We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

  “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.)

  The Operational Section is staffed with our best and most experienced physicians, who work under the direct supervision of the Benefactor Himself. They have a variety of instruments, the most effective of them all the famous Gas Bell. Essentially, it is the old school laboratory experiment: a mouse is placed under a glass jar and an air pump gradually rarefies the air inside it And so on. But, of course, the Gas Bell is a much more perfect apparatus, using all sorts of gases. And then, this is no longer torture of a tiny helpless animal. It serves a noble end: it safeguards the security of the One State —in other words, the happiness of millions. About five centuries ago, when the Operational Section was first being developed, there were some fools who compared the Section to the ancient Inquisition, but that is as absurd as equating a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highwayman; both may have the same knife in then-hands, both do the same thing—cut a living man’s throat—yet one is a benefactor, the other a criminal; one has a + sign, the other a…

  All this is entirely clear—within a single second, at a single turn of the logical machine. Then suddenly the gears catch on the minus, and something altogether different comes to ascendancy—the key ring, still swaying in the door. The door had evidently just been shut, yet I-330 was already gone, vanished. That was something the machine could not digest in any way. A dream? But even now I felt that strange sweet pain in my right shoulder— I-330 pressing herself against the shoulder, next to me in the fog. “Do you like fog?” Yes, I love the fog… I love everything, and everything is firm, new, astonishing, everything is good…

  “Everything is good,” I said aloud.

  “Good?” The china eyes goggled at me. “What is good about this? If that unnumbered one had managed… it means that they are everywhere, all around us, at all times… they are here, around the Integral, they…”

  “Who are they?”

  “How would I know who? But I feel them, you understand? All the time.”

  “And have you heard about the newly invented operation—excision of the imagination?” (I had myself heard something of the kind a few days earlier.)

  “I know about it. But what has that to do with… ?”

  “Just this: in your place, I would go and ask to be operated on.”

  Something distinctly lemon-sour appeared on the plate. The good fellow was offended by the hint that he might possibly possess imagination… Oh, well, only a week ago I would have been offended myself. Not today. Today I know that I have it, that I am ill. I also know that I don’t want to be cured. I don’t, and that’s all there is to it We ascended the glass stairs. Everything below was as clearly visible as if it were spread out on the palm of my hand.

  You, who read these notes, whoever you may be—you have a sun over your heads. And if you have ever been as ill as I am now, you know what the sun is like—what it can be like—in the morning. You know that pink, transparent, warm gold, when the very air is faintly rosy and everything is suffused with the delicate blood of the sun, everything is alive: the stones are alive and soft; iron is alive and soft; people are alive, and everyone is smiling. In an hour, all this may vanish, in an hour the rosy blood may trickle out, but for the moment everything lives. And I see something pulsing and flowing in the glass veins of the Integral. I see—the Integral is pondering its great, portentous future, the heavy load of unavoidable happiness it will carry upward, to you, unknown ones, who are forever searching and never finding. You shall find what you seek, you shall be happy—it is your duty to be happy, and you do not have much longer to wait.

  The body of the Integral is almost ready: a graceful, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass—as eternal as gold, as flexible as steel. I saw the transverse ribs and the longitudinal stringers being attached to the body from within; in the stern they were installing the base for the giant rocket motor. Every three seconds, a blast; every three seconds the mighty tail of the Integral will eject flame and gases into cosmic space, and the fiery Tamerlane of happiness will soar away and away…

  I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm, according to the Taylor system, bending, unbending, turning like the levers of a single huge machine. Tubes glittered in their hands; with fire they sliced and welded the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw transparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of this was one: humanized machines, perfect men. It was the highest, the most stirring beauty, harmony, music… Quick! Below! To join them, to be with them!

  And now, shoulder to shoulder, welded together with them, caught up in the steel rhythm… Measured movements; firmly round, ruddy cheeks; mirror-smooth brows, untroubled by the madness of thought. I floated on the mirror-smooth sea. I rested.

  Suddenly one of them turned to me serenely. “Better today?”

  “Better? What’s better?”

  “Well, you were out yesterday. We had thought it might be something dangerous…” A bright forehead, a childlike, innocent smile.

