed-up paper, and every text came with a shot of a spitball. R was punished, of course; what he had done was bad, of course, but now we laughed heartily – our whole triangle – and I confess, I did too.

“What if he had been alive, like the ancient teachers, eh? Wouldn’t that have been…” – a spray of words from the thick lips.

Sunlight – through the ceiling, the walls; sun – from above, from the sides, reflected from below. O sat on R’s lap, and tiny drops of sunlight gleamed in her blue eyes. I felt warmed, somehow, restored. The V-1 died down, did not stir…

“And how is your Integral? We shall soon be setting off to educate the inhabitants of other planets, eh? You’d better rush it, or else we poets will turn out so much material that even your Integral will not be able to lift it. Every day from eight to eleven…” R shook his head, scratched it The back of his head is like a square little valise, attached from behind (I recalled the ancient painting, “In the Carriage”).

“Are you writing for the Integral, too?” I was interested. “What about? Today, for example?”

“Today, about nothing. I was busy with something else…” His ‘b’s spurted out at me.

“What?”

R made a grimace. “What, what! Well, if you wish, a court sentence. I versified a sentence. An idiot, one of our poets, too… For two years he sat next to me, and everything seemed all right Then suddenly, how do you do! ‘I am a genius,’ he says, ‘a genius, above the law.’ And scribbled such a mess… Eh! Better not speak about it…”

The thick lips hung loosely, the lacquer vanished from his eyes. R-13 jumped up, turned, and stared somewhere through the wall. I looked at his tightly locked little valise, thinking, What is he turning over there, in that little box of his?

A moment of awkward, asymmetrical silence. It was unclear to me what the trouble was, but something was wrong.

“Fortunately, the antediluvian ages of all those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskys, or whatever you call them, are gone,” I said, deliberately loudly.

R turned his face to me. The words still rushed out of him like spray, but it seemed to me that the merry shine was no longer in his eyes.

’Yes, my dearest mathematician, fortunately, fortunately, fortunately! We are the happiest arithmetical mean… As you mathematicians say – integration from zero to infinity, from a cretin to Shakespeare… yes!”

I do not know why – it seemed completely irrelevant – but I recalled the other one, her tone; the finest thread seemed to extend from her to R. (What was it?) Again the V-1 began to stir. I opened my badge – it was twenty-five minutes to seventeen. They had forty-five minutes left for their pink coupon.

“Well, I must go…” I kissed O, shook hands with R, and went out to the elevator.

In the street, when I had already crossed to the other side, I glanced back: in the bright, sun-permeated glass hulk of the building squares of bluish-gray, opaque drawn shades could be seen here and there – squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square; he had already drawn the blind.

Dear O… Dear R… In him there is also (I don’t know why “also,” but let my hand write as it will) – in him there is also something not entirely clear to me. And yet, he, I, and O – we are a triangle, perhaps not equilateral, but a triangle nonetheless. To put it in the language of our ancestors (perhaps, my planetary readers, this language is more comprehensible to you), we are a family. And it is so good occasionally, if only briefly, to relax, to rest, to enclose yourself in a simple, strong triangle from all that…




Ninth Entry





A bright, solemn day. On such days you forget your weaknesses, imprecisions, ailments, and everything is crystal, immutable, eternal – like our glass.

The Cube Plaza. Sixty-six great concentric circles of stands. Sixty-six rows of quiet luminous faces, eyes reflecting the glow of the sky, or perhaps the glow of the One State. Blood-red flowers – the women’s lips. Tender garlands of childish faces in the front rows, near the center of action. Absorbed, stern, Gothic silence.

According to the descriptions that have come down to us, something similar was experienced by the ancients during their “religious services.” But they worshiped their own irrational, unknown God; we serve our rational and precisely known one. Their God gave them nothing except eternal, tormenting searching; their God had not been able to think of anything more sensible than offering himself as sacrifice for some incomprehensible reason. We, on the other hand, offer a sacrifice to our God, the One State – a calm, reasoned, sensible sacrifice. Yes, this was our solemn liturgy to the One State, a remembrance of the awesome time of trial, of the Two Hundred Years’ War, a grandiose celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual.

