Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/63

Rh within forty-eight hours fails to report to the Bureau is considered ’”

My heart banged so forcibly that the iron bars bent. If I were not sitting like a little boy, how stupid! I was caught like a little boy, and stupidly I kept silent. I felt I was in a net; neither my legs nor my arms

She stood up and stretched herself lazily. She pressed the button, and the curtains on all four walls fell with a slight rustle. I was cut off from the rest of the world, alone with her.

She was somewhere behind me, near the closet door. The unif was rustling, falling. I was listening, all listening. I remembered—no, it glistened in my mind for one hundredth of a second—I once had to calculate the curve of a new type of street membrane. (These membranes are handsomely decorated and are placed over all the avenues, registering all street conversations for the Bureau of Guardians.) I remembered a rosy, concave, trembling membrane, a strange being consisting of one organ only, an ear. I was at that moment such a membrane.

Now the “click” of the snap at her collar, at her breast, and lower. The glassy silk rustled over her shoulders and knees, over the floor. I heard—and it was clearer than actually seeing—I heard how one foot stepped out of the grayish-blue heap of silk, then the other Soon I’d hear the creak of the bed, and

The tensely stretched membrane trembled and registered the silence—no, the sharp, hammerlike blows of the heart against the iron bars, and endless pauses between beats. And I heard, saw, how she, behind me, hesitated for a second, thinking. The door of the closet It slammed; again silk silk

“Well, all right.”

I turned around. She was dressed in a saffron-yellow dress of an ancient style. This was a thousand times worse than if she had not been dressed at all. Two sharp points glowing with rosiness through the thin tissue; two burn-