– 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
Topics: Liturgy. Iambics and Trochees. A Cast-Iron Hand
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