前言

生活在一个后 1984 式社会中，我们想活得稍微好点就不得不了解 BigBrother 的行为方式。

这本书就是对历史的反映，也是对未来的预言。。

总能从中找到对现状的贴切描述，让我“身临其境”。

读英文版能了解很多独特的英语单词，纯看中文翻译不能完全体会那个意思。。而且这里的翻译也存在很大问题，和英文原文存在较大出入。比如 Imperial China 被翻译成封建时代的中国；奥博莱恩的那个仆人明明是 Chinese，这里却只是个亚裔；关于三国地图那块，问题也很大，这里不再赘述。

就个人观察而言，《我们》和《动物农场》是对苏联式马克思主义的形象描绘，《美丽新世界》是文化马克思主义的终极模式的生动反映，而《1984》中的社会则是两种马克思主义终极模式的综合。《1984》中不仅有物理消灭（苏联大审判）还有精神消灭（从概念上解构认知）。。

还有好多要补充的，但是我暂时没空，这个留待以后补充吧！

书籍简介

《一九八四》（英語：Nineteen Eighty-Four），是英國作家喬治·歐威爾所創作的一部反烏托邦小說，出版於1949年。它重點探討黨和政府權力過分伸張、推行極權主義、實施壓抑性統治的後果。故事發生的時間設於1984年——為當時作者對未來的虛構想像。在其構想中，世界大部分地區都陷入了一場永久的戰爭、政府監控無處不在、資料記錄中滿是歷史否定主義及政治宣傳。其為反烏托邦小說類三部代表作之一（另外兩部是《我們》和《美麗新世界》）。

在小說中，英國（第一空降場）成了超級大國大洋國的一個省，整個國家由黨所支配，它僱用了思想警察去迫害個人以及個人思考。老大哥是黨的領導人，喜歡強烈的個人崇拜，但他可能根本不存在。小說的主角溫斯頓·史密斯，是一名外圍黨員，他在真理部（新語稱為真部）工作，真理部負責宣傳和修改歷史，他的工作是重新編寫過去的報紙，好讓歷史記錄一如既往地支持政黨的發展路線。真理部的工作者會視此行為為「糾正錯誤」，儘管他們實際上是以虛假的資訊取代真相。該部的大部分工作者也積極地銷毀沒經修訂的所有文件；這樣一來，就沒有證據證明政府干擾歷史記錄。溫斯頓是一個勤勞且精巧的工人，但暗地裡憎恨黨並且夢想著反叛老大哥。溫斯頓通過與小說部的工作者茱莉亞保持性關係來逐漸開始他的反叛行為。

《一九八四》的故事舞台位於大洋國（Oceania）。大洋國是三個洲際超級大國之一，二次世界大戰之後，世界分成了三個國家聯盟。大部分情節發生於倫敦——「第一空降場的主要城市」，大洋國的一個省，「曾經被稱為英格蘭或不列顛」。黨的領導者老大哥的標語海報，「老大哥在看著你」佔據整個城市；而無處不在的「電幕」（telescreen，一種雙向電視，）在私密和公開場合監視著公眾。大洋國的社會階級系統有三層：

（I）上等階級的核心黨員（Inner Party），少數的統領精英，佔全國人口的2%左右。

（II）中等階級的外圍黨員（Outer Party），佔全國人口的13%左右。

（III）下等階級的無產階級（Proles）：佔全國人口的85%左右，代表沒受過教育的無產階級。 在政府(黨)利用四個部門控制群眾：

• 和平部負責戰爭
• 富裕部負責經濟事務（定量配給和令人民飢餓）
• 友愛部負責法律和秩序（酷刑和洗腦）
• 真理部負責新聞、娛樂、教育和藝術（宣傳）

每個部門的名稱都與它們所執行的任務相反

真理部亦是主角溫斯頓·史密斯（一個外圍黨的成員）工作的地方，在那裡他改寫歷史文獻好將過去改寫成符合正統的政黨路線——這每天都在改變——並將非人從歷史上抹去，「非人」是指被人「蒸發」的人，即不僅被國家殺掉，而是在歷史上或記憶上抹去這個人的存在。

溫斯頓的故事從1984年4月4日開始：「四月裡，天氣晴朗寒冷，鐘敲了十三下」；雖然這樣，日期是存有疑慮的，因為這是溫斯頓·史密斯個人感知到的東西，在持續對歷史的修改中；在這之後說明了這個日期是相對的。溫斯頓的記憶，及他閱讀的那本禁書，戈斯坦寫的《寡頭政治體系的理論和實踐》透露了在第二次世界大戰之後，英國陷入了內戰，然後被融合成為大洋國的一個部分。同時，蘇聯對歐洲大陸的吞併構成了第二個超級大國歐亞國。第三個超級大國，東亞國，包括中國占領的東亞部分。這三個超級大國打著永久的戰爭，為爭奪世界上未被征服的陸地。他們在適當的時候就結盟或打破盟約。

從他的兒時記憶（1949–1953）中，溫斯頓記起了發生在歐洲、俄羅斯西部和北美的核戰爭。內戰、黨的掌權、美國吞併大英帝國或科爾切斯特被轟炸很難說哪個先發生，然而，他記憶的愈發清晰以及他家庭解體的故事暗示，原子彈的爆炸先出現（史密斯一家躲在地鐵站），接著是內戰以及社會在戰後的重塑，黨把這回顧地稱為「革命」。

情節

這是一場核戰爭後，溫斯頓·史密斯在1984年的故事以及他對一號空降場（英國）當時生活的觀察（一號空降場是大洋國——三個超級大國之一——的一個省份）、對英社思想上的反叛、他與裘莉亞的偷情；及必然地在仁愛部被思想警察進行監禁、審問、拷打、洗腦和再教育。

溫斯頓·史密斯

溫斯頓·史密斯是一名知識分子，外圍黨的成員。他住在曾經是倫敦的一號空降場，成長於第二次世界大戰前的英國，與此同時，革命和內戰讓黨獲得了權力。在內戰中，英國社會主義黨（英社）將他安置在一個孤兒院裡，這個孤兒院的主要目的是培養孩童，並在他們成年之後將他們吸收入黨。雖然是黨員，他卻過著條件相當惡劣的生活：一間一居室的公寓，日常飲食包括黑麵包以及人工合成的飯菜，伴以勝利牌杜松子酒。他的理智讓他對此不滿，因此有了記日記的習慣，日記里存留有他對黨和老大哥的負面看法——這本日記如果被發現，將會是足以判他死刑的證據。不僅如此，幸運的是，他的房間裡還有個壁龕在電幕旁邊，使溫斯頓能避開電幕的監視。在日記中他寫道：「思想罪不會導致死亡；思想罪本身『就是』死亡。」電幕（在所有公共場合及每個黨員的住處都有）、隱藏的竊聽器以及告密者讓思想警察可以監視每一個人，並因而找出任何有可能危及黨的統治的人；孩子們則被從小教導要找出並報告有思想罪嫌疑的人——特別是他們的父母。

在真理部，溫斯頓是一名負責改寫歷史的職員，將過去修正為目前黨的官方版本，好讓大洋國的政府顯得無所不知。因為這樣，他不斷重寫記錄，偽造照片，並將原始的資料扔進忘懷洞。儘管喜歡改寫歷史所帶來的智力挑戰，溫斯頓同時也著迷於「真正的」過去，熱切地試圖了解那個被禁止的世界。

茱莉亞

一天，在真理部，當溫斯頓幫助一個摔倒的黑髮女人時，她悄悄地給了他一張紙條，上面寫著「我愛你」。她就是茱莉亞，一個修理員，負責在小說司維修那裡的小說寫作機器。在那一天之前，他深切地憎惡她，認為她是一個少年反性同盟的狂熱追隨者，因為她帶著此同盟的紅腰帶，一個禁慾和貞潔的象徵。在她給他遞了紙條後，這種敵意消減了。從那時他們開始暗中來往：第一次在鄉間幽會，後來則定期在附近一位無產者小鋪子的樓上，他們認為那裡是安全可靠的。溫斯頓不知道的是，思想警察已經發現了他們的反叛之舉並監視著他們。

當一位核心黨黨員歐布朗和他們接近後，溫斯頓相信他已和反黨組織兄弟會取得聯繫了。歐布朗給了他「那本書」，《寡頭政治集體主義的理論和實踐》，據說是兄弟會的領導者埃曼紐爾·戈斯坦寫的。這本書闡釋了永久的戰爭並揭穿了黨的三句口號「戰爭即和平，無知即力量，自由即奴役」背後的真相。

