Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/128

me, all over me, a host of smiles, a bit of a smile on each crack of my face, and this gave me pleasant sensations, as if I were tightly bound like an infant of the ancients in a swaddling cloth.

“Imagine! Today, when I entered the classroom”—she works in the Child-Educational Refinery—“I suddenly noticed a caricature upon the blackboard. Indeed! I assure you! They had pictured me in the form of a fish! Perhaps I really—”

“No, no! Why do you say that?” I hastily exclaimed. When one was near her, it was clear indeed that she had nothing resembling gills. No. When I referred to gills in these pages I was certainly irreverent.

“Oh, after all it does not matter. But the act as such, think of it! Of course I called the Guardians at once. I love children very much and I think that the most difficult and the most exalted love is—cruelty. You understand me, of course.”

“Certainly!” Her sentence so closely resembled my thoughts! I could not refrain from reading to her a passage from my Record No. 20, beginning “Quietly, metallically, distinctly, do the thoughts” . . . etc. I felt her brownish-pink cheeks twitching and coming closer and closer to me. Suddenly I felt in my hands her firm, dry, even slightly prickling fingers.

“Give, give this to me, please. I shall have it transcribed and make the children learn it by heart. Not only your Venerians need all this, but we ourselves right now, tomorrow, day after tomorrow.”

She glanced around and said in a very low voice:

“Have you heard? They say that on the Day of Unanimity—”

I sprang to my feet.

“What? What do they say? What-on the Day of Unanimity?”

The coziness of my room, its very walls, seemed to have vanished. I felt myself thrown outside, where the tre-