Darkness at Noon (2 page)

It was cold, dark and very quiet on the staircase. The younger of the two men from the Commissariat of the Interior proposed to shoot the lock of the door to pieces. Vassilij leant against the lift door; he had not had the time to put on his boots properly, and his hands trembled so much that he could not tie the laces. The elder of the two men was against shooting; the arrest had to be carried out discreetly. They both blew on their stiff hands and began again to hammer against the door; the younger banged on it with the butt of his revolver. A few
floors below them a woman screamed in a piercing voice. “Tell her to shut up,” said the young man to Vassilij. “Be quiet,” shouted Vassilij. “Here is Authority.” The woman became quiet at once. The young man changed over to belabouring the door with his boots. The noise filled the whole staircase; at last the door fell open.

The three of them stood by Rubashov's bed, the young man with his pistol in his hand, the old man holding himself stiffly as though standing to attention; Vassilij stood a few steps behind them, leaning against the wall. Rubashov was still drying the sweat from the back of his head; he looked at them shortsightedly with sleepy eyes. “Citizen Rubashov, Nicholas Salmanovitch, we arrest you in the name of the law,” said the young man. Rubashov felt for his glasses under the pillow and propped himself up a bit. Now that he had his glasses on, his eyes had the expression which Vassilij and the elder official knew from old photographs and colour-prints. The elder official stood more stiffly to attention; the young one, who had grown up under new heroes, went a step closer to the bed; all three saw that he was about to say or do something brutal to hide his awkwardness.

“Put that gun away, comrade,” said Rubashov to him. “What do you want with me, anyhow?”

“You hear you are arrested,” said the boy. “Put your clothes on and don't make a fuss.”

“Have you got a warrant?” asked Rubashov.

The elder official pulled a paper out of his pocket, passed it to Rubashov and stood again to attention.

Rubashov read it attentively. “Well, good,” he said. “One never is any the wiser from those things; the devil take you.”

“Put your clothes on and hurry up,” said the boy. One saw that his brutality was no longer put on, but was natural to him. A fine generation have we produced, thought Rubashov. He recalled the propaganda posters on which youth was always represented with a laughing face. He felt very tired. “Pass me my dressing-gown, instead of fumbling around with your revolver,” he said to the boy. The boy reddened, but remained silent. The elder official passed the dressing-gown to Rubashov. Rubashov worked his arm into the sleeve. “This time it goes at least,” he said with a strained smile. The three others did not understand and said nothing. They watched him as he got slowly out of bed and collected his crumpled clothes together.

The house was silent after the one shrill woman's cry, but they had the feeling that all the inhabitants were awake in their beds, holding their breath.

Then they heard someone in an upper story pull the plug and the water rushing down evenly through the pipes.

At the front door stood the car in which the officials had come, a new American make. It was still dark; the chauffeur had put on the headlights, the street was asleep or pretended to be. They got in, first the lad, then Rubashov, then the elder official. The chauffeur, who was also in uniform, started the car. Beyond the corner the asphalt surface stopped; they were still in the centre of the town; all around them were big modern buildings of nine and
ten stories, but the roads were country cart-tracks of frozen mud, with a thin powdering of snow in the cracks. The chauffeur drove at a walking pace and the superbly sprung motor car creaked and groaned like an oxen wagon.

“Drive faster,” said the lad, who could not bear the silence in the car.

The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders without looking round. He had given Rubashov an indifferent and unfriendly look as he got into the car. Rubashov had once had an accident; the man at the wheel of the ambulance-car had looked at him in the same way. The slow, jolting drive through the dead streets, with the wavering light of the head lamps before them, was difficult to stand. “How far is it?” asked Rubashov, without looking at his companions. He nearly added: to the hospital. “A good half-hour,” said the older man in uniform. Rubashov dug cigarettes out of his pocket, put one in his mouth and passed the packet around automatically. The young man refused abruptly, the elder one took two and passed one on to the chauffeur. The chauffeur touched his cap and gave everybody a light, holding the steering-wheel with one hand. Rubashov's heart became lighter; at the same time he was annoyed with himself for it. Just the time to get sentimental, he thought. But he could not resist the temptation to speak and to awaken a little human warmth around him. “A pity for the car,” he said. “Foreign cars cost quite a bit of gold, and after half a year on our roads they are finished.”

