Darkness at Noon (13 page)

He did not think at all of the absurd story of a plot against No. 1’s life; he was far more interested in the personality of Ivanov himself. Ivanov had said that their rules . could equally well have been reversed; in that he was doubtless right. He himself and Ivanov were twins in their development; they did not come from the same ovum, yet were nourished by the same umbilical cord of a common conviction; the intense environment of the Party had etched and moulded the character of both during the decisive years of development. They had the same moral standard, the same philosophy, they thought in the same terms. Their positions might just as well have been the other way round. Then Rubashov would have sat behind the desk and Ivanov in front of it; and from that position Rubashov would probably have used the same arguments as had Ivanov. The rules of the game were fixed. They only admitted variations in detail.

The old compulsion to think through the minds of others had again taken hold of him; he sat in Ivanov’s place and saw himself through Ivanov’s eyes, in the position of the accused, as once he had seen Richard and Little Loewy. He saw this degraded Rubashov, the shadow of the former companion, and he understood the mixture of tenderness and contempt with which Ivanov had treated him. During their discussion, he had repeatedly asked himself whether Ivanov was sincere or hypocritical; whether he was laying traps for him, or really wanted to show him a way of escape. Now, putting himself in Ivanov’s position, he realized that Ivanov was sincere—as much so or as little, as he himself had been towards Richard or Little Loewy.

These reflections also had the form of a monologue, but along familiar lines; that newly discovered entity, the silent partner, did not participate in them. Although it was supposed to be the person addressed in all monologues, it remained dumb, and its existence was limited to a grammatical abstraction called the “first person singular”. Direct questions and logical meditations did not induce it to speak; its utterances occurred without visible cause and, strangely enough, always accompanied by a sharp attack of toothache. Its mental sphere seemed to be composed of such various and disconnected parts as the folded hands of the
Pietà
, Little Loewy’s cats, the tune of the song with the refrain of “come to dust”, or a particular sentence which Arlova had once spoken on a particular occasion. Its means of expression were equally fragmentary: for instance, the compulsion to rub one’s pince-nez on one’s sleeve, the impulse to touch the light patch on the wall of Ivanov’s room, the uncontrollable movements of the lips which murmured such senseless sentences as “I shall pay”, and the dazed state induced by daydreams of past episodes in one’s life.

Rubashov tried to study this newly discovered entity very thoroughly during his wanderings through the cell; with the shyness of emphasizing the first person singular customary in the Party, he had christened it the “grammatical fiction”. He probably had only a few weeks left to live, and he felt a compelling urge to clear up this matter, to “think it to a logical conclusion”. But the realm of the “grammatical fiction” seemed to begin just where the “thinking to a conclusion” ended. It was obviously an essential part of its being, to remain out of the reach of logical thought, and then to take one unawares, as from an ambush, and attack one with daydreams and toothache. Thus, Rubashov passed the entire seventh day of his imprisonment, the third after the first hearing, re-living a past period of his existence—namely, his relation with the girl Arlova, who had been shot.

The exact moment in which, in spite of his resolutions, he had slid into the day-dream was as impossible to establish afterwards as the moment in which one falls asleep. On the morning of this seventh day, he had worked on his notes, then, presumably, he had stood up to stretch his legs a bit—and only when he heard the rattling of the key in the lock did he wake up to the fact that it was already midday, and that he had walked back and forth in the cell for hours on end. He even had hung the blanket round his shoulders because, presumably also for several hours, he had been rhythmically shaken by a kind of ague and had felt the nerve of his tooth pulsing in his temples. He absently spooned out his bowl which the orderlies had filled with their ladles, and continued his walk. The warder, who observed him from time to time through the spy-hole, saw that he had shiveringly hunched up his shoulders and that his lips were moving.

Once more Rubashov breathed the air of his erstwhile office in the Trade Delegation, which was filled with the peculiarly familiar odor of Arlova’s big, well-formed and sluggish body; once more he saw the curve of her bowed neck over the white blouse, bent over her note-book while he dictated, and her round eyes following his wanderings through the room in the intervals between the sentences. She always wore white blouses, of the same kind as Rubashov’s sisters had worn at home, embroidered with little flowers at the high neck, and always the same cheap ear-rings, which stood out a little from her cheeks as she bent over her note-book. In her slow, passive way, she was as if made for this job, and had an unusually quietening effect on Rubashov’s nerves when he was overworked. He had taken over his new post as leader of the Trade Delegation in B. immediately after the incident with Little Loewy, and had- thrown himself into work head first; he was grateful to the C.C. for providing him with this bureaucratic activity. It was exceedingly rare that leading men out of the International were transferred to the diplomatic services. No. 1 presumably had special intentions with him, for usually the two hierarchies were kept strictly apart, were not allowed to have contact with each other, and sometimes even followed opposite policies. Only when seen from the higher viewpoint of the spheres around No. 1 did the apparent contradictions resolve themselves and the motives became clear.

Rubashov needed some time to get used to his new way of life; it amused him that he now had a diplomatic passport, which was even authentic and in his own name; that, in formal clothes, he had to take part in receptions; that policemen stood to attention for him, and that the inconspicuously dressed men in black bowlers who sometimes followed him about were doing it solely out of tender care for his safety.

At first he felt slightly estranged by the atmosphere in the rooms of the Trade Delegation, which was attached to the legation. He understood that in the bourgeois world one had to be representative and play their game, but he considered that the game was played rather too well here, so that it was hardly possible to distinguish appearance from reality. When the First Secretary of the legation drew Rubashov’s attention to certain necessary changes in his dress and in his style of living—the First Secretary had before the Revolution forged money in the service of the Party—he did not do this in a comradely, humorous way, but with such underlined consideration and tact that the scene became embarrassing and got on Rubashov’s nerves.

