Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/28

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16

Record Four

The Wild Man with a Barometer
Epilepsy
If

Until today everything in life seemed to me clear (that is why, I think, I always had a sort of partiality toward the word “clear”), but today . . . I don’t understand. First, I really was assigned to auditorium 112, as she said, although the probability was 500 to 10,000,000 or 1:20,000. (Five hundred is the number of auditoriums and there are 10,000,000 Numbers.) And second . . . But let me relate things in proper order.

The auditorium: an enormous half-globe of glass with the sun piercing through. The circular rows of noble, globelike, closely shaven heads. With joy in my heart I looked around. I believe I was looking in the hope of seeing the rose-colored scythe, the dear lips of O- somewhere among the blue waves of the unifs. Then I saw extraordinarily white, sharp teeth like the . . . But no! Tonight at twenty-one o’clock O- was to come to me; therefore my desire to see her was quite natural. The bell. We stood up, sang the Hymn of the United State, and our clever phono-lecturer appeared on the platform with a sparkling golden loud-speaker.

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