Chapter 2
A
s he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that
he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big
enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by
shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly
a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face,
was standing outside.
‘Oh, comrade,’ she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, ‘I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you
could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’s
got blocked up and——’
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. (’Mrs’ was a word somewhat discountenanced by the
Party—you were supposed to call everyone ‘comrade’—
but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had
the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions
were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and
walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked
whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually
running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a
window-pane for two years.
‘Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,’ said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy
in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on
look, as though the place had just been visited by some large
violent animal. Games impedimenta—hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned
inside out—lay all over the floor, and on the table there was
a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On
the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the
Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the
usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building,
but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which—
one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say
how—was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of
toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music
which was still issuing from the telescreen.
‘It’s the children,’ said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. ‘They haven’t been out today.
And of course——’ 8 1984
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy
greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the
pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down,
which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons
looked on helplessly.
‘Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a moment,’ she said. ‘He loves anything like that. He’s ever so
good with his hands, Tom is.’
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing
stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those
completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom,
more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the
Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating
into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the
Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was
a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other
committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance
at the Community Centre every evening for the past four
years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9
him about wherever he went, and even remained behind
him after he had gone.
‘Have you got a spanner?’ said Winston, fiddling with the
nut on the angle-joint.
‘A spanner,’ said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps the children—
‘—
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs
Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water
and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had
blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could
in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other
room.
‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up
from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy
automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years
younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts,
and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies.
Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was
not altogether a game.
‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you,
I’ll send you to the salt mines!’
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting
‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating 0 1984
her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly
frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will
soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big
enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he
was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons’ eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the
children, and back again. In the better light of the livingroom he noticed with interest that there actually was dust
in the creases of her face.
‘They do get so noisy,’ she said. ‘They’re disappointed
because they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it
is. I’m too busy to take them. and Tom won’t be back from
work in time.’
‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy in
his huge voice.
‘Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!’
chanted the little girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to
be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.
This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He
took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he
had not gone six steps down the passage when something
hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was
as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun
round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back
into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1
‘Goldstein!’ bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless
fright on the woman’s greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The
music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped
military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish,
a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and
the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and
they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of
unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into
ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them
no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the
Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the
banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the
yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a
sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned
outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost
normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own
children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed
in which ‘The Times’ did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the 1984
phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising
remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked
up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find
something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began
thinking of O’Brien again.
Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—he
had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark
room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as
he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually—a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing.
What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the
words had not made much impression on him. It was only
later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before
or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the
first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the
dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after this
morning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure
whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even
seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding
between them, more important than affection or partisanship. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’
he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that
in some way or another it would come true.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,
clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice
continued raspingly:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this
moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South
India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say
that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war
within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash—
‘—
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough,
following on a gory description of the annihilation of a
Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the
chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to
twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving
a deflated feeling. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the
victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—
crashed into ‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’. You were supposed to
stand to attention. However, in his present position he was
invisible.
‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the
telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far
away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on
London at present. 4 1984
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to
and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak,
doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though
he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in
a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He
was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
What certainty had he that a single human creature now
living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like
an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There,
too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed,
and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on
stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and
on the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.
Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors,
in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of
the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart
quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs
would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he
was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an
age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay
not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced
to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police
would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of
existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal
to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically
survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put
new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth
that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table,
dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not
live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the
age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink—greetings! 1984
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate
his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry
(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing
during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing—and then drop a
hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom
and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty darkbrown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was
therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