We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (whitelam books txt) 📗

“Walls are the foundation of every human⁠—” I began.

R-13 sprinkled his fountain. O- laughed rosily and roundly. I waved my hand: “Well, you may laugh, I don’t care.” I was busy with something else. I had to find a way of eating up, of crushing down, that square-root of minus one. “Suppose,” I offered, “we go to my place and do some arithmetical problems.” (The quiet hour of yesterday afternoon came to my memory; perhaps today also.⁠ ⁠…)

O- glanced at R-, then serenely and roundly at me; the soft, endearing color of our pink checks came to her cheeks.

“But today I am.⁠ ⁠… I have a check to him today.” (A glance at R-.) “And tonight he is busy, so that⁠—”

The moist varnished lips whispered good-naturedly: “Half an hour is plenty for us, is it not, O-? I am not a great lover of your problems; let us simply go over to my place and chat.”

I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or to be more correct, with that new strange self, who by some curious coincidence bore my number, D-503. So I went with R-. True, he is not precise, not rhythmic, his logic is jocular and turned inside out, yet we are.⁠ ⁠… Three years ago we both chose our dear, rosy O-. This tied our friendship more firmly together than our schooldays did. In R-’s room everything seems like mine; the Tables, the glass of the chairs, the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R- moved one chair out of place, then another⁠—the room became confused, everything lost the established order and seemed to violate every rule of Euclid’s geometry. R- remained the same as before; in Taylor and in mathematics he always lagged at the tail of the class.

We recalled Plappa, how we boys used to paste the whole surface of his glass legs with paper notes expressing our thanks (we all loved Plappa). We recalled our priest (it goes without saying that we were taught not the “law” of ancient religion but the law of the United State). Our priest had a very powerful voice; a real hurricane would come out of the megaphone. And we children would yell the prescribed texts after him with all our lung-power. We recalled how our scapegrace, R-13, used to stuff the priest with chewed paper; every word was thus accompanied by a paper wad shot out. Naturally, R- was punished, for what he did was undoubtedly wrong, but now we laughed heartily;⁠—by we I mean our triangle, R-, O-, and I, I must confess, I too.

“And what if he had been a living one? Like the ancient ones, heh?” We’d have b⁠ ⁠… b⁠ ⁠… , a fountain running from the fat bubbling lips. The sun was shining through the ceiling, the sun above, the sun from the sides, its reflection from below. O- on R-13’s lap and minute drops of sunlight in O-’s blue eyes. Somehow my heart warmed up. The square-root of minus one became silent and motionless.⁠ ⁠…

“Well, how is your Integral? Will you soon hop off to enlighten the inhabitants of the planets? You’d better hurry up, my boy, or we poets will have produced such a devilish lot that even your Integral will be unable to lift the cargo. ‘Every day from eight to eleven’⁠ ⁠…” R- wagged his head and scratched the back of it. The back of his head is square; it looks like a little valise (I recalled for some reason an ancient painting In the Cab). I felt more lively.

“You too are writing for the Integral? Tell me about it. What are you writing about? What did you write today, for instance?”

“Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else.” “B-b-busy” sprinkled straight into my face.

“What else?”

R- frowned. “What? What? Well, if you insist I’ll tell you. I was busy with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An idiot⁠—and to be frank, one of our poets.⁠ ⁠… For two years we all lived side by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am a genius! And I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense.⁠ ⁠… But it is not a thing to talk about.”

The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise now?”

A moment of awkward asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter but I was certain there was something.⁠ ⁠…

“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.

R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.

“Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity, from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”

I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square-root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.

“Well, I must go.” I kissed O-, shook hands with R- and went to the elevator.

As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque squares of lowered curtains⁠—the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were already