Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/115

it also seems droll to me, that yesterday I was thinking, even relating in these pages about a gray blot! All that was only the “softening of the surface” which is normally as hard as diamond, like our walls. (There is an ancient saying: “Shooting beans at a stone wall . . .”)

Sixteen o’clock. I did not go for the supplementary walk; who knows, she might come now, when the sun is so noisily bright?

I am almost the only one in this room. Through the walls full of sunshine I see for a distance to the right and to the left, and below strings of other rooms, repeating each other as if in a mirror, hanging in the air and empty. Only on the bluish stairway, striped by the golden ink of the sun, a thin, gray shadow is seen rising. Already I hear steps, and I see through the door, and I feel a smile pasted to my face like a plaster. But it passed to another stairway and down. The click of the switchboard! I threw myself to that little white slit and . . . an unfamiliar male Number! (A consonant means a male Number.)

The elevator groaned and stopped. A big, slovenly, slanting forehead stood before me, and the eyes . . . They impressed me strangely; it seemed as if the man talked with his eyes which were deep under the forehead.

“Here is a letter from her, for you.” (From under the awning of that forehead.) “She asked that everything . . . as requested in the letter . . . without fail.” This, too, from under the forehead, from under the awning, and he turned, looked about.

“No, there is nobody, nobody. Quickly! the letter!”

He put the letter in my hand and went out without a word.

A pink check fell out of the envelope. It was hers, her check! Her tender perfume! I felt like running to catch up with that wonderful under-the-forehead one. A tiny note followed the check from the envelope; three lines: “The check . . . Lower the curtains without fail,