An absurd feeling yet it was there; I really must! Absurd, because
this "duty" of mine was nothing but another crime. Absurd, because
white and black cannot be one, duty and crime cannot coincide. Or
perhaps there is no black and white in life, but everything depends
upon the first logical premise? If the premise is that I unlawfully
gave her a child....
"It is all right, but don't, only don't ..." I said. "Of course I
understand.... I must take you to I-330, as I once offered to, so
that she...."
"Yes." (This in a low voice, without uncovering her face.)
I helped her rise. Silently we went along the darkening street, each
busy with his own thoughts, or perhaps with the same thought.... We
walked between silent leaden houses, through the tense, whipping
branches of the wind....
Through the whistling of the wind all at once I heard, as if
splashing through ditches, the familiar footsteps coming from some
unseen point. At the corner I turned around, and among the clouds,
flying upside-down reflected in the dim glass of the pavement I saw
S-. Instantly my arms became foreign, swinging out of time, and
I began to tell O-90 in a low voice that tomorrow, yes tomorrow,
was the day of the first flight of the _Integral_, and that it was
to be something that never happened before in all history, great,
miraculous.
"Think of it! For the first time in life to find myself outside
the limits of our city and see--who knows what is beyond the Green
Wall?"
O-90 looked at me extremely surprised, her blue eyes trying to
penetrate mine; she looked at my senselessly swinging arms. But
I did not let her say a word,--I kept talking, talking.... And
within me, apart from what I was saying and audible only to myself a
thought was feverishly buzzing and knocking. "Impossible! You must
somehow ... you must not lead _him_ to I-330!"
Instead of turning to the right I turned to the left. The bridge
submissively bent its back in a slavish way to all three of us,
to me, to O-, to him behind. Lights were falling from the houses
across the water, falling and breaking into thousands of sparks
which danced feverishly, sprayed with the mad white foam of the
water. The wind was moaning like a tensely stretched string of a
double-basso somewhere not far away. Through this basso, behind, all
the while....
The house where I live. At the entrance O- stopped and began:
"No! You promised, did you not, that...."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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