George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 13
Chapter
13
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
flagstaff's 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.
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