  The blood rushed to my face. I could not, could not lie to those eyes. I was sil
ent, drowning…

  The gleaming white round china face bent down through the hatch above. “Hey! D-503! Come up, please! We’re getting a rigid frame here with the brackets, and the stress…”

  Without listening to the end, I rushed up to him. I was escaping ignominiously, in headlong flight I could not raise my eyes. The glittering glass stairs flashed under my feet, and every step increased my hopelessness: I had no place here—I, the criminal, the poisoned one. Never again would I merge into the regular, precise, mechanical rhythm, never again float on the mirrorlike untroubled sea. I was doomed to burn forever, to toss about, to seek a corner where to hide my eyes-forever, until I finally found strength to enter that door and…

  And then an icy spark shot through me: I—well, I didn’t matter; but I would also have to tell about her, and she, too, would be…

  I climbed out of the hatch and stopped on the deck. I did not know where to turn now, I didn’t know why I had come there. I looked up. The midday-weary sun was rising dully. Below me was the Integral, gray-glassy, unalive. The rosy blood had trickled out It was clear to me that all of this was merely my imagination, that everything remained as it had been before, yet it was also clear…

  “What’s wrong with you, 508, are you deaf? I have been calling and calling… What’s the matter?” The Second Builder shouted into my ear. He must have been shouting for a long time.

  What’s the matter with me? I have lost the rudder. The motor roars, the aero quivers and rushes at full speed, but there is no rudder, no controls, and I don’t know where I’m flying: down-to crash into the ground in a moment, or up-into the sun, into the flames…

  Sixteenth Entry

  TOPICS:

  Yellow

  Two-Dimensional Shadow

  Incurable Soul

  I have not written anything for several days, I don’t know how many. All the days are one day. All the days are one color—yellow, like parched, fiery sand. And there is not a spot of shadow, not a drop of water… On and on endlessly over the yellow sand. I cannot live without her, yet since she vanished so incomprehensibly that day in the Ancient House, she…

  I have seen her only once since that day, during the daily walk. Two, three, four days ago—I do not know; all the days are one. She flashed by, filling for a second the yellow, empty world. And, hand in hand with her, up to her shoulder, the double-bent S and the paper-thin doctor. And there was a fourth one—I remember nothing but his fingers: they would fly out of the sleeves of his unif like clusters of rays, incredibly thin, white, long. I-330 raised her hand and waved to me. Over her neighbor’s head she bent toward the one with the ray-like fingers. I caught the word Integral. All four glanced back at me. Then they were lost in the gray-blue sky, and again—the yellow, dessicated road.

  That evening she had a pink coupon to visit me. I stood before the annunciator and implored it, with tenderness, with hatred, to click, to register in the white slot: I-330. Doors slammed; pale, tall, rosy, swarthy numbers came out of the elevator; shades were pulled down on all sides. She was not there. She did not come.

  And possibly, just at this very moment, exactly at twenty-two, as I am writing this, she stands with closed eyes, leaning against someone with her shoulder, saying to someone, “Do you love?” To whom? Who is he? The one with the raylike fingers, or the thick-lipped, sputtering R? Or S?

  S… Why am I constantly hearing his flat steps all these days, splashing as through puddles? Why is he following me all these days like a shadow? Before me, beside me, behind—a gray-blue, two-dimensional shadow. Others pass through it, step on it, but it is invariably here, bound to me as by some invisible umbilical cord. Perhaps this cord is she—I-330? I don’t know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians, already know that I…

  Suppose you were told: Your shadow sees you, sees you all the time. Do you understand me? And suddenly you have the strangest feeling: your hands are not your own, they interfere with you. And I catch myself constantly swinging my arms absurdly, out of time with my steps. Or suddenly I feel that I must glance back, but it’s impossible, no matter how I try, my neck is rigid, locked. And I run, I run faster and faster, and feel with my back—my shadow runs faster behind me, and there is no escape, no escape anywhere…

  Alone, at last, in my room. But here there is something else—the telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Yes, I-330, please.” And again I hear a rustle in the receiver, someone’s steps in the hall, past her room—and silence… I throw down the receiver—I can’t, I can’t endure it any longer. I must run there, to her.

  This happened yesterday. I hurried there, and wandered for an hour, from sixteen to seventeen, near the house where she lives. Numbers marched past me, row after row. Thousands of feet stepped rhythmically, a million-footed monster floated, swaying, by. And only I was alone, cast out by a storm upon a desert island, seeking, seeking with my eyes among the gray-blue waves.

