1984第3部1-2

Part Three

Chapter 1
He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in
the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making
certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with
walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded
it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming
sound which he supposed had something to do with the
air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran
round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite
the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There
were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there
ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and
driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing,
unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four
hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did
not know, probably never would know, whether it had been
morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was
arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his
hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit
still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you
from the telescreen. But the craving for food was growing
upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.
He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the
pocket of his overalls. It was even possible—he thought this
because from time to time something seemed to tickle his
leg—that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the
end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped
a hand into his pocket.
‘Smith!’ yelled a voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith
W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!’
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before
being brought here he had been taken to another place
which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary
lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how long he
had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and
no daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evilsmelling
place. They had put him into a cell similar to the
one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times crowded
by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common
criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among
them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to
take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing
the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party
prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always
silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to
care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards,
fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded,
wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food
which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their
clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried
to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed
to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames,
and tried to wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole
in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals
with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour
camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent.
It was ‘all right’ in the camps, he gathered, so long as you
had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality
and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given
only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and
the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the
dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every
description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers,
drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so
violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress
them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about
sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white
hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in,
kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her
one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which
she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down
across Winston’s lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The
woman hoisted herself upright and followed them out with
a yell of ‘F—— bastards!’ Then, noticing that she was sitting
on something uneven, she slid off Winston’s knees on
to the bench.
‘Beg pardon, dearie,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ‘a sat on you,
only the buggers put me there. They dono ‘ow to treat a lady,
do they?’ She paused, patted her breast, and belched. ‘Pardon,’
she said, ‘I ain’t meself, quite.’
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
‘Thass better,’ she said, leaning back with closed eyes.
‘Never keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it’s
fresh on your stomach, like.’
She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and
seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast
arm round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing
beer and vomit into his face.
‘Wass your name, dearie?’ she said.
‘Smith,’ said Winston.
‘Smith?’ said the woman. ‘Thass funny. My name’s Smith
too. Why,’ she added sentimentally, ‘I might be your mother!’
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was
about the right age and physique, and it was probable that
people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour
camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent
the ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. ‘The
polITS,’ they called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt.
The Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to
anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only
once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed
close together on the bench, he overheard amid the din of
voices a few hurriedly-whispered words; and in particular a
reference to something called ‘room one-oh-one’, which he
did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought
him here. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but
sometimes it grew better and sometimes worse, and his
thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When it
grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire
for food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him.
There were moments when he foresaw the things that would
happen to him with such actuality that his heart galloped
and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons on
his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself
grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken
teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his
mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but
that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic.
He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered
what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O’Brien,
with a flickering hope. O’Brien might know that he had
been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to
save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would
send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps
five seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The
blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness,
and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the bone.
Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling
from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he
would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was
more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting
another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there
was torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain
bricks in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but
he always lost count at some point or another. More often he
wondered where he was, and what time of day it was. At one
moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight outside,
and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In
this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be
turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now
why O’Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion. In the
Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell might be
at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it might
be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved
himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine
by the feeling of his body whether he was perched
high in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel
door opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed
figure who seemed to glitter all over with polished
leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a
wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He motioned
to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they
were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell.
The door clanged shut again.
Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from
side to side, as though having some idea that there was another
door to go out of, and then began to wander up and
down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston’s presence.
His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre
above the level of Winston’s head. He was shoeless; large,
dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his socks. He
was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard
covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of
ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and
nervous movements.
Winston roused hirnself a little from his lethargy. He
must speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen.
It was even conceivable that Ampleforth was the
bearer of the razor blade.
‘Ampleforth,’ he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth
paused, mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly
on Winston.
‘Ah, Smith!’ he said. ‘You too!’
‘What are you in for?’
‘To tell you the truth—’ He sat down awkwardly on the
bench opposite Winston. ‘There is only one offence, is there
not?’ he said.
‘And have you committed it?’
‘Apparently I have.’
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for
a moment, as though trying to remember something.
‘These things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been
able to recall one instance—a possible instance. It was an
indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive
edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to
remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost 

indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was
impossible to change the line. The rhyme was ‘rod”. Do you
realize that there are only twelve rhymes to ‘rod’ in the entire
language? For days I had racked my brains. There WAS
no other rhyme.’
The expression on his face changed. The annoyance
passed out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased.
A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has
found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and
scrubby hair.
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history
of English poetry has been determined by the fact that
the English language lacks rhymes?’
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very
important or interesting.
‘Do you know what time of day it is?’ he said.
Ampleforth looked startled again. ‘I had hardly thought
about it. They arrested me—it could be two days ago—perhaps
three.’ His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he
half expected to find a window somewhere. ‘There is no difference
between night and day in this place. I do not see
how one can calculate the time.’
They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without
apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be
silent. Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth,
too large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted
from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one
knee, then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to
keep still. Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour—it was
difficult to judge. Once more there was a sound of boots
outside. Winston’s entrails contracted. Soon, very soon,
perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots
would mean that his own turn had come.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped
into the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated
Ampleforth.
‘Room 101,’ he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards,
his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston’s
belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round
on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into
the same series of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain
in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming;
O’Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in
his entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the door
opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a powerful
smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was
wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
‘YOU here!’ he said.