INTRODUCTION
Anna Alexandrovna Barkova was born on July 3rd, 1901 to a working class family, her father a porter at the local school, and her mother a textile factory worker, who died when Anna was young. Barkova began writing at an early age, publishing her first works of poetry at the age of 16, and worked the newspaper "Worker's Realm" between 1918 and 1921. She is primarily known for her poetry, the only book of her poems published in her lifetime was "Woman", in 1922.
Her works often contained a highly sarcastic and critical tone, which put her at odds with censors and the authorities. Beginning in 1934, she served numerous sentences in the Gulag system. Her first arrest, on December 25, 1934, was in the aftermath of Kirov affair, presumably for an off-hand remark, and she spent four years in Karlag. Her second arrest was in 1947, charged under Article 58:10, or "propaganda and agitation that called to overturn or undermining of the Soviet regime". She received a ten year sentence, serving most of it at Inta. Shortly after her release in January of 1956, she was arrested again, on November 13st, 1957 under Article 54:10, for one of her stories about Molotov, which had been intercepted in the mail. She served another eight years in Ozerlag.
After her third and final release, Barkova briefly lived in the village Potma before moving to Moscow in 1967, where she spent the remainder of her life, writing some of her most acclaimed poetry. She died on April 29, 1976 and anthologies of her work began to appear in Russia only several years after her death.
"A Steel Husband" was initially published in the magazine "Red Field", May 23rd, 1926. This translation is based off the Russian text from the anthology "Eight Chapters of Madness", which can be found here:
https://www.rulit.me/books/vosem-glav-bezumiya-proza-dnevniki-read-452895-1.html
Notes from this edition have been translated and marked as "Editor's note", my notes as "Translator's note". For further biographical information, see the entry on Laboratory of Fantastika (in Russian):
https://fantlab.ru/autor6656
A STEEL HUSBAND
I
In September 1922, I said to my good friend, the greatest scientist of our era, only equal to Einstein, but someone who wasn't recognized to the degree that befit such an excellent electrical engineer and chemist:
- "I've finally decided. Make me a steel husband. I clearly see that my foul temper and my awkward appearance only serve as a impassable obstacle to a romance with a natural, animate representative of the opposite sex. I don't care for the people who could love me, and the people I've fallen in love with respond with the deepest indifference, or justify their rejection by 'lack of spiritual unity', or 'differences in views and beliefs', or don't want to find love outside of their work or class. I'm sick of psychology. I repeat: make me a steel husband."
The tiny old man, enormously foreheaded, the remainder of his miniscule face modestly and timidly clinging to his forehead, raised his head out of his drawings. I saw his pale blue eyes, pitted with the narrow, and likely very deep, holes of his black pupils, and a thick, curved wrinkle that crossed his face above the eyebrows and the bridge of his nose, the very spot where it would seem that glued to his dictatorial forehead was its unfortunate, shriveled and miserable slave - the lower part of his face.
- "First of all, it won't be a steel husband. Its composition will consist of many physical and chemical elements; secondly, you used the word 'animate'; what does that mean? This word is only something's skin, something's shape. Where's what's implied by the word 'animate' - 'the soul'?[Translator's note: a play on words difficult to translate. "одушевленный"/"odushevlennij" is the word for "animate" and "душа"/"dusha" is the word for "soul" - the soul being encompassed in the word animate. I debated using the word "spirited" for "animate" to try to preserve the pun, but I don't think it quite fits.] Be careful with this word. Remember: the only things that exist are reactions to external stimuli: only to spatial phenomena, audible, visible, and tangible. Everything else is a fiction of a prehistoric time. There's no psychology. You can't understand this, you're a sentimental, late-born daughter of the slave era. Long live the system of 'organic movements' towards which we're aspiring!"
- "Yes, indeed - organic. And the steel husband you're going to prepare for me in your laboratory is something mechanical."
And I lowered my eyes under the poisoned lancets of the engineer's black pupils.
- "Something mechanical!" - the fool exclaimed and blinked. - "We know to what quiet, moonlit, flower-scented, mystical regions the word 'organic' takes you, a word you don't understand. 'Organic' to you is something that isn't mechanical, that is, psychological, pan-psychological, and ultimately, divine."
