Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/53

side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am a genius! and I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense. . . . But it is not a thing to talk about.”

The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around, and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise now?”

A moment of awkward, asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter, but I was certain there was something. . . .

“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.

R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.

“Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity, from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”

I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin, invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.

“Well, I must go.” I kissed O-, shook hands with R-, and went to the elevator.

As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque squares of lowered curtains, the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were already lowered.