Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/220

Record Thirty-Eight

I Don’t Know What Title-Perhaps the Whole
Synopsis May Be Called a Castoff Cigarette Butt

I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half-closed my eyes. My head seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was enveloped in fog, and through the fog:

“But I did not turn on the light . . . then how is it . . .”

I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling, sat I-330, looking at me.

She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or fifteen minutes are already well behind me, cruelly twisted into a very firm spring. Yet it seems to me that the door closed after her only a second ago, and that I could still overtake her and grasp her hand, and that she might laugh out and say . . .

I-330 was at the table. I rushed toward her.

“You? You! I have been . . . I saw your room. . . . I thought you . . .” But midway I hurt myself upon the sharp, motionless spears of her eyelashes, and I stopped. I remembered: she had looked at me in the same way before, in the Integral I felt I had to tell her everything in one split second, and in such a way that she would surely believe, or she would never . . .