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 musical-box. 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.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active
rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take
the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality,
there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into
it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed
to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he
sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence,
announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his
help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an
impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by
their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should
believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single
flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that
everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and
would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she
refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition
existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his
underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which
the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had
to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies
and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of
her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never
heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest
belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her
place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded
the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death
to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always
excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she
had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what
doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since
the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological
battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an
independent political movement was outside her imagination: and
in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist,
and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against
it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of
violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far
less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in
some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled
him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not
happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were
probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally
never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him
by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great
difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only
questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way
touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the
official mythology, simply because the difference between truth
and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for
instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had
invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston
remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter
that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the
aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the
steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in
existence before he was born and long before the Revolution,
the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what
did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more
of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark
that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had
been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was
true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently
she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had
changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she
said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of
aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover
in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was
grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of
an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back
until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not
Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as
unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always
one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all
lies anyway.
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and
the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did
not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening
beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He
told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the
momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his
fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first,
indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members.
Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to
the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by
sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being
killed off all the time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional
case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do
you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been
actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few
solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of
glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the
Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record
has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and
building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And
that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present
in which the Party is always right. I know, of course,
that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for
me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After
the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence
is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that
any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one
instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete
evidence after the event -- years after it.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes
later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take
risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old
newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had
kept it?'
'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have
planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared
to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter
anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots
of resistance springing up here and there -- small groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and
even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations
can carry on where we leave off.'
'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm
interested in us.
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told
her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms
round him in delight.
In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the
faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles
of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the
denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she
became bored and confused and said that she never paid any
attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all
rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to
cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he
persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting
habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go
to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he
realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy
while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a
way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most
successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They
could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what
was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in
public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed
everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because
it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.
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