逮捕

思想警察在茱莉亞和溫斯頓的臥室裡抓住了他們，將他們押解到友愛部進行審問。在這之前林頓先生，那個把房間租給他們的無產者，卻公開了自己思想警察的身份。之後的很長一段時間內是系統有計劃的拷打，及黨內觀念學家的心理戰術。之後，歐布朗利用電擊療法拷問溫斯頓，並告訴他，這會治好他的精神錯亂，即他對黨明顯的仇恨。在漫長而複雜的談話間，歐布朗解釋了核心黨的動機：使一種絕對的權力完整。溫斯頓問過，兄弟會是否存在，得到的回答是他永不會知道，這將會是他腦子裡不可解的謎。在一次拷問的過程中，他在友愛部的監押過程得到了說明：「你的改造有三個階段」：「學習，理解，接受」關於黨的事實；然後溫斯頓將被處決。

懺悔和背叛

政治性再教育中，溫斯頓承認了他的罪行，但沒有供出同夥和他心愛的茱利亞。重返社會的第二階段再教育中，歐布朗讓溫斯頓明白自己「已經爛掉了」。反駁說黨無法成功（雖然後來被歐布朗駁倒），溫斯頓承認：「我沒有背叛茱莉亞。」歐布朗了解，雖然溫斯頓招供了關於他和茱莉亞的一切，他並沒有背叛她，因為他「沒有停止愛她；他對她的感情一如既往」。

一天晚上在囚室裡，溫斯頓突然醒來，尖叫著：「茱莉亞！茱莉亞！我的親人！茱莉亞！」於是歐布朗沖了進來，不是為審問他，而是為了將他送到101室，友愛部里最令人害怕的房間，因為裡邊的東西是「世界上最可怕的東西」。在那裡，一個犯人最怕的東西將被拿來威脅他或她，作為政治性再教育的最後一步：接受。溫斯頓最害怕的東西——老鼠，被以這樣的形式施加於他：一個鐵籠子中裝著飢餓的老鼠，籠子前面的面罩貼合他的臉。當籠子打開，老鼠將吞噬他。當籠子的鐵絲網碰到他臉頰上時，他開始瘋狂地喊叫：「去咬茱莉亞！」拷問結束了，溫斯頓回到了社會上，已被洗腦，接受黨的學說並熱愛老大哥。

在溫斯頓的再教育過程中，歐布朗總是理解溫斯頓，知道他在想些什麼。

與茱莉亞重逢

重返大洋國社會後，茱莉亞在公園重逢溫斯頓，每個人都承認出賣了對方，背叛改變了人：

「我出賣了你，」她若無其事地說。 「我出賣了你，」他說。 她又很快地憎惡的看了他一眼。 「有時候，」她說，「他們用什麼東西來威脅你，這東西你無法忍受，而且想都不能想。於是你就說，『別這樣對我，對別人去，對某某人去。』後來你也許可以偽裝這不過是一種計策，這麼說是為了使他們停下來，真的意思並不是這樣。但是這不對。當時你說的真是這個意思。你認為沒有別的辦法可以救你，因此你很願意用這個辦法來救自己。你真的願意這事發生在另外一個人身上。他受得了受不了，你根本不在乎。你關心的只是你自己。」 「你關心的只是你自己，」他隨聲附和說。 「在這以後，你對另外那個人的感情就不一樣了。」 「不一樣了，」他說，「你就感到不一樣了。」 似乎沒有別的可以說了。風把他們的單薄的工作服刮得緊緊地裹在他們身上。一言不發地坐在那裡使他覺得很難堪，而且坐著不動也太冷，他說要趕地下鐵道，就站了起來要走。 「我們以後見吧，」他說。 「是的，」她說，「我們以後見吧。」

投降與轉變

溫斯頓·史密斯最後成了一個嗜酒的閒散人員。一次，他在酒吧中聽到一則公報，公報中聲稱大洋國對歐亞國在非洲控制權上取得了決定性的勝利。這使他的思想徹底歸順，接受了黨對社會和生活的描述，並對他即將來臨的公開審判和處決聽之任之。他在被槍決的一瞬間意識到「他戰勝了自己，他愛老大哥。」

角色

主要角色

• 溫斯頓·史密斯（Winston Smith）：冷漠的主人公，外圍黨員。
• 茱莉亞（Julia）：溫斯頓的情人，暗中進行「腰部以下的叛逆」，以「青少年反性團的成員」這一身份公開擁護黨的學說。
• 老大哥（Big Brother）：大洋國的領袖，黑眼睛，留有黑鬍子。
• 歐布朗（O’Brien）：核心黨員，其假扮成兄弟會的成員，抵抗反革命，思想警察頭子，以欺騙、設立圈套的方式捕獲溫斯頓和朱莉婭。
• 埃曼紐爾·戈斯坦（Emmanuel Goldstein）：傳說中革命的敵人，並是《寡頭政治體系的理論和實踐》的作者，早年大洋國社會主義革命的領導者之一，後來背叛革命成為國家的象徵敵人，此一情況在兩分鐘仇恨和其他製造恐慌的情況下特為明顯，目的是加強人民對黨及老大哥的忠誠。溫斯頓最終得知那本書是一個包括歐布朗的核心黨員委員會的作品。不論戈斯坦還是他的兄弟會，溫斯頓以至讀者也不知道其是真實存在的還是黨的胡編亂造。

其他角色

• 艾朗臣、鍾斯和魯瑟福（Aaronson, Jones, Rutherford）：被整肅的前黨核心人物；已在「歷史」中被刪除，是一群「非人」，依稀記得他們是在他聽說老大哥以前的革命原領導人。他們供認與外國列強共謀叛國，並隨後在20世紀60年代被大清算。溫斯頓曾在栗樹咖啡館看見三人，該時他們正處於認罪與處決之間的空窗期。溫斯頓看到艾朗森和魯瑟福的鼻子被打扁了，這表示他們的供詞是通過酷刑取得的。後來，在溫斯頓的編輯工作過程中，他從報紙上看到了一項可證實口供不符合現實的證據，但其後把其掉進忘懷洞，十一年後，他在他的訊問中看到同樣的照片。
• 安普科夫（Ampleforth）：溫斯頓的紀錄司同僚，擅長修改詩歌韻文，因不能把吉卜林詩集一句詩最後的一個字「God」改掉以押「rod」韻而被友愛部囚禁，溫斯頓亦在友部遇到他。安普福斯是一個夢想家且對他的智力利用於他的工作中感到快樂，並尊重詩歌和語言，但這使他受到黨的冷遇。
• 查靈頓先生（Mr. Charrington）：表面上是一間貧民區舊貨店的東主；實際上是一名思想警察。
• 凱瑟琳（Katharine）：感情上冷漠的妻子，溫斯頓無法擺脫她。儘管不喜歡性交，但還是與溫斯頓結婚，因為這是「對黨的義務」。雖然她是一個「好思想性」的人，但兩人還是分居，因為她不能生孩子。離婚是不被允許的，但不能有孩子的夫妻可分開住。溫斯頓在故事的很多情節中模糊地希望凱瑟琳會死或者可以「擺脫」她，以使他可以娶茱莉亞為妻。他很後悔他在很多年前有機會時，沒有在一個石礦場的邊緣推她一把以殺了她。
• 馬田（Martin）：歐布朗的僕人。
• 帕臣斯（Parsons）：溫斯頓的鄰居和外圍黨員中的理想成員，一個沒有受過教育、易受影響，並完全忠於黨的人，還充分相信黨的完美形象。他在社交方面十分活躍且為其社會地位參與黨的活動，他對溫斯頓十分友好，且會因他的「好思想」孩子拿彈弓射溫斯頓而罵他們。其後以囚犯的身份在友愛部被溫斯頓遇到，因夢囈中出現反黨言論而被自己的子女向思想警察告發。但即使如此也沒有澆滅他對黨的信念。
• 帕森斯的孩子：少年偵察隊的隊員，代表著新一代的大洋國公民：除了老大哥以外沒有生活的回憶，沒有對親人的情感或關係；核心黨員認為的模範社會人民。
• 賽麥（Syme）：溫斯頓在真理部的同事，是新語辭典的編輯者，他喜歡摧毀文字的過程，並全心全意地相信2050年或以前新話會取代老話（標準英語）。雖然賽姆的政治觀點正統得與黨的學說一致，然而溫斯頓指出「他太聰明了，他把一切看得太清了、講的太坦率了」，並指出賽姆的名字從象棋委員會委員的名單消去後，溫斯頓推斷出他已成為非人。賽姆的蒸發諷刺史達林的大清洗。
• 狄洛臣（Tillotson）：與溫斯頓在同在真理部工作的矮個子男人，對其了解極少。

经典名词

Hate Week

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

telescreen

the Party

INGSOC

the Thought Police

the Ministry of Truth

Oceania

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four

第一部 One

I

IT WAS A BRIGHT cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak*—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-colored bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colorless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (“dealing on the free market,” it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his brief case. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All warfilms. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turnedpink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middleaged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms; little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the center of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prizefighter’s physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to, if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess; indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wristwatch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters; perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumored—in some hiding place in Oceania itself.

Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheeplike face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne; besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumors. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine!” and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dietionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his submachine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black mustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward oyer the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like “My Savior!” she extended her arms toward the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of “B-B!…B-B!…B-B!” over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first “B” and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this subhuman chanting of “B-B!…B-B!” always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened—if, indeed, it did happen.

Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. “I am with you,” O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. “I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!” And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.

That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumors of vast underground conspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hands which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.

His eyes refocused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals—

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

over and over again, filling half a page.

He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary; but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

they’ll shoot me i dont care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.

Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily toward the door.

第一章

4月的一天，天氣寒冷晴朗，13點的鐘聲還迴盪在耳畔。為了躲開寒風，溫斯頓·史密斯縮著脖子，快步溜進勝利大廈的玻璃門——不過還不夠快，一陣旋起的風沙跟著他進了門。

門廳裡有股煮捲心菜和舊地毯的味道。一端的牆上，釘著一幅大到離譜的彩色海報，與房間面積極不相稱。海報上是一張大臉，1米多寬。那是一位約有45歲的男人的臉，鬍鬚濃黑，面目粗獷英俊。溫斯頓徑直走向樓梯，沒有選擇搭電梯。即便在景氣的日子，電梯都難得開，何況如今為了迎接仇恨周的節約運動，白天要拉閘限電。寓所在7樓，溫斯頓爬得很慢，一路歇了好幾回。他39歲了，右腳踝患有靜脈曲張。每上一層，那張碩大無朋的臉都從正對著電梯間的牆上盯著他。有這麼一類特別的畫像，畫中人的眼睛會死死跟著你，任你走到哪裡，這海報就是這種類型。海報下的標語如是寫道：老大哥在看著你。

寓所裡，一個圓潤的聲音報出一串數字，好像是關於生鐵產量。左牆上有一面長方形金屬板，構成了牆體的一部分，看起來像是一面照不清人影的鏡子，聲音就是從那兒傳來的。溫斯頓轉動旋鈕，聲音小了些，不過依然清晰可辨。他們管這玩意叫電屏，可以調音，但沒法關掉。他走到窗前，看到自己矮小又瘦弱的身形，穿著藍色的制服，更顯得乾瘦。這是黨服，必須得穿。他髮色金黃，面色紅潤，劣質肥皂和鈍刀片，再加上剛剛過去的冬天的嚴寒，讓他面皮粗糙。

隔著緊閉的玻璃窗，他依然能夠感受到外面的寒意。從樓上向街角盡頭張望，旋風捲著灰塵和紙屑打轉，太陽高照，天空湛藍，但一切看起來還是毫無生氣，除了那張貼滿大街小巷各個角落的海報。那張生著黑鬍鬚的臉，從街面的每個要處直勾勾地向下盯視。沒錯，公寓門口正對面就有一幅。那雙黑眼睛直直地盯著溫斯頓，讓他心裡有些牴觸，標語上寫著「老大哥在看著你」。前街還有一幅，一角被撕開，當風抖著，上面唯一的一個詞不斷被蓋住又露出來，「英社」——英國社會主義。遠處，一架直升機低低地從屋頂上方盤旋而過，像只綠豆蠅，然後又掉個彎匆匆飛去了。這是專門在人家窗前捕風捉影的巡邏警察。巡邏警察並不可怕，真正可怕的是思想警察。

溫斯頓身後，電屏裡的聲音仍然在喋喋不休地講生鐵產量和超額完成第九個三年計劃的事情。電屏可同時接收和傳送，溫斯頓的每一點動靜，哪怕僅僅比最小聲的耳語稍大一些，都會被這玩意聽見，而且只要他停留在電屏設定的可視範圍內，就會被監視和監聽。顯然，你不知道自己什麼時候會被監視。思想警察會多久一次、通過何種系統接入私人線路，是完全不可知的，甚至可以認為，他們在全天候地監視著所有人。不管怎樣說，只要他們願意，可以隨時接入你的線路。

溫斯頓背對著電屏。儘管他清楚地知道一個人的脊樑也是會洩露秘密的，但他還是認為這樣相對安全些。離勝利大樓1公里處，就是他的辦公地點——真理部，一座氣勢恢宏的白色大廈,很顯眼地聳立在灰暗的背景中。總之，這就是倫敦，第一航道最大的城市，後者也是大洋國人口第三大的行政區。溫斯頓這樣想著，帶著厭惡的情緒。他竭力思索，試圖找回一些兒時的記憶，或許這能讓他想起昔日倫敦的模樣。那時候的倫敦，房屋是否也是殘破的19世紀的建築？房子是否也用一堆木頭撐著？窗戶是否也用紙板打著補丁？屋頂是否也因年久失修而架起了瓦楞鐵？殘破的花園牆是否也已經東倒西歪？眼下那些被轟炸得塵土飛揚的地方，那些荒蕪遍地的殘垣斷壁，原來又是怎樣的一番景象？還有那些被炸平了的大片空地，如今已經被蓋上了像雞窩一樣的木房子，挪去這些爛木頭的話，是否還能還原它先前的模樣？不管他怎樣努力地搜索都是徒勞的，童年的記憶仍然是一片空白。他不記得以前發生過的事情，更看不到一點記憶的影子，也弄不明白其中原因。

真理部大廈，用大洋國的新語（新語乃大洋國的官方語言，其結構和詞源學解釋可參見附錄）講，叫作「真部大廈」，它與視線範圍內的其他建築風格迥異。這是一座巨大的金字塔式的白色混凝土樓宇，從外面看起來發著亮光，高達300多米，一層繞著一層聳入雲霄。從溫斯頓站立的地方，就可以遙望到那白色的牆面上鐫刻著的黨的口號：

戰爭即和平

自由即奴役

無知即力量

據說，真理部的地上與地下各有3000個房間。倫敦周圍還有其他3座與之相似的政府建築。所以，相對於這些高大的樓房，周圍的建築物就顯得相當渺小了。站在勝利大廈的樓頂上，這四座高樓便巍立在你的眼前。四座樓各有一個部門，它們的職責分別是：真理部主管新聞、娛樂、教育和藝術；和平部負責戰事；仁愛部掌管法律和秩序；富裕部運作經濟事務。這四個部門的名字，在新語裡面分別叫：真部、和部、愛部和富部。

仁愛部是最令人望而生畏的部門，連窗戶都沒有。溫斯頓從來都沒去過那裡，就連那座大樓方圓半公里的區域都不曾涉足。除了公事之外，你根本不可能靠近一步。那簡直是座迷宮，路上佈滿了帶刺的鐵絲網和隱藏的機槍陣。就連通往那座大廈外圍哨卡的街道上，也都佈滿了身穿黑制服、手持警棍、四面巡邏、酷似大猩猩的武裝警衛。

溫斯頓突然轉身。此時，他一臉的平靜和樂觀，面對電屏，他不得不裝裝樣子。他穿過房間進入了窄小的廚房。在這個時間離開真理部，就吃不到食堂的午餐了。他也意識到，廚房裡沒什麼吃的了，除了那塊留作明日早餐的黑麵包。他從架子上拿下一瓶無色液體，通過上面的白色標籤可以辨認出，是勝利牌杜松子酒。這東西氣味怪怪的，油乎乎的，像極了中國的米酒。溫斯頓斟了一杯，像嗑苦藥似的一股腦兒地吞了下去。

不消片刻，他的臉漲得通紅，眼淚也跟著流了出來。這東西像硝酸，吞下去的感覺，簡直像後腦勺猛然一記悶棍。沒過多一會兒，待這液體在腹中燃燒的感覺平息後，世界也開始變得祥和起來。他從一個被壓扁的皺巴巴的標有「勝利牌香煙」的煙盒裡拿出一支煙，卻不小心將煙卷豎了起來，於是裡面的煙絲都掉到地上了。再拿第二根時，他顯得格外小心，生怕重蹈上一次的覆轍。他返回房間，在電屏左邊的一張小桌子旁坐下。從桌子抽屜裡拿出了一支筆、一瓶墨水和一本厚厚的四開空白記事本。這個記事本極為別緻，底面是紅色的，封面由雲石紙做成。

不知是什麼原因，溫斯頓屋裡的電屏竟然被放在了一個不尋常的位置——對窗的牆上。通常情況下，它是裝在迎門的牆上的，因為那樣可對房間裡的場景一覽無餘。在牆的一端有一個淺淺的壁龕，溫斯頓剛好能置身其中，想必在房子建造之初，這裡是有放書架的用意的。如果他坐在壁龕前，再收緊身子，就可以完全躲開電屏的監控了。當然，老大哥依然能聽到他的聲音，只是看不到他目前所處的位置而已。正因為房間佈局特殊的緣故，他才會想到，有些事情現在可以動手幹了。

