Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/221

Rh “Listen, I-330, I must I must  everything! No, no, one moment—let me have ​a glass of water first.”

My mouth was as dry as if it were lined with blotting paper. I poured a glass of water but I couldn’t I put the glass back upon the table, and with both hands firmly grasped the carafe.

Now I Noticed that the blue smoke came from a cigarette. She brought the cigarette to her lips, and eagerly drew in and swallowed the smoke as I did water; then she said:

“Don’t. Be silent. Don’t you see it matters very little? I came, anyway. They are waiting for me below Do you want these minutes, which are our last ?”

Abruptly she threw the cigarette on the floor and bent backward, over the side of the chair, to reach the button in the wall (it was quite difficult to do), and I remember how the chair swayed slightly, how two of its legs were lifted. Then the curtains fell.

She came close to me and embraced me. Her knees, through her dress, were like a slow, gentle, warm, enveloping, and permeating poison

Suddenly (it happens at times) you plunge into sweet, warm sleep—when all at once, as if something pricks you, you tremble and your eyes are again widely open. So it was now; there on the floor in her room were the pink checks stamped with traces of footsteps, some of them bore the letter F- and some figures Plus and minus fused within my mind into one lump  I could not say even now what sort of feeling it was, but I crushed her so that she cried out with pain

One more minute out of those ten or fifteen; her head thrown back, lying on the bright white pillow, her eyes half-closed, a sharp, sweet line of teeth And all this reminded me in an irresistible, absurd, torturing way about something forbidden, something not permissible at that moment. More tenderly, more cruelly, I pressed her to myself, brighter grew the blue traces of my fingers