I Don't Know What Title--Perhaps the Whole Synopsis May Be Called
a Cast-off Cigarette-butt.
I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half closed my eyes.
My head seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was
enveloped in fog and through the fog:
"But I did not turn on the light ... then how is it...."
I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling,
was I-330, looking at me.
She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or
fifteen minutes are already behind me, cruelly twisted into a very
firm spring. Yet it seems to me that the door closed after her only
a second ago and that I could still overtake her and grasp her
hand,--and that she might laugh out and say....
I-330 was at the table. I rushed towards her.
"You? You! I have been.... I saw your room.... I thought you...."
But midway I hurt myself upon the sharp, motionless spears of her
eyelashes and I stopped. I remembered: she looked at me in the same
way before,--in the _Integral_. It was urgent to tell her everything
in one second and in such a way that she should believe--or she
would never....
"Listen, I-330, I must.... I must ... everything! No, no, one
moment--let me have a glass of water first."
My mouth was as dry as though it were lined with blotting paper. I
poured a glass of water but I could not.... I put the glass back
upon the table, and with both hands firmly grasped the carafe.
Now I noticed that the blue smoke was from a cigarette. She brought
the cigarette to her lips and with avidity she drew in and swallowed
the smoke as I did water; then she said:
"Don't. Be silent. Don't you see it matters little? I came anyway.
They are waiting for me below.... Do you want these minutes which
are our last...?"
Abruptly she threw the cigarette on the floor and bent backwards
over the side of the chair to reach the button in the wall (it was
quite difficult to do so), and I remember how the chair swayed
slightly, how two of its legs were lifted. Then the curtains fell.
She came close to me and embraced me. Her knees, through her dress,
were like a slow, gentle, warm, enveloping and permeating poison....
Suddenly (it happens at times) you plunge into sweet, warm
sleep--when all at once, as if something pricks you, you tremble and
your eyes are again widely open. So it was now; there on the floor
in her room were the pink checks stamped with traces of footsteps,
one of them bore the letter F. and some figures.... Plus and minus
fused within my mind into one lump.... I could not say even now what
sort of a feeling it was but I crushed her so that she cried out
with pain....
One more minute out of these ten or fifteen; her head thrown back,
lying on the bright white pillow, her eyes half closed, a sharp,
sweet line of teeth.... And all this reminded me in an irresistible,
absurd, torturing way about something forbidden, something not
permissible at that moment. More tenderly, more cruelly, I pressed
her to myself, more bright grew the blue traces of my fingers....
She said, without opening her eyes (I noticed this), "They say you
went to see the Well-Doer yesterday, is it true?"
"Yes."
Then her eyes opened widely and with delight I looked at her and saw
that her face grew quickly paler and paler, that it effaced itself,
disappearing,--only the eyes remained.
I told her everything. Only for some reason, what I don't know--(no,
it is not true, I know the reason) I was silent about one thing: His
assertion at the end that they needed me only in order....
Like the image on a photographic plate in a developing fluid, her
face gradually reappeared; the cheeks, the white line of teeth, the
lips. She stood up and went to the mirror-door of the closet. My
mouth was dry again. I poured water but it was revolting to drink
it; I put the glass back on the table and asked:
"Did you come to see me because you wanted to inquire...?"
A sharp, mocking triangle of brows drawn to the temples looked at
me from the mirror. She turned around to say something but said
nothing.
It was not necessary; I knew.
To bid her good-bye, I moved my foreign limbs, struck the chair with
them. It fell upside down, dead, like the table in her room. Her
lips were cold ... just as cold was once the floor, here, near my
bed....
When she left I sat down on the floor, bent over the
cigarette-butt....