此外，他剛從抽屜裡拿出來的記事本，似乎也在暗示自己，該動手做事情了。這是一本極為別緻的記事本，雖然紙張因為日子久了而略微泛黃，但是質地卻光滑異常，這至少應該是40年前的物件了。不，照他的猜測，這個本子的年歲要遠遠超過40年。最初，他是在城中街區一個邋裡邋遢的小店的櫥窗裡看到的，至於確切是哪個街區，他現在也記不起來了。但當他看到這個記事本的時候，就立即迸發了強烈的佔有慾。按理說，黨員是不能光顧這樣的店舖的，因為跑到這裡來，就等於和「自由市場交易」扯上了關係。但不管怎麼說，規矩總歸只是規矩，也很少嚴格地執行過，像鞋帶、剃鬚刀這樣的東西，不來這兒又能去哪兒買呢？溫斯頓還記得，當時他匆忙地瞥了一下街道的兩端，就「嗖」地一下閃進了小店裡，掏2塊5毛錢買下了這個本子。付過錢後，他仍然沒有想出這樣一個本子買來何用。他把它放進公文包，揣著糾結的心情回家了。即便什麼都不寫，光是收藏這樣一個空本子，也會給他帶來麻煩。

他要做的事情，就是寫日記。這並不是非法的事情，既然沒有法律可言，犯法也就無從談起。理是這麼說，但一旦被發現，就算不判死刑，至少也要被勞改25年。溫斯頓把筆尖插在筆管上，同時吸去筆尖上的油質。這種筆如今已成了老古董，鮮有人用它去簽名了，他費了好大一番力氣才偷摸地弄到手。他覺得，只有真正的鋼筆才配得上在這光鮮的紙上寫字，用墨水筆只會把好東西糟蹋了。事實上，他不是很習慣於手寫，除了簡短的字條外，通常他都會用讀寫器來處理文件。當然，今天要寫的東西，就沒必要用讀寫器了。他把筆尖兒在墨水裡蘸了一下，開始思索起來。他的腸胃裡猛然震顫了一下，把筆端付諸紙上才是當前最要緊的事情。於是，他用笨拙而微小的文字寫著：

1984年4月4日

他屁股往後挪了一下，一種無助感頓時朝他襲來。他甚至不能確定，今年到底是不是1984年，只是粗略地估算了一下。他只知道自己今年39歲，生於1944年或1945年——要想記下來哪一年哪一天發生了什麼，還真是難上加難。

他突然有點迷惑，這日記到底是為誰寫的呢？為未來，還是為尚未誕生的後人。他望著寫下了日期的紙面，思忖片刻，腦海裡突然浮現出一個新詞——雙重思想。就在此時，他突然意識到自己現在做的事情是多麼地有意義了。但是，他怎麼才能和未來對話呢？這是根本不可能的，或許未來就是現世的複製，到時人們同樣會像現在一樣不相信自己；再或許，未來是一個全新的世界，而自己目前的窘境也就變得毫無意義了。

他坐著，望著眼前鋪開的筆記本，發呆了許久。電屏上的節目早已換掉，現在正在播放刺耳的軍樂。說來奇怪，此時他似乎不單喪失了表達自己的能力，就連原本想要記下來的事情也忘了。幾個星期以來，他一直在為這一刻的到來而精心準備著，腦海裡也一直縈繞著「有志者事竟成」的念頭。其實寫作是一件很簡單的事情，難的是把腦海裡無休止的、不安分的獨白付諸紙上。然而，此時此刻，就連這獨白也變得不見了蹤跡。更要命的是，腿上的靜脈曲張讓他奇癢難耐，但又不敢撓，一撓就會發炎。時間一分一秒地過去。除了面前的白紙、腳踝上皮膚的瘙癢、噪耳的軍樂以及杜松子酒帶來的淺醉，溫斯頓此刻再無其他感覺。

突然，他近似瘋狂地奮筆疾書，至於寫些什麼，連他自己都覺得有點兒模糊。他那細小而近乎稚嫩的字體龍飛鳳舞、歪歪扭扭地錯落在紙上。他寫著寫著，開始時還只是忽略大小寫字母，到後來，就連標點符號也都省略掉了。

1984年4月4日。昨晚看電影，全是戰爭題材。其中我認為較好的一部，說的是地中海的一艘載有難民的船被炸的故事。觀眾被影片中大胖子試圖擺脫直升機的掃射而踉蹌逃命的情節逗樂。起初你看到他時，他像海豚一樣在水裡翻騰，然後你從直升機的瞄準鏡再看他時，已是滿身遍佈彈孔，周圍的海水慢慢變紅，突然間他好像由於身上的彈孔進水過多而下沉。在他下沉的那刻，觀眾們像打了雞血般爆笑如雷。這時，屏幕上出現了一條滿載兒童的救生艇，水面上空盤旋著直升飛機。一位貌似猶太人的中年婦女在船頭坐著，懷裡抱著一個三歲左右的小男孩。小男孩被嚇得尖叫起來，把腦袋深埋在女人的胸前。女人雙手摟著孩子，不停地安慰著受驚嚇的寶貝，雖然自己也身陷恐懼，但她卻一直盡可能地用雙臂抱緊孩子，生怕子彈繞過她的手臂傷到孩子。這時直升機投了一個20公斤的炸彈，只見呼地一下，小船頓時成了被引燃的火柴盒。有一個特別精彩的鏡頭：小孩的手臂不停地往上揮舞此時裝了攝像頭的直升飛機似乎也很配合地迎合著小孩手臂的起落看到此景黨員座位上立刻響起了熱烈掌聲但是無產者座中的女人卻受不住了大聲嚷嚷起來抱怨不該在孩子面前播放這樣的鏡頭這樣是不對的但是後來她還是被警察帶走了我想她不會有事的沒有人在乎無產者說什麼無產者的反應是什麼從來沒有——

溫斯頓停下了筆，或許是靜脈曲張令他痛苦。他不知道是什麼鬼東西讓他稀里糊塗地吐出了這麼多廢話。但是令人奇怪的是，就在他奮筆疾書之時，一個不尋常的記憶湧上了他的心頭，每一個細節都歷歷在目，彷彿早前在日記本裡記錄過一樣。他現在突然明白過來，就是因為這件事，今天他才決定回家寫日記的。

這是今天早晨在部裡發生的一件事——倘若這種含糊不清的事，也可以拿「發生」來說的話。

大約11點鐘，在溫斯頓工作的記錄科裡，同事們把椅子從隔間裡搬出來，擺放在大堂中央，正對著大電屏，準備參加「兩分鐘仇恨」節目。溫斯頓正要在中間那排椅子上坐下，這時，有兩個打過照面但從未有過交談的人出乎意料地走進了房間。其中一個是經常在走廊裡遇見的女孩，他不知道她叫什麼名字，只知道她任職於小說科。因為她經常滿手油污，還常拿著扳手之類的工具，想必是保養小說生產機的技師。她看起來是一個有責任心的女孩兒，大約27歲，有著天生濃密的黑髮和一張佈滿雀斑的面龐，同時也有著運動員一般輕巧的身材。她繫著一條細長的猩紅腰帶，這紅帶子通常被認為是青年反性聯盟的標記。她把腰帶扎得很緊，像是在套頭工裝上緊匝的線圈，不過這也剛好襯出她那豐碩的臀部。溫斯頓從初次見到她，就對她厭惡至極。至於為什麼那麼討厭她，當然只有溫斯頓自己知道。她所極力表現的一切，都會讓你想到這些：曲棍球場的氣氛、冷水浴、社團徒步旅行，甚至是思想純潔的一切。他幾乎討厭每一個女人，尤其是年輕漂亮的。在他看來，只有女人，特別是年輕的女人，才會和這些人、這些事兒扯上關係：對黨過分的阿諛附和，隨便的輕信主義者，業餘探子，喜歡搬弄是非，打小報告。而眼前這個特別的女人，讓他感覺到前所未有的威脅。有一次，他們在走廊裡相遇，這個女人隨即迅速地瞥了他一眼，他總覺得，自己像是被這女人用放射線看了個透底兒，頓時陷入到黑色恐怖之中。他腦子裡甚至一直縈繞著這樣一種想法——她就是個思想警察。儘管按理來說，這是不可能的事情。自此之後，每每她接近他時，他都會心懷忐忑，內心總有一種恐懼與敵意糾結在一起的情緒。

