We, Yevgeny Zamyatin [read a book .TXT] 📗

apparently I am myself a microbe, and she too, I-330, is a microbe, a wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite possible that there are already thousands of such microbes among us, still pretending to be phagocytes, as I pretend. What if today’s accident, although in itself not important, is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass paradise? Record Twenty-Three

Flowers⁠—The dissolution of a crystal⁠—If only (?).

They say there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why not suppose the existence of flowers that bloom only once a thousand years? We may have known nothing about them until now only because today is the “once in a thousand years”?

Happy and dizzy I walked downstairs to the controller on duty and quickly under my gaze all around me and silently the thousand-year-old buds burst, and everything was blooming: armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark heavy eyes, the polished columns of the banisters, the handkerchief which someone lost on the stairs, the small, inkblotted desk of the controller and the tender brown, somewhat freckled cheeks of U-. Everything seemed not ordinary, new, tender, rosy, moist. U- took the pink stub from me while the blue, aromatic moon, hanging from an unseen branch, shone through the glass of the wall and over the head of U-. With a solemn gesture I pointed my finger and said:

“The moon. You see?”

U- glanced at me, then at the number of the stub and again made that familiar, charmingly innocent movement with which she fixes the fold of the unif between her knees.

“You look abnormal and ill, dear. Abnormality and illness are the same thing. You are killing yourself. And no one would tell you that, no one!”

That “No one” was certainly equivalent to the number on the stub⁠—I-330. This thought was confirmed by an inkblot which fell close to the figure 330. Dear, wonderful U-! You are right, of course. I am not reasonable. I am sick. I have a soul. I am a microbe. But is blooming⁠—not a sickness? Is it not painful when the buds are bursting? And don’t you think that spermatozoa are the most terrible of all microbes?

Back upstairs to my room. In the widely open cup of the armchair was I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger and larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one. And the wonderfully smiling old woman at the gate of the Ancient House, and the wild debris beyond the Green Wall, and some strange silver wreckage on a black background, dozing like the old woman and the slam of a door in the distance⁠—all this was within me, was listening to my pulse and soaring through the happiest of seconds.

In absurd, confused, overflowing words I attempted to tell her that I was a crystal and that there was a door in me, and that I felt how happy the armchair was. But something nonsensical came out of the attempt and I stopped. I was ashamed. And suddenly:

“Dear I-! Forgive me! I understand nothing. I talk so foolishly!”

“And why should you think that foolishness is not fine? If we had taken pains to educate human foolishness through centuries, as we have done with our intelligence, it might perhaps have been transformed into something very precious.”

Yes, I think she is right! How could she be wrong at that moment?

“… And for this foolishness of yours and for what you did yesterday during the walk, I love you the more, much more.”

“Then why did you torture me? Why would you not come? Why did you send me the pink check and make me⁠—?”

“Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps I must be sure that you will do anything I wish, that you are completely mine.”

“Yes, completely.”

She took my face, my whole self, between her palms, lifted my head:

“And how about ‘It is the duty of every honest Number’? Eh?”

Sweet, sharp, white teeth⁠—a smile. In the open cup of the armchair she was like a bee⁠—sting and honey combined.

Yes, duty.⁠ ⁠… I turned over in my mind the pages of my records; indeed there is not a thought about the fact that strictly speaking I should.⁠ ⁠…

I was silent. Exaltedly (and probably stupidly) I smiled, looking into the pupils of her eyes. I followed first one eye and then the other and in each of them I saw myself, a millimetric self imprisoned in those tiny rainbow cells. Then again the lips and the sweet pain of blooming.

In each Number of the United State there is an unseen metronome which ticktocks silently; without looking at the clock we know exactly the time of day within five minutes. But now my metronome had stopped and I did not know how much time had passed. In fright I grasped my badge with its clock from under the pillow. Glory be to the Well-Doer! I had twenty minutes more! But those minutes were such tiny, short ones! They ran! And I wanted to tell her so many things. I wanted to tell her all about myself; about the letter from O- and about that terrible evening when I gave her a child; and for some reason also about my childhood, about our mathematician Plappa and about the square-root of minus one; and how, when I attended the glorification on the Day of Unanimity for the first time in