The one. He stood on the steps of the sun-filled Cube. A white – no, not even white, already colorless – face: a glass face, glass lips. And only the eyes – black, greedy, engulfing holes. And the dread world from which he was but minutes away. The golden badge with his number had already been removed. His arms were bound with a purple ribbon – an ancient custom. (It evidently dates back to olden times, before such things were done in the name of the One State; in those days, the condemned understandably felt that they had the right to resist, and so their hands were usually bound in chains.)

And all the way above, upon the Cube, near the Machine – the motionless figure, as if cast in metal, of Him whom we call the Benefactor. His face could not be seen in detail from below; all you could tell was that it was defined in square, austere, majestic contours. But the hands… It sometimes happens in photographs that the hands, placed in the foreground too near the camera, come out huge; they hold the eye and shut out all the rest So with these heavy hands, still calmly reposing on the knees. And it was clear – they were stone, and the knees were barely able to support their weight.

Then suddenly one of those huge hands slowly rose – a slow, cast-iron movement. And from the stands, obeying the raised hand, a number approached the Cube. He was one of the State Poets, whose happy lot it was to crown the celebration with his verse. Divine, brass iambics thundered over the stands – about the madman with glass eyes, who stood there on the steps, awaiting the logical results of his mad ravings.

A blazing fire. In the iambics buildings swayed, went up in jets of liquid gold, collapsed. Fresh green trees withered, shriveled, sap dripping out-nothing remaining but the black crosses of their skeletons. But now Prometheus (meaning us) appeared.

“He harnessed fire in the machine, in steel,
And bound chaos in the chains of Law.”

And everything was new, everything was steel – a steel sun, steel trees, steel men. But suddenly a madman “unchained the fire” and everything would perish again…

Unfortunately, I have a poor memory for verses, but I remember one thing: it would have been impossible to choose more beautiful, more instructive images.

Again the slow, heavy gesture, and a second poet appeared on the steps of the Cube. I even rose a little from my seat: it could not be! No, those were his thick lips, it was he… Why hadn’t he told me he was to have this high… His lips trembled, they were gray. I understood: to appear before the Benefactor, before the entire host of Guardians… Yet-to be so nervous…

Sharp, quick trochees – like blows of an ax. About a heinous crime, about sacrilegious verses which dared to call the Benefactor… no, my hand refuses to repeat it.

R-13 sank into his seat, pale, looking at no one (I would not have expected him to be so shy). For the smallest fraction of a second I had a glimpse of someone’s face – a dark, sharp, pointed triangle-flashing near him, then vanishing at once. My eyes, thousands of eyes, turned up to the Machine. The third castiron gesture of the nonhuman hand. And the transgressor, swayed by an unseen wind, walked slowly up one stair, another, and now – the last step in his life, and he is on his last bed, face to the sky, head thrown back.

The Benefactor, heavy, stony as fate, walked around the Machine, placed His huge hand on the lever… Not a sound, not a breath – all eyes were on that hand. What a fiery gust of exaltation one must feel to be the instrument, the resultant of a hundred thousand wills! What a great destiny!

An infinite second. The hand moved down, switching on the current A flash of the intolerably dazzling blade of the ray, sharp as a shiver; faint crackling of the tubes in the Machine. The prone body enveloped in a light, glowing mist – and melting, melting before our eyes, dissolving with appalling speed. Then nothing – only a small puddle of chemically pure water, which but a moment ago had pulsed redly, wildly in the heart…

All this was elementary and known to everyone: yes, dissociation of matter; yes, splitting of the atoms of the human body. And yet each tune it was a miracle – a token of the superhuman power of the Benefactor.

Above us, facing Him, the flushed faces of ten female numbers, lips parted with excitement, flowers swaying in the wind.[4 - From the Botanical Museum, of course. Personally, I see nothing beautiful in flowers, or in anything belonging to the primitive world long exiled beyond the Green Wall. Only the rational and useful is beautiful: machines, boots, formulas, food, and so on.]

