Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/86

Rh enormous—a yellow parabola. I was walking up and down the room suffering. How could I meet her, after all that happened? O-90, I mean. I felt plainly, to my right, how the eyes of my neighbor were staring at me. I clearly saw the wrinkles on his forehead like a row of yellow, illegible lines; and for some reason I was certain that those lines dealt with me.

A quarter of an hour before twenty-two the cheerful, rosy whirlwind was in my room; the firm ring of her rosy arms closed about my neck. Then I felt how that ring grew weaker and weaker; and then it broke and her arms dropped

“You are not the same, not the same man! You are no longer mine!”

“What curious terminology: ‘mine’ I never belonged—” I faltered. It suddenly occurred to me: true, I had belonged to no one before, but now Is it not clear that now I no longer live in our rational world but in the ancient delirious world, in a world of the square root of minus one?

The curtains fell. There to my right my neighbor let his book drop at that moment from the table to the floor. And through the last narrow space between the curtain and the floor I saw a yellow hand pick up the book. Within I felt: "Only to seize that hand with all my power.”

“I thought I wanted to meet you during the hour for the walk. I wanted I must talk to you about so many things, so many ”

Poor, dear O-90. Her rosy mouth was a crescent with its horns downward. But I could not tell her everything, could I, if for no other reason than that it would make her an accomplice to my crimes? I knew that she would not have the courage to report me to the Bureau of Guardians, consequently

“My dear O-, I am sick, I am exhausted. I went again today to the Medical Bureau; but it is nothing, it will pass. But let us not talk about it; let us forget it.”