obediently… A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls downward, but on the way it whirls, catches at every familiar branch, fork, knot And I, too, was catching at every silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the blue spire of the Accumulator Tower piercing a cloud.
At that moment, when an impenetrable curtain was just about to cut me off from this whole, beautiful world, I saw nearby, swinging his pink ear-wings, gliding over the mirror-smooth pavement, a huge, familiar head. And a familiar, flattened voice: “It is my duty to inform you that Number D-503 is ill and incapable of controlling his emotions. And I am sure that he was carried away by natural indignation…”
“Yes, yes.” I seized at it. “I even cried ‘Hold her!’ ”
Behind my back: “You did not cry anything.”
“Yes, but I wanted to—I swear by the Benefactor, I did.”
For a second the gray, cold gimlet-eyes drilled through me. I don’t know whether he saw within me that this was (almost) the truth, or whether he had some secret purpose of his own in sparing me again for a while, but he wrote out a note and gave it to one of those who held me. And I was free again, or, to be more exact, was returned again to the regular, endless Assyrian ranks.
The rectangle, containing both the freckled face and the temple with the map of bluish veins, disappeared around the corner, forever. We walked— a single million-headed body, and within each of us—that humble joy which probably fills the lives of molecules, atoms, phagocytes. In the ancient world this was understood by the Christians, our only predecessors (however imperfect) : humility is a virtue, and pride a vice; “We” is from God, and “I” from the devil.
And now I was marching in step with everyone— yet separated from them. I still trembled from the recent excitement, like a bridge after an ancient iron train rushed, clattering, across it. I felt myself. But only an eye with a speck of dust in it, an abscessed finger, an infected tooth feel themselves, are aware of their individuality; a healthy eye, finger, tooth are not felt—they seem nonexistent Is it not clear that individual consciousness is merely a sickness?
Perhaps I am no longer a phagocyte, busily and calmly devouring microbes (with bluish temples and freckles). Perhaps I am a microbe, and perhaps there are already thousands of them among us, still—like myself—pretending to be phagocytes…
What if today’s essentially unimportant incident… what if it is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a hail of thundering fiery rocks poured by infinity upon our glass paradise?
Twenty-third Entry
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never knew about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come only today?
Blissfully, drunkenly, I walked down the stairs to the number on duty, and all around me, wherever my eyes fell, thousand-year-old buds were bursting into bloom. Everything bloomed—armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark, shaggy eyes, the faceted columns of the banisters, a handkerchief someone dropped on the stairs, the table of the number on duty, and the delicately brown, speckled cheeks of U over the table. Everything was extraordinary, new, delicate, rosy, moist.
U took the pink coupon, and above her head, through the glass wall, the moon, pale blue, fragrant, swayed from an unseen branch. I pointed triumphantly at the moon and said, “The moon— you understand?”
U glanced at me, then at the number on the coupon, and I saw again that enchantingly modest, familiar movement of her hand, smoothing the folds of the unif between the angles of her knees.
“My dear, you don’t look normal, you look sick— for abnormality and sickness are the same thing. You are ruining yourself, but no one, no one will tell you that.”
That “no one” is, of course, equated with the number on the coupon: I-330. Dear, marvelous U! Of course you are right: I am imprudent, I am sick, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But isn’t blooming a sickness? Doesn’t it hurt when a bud splits open? And don’t you think that spermatozoa are the most terrible of microbes?
Back upstairs, in my room. In the wide-open calyx of the chair—I-330. I am on the floor, embracing her legs, my head in her lap. We do not speak. Silence, heartbeats… And I am a crystal, I dissolve in her. I feel with utmost clarity how the polished facets that delimit me in space are melting away, away—I vanish, dissolve in her lap, within her, I grow smaller and smaller and at the same time ever wider, ever larger, expanding into immensity. Because she is not she, but the universe. And for a moment I and this chair near the bed, suffused with joy, are one. And the magnificently smiling old woman at the gate of the Ancient House, and the wild jungle beyond the Green Wall, and some silver ruins on black ground, dozing like the old woman, and the slamming of a door somewhere, immeasurably far away—all this is in me, with me, listening to the beating of my pulse and rushing through the blessed second…
In absurd, confused, flooded words I try to tell her that I am a crystal, and therefore there is a door in me, and therefore I feel the happiness of the chair she sits in. But the words are so nonsensical that I stop, ashamed: I—and suddenly such…
“Darling, forgive me! I don’t know—I talk such nonsense, so foolishly…”
“And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.”
“Yes…” (It seems to me that she is right—how could she be wrong at this moment?)
“And for one foolish action—for what you did the other day during the walk—I love you still more, much more.”
“But why did you torment me, why didn’t you come, why did you send me your coupons and make me…”
“Perhaps I had to test you? Perhaps I must know that you will do whatever I wish—that you are altogether mine?”
“Yes, altogether!”
She took my face—all of me—in her hands and raised my head. “And what about your ‘duty of every honest number’? Eh?”
Sweet, sharp, white teeth; a smile. In the open calyx of the chair she is like a bee—a sting, and honey.
Yes, duties… Mentally I turn the pages of my latest entries: not a hint of a thought anywhere that, actually, I should…
I am silent. I smile ecstatically (and probably foolishly), look into her pupils, run with my eyes from one to the other, and in each of them I see myself: I, tiny, infinitesimal, am caught in these tiny rainbow prisons. And then again—bees—lips, the sweet pain of blooming…
In every number there is an invisible, quietly ticking metronome, and we know the time exactly to within, five minutes without looking at a clock. But now my metronome had stopped, I did not know how much time had passed. Anxiously, I drew out the badge with my watch from under the pillow.
Thanks to the Benefactor! We still have twenty minutes. But minutes, so ridiculously short, are running fast, and I must tell her so much— everything, all of me: about O’s letter, about that dreadful evening when I gave her a child; and also, for some reason, about my childhood—about the mathematician Plapa, about V-1, about my first time at the Day of Unanimity, when I cried bitterly because, on such a day, there turned out to be an inkspot on my unif.
I-330 raised her head, leaned on her elbow. At the corners of her lips, two long, sharp lines, and the dark angle of raised eyebrows: a cross.
“Perhaps, on that day…” She broke off, her brow darkening. She took my hand and pressed it hard. “Tell me, you will not forget me, you will remember me always?”