According to the old custom, ten women garlanded with flowers the Benefactor’s unif, still wet with spray. With the majestic step of a high priest, He slowly descended and slowly walked between the stands. And in His wake, the delicate white branches of female hands raised high, and a million-voiced storm of cheers, shouted in unison. Then cheers in honor of the host of Guardians, invisibly present somewhere here, within our ranks. Who knows, perhaps it was precisely these Guardians who had been foreseen by the imagination of ancient man when he created his dread and gentle “archangels” assigned to each man from his birth.

Yes, there was something of the old religions, something purifying like a storm, in that solemn ceremony. You who will read this – are you familiar with such moments? I pity you if you are not…




Tenth Entry





Yesterday was to me like the paper through which chemists filter their solutions: all suspended particles, all that is superfluous remains on this paper. And this morning I went downstairs freshly distilled, transparent.

Downstairs in the vestibule, the controller sat at her table, glancing at the watch and writing down the numbers of those who entered. Her name is U… but I had better not mention her number, lest I say something unflattering about her. Although, essentially, she is quite a respectable middle-aged woman. The only thing I dislike about her is that her cheeks sag like the gills of a fish (but why should that disturb me?).

Her pen scraped, and I saw myself on the page – D-503, and next to me an inkblot.

I was just about to draw her attention to it when she raised her head and dripped an inky little smile at me. “There is a letter for you. Yes. You will get it, my dear, yes, yes, you will get it.”

I know that the letter, which she had read, still had to pass the Office of the Guardians (I believe there is no need to explain to you this natural procedure), and would reach me not later than twelve. But I was disturbed by that little smile; the ink drop muddied my transparent solution. So much, in fact, that later, at the Integral construction site, I could not concentrate and even made a mistake in my calculations, which had never happened to me before.

At twelve, again the pinkish-brown gills, and finally the letter was in my hands. I don’t know why I did not read it at once, but slipped it into my pocket and hurried to my room. I opened it, ran through it, and sat down… It was an official notification that number I-330 had registered for me and that I was to be at her room today at twenty-one. The address was given below.

No! After everything that had happened, after I had so unequivocally shown my feelings toward her! Besides, she did not even know whether I had gone to the Office of the Guardians. After all, she had no way of learning that I had been sick – well, that I generally could not… And despite all this…

A dynamo whirled, hummed in my head. Buddha, yellow silk, lilies of the valley, a rosy crescent… Oh, yes, and this too: O was to visit me today. Ought I to show her the notice concerning I-330? I didn’t know. She would not believe (indeed, how could she?) that I’ve had nothing to do with it, that I was entirely… And I was sure – there would be a difficult, senseless, absolutely illogical conversation… No, only not that Let everything be resolved automatically: I would simply send her a copy of the notice. I hurriedly stuffed the notice into my pocket – and suddenly saw this dreadful, apelike hand of mine. I recalled how I-330 had taken my hand that time, during the walk, and looked at it. Did she really…

And then it was a quarter to twenty-one. A white night. Everything seemed made of greenish glass. But a very different glass from ours – fragile, unreal, a thin glass shell; and under it something whirling, rushing, humming… And I would not have been astonished if the cupolas of the auditoriums had risen up in slow, round clouds of smoke, and the elderly moon smiled inkily – like the woman at the table in the morning, and all the shades dropped suddenly in all the houses, and behind the shades…

A strange sensation: I felt as though my ribs were iron rods, constricting, definitely constricting my heart – there was not room enough for it. I stood before the glass door with the golden figures: I-330. She was sitting with her back to me, at the table, writing something. I entered.

“Here…” I held out the pink coupon. “I was notified today, and so I came.”

“How prompt you are! One moment, may I? Sit down, I’ll just finish.”

Again her eyes turned down to the letter – and what was going on within her, behind those lowered shades? What would she say? What was I to do a minute later? How could I find out, how calculate it, when all of her was – from there, from the savage, ancient land of dreams?

