Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/203

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191

Record Thirty-Five

In a Ring
A Carrot
A Murder

I did not sleep all night. But one thought the whole night . . . As a result of yesterday’s mishap my head is tightly bandaged—it seems to me not a bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass iron, riveted about my head. And I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted circle: to kill U-. To kill U- and then go to her and say: “Now do you believe?” What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break her head with something—the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.

I had in my closet a heavy piston rod which had cracked during the casting, and which I had brought home in order to find out with a microscope the cause of the cracking. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube, and went downstairs. The stairway seemed endless, the steps disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had to wipe moisture from off my mouth very frequently. Downstairs . . . my heart dropped. I took the piston out and went to the controller’s table. But she was not there; instead, an empty, icy desk with ink blots. And then I remembered that today all

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