- "Ok, fine. I'm not looking to argue with you, especially considering I need your help. Nevertheless, tell me: will my steel husband be... well, able to feel, to have experiences like a real, living person, to love, to learn..."
- "I'll give him the best construction. I'll endow him with all the organic movements that express the so-called 'emotions': love, hate, fear, tenderness, and so forth."
- "Well, and what about his mental apparatus, his intellectual side?"
- "He'll read and speak several different languages; I'll give him all the beliefs you desire. In a word, your husband will embody something more perfect than all the people born in the usual fashion. Indeed, one thing I will give it is strength, one hundred percent. Instead of liquid, corrupted, inert human blood, I will pour electric currents of power, capable of destroying an entire small town, into your husband's vessels. Steel and electricity. A neatly and perfectly arranged internal power plant, and an exterior of an elastic synthesis of the last ten simple elements I've discovered - and there's your future husband."
- "How! No blood, no digestion, no nothing? That's horrible! And besides, it would arouse suspicion: a person who never eats anything? Aren't you trying to improve your method of constructing these peo... these machines?"
- "This is the most advanced method. Understand: the future belongs to people with a power plant, rather than the unkempt lump of meat called a heart."
- "People. They're not people, they're machines, they're just machines! Can't you see that, you insane loony?"
- "They're organisms of the highest value. This is the final stage of culture, these are our heirs. If I had the material resources, all the necessary preparations, devices and machines, I would make a thousand of such organisms, I would make them conquer the world, I would teach them to create their own kind and then I would kill myself. My mission, in feudalistic language, would be accomplished."
- "Excuse me, excuse me. And what about the revolution? In your scientific madness you forgot about the proletariat. What will your machines do in the future?"
- "The proletariat is the grave-digger of the bourgeoisie, and the steel man is the grave-digger of humanity's old meat. The proletariat paved the way for this electrified, immortal organism, devoid of class, national or racial characteristics."
The following words, I'm sure, were not spoken, but carved into my eardrum by the old man's disgusting pupils.
- "Why do you, with your 'horror' and 'disgust', turn to me? Do you need a love machine? I'll make one for you. This fact on its own demonstrates that 'animate' people will become annoying, tedious, unwieldy, uneconomical and obsolete. Let's get down to business. Which beliefs and activities do you want me to provide for your husband?"
- "Let him have artistic inclinations, but not in a literary direction. I don't want the machine to triumph where I, a human being, have failed. Let him be, well, for example, an actor. Would you be able to give him the appropriate set of movements?"
- "That set isn't particularly difficult. After receiving his partner's speech patterns, he'll raise his hands, yell, beat his chest and fall to his knees... He'll become a famous actor. Satisfied?"
- "In terms of beliefs... I don't want a husband who has the same views as me. That's boring. But I can't stand people who keep repeating the same thing day in and day out and call it ideological stability. Is it possible to arrange an entire scale of beliefs for my steel husband, from dramatically materialistic to sentimental liberalism?[Translator's note: "Scale" literally "keyboard"] Exclude only economic materialism and communism. That's too much distinction for a machine."
- "I'll do it all. You can turn on your husband according to your desire and mood."
- "Turn on... But how? Frequently? Every day, every hour, or..."
- "You can turn him on for several years, but you say you like variety, so turn him on for a day or two, or for a week. I'll show you the button on his forehead, which will need to be pressed accordingly."
- "Well, what about love? This is a delicate, but most important question. Actually, it's all unnatural. 'Turn him on', 'press the button on his forehead', all of this is a mechanical gimmick..."
- "You can also turn love on. By kissing him on his lips, you'll exacerbate the flowing current..."
- "Thank you so much. So any madwoman will be able turn him on and cuckquean me, pardon the expression, I can't agree to this machine."[Translator's note: "Cuckquean", literally "to wear horns"]
- "I guarantee you the complete fidelity of your future husband, I'll make the mechanism complicated. Only by pressing a certain button on his right shoulder do you activate the lip apparatus. When this set of movements is performed, you stop the motion, and again press a certain button on the back of his head."