I looked at her silently. My ribs were iron rods; I could not breathe… When she spoke, her face was like a rapid, sparkling wheel – you could not see the individual spokes. But now the wheel was motionless. And I saw a strange combination: dark eyebrows raised high at the temples – a mocking, sharp triangle. And yet another, pointing upward – the two deep lines from the corners of her mouth to the nose. And these two triangles somehow contradicted one another, stamped the entire face with an unpleasant, irritating X, like a slanting cross. A face marked with a cross.

The wheel began to turn, the spokes ran together…

“So you did not go to the Office of the Guardians?”

“I did not… could not – I was sick.”

“Certainly. I thought so. Something had to prevent you – no matter what.” (Sharp teeth, smile.) “But now you are in my hands. You remember – ‘Every number who has failed to report to the Office of the Guardians within forty-eight hours, is considered…’ ”

My heart thumped so violently that the rods bent. Caught stupidly, like a boy. And stupidly I kept silent. And I felt: I’m trapped, I cannot move a hand or a foot.

She stood up and stretched lazily. Then she pressed a button, and the shades dropped, crackling lightly. I was cut off from the world, alone with her.

I-330 was somewhere behind me, near the closet. Her unif rustled, fell. I listened, all of me listened. And I remembered… no, it flashed upon me within one hundredth of a second…

I had had occasion recently to calculate the curve for a street membrane of a new type (now these membranes, gracefully camouflaged, were installed on every street, recording all conversations for the Office of the Guardians). And I remembered the rosy, concave, quivering film, the strange creature consisting of a single organ – an ear. I was such a membrane at this moment.

A click of the fastening at the collar, on the breast still lower. The glass silk rustled down the shoulders, knees, dropped to the floor. I heard, more clearly than I could see, one foot step out of the bluish-gray silk pile, the other…

The tautly stretched membrane quivered and recorded silence. No: sharp blows of a hammer against the iron rods, with endless pauses. And I heard – I saw her behind me, thinking for a second.

And now – the closet doors, the click of an opening lid – and again silk, silk…

“Well, if you please.”

I turned. She was in a light, saffron-yellow dress of the ancient model. This was a thousand times more cruel than if she had worn nothing. Two pointed tips through the filmy silk, glowing pink-two embers through the ash. Two delicately rounded knees…

She sat in a low armchair. On the rectangular table before her, a bottle with something poi-sonously green, two tiny glasses on stems. At the corner of her lips a thread of smoke – that ancient smoking substance in the finest paper tube (I forget what it was called).

The membrane still quivered. The hammer pounded inside me against the red-hot iron rods. I clearly heard each blow, and… and suddenly: What if she heard it too?

But she puffed calmly, glancing at me calmly, and carelessly shook off the ash – on my pink coupon.

As coolly as I could, I asked, “Now, listen, if that’s the case, why did you register for me? And why did you compel me to come here?”

It was as if she did not hear. She poured the liquid from the bottle into her glass, sipped it.

“Delicious liqueur. Would you like some?”

It was only now that I understood: alcohol. Yesterday’s scene flashed like a stroke of lightning: the Benefactor’s stony hand, the blinding ray. But on the Cube above – this body, prostrate, with the head thrown back. I shuddered.

“Listen,” I said. “You know that everyone who poisons himself with nicotine, and especially alcohol, is ruthlessly destroyed by the One State…”

Dark eyebrows rose high to the temples, a sharp mocking triangle. “Quick destruction of a few is more sensible than giving many the opportunity to ruin themselves? And then, degeneration, and so on. Right – to the point of indecency.”

“Yes… to the point of indecency.”

“And if this little company of naked, bald truths were to be let out in the street… No, just imagine… Well, take the most constant admirer of mine – oh, but you know him-… Imagine that he has discarded all the falsehood of clothes and stood among the people in his true shape… Oh!”

She laughed. But I could clearly see her lower, sorrowful triangle – the two deep lines from the corners of her mouth to her nose. And for some reason these lines revealed it to me: that stooping, wing-eared, doubly curved… he embraced her – as she was now… He…

But I am trying to convey the feelings – the abnormal feelings – I had at that moment Now, as I write this, I am perfectly aware that all of this is as it should be. Like every honest number, he has an equal right to joy, and it would be unjust… Oh, well, but this is clear.

