Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/51

should glance beyond the wall, you would be dazzled and close your eyes—yes—”

“Walls are the foundation of every human,” I began.

R-13 sprinkled his fountain. O- laughed rosily and roundly. I waved my hand. “Well, you may laugh, I don’t care.” I was busy with something else. I had to find a way of eating up, of crushing down, that square root of minus one. “Suppose,” I offered, “we go to my place and do some arithmetical problems.” (The quiet hour of yesterday afternoon came to my memory; perhaps today also. . . .)

O- glanced at R-, then serenely and roundly at me; the soft, endearing color of our pink checks came to her cheeks.

“But today I am . . . I have a check to him today.” (A glance at R-.) “And tonight he is busy, so . . .”

The moist, varnished lips whispered good-naturedly: “Half an hour is plenty for us, is it not, O-? I am not a great lover of your problems; let us simply go over to my place and chat.”

I was afraid to remain alone with myself or, to be more correct, with that strange new self who by some curious coincidence bore my number, D-503. So I went with R-. True, he is not precise, not rhythmic, his logic is jocular and turned inside out, yet we are . . . Three years ago we both chose our dear, rosy O-. This tied our friendship more firmly together than our school days did. In R-’s room everything seems like mine: the Tables, the glass of the chairs, the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R- moved one chair out of place, then another—the room became confused, everything lost the established order and seemed to violate every rule of Euclid’s geometry. R- remained the same as always; in Taylor and in mathematics he always lagged at the tail of the class.

We recalled Plappa, how we boys used to paste the whole surface of his glass legs with paper notes expressing our thanks (we all loved Plappa). We recalled our priest (it goes without saying that we were not taught