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.”