Read Ebook: We by Zamiatin Evgenii Ivanovich Zilboorg Gregory Translator

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Ebook has 1012 lines and 53044 words, and 21 pages

the bad habit of joking.

"Heh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall. Yes, sir! And if ever you should glance beyond the wall you would be dazzled and close your eyes,--yes,--"

"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."

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." "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 school-days 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 recalled our priest . 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....

"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 Dostoyevskis 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?"

"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 lowered.

Dear O-.... Dear R-.... He also has , he too has something which is not entirely clear in him. Yet I, he and O-, we are a triangle; I confess, not an isosceles triangle but a triangle nevertheless. We, to speak in the language of our ancestors we are a family. And one feels so good at times, when one is able for a short while, at least, to close oneself within a firm triangle, to close oneself away from anything that....

RECORD NINE

Liturgy Iambus The Cast-Iron Hand

A solemn bright day. On such days one forgets one's weaknesses, inexactitudes, illnesses, and everything is crystalline and imperturbable like our new glass....

The Plaza of the Cube. Sixty-six imposing concentric circles--stands. Sixty-six rows of quiet serene faces. Eyes reflecting the shining of the sky,--or perhaps it is the shining of the United State. Red like blood, are the flowers--the lips of the women. Like soft garlands the faces of the children in the first rows, nearest the place of action. Profound, austere, gothic silence.

To judge by the descriptions which reach us from the ancients, they felt somewhat like this during their "Church services," but they served their nonsensical unknown god; we serve our rational god, whom we most thoroughly know. Their god gave them nothing but eternal, torturing seeking; our god gives us absolute truth, that is, he has rid us of any kind of doubt. Their god did not invent anything cleverer than sacrificing oneself, nobody knows what for; we bring to our god, The United State, a quiet, rational, carefully thought-out sacrifice.

On the top of the Cube, next to the Machine, the motionless, metallic figure of him whom we call the Well-Doer. One could not see his face from below. All one could see was that it was bounded by austere, magnificent, square lines. And his hands.... Did you ever notice how sometimes in a photograph the hands, if they were too near the camera, come out enormous? They then compel your attention, overshadow everything else. Those hands of his, heavy hands, quiet for the time being, were stony hands,--it seemed the knees on which they rested must have had pains to bear their weight.

Suddenly one of those hands rose slowly. A slow cast-iron gesture; obeying the will of the lifted hand, a Number came out on the platform. It was one of the State poets, whose fortunate lot it was to crown our celebration with his verses.

Divine iambic brass verses thundered over the many stands. They dealt with the man, who, his reason lost and lips like glass, stood on the steps and waited for the logical consequences of his own insane deeds.

... A blaze.... Buildings were swaying in those iambic lines, and sprinkling upward their liquified golden substance, they broke and fell. The green trees were scorched, their sap slowly ran out and they remained standing like black crosses, like skeletons. Then appeared Prometheus .

"... he harnessed fire With machines and steel And fettered chaos with Law...."

The world was renovated; it became like steel,--a sun of steel, trees of steel, men of steel. Suddenly an insane man, "Unchained the fire and set it free," and again the world had perished.... Unfortunately I have a bad memory for poetry, but one thing I am sure of: one could not choose more instructive or more beautiful parables.

Swift sharp verses like an axe.... They told about an unheard-of crime, about sacrilegious poems in which the Well-Doer was called.... But no, I do not dare to repeat....

R-13 was pale when he finished, and looking at no one he descended and sat down. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second I saw right beside him somebody's face--a sharp, black triangle--and instantly I lost it; my eyes, thousands of eyes, were directed upward toward the Machine. Then--again the superhuman, cast-iron, gesture of the hand.

Swayed by an unknown wind the criminal moved; one step ... one more, ... then the last step in his life. His face was turned to the sky, his head thrown backward--he was on his last.-- ... Heavy, stony like fate, the Well-Doer went around the machine, put his enormous hand on the lever.... Not a whisper, not a breath around; all eyes were upon that hand.... What crushing, scorching power one must feel to be the tool, to be the resultant of hundreds of thousands of wills! How great his lot!