- "Yes. Quite confusing. All this must be memorized, like a multiplication table."
- "As for 'unnatural', I advise you not to forget that most 'animate' men are turned on by kisses no less than the machine you despise. But regarding the specific nature of the movements that are to be included in this set, would you be so kind as to detail them to me in writing? I'm a scientist, a bachelor, I only know them in general terms, and your psychology and animation seem to have reached their climax here."
- "Hm, although it's not particularly easy for me to write about such things, I'll try..."
- "Maybe you'd like to see the production process itself?"
- "No. I know that it will be steel, and... 'This consciousness is enough for me'.[Editor note: "This consciousness is enough for me", from the Puskin opera "The Miserly Knight", scene two] Will he be ready soon?"
- "In a month. Don't leave yet. His appearance?"
- "Oh, yes! Tall, graying hair, a slightly upturned, abnormal nose, one of those that are called piquant, and certainly wears a pince-nez."
- "Very well."
II
Exactly a month later, I was strolling through the Moscow streets, no longer alone. By the arm, I was led by my steel husband.
The work was magnificent to the point of eeriness. Next to me, a proud, firm, confident, handsome man strode forward with an elastic, victorious step. Completely lively, bright lips smiled at me; I heard a sonorous voice and felt how here, nearby, my husband's electric heart was beating tensely, evenly and powerfully. All my sentimentality, which disgusted me, all my messianic aspirations, both personal and social, all my intellectual liberalism, all my inclinations towards ventriloquism, which have somehow taken on the form of prophecy, I've projected them all into the machine made according to my instructions.
Now I listened with pleasure to the steady, authoritative voice of my steel husband.
- "My darling. An artist can only live with a deep-seated belief in art's primacy above life. We all supposedly start from life, but then the part steadily absorbs the whole. Art is already higher than life because it anticipates the action of the forces in life which have not yet escaped from an inert dormant potency. Futurism - the art and craft - is something deeply unnatural, contrary to the logic of the world's creativity."
I squeezed the hand of my beloved, stupid machine, and felt the electric beat of his pulse.
- "My dear, this is a priest's sophism. Religion is dead and your clerical instincts are pushing you in search of the Absolute. From artistic creativity, where the scalpel of precise science has not yet penetrated, you've made a god yourself. Why do you detest futurists so fiercely? They've killed the theology of art, and turned its technique into public work. Learn the technique - and you will become an artist."
- "Why do you say what you don't mean? An artist has, after all, a piercingly clear intellect and intense emotion. In the products of his work, there remain traces of both. With this, a work of art goes beyond being considered just a piece of technology. And what is a machine without a worker, an airplane without an aviator? The creative spirit, strangled by matter, now understands where dependence on it lies. In the future - the realm of the spirit. And the proletarian revolution - truth, the hope and torment of the whole world - will lead, in spite of the will of its leaders, the resurrection of the dead, where the holy, desecrated Psyche, Sophia, and Soul will triumph."
Electric sparks gleamed behind my steel husband's pince-nez. Fortunately, glass is not electrically conductive, and with a somewhat insolent grin, even for a wife, I parried his glances.
Living with a machine endowed with the most heartwarming and audacious fantasies of animate creatures provided sumptuous feasts for my off-color cynical mockery. The remnants of my principles crumbled into fine dust with the embrace of this handsome machinery, my head spun around so, and so imbued was I with the so-called "emotions" of tenderness, passion, delight, that I sometimes doubted:
- "Wait: is it a machine? Did the old scoundrel deceive me?"
But with slight pressure on the barely palpable bulge on the back of his head, the "emotions" of love stopped. The machine was at rest. The electric heart beat slowed down. Prehistoric poets would have yearned for my husband with a grimace:
- "Blissful loving weariness fanned him with its chilled wings."
And at that moment, having my heart's content with ventriloquism, I touched his forehead with a playful caress, pushing the intellect button in the desired direction.
My steel husband smiled at me, fell silent, looked into the storefront window we were passing by, firmly but gently squeezed my elbow and spoke in the tone of one spoiled by women, tired, but still strong and insatiable, indifferent to "beginnings and ends", an intelligent viveur. [Editor note: French, one who enjoys life.] The machinery was functioning.
