ちうぃき

Chapter 5



Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few
thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody
mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the
Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried
a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had
been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had
been crossed out--but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had
ceased to exist: he had never existed.

The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the
staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the
production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in
going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news
items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of
rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The
rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance
there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which
there were wild rumours.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song,
it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged
on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly
be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by
hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed
with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children
played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred
metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting
to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along
with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption,
and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three
or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face
and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been
plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the
portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war,
were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been
killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film
theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The
whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing
funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.
Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground
and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the
poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and
a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round
that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and
an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their
house set on fire and perished of suffocation.

In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia
and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window,
naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs
had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle
everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes,
and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that
the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.

Four, five, six--seven times they met during the month of June. Winston
had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost
the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided,
leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of
coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased
to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a
secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that
they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time.
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know
that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room
was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually
stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other
hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to
talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and
thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had
always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman.
With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or
that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never
asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To
talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box.
He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of
forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and
another about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death
of poor Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he
would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new
fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one
rhyme.

Both of them knew--in a way, it was never out of their minds that what
was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of
impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would
cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul
grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five
minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion
not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in
this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was
difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when
Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that
it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside
it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of
escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their
intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or
Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would
succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or
they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak
with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives
undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In
reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day
and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed
an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next
breath so long as there is air available.

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the
Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the
fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty
of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that
existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the
impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce
that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough,
this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to
judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston
should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash
of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly
everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought
it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized
opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his
underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party
had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe
in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,
she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose
names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the
faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place
in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from
morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!' During
the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults
at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and
what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the
fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was
outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It
would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel
against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of
violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible
to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention
the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her
opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on
London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred
to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during
the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out
laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they
in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept
the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and
falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having
learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own
schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the
helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one
generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long
before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After
all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more
of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did
not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia
and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as
a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy
had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said
vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated
from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened
only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about
it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing
her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and
not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as
unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody
war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'

Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent
forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify
her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought
of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between
his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she
failed to grasp the point of the story.

'Were they friends of yours?' she said.

'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were
far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the
Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.'

'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the
time, aren't they?'

He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It wasn't
just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past,
starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives
anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like
that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about
the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and
minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless
present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the
past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even
when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence
ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know
with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in
that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence
after the event--years after it.'

'And what good was that?'

'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the
same thing happened today, I should keep it.'

'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only
for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you
have done with it even if you had kept it?'

'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts
here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody. I don't
imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine
little knots of resistance springing up here and there--small groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving
a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we
leave off.'

'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in US.'

'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest.
Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the
mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use
Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so
why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo,
and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects,
she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those
people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her,
he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while
having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view
of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of
understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was
demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to
notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.
They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm,
because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.




Chapter 6



It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it
seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost
at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became
aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The
person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to
speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was
to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of
speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement,
laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of
them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.

'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said. 'I was
reading one of your Newspeak articles in 'The Times' the other day. You
take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he
said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had anything
to do with the actual construction of the language.'

'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is not only my own
opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an
expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.'

Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this
was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead,
he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended
as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had
turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll
slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious,
disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he
resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:

'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you
had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become
so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak
Dictionary?'

'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still
using the ninth in the Records Department.'

'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a
few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might
interest you to look at it, perhaps?'

'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.

'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the
number of verbs--that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let
me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am
afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick
it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my
address.'

They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absent-mindedly
O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered
notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in
such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the
instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.

'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my servant will
give you the dictionary.'

He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time
there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was
written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along
with a mass of other papers.

They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most.
There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had
been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This
was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to
discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. 'If
you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien
had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed
somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The
conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer
edges of it.

He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. Perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay--he was not certain. What was
happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years
ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second
had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words,
and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would
happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained
in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like
a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was
speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly
shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation
of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better
because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.