Darkness at Noon (7 page)

“Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,” said Rubashov.

“Have you got prison vouchers?”

“My money was taken from me on my arrival,” said Rubashov.

“Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.”

“How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?” asked Rubashov.

“You can write a letter of complaint,” said the old man.

“You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,” said Rubashov.

“To buy writing materials you have to have vouchers,” said the warder.

Rubashov could feel his temper rising, the familiar pressure in the chest and the choking feeling in the throat; but he controlled it. The old man saw Rubashov’s pupils glitter sharply through his pince-nez; it reminded him of the colour prints of Rubashov in uniform, which in the old days one used to see everywhere; he smiled with senile spite and stepped back a pace.

“You little heap of dung,” said Rubashov slowly, turned his back on him and went back to his window.

“I will report that you used insulting language,” said the voice of the old man at his back; then the door slammed.

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve and waited until he breathed more calmly. He had to have cigarettes, else he would not be able to hold out. He made himself wait ten minutes. Then he tapped through to No. 402:

HAVE YOU ANY TOBACCO?

He had to wait a bit for the answer. Then it came, clearly and well spaced:

NOT FOR YOU.

Rubashov went slowly back to the window. He saw the young officer with the small moustache, the monocle stuck in, staring with a stupid grin at the wall which separated them; the eye behind the lens was glassy, the reddish eyelid turned up. What went on in his head? Probably he was thinking: I gave it to you all right. Probably also: Canaille, how many of my people have you had shot? Rubashov looked at the whitewashed wall; he felt that the other was standing behind it with his face turned towards him; he thought he heard his panting breath. Yes, how many of yours have I had shot, I wonder? He really could not remember; it was long, long ago, during the Civil War, there must have been something’ between seventy and a hundred. What of it? That was all right; it lay on a different plane to a case like Richard’s, and he would do it again to-day. Even if he knew beforehand that the revolution would in the end put No. 1 in the saddle? Even then.

With you, thought Rubashov and looked at the whitewashed wall behind which the other stood—in the meantime he had probably lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke against the wall—with you I have no accounts to settle. To you I owe no fare. Between you and us there is no common currency and no common language. ... Well, what do you want now?

For No. 402 had started to tap again. Rubashov went back to the wall. ... SENDING YOU TOBACCO, he heard. Then, more faintly, he heard No. 402 hammering on his door in order to attract the warder’s attention.

Rubashov held his breath; after a few minutes he heard the old man’s shuffling footsteps approaching. The warder did not unlock No. 402’s door, but asked through the spy-hole:

“What do you want?”

Rubashov could not hear the answer, although he would have liked to hear No. 402’s voice. Then the old man said loudly, so that Rubashov should hear it:

“It is not allowed; against the regulations.”

Again Rubashov could not hear the reply. Then the warder said:

“I will report you for using insulting language.” His steps trailed over the tiles and were lost in the corridor.

For a time there was silence. Then No. 402 tapped:

A BAD LOOK-OUT FOR YOU.

Rubashov gave no answer. He walked up and down, feeling the thirst for tobacco itching in the dry membranes of his throat. He thought of No. 402. “Yet I would do it again,” he said to himself. “It was necessary and right. But do I perhaps owe you the fare all the same? Must one also pay for deeds which were right and necessary?”

The dryness in his throat increased. He felt a pressure in his forehead; he went restlessly back and forth, and while he thought his lips began to move.

Must one also pay for righteous acts? Was there another measure besides that of reason?

Did the righteous man perhaps carry the heaviest debt when weighed by this other measure? Was his debt, perhaps, counted double—for the others knew not what they did? ...

Rubashov stood still on the third black tile from the window.

What was this? A breath of religious madness? He became conscious that he had for several minutes been talking half aloud to himself. And even as he was watching himself, his lips, independently of his will, moved and said:

“I shall pay.”

For the first time since his arrest Rubashov was scared. He felt for his cigarettes. But he had none.

Then again he heard the delicate tappings on the wall over the bedstead. No. 402 had a message for him:

HARE-LIP SENDS YOU GREETINGS.

He saw in his mind’s eye the yellow, upturned face of the man: the message made him feel uncomfortable. He tapped:

WHAT IS HIS NAME?

No. 402 answered:

HE WON’T SAY. BUT HE SENDS YOU GREETINGS.

During the afternoon Rubashov felt even worse. He was seized by periodic fits of shivering. His tooth also had started to ache again—the right eye-tooth which was connected to the eye-nerve orbitalis. He had had nothing to eat since his arrest, yet did not feel hungry. He tried to collect his wits, but the cold shudders which ran over him and itching and tickling in his throat prevented him. His thoughts circled alternatively round two poles: the desperate thirst for a cigarette and the sentence: I shall pay.

Memories overwhelmed him; they hummed and buzzed subduedly in his ears. Faces and voices came up and vanished; wherever he tried to hold them they hurt him; his whole past was sore and festered at every touch. His past was the movement, the Party; present and future, too, belonged to the Party, were inseparably bound up with its fate; but his past was identical with it. And it was this past that was suddenly put in question. The Party’s warm, breathing body appeared to him to be covered with sores—festering sores, bleeding stigmata. When and where in history had there ever been such defective saints? Whenever had a good cause been worse represented? If the Party embodied the will of history, then history itself was defective.

Rubashov gazed at the damp patches on the walls of his cell. He tore the blanket off the bunk and wrapped it round his shoulders; he quickened his pace and marched to and fro with short, quick steps, making sudden turns at door and window; but shivers continued to run down his back. The buzzing in his ears went on, mixed with vague, soft voices; he could not make out whether they came from the corridor or whether he was suffering from hallucinations. It is the orbitalis, he said to himself; it comes from the broken-off root of the eye-tooth. I will tell the doctor about it tomorrow, but in the meantime there is still a lot to do. The cause of the Party’s defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked. ...