  A moment, and I shall see the sharply mocking angle of the eyebrows lifted to the temples, the dark windows of the eyes, and there, within them, the burning fireplace, the stirring shadows. And I will step inside directly, I will say, “You know I cannot live without you. Why, then…” I will use the warm, familiar “thou”—only “thou.”

  But she is silent. Suddenly I hear the silence, I do not hear the Music Plant, and I realize it is past seventeen, everybody else is gone, I am alone, I am late. Around me—a glass desert, flooded by the yellow sun. In the smooth glass of the pavement, as in water, I see the gleaming walls suspended upside down, and myself, hung mockingly head down, feet up.

  I must hurry, this very second, to the Medical Office to get a certificate of illness, otherwise they’ll take me and… But perhaps that would be best? To stay here and calmly wait until they see me and take me to the Operational Section—and so put an end to everything, atone for everything at once.

  A faint rustle, and a doubly bent shadow before me. Without looking, I felt two steel-gray gimlets drill into me. With a last effort, I smiled and said—I had to say something—“I… I must go to the Medical Office.”

  “What’s the problem, then? Why do you stand here?”

  Absurdly upside down, hung by the feet, I was silent, burning up with shame. “Come with me,” S said harshly. I followed obediently, swinging my unnecessary, alien arms. It was impossible to raise my eyes; I walked all the way through a crazy, upside-down world: some strange machines, their bases up; people glued antipodally to the ceiling; and, lower still, beneath it all, the sky locked into the thick glass of the pavement. I remember: what I resented most of all was that, for this last time in my life, I was seeing everything in this absurdly upside-down, unreal state. But it was impossible to raise my eyes.

  We stopped. A staircase rose before me. Another step, and I would see the figures in white medical smocks, the huge, mute Bell…

  With an enormous effort, I finally tore my eyes away from the glass underfoot, and suddenly the golden letters of MEDICAL OFFICE burst into my face. At that moment it had not even occurred to me to wonder why he had spared me, why he had brought me here instead of to the Operational Section. At a single bound I swung across the steps, slammed the door firmly behind me, and took a deep breath. I felt: I had not breathed since morning, my heart had not been beating—and it was only now that I had taken my first breath, only now that the sluices in my breast had opened…

  There were two of them: one short, with tubby legs, weighing the patients with his eyes as though lifting them on horns; the other paper-thin, with gleaming scissor-lips, his nose a finest blade… The same one. I rushed to him as to someone near and dear, mumbling about insomnia, dreams, shadows, a yellow world. The scissor-lips gleamed, smiled.

  “You’re in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

  A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes use the words “soul-stirring,” “soulless,” but “soul”… ?

  “Is it… very dangerous?” I muttered.

  “Incurable,”
the scissors snapped.

  “But… what, essentially, does it mean? I somehow don’t… don’t understand it.”

  “Well, you see… How can I explain it to you?… You are a mathematician, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then—take a plane, a surface—this mirror, say. And on this surface are you and I, you see? We squint against the sun. And here, the blue electric spark inside that tube, and there—the passing shadow of an aero. All of it only on the surface, only momentary. But imagine this impermeable substance softened by some fire; and nothing slides across it any more, everything enters into it, into this mirror world that we examined with such curiosity when we were children. Children are not so foolish, I assure you. The plane has acquired volume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the mirror—inside you: the sun, the blast of the whirling propeller, your trembling lips, and someone else’s. Do you understand? The cold mirror reflects, throws back, but this one absorbs, and everything leaves its tracer-forever. A moment, a faint line on someone’s face—and it remains in you forever. Once you heard a drop fall in the silence, and you hear it now…”

  “Yes, yes, exactly…” I seized his hand. I heard it now—drops falling slowly from the washstand faucet And I knew: this was forever. “But why, why suddenly a soul? I’ve never had one, and suddenly… Why… No one else has it, and I…?”

  I clung even more violently to the thin hand; I was terrified of losing the lifeline.

  “Why? Why don’t you have feathers, or wings-only shoulder blades, the base for wings? Because wings are no longer necessary, we have the aero, wings would only interfere. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere else to fly: we have arrived, we have found what we had been searching for. Isn’t that so?”

  I nodded in confusion. He looked at me with a scalpel-sharp laugh. The other heard it, pattered in from his office on his tubby feet, lifted my paper-thin doctor, lifted me on his horn-eyes.