Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/50

out hesitating. Why, then, am I unable to go now? . . . Why?

Today, for instance, at exactly sixteen-ten I stood before the glittering Glass Wall. Above was the shining, golden, sun-like sign: “Bureau of Guardians.” Inside, a long queue of bluish-gray unifs awaiting their turns, faces shining like the oil lamps in an ancient temple. They had come to accomplish a great thing: they had come to put on the altar of the United State their beloved ones, their friends, their own selves. My whole being craved to join them, yet . . . I could not; my feet were as though melted into the glass plates of the sidewalk. I simply stood there looking foolish.

“Hey, mathematician! Dreaming?”

I shivered. Black eyes varnished with laughter looked at me—thick Negro lips! It was my old friend the poet, R-13, and with him rosy O-. I turned around angrily (I still believe that if they had not appeared I should have entered the Bureau and have torn the square root of minus one out of my flesh).

“Not dreaming at all. If you will, ‘standing in adoration,’ ” I retorted quite brusquely.

“Oh, certainly, certainly! You, my friend, should never have become a mathematician; you should have become a poet, a great poet! Yes, come over to our trade, to the poets. Eh? If you will, I can arrange it in a jiffy. Eh?”

R-13 usually talks very fast. His words run in torrents, his thick lips sprinkle. Every “p” is a fountain, every “poets” a fountain.

“So far I have served knowledge, and I shall continue to serve knowledge.”

I frowned. I do not like, I do not understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.

“Oh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall, and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall. Yes, sir! And if ever you