- "My dear, right, sometimes you look around: at the sun, at the snow, at the cheeks of women ruddy from frost, you hear some cracked waltz in a café, and you decide: this is life, eternal and imperishable. Everything else is nonsense. Everything else is from the devil. Agreed? But? Ha, ha, ha. You're a completely stupid, pedantic girl, trying to deceive me with your college philosophy and Bolshevik rigorism. Lo and behold, your communists are primarily people who are intelligent, sweet and love life."
I stopped in embarrassment, burned by the kiss of my mischievous steel husband.
- "You're crazy. They're looking at us. And now you're inconsistent. Just now, a minute before your last words, you cried about Psyche, killed by matter, and about the fact that the proletarian revolution brings about her resurrection..."
- "I said that? Madwoman. I was just parodying you. It was a joke."
I immediately became angry, and the frightened machine immediately went through the whole set of organic movements expressing repentance. He looked into my eyes, timidly and pleadingly shook my hand, justified himself in a conciliatory voice, and I was assured that's how all of this probably seemed.
The illusion of animation filled me with horror. Now I passionately wished that the tissues of my steel husband's body, impregnated with some kind of compound, would become electrically conductive, and then I would be certain that in the veins of this self-confident, tall, strong, beautiful, graying machinery, instead of blood, was an electric current circulating with power capable of destroying the entire city.
However, I took possession of myself. We came to the theater where my husband worked. The play started. They clapped furiously, cried out, approached me, scrutinized me from head to toe, and lashed me with their howls of admiration, wails of delight, and squeals of curiosity.
- "Your husband performs with his nerves. It's amazing, he'll eventually die on stage!"
- "Where did you meet your husband?"
- "How handsome your husband is!"
- "Your husband's voice is like a Stradivarius violin."
- "It's his very soul, his soul! It's an old soul, the great and pure soul of a Russian actor!" - the phrase was excitedly emphasized.
- "And where exactly did you meet your husband?"
- "I met my husband as soon as he came into the light, in the laboratory of a Moscow chemist and electrician, his father."
I was not understood. Then I heard how my words were passed on in strict confidence, as a piquant anecdote. There was no limit to my resentment and cynicism.
Time passed; but I, through the usual human inertia, couldn't reconcile myself with the fact that my husband was a machine. My friend and teacher, the engineer, evinced the most humiliating contempt, with a touch of pity for me, whenever we met. Indeed, he treated me in the same way that I would treat a beaten, whining dog.
- "Indeed you can't comprehend the simple axiom: that extra-spatial phenomena 'soul', 'psyche', and 'experience' don't exist? You're not observing them. Your husband gives you everything you need, even more than your 'animate person' could give you. My mechanical son will be protected from 'fatigue', 'low spirits', 'spleen' and other such health problems generated by weak, liquid blood and a strained, worn out sack of meat - the heart."
- "All of that is true, but being conscious of the fact that he's steel poisons my entire domestic idyll, not to mention the upper reaches of my spirit. I cannot reconcile myself to the fact that this machine is fooling everyone, and himself, with his imaginary animation..."
- "What animation? You yourself wanted me to give him the organic speech patterns that belonged to the people of an older era. Of course his vocal cords produce the words: 'soul', 'Sophia', 'Apollo', 'Christ', 'Dionysus', 'World Spirit', words invented by exploiters."
- "Listen. I just hate seeing how he drinks the electric wine you've concocted, which you gave, contrary to all the laws of human gastronomy, the flavor of port wine. It's sheer madness. You see, I'll go crazy, I'll lose my mind. Yes, I'm a real person, not a damned doll. I don't want to see nature trampled down."
- "Give me back your steel husband and go find some animate fool. I'll get more use out of him in my laboratory than you have in your bedroom."
- "Get the hell out! I do know something about you. You're able to exhaust even a machine."
Oh, with what pleasure would I have torn off the meager lower half of the scientist's face, clinging to his forehead!..
