We, Yevgeny Zamyatin [read a book .TXT] 📗

she there, behind her lowered curtains? What would she say? What would she do in a second? How to learn it? How to calculate it, since she comes from beyond, from the wild ancient land of dreams? I looked at her in silence. My ribs were iron bars. The space for the heart was too small.⁠ ⁠… When she speaks her face is like a swiftly revolving, glittering wheel; you cannot see the separate bars. But at that moment the wheel was motionless. I saw a strange combination: dark eyebrows running right to the temples⁠—a sharp, mocking triangle; and still another dark triangle with its apex upward⁠—two deep wrinkles from the nose to the angles of the mouth. And these two triangles somehow contradicted each other. They gave the whole face that disagreeable, irritating X, or cross; a face obliquely marked by a cross.

The wheel started to turn; its bars blurred.

“So you did not go to the Bureau of Guardians after all?”

“I did⁠ ⁠… I did not feel well⁠ ⁠… I could not.”

“Yes? I thought so; something must have prevented you, matters little what (sharp teeth⁠—a smile). But now you are in my hands. You remember: ‘Any Number who 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 street membrane of a new type. (These membranes are handsomely decorated and are placed on 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-button at her collar, at her breast, and⁠ ⁠… lower. The glassy silk rustled over her shoulders and knees, over the floor. I heard⁠—and this was clearer than actual 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 hammer-like 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, through the thin tissue glowing with rosiness, two burning embers piercing through ashes; two tender, round knees.⁠ ⁠…

She was sitting in a low armchair. In front of her on a small square table, I noticed a bottle filled with something poisonously green and two small glasses on thin legs. In the corner of her mouth she had a very thin paper tube; she was ejecting smoke formed by the burning of that ancient smoking substance whose name I do not now remember.

The membrane was still vibrating. Within the sledgehammer was pounding the red-hot iron bars of my chest. I heard distinctly every blow of the hammer, and⁠ ⁠… what if she too heard it?

But she continued to produce smoke very calmly; calmly she looked at me; and nonchalantly she flicked ashes on the pink check!

With as much self-control as possible I asked, “If you still feel that way, why did you have me assigned to you? And why did you make me come here?”

As if she had not heard at all, she poured some of the green liquid from the bottle into a small glass and sipped it.

“Wonderful liqueur! Want some?”

Then I understood; alcohol! Like lightning there came to memory what I saw yesterday: the stony hand of the Well-Doer, the unbearable blade of the electric ray; there on the Cube, the head thrown backward, the stretched-out body! I shivered.

“Please listen,” I said, “You know, do you not, that anyone who poisons himself with nicotine, more particularly with alcohol, is severely treated by the United State?”

Dark brows raised high to the temples, the sharp mocking triangle.

“ ‘It is more reasonable to annihilate a few than to allow many to poison themselves.⁠ ⁠… And degeneration,’⁠ ⁠… etc.⁠ ⁠… This is true to the point of indecency.”

“Indecency?”

“Yes. To let out into the street such a group of bald-headed naked little truths. Only imagine please. Imagine, say, that persistent admirer of mine, S-, well, you know him. Then imagine: if he should discard the deception of clothes and appear in public in his true form⁠ ⁠… oh!” She laughed. But I clearly saw her lower, sorrowful triangle; two deep grooves from the nose to the mouth. And for some reason these grooves made me think: that double-curved being, half-hunched, with winglike ears⁠—he embraced her? her, such⁠ ⁠… Oh!

Naturally, I try now merely to express my abnormal feelings of that moment. Now, as I write, I understand perfectly that all this is as it should be; that he, S-4711, like any other honest Number has a perfect right to the joys of life and that it would be unjust.⁠ ⁠… But I think the point is quite clear.

I-330 laughed a long, strange laugh. Then she cast a look at me, into me.

“The most curious thing is that I am not in the least afraid of you. You are such a dear, I am sure of it! You would never think of going to the Bureau and