I-330 laughed very strangely and very long. Then she looked closely at me – into me. “But the main thing is that I am completely at ease with you. You are such a dear – oh, I am sure of it – you will never think of going to the Office and reporting that I drink liqueur, that I smoke. You will be sick, or you will be busy, or whatever. I am even sure that in a moment you will drink this marvelous poison with me…”

That brazen, mocking tone. I definitely felt: now I hate her again. But why the “now”? I have hated her all the time.

She tilted the whole glassful of green poison into her mouth, stood up, and, glowing pink through the transparent saffron, took several steps… and stopped behind my chair.

Suddenly, an arm around my neck, lips into lips – no, somewhere still deeper, still more terrifying. I swear, this took me completely by surprise, and perhaps that was the only reason why… After all, I could not – now I realize it clearly – I myself could not have wanted what happened after that.

Intolerably sweet lips (I suppose it must have been the taste of the “liqueur”) – and a mouthful of fiery poison flowed into me – then more, and more… I broke away from the earth and, like a separate planet, whirling madly, rushed down, down, along an unknown, uncalculated orbit…

What followed can be described only approximately, only by more or less close analogies.

It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see… I became glass. I saw – within myself. There were two of me. The former one, D-503, number D-503, and the other… Before, he had just barely shown his hairy paws from within the shell; now all of him broke out, the shell cracked; a moment, and it would fly to pieces and… And then… what?

With all my strength, as though clutching at a straw, I gripped the arms of the chair and asked – only to hear myself, the other self, the old one, “Where… where did you get this… this poison?”

“Oh, this! A certain doctor, one of my…”

“ ‘One of my…’? ‘One of my’ – what?” And suddenly the other leaped out and yelled, “I won’t allow it! I want no one but me. I’ll kill anyone who… Because I… Because you… I…”

I saw – he seized her roughly with his shaggy paws, tore the silk, and sank his teeth into… I remember exactly – his teeth…

I don’t know how, but I-330 managed to slip away. And now – her eyes behind that damned impermeable shade – she stood leaning with her back against the wardrobe and listened to me.

I remember – I was on the floor, embracing her legs, kissing her knees, pleading, “Now, right this minute, right now…”

Sharp teeth, sharp mocking triangle of eyebrows. She bent down and silently unpinned my badge.

“Yes! Yes, darling, darling.” I hurriedly began to throw off my unif But I-330 just as silently showed me the watch on my badge. It was five minutes to twenty-two and a half.

I turned cold. I knew what it meant to be seen in the street after twenty-two and a half. My madness vanished as if blown away. I was myself. And one thing was clear to me: I hate her, hate her, hate her!

Without a good-by, without a backward glance, I rushed out of the room. Hurriedly pinning on the badge as I ran, skipping steps, down the stairway (afraid of meeting someone in the elevator), I burst out into the empty street.

Everything was in its usual place – so simple, ordinary, normal: the glass houses gleaming with lights, the pale glass sky, the motionless greenish night. But under this cool quiet glass something violent blood-red, shaggy, rushed soundlessly. And I raced, gasping, not to be late.

Suddenly I felt the hastily pinned badge loosening – it slipped off, clicking on the glass pavement. I bent down to pick it up, and in the momentary silence heard the stamping of feet behind me. I turned – something little, bowed, slunk out from around the corner, or so it seemed to me at the time.

I rushed on at full speed, the air whistling in my ears. At the entrance I stopped: the watch showed one minute before twenty-two and a half. I listened – there was no one behind me. Obviously, it had all been a preposterous fantasy, the effect of the poison.

It was a night of torment. My bed rose and sank and rose again under me, floating along a sinusoid. I argued with myself: At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense… And yet, I could not and could not.