III
In essence, why should I feel unhappy? The woman question, the physical side of love, the sexual problem, break the backs of the women of our transitional period, but for me, they were resolved with a mechanical - a synonym for the word magical - ease. I couldn't bear children from my steel husband, and I would be blessed if I could finally acquire a method, pure and elegant like the most delicate physical experience, of propagating the human race.
And the poem of our passion was in no way inferior to the Song of Songs, and it was not for nothing that I worked for three days in a row on compiling a detailed list for the set of organic movements expressing the love-emotion.
A particularly painful, furious and intoxicating passion was bestowed upon woman and machine during the winter blizzard evenings and the hot spring thunderstorms. In the cold, we want to warm ourselves, and the thunderstorm charges us with a fierce energy, that tears at the nether regions of the body.
Usually I approached my steel husband, embraced him with my right arm, and tossed my left in a playful catlike movement over his right shoulder, then "activated the lip apparatus," in the terms of the old engineer.
My husband was transformed. With an illuminated face, he tightly squeezed me with his beautiful strong hands. The electric current in his veins began to pulsate with tenfold force. The heart worked sternly and intensely, intoxicated by its accumulated electrical energy, pumping it throughout the body, "enveloped in love." And my poor, neurotic, worn-out heart was torn with passion and fear. Would this incredibly complex mechanism suddenly fail from an excess of action? I'll be killed by the first electrical charge that shoots out.
"And," I thought, "who knows? If I applied the same techniques at the right moment to a man of flesh and blood, perhaps I would have achieved the same brilliant results."
However, I've found that the embrace of animate beings is quite distant from the embrace of a power plant.
My steel husband whispered:
- "I love you, I love you, my sweet, sullen girl. I won't give you up to anyone, I won't leave you."
- "Why do you love me? I'm very stubborn, very angry. These traits, alas, aren't cleansed by beauty. I'm just like all the devils."
- "Yes, that's why I love you. For your inconsistent, selfish, femininely sensual, magnificent animal mind. I love that you certainly want to escape womanhood but cannot. You're vain, lazy, you try to be intellectual, but you remain obstinate, as incomprehensible as a wild animal is incomprehensible and mysterious..."
- "Now, listen to why I love you. You're a wonderfully equipped machine, warranted for my entire life. I, if I wanted to, could bequeath you to someone. You'd be turned on by her gentle kissing and caressing, and at the touch of that gorgeous minx's little hand, you'd blurt out all of your thoughts."
- "Stop it, my friend, my dear. Why are you so crass, so tedious, boring and ridiculous? You annoy me with such awkward and, please forgive me, vapid jokes."
- "Well, I won't. True, this is stupid. So you won't leave me? Ever?"
- "I'm an old, gray-haired man. Remember:
Oh, how in our declining years
We love more tenderly and more superstitiously...
Shine, shine, parting light
Last love, evening dawn![Editor's note: From the poem "Last Love" by Fyodor Tyutchev.][Translator's note: Rhyme scheme in Russian ABAB]
I'm an old man, and infidelity is a luxury of youth."
Still, this sentimental steel cylinder tickled my anger. With the most devoted tenderest voice, I cooed:
- "Yes, sweetheart, you won't be unfaithful to me, unless of course, by dumb luck, some lady kisses you and puts her paws all over your right shoulder."
- "Why are you talking like this? Well, I love it when your hand is on my shoulder, but really, any woman, should she do the same..."
- "Any. Any. Whoever's hand winds up the clock, it will run the same way."
Such teasing incensed and irritated my steel husband. He seriously demanded that I stop such "strange" jokes and was flustered until, with slight pressure on the back of his head, I stopped the love current flow, and turned on his mental apparatus.
This game both engaged and disturbed me. On one hand, a decrepit sense of morality reproached me in a toothless whisper for violating the laws of nature. I was ready to pore over the criminal code in search of articles punishing unnatural sexual relations with a machine; and on the other hand, every day I received a horse's dose of confidence that my steel husband is the most real, genuine person with all the responses intrinsic to a person, and with all of a person's interests and inclinations.
- "But he doesn't feel," I cried to myself, "he doesn't think, he has no soul, he's only mechanical, he's only electrical, he's only non-conductive external tissue, elastic, so warm and adorable, humanly colored."
