Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/73

Rh I) grasped my other wild, hairy, heavily breathing self forcibly. I (the real I) said to him, to R-, “In the name of the Well-Doer, please forgive me. I am very sick; I don’t sleep; I do not know what is the matter with me.”

A swiftly passing smile appeared on the thick lips.

“Yes, yes, I understand, I understand. I am familiar with all this—theoretically, of course. Good-by.”

At the door he turned around like a little black ball, came back to the table and put a book upon it. “This is my latest book. I came to bring it to you. Almost forgot. Good-by.” (“b” like a splash.) The little ball rolled out.

I am alone. Or, to be more exact, I am tête-à-tête with that other self. I sit in the armchair and, having crossed my legs, I watch curiously from some indefinite “there” how I, myself, am shriveling in my bed!

Why, oh, why is it, that for three years R-, O-, and I were so friendly together and now suddenly—one word only about that other female, about I-330, and Is it possible that that insanity called love and jealousy does exist, and not only in the idiotic books of the ancients? What seems most strange is that I, I! Equations, formulae, figures, and suddenly this! I can’t understand it, I can’t! Tomorrow I shall go to R- and tell him No, it isn’t true; I shall not go; neither tomorrow nor day after tomorrow, nor ever I can’t, I do not want to see him. This is the end. Our triangle is broken up.

I am alone. It is evening. There is a light fog. The sky is covered by a thin, milky-golden tissue. If I only knew what is there—higher. If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?