Ponovni napad
71
You still don’t know who Julija is, do you? I know very well what she is. She is both something outside of me, and something that emerges through me. She is something that erupts when the iron dam, the normal me, dissolves.
The angel opines that Julija is my response to the fact that I was born unfinished. “Why are you hiding her?”
I cry in spirit: “Stop calling me unfinished … !” My facial expression becomes painful. “Stop!!” Buries the face in both hands, shakes her head.
…
“You said I was ‘born unfinished’! Who talks like that?! I would never say something similar even to a person born without legs!” Covers her eyes.
The angel says that he feels sorry for me.
72
I look at your form with tired eyes, and say in a calm voice, “This obsession with symmetry, perfect shapes, and completeness has gone too far. I may be hiding behind layers of tall walls, but I can still feel. And I feel deeply.”
The angel observes that I constructed the Redoubt to control my own imperfection with its flawlessness.
Me: “It is not flawless. It’s something tailored to my taste.”
Angel: “Is that so? Why do you not want to live in it, then?”
Me: Solemn tone. “It is something that keeps me upright. Something necessary.”
The angel retorts that he does not see the point in my uprightness; that he sees no court and no assembly that could witness it. “Are you so upright because you are afraid that you might break down in public?”
Me: “Julija is something that comes to me only when I summon her; she cannot come on her own, so there is no fear of ‘breaking down in public’. This world will not tear me apart me and reshape me to its liking. And neither will you.”
The angel replies that I am not afraid of Julija herself, but what she confirms when she appears.
73
On the necessity to stay upright: I do it for the sake of my mind’s eye. For the sake of the principles I deem just and worthy of admiration, after having them established and thoroughly defined.
The angel says, “Let it be so,” and takes one step back.
74
I spurn your opinion that the Red Fortress rejected me. The tilted perspective most likely had its origin in the fact that as a child, I had always loved looking at the seventeenth century etchings of mediæval castles. If anything, it did not reject me: it comforted me.
The angel observes that the Red Fortress consequently represents a refuge from the rejection from below and retracts his previous interpretation.