The grimace of the enormously foreheaded engineer flashed before my eyes:
- "A soul. What is a soul, according to you? Something elusive, extra-spatial, Descartes's liquid or an infant who is carried away by an angel on an icon depicting the Assumption of the Virgin. [Editor's note: Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, physiologist. He represented the soul in the form of a thinking substance, located in a small piece of iron in the brain.] Your soul, your psyche, is only movement. How can you prove the animation of yourself and others?"
- "I, for one, am not turned on by anyone: neither to love, nor to ideology."
- "'Love', 'ideology', yes, by the fact that you use these words, an empty husk, you prove that you've been turned on a long time ago, back at school, back in your home, and now your tongue automatically repeats these verbal formulas, while your brain gets tired in a fruitless effort to react to a non-existent irritation. It's beaten down by the words repeated day to day and delivered through the auditory nerves: 'spirit', 'ideology'. Your brain will turn to mush under the blows of these extra-spatial scourges."
I was forced to give credit to the work of this accursed scholarly sorcerer. My steel husband could be turned on once and for all in everything. But I couldn't risk giving the machine unlimited freedom. After all, this freedom would certainly entail betrayal, divisions of beliefs and of our familial scenes, because it would bring all the human delusions and weakness to my steel husband's character...
He could say to himself: I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.
IV
We returned from the theater at one o'clock in the morning. On this memorable tragic evening, the extraordinary genius of my husband's dramaturgy reached dizzying heights. In my chair in the stalls, I was clearly feeling and realizing that it was impossible to live like this any longer, I couldn't reconcile myself with the triumph of this machine. That's why I decided to destroy the machine. This mad thought jumped from fear to anger in huge, illogical bounds.
- "He musn't dare so, he shouldn't be so, that damned electric steel machine. He bestows the delights of art upon the world, and upon me - the invigorating intoxication of a passion, fuller, stronger and purer than people can bestow. I don't want to lose those last vestiges of faith in human, liquid blood, and maybe, in an infant, carried away by an angel. I must, by all means, convince the machine that it is a machine.
And it was strange: an unprecedented sadness and an unprecedented tenderness, and the sharp coldness of a painful foreboding, immediately seemed like they were all cutting wrinkles into my face and my heart. Decisions involving an excess of love, or an excess of hate, always age.
And my husband, all sparkling with affection, joy, or perhaps just electricity, asked me:
- "Why don't you ever drink from the same bottle as me? Well, I beg you, don't refuse me today. Here, allow me to pour."
The electric wine burned with a yellow-red, gloomy menace of an enslaved sun. The old engineer assured me that the wine was harmless to miserable creatures with minds and an unclean liquid called "blood", but until now I hadn't drank from it, on the same principle as "never drink engine oil".
Today I decided to. I clinked glasses with my husband and, not without some hidden fear, knocked back the glass in one gulp.
Intoxication? No. I don't know what to call it. Rather, a clarification, reducing the coherence of consciousness to the point of absurdity, perhaps.
My steel husband wearily laid on the sofa. Poor power plant, what a shock I'll give you.
Jokingly, in moments of intimate tenderness, I called him my steel husband, and he was not indignant. He was sure that the epithet referred to his spiritual strength: endurance, firmness, inflexibility and fidelity.
- "Why do I sometimes notice some kind of hopelessness in your love for me, as if you do not believe in me, or in yourself, or in our passion? You're trying to refrain from something, but you're not able to."
- "Maybe I don't trust or love either of us. Or maybe I'm afraid of losing you."
- "All in vain. This is already my last love, 'a farewell smile to my sad sunset'.[Editor note: Paraphrasing the final lines of A. Pushkin's poem "Elegy" ("Mad years faded joy..."): And maybe - on my sad sunset, Love will flash with a farewell smile."] I should be afraid of your agility, my legs are too old to run away, and my hands are too powerless to break the chains."
- "Yes, you're right. I am your first, last and only love."
A sly, teasing smile, that smile, the smile of a lively, frivolous person, parted from my husband's lips.
