We / Мы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

’ 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…

Ninth Entry

A bright, solemn day. On such days you forget your weaknesses, imprecisions, ailments, and everything is crystal, immutable, eternal – like our glass.

The Cube Plaza. Sixty-six great concentric circles of stands.