Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/204

work had stopped; everyone was to go to be operated on. There was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be registered. . . .

The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring panels of cast iron. And exactly as it had seemed for one moment yesterday, the whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments, and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each would stop for a second, hang before me in the air, and disappear without a trace. It was as if the precise, black letters on this page should suddenly move apart and begin to jump hither and thither in fright, so that there was not a word on the page, only nonsensical “ap,” “jum,” “wor.” The crowd seemed just as nonsensical, dispersed (not in rows), going forward, backward, diagonally, transversely. . . .

Then nobody. For a second, suddenly stopping in my mad dashing, I saw on the second floor, in the glass cage of a room hanging in the air, a man and a woman—a kiss; she, standing with her whole body bent backward, brokenly: “This is for the last time, forever. . . .”

At a corner a thorny, moving bush of heads. Above the heads separate, floating in the air, a banner: “Down with the machines! Down with the Operation!” And, distinct from my own self, I thought: “Is it possible that each one of us bears such a pain, that it can be removed only with his heart? . . . . That something must be done to each one, before he . . .” For a second everything disappeared for me from the world, except my beast-like hand with the heavy, cast-iron package it held. . . .

A boy appeared. He was running, a shadow under his lower lip. The lower lip turned out like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve. His face was distorted; he wept loudly; he was running away from someone. The stamping of feet was heard behind him. . .

The boy reminded me: “U- must be in school. I must hurry!” I ran to the nearest opening of the Underground