The old woman at the gates of the Ancient House. The dear mouth, grown together, with its rays of wrinkles. It must have been closed all these days, but now it opened, smiled. “Aah, you mischievous imp! Instead of working like everybody else… oh, well, go in, go in! If anything goes wrong, I’ll come and warn you…”
The heavy, creaky, untransparent door closed, and at once my heart opened painfully wide – still wider – all the way. Her lips were mine. I drank and drank. I broke away, stared silently into her eyes, wide open to me, and again…
The twilight of the rooms, the blue, the saffron-yellow, the dark green leather, Buddha’s golden smile, the glimmering mirrors. And – my old dream, so easy to understand now – everything filled with golden-pink sap, ready to overflow, to spurt…
It ripened. And inevitably, as iron and the magnet, in sweet submission to the exact, immutable law, I poured myself into her. There was no pink coupon, no accounting, no State, not even myself. There were only the tenderly sharp clenched teeth, the golden eyes wide open to me; and through them I entered slowly, deeper and deeper. And silence. Only in the corner, thousands of miles away, drops falling in the washstand, and I was the universe, and from one drop to the other-eons, millennia…
Slipping on my unif, I bent down to I-330 and drank her in with my eyes for the last time.
“I knew it… I knew you…” she said, just audibly.
Rising quickly, she put on her unif and her usual sharp bite-smile. “Well, fallen angel. You’re lost now. You’re not afraid? Good-by, then! You will return alone. There.”
She opened the mirrored door of the wardrobe; looking at me over her shoulder, she waited. I went out obediently. But I had barely stepped across the threshold when suddenly I felt that I must feel her press against me with her shoulder-only for a second, only with her shoulder, nothing more.
I rushed back, into the room where she was probably still fastening her unif before the mirror. I ran in – and stopped. I clearly saw the ancient key ring still swaying in the door of the wardrobe, but I-330 was not there. She could not have left – there was only one exit. And yet she was not there. I searched everywhere, I even opened the wardrobe and felt the bright, ancient dresses. No one…
I feel embarrassed, somehow, my planetary readers, to tell you about this altogether improbable occurrence. But what can I say if this was exactly how it happened? Wasn’t the whole day, from the earliest morning, full of improbabilities? Isn’t it all like that ancient sickness of dreams? And if so, what difference does it make if there is one absurdity more, or one less? Besides, I am certain that sooner or later I shall succeed in fitting all these absurdities into some logical formula. This reassures me and, I hope, will reassure you.
But how full I amI If only you could know how full I am – to the very brim!
Fourteenth Entry
Topics: “Mine”. Impossible. The Cold Floor
More about the other day. My personal hour before bedtime was occupied, and I could not record it yesterday. But all of it is etched in me, and most of all – perhaps forever – that intolerably cold floor…
In the evening O was to come to me – this was her day. I went down to the number on duty to obtain permission to lower my shades.
“What is wrong with you?” the man on duty asked me. “You seem to be sort of…”
“I… I am not well…”
As a matter of fact, it was true. I am certainly sick. All of this is an illness. And I remembered: yes, of course, the doctor’s note… I felt for it in my pocket – it rustled there. Then everything had really happened, it had been real…
I held out the slip of paper to the man on duty. My cheeks burned. Without looking, I saw him glance up at me, surprised.
And then it was twenty-one and a half. In the room at the left, the shades were down. In the room at the right, I saw my neighbor over a book – his knobby brow and bald head a huge yellow parabola. Tormentedly I paced my room. How could I now, with O, after all that had happened? And from the right I sensed distinctly the man’s eyes upon me, I saw distinctly the wrinkles on his forehead – a row of yellow illegible lines; and for some reason it seemed to me those lines were about me.
At a quarter to twenty-two a joyous rosy hurricane burst into my room, a strong circle of rosy arms closed about my neck. And then I felt the circle weakening, weakening. It broke. The arms dropped.
“You’re not the same, you’re not the old one, not mine!”
“What sort of primitive notion – ’mine’? I never was…” and I broke off. It came to me: it’s true; before this I never was… But now? Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
The shades fell. Behind the wall on the right my neighbor dropped bis book on the floor, and in the last, momentary narrow slit between the shade and the floor I saw the yellow hand picking up the book, and my one wish was to grasp at that hand with all my strength…
“I thought – I hoped to meet you during the walk today. I have so much – there is so much I must tell you…”
Sweet, poor O! Her rosy mouth – a rosy crescent, its horns down. But how can I tell her what happened? I cannot, if only because that would make her an accomplice to my crimes. I knew she would not have enough strength to go to the Office of the Guardians, and hence…
She lay back. I kissed her slowly. I kissed that plump, naive fold on her wrist. Her blue eyes were closed, and the rosy crescent slowly opened, bloomed, and I kissed all of her.
And then I felt how empty, how drained I was – I had given everything away. I cannot, must not. I must – and it’s impossible. My lips grew cold at once…
The rosy half-moon trembled, wilted, twisted. O drew the blanket over herself, wrapped herself in it, hid her face in the pillow…
I sat on the floor near the bed – what an incredibly cold floor! – I sat silently. The agonizing cold rose from beneath, higher and higher. It must be cold like this in the blue, silent, interplanetary space.
“But you must understand, I did not want to…” I muttered. “I did all I could…”
This was true. I, the real I, had not wanted to. And yet how could I tell her this? How explain that the iron may not want to, but the law is ineluctable, exact…
O raised her face from the pillow and said without opening her eyes, “Go away.” But she was crying, and the words came out as “gooway,” and for some reason this silly trifle cut deeply into me.
Chilled, numb all through, I went out into the corridor. Outside, behind the glass, a light, barely visible mist. By nightfall the fog would probably be dense again. What would happen that night?
O silently slipped past me toward the elevator. The door clicked.
“One moment,” I cried out, suddenly frightened.
But the elevator was already humming, down, down, down.
She had robbed me of R.
She had robbed me of O.
And yet, and yet…
Fifteenth Entry
Topics: The Bell. The Mirror-Smooth Sea. I Am to Burn Eternally
I had just stepped into the dock where the Integral is being built when the Second Builder hurried to meet me. His face – round, white, as usual – a china plate; and his words, like something exquisitely tasty, served up on the plate: “Well, while it pleased you to be sick the other day, we had, I’d say, quite a bit of excitement here in the chiefs absence.”
“Excitement?”
“Oh, yes! The bell rang at the end of the workday, and everybody began to file out. And imagine – the doorman caught a man without a number. I’ll never understand how he managed to get in. He was taken to the Operational Section. They’ll know how to drag the why and how out of the fellow…” (All this with the tastiest smile.)