Читать книгу We - Yevgeny Zamyatin - Страница 17

LOG 9

BRIEF:

Liturgy. Iambs and Trochees. The Iron Hand.

A bright, solemn day. On days like this, you forget your weaknesses, imprecisions, illnesses – everything turns crystal, faithful, eternal – like our new glass . . .

Cube Square. Sixty-six mighty concentric circles: the tribunes. In sixty-six rows: mute lanterns of faces with eyes reflecting the radiance of the heavens – or perhaps, the radiance of the One State. Blood-crimson flowers – women’s lips. The tender garlands of children’s faces – in the front rows, up close to the action. Deep, solemn, gothic silence.

Judging by the surviving descriptions, the Ancients felt something similar during their ‘services’. But they were serving their irrational, unknowable God – we are serving our rational and, in the most precise sense, knowable one. Their God gave them nothing but endless, torturous searching: He didn’t come up with anything better than sacrificing Himself for some unknown reason. We sacrifice to our God, the One State, offering a calm, thoughtful, rational sacrifice. Yes, this was the solemn liturgy to the One State, in remembrance of the Two Hundred Years’ War, our baptism by fire, the great celebration of the momentous victory of all over one, of the sum over the unit . . .

Here was one – on the steps of the sun-filled Cube. White . . . and not even white but actually colourless – a glass face with glass lips. He was all eyes – black, sucking, swallowing holes – on the precipice of that terrible world. The golden badge bearing his number had already been stripped away. His hands were tied with a purple ribbon (an ancient custom: apparently because in ancient times, when people would do this not in the name of the One State, the accused would, understandably, feel that it was within their rights to resist, and so their hands were usually fettered with chains). Up above, on the Cube, beside the Machine stood the metallic, motionless figure of the one whom we call the Benefactor. It’s impossible to make out His face from down here: all you can tell is that it is delineated by stately and stern quadrilinear contours. But then, the hands . . . You see it in photographs: they are too close, hands in the foreground turn out gigantic, arresting the gaze – blocking out everything else. Those heavy hands, still calmly lying in His lap, for now – clearly: they were like stones and His knees could barely bear their weight . . .

Then, suddenly, one of these giant hands slowly rose – a slow, iron gesture – and from the tribune, obeying the lifted hand, a number approached the Cube. This was one of the State Poets – he’d drawn the golden ticket: to adorn the celebration with his verse. Divine bronze iambs began thundering down over the tribunes – about the madman with glassy eyes who now stood on the steps awaiting the logical consequence of his insanity.

. . . Fire. In the iambs, buildings roiled, spewing up molten gold, before toppling. Green trees writhed in the flames, bleeding sap – until only black, skeletal crosses remained. But then, Prometheus (meaning us) appeared and he:

Yoked fire to the machine, in steelAnd fettered chaos in the chains of law.

Everything was reborn in steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people. Until suddenly some madman ‘let fire off the chain again and set it free’, and everything died . . .

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good memory for poetry, but I remember one thing: it would have been impossible to choose more educational and beautiful images.

Another slow and heavy gesture – a second poet appeared on the steps of the Cube. I even rose up out of my seat: I couldn’t believe my eyes! But it really was: his thick lips – it was him! Why hadn’t he said anything, revealing that he was about to receive this high . . . His lips trembled, they were grey. I understood: standing in front of the Benefactor, in front of the entire legion of Guardians – but still: letting yourself get that nervous . . .

Swift, trenchant trochees, as sharp as axes. About an unfathomable crime: blasphemous verses calling the Benefactor . . . no, I couldn’t bear to repeat it.

Afterwards, a pallid R-13 returned to his seat without looking at anyone (I would have never expected him to be this shy). For an infinitesimal differential of a second, someone’s face flashed next to his – a sharp, black triangle – and was instantly erased: my eyes – thousands of eyes – looked up towards the Machine. Up there – the third, iron gesture of the inhuman hand. Then, stirred by an invisible wind – the criminal began his slow ascent – one step, the next – and finally, the last step of his life – his face to the sky, head thrown back – he’d arrived at his final resting place.

The leaden Benefactor, stony as fate itself, circled the Machine then laid His giant hand on the lever . . . Not a thing stirred, no one dared to breathe: all eyes were on His hand. What a cyclone of flame must be blazing inside Him – the instrument, with the force of hundreds of thousands of volts. What a magnificent destiny!

An immeasurable second. The hand, releasing the current, fell. The unbearably sharp blade of the ray sparked – like a shudder, a barely perceptible crackling in the Machine’s inner workings. The prostrate body – enveloped in faint, glowing smoke – dissolving, melting right before our eyes, with horrifying speed. Then – nothing. All that’s left: a puddle of chemically pure water, which, just a moment ago, was red, beating furiously inside a heart . . .

All of this was simple, each of us knew it all: yes, the dissociation of matter – yes, the simultaneous fission of all the atoms in the human body. And yet, every time, it was a miracle, proof of the Benefactor’s superhuman power.

Above, in front of Him, the flushed faces of ten female numbers, their mouths half-open from excitement, their flowers⁵ fluttering in the wind.

In keeping with old tradition, the ten women adorned the Benefactor’s unif, still wet from the sprays, with flowers. With a majestic stride, like a hierophant, He slowly descended, slowly passed among the tribunes – trailing behind Him the delicate white branches of women’s arms, raising a millions-strong storm of voices. Then, the same cries in honour of the legion of Guardians, invisibly present among us, here, in our ranks. Who knows: perhaps it was them, the Guardians, that the imaginations of ancient men presaged when imagining their gentle and terrible ‘archangels’, who watch over each person from birth.

Yes, there was something from ancient religion, something cleansing, like thunder and storms, in this ceremony. Readers: have you experienced moments like these? I feel sorry for you if you haven’t . . .

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5 Which came, of course, from the Botanical Museum. I personally don’t see anything beautiful about flowers or anything else from the savage world that was chased out beyond the Green Wall long ago. Only things that are useful and rational are beautiful: machines, boots, formulas, food etc.