He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind’s eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer’s lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No. 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels.. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out. And himself; and No. 1.

He was frozen, and he longed for a cigarette. He saw himself again in the old Belgian port, escorted by merry Little Loewy, who was slightly hunchbacked and smoked a sailor’s pipe. He smelled again the smell of the harbour, a mixture of rotting seaweed and petrol; he heard the musical clock on the tower of the old guildhall, and saw the narrow streets with overhanging bays, from the lattices of which the harbour prostitutes hung their washing during the day. It was two years after the affair with Richard. They had not succeeded in proving anything against himself. He had kept silent when they beat him up, kept silent when they knocked the teeth out of his head, injured his hearing and broke his glasses. He had kept silent, and had gone on denying everything and lying coldly and circumspectly. He had marched up and down his cell, and crawled over the flagstones of the dark punishment cell, he had been afraid and he had gone on working at his defence; and when cold water woke him from unconsciousness, he had groped for a cigarette and gone on lying. In those days he felt no surprise at the hatred of those who tortured him, and did not wonder why he was so detestable to them. The whole legal machinery of the dictatorship ground its teeth, but they could prove nothing against him. After his release he was taken by aeroplane to his country—to the home of the Revolution. There were receptions and jubilant mass-meetings and military parades. Even No. 1 appeared repeatedly in public with him.

He had not been in his native country for years and found that much was changed. Half the bearded men of the photograph no longer existed. Their names might not be mentioned, their memory only invoked with curses—except for the old man with the slanting Tartar eyes, the leader of yore, who had died in time. He was revered as God-the-Father, and No. 1 as the Son; but it was whispered everywhere that he had forged the old man’s will in order to come into the heritage. Those of the bearded men in the old photograph who were left had become unrecognizable. They were, clean-shaven, worn out and disillusioned, full of cynical melancholy. From time to time No. 1 reached out for a new victim amongst them. Then they all beat their breasts and repented in chorus of their sins. After a fortnight, when he was still walking on crutches, Rubashov had asked for a new mission abroad. “You seem to be in rather a hurry,” said No. 1, looking at him from behind clouds of smoke. After twenty years in the leadership of the Party they were still on formal terms with each other. Above No. 1’s head hung the portrait of the Old Man; next to it the photograph with the numbered heads had hung, but it was now gone. The colloquy was short, it had lasted only a few minutes, but on leaving No. 1 had shaken his hand with peculiar emphasis. Rubashov had afterwards cogitated a long time over the meaning of this handshake; and over the look of strangely knowing irony which No. 1 had given him from behind his smoke-clouds. Then Rubashov had hobbled out of the room on his crutches; No. 1 did not accompany him to the door. The next day he had left for Belgium.

On the boat he recovered slightly and thought over his task. Little Loewy with the sailor’s pipe came to meet him on his arrival. He was the local leader of the dock-workers’ section of the Party; Rubashov liked him at once. He showed Rubashov through the docks and the twisting harbour streets as proudly as if he had made it all himself. In every pub he had acquaintances, dock workers, sailors and prostitutes; he was everywhere offered drinks and returned salutations by raising his pipe to his ear. Even the traffic policeman on the marketplace winked at him as they passed, and the sailor comrades from foreign ships, who could not make themselves understood, slapped him tenderly on the deformed shoulder. Rubashov saw all this with a mild surprise. No, Little Loewy was not odious and detestable. The dock workers’ section in this town was one of the best organized sections of the Party in the world.

In the evening Rubashov, Little Loewy and a couple of others sat in one of the harbour pubs. A certain Paul was amongst them, the section’s organization Secretary. He was an ex-wrestler, bald-headed, pockmarked, with big sticking-out ears. He wore a sailor’s black sweater under his coat, and a black bowler on his head. He had the gift of waggling his ears, thereby lifting his bowler and letting it drop again. With him was a certain Bill, an ex-sailor who had written a novel about the sailor’s life, had been famous for a year and then quickly forgotten again; now he wrote articles for Party newspapers. The others were dock workers, heavy men and steadfast drinkers. New people kept coming in, sat down or stood at the table, paid a round of drinks and lounged out again. The fat pub-keeper sat down to their table whenever he had a free moment. He could play the mouth-organ. Quite a lot was drunk.

Rubashov had been introduced by Little Loewy as a “comrade from Over There” without further commentary. Little Loewy was the only one who knew his identity. As the people at the table saw that Rubashov either was not in a communicative mood, or had reasons not to be, they did not ask him many questions; and those which they did ask referred to the material conditions of life “over there”, the wages, the land problem, the development of industry. Everything they said revealed a surprising knowledge of technical detail, coupled with an equally surprising ignorance of the general situation and political atmosphere “over there”. They inquired about the development of production in the light metal industry, like children asking the exact size of the grapes of Canaan. An old dock worker, who had stood at the bar for a time without ordering anything until Little Loewy called him over for a drink, said to Rubashov, after having shaken hands with him’ “You look very like old Rubashov.” “That I have often been told,” said Rubashov. “Old Rubashov—there’s a man for you,” said the old man, emptying his glass. It was not a month ago that Rubashov had been set free, and not six weeks since he knew that he would remain alive. The fat pub-keeper played his mouth-organ. Rubashov lit a cigarette and ordered drinks all round. They drank to his health and to the health of the people “over there”, and the Secretary Paul moved his bowler hat up and down with his ears.