I see what shape the car was in; the hood, the entire front, everything was folded like an accordion. The gleeder, on the other hand, was hardly damaged — now I appreciated its superiority — only a small dent in the side, where it had taken the main impact. Eri helped me get in, backed away the gleeder until the wreck of my car fell over on its side with a long clattering of metal, then took off. We were going back. I was silent, the lights swam by. My head wobbled, still large and heavy. We got out in front of the cottage. The windows were still lit up, as if we had left only for a moment. She helped me inside. I lay down on the bed. She went to the table, walked around it, walked to the door. I sat up:
“You’re leaving!”
She ran to me, knelt by the side of the bed, and shook her head in denial.
“No?”
“No.”
“And you’ll never leave me?”
“Never.”
I embraced her. She put her cheek to my face, and everything was drained from me — the burning embers of my obstinacy and anger, the madness of the last few hours, the fear, the despair; I lay there empty, like one dead, and only pressed her to me more tightly, as if my strength had returned, and there was silence, the light gleamed on the golden wallpaper of the room, and somewhere far away, as in another world, outside the open windows, the Pacific roared.
It may seem strange, but we said nothing that evening, or that night. Not a single word. Not until late the following day did I learn how it had been. As soon as I had driven off, she’d guessed the reason and panicked, didn’t know what to do. First she thought to summon the white robot, but realized that it could not help; and he — she referred to him in no other way — he could not help, either. Olaf, perhaps. Olaf, certainly, but she did not know where to find him, and anyway there wasn’t time. So she took the house gleeder and drove after me. She quickly caught up with me, then kept behind me for as long as there was a chance that I was only returning to the cottage.
204
“Would you have got out then?” I asked. She hesitated.
“I don’t know. I think I would have. I think so now, but I don’t know.”
Then, when she saw that I did not stop but kept driving, she got even more frightened. The rest I knew.
“No. I don’t understand it,” I said. “This is the part I don’t understand. How were you able to do it?”
“I told myself that… that nothing would happen.”
“You knew what I wanted to do? And where?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
After a long pause:
“I don’t know. Perhaps because by now I know you a little.”
I was silent. I still had many things to ask but didn’t dare. We stood by the window. With my eyes closed, feeling the great open space of the ocean, I said:
“All right, Eri, but what now? What is going to happen?”
“I told you already.”
“But I don’t want it this way,” I whispered.
“It can’t be any other way,” she replied after a long pause. “Besides…”
“Besides?”
“Never mind.”
That very day, in the evening, things got worse, again. Our trouble returned and progressed, and then retreated. Why? I do not know. She probably did not know, either. As if it was only in the face of extremity that we became close, and only then that we were able to understand each other. And a night. And another day.
On the fourth day I heard her talking on the telephone and was terribly afraid. She cried afterward. But at dinner was smiling again.
And this was the end and the beginning. Because the following week we went to Mae, the main city of the district, and in an office there, before a man dressed in white, we said the words that made us man and wife. That same day I sent a telegram to Olaf. The next day I went to the post office, but there was nothing from him. I thought that perhaps he had moved, and hence the delay. To tell the truth, even then, at the post office, I felt a twinge of anxiety, because this silence was not like Olaf, but what with all that had happened, I thought about it only for a moment and said nothing to her. As if it were forgotten.
SIX
For a couple joined only by the violence of my madness, we suited each other above expectation. Our life together was subject to a curious division. When it came to a difference in attitudes, Eri was able to defend her position, but then the matter in question was usually of a general nature; she was, for example, a staunch advocate of betrization and defended it with arguments not taken from books. That she opposed my views so openly I considered a good sign; but these discussions of ours took place during the day. In the light of day she did not dare — or did not wish — to speak about me objectively, calmly, no doubt because she did not know which of her words would amount to pointing out some personal fault of mine, some absurdity of “the character from the pickle jar,” to use Olaf’s expression, and which an attack leveled at the basic values of my time. But at night — perhaps because the darkness attenuated my presence somewhat — she spoke to me about myself, that is, about us, and I was glad of these quiet conversations in the dark, for the dark mercifully hid my frequent amazement. She told me about herself, about her childhood, and in this way I learned for the second time — for the first time, really, since with concrete, human content — how finely wrought was this society of constant, delicately stabilized harmony. It was considered a natural thing that having children and raising them during the first years of their life should require high qualifications and extensive preparation, in other words, a special course of study; in order to obtain permission to have offspring, a married couple had to pass a kind of examination; at first this seemed incredible to me, but on thinking it over I had to admit that we, of the past, and not they, should be charged with having paradoxical customs: in the old society one was not allowed to build a house or a bridge, treat an illness, perform the simplest administrative function, without specialized education, whereas the matter of utmost responsibility, bearing children, shaping their minds, was left to blind chance and momentary desires, and the community intervened only when mistakes had been made and it was too late to correct them.
So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone. Furthermore, parents could not isolate children from their contemporaries; specially selected groups were formed, for both sexes, and in these the most divergent temperaments were represented. So-called difficult children were given additional, hypnagogic treatment, and the education of all children was begun very early. Not reading and writing, which came much later, but the education of the youngest, introducing them — through special games — to the functioning of the world, Earth, to the richness and variety of life in society; four- and five-year-olds were instilled, in precisely this way, with the principles of tolerance, coexistence, respect for other beliefs and attitudes, the unimportance of the differing external features of the children (and hence the adults) of other races. All of which seemed quite fine to me, with one single but fundamental reservation, because the immovable cornerstone of this world, its all- embracing rule, was betrization. The whole aim of a child’s upbringing was to make it accept betrization as a fact of life no less unquestionable than birth or death. When I heard how ancient history was taught, even from Eri, I had difficulty containing my indignation. According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others. What once took untold effort, they said, and was attainable only by a few, the road to it bristling with danger and the necessity for sacrifice, compromise — material success purchased only by moral defeat — was now common, easy, and certain.
It was not so bad as long as one dealt in generalizations; I could go along with the condemnation of various