“There you are quite right. Our roads are very backward,” said the old official. By his tone Rubashov realized that he had understood his helplessness. He felt
like a dog to whom one had just thrown a bone; he decided not to speak again. But suddenly the boy said aggressively:

“Are they any better in the capitalist states?”

Rubashov had to grin. “Were you ever outside?” he asked.

“I know all the same what it is like there,” said the boy. “You need not try to tell me stories about it.”

“Whom do you take me for, exactly?” asked Rubashov very quietly. But he could not prevent himself from adding: “You really ought to study the Party history a bit.”

The boy was silent and looked fixedly at the driver's back. Nobody spoke. For the third time the driver choked off the panting engine and let it in again, cursing. They jolted through the suburbs; in the appearance of the miserable wooden houses nothing was changed. Above their crooked silhouettes hung the moon, pale and cold.

In every corridor of the new model prison electric light was burning. It lay bleakly on the iron galleries, on the bare whitewashed walls, on the cell doors with the name cards and the black holes of the judas-eyes. This colourless light, and the shrill echoless sound of their steps on the tiled paving were so familiar to Rubashov that for a few seconds he played with the illusion that he was dreaming again. He tried to make himself believe that the whole thing was not real. If I succeed in believing
that I am dreaming, then it will really be a dream, he thought.

He tried so intensely that he nearly became dizzy; then immediately a choking shame rose in him. This has to be gone through, he thought. Right through to the end. They reached cell No. 404. Above the spy-hole was a card with his name on it, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov. They have prepared everything nicely, he thought; the sight of his name on the card made an uncanny impression on him. He wanted to ask the warder for an extra blanket, but the door had already slammed behind him.

At regular intervals the warder had peeped through the judas into Rubashov's cell. Rubashov had been lying tranquilly on the bunk; only his hand had twitched from time to time in his sleep. Beside the bunk lay his pincenez and a cigarette stump on the tiles.

At seven o'clock in the morning—two hours after he had been brought to cell 404—Rubashov was woken by a bugle call. He had slept dreamlessly, and his head was clear. The bugle repeated three times the same blaring sequence. The trembling tones re-echoed and died out; a malevolent silence remained.

It was not yet quite day; the contours of the can and of the wash-basin were softened by the dim light. The window grate was a black pattern silhouetted against the dingy glass; top left a broken pane had a piece of newspaper stuck over it. Rubashov sat up, reached for the pince-nez and the cigarette stump at the end of his bed and lay
back again. He put on the pince-nez and managed to make the stump glow. The silence lasted. In all the white-washed cells of this honeycomb in concrete, men were simultaneously arising from their bunks, cursing and groping about on the tiles, yet in isolation cells one heard nothing—except from time to time retreating footsteps in the corridor. Rubashov knew that he was in an isolation cell and that he was to stay there until he was shot. He drew his fingers through his short, pointed beard, smoked his cigarette-end and lay still.

