A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes use the words “soul-stirring,” “soulless,” but “soul”… ?
“Is it… very dangerous?” I muttered.
“Incurable,” the scissors snapped.
“But… what, essentially, does it mean? I somehow don’t… don’t understand it.”
“Well, you see… How can I explain it to you?… You are a mathematician, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then—take a plane, a surface—this mirror, say. And on this surface are you and I, you see? We squint against the sun. And here, the blue electric spark inside that tube, and there—the passing shadow of an aero. All of it only on the surface, only momentary. But imagine this impermeable substance softened by some fire; and nothing slides across it any more, everything enters into it, into this mirror world that we examined with such curiosity when we were children. Children are not so foolish, I assure you. The plane has acquired volume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the mirror—inside you: the sun, the blast of the whirling propeller, your trembling lips, and someone else’s. Do you understand? The cold mirror reflects, throws back, but this one absorbs, and everything leaves its tracer-forever. A moment, a faint line on someone’s face—and it remains in you forever. Once you heard a drop fall in the silence, and you hear it now…”
“Yes, yes, exactly…” I seized his hand. I heard it now—drops falling slowly from the washstand faucet And I knew: this was forever. “But why, why suddenly a soul? I’ve never had one, and suddenly… Why… No one else has it, and I…?”
I clung even more violently to the thin hand; I was terrified of losing the lifeline.
“Why? Why don’t you have feathers, or wings-only shoulder blades, the base for wings? Because wings are no longer necessary, we have the aero, wings would only interfere. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere else to fly: we have arrived, we have found what we had been searching for. Isn’t that so?”
I nodded in confusion. He looked at me with a scalpel-sharp laugh. The other heard it, pattered in from his office on his tubby feet, lifted my paper-thin doctor, lifted me on his horn-eyes.
“What’s the trouble? A soul? A soul, you say? What the devil! We’ll soon return to cholera if you go on that way. I told you” (raising the paper-thin one on his horns) “—I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone… Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do…”
He saddled his nose with huge X-ray glasses, circled around and around me for a long time, peered through the bones of my skull, examining the brain, and writing something in his book.
“Curious, most curious I Listen, would you consent to… to being preserved in alcohol? It would be extremely useful to the One State… It would help us prevent an epidemic… Of course, unless you have some special reasons to…”
“Well, you see,” said the thin one, “Number D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, and I am sure it would interfere with…”
“U-um.” The other grunted and pattered back to his office.
We remained alone. The paper-thin hand fell lightly, gently on my hand, the profile face bent close to mine. He whispered, “I’ll tell you in confidence—you are not the only one. It was not for nothing that my colleague spoke about an epidemic. Try to remember—haven’t you noticed anything like it, very much like it, very similar in anyone else?” He peered at me closely. What was he hinting at? Whom did he mean? Could it be… ?
“Listen.” I jumped up from the chair.
But he was already speaking loudly about other things. “As far as your insomnia and your dreams, I can suggest one thing—do more walking. Start tomorrow morning, go out and take a walk… well, let’s say to the Ancient House.”
He pierced me with his eyes again, smiling his thinnest smile. And it seemed to me—I saw quite clearly a word, a letter, a name, the only name, wrapped in the finest tissue of that smile… Or was this only my imagination again?
I could barely wait until he wrote out a certificate of illness for that day and the next. Silently I pressed his hand once more, and ran out. My heart, fast and light as an aero, swept me up and up. I knew—some joy awaited me tomorrow. What was it?
Seventeenth Entry
I am completely bewildered. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought that everything was already disentangled, that all the X’s were found, new unknown quantities appeared in my equation.
The starting point of all the coordinates in this entire story is, of course, the Ancient House. It is the center of the axial lines of all the X’s, Y’s and Z’s on which my whole world has been built of late. Along the line of X’s ( Fifty-ninth Avenue ) I walked toward the starting point of the coordinates. All that had happened yesterday whirled like a hurricane within me: upside-down houses and people, tormentingly alien hands, gleaming scissors, sharp drops falling in the washstand—all this had happened, had happened once. And all of it, tearing my flesh, was whirling madly within, beneath the surface melted by a fire, where the “soul” was.
In order to carry out the doctor’s prescription, I deliberately chose to walk along two lines at right angles instead of a hypotenuse. I was already on the second line—the road along the Green Wall. From the illimitable green ocean behind the Wall rose a wild wave of roots, flowers, branches, leaves. It reared, and in a moment it would roll and break and overwhelm me, and, instead of a man—the finest and most precise of instruments—I would be turned into…
But fortunately between me and the wild green ocean was the glass of the Wall. Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall Man ceased to be a savage only when we had built the Green Wall, when we had isolated our perfect mechanical world from the irrational, hideous world of trees, birds, animals…
Through the glass the blunt snout of some beast stared dully, mistily at me; yellow eyes, persistently repeating a single, incomprehensible thought. For a long time we stared into each other’s eyes—those mine-wells from the surface world into another, subterranean one. And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
I raised my hand, the yellow eyes blinked, backed away, and disappeared among the greenery. The paltry creature! What absurdity—that he could possibly be happier than we are! Happier than I, perhaps; but I am only an exception, I am sick.
But even I… The dark-red walls of the Ancient House were already before me, and the old woman’s dear, ingrown mouth.
I rushed to her: “Is she here?”
The ingrown mouth opened slowly. “Which ‘she’?”
“Oh, which, which! I-330, of course… We came here together that day—by aero…”
“Oh, oh, I see… I see…”
The rays of wrinkles round the lips, sly rays from the yellow eyes, probing inside me, deeper and deeper. And at last, “Oh, well… She’s here, she came a little while ago.”
She’s here. I saw a shrub of silvery-bitter wormwood at the old woman’s feet. (The courtyard of the Ancient House is part of the museum, carefully preserved in its prehistoric state.) A branch of the wormwood lay along the old woman’s hand and she stroked it; a yellow strip of sunlight fell across her knees. And for an instant, I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, and the yellow eyes were one, bound firmly together by some invisible veins, and, pulsing through the veins, the same tumultuous, glorious blood…