I am perishing. I am unable to fulfill my obligations to the One State… I…




Eleventh Entry





Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden by a milky-golden veil and you cannot see what is above, beyond it. The ancients knew that God – their greatest, bored skeptic – was there. We know that there is only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing. But now I do not know what is there: I have learned too much. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith. I had had firm faith in myself; I had believed that I knew everything within myself. And now…

I stand before a mirror. And for the first time in my life – yes, for the first time – I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself with astonishment as a certain “he.” Here am I – he: black eyebrows, etched in a straight line; and between them, like a scar, a vertical fold (I don’t know whether it was there before). Steel-gray eyes, surrounded by the shadow of a sleepless night. And there, behind this steel… it turns out that I have never known what is there. And out of “there” (this “there” is at the same time here and infinitely far), out of “there” I look at myself – at him – and I know: he, with his straight eyebrows, is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first time in my life. And I, the real I, am not he.

No. Period. All this is nonsense, and all these absurd sensations are but delirium, the result of yesterday’s poisoning… Poisoning by what? – a sip of the green venom, or by her? It does not matter. I am writing all this down merely to show how strangely human reason, so sharp and so precise, can be confused and thrown into disarray. Reason that had succeeded in making even infinity, of which the ancients were so frightened, acceptable to them by means of…

The annunciator clicks: it is R-13. Let him come; in fact, I am glad. It is too difficult for me to be alone now…


Twenty minutes later

On the plane surface of the paper, in the two-dimensional world, these lines are next to one another. But in a different world they… I am losing my sense of figures: twenty minutes may be two hundred or two hundred thousand. And it seems so strange to write down in calm, measured, carefully chosen words what has occurred just now between me and R. It is like sitting down in an armchair by your own bedside, legs crossed, and watching curiously how you yourself are writhing in the bed.

When R-13 entered, I was perfectly calm and normal. I spoke with sincere admiration of how splendidly he had succeeded in versifying the sentence, and told him that his trochees had been the most effective instrument of all in crushing and destroying that madman.

“I would even say – if I were asked to draw up a schematic blueprint of the Benefactor’s Machine, I would somehow, somehow find a way of incorporating your verses into the drawing,” I concluded.

But suddenly I noticed R’s eyes turn lusterless, his lips turn gray.

“What is it?”

“What, what! Oh… Oh, I’m simply tired of it. Everyone around talks of nothing but the sentence. I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just don’t want to!”

He frowned and rubbed the back of his head-that little box of his with its strange baggage that I did not understand. A pause. And then he found something in the box, pulled it out, opened it. His eyes glossed over with laughter as he jumped up.

“But for your Integral, I am composing… That will be… Oh, yes, that will be something!”

It was again the old R: thick, sputtering lips, spraying saliva, and a fountain of words. “You see” (“s” – a spray) “…that ancient legend about paradise… Why, it’s about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The chains – you understand? That’s what world sorrow was about For ages! And only we have found the way of restoring happiness… No, wait listen further! The ancient God and we – side by side, at the same table. Yes! We have helped God ultimately to conquer the devil – for it was he who had tempted men to break the ban and get a taste of ruinous freedom, he, the evil serpent. And we, we’ve brought down our boot over his little head, and – cr-runch! Now everything is fine – we have paradise again. Again we are as innocent and simple-hearted as Adam and Eve. No more of that confusion about good and evil. Everything is simple – heavenly, childishly simple. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians – all this is good, all this is sublime, magnificent, noble, elevated, crystally pure. Because it protects our unfreedom – that is, our happiness. The ancients would begin to talk and think and break their heads – ethical, unethical… Well, then. In short, what about such a paradisiac poem, eh? And, of course, in the most serious tone… You understand? Quite something, eh?”





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notes


Примечания





1


Derived apparently from the ancient “uniform.”




2


This word has survived only as a poetic metaphor; the chemical composition of this substance is unknown to us.




3


Naturally, his subject was not “Religious Law,” or “God’s Law,” as the ancients called it, but the law of the One State.




4


From the Botanical Museum, of course. Personally, I see nothing beautiful in flowers, or in anything belonging to the primitive world long exiled beyond the Green Wall. Only the rational and useful is beautiful: machines, boots, formulas, food, and so on.