另一個是奧布萊恩，一個「內黨」分子。溫斯頓只知道他黨內職位顯赫，高不可攀，然而對他的身份實在是缺乏瞭解。大堂裡圍著椅子準備落座的人們，看到身著黑制服的內黨成員走過來，頓時變得鴉雀無聲。奧布萊恩身寬體胖，滿脖子橫肉，長著一張滑稽、殘忍又粗暴的臉。他雖然外表強悍，態度倒還有可親之處。他把眼鏡壓在鼻樑上的姿勢很有個性，反正是你無法準確說出的那種，總之就是很得體吧。他的動作，像是18世紀的法國貴族拿鼻煙盒給別人用。溫斯頓細細數來，在過去的十幾年裡，怎麼著也和他見了十幾次面了吧。溫斯頓對奧布萊恩極具好感，這種情結不是單純地來源於他那溫文爾雅的性格與其拳擊手的體魄之間的簡單對比，更多地是因為溫斯頓心存的那個強大的信念——也許還不算作信念，僅僅只是一個希望——那就是他希望奧布萊恩的政治觀念有別於正統。他臉上表露的東西讓你禁不住做出這樣的猜測，更進一步說，他臉上流露的東西不但不屬於正統，簡直就是大智慧。不管怎麼說，憑他的外貌可以斷定，他是個值得交心的人，如果你可以騙過電屏的眼睛，和他單獨相處的話。但是，溫斯頓從未盡自己的努力去求證這種猜測是否可靠，而且，他確實也沒有機會這樣去做。這時，奧布萊恩瞥了一下腕表，發現馬上就要11點了，毅然決定留下來參加記錄科的「兩分鐘仇恨」節目。他和溫斯頓坐在同排，差不多隔兩個座位，夾在他們中間的是個淺褐色頭髮的小女人，剛好在他的隔壁做事，而那個黑頭髮的女人則正好坐在他的背後。

緊接著，一種可怕的、令人難以忍受的聲音，從大堂末端的電屏裡傳來，這種聲音像是沒有加油的大機器咯吱咯吱地碾壓、摧殘著人的耳膜。那種動靜讓人咬牙切齒、毛骨悚然，「兩分鐘仇恨」節目開始了。

像往常一樣，電屏上出現了人民公敵艾曼紐爾·戈斯坦的面孔。房間裡噓聲四起。那個淺褐色頭髮的小女人尖叫了一聲，聲音中夾雜著恐懼與厭惡。戈斯坦是個反動的叛徒，很多年前曾經是黨的領導成員，至於多少年前，早已無人記得，只知道當時他幾乎可以跟老大哥平起平坐。後來，他因為從事反革命活動而被判處死刑，但他竟然奇跡般地逃脫了，最終不知去向。「兩分鐘仇恨」節目每天都有，內容不同，但都無一例外地把戈斯坦作為主要的批判對象。他是賣國的首犯，也是最早玷污黨的清白的人。接下來發生的所有叛黨行徑、陰謀顛覆國家的勾當、街頭巷尾流傳的歪理邪說以及離經叛道的思想，都與他的直接挑唆不無關係。他還活著，坐陣在某個角落，繼續著他的顛覆陰謀。或許他藏身海外，被他在國外的所謂「戰友」窩藏了起來，再或許，他正躲在大洋國的某個地方，至少有這樣的傳言。

溫斯頓覺得胸口像是被什麼東西堵住了似的。每每看到戈斯坦的頭像，他都會產生複雜且痛苦的情感。戈斯坦生就一副猶太人的消瘦面龐，頂著一頭毛茸茸的白髮，蓄著山羊鬍子。這面相看著聰明伶俐、慈祥可親，但誰又知道，扯開面皮的偽裝後，是不是藏著一副卑鄙的嘴臉。他長而單薄的鼻樑上架著一副眼鏡，給人一種年邁衰老的感覺。戈斯坦長得像綿羊，就連說話的聲音，也有點像羊叫。戈斯坦惡毒地攻擊著黨的理論，這攻擊聽起來荒誕滑稽，然而這些3歲孩子都能看穿的謊言，卻可以讓頭腦不如小孩清醒的大人上當，不得不讓人擔心。他在謾罵老大哥，在詆毀黨的專政制度，他要求立即與歐亞國締結和約，他倡導言論自由、出版自由、集會自由和思想自由，他歇斯底里地奔走呼號：革命已被出賣了！他的語速極快，慣用多音節字眼，單純就這一點來講，他的演說風格與辭令運用與黨內領導非常相似。偶爾，還能從他的話語裡帶出幾個新語詞彙，且這類詞彙出現的次數比任何一個黨員在日常生活中所用到的還要多。與此同時，為了更好地鼓動潛在的追隨者相信既成事實，掩蓋自己譁眾取寵的真相，在他背後的電屏上，一隊又一隊的歐亞大陸軍隊列陣而過，聲勢浩大，但這些亞洲人實在毫無表情可言。這些冷冰冰的面孔躍然電屏之上，轉而消失，又被一波相似的面孔所取代。士兵行進時踏出的空洞的節奏，恰好成了戈斯坦咩咩嘶叫的背景聲音。

「兩分鐘仇恨」節目開始還不到半分鐘，大堂裡的一多半人已迫不及待地想把心中的憤懣傾瀉出來，開始大喊大叫。電屏上那張洋洋自得的綿羊臉以及歐亞國軍隊展現出的強大震懾力，讓台下的黨員坐不住了。此外，戈斯坦的一個眼神或者想法，都會令觀眾自動迸發出恐懼與憤怒的情緒。他成了比歐亞國或者東亞國更可憎的對象，因為大洋國和任何一國開戰都將與另外一國修好。但是，奇怪的是，儘管戈斯坦遭萬千人憎恨和唾棄，儘管他的言辭論調每天數以千次地在講台、電屏、報紙和書上被抵制、粉碎、嘲弄，他的無知也體無完膚地暴露在公眾面前，但他的影響力卻不降反增。心甘情願上當受騙的蠢貨大有人在。如此情況下，倒是忙壞了思想警察，差不多每天都在逮捕受他教唆的間諜和破壞分子。他是龐大影子軍隊的指揮官，也是陰謀推翻國家的地下組織的幕後老大。這個地下組織應該叫兄弟會。傳聞，他還編纂了一本集歪理邪說於一體的大作，他是第一作者。那本書一直在秘密流傳，沒有書名，倘若有人提起它時，僅簡單地用「那本書」一帶而過。至於這些情況是否屬實，不得而知，大都來源於傳聞吧。於是，兄弟會和那本書都成了黨員的大忌，能不談則不談，沒人願意把它當成話題。

在「兩分鐘仇恨」節目進行到第二分鐘的時候，場面一度陷入瘋狂。有人在座位上手舞足蹈，跳上跳下，有人則聲嘶力竭地呼喊，試圖以一己之力來壓制電屏中那近似於咩咩的嘶叫。坐在溫斯頓旁邊的褐髮女人面色紅熱，嘴巴一張一合，宛如被海水拍到沙灘上擱淺的魚。就連奧布萊恩那嚴肅的臉也熱得通紅。他在椅子上挺了挺腰桿，強健的胸膛一起一伏，彷彿正準備迎擊波浪的衝擊。坐在溫斯頓後面的那個黑髮女人開始大聲呼號，「豬玀！豬玀！豬玀！」她順手拿起一本新語字典奮力擲向前方的電屏，結果正好打在戈斯坦的鼻子上，彈了回來，但是羊叫卻沒有一點要停下來的跡象。在神志稍微清醒之後，溫斯頓才發現他剛才正跟隨眾人一起大喊大叫，並使勁兒地用鞋跟踢著椅子的橫樑。「兩分鐘仇恨」節目最最可怕的地方，不在於你必須參加，而在於你簡直無法在其過程中保持克制。不需要任何借口，只要置身其中30秒，只需30秒，人們就會變得近乎瘋狂地恐懼，變得極端地仇恨，甚至會有殺人的衝動，想實施暴行，想用錘子砸爛敵人的腦殼。每個人都如同觸電般不能自已，違背自己的意志，變成一個面目凶狠、狂呼亂叫的瘋子。然而，人們所能感受到的憤怒卻是抽像的、莫名的，這種情感如同噴燈的火舌肆意地到處試探，隨時可能指向下一個目標。這時，溫斯頓的仇恨也如噴燈的火舌一般，變換了方向，不是指向戈斯坦，而是老大哥、黨和思想警察。此時此刻，溫斯頓對於屏幕上正在被嘲弄的、孤獨的異端分子深表同情，彷彿這個異端正是這荒誕的世界中真理與良知的唯一守護者。當然，下一刻也許他會像牆頭草一般，立即對戈斯坦怒目相視，且大聲咒罵——他活該有此下場。這時，他內心深處對老大哥的厭惡會突然變成崇拜，頓時，老大哥在他心目中的形象又像原來那樣高大起來。老大哥是一個勇猛無畏、戰無不勝的守護神，如石頭般巍然聳立，抗擊著亞洲的滾滾人潮。相反，戈斯坦雖說孤立無援，甚至是否活著都讓人生疑，但他卻像一個活脫脫的災星，咩咩幾聲，就攪得世間不寧，隨便出來叫幾聲就能讓文明大廈傾覆。

