Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/134

Rh RECORD TWENTY-THREE

FlowersThe Dissolution of a CrystalIf Only (?)

They say there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why not suppose the existence of flowers that bloom only once in a thousand years? We may have known nothing about them until now only because today is the “once in a thousand years.”

Happy and dizzy, I walked downstairs to the controller on duty, and quickly under my gaze, all around me and silently, the thousand-year-old buds burst, and everything was blooming: armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark heavy eyes, the polished columns of the banisters, the handkerchief which someone had lost on the stairs, the small, ink-blotted desk of the controller, and the tender, brown, somewhat freckled cheeks of U-, Everything seemed not ordinary, but new, tender, rosy, moist. U- took the pink stub from me while the blue, aromatic moon, hanging from an unseen branch, shone through the glass of the wall and over the head of U-. With a solemn gesture I pointed my finger and said:

“The moon. You see?”

U- glanced at me, then at the number of the stub, and again made that familiar, charmingly innocent movement with which she fixes the fold of the unif between her knees.