Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/80

“Oh, you are at home? I am very glad! Wait for me at the corner. We shall go together. . . . Where? Well, you’ll see.”

“You know perfectly well that I am going to work now.”

“You know perfectly well that you’ll do as I say! Au revoir. In two minutes! . . .”

I stood at the corner. I had to wait to try to make clear to her that only the United State directs me, not she. “You’ll do as I say!” How sure she is! One hears it in her voice. And what if . . .?

Unifs, dull gray as if woven of damp fog, would appear for a second at my side and then soundlessly redissolve. I was unable to turn my eyes away from the clock. . . . I seemed myself to have become that sharp, quivering hand that marked the seconds. Ten, eight minutes . . . three . . . two minutes to twelve. . . . Of course! I was late! Oh, how I hated her. Yet I had to wait to prove that I . . .

A red line in the milky whiteness of the fog—like blood, like a wound made by a sharp knife—her lips.

“I made you wait, I think. And now you are late for your work anyway?”

“How . . . ? Well, yes, it is too late now.”

I glanced at her lips in silence. All women are lips, lips only. Some are rosy lips, tense and round, a ring, a tender fence separating one from the world. But these! A second ago they were not here, and suddenly . . . the slash of a knife! I seemed even to see the sweet, dripping blood . . . .

She came nearer. She leaned gently against my shoulder; we became one. Something streamed from her into me. I felt, I knew, it should be so. Every fiber of my nervous system told me this, every hair on my head, every painfully sweet heartbeat. And what a joy it was to submit to what should be. A fragment of iron ore probably feels the same joy of submission to precise, inevitable law when it clings to a lodestone. The same joy is in a stone which, thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man