此刻，你甚至可以自由地變換仇恨的對象。突然，如噩夢驚醒時腦袋從枕頭上彈起那樣，溫斯頓將他的仇恨從電屏裡的戈斯坦轉移到了他身後的黑髮女人身上。頓時，他浮想聯翩，腦海中泛起了一個逼真、美麗的念頭：他把橡膠警棍用力地抽打在黑髮女人身上；把她赤身裸體地綁在刑架上，像異教徒對待聖徒塞巴斯蒂安一樣，給她來個萬箭穿心；再然後乾脆把她強姦，在高潮後割斷她的喉嚨。此刻，他才意識到，為什麼自己對這個女人如此仇視，而且這種情緒比以往任何時候都要強烈。他厭惡她，因為她雖然年輕漂亮，卻是個「反性」的女人，他想和她在床上做愛，卻偏偏是一廂情願。看到她芳香、柔軟的細腰，他真想張開臂膀去摟抱，無奈她偏偏把那條猩紅色貞潔帶束在腰間，讓他倒盡了胃口。

「兩分鐘仇恨」節目已經達到了高潮。戈斯坦的聲音真正地變成了羊叫，他的臉也變成了真正的綿羊臉。然後，綿羊臉漸漸變得模糊，被強大恐怖的歐亞士兵方陣所取代。他們正朝著觀眾衝過來，手中的機關鎗咆哮著，彷彿馬上就要衝破電屏似的，嚇得前排觀眾本能地向後拖動椅子。就在此危急關頭，這群敵對分子突然消失，天神降臨，老大哥的容顏出現，每個人都如釋重負地深深呼了一口氣。只見他頭髮烏黑，蓄著八字鬍，臉上顯露出堅毅和不可思議的冷靜，他的面龐絕對能夠蓋過敵對分子的身影，大得幾乎擠滿了整個電屏。沒有人能夠聽清老大哥在說什麼，似乎是在殷殷說教著一些只有在戰爭動員時才可能激昂脫口的辭令。雖然只有寥寥數語，字眼也分辨不清，但是老大哥的出現，還是讓大家心裡吃了一顆定心丸，人們不由得變得信心滿懷。不一會兒，老大哥的尊容慢慢地從電屏上消去，取而代之的，是黨的那三條宣傳標語，用黑體大字這樣寫著：

戰爭即和平

自由即奴役

無知即力量

儘管老大哥的尊容只在電屏上停留了幾秒鐘，但一切影像對台下每個人眼球的強力衝擊，卻難以在短時間內平復。旁邊那個淺褐色頭髮的小女人突然撲倒在前排的椅背上，用略帶顫抖的聲音低聲自語著，像是在說「我的救世主啊」。她張開雙臂，伸向電屏，然後雙手掩面，顯然是在祈禱了。

這時，全體觀眾爆出了深沉、舒緩、整齊劃一、像是唱詩班一樣的調子，「老大哥！老大哥！老大哥！老大哥！」一遍一遍地呼喚著，故意拉著長調，先念「老大」，停頓一下再念「哥」。這種沉重、喃喃低語的聲音，聽起來有點野蠻，像是土著人和著節拍，赤腳踏地，拍著印第安手鼓。這種吟唱持續了大約有30秒鐘。一般在人們情緒激昂的時候，才能聽見這種吟唱。這樣的表達方式，一定程度上是對老大哥智慧與威嚴的讚美，同時也是一種自我催眠，人們故意用這樣有節奏的拍子來抹殺內心理性的波瀾。溫斯頓渾身發冷。在「兩分鐘仇恨」節目裡，他不得不隨波逐流，與眾人一起陷入癲狂，然而這種類似於靈歌式的表達方式，著實讓他起了一身雞皮疙瘩，真是不寒而慄。當然，他必須濫竽充數，因為除了這樣他別無選擇。這時，掩飾你的情感，控制你的神情，人云亦云，已經變成一種本能反應了。儘管如此，也總是有這麼幾秒鐘，他的眼睛已經背叛他的心了。恰恰就在這時，一件大事就要發生了——倘若真有此事的話。

他和奧布萊恩的眼神不期而遇。奧布萊恩此時已經站了起來，他摘下眼鏡，以慣常的姿勢壓了壓眼鏡，又重新架在鼻樑上。然而，就在他們眼神相遇的那一刻，溫斯頓心裡突然感覺到——真的，他越發感覺到，奧布萊恩的所思所想和自己一模一樣，似有一種心有靈犀的感覺。好比兩個人各自敞開心扉，任意念在心間馳騁，只要對一下眼神，它就倏地從一方的眼睛跑到到另一方的眼睛裡去了。他好像聽見奧布萊恩在說，「我是和你並肩作戰的戰友，我能真切地感受到你此刻的心情，也知道你對這個世界是多麼地輕蔑，我瞭解你的仇恨，懂得你的厭惡，不過你大可放寬心，我將永遠站在你這一邊。」

但這靈光的瞬間，來得快去得也快，奧布萊恩的臉上又恢復到了跟別人一樣的表情：深不可測。

那就這樣吧，反正溫斯頓現在也有點懷疑這事是否真的發生過。這樣的事情本來就沒有什麼結果的最好的結果無非是讓自己心中還有信仰，或者是希望，覺得畢竟除了自己以外，還有別人同樣是黨的敵人。或許有關地下陰謀組織的傳言是真的，再或許，兄弟會也是真實存在的。雖然對兄弟會這些敵對分子的逮捕、逼供、殺戮從未停止過，但你仍然不能肯定兄弟會是否僅是傳說中的組織。溫斯頓有時覺得它是存在的，有時又覺得它不存在。其實對於這件事,在拿到確鑿證據之前，人們也僅是憑某些表象妄加猜度罷了。譬如街面上的道聽途說，廁所牆上的潦草塗鴉，更有甚者，兩個陌生人碰在一起，簡單地握一下手，都會被視作接頭的暗號。這根本就是猜測，一種肆無忌憚的猜測。溫斯頓連看都不看奧布萊恩一眼，就徑直走回自己工作的小房間，腦海裡乾脆不想如何把之前的短暫接觸再繼續下去。即便他現在知道怎樣繼續下去，其間的危險也是不可想像的。那就讓這短暫曖昧的相視，為這離奇的故事畫上結束的句點吧。不過，雖說過程短暫，但相較於漫漫人生苦旅，也算作是一丁點美好的回憶了。

溫斯頓抖了抖精神，坐直了身子，打了個嗝。杜松子酒的氣味從他胃裡升騰起來。

他的視線重新回到日記本上。這時，他發覺就在自己冥思苦想的間歇，手中的筆卻沒停下來，這倒完全像出於一種本能。此時的筆跡也不像此前那般潦草不堪。筆尖在光滑的紙上從容地劃過，而且整齊地用大寫字體寫了一遍又一遍，足足佔了半頁篇幅：

打倒老大哥！

打倒老大哥！

打倒老大哥！

打倒老大哥！

打倒老大哥！

他禁不住感到一陣恐慌。說來也荒謬，因為，寫「打倒老大哥」這種大逆不道的話不比寫日記的行為本身更危險。但他還是一度想把這幾頁紙撕得粉碎，算是和他所謂的事業做個了斷吧。

然而他沒有這樣做，因為他知道那毫無意義。無論是他寫「打倒老大哥」，還是就此忍住不寫，結果都是一樣，沒有分別。無論是把日記繼續寫下去，還是半途而廢，同樣也沒有分別。等待他的，都是同樣的結果，那就是被思想警察投進監獄。他已然犯了彌天大罪，即使他一個字都不寫。那可是萬惡之首啊，人們都把這種罪行叫做「思想罪行」。「思想罪行」是永遠也掩蓋不住的，即便現在你可以隱瞞一時，甚至好些年，但「罪行」早晚都會敗露，你總會落入思想警察手中裡。

抓捕行動無一例外地都在晚上進行。你會被強行地從睡夢中拖出來，野蠻的大手一把扭住你的肩膀，讓你動彈不得，手電筒肆意地晃著你的眼睛，一張張冷酷的面孔把床榻圍得嚴嚴實實。在大多數案子中，他們根本就不給你接受審判的機會，連你被抓了也沒人知道。那些所謂「罪人」，就是這樣在夜間消失的。隨之你的名字也在花名冊上消失了，世間有關於你的一切記錄都像錄影帶一樣，被抹得不留一點兒痕跡，甚至你一度活在世上的事實也被否認了，最終你也就被人們徹底地遺忘了。你被摧毀，被毀滅，或套用他們慣常的叫法，應該叫做「蒸發」吧。

這一刻，溫斯頓的心裡被狂亂所佔據，手中的筆彷彿也亂了分寸，開始倉促且凌亂地在紙上劃著：

他們朝我開槍我不在乎他們在我脖子後開槍我不在乎打倒老大哥他們都是從脖子後開槍我不在乎打倒老大哥——

他靠在椅背上，把筆放下，突然對自己剛才的所作所為感到有些慚愧。沒過多一會兒，他又開始奮筆疾書。咚咚咚，有人敲門了。

這麼快！他像老鼠一樣靜坐在椅子上，動彈不得，幻想著敲門的人在無人應門後敗興而歸。但敲門的人絲毫不理會他的心思，咚咚聲又來了。現在，最壞的打算估計也就是拖延時間了。他的心跳像小鼓一樣砰砰響著，大概現在他臉上也是毫無表情的，和自己平時示人的一樣。他站了起來，步履沉重地朝門走去。

II

AS HE PUT HIS HAND to the doorknob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colorless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face, was standing outside.

