We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

And now – the closet doors, the click of an opening lid – and again silk, silk…

“Well, if you please.”

I turned. She was in a light, saffron-yellow dress of the ancient model. This was a thousand times more cruel than if she had worn nothing. Two pointed tips through the filmy silk, glowing pink-two embers through the ash. Two delicately rounded knees…

She sat in a low armchair. On the rectangular table before her, a bottle with something poi-sonously green, two tiny glasses on stems. At the corner of her lips a thread of smoke – that ancient smoking substance in the finest paper tube (I forget what it was called).

The membrane still quivered. The hammer pounded inside me against the red-hot iron rods. I clearly heard each blow, and… and suddenly: What if she heard it too?

But she puffed calmly, glancing at me calmly, and carelessly shook off the ash – on my pink coupon.

As coolly as I could, I asked, “Now, listen, if that’s the case, why did you register for me? And why did you compel me to come here?”

It was as if she did not hear. She poured the liquid from the bottle into her glass, sipped it.

“Delicious liqueur. Would you like some?”

It was only now that I understood: alcohol. Yesterday’s scene flashed like a stroke of lightning: the Benefactor’s stony hand, the blinding ray. But on the Cube above – this body, prostrate, with the head thrown back. I shuddered.

“Listen,” I said. “You know that everyone who poisons himself with nicotine, and especially alcohol, is ruthlessly destroyed by the One State…”

Dark eyebrows rose high to the temples, a sharp mocking triangle. “Quick destruction of a few is more sensible than giving many the opportunity to ruin themselves? And then, degeneration, and so on. Right – to the point of indecency.”

“Yes… to the point of indecency.”

“And if this little company of naked, bald truths were to be let out in the street… No, just imagine… Well, take the most constant admirer of mine – oh, but you know him-… Imagine that he has discarded all the falsehood of clothes and stood among the people in his true shape… Oh!”

She laughed. But I could clearly see her lower, sorrowful triangle – the two deep lines from the corners of her mouth to her nose. And for some reason these lines revealed it to me: that stooping, wing-eared, doubly curved… he embraced her – as she was now… He…

But I am trying to convey the feelings – the abnormal feelings – I had at that moment Now, as I write this, I am perfectly aware that all of this is as it should be. Like every honest number, he has an equal right to joy, and it would be unjust… Oh, well, but this is clear.

I-330 laughed very strangely and very long. Then she looked closely at me – into me. “But the main thing is that I am completely at ease with you. You are such a dear – oh, I am sure of it – you will never think of going to the Office and reporting that I drink liqueur, that I smoke. You will be sick, or you will be busy, or whatever. I am even sure that in a moment you will drink this marvelous poison with me…”

That brazen, mocking tone. I definitely felt: now I hate her again. But why the “now”? I have hated her all the time.

She tilted the whole glassful of green poison into her mouth, stood up, and, glowing pink through the transparent saffron, took several steps… and stopped behind my chair.

Suddenly, an arm around my neck, lips into lips – no, somewhere still deeper, still more terrifying. I swear, this took me completely by surprise, and perhaps that was the only reason why… After all, I could not – now I realize it clearly – I myself could not have wanted what happened after that.

Intolerably sweet lips (I suppose it must have been the taste of the “liqueur”) – and a mouthful of fiery poison flowed into me – then more, and more… I broke away from the earth and, like a separate planet, whirling madly, rushed down, down, along an unknown, uncalculated orbit…

What followed can be described only approximately, only by more or less close analogies.

It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see… I became glass. I saw – within myself. There were two of me. The former one, D-503, number D-503, and the other… Before, he had just barely shown his hairy paws from within the shell; now all of him broke out, the shell cracked; a moment, and it would fly to pieces and… And then… what?

With all my strength, as though clutching at a straw, I gripped the arms of the chair and asked – only to hear myself, the other self, the old one, “Where… where did you get this… this poison?”

“Oh, this! A certain doctor, one of my…”

“ ‘One of my…’? ‘One of my’ – what?” And suddenly the other leaped out and yelled, “I won’t allow it! I want no one but me. I’ll kill anyone who… Because I… Because you… I…”

I saw – he seized her roughly with his shaggy paws, tore the silk, and sank his teeth into… I remember exactly – his teeth…

I don’t know how, but I-330 managed to slip away. And now – her eyes behind that damned impermeable shade – she stood leaning with her back against the wardrobe and listened to me.

