Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/142

dissonance in our customary unity—our unseen Guardians are always right there among us, are they not, to register the Numbers who might fall into error and save them from any further false steps? The United State is theirs, the Numbers’! And besides . . .

Through the wall to my left a she-Number before the mirror door of the closet; she is hastily unbuttoning her unif. For a second, swiftly—eyes, lips, two sharp, pink . . . the curtains fell. Within me, all that happened yesterday instantly awoke, and now I no longer know what I meant to say by “besides . . .” I no longer wish to—I cannot. I want one thing. I want I-330. I want her every minute, every second, to be with me, with no one else. All that I wrote about Unanimity is of no value; it is not what I want; I have a desire to cross it out, to tear it to pieces and throw it away. For I know (be it a sacrilege, yet it is the truth) that a glorious Day is possible only with her and only when we are side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Without her tomorrow’s sun will appear to me only as a little circle cut out of a tin sheet, and the sky a sheet of tin painted blue, and I myself . . . I snatched the telephone receiver.

“I-330, are you there?”

“Yes, it is I. Why so late?”

“Perhaps not too late yet. I want to ask you . . . I want you to be with me tomorrow—dear!”

I said “Dear” in a very low voice. And for some reason a thing I saw this morning at the docks flashed through my mind: just for fun someone had put a watch under the hundred-ton sledge hammer. . . . A swing, a breath of wind in the face, and the silent, hundred-ton, knife-like weight on the breakable watch . . .

A silence. I thought I heard someone’s whisper in I-33o’s room. Then her voice:

“No, I cannot. Of course you understand that I myself . . . No, I cannot. ‘Why?’ You shall see tomorrow.”

Night.