“Oh, comrade,” she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, “I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’s got blocked up and—”

It was Mrs. Parsons, the wife of a neighbor on the same floor. (“Mrs.” was a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party—you were supposed to call everyone “comrade”—but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years.

“Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,” said Mrs. Parsons vaguely.

The Parsons’s flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta—hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out—lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which—one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how—was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.

“It’s the children,” said Mrs. Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance at the door. “They haven’t been out today. And of course—”

She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs. Parsons looked on helplessly.

“Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a moment,” she said. “He loves anything like that. He’s ever so good with his hands, Tom is.”

Parsons was Winston’s fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Center every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.

“Have you got a spanner?” said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.

“A spanner,” said Mrs. Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps the children—”

There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living room. Mrs. Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.

“Up with your hands!” yelled a savage voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanor, that it was not altogether a game.

“You’re a traitor!” yelled the boy. “You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!”

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting “Traitor!” and “Thought-criminal!”, the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.

Mrs. Parsons’s eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

“They do get so noisy,” she said. “They’re disappointed because they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them and Tom won’t be back from work in time.”

“Why can’t we go and see the hanging?” roared the boy in his huge voice.

“Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!” chanted the little girl, still capering round.

Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamored to be taken to see it. He took his leave of Mrs. Parsons and made for the door. But he had not gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs. Parsons dragging her son back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.

“Goldstein!” bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s grayish face.

Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—“child hero” was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.

The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O’Brien again.

Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” It was said very quietly, almost casually—a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the first time; nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.

Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after this morning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure—whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.

The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:

“Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash—”

Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grams to twenty.

Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—crashed into “Oceania, ’tis for thee.” You were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he was invisible.

“Oceania, ’tis for thee” gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure forever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

He took a twenty-five-cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapor. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.

Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!

He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably; someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, what he had been writing—and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.

第二章

帕森斯先生是溫斯頓的同事，同在真理部上班。他是一個體型臃腫但又異常活躍的人，雖然笨得要命，卻滿腔熱情。他對黨忠心耿耿，單就這一點來說，他甚至比思想警察還要可靠。毫不誇張地說，黨要保持安定的局面，必須仰仗這樣的人。他在35歲的時候，還不願意退出青年團。另外，在他進入青年團以前，他同樣以超過法定年齡的年紀，在特務營多混了1年。湯姆在真理部的一個邊緣崗位工作，這份工作對知識層次和文化水平沒有什麼特別的要求，但他在運動委員會和其他組織可是首腦人物。這些組織，專門致力於群眾遊行、公共演說、節約運動等一系列志願活動。湯姆在談到過去四年中每晚都在社區中心拋頭露面的情形時，他的煙斗噴出的濃煙後面，總會現出一張洋洋自得的臉。無論他走到哪，都會帶著他那特有的令人窒息的汗臭味，即便他走開了，臭味還久久不能散去。無需多言，單就這一點來說，足以看出他對黨的事業有多麼地盡心竭力了。

……

「舉起手來！」身後一個凶狠的聲音朝他喊著。

一個模樣俊俏但表情凶悍的9歲小男孩，突然從餐桌後面閃了出來。他手握玩具自動手槍，把槍口瞄向溫斯頓。他那小兩歲的妹妹，也擺出同樣的姿勢，只不過「武器」變成了木條。這兩個小鬼身穿藍色短褲、灰白色T恤，脖子上繫著紅圍巾，地地道道的特務營裝扮。溫斯頓很配合地把雙手舉過頭頂，不過眼前的這一幕還是讓他心裡極度不安，孩子們的氣勢如此咄咄逼人，以致讓他覺得這不是一場遊戲。這完全突破了遊戲的界限。

「你是一個大叛徒，」小男孩朝他喊道，「你是一個思想罪犯，你是歐亞國安插過來的間諜！我要一槍打死你！我要把你從人間蒸發掉！我要把你發配到鹽礦！」

突然孩子們近身圍著他，不停地跳著，大喊著「大叛徒」、「思想罪犯」——他們倆強加給溫斯頓的罪行。小女孩時刻和哥哥保持一致，哥哥怎麼做，她就跟著怎麼做。說實在的，這樣的鬧法真是讓人膽寒，這一刻的情形，就好比即將要長大吃人的虎崽子在戲弄它的獵物一樣。小男孩的眼裡，露出一種蠻橫的凶光，甚至能夠讓人從他的眼神裡明顯地察覺到他一旦長大，便會無所顧忌地將溫斯頓痛扁一頓這樣的心思。還好，他拿的不是真的手槍，溫斯頓這樣想。

帕森斯太太的目光，焦躁不安地在溫斯頓和孩子們之間來回瞟著。在臥室內燈光的強烈照射下，溫斯頓此時饒有興致地發現，帕森斯太太臉上的皺紋裡，確實深埋著灰塵。

「他們總是這麼煩人，」她說，「就因為沒有帶他們去看絞刑，你看，一個個垂頭喪氣的樣子。我忙得抽不開身，湯姆又不能及時趕回來。」

「我們為什麼不能去看絞刑？」男孩抬高了嗓門大聲質問道。

「我們要去看絞刑！我們要去看絞刑！」小女孩反覆嘟囔著，而且是一邊跳一邊喊。

溫斯頓記起來了，今天晚上有一批歐亞國囚徒和戰犯將會在公園被處以絞刑。這是一個備受關注的活動，每月一次，小孩子總是糾纏大人帶他們去看熱鬧。溫斯頓告別帕森斯太太，轉身朝門口走去。沒等他在走廊裡走上幾步，他突然覺得脖子就像被什麼東西狠狠地戳了一下，像是燒紅的金屬絲。他轉過身來，剛巧看到帕森斯太太正把那個小男孩往屋裡拖，而此時他正急忙地把彈弓往衣兜裡塞。在房門即將關上的那一刻，小男孩還不忘甩出一句「戈斯坦」來。但最使他印象深刻的，還是那老女人臉上所流露出來的無助的惶恐。

回到房間以後，他幾個大步躲過電屏的追蹤，重新坐回到桌子旁邊，並一直用手揉著脖子上的痛處。此時，電屏裡的音樂已經停下來了，取而代之的，是一個高亢的軍人聲音，用近乎殘暴的口吻，講述著冰島與法羅群島之間，一些新近建造起來的被稱為浮動堡壘的軍事裝備的情況。

帶著這樣一雙兒女，這個可憐的女人注定要整日擔驚受怕地過日子了，溫斯頓這樣想著。再過一兩年，這兩個小冤家估計就得整日盯著她，看她是否有異端嫌疑。現在，幾乎所有孩子都像他們兩個一樣可怕。更糟糕的是，在諸如特務營這類組織的教唆下，這些孩子將變成難以約束的洪水猛獸。不過對黨來說，倒也未必是壞事，至少這些被馴化的「猛獸」，不管在什麼情況下都是不敢公然挑釁黨綱黨紀的。正好相反，他們會頂禮膜拜黨及其有關的一切。吟唱讚歌、列隊遊行、張貼標語、拉練、用玩具步槍操練、狂喊口號、崇拜老大哥，這些都是他們熱衷的「遊戲」。再然後，他們會極其凶殘地對待國家公敵、異族、叛徒、破壞分子乃至思想罪犯。難怪年過三十的父母害怕自己的孩子會成為一種正常現象，《泰晤士報》幾乎每週都會刊登這樣的消息：孩子們偷聽了大人的談話，即便是很折中的評論，他們都會向思想警察揭發大人的罪行。當然《泰晤士報》筆下的孩子都是「英雄少年」，絕非鬼鬼祟祟的竊聽者。

……

他隨手從衣兜裡摸出一枚兩角五分的硬幣。硬幣的一面鐫刻著密密麻麻但清晰可見的小字，沒錯，就是黨的這三句標語，硬幣的另一面則是老大哥的頭像。即使硬幣上刻著的只是老大哥的頭像，但這還是讓溫斯頓覺得，有一雙眼睛在緊緊地盯著他，好不自在。硬幣、郵票、書皮、廣告牌，乃至於煙盒上面，到處都是老大哥的身影，還真是陰魂不散啊。老大哥在緊緊地盯著你，同時他的聲音也在裹挾著你。無論是睡著還是醒著，是工作還是吃飯，是在家裡還是在外面，是在浴室還是在床上，老大哥都在盯著你，讓你掙脫不得。在這個世界上，沒有什麼東西是你自己的，除了腦殼裡那不多的幾立方厘米的空間。

……

思想罪不會帶來死亡，思想罪本身就是死亡。

附录 ISIS 和文革

【注：红领巾起源于苏联东正教。ISIS 让小孩击杀囚犯。】

少年英雄 举报父母

III

WINSTON WAS dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the Fifties.

