silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter but I was certain there was something....
“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskis
(or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.
R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.
“Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity,
from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”
I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square-root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.
“Well, I must go.” I kissed O-, shook hands with R- and went to the elevator.
As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque squares of lowered curtains,—the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were already lowered.
Dear O-.... Dear R-.... He also has (I do not know why I write this “also,” but I write as it comes from my pen), he too has something which is not entirely clear in him. Yet I, he and O-, we are a triangle; I confess, not an isosceles triangle but a triangle nevertheless. We, to speak in the language of our ancestors (perhaps to you, my planetary readers, this is the more comprehensible language) we are a family. And one feels so good at times, when one is able for a short while, at least, to close oneself within a firm triangle, to close oneself away from anything that....