Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/73

I) grasped my other wild, hairy, heavily breathing self forcibly. I (the real I) said to him, to R-, “In the name of the Well-Doer, please forgive me. I am very sick; I don’t sleep; I do not know what is the matter with me.”

A swiftly passing smile appeared on the thick lips.

“Yes, yes, I understand, I understand. I am familiar with all this—theoretically, of course. Good-by.”

At the door he turned around like a little black ball, came back to the table and put a book upon it. “This is my latest book. I came to bring it to you. Almost forgot. Good-by.” (“b” like a splash.) The little ball rolled out.

I am alone. Or, to be more exact, I am tête-à-tête with that other self. I sit in the armchair and, having crossed my legs, I watch curiously from some indefinite “there” how I, myself, am shriveling in my bed!

Why, oh, why is it, that for three years R-, O-, and I were so friendly together and now suddenly—one word only about that other female, about I-330, and . . . Is it possible that that insanity called love and jealousy does exist, and not only in the idiotic books of the ancients? What seems most strange is that I, I! . . . Equations, formulae, figures, and suddenly this! I can’t understand it, I can’t! Tomorrow I shall go to R- and tell him . . . No, it isn’t true; I shall not go; neither tomorrow nor day after tomorrow, nor ever. . . . I can’t, I do not want to see him. This is the end. Our triangle is broken up.

I am alone. It is evening. There is a light fog. The sky is covered by a thin, milky-golden tissue. If I only knew what is there—higher. If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?