I remember – I was on the floor, embracing her legs, kissing her knees, pleading, “Now, right this minute, right now…”

Sharp teeth, sharp mocking triangle of eyebrows. She bent down and silently unpinned my badge.

“Yes! Yes, darling, darling.” I hurriedly began to throw off my unif But I-330 just as silently showed me the watch on my badge. It was five minutes to twenty-two and a half.

I turned cold. I knew what it meant to be seen in the street after twenty-two and a half. My madness vanished as if blown away. I was myself. And one thing was clear to me: I hate her, hate her, hate her!

Without a good-by, without a backward glance, I rushed out of the room. Hurriedly pinning on the badge as I ran, skipping steps, down the stairway (afraid of meeting someone in the elevator), I burst out into the empty street.

Everything was in its usual place – so simple, ordinary, normal: the glass houses gleaming with lights, the pale glass sky, the motionless greenish night. But under this cool quiet glass something violent blood-red, shaggy, rushed soundlessly. And I raced, gasping, not to be late.

Suddenly I felt the hastily pinned badge loosening – it slipped off, clicking on the glass pavement. I bent down to pick it up, and in the momentary silence heard the stamping of feet behind me. I turned – something little, bowed, slunk out from around the corner, or so it seemed to me at the time.

I rushed on at full speed, the air whistling in my ears. At the entrance I stopped: the watch showed one minute before twenty-two and a half. I listened – there was no one behind me. Obviously, it had all been a preposterous fantasy, the effect of the poison.

It was a night of torment. My bed rose and sank and rose again under me, floating along a sinusoid. I argued with myself: At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense… And yet, I could not and could not.

I am perishing. I am unable to fulfill my obligations to the One State… I…

Eleventh Entry

Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden by a milky-golden veil and you cannot see what is above, beyond it. The ancients knew that God – their greatest, bored skeptic – was there. We know that there is only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing. But now I do not know what is there: I have learned too much. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith. I had had firm faith in myself; I had believed that I knew everything within myself. And now…

I stand before a mirror. And for the first time in my life – yes, for the first time – I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself with astonishment as a certain “he.” Here am I – he: black eyebrows, etched in a straight line; and between them, like a scar, a vertical fold (I don’t know whether it was there before). Steel-gray eyes, surrounded by the shadow of a sleepless night. And there, behind this steel… it turns out that I have never known what is there. And out of “there” (this “there” is at the same time here and infinitely far), out of “there” I look at myself – at him – and I know: he, with his straight eyebrows, is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first time in my life. And I, the real I, am not he.

No. Period. All this is nonsense, and all these absurd sensations are but delirium, the result of yesterday’s poisoning… Poisoning by what? – a sip of the green venom, or by her? It does not matter. I am writing all this down merely to show how strangely human reason, so sharp and so precise, can be confused and thrown into disarray. Reason that had succeeded in making even infinity, of which the ancients were so frightened, acceptable to them by means of…

The annunciator clicks: it is R-13. Let him come; in fact, I am glad. It is too difficult for me to be alone now…

Twenty minutes later

On the plane surface of the paper, in the two-dimensional world, these lines are next to one another. But in a different world they… I am losing my sense of figures: twenty minutes may be two hundred or two hundred thousand. And it seems so strange to write down in calm, measured, carefully chosen words what has occurred just now between me and R. It is like sitting down in an armchair by your own bedside, legs crossed, and watching curiously how you yourself are writhing in the bed.

When R-13 entered, I was perfectly calm and normal. I spoke with sincere admiration of how splendidly he had succeeded in versifying the sentence, and told him that his trochees had been the most effective instrument of all in crushing and destroying that madman.

“I would even say – if I were asked to draw up a schematic blueprint of the Benefactor’s Machine, I would somehow, somehow find a way of incorporating your verses into the drawing,” I concluded.

But suddenly I noticed R’s eyes turn lusterless, his lips turn gray.

“What is it?”

“What, what! Oh… Oh, I’m simply tired of it. Everyone around talks of nothing but the sentence. I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just don’t want to!”