“Yes, lilies of the valley! And there is nothing funny about it, nothing funny!”
The smooth round globes of heads passing by were turning toward us. O-90 gently took my hand.
“You are so strange today… are you ill?”
My dream…. Yellow color…. Buddha…. It was at once borne clearly upon me that I must go to the Medical Bureau.
“Yes, you are right, I am sick,” I said with joy (that seems to me an inexplicable contradiction; there was nothing to be joyful about).
“You must go at once to the doctor. You understand that; you are obliged to be healthy; it seems strange to have to prove it to you.”
“My dear O-, of course you are right. Absolutely right.”
I did not go to the Bureau of Guardians; I could not; I had to go to the Medical Bureau; they kept me there until seventeen o’clock.
In the evening (incidentally, the Bureau of Guardians is closed evenings)—in the evening O- came to see me. The curtains were not lowered. We busied ourselves with the arithmetical problems of an ancient textbook. This occupation always calms and purifies our thoughts. O-sat over her notebook, her head slightly inclined to the left; she was so assiduous that she poked out her left cheek with the tongue from within. She looked so childlike, so charming…. I felt everything in me was pleasant, precise, and simple.
She left. I remained alone. I breathed deeply two times (it is very good exercise before retiring for the night). Suddenly—an unexpected odor reminiscent of something very disagreeable! I soon found out what was the matter: a branch of lily of the valley was hidden in my bed. Immediately everything was aroused again, came up from the bottom. Decidedly, it was tactless on her part to put these lilies of the valley there surreptitiously. Well, true I did not go; I didn’t, but was it my fault that I had felt indisposed?
Record Eight
An Irrational Root
R-13
The Triangle
It was long ago, during my school days, when I first encountered the square root of minus one. I remember it all very clearly: a bright globelike class hall, about a hundred round heads of children, and Plappa—our mathematician. We nicknamed him Plappa; it was a very much used-up mathematician, loosely screwed together; as the member of the class who was on duty that day would put the plug into the socket behind, we would hear at first from the loud-speaker, “Plap-plap-plap-plap—tshshsh… Only then the lesson would follow. One day Plappa told us about irrational numbers, and I remember I wept and banged the table with my fist and cried, “I do not want that square root of minus one; take that square root of minus one away!” This irrational root grew into me as something strange, foreign, terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought out. It could not be defeated because it was beyond reason.
Now, that square root of minus one is here again. I read over what I have written and I see clearly that I was insincere with myself, that I lied to myself in order to avoid seeing that square root of minus one. My sickness is all nonsense! I could go there. I feel sure that if such a thing had happened a week ago I should have gone without hesitating. Why, then, am I unable to go now? … Why?
Today, for instance, at exactly sixteen-ten I stood before the glittering Glass Wall. Above was the shining, golden, sun-like sign: “Bureau of Guardians.” Inside, a long queue of bluish-gray unifs awaiting their turns, faces shining like the oil lamps in an ancient temple. They had come to accomplish a great thing: they had come to put on the altar of the United State their beloved ones, their friends, their own selves. My whole being craved to join them, yet… I could not; my feet were as though melted into the glass plates of the sidewalk. I simply stood there looking foolish.
“Hey, mathematician! Dreaming?”
I shivered. Black eyes varnished with laughter looked at me—thick Negro lips! It was my old friend the poet, R-13, and with him rosy O-. I turned around angrily (I still believe that if they had not appeared I should have entered the Bureau and have torn the square root of minus one out of my flesh).
“Not dreaming at all. If you will, ‘standing in adoration,’” I retorted quite brusquely.
“Oh, certainly, certainly! You, my friend, should never have become a mathematician; you should have become a poet, a great poet! Yes, come over to our trade, to the poets. Eh? If you will, I can arrange it in a jiffy. Eh?”
R-13 usually talks very fast. His words run in torrents, his thick lips sprinkle. Every “p” is a fountain, every “poets” a fountain.
“So far I have served knowledge, and I shall continue to serve knowledge.”
I frowned. I do not like, I do not understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.
“Oh, 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.” (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 …”
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 strange new 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 always; 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 not taught 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 loud-speaker. And we children would yell the prescribed texts after him with all our lung power. We recalled how our scapegrace, R13, 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
