Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/217

bunches of rays were growing. Through the noise of the wind and the wings and the cawing he cried to me:

“Do you realize? Do you realize! They have blown up the Wall! The Wall has been blown up! Do you understand?”

Somewhere in the background figures with their heads drawn in were hastily rushing by and into the houses. In the middle of the pavements was a mass of those who had already been operated upon; they moved toward the west . . .

. . . Hairy bunches of rays around the lips and eyes . . . I grasped his hands:

“Tell me. Where is she? Where is I-330? There? Beyond the Wall, or . . .? I must . . . Do you hear me? At once . . . I cannot . . .”

“Here!” he shouted in a happy, drunken voice, showing strong yellow teeth, “here in town, and she is acting! Oh, we are doing great work!”

Who are those “we”? Who am I?

There were about fifty around him. Like him, they seemed to have crawled out from under their foreheads. They were loud, cheerful, strong-toothed, swallowing the stormy wind. With their simple not at all terrible-looking electrocutors (where did they get them?), they started to the west, toward the operated ones, encircling them, keeping parallel to avenue Forty-eight . . .

Stumbling against the tightly drawn ropes woven by the wind, I was running to her. What for? I did not know. I was stumbling . . . Empty streets . . . The city seemed foreign, wild, filled with the ceaseless, triumphant hubbub of the birds. It seemed like the end of the world, Doomsday.

Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my mind), I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces—without curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day! . . .

The house—her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the