Darkness at Noon (28 page)

“A lot you understand about it,” sighed Wassilij.

Vera Wassiljovna threw him a quick glance which had the effect of making him turn his head to the wall again. Each time she gave him that peculiar glance, Wassilij was reminded that he was in Vera Wassiljovna’s way, who wanted to have the porter’s lodge for herself. Three weeks ago, she and a junior mechanic at her factory had put their names down together in the marriage register, but the pair had no home; the boy shared a room with two colleagues and nowadays it often was many years before one was assigned a flat by the housing trust.

The Primus was at last alight. Vera Wassiljovna put the kettle on it.

“The cell secretary read us the resolution. In it is written that we demand that the traitors be mercilessly exterminated. Whoever shows pity to them is himself a traitor and must be denounced,” she explained in a purposely matter-of-fact voice. “The workers must be watchful. We have each received a copy of the resolution in order to collect signatures for it.”

Vera Wassiljovna took a slightly crushed sheet of paper out of her blouse and flattened it out on the table. Wassilij now lay on his back; the rusty nail stuck out of the wall straight above his head. He squinted over to the paper, which lay spread next to the Primus stove. Then he turned his head away quickly.

“And he said: I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me. ...”

The water in the kettle began to hum. Old Wassilij put on a cunning expression:

“Must also those sign who were in the Civil War?”

The daughter stood bent over the kettle, in her flowered head-kerchief. “Nobody has to,” she said with the same peculiar glance as before. “In the factory they know, of course, that he lived in this house. The cell secretary asked me after the meeting whether you were friends until the end, and whether you had spoken much together.”

Old Wassilij sat up on the mattress with a jump. The effort made him cough, and the veins swelled on his thin, scrofulous neck.

The daughter put two glasses on the edge of the table and scattered some tea-leaf dust into each out of a paper bag. “What are you mumbling again?” she asked.

“Give me that damned paper,” said old Wassilij.

The daughter passed it to him. “Shall I read it to you, so that you know exactly what is in it?”

“No,” said the old man, writing his name on it. “I don’t want to know. Now give me some tea.”

The daughter passed him the glass. Wassilij’s lips were moving; he mumbled to himself while drinking the pale yellow liquid in small sips.

After they had drunk their tea, the daughter went on reading from the newspaper. The trial of the accused Rubashov and Kieffer was nearing its end. The debate on the charge of the planned assassination of the leader of the Party had released storms of indignation amongst the audience; shouts of “Shoot the mad dogs!” were heard repeatedly. To the Public Prosecutor’s concluding question, concerning the motive of his actions, the accused Rubashov, who seemed to have broken down, answered in a tired, dragging voice:

“I can only say that we, the opposition, having once made it our criminal aim to remove the Government of the Fatherland of the Revolution, used methods which seemed proper to our purpose, and which were just as low and vile as that purpose.”

Vera Wassiljovna pushed back her chair. “That is disgusting,” she said “It makes you sick the way he crawls on his belly.”

She put aside the newspaper and began noisily to clear away Primus and glasses. Wassilij watched her. The hot tea had given him courage. He sat up in bed.

“Don’t you imagine that you understand,” he said “God knows what was in his mind when he said that. The Party has taught you all to be cunning, and whoever becomes too cunning loses all decency. It’s no good shrugging your shoulders,” he went on angrily. “It’s come to this in the world now that cleverness and decency are at loggerheads, and whoever sides with one must do without the other. It’s not good for a man to work things out too much. That’s why it is written: ‘Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatever is more than these cometh of evil.’ ”

He let himself sink back on the mattress and turned away his head, so as not to see the face his daughter would make. He had not contradicted her so bravely for a long time. Anything might come of it, once she had it in her mind that she wanted the room for herself and her husband. One had to be cunning in this life, after all—else one might in one’s old age go to prison or have to sleep under the bridges in the cold. There one had it: either one behaved cleverly or one behaved decently: the two did not go together.

“I will now read you the end,” announced the daughter.

The Public Prosecutor had finished his cross-examination of Rubashov. Following it, the accused Kieffer was examined once more; he repeated his preceding statement on the attempted assassination in full detail. “... Asked by the President whether he desired to put any questions to Kieffer, which he would be entitled to do, the accused Rubashov answered that he would forgo this right. This concluded the hearing of evidence and the Court was adjourned. After the re-opening of the sitting, the Citizen Public Prosecutor begins his summing-up. ...”

Old Wassilij was not listening to the Prosecutor’s speech. He had turned to the wall and gone to sleep. He did not know afterwards how long he had slept, how often the daughter had refilled the lamp with oil, nor how often her forefinger had reached the bottom of the page and started on a new column. He only woke up when the Public Prosecutor, summing up his speech, demanded the death sentence. Perhaps the daughter had changed her tone of voice towards the end, perhaps she had made a pause; in any case, Wassilij was awake again when she came to the last sentence of the Public Prosecutor’s speech, printed in heavy black type:

“I demand that all these mad dogs be shot.”

