Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/137

were such tiny, short ones! They ran! And I wanted to tell her so many things. I wanted to tell her all about myself; about the letter from O- and about that terrible evening when I gave her a child; and for some reason also about my childhood, about our mathematician Plappa, and about the square root of minus one; and how, when I attended the glorification on the Day of Unanimity for the first time in my life, I wept bitterly because there was an inkstain on my unif—on such a holy day!

I-330 lifted her nead. She leaned on her elbow. In the corners of her lips two long, sharp lines and the dark angle of lifted eyebrows—a cross.

“Perhaps on that day . . .” her brow grew darker; she took my hand and pressed it hard. “Tell me, will you ever forget me? Will you always remember me?”

“But why such talk? What is it, I-, dear?”

She was silent. And her eyes were already sliding past me, through me, away into the distance. I suddenly heard the wind beating the glass with its enormous wings. Of course it had been blowing all the while, but I had not noticed it until then. And for some reason those cawing birds over the Green Wall came to my mind.

I-330 shook her head with a gesture of throwing something off. Once more she touched me for a second with her whole body, as an aero before landing touches the ground for a second with all the tension of a recoiling spring.

“Well, give me my stockings, quick!”

The stockings were on the desk, on the open manuscript, on page 124. Being in haste, I caught some of the pages and they were scattered over the floor, so that it was hard to put them back in the proper order. Moreover, even if I put them in that order there will be no real order; there are obstacles to that anyway, some undiscoverable unknowns.

“I can’t bear it,” I said. “You are here, near me, yet