- "Chronologically, of course, not the first, but merely the last. But in itself, and the first, and last, and only."
- "And chronologically the first."
- "Well, have it your way: 'shaved, cut, no, shaved.'"
- "Tell me something else. Enough with the chronology. Are you happy?"
- "I'm happy, like how one can be happy at a sunset, before old age. Now I'm on the very edge of joy. It's like not blood in my veins, but electricity, to put it banally."
- "That banal expression is quite close to the truth."
- "Is it? So much the better for me and... for you."
However, I was afraid that a dangerous fondness for the machine would interfere with my intention to return it to the category of objects, as happened several times before. But due to human weakness, I certainly wanted to start with a quarrel, to find an excuse, something to latch onto. To declare simply, honestly and openly - "know that you are a machine!" - I couldn't. Only in a fit of blind rage would I throw this insult in the face of my steel husband. And here I erred: I reckoned with the machine, as I would reckon with a man. I tried to injure, insult, and irritate.
I lightly scratched the sore spot.
- "Well, my sweet electric battery..."
- "My friend."
- "I'm here, my dear cylinder."
- "This is silly."
- "Let go, please.
Oh how hard
The squeeze of your steel right hand."[Editor's note: Paraphrase of Don Juan's dialog in A. Pushkin's tragedy "The Stone Guest", scene 4.]
- "You know, everything's fine in small portions. You want to ruin my evening."
Ah-ha. "My evening". Finally, I understood the hidden shameful reason for my bitterness in "my evening." Where I was ridiculed, the machine was greeted with worship. It wouldn't be so bad to discharge this walking electricity among the crowd, stupefied with emotions, it wouldn't be so bad to use this steel skeleton for grinding their fragile weak heads that have long lost their own passions and their own thoughts. These idiots blink their eyes and ears at the machine built in their likeness and exclaim: "Oh, it's nerves! It's power! It's performance!". Yes, unfortunate fools, this is power, even if the machine performs more talentedly, loves more intensely, than you're able to love and perform, imbued with contempt for your own nature. After all, you have only liquid, coagulating blood in your veins and only a fragile, frayed sack in your chest.
- "What are you thinking about for so long? Forget about everything, look at me."
How amazingly my moods changed on this last night of love, probably under the influence of electric hops. I decided to succumb to a dangerous passion and, at its climax - to poison it. If I can't endure it, I'll remain a loving slave of a machine for the rest of my life. Man will suffer the last shameful defeat.
And am I right? How can I prove the "animation" of myself or someone else? He gave me everything that love could give. Everyone would think that I'm crazy if I publicly declared: "This man is a machine."
The poor frenzied elegiac passions of Dante and Beatrice, Laura and Petrarch, Romeo and Juliet. Your hymns are enclosed in the keys of the monkey-machinery, and your secret sweet whispers now fly from lips colored with the ominous warmth of electricity.
- "Listen. Give me your word that you'll take everything I say seriously and believe me."
- "Why? It's unnecessary, unnecessary."
I shuddered from this involuntary cry - a plea for mercy. In the eyes of the creature, to which I no longer gave any name, I read the timidity and human fear that lies before the ugly and inexplicable.
- "Someday you must know. I can't take it any more. Give me your word."
He even held out his hands:
- "My Father, let this cup pass from me."[Translator's note: Matthew 26:39]
This strong mechanical object stood now, trying to contract himself, as if not to be crushed.
- "I promise to believe everything you tell me."
- "Then know: you're a machine. You're a mechanical man, constructed by the old engineer who visits us, in his laboratory."
- "This can't be! You've gone mad! You're jesting! You're mistaken!"
In the last two words were the last spark of hope and a completely terrifying certainty. The machine convinced itself that it was a machine. He would be happy if it turned out that I really had gone mad.
- "I haven't gone mad and I'm not mistaken. You're a machine with a backbone of some sort of alloy. Your composition includes steel, electricity, all sorts of proteins, acids, and other substances that I can't name because I'm not familiar with chemistry. But, you know, there's no need to despair. The engineer assures me that the most perfect people are those whose mode of production is the one that he's discovered. They belong to the future. After all, there's no such thing as the spirit, it's all nonsense. The main thing is movement. And your movements are more harmonious and more expedient than ordinary people's movements."
