Take, for example, our famous “mathematical couplets.” Could we have learned in school to love the four rules of arithmetic so tenderly and so sincerely without them? Or “Thorns,” that classical image: the Guardians as the thorns on the rose, protecting the delicate flower of the State from rude contacts… Whose heart can be so stony as to remain unmoved at the sight of innocent childish lips reciting like a prayer the verse:
“The bad boy rudely sniffed the rose. But the steely thorn pricked bis nose. The mischief-maker cries, ‘Oh, Oh,’ And runs as fast as he can go,” and so on.
Or the Daily Odes to the Benefactor? Who, upon reading them, will not bow piously before the selfless labors of this Number of Numbers? Or the awesome “Red Flowers of Court Sentences”? Or the immortal tragedy “He Who Was Late to Work?” Or the guidebook “Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene”?
All of our life, in its entire complexity and beauty, has been engraved forever in the gold of words.
Our poets no longer soar in the empyrean; they have come down to earth; they stride beside us to the stern mechanical March of the Music Plant. Their lyre encompasses the morning scraping of electric toothbrushes and the dread crackle of the sparks in the Benefactor’s Machine; the majestic echoes of the Hymn to the One State and the intimate tinkle of the gleaming crystal chamberpot; the exciting rustle of dropping shades, the merry voices of the latest cookbook, and the scarcely audible whisper of the listening membranes in the streets.
Our gods are here, below, with us – in the office, the kitchen, the workshop, the toilet; the gods have become like us. Ergo, we have become as gods. And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on the distant planet, to make your life as divinely rational and precise as ours.
Thirteenth Entry
Topics: Fog. Thou. An Utterly Absurd Incident
I woke at dawn; the solid, rosy firmament greeted my eyes. Everything was beautifully round. In the evening O would be here. I felt: I am completely well. I smiled and fell asleep again.
The morning bell. I rose. But now all was different around me: through the glass of the ceiling, the wall – everywhere – dense, penetrating fog. Crazy clouds, now heavier, now lighter. There were no longer any boundaries between sky and earth; everything was flying, melting, falling – nothing to get hold of. No more houses. The glass walls dissolved in the fog like salt crystals in water. From the street, the dark figures inside the houses were like particles suspended in a milky, nightmare solution, some hanging low, some higher and still higher-all the way up to the tenth floor. And everything was swirling smoke, as in a silent, raging fire.
Exactly eleven-forty-five; I glanced deliberately at the watch – to grasp at the figures, at the solid safety of the figures.
At eleven-forty-five, before going to perform the usual physical labor prescribed by the Table of Hours, I stopped off for a moment in my room. Suddenly, the telephone rang. The voice – a long, slow needle plunged into the heart: “Ah, you are still home? I am glad. Wait for me on the corner. We shall go… you’ll see where.”
“You know very well that I am going to work now.”
“You know very well that you will do as I tell you. Good-by. In two minutes…”
Two minutes later I stood on the corner. After all, I had to prove to her that I was governed by the One State, not by her. “You will do as I tell you…” And so sure of herself – I could hear it in her voice. Well, now I shall have a proper talk with her.
Gray unifs, woven of the raw, damp fog, hurriedly came into being at my side and instantly dissolved in the fog. I stared at my watch, all of me a sharp, quivering second hand. Eight minutes, ten… Three minutes to twelve, two minutes…
Finished. I was already late for work. I hated her. But I had to prove to her…
At the corner, through the white fog, blood – a slit, as with a sharp knife – her lips.
“I am afraid I delayed you. But then, it’s all the same. It is too late for you now.”
How I… But she was right, it was too late.
I silently stared at her lips. All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some pink, firmly round – a ring, a tender protection against the whole world. But these: a second ago they did not exist, and now – a knife slit – and the sweet blood will drip down.
She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me – and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this “must.” A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath – and dying.
I remember I smiled dazedly and said, for no good reason, “Fog… So very…”
“Do you like fog?”
She used the ancient, long-forgotten “thou” – the “thou” of the master to the slave. It entered into me slowly, sharply. Yes, I was a slave, and this, too, was necessary, was good.
“Yes, good…” I said aloud to myself. And then to her, “I hate fog. I am afraid of it.”
“That means you love it. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.”
Yes, this is true. And this is precisely why – precisely why I…
We walked, the two of us – one. Somewhere far through the fog the sun sang almost inaudibly, everything was filling up with firmness, with pearl, gold, rose, red. The entire world was a single unen compassable woman, and we were in its very womb, unborn, ripening joyfully. And it was clear to me – ineluctably clear – that the sun, the fog, the rose, and the gold were all for me…
I did not ask where we were going. It did not matter. The only thing that mattered was to walk, to walk, to ripen, to fill up more and more firmly…
“Here.” I-330 stopped at a door. “The one I spoke to you about at the Ancient House is on duty here today.”
From far away, with my eyes only, protecting what was ripening within me, I read the sign: MEDICAL OFFICE. I understood.
A glass room filled with golden fog. Glass ceilings, colored bottles, jars. Wires. Bluish sparks in tubes.
And a tiny man, the thinnest I had ever seen. All of him seemed cut out of paper, and no matter which way he turned, there was nothing but a profile, sharply honed: the nose a sharp blade, lips like scissors.
I did not hear what I-330 said to him: I watched her speak, and felt myself smiling blissfully, uncontrollably. The scissor-lips flashed and the doctor said, “Yes, yes. I understand. The most dangerous disease – I know of nothing more dangerous…” He laughed, quickly wrote something with the thinnest of paper hands, and gave the slip to I-330; then he wrote another one and gave it to me.
He had given us certificates that we were ill and could not report to work. I was stealing my services from the One State, I was a thief, I saw myself under the Benefactor’s Machine. But all of this was as remote and indifferent as a story in a book… I took the slip without a moment’s hesitation. I – all of me, my eyes, lips, hands – knew that this had to be.
At the corner, at the almost empty garage, we took an aero. I-330 sat down at the controls, as she had the first time, and switched the starter to “Forward.” We broke from the earth and floated away. And everything followed us: the rosy-golden fog, the sun, the finest blade of the doctor’s profile, suddenly so clear. Formerly, everything had turned around the sun; now I knew – everything was turning around me – slowly, blissfully, with tightly closed eyes…