Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/228

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We

was perishing it was my duty (before you, my unknown and beloved) to leave these records in a finished form.

I asked him to give me some paper, and here in the rest room, to the accompaniment of the quiet music, transparent like water, I wrote down these last lines.

I was about to put down a period as the ancients would put a cross over the caves into which they used to throw their dead, when all of a sudden my pencil trembled and fell from between my fingers . . .

“Listen!” I pulled my neighbor. “Yes, listen, I say. There, where your finite universe ends, what is there? What?”

He had no time to answer. From above, down the steps stamping . . .