So I shall be shot, thought Rubashov. Blinking, he watched the movement of his big toe, which stuck up vertically at the end of the bed. He felt warm, secure and very tired; he had no objection to dozing straight off into death, there and then, if only one let him remain lying under the warm blanket. “So they are going to shoot you,” he told himself. He slowly moved his toes in the sock and a verse occurred to him which compared the feet of Christ to a white roebuck in a thornbush. He rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve with the gesture familiar to all his followers. He felt in the warmth of the blanket almost perfectly happy and feared only one thing, to have to get up and move. “So you are going to be destroyed,” he said to himself half-aloud and lit another cigarette, although only three were left. The first cigarettes on an empty stomach caused him sometimes a slight feeling of drunkenness; and he was already in that peculiar state of excitement familiar to him from former experiences of the nearness of death. He knew at the same time that this condition was reprehensible and, from a certain point of view, unpermissible, but at the moment he felt no inclination to take that point of view. Instead, he observed
the play of his stockinged toes. He smiled. A warm wave of sympathy for his own body, for which usually he had no liking, played over him and its imminent destruction filled him with a self-pitying delight. “The old guard is dead,” he said to himself. “We are the last.” “We are going to be destroyed.” “For golden lads and girls must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust….” He tried to recall the tune of “come to dust …”, but only the words came to him. “The old guard is dead,” he repeated and tried to remember their faces. He could only recall a few. Of the first Chairman of the International, who had been executed as a traitor, he could only conjure up a piece of a check waistcoat over the slightly rotund belly. He had never worn braces, always leather belts. The second Prime Minister of the Revolutionary State, also executed, had bitten his nails in moments of danger…. History will rehabilitate you, thought Rubashov, without particular conviction. What does history know of nail-biting? He smoked and thought of the dead, and of the humiliation which had preceded their death. Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to hate No. 1 as he ought to. He had often looked at the colour-print of No. 1 hanging over his bed and tried to hate it. They had, between themselves, given him many names, but in the end it was No. 1 that stuck. The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right. There was no certainty; only the appeal to that mocking oracle they called History, who gave her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long since fallen to dust.

Rubashov had the feeling that he was being watched through the spy-hole. Without looking, he knew that a pupil pressed to the hole was staring into the cell; a moment later the key did actually grind in the heavy lock. It took some time before the door opened. The warder, a little old man in slippers, remained at the door:

“Why didn't you get up?” he asked.

“I am ill,” said Rubashov.

“What is the matter with you? You cannot be taken to the doctor before to-morrow.”

“Toothache,” said Rubashov.

“Toothache, is it?” said the warder, shuffled out and banged the door.

Now I can at least remain lying here quietly, thought Rubashov, but it gave him no more pleasure. The stale warmth of the blanket became a nuisance to him, and he threw it off. He again tried to watch the movements of his toes, but it bored him. In the heel of each sock there was a hole. He wanted to darn them, but the thought of having to knock on the door and request needle and thread from the warder prevented him; the needle would probably be refused him in any case. He had a sudden wild craving for a newspaper. It was so strong that he could smell the printer's ink and hear the crackling and rustling of the pages. Perhaps a revolution had broken out last night, or the head of a state had been murdered, or an American had discovered the means to counteract the force of gravity. His arrest could not be in it yet; inside the country, it would be kept secret for a while, but abroad the sensation would soon leak through, they would print ten-year-old photographs dug out of the newspaper archives and publish a lot of nonsense about
him and No. 1. He now no longer wanted a newspaper, but with the same greed desired to know what was going on in the brain of No. 1. He saw him sitting at his desk, elbows propped, heavy and gloomy, slowly dictating to a stenographer. Other people walked up and down while dictating, blew smoke-rings or played with a ruler. No. 1 did not move, did not play, did not blow rings…. Rubashov noticed suddenly that he himself had been walking up and down for the last five minutes; he had risen from the bed without realizing it. He was caught again by his old ritual of never walking on the edges of the paving stones, and he already knew the pattern by heart. But his thoughts had not left No. 1 for a second, No. 1, who, sitting at his desk and dictating immovably, had gradually turned into his own portrait, into that well-known colour-print, which hung over every bed or sideboard in the country and stared at people with its frozen eyes.

Rubashov walked up and down in the cell, from the door to the window and back, between bunk, wash-basin and bucket, six and a half steps there, six and a half steps back. At the door he turned to the right, at the window to the left: it was an old prison habit; if one did not change the direction of the turn one rapidly became dizzy. What went on in No. 1's brain? He pictured to himself a cross-section through that brain, painted neatly with grey water-colour on a sheet of paper stretched on a drawing-board with drawing-pins. The whorls of grey matter swelled to entrails, they curled round one another like muscular snakes, became vague and misty like the spiral nebulæ on astronomical charts…. What went on in the inflated grey whorls? One knew everything
about the far-away nebulæ, but nothing about the whorls. That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: “Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process.” And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobe of No. 1's brain: “Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe.” Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, merely superstition and black magic….