Did you notice the absurdity of the tirade that followed the first shock? I suddenly, I don't remember exactly which "suddenly" that night, realized that I was committing an outrageously terrible, savage and unforgivable crime. I uttered the words: "You're a machine" and immediately doubted them. Because I don't know anything, I don't know anything, ultimately.
He looked at me with the same loving gaze. Well, call me a fool, or whatever you want. But I saw the most true love in the eyes of the automaton. Let it be neither monstrous, nor worst of all, ridiculous.
He became unusually calm. For about ten seconds he stood, staring at me, then with a heavy mechanical step he went to the door. His movements lost their free elastic flexibility. The machine returned to its essence. At that moment, I really went mad. I half-consciously rushed after my departing husband, and with a trembling hand I turned his head towards me and pressed the intellect button on his forehead, wanting to divert the automaton's thoughts in another direction.
He smiled, shook my hand and left.
I heard his voice from behind the door, sadly playful and firm:
- "The apparatus is broken."
V
For several days my steel husband didn't leave his office. What was he doing in there? I cautiously walked past the door. Did I know what a rebellious, deprived machine could do? A flywheel can crush a person and turn him into minced meat while he just gapes at it. And I could not forget the bewildered, all too human speechlessness from the shock that met my steel husband.
I fell into a bright vacant serenity; I immediately severed the passion and the machine's fatal influence from my life. I knew that this would not go in vain, that the most intimate proximity to a power plant in the form of a beautiful amorous man turned my whole world upside down forever. At the same time, I was mercilessly burning with the realization that anything further would have killed me. I did not foresee, nor in the least bit comprehend, what was to come.
One day, between morning and night, I jumped up with a fit of palpitations. The consciousness of the important hour, which was already departing, threw me out of bed. I rushed to my steel husband's room. An unlocked door and an empty brightly lit room. On the desk, a large envelope, with "To my wife" written in massive letters, attracted my desperately pounding heart.
"My dear!
I'm leaving to kill myself. I've found a way to destroy this damned artificial body, my 'self'. Is it just my 'self'?
I'll go far away. In such a strong electric discharge, I don't want to destroy hundreds of people with me, people with meat, nerves and bones.
Well, I'm not such a stranger to the forest. Everything eventually returns to the inexhaustible maternal bosom of cosmic energy.
I say: 'I loved, I felt, I was quite a psychic being, despite the one who made me to order in his laboratory.' How did this miracle happen? I know how. I now see, and bitterly and painfully evaluate my six months spent as a blind, dead machine. No. That's not right. I was dead for the first month, for two, I was a machine, subject to your cruel, stubborn and suffering hand. You agonized, setting in motion an inert electric steel apparatus. You wanted, without admitting it to yourself, to animate the machine. And you've achieved your goal. Love is stronger than death, stronger than the dead iron stubbornness of machines. I came to life for love and creativity. I experienced fear and disgust that I didn't understand when you, in your cruelty, unaware of the miracle you brought about, called me a machine. I understand it now. The man in me was vaguely aware of his origins.
I can't remain near you. I can feel inside of myself, in my light, flexible and durable metal frame, in my electric heart, and I'm terrified. But that's not the point. The point is - your disgust! And without your love, I don't want to, nor can I, live.
The old man was mistaken. His machines with 'a single system of organic movements' will not conquer the world. The first one has already humbly left, submitting to a person. During these three days, there were moments when I succumbed to an exorbitant superhuman pride.
But... I could conquer the whole world, except for you: all women would love me, except for you, and I would refuse it all. Well, isn't this the first case in the history of mankind when a machine voluntarily, out of love for its creator, gives way to him and withdraws? Goodbye. None of the living people, born from mothers, will ever love you the way your Steel Husband loved you."
- "Well, what do you say to that, you old donkey?"
- "An amazing case. However, this confirms my theory. Extra-dimensional ghosts, words without flesh, destroy not only people made from meat, but also mechanical ones." - his pupils narrowed... The old man bent over his drawings.
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