In a ring—A carrot—A murder.
I did not sleep all night. The whole night but one thought. … As a result of yesterday’s mishap my head is tightly bandaged—it seems to me not a bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass-iron, riveted about my head. And I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted circle: to kill U- . To kill U- and then go to her and say: “Now do you believe?” What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break her head with something—the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.
I had in my closet a heavy piston-rod which cracked during the casting and which I brought home in order to find out the cause of the cracking with a microscope. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube and went downstairs. The stairway seemed endless, the steps disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had to wipe off moisture from my mouth very frequently. Downstairs … my heart dropped. I took out the piston and went to the controller’s table, but she was not there; instead an empty, icy desk with inkblots. I remembered that today all work was stopped; everybody was to go to be operated upon. Hence there was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be registered. …
The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring panels of cast-iron. And exactly as it seemed for one moment yesterday, the whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments, and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each