Then it began.
His hand groped for a long
time, grappling air: there was no clock and no table. Sutulin opened his eyes
at once. In an instant he was sitting up, looking dazedly round the room. The
table that usually stood right here, at the head of the bed, had moved off into
the middle of a faintly familiar, large but ungainly room.
Everything was the same:
the skimpy, threadbare rug that had trailed after the table somewhere up ahead
of him, and the photographs, and the stool, and the yellow patterns on the
wallpaper. But they were all strangely spread out inside the expanded room
cube.
"Quadraturin,"
thought Sutulin, "is terrific!"
And he immediately set
about rearranging the furniture to fit the new space. But nothing worked: the
abbreviated rug, when moved back beside the bed, exposed worn, bare
floorboards; the table and the stool, pushed by habit against the head of the
bed, had disencumbered an empty corner latticed with cobwebs and littered with
shreds and tatters, once artfully masked by the corner's own crowdedness and
the shadow of the table. With a triumphant, but slightly frightened smile, Sutulin
went all round his new, practically squared square, scrutinizing every detail.
He noted with displeasure that the room had grown more in some places than in
others: an external corner, the angle of which was now obtuse, had made the
wall askew; Quadraturin, apparently, did not work as well on internal corners;
carefully as Sutulin had applied the essence, the experiment had produced
somewhat uneven results...
...Then he switched on the
light and stood there for a long time, his arms spread flat against the wall,
his heart beating wildly: this he had not expected - not at all.
The Quadraturin was still
working. During the eight or nine hours Sutulin had been out, it had pushed the
walls at least another seven feet apart; the floorboards, stretched by invisible
rods, rang out at his first step - like organ pipes. The entire room, distended
and monstrously misshapen, was beginning to frighten and torment him. Without
taking off his coat, Sutulin sat down on the stool and surveyed his spacious
and at the same time oppressive coffin-shaped living box, trying to understand
what had caused this unexpected effect. Then he remembered: he hadn't done the
ceiling - the essence had run out. His living box was spreading only sideways,
without rising even an inch upwards.
"Stop. I have to stop
this quadraturinizing thing. Or I'll..."
Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky,
1926
translation by Joanne
Turnbull from Glas 39
Evicted From His Own Head:
On Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky - The Nation
Geoff Manaugh (BldgBlog). A series of four
lectures at SCI-Arc on expansionary geographies including the fiction of China Mieville and
Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky: Quadraturin And Other Expansionary Tales
