Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/96

arms. I could not raise my eyes. I walked through a strange world turned upside down, where people had their feet pasted to the ceilings, and where engines stood with their bases upward, and where, still lower, the sky merged in the heavy glass of the pavement. I remember what pained me most was the fact that looking at the world for the last time in my life I should see it upside down rather than in its natural state; but I could not raise my eyes.

We stopped. Steps. One step . . . and I should see the figures of the doctors in their white aprons, and the enormous, dumb Bell.

With force, with some sort of an inner twist, I succeeded at last in tearing my eyes away from the glass beneath my feet, and I noticed the golden letters, “Medical Bureau.” Why did he bring me here rather than to the Operation Department? Why did he spare me? About this I did not even think at the moment. I made all the steps in one jump, firmly closed the door behind me, and took a very deep breath—as if I had not breathed since morning, as if my heart had not beaten for the same length of time, as if only now I started to breathe and only now a sluice opened in my chest. . . .

Inside there were two of them, one a short specimen with heavy legs, his eyes like the horns of a bull tossing the patients up, the other extremely thin with lips like sparkling scissors, a nose like a blade—it was the same man who . . . I ran to him as to a dear friend, straight over close to the blade, and muttered something about insomnia, dreams, shadows, yellow sand. The scissors lips sparkled and smiled.

“Yes, it is too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you.”

A soul? That strange, ancient word that was forgotten long ago. . . .

“Is it . . . v-very dangerous?” I stuttered.