Another second. The hand moved down, switching in the current. The lightning-sharp blade of the electric ray.... A faint crack like a shiver, in the tubes of the Machine.... The prone body, covered with a light phosphorescent smoke; then suddenly, under the eyes of all, it began to melt,--to melt, to dissolve with terrible speed. And then nothing; just a pool of chemically pure water which only a moment ago was so red and pulsated in his heart....

All this was simple; all of us were familiar with the phenomenon, dissociation of matter,--yes, the splitting of the atoms of the human body! Yet every time we witnessed it, it seemed a miracle; it was a symbol of the superhuman power of the Well-Doer.

Above, in front of Him, the burning faces of the female numbers, mouths half open from emotion, flowers swaying in the wind. According to custom, ten women were covering with flowers the unif of the Well-Doer, which was still wet with spray. With the magnificent step of a supreme priest He slowly descended, slowly passed between the rows of stands; and like tender white branches there rose toward Him the arms of the women; and, millions like one, our tempestuous cheers! Then cheers in honor of the Guardians, who all unseen, were present among us.... Who knows, perhaps the fancy of the ancient man foresaw them centuries ahead, when he created the gentle and formidable "guardian-angels" assigned to each one from the day of his birth?

These flowers naturally were brought from the Botanical Museum. I, personally, am unable to see anything beautiful in flowers, or in anything else that belongs to the lower kingdom which now exists only beyond the Green Wall. Only rational and useful things are beautiful: machines, boots, formulae, food, etc.

Yes, there was in our celebration something of the ancient religions, something purifying like a storm.... You whose lot it may be to read this, are you familiar with such emotions? I am sorry for you if you are not.

RECORD TEN

A Letter A Manhunt Hairy I

Yesterday was for me a kind of filter-paper which chemists use for filtering their solutions . This morning I went downstairs all purified and distilled, transparent.

Downstairs in the hall the controller sat at a small table, constantly looking at her watch and recording the Numbers who were leaving. Her name is U- ... well, I prefer not to give her Number, for I fear I may not write kindly about her. Although, as a matter of fact, she is a very respectable, mature woman. The only thing I do not like in her is that her cheeks fold down a little like gills of a fish . She scratched with her pen and I saw on the page "D-503"--and suddenly, splash! an ink-blot. No sooner did I open my mouth to call her attention to that, than she raised her head and blotted me with an inky smile. "There is a letter for you. You will receive it, dear. Yes, yes, you will."

At twelve o'clock, again the rosy-brown fish-gills' smile, and at last the letter was in my hands. I cannot say why I did not read it right there, but I put it in my pocket and ran into my room. I opened it and glanced it over and ... and sat down. It was the official notification advising me that Number I-330 had had me assigned to her and that today at twenty-one o'clock, I was to go to her. Her address was given.

"No! After all that happened! After I showed her frankly my attitude toward her! Besides, how could she know that I did not go to the Bureau of the Guardians? She had no way of knowing that I was ill and could not.... And despite all this...."

A dynamo was whirling and buzzing in my head. Buddha ... yellow ... lilies-of-the-valley ... rosy crescent.... Besides,--besides, O- wanted to come to see me today! I am sure she would not believe , that I had absolutely nothing to do with the matter, that ... I am sure also that we will have a difficult, foolish and absolutely illogical conversation. No, anything but that! Let the situation solve itself mechanically; I shall send her a copy of this official communication.

While I was hastily putting the paper in my pocket, I noticed my terrible ape-like hand. I remembered how that day during our walk, she took my hand and looked at it. Is it possible that she really ... that she....

A quarter to twenty-one. A white northern night. Everything was glass,--greenish. But it was a different kind of glass, not like ours, not genuine but very breakable,--a thin glass shell and within that shell things were flying, whirling, buzzing. I should not have been surprised if suddenly the cupola of the auditorium had risen in slow, rolling clouds of smoke; or if the ripe moon had sent an inky smile,--like that one at the little table this morning; or if in all the houses suddenly all the curtains had been lowered and behind the curtains....

"Here...." I held out the pink check, "... I received the notification this noon and here I am!"

"How punctual you are! Just a minute please, may I? Sit down. I shall finish in a minute."

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