CHAPTER 5

S
yme 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.