I-330, is a microbe, a wonderful, diabolic microbe! It is quite possible that there are already thousands of such microbes among us, still pretending to be phagocytes, as I pretend. What if today’s accident, although in itself not important, is only a beginning, only the first meteorite of a shower of burning and thundering stones which the infinite may have poured out upon our glass paradise?
RECORD TWENTY-THREE
Flowers
The Dissolution of a Crystal
If only (?)
They say there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why not suppose the existence of flowers that bloom only once a thousand years? We may have known nothing about them until now only because today is the “once in a thousand years”?
Happy and dizzy I walked downstairs to the controller on duty and quickly under my gaze all around me and silently the thousand-year-old buds burst, and everything was blooming: armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark heavy eyes, the polished columns of the banisters, the handkerchief which someone lost on the stairs, the small, ink-blotted desk of the controller and the tender brown, somewhat freckled cheeks of U-. Everything seemed not ordinary, new, tender, rosy, moist. U- took the pink stub from me while the blue, aromatic moon, hanging from an unseen branch, shone through the glass of the wall and over the head of U-. With a solemn gesture I pointed my finger and said:
“The moon. You see?”
U- glanced at me, then at the number of the stub and again made that familiar, charmingly innocent movement with which she fixes the fold of the unif between her knees.
“You look abnormal and ill, dear. Abnormality and illness are the same thing. You are killing yourself. And no one would tell you that, no one!”
That “No one” was certainly equivalent to the number on the stub,—I-330. This thought was confirmed by an ink-blot which fell close to the figure 330. Dear, wonderful U-! You are right, of course. I am not reasonable. I am sick. I have a soul. I am a microbe. But is blooming—not a sickness? Is it not painful when the buds are bursting? And don’t you think that spermatozoa are the most terrible of all microbes?
Back upstairs to my room. In the widely open cup of the armchair was I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger and larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one. And the wonderfully smiling old woman at the gate of the Ancient House, and