Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/81

when in his final convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies.

I remember I smiled vaguely and said for no reason at all, “Fog . . . very.”

“Thou lovest fog, dost thou?”

This ancient, long-forgotten thou—the thou of a master to his slave—penetrated me slowly, sharply. . . . Yes, I was a slave. . . . This, too, was inevitable, was good.

“Yes, good . . .” I said aloud to myself, and then to her, “I hate fog. I am afraid of fog.”

“Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.”

“Yes, that is so. That is why . . . that is precisely why I . . .”

We were walking—as one. Somewhere beyond the fog the sun was singing in a faint tone, gradually swelling, filling the air with tension and with pearl and gold and rose and red. . . . The whole world seemed to be one unembraceable woman, and we who were in her body were not yet born; we were ripening in joy. It was clear to me, absolutely clear, that everything existed only for me: the sun, the fog, the gold—for me. I did not ask where we were going; what did it matter? It was a pleasure to walk, to ripen, to become stronger and more tense. . . .

“Here . . .” I-330 stopped at a door. “It so happens that today there is someone on duty who . . . I told you about him in the Ancient House.”

Carefully guarding the forces ripening within me, I read the sign: “Medical Bureau.” Only automatically I understood.

. . . A glass room, filled with golden fog; shelves of glass, colored bottles, jars, electric wires, bluish sparks in tubes; and a male Number—a very thin flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper. Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a