Rubashov had twelve subordinates, each with a clearly defined rank; there were First and Second Assistants, First and Second Book-keepers, Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. Rubashov had the feeling that the whole bunch of them regarded him as something between a national hero and a robber chief. They treated him with exaggerated respect and indulgently superior tolerance. When the Secretary to the legation had to report to him about a document, he made an effort to express himself in the simple terms one would use to a savage or a child. Rubashov’s private secretary, Arlova, got on his nerves the least; only he could not understand why she wore such ridiculously high-heeled, patent-leather shoes with her pleasant, simple blouses and skirts.

It was nearly a month before he first spoke to her in a conversational tone. He was tired by dictating and walking up and down, and suddenly became aware of the silence in the room. “Why do you never say anything, Comrade Arlova?” he asked, and sat down in the comfortable chair behind his writing-desk.

“If you like,” she answered in her sleepy voice, “I will always repeat the last word of the sentence.”

Every day she sat on her chair in front of the desk, in her embroidered blouse, her heavy, shapely bust bent over the note-book, with bowed head and ear-rings hanging parallel to her cheeks. The only jarring element was the patent leather shoes with pointed heels, but she never crossed her legs, as most of the women did whom Rubashov knew. As he always walked up and down while dictating, he usually saw her from behind or half in profile, and the thing he remembered most clearly was the curve of her bent neck. The back of her neck was neither fluffy nor shaved; the skin was white and taut over the vertebrae; below were the embroidered flowers on the edge of her white blouse.

In his youth Rubashov had not had much to do with women; nearly always they were comrades, and nearly always the start of the affair had been a discussion prolonged so late into the night that whichever was the other’s guest missed the last tram home.

After that unsuccessful attempt at a conversation, another fortnight passed At first Arlova had really repeated the last word of the dictated sentence in her drowsy voice; then she had given it up, and when Rubashov paused, the room was again still and saturated with her sisterly perfume. One afternoon, to his own surprise, Rubashov stopped behind her chair, put both his hands lightly on her shoulders, and asked her whether she would go out with him in the evening. She did not jerk back and her shoulders kept still under his touch; she nodded in silence and did not even turn her head. It was not a habit of Rubashov’s to make frivolous jokes, but later in the same night he could not forbear saying with a smile: “One would think you were still taking down dictation.” The outline of her large, well-shaped breast seemed as familiar against the darkness of the room as though she had always been there. Only the ear-rings now lay flax on the pillow. Her eyes had the same expression as ever, when she pronounced that sentence which could no more leave Rubashov’s memory than the folded hands of the
Pietà
, and the smell of sea-weed in the harbour town:

“You will always be able to do what you like with me.”

“But why?” asked Rubashov, astonished and slightly startled

She did not answer. Probably she was already asleep. Asleep, her breathing was as inaudible as waking. Rubashov had never noticed that she breathed at all. He had never seen her with shut eyes. It made her face strange to him; it was much more expressive with shut eyes than with open. Strange to him also were the dark shadows of her armpits; her chin, otherwise lowered to her breast, stuck out steeply like a dead woman’s. But the light, sisterly scent of her body was familiar to him, even asleep.

The next day and all the following days, she sat again in her white blouse, bent over the desk; the next night and all the following nights the paler silhouette of her breast was raised against the dark bedroom curtain. Rubashov lived by day and by night in the atmosphere of her large, lazy body. Her behaviour during work remained unaltered, her voice and the expression of her eyes was the same; never did they contain the least suggestion of an allusion. From time to time, when Rubashov was tired by dictating, he stopped behind her chair and leaned his hands on her shoulders; he said nothing, and under the blouse her warm shoulders did not move; then he found the phrase he had been searching for, and, resuming his wandering through the room, he went on dictating.

Sometimes he added sarcastic commentaries to what he was dictating; then she stopped writing and waited, pencil in hand, until he had finished; but she never smiled at his sarcasm and Rubashov never discovered what she thought of them. Only once, after a particularly dangerous joke of Rubashov’s, referring to certain personal habits of No. 1’s she said suddenly, in her sleepy voice: “You ought not to say such things in front of other people; you ought to be more careful altogether. ...” But from time to time, particularly when instructions and circulars from above arrived, he felt a need to give vent to his heretical witticisms.

It was the time of preparation for the second great trial of the opposition. The air in the legation had become peculiarly thin. Photographs and portraits disappeared from walls overnight; they had hung there for years, nobody had looked at them, but now the light patches leaped to the eye. The staff restricted their conversation to service matters; they spoke to each other with a careful and reserved politeness. At meals in the Legation canteen, when conversation was unavoidable, they stuck to the stock phrases of official terminology, which, in the familiar atmosphere, appeared grotesque and rather uneasy; it was as though, between requests for salt-cellar and mustard-pot, they called out to each other the catch-words of the latest Congress manifesto. Often it happened that somebody protested against a supposed false interpretation of what he had just said, and called his neighbours to witness, with precipitate exclamations of “I did not say that”, or “That is not what I meant”. The whole thing gave Rubashov the impression of a queer and ceremonious marionette-play with figures, moving on wires, each saying their set piece. Arlova alone, with her silent, sleepy manner, seemed to remain unchanged.

Not only the portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discreetly, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves—their author, the People’s Commissar for Finance, had just been arrested; also nearly all old Party Congress reports treating the same subject; most books and reference-books on the history of antecedents of the Revolution; most works by living authors of jurisprudence and philosophy; all pamphlets dealing with the problems of birth control; the manuals on the structure of the People’s Army; treatises on trade unionism and the right to strike in the People’s state; practically every study of the problems of political constitution more than two years old, and, finally, even the volumes of the
Encyclopaedia
published by the Academy—a new revised edition being promised shortly.