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Eighth Entry

How long ago it was – during my school years – when I first encountered V-l. A vivid memory, as though cut out of time: the brightly lit spherical hall, hundreds of round boys’ heads, and Plapa, our mathematics teacher. We nicknamed him Plapa. He was badly worn out, coming apart, and when the monitor plugged him in, the loudspeakers would always start with “Pla-pla-pla-tsh-sh sh,” and only then go on to the day’s lesson. One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, “I don’t want V”!! Take V-1 out of me!” This irrational number had grown into me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me – it was impossible to conceive, to render harmless, because it was outside ratio.

And now again V-1. I’ve just glanced through my notes, and it is clear to me: I have been dodging, lying to myself – merely to avoid seeing the V-1 – It’s nonsense that I was sick, and all the rest of it. I could have gone there. A week ago, I am sure, I would have gone without a moment’s hesitation. But now? Why?

Today, too. Exactly at sixteen-ten I stood before the sparkling glass wall. Above me, the golden, sunny, pure gleam of the letters on the sign over the Office. Inside, through the glass, I saw the long line of bluish unifs. Faces glowing like icon lamps in an ancient church: they had come to perform a great deed, to surrender upon the altar of the One State their loved ones, their friends, themselves. And I – I longed to join them, to be with them. And could not: my feet were welded deep into the glass slabs of the pavement, and I stood staring dully, incapable of moving from the spot.

“Ah, our mathematician! Dreaming?”

I started. Black eyes, lacquered with laughter; thick, Negroid lips. The poet R-13, my old friend – and with him, pink O.

I turned angrily. If they had not intruded, I think I finally would have torn the V-1 out of myself with the flesh, and entered the Office.

“Not dreaming. Admiring, if you wish!” I answered sharply.

“Certainly, certainly! By rights, my good friend, you should not be a mathematician; you ought to be a poet! Yes! Really, why not transfer to us poets, eh? How would you like that? I can arrange it in a moment, eh?”

R-13 speaks in a rush of words; they spurt out in a torrent and spray comes flying from his thick lips. Every “p” is a fountain; “poets” – a fountain.

“I have served and will continue to serve knowledge,” I frowned. I neither like nor understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.

“Oh, knowledge! This knowledge of yours is only cowardice. Don’t argue, it’s true. You’re simply trying to enclose infinity behind a wall, and you are terrified to glance outside the wall. Yes! Just try and take a look, and you will shut your eyes. Yes!”

“Walls are the foundation of all human…” I began.

R spurted at me like a fountain. O laughed roundly, rosily. I waved them off – laugh if you please, it doesn’t matter to me. I had other things to think about I had to do something to expunge, to drown out that damned V-1.

“Why not come up to my room,” I suggested. “We can do some mathematical problems.” I thought of that quiet hour last evening – perhaps it would be quiet today as well.

O glanced at R-13, then at me with clear, round eyes. Her cheeks flushed faintly with the delicate, exciting hue of our coupons.

“But today I… Today I am assigned to him,” she nodded at R, “and in the evening he is busy… So that…”

R’s wet, lacquered lips mumbled good-humoredly “Oh, half an hour will be enough for us. Right, O? I don’t care for your problems, let’s go up to my place for a while.”

I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or rather, with that new, foreign being who merely by some odd chance had my number – D-503. And I went with them to R’s place. True, he is not precise, not rhythmical, he has a kind of inside-out, mocking logic; nevertheless, we are friends. Three years ago we had chosen together the charming, rosy O. This bound us even more firmly than our school years.

Then, up in R’s room. Everything would seem to be exactly the same as mine: the Table, the glass chairs, the closet, the bed. But the moment R entered, he moved one chair, another – and all planes became displaced, everything slipped out of the established proportions, became non-Euclidean. R is the same as ever. In Taylor and in mathematics he was always at the bottom of the class.

We recalled old Plapa, the little notes of thanks we boys would paste all over his glass legs (we were very fond of him). We reminisced about our law instructor.[3] This instructor had an extraordinarily powerful voice; it was as though blasts of violent wind blew from the loud-speaker – and we children yelled the texts after him in deafening chorus. We also recalled how the unruly R-13 once stuffed his speaker with chewed-up paper, and every text came with a shot of a spitball. R was punished, of course; what he had done was bad, of course, but now we laughed heartily – our whole triangle – and I confess, I did too.

“What if he had been alive, like the ancient teachers, eh? Wouldn’t that have been…” – a spray of words from the thick lips.

Sunlight – through the ceiling, the walls; sun – from above, from the sides, reflected from below. O sat on R’s lap, and tiny drops of sunlight gleamed in her blue eyes. I felt warmed, somehow, restored. The V-1 died down, did not stir…

“And how is your Integral? We shall soon be setting off to educate the inhabitants of other planets, eh? You’d better rush it, or else we poets will turn out so much material that even your Integral will not be able to lift it. Every day from eight to eleven…” R shook his head, scratched it The back of his head is like a square little valise, attached from behind (I recalled the ancient painting, “In the Carriage”).

“Are you writing for the Integral, too?” I was interested. “What about? Today, for example?”

“Today, about nothing. I was busy with something else…” His ‘b’s spurted out at me.

“What?”

R made a grimace. “What, what! Well, if you wish, a court sentence. I versified a sentence. An idiot, one of our poets, too… For two years he sat next to me, and everything seemed all right Then suddenly, how do you do! ‘I am a genius,’ he says, ‘a genius, above the law.’ And scribbled such a mess… Eh! Better not speak about it…”

The thick lips hung loosely, the lacquer vanished from his eyes. R-13 jumped up, turned, and stared somewhere through the wall. I looked at his tightly locked little valise, thinking, What is he turning over there, in that little box of his?

A moment of awkward, asymmetrical silence. It was unclear to me what the trouble was, but something was wrong.

“Fortunately, the antediluvian ages of all those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskys, or whatever you call them, are gone,” I said, deliberately loudly.

R turned his face to me. The words still rushed out of him like spray, but it seemed to me that the merry shine was no longer in his eyes.

’Yes, my dearest mathematician, fortunately, fortunately, fortunately! We are the happiest arithmetical mean… As you mathematicians say – integration from zero to infinity, from a cretin to Shakespeare… yes!”

I do not know why – it seemed completely irrelevant – but I recalled the other one, her tone; the finest thread seemed to extend from her to R. (What was it?) Again the V-1 began to stir. I opened my badge – it was twenty-five minutes to seventeen. They had forty-five minutes left for their pink coupon.

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

In the street, when I had already crossed to the other side, I glanced back: in the bright, sun-permeated glass hulk of the building squares of bluish-gray, opaque drawn shades could be seen here and there – squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square; he had already drawn the blind.

Dear O… Dear R… In him there is also (I don’t know why “also,” but let my hand write as it will) – in him there is also something not entirely clear to me. And yet, he, I, and O – we are a triangle, perhaps not equilateral, but a triangle nonetheless. To put it in the language of our ancestors (perhaps, my planetary readers, this language is more comprehensible to you), we are a family. And it is so good occasionally, if only briefly, to relax, to rest, to enclose yourself in a simple, strong triangle from all that…