Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/183

“And don’t you think that at the apex are, precisely, stones unified into an organized society?” The triangle grew sharper and sharper, darker and darker.

“Happiness . . . well? . . . Desires are tortures, aren’t they? It is clear, therefore, that happiness is when there are no longer any desires, not a single desire any more. What an error, what an absurd prejudice it was, that we used to mark happiness with the sign ‘plus’! No, absolute happiness must be marked ‘minus’—divine minus!”

I remember I stammered unintelligibly:

“Absolute zero!—minus 273° C.”

“Minus 273°—exactly! A somewhat cool temperature. But doesn’t it prove that we are at the summit?”

As before she seemed somehow to speak for me and through me, developing my own thoughts to the end. But there was something so morbid in her tone that I could not refrain . . . with an effort I drew out a “No.”

“No,” I said. “You, you are mocking. . . .”

She burst out laughing loudly, too loudly. Swiftly, in a second, she laughed herself to some unseen edge, stumbled, and fell over. . . . Silence.

She stood up, put her hands upon my shoulders, and looked into me for a long while. Then she pulled me toward her and everything seemed to have disappeared save her sharp, hot lips. . . .

“Good-by.”

The words came from afar, from above, and reached me not at once but only after a minute, perhaps two minutes later.

“Why . . . why ‘good-by’?”

“You have been ill, have you not? Because of me you have committed crimes. Hasn’t all this tormented you? And now you have the Operation to look forward to. You will be cured of me. And that means—good-by.”

“No!” I cried.

A pitilessly sharp black triangle on a white background.

“What? Do you. mean that you don’t want happiness?”