Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/162

metallic—and another one, almost inflexible, like a wooden ruler, the voice of U-. Then the door burst open with a crack and both of them shot into the room. Shot is the right word.

I-330 put her hand on the back of my armchair and smiled over her shoulder, but only with her teeth, at U-. I should not care to stand before such a smile.

“Listen,” she said to me, “this woman seems to have made it her business to guard you from me like a little child. Is it with your permission?”

“But he is a child. Yes! That is why he does not notice that you . . . that it is only in order . . . That all this is only a foul game! Yes! And it is my duty . . .”

For a second (in the mirror) the broken, trembling line of brows. I leaped, controlling with difficulty the other self within me, the one with the hairy fists. With difficulty, pushing every word through my teeth, I cried straight into her face, into her very gills:

“Get out of here at once! Out! At once!”

The gills swelled at first into brick-red lumps, then fell and became gray. She opened her mouth to say something, but without a word she slammed it shut and went out.

I threw myself toward I-330.

“Never, never will I forgive myself! She dared! You . . . But you don’t think, do you, that you, that she . . . This is all because she wants to register on me, but I . . .”

“Fortunately she will not have time for that now. Besides, even a thousand like her . . . I don’t care . . . I know you will not believe that thousand, but only me. For after all that happened yesterday, I am all yours, you wanted it. all, to the very end, as I am in your hands; you can now at any moment . . .”

“What, ‘at any moment’?” (But immediately I understood what. The blood rushed to my ears and cheeks.) “Don’t speak about that, you must never speak about that! The other I, my former self . . . but now . . .”