Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/43

Rh RECORD SEVEN

An Eyelash Taylor Henbane and Lily of the Valley

Night. Green, orange, blue. The red royal instrument. The yellow dress. Then a brass Buddha. Suddenly it lifted the brass eyelids and sap began to flow from it, from Buddha. Sap also from the yellow dress. Even in the mirror, drops of sap, and from the large bed and from the children’s bed and soon from myself It is horror, mortally sweet horror!

I woke up. Soft blue light, the glass of the walls, of the chairs, of the the table was glimmering. This calmed me. My heart stopped palpitating. Sap! Buddha! How absurd! I am sick, it is clear; I never saw dreams before. They say that to see dreams was a common normal thing with ancients. Yes, after all, their life was a whirling carousel: green, orange, Buddha, sap. But we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a serious mental disease.

I Is it possible that my brain, this precise, clean, glittering mechanism, like a chronometer without a speck of dust on it, is  ? Yes, it is, now. I really feel there in the brain some foreign body like an eyelash in the eye. One does not feel one’s whole body, but this eye with a hair in it; one cannot forget it for a second

The cheerful, crystalline sound of the bell at my head. Seven o’clock. Time to get up. To the right and to the left