Are you familiar with this strange condition? It is night and you have fallen asleep and then you open your eyes in the blackness and suddenly: you have become lost and you start to feel around quickly, quickly looking for something familiar and solid—the wall, the lamp, the chair. I felt around just like that in the State Gazette —quickly, quickly—and here is what I found: YESTERDAY, THE LONG AND IMPATIENTLY AWAITED DAY OF THE ONE VOTE TOOK PLACE. FOR THE 48TH TIME THE BENEFACTOR, WHO HAS PROVEN HIS UNSHAKABLE WISDOM MANY TIMES OVER, WAS UNANIMOUSLY CHOSEN. THE CELEBRATION WAS CLOUDED BY A
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From a few pages earlier:
“I ask those who vote ‘Yes’ to please raise your hands.”
If only I could look him straight in the eye, like before, with devotion: “Here I am, my whole self. My whole self! Take me!” But I couldn’t now summon the courage. With effort, as if all my joints had rusted, I raised my hand.
The rustling of millions of hands. Someone’s stifled “Ah!” And I could feel that something had already started and it was falling headlong, but I didn’t understand what it was, and I didn’t have the strength to—I didn’t dare look . . .
“Who says ‘No’?”
This was always the most magnificent moment of the holiday: everyone continues to sit, immobile, joyfully bowing their heads to the beneficial yoke of the Cipher of ciphers. But now, to my horror, I heard another rustling: a very light sound, like a sigh, but more audible than the brass pipes of the Hymn earlier. It’s like the last sigh of a person’s life—barely audible—and yet everyone’s faces blanch on hearing it, and cold drops appear on their foreheads . . .
I raised my eyes and . . .
In the hundredth part of a second, the hairspring of a clock, I saw: thousands of hands wave up—“No”—and fall again.
