Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/171

It seemed as though it would soon tear the thin cloth and come out into the sun, into the light. I think that there in the green debris, in springtime, the unseen sprouts try thus to tear their way through the ground in order to send forth their branches and leaves and to bloom.

For a few seconds she stared into my face with her blue eyes, in silence.

“I saw you on the Day of Unanimity.”

“I saw you, too.” I at once remembered; below, in a narrow passage she had stood, pressing herself to the wall, protecting her abdomen with her arms; and automatically I now glanced at her abdomen which rounded the unif. She must have noticed, for she became pink, and with a rosy smile:

“I am so happy . . . so happy! I am so full of . . . you understand, I am . . . I walk and I hear nothing around me And all the while I listen within, within me. . . .”

I was silent. Something foreign was shadowing my face and I was unable to rid myself of it. Suddenly, all shining, light blue, she caught my hand; I felt her lips upon it. . . . It was the first time in my life. . . . It was some ancient caress as yet unknown to me. . . . And I was so ashamed and it pained me so much that I swiftly, I think even roughly, pulled my hand away.

“Listen, you are crazy, it seems. . . . And anyway you . . . What are you happy about? Is it possible that you forget what is ahead of you? If not now, then within a month or two. . . .”

Her light went out, her roundness sagged and shrank. And in my heart an unpleasant, even a painful compression, mixed with pity. Our heart is nothing else than an ideal pump: a compression, i.e., a shrinking at the moment of pumping, is a technical absurdity. Hence it is clear how essentially absurd, unnatural, and pathological are all these “loves” and “pities,” etc., etc., which create that compression. . . .

Silence. To the left the cloudy green glass of the Wall.