1984第2部5-8

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 musicalbox.
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.