“I ... I am sick.”
Strictly speaking, I told her the truth. I certainly am sick. All this is an illness. Presently I remembered; of course, my certificate! I touched it in my pocket. Yes, there it was, rustling. Then all this did happen! It did actually happen!
I held out the paper to the controller. As I did so, I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. Without looking directly at her, I noticed with
what an expression of surprise she gazed at me.
Then at twenty-one-thirty o’clock.... In the room to the left the curtains were lowered, and in the room to the right my neighbor was sitting over a book. His head is bald and covered with bulging lumps. His forehead is enormous—a yellow parabola. I was walking up and down the room—suffering. How could I meet her, after all that happened! O-90, I mean. I felt plainly to my right, how the eyes of my neighbor were staring at me. I clearly saw the wrinkles on his forehead like a row of yellow, illegible lines; and for some reason I was certain that those lines dealt with me.
A quarter of an hour before twenty-two, the cheerful, rosy whirlwind was in my room; the firm ring of her rosy arms closed about my neck. Then I felt how that ring grew weaker and weaker, and then it broke and her arms dropped....
“You are not the same, not the same man! You are no longer mine!”
“What curious terminology: ‘mine.’ I never belonged—” I faltered. It suddenly occurred to me: true, I belonged to no one before, but now—Is it not clear that now I do not live any more in our rational world but in the ancient delirious world, in a world of square-root of minus one?
The curtains fell. There to my right my neighbor let his book drop at that moment from the table to the floor. And through the last narrow space between the curtain and the floor I saw a
yellow hand pick up the book. Within I felt: “Only to seize that hand with all my power.”