Then the accused were allowed to say their last words.

“... The accused Kieffer turned to the judges and begged that, in consideration of his youth, his life be spared He admitted once again the baseness of his crime and tried to attribute the whole responsibility for it to the instigator Rubashov. In so doing, he started to stammer agitatedly, thus provoking the mirth of the spectators, which was, however, rapidly suppressed by the Citizen President Then Rubashov was allowed to speak. ...”

The newspaper reporter here vividly depicted how the accused Rubashov “examined the audience with eager eyes and, finding not a single sympathetic face, let his head sink despairingly”.

Rubashov’s final speech was short It intensified the unpleasant impression which his behaviour in court had already made.

“Citizen President,” the accused Rubashov declared, “I speak here for the last time in my life. The opposition is beaten and destroyed. If I ask myself to-day, ‘For what am I dying?’ I am confronted by absolute nothingness. There is nothing for which one could die, if one died without having repented and unreconciled with the Party and the Movement. Therefore, on the threshold of my last hour, I bend my knees to the country, to the masses and to the whole people. The political masquerade, the mummery of discussions and conspiracy are over. We were politically dead long before the Citizen Prosecutor demanded our heads. Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust. I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges: that I did not make it easy for myself. Vanity and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a moving swan-song on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge your accusers. That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation. With that my task is ended. I have paid; my account with history is settled. To ask you for mercy would be derision. I have nothing more to say.”

“... After a short deliberation, the President read the sentence. The Council of the Supreme Revolutionary Court of Justice sentenced the accused in every case to the maximum penalty: death by shooting and the confiscation of all their personal property.”

The old man Wassilij stared at the rusty hook above his head. He murmured:

“Thy will be done. Amen,”

and turned to the wall.

So now it was all over. Rubashov knew that before midnight he would have ceased to exist.

He wandered through his cell, to which he had returned after the uproar of the trial; six and a half steps to the window, six and a half steps back. When he stood still, listening, on the third black tile from the window, the silence between the whitewashed walls came to meet him, as from the depth of a well. He still did not understand why it had become so quiet, within and without. But he knew that now nothing could disturb this peace any more.

Looking back, he could even remember the moment when this blessed quietness had sunk over him. It had been at the trial, before he had started his last speech. He had believed that he had burnt out the last vestiges of egotism and vanity from his consciousness, but in that moment, when his eyes had searched the faces of the audience and found only indifference and derision, he had been for a last time carried away by his hunger for a bone of pity; freezing, he had wanted to warm himself by his own words. The temptation had gripped him to talk of his past, to rear up just once and tear the net in which Ivanov and Gletkin had entangled him, to shout at his accusers like Danton: “You have laid hands on my whole life. May it rise and challenge you. ...” Oh, how well he knew Danton’s speech before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He could repeat it word for word. He had as a boy learnt it by heart: “You want to stifle the Republic in blood. How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones? Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she strides over our dead bodies.”

The words had burnt on his tongue. But the temptation had only lasted a moment; then, when he started to pronounce his final speech, the bell of silence had sunk down over him. He had recognized that it was too late.

Too late to go back again the same way, to step once more in the graves of his own footprints. Words could undo nothing.

Too late for all of them. When the hour came to make their last appearance before the world, none of them could turn the dock into a rostrum, none of them could unveil the truth to the world and hurl back the accusation at his judges, like Danton.

Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins. The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game. The public expected no swan-songs of them. They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night. ...

So now it was over. He had nothing more to do with it. He no longer had to howl with the wolves. He had paid, his account was settled. He was a man who had lost his shadow, released from every bond. He had followed every thought to its last conclusion and acted in accordance with it to the very end; the hours which remained to him belonged to that silent partner, whose realm started just where logical thought ended. He had christened it the “grammatical fiction” with that shamefacedness about the first person singular which the Party had inculcated in its disciples.

Rubashov stopped by the wall which separated him from No. 406. The cell was empty since the departure of Rip Van Winkle. He took off his pince-nez, looked round furtively and tapped:

2—4 ...

He listened with a feeling of childlike shame and then knocked again:

2—4 ...

He listened, and again repeated the same sequence of signs. The wall remained mute. He had never yet consciously tapped the word “I”. Probably never at all. He listened. The knocking died without resonance.

He continued pacing through his cell. Since the bell of silence had sunk over him, he was puzzling over certain questions to which he would have like to find an answer before it was too late. They were rather naive questions; they concerned the meaning of suffering, or, more exactly, the difference between suffering which made sense and senseless suffering. Obviously only such suffering made sense as was inevitable; that is, as was rooted in biological fatality. On the other hand, all suffering with a social origin was accidental, hence pointless and senseless. The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be.

And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the
Pietà
, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.