At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight forever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

The girl with dark hair was coming toward him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him; indeed, he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.

The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed—naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only three thousand clothing coupons annually, and a suit of pajamas was six hundred—and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.

“Thirty to forty group!” yapped a piercing female voice. “Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!”

Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym shoes, had already appeared.

“Arms bending and stretching!” she rapped out. “Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three four! One, two, three, four!…”

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston’s mind the impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister—or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station.

There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair; his face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved, a little granddaughter perhaps, had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:

“We didn’t ought to ‘ave trusted ’em. I said so, Ma, didn’t I? That’s what come of trusting ’em. I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ‘ave trusted the buggers.”

But which buggers they didn’t ought to have trusted Winston could not now remember.

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened— that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

“Stand easy!” barked the instructress, a little more genially.

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

The instructress had called them to attention again. “And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!” she said enthusiastically. “Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two!…”

Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the Sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the Forties and the Thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—“English Socialism,” that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented airplanes. He remembered airplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of a historical fact. And on that occasion—

“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

“There, comrades! That’s how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.” She bent over again. “You see my knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,” she added as she straightened herself up. “Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,” she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

第三章

他已記不起來到底發生過什麼，他只知道夢裡的母親和妹妹要犧牲掉自己的性命，來為他換取一線生機。有一種夢是這樣的，它從方方面來看都是夢，卻延續著人的精神生活，而夢中所經歷的事實和念頭，讓人在醒來後覺得依然鮮活且極具價值。溫斯頓的夢就是這樣的。現在最讓他心中為之震顫的，就是母親的離去。這件事讓他悲痛欲絕，雖然已經過去30年了，雖然從某種程度上來講，當前這代人已經沒有了這樣的情感。他領悟到悲劇屬於古代，但即便在那個悲哀的年代，還尚有隱私、友情、愛情可言，家人間還可以不問緣由地相互攙扶。每每想起母親，都讓他心如刀割。因為母親至死不渝地愛著他，而自己卻由於太年輕、太自私，不能對她有任何回報；因為母親堅定不移地守護著忠誠的信念，寧願把性命搭進去，而自己卻不知細節。他想，這樣的事情，絕不會在當下這個年月發生。現在的人們心裡充滿了恐懼、仇恨和痛苦，毫無感情、尊嚴可談，根本沒有深沉而複雜的哀慟。從母親和妹妹的眼神裡，他似乎讀懂了這一切。她們還在透過碧綠的海水望著他，彷彿離他有幾百英里遠，可船還在下沉。

……

電屏中傳來震耳欲聾的號子聲，調子一成不變，持續了有30秒鐘。7點15分，是辦公室工作人員的起床時間了。溫斯頓掙扎著從被窩裡鑽了出來，一絲不掛。他抓起放在椅子上的汗衫和短褲，權當是塊救命的遮羞布好了。對於外黨黨員而言，每年只有3000元的購衣券補助，而一身睡衣就要花去600元，沒有人奢侈到拿購物券去添置睡衣，所以光著身子睡覺也就不足為奇了。早間健身運動將在3分鐘後開始。沒過多一會兒，他開始猛烈地咳嗽起來，這已經是困擾他的老毛病了，幾乎早上一起床就開始發作。他差一點兒就把肺給咳出來了，只好重新躺下，深呼吸一次才緩過勁兒來。他咳得很厲害，血管賁張。伴隨著咳嗽，他的靜脈曲張處開始瘙癢難耐。

「三十到四十歲組，」一個刺耳的女人聲音喊道，「三十到四十歲組，請各就各位。三十到四十歲組！」

溫斯頓馬上跳到電屏前面，立正站好。電屏上出現了一個年輕女人的面孔，她身材單薄卻肌肉強健，穿著一身緊身運動衣，腳踏一雙運動鞋。

「動起你的手臂！」她大聲地喊著，「跟著我的口令。一、二、三、四！一、二、三、四！同志們，加油，用點兒力氣！一、二、三、四！一、二、三、四！」

方才咳嗽發作帶來的痛苦，並沒有完全驅散溫斯頓夢中的印象，倒是早操的律動，讓他慢慢地從夢中清醒過來。反覆而機械地舉起手臂之餘，他還要假裝滿臉快活的樣子，只有這樣，才符合早間健身運動的主旨和本意。就在做健身運動的同時，他突然把記憶轉向了孩提時的那段不堪回首的歲月。當時的處境很艱難。不過，50年代之前的那些事兒，他的確有點兒印象模糊了。要是沒有可靠的外部資料以供參考的話，估計他連自己人生的樣子都搞不清楚了。你想起來的所謂大事，可能壓根就沒有發生過。而有些事情的細節你可能還記得，至於當時的情境如何，卻又不可能想起來了。當然，這還不包括你的記憶中空白而又冗長的那段歲月。總之，那段歲月與現在相比，迥然不同。即使是國家的名稱以及它們在地圖上的輪廓，也和現在迥然不同。再比如，第一航道過去就不這麼叫，它過去叫英格蘭或大不列顛，但倫敦就一直用它慣常的名稱，依然叫作倫敦。

……

自打那以後，戰爭就一直在延續，沒有停過，或者嚴格地說，只是目標和對像在變換而已。在他孩提時代，倫敦街頭的巷戰曾一度持續了幾個月，甚至一些巷戰的具體情形，他也還能原原本本地回想起來。但是追蹤其歷史始末，說出當時是誰和誰交了火，還是不可能，因為壓根兒就沒有書面記錄材料，也沒有人在談話中涉及，即便是從別的國家探得口風，那也必須是盟國才行。就拿眼下的1984年來說吧（如果確是1984年的話），大洋國與歐亞國交戰，與東亞國結盟。不論是在公共場合還是私底下談論，從沒有人承認過，上述三方彼此間總是兩兩結盟對抗另一國。但據溫斯頓所知的實際情況，就在4年前，與大洋國交火的還是東亞國，與大洋國結盟的卻是歐亞國。這事兒絕對算得上是個重大機密，只是溫斯頓碰巧還記得這件事，他的記憶模糊混亂，自己也越來越不清楚了。但是，官方從未承認過改變盟友這個事實：大洋國一直都在和歐亞國交戰，歐亞國自始至終都是敵人。此刻的敵人便是永久罪惡的象徵，這意味著，大洋國過去及將來都不可能和它締結任何條約。

更為可怕的是——他反覆思考了不下一千次，每次思考時肩膀都深受劇痛的煎熬，他把雙手放在臀部，讓腰盡力地向後彎曲，然後像陀螺一樣旋轉，據說這樣的運動方式對背肌康復有好處——這一切看起來都像是真的，可又像在弄虛作假。如果黨插手操縱歷史，並且說這事或那事從未發生過，想必這比嚴刑拷問和死亡要可怕得多吧？

黨說大洋國從未與歐亞國結過盟。他，溫斯頓卻心如明鏡地知道，最多在4年之前，大洋國與歐亞國恰恰有過結盟的勾當。但是，他如此認定的依據又在哪呢？恐怕只是在他自己的意識裡，而這種意識也很可能會曇花一現，草草結束。如果所有人都聽信黨這別有用心的謊言，如果所有記錄都如是記載這謊言，那麼這謊言就會順理成章地變成歷史，變成真理了。於是黨的口號，也就變成這樣：「誰主宰歷史，誰就主宰未來；誰主宰現在，誰就主宰歷史。」如此一來，歷史也就不容更改了，其實這裡的歷史就其本質來說，早已被黨大肆篡改過了。現在正確的事情，將來也一定是正確的，就是這麼一個簡單的道理。如此情形之下，你要做的無非只能是順從所謂的歷史，戰勝你頑固的記憶罷了。這就是他們所謂的「現實控制」，新語美其名曰「雙重思想」。

「稍息！」女指導員高聲喝道。她的態度似乎變得和藹些了。

溫斯頓把手臂放了下來，深深地舒了一口氣。此刻他的思想，已經悄悄地溜到了雙重思想的迷幻世界中去了：明明知道，卻佯裝不知；本來對事實心知肚明，去偏要費盡心機去編造謊言；明知兩種觀點水火不容，卻硬要把它們捏合在一起，相信其必能共存共榮；本來已合乎邏輯，卻偏偏用邏輯推翻邏輯；明明批判道德，卻轉而吹噓道德；民主已是空談，卻偏偏要做民主的守護者；明明已忘卻該忘卻的一切，卻偏偏在需要時把它撿起來，然後在不需要時再把它丟出去。總之，最重要的是將做法用於做法本身——這就是雙重思想玄之又玄的地方：有意識地進入無意識狀態，然後對剛才的自我催眠裝作一無所知，統統拋於腦後。要想理解「雙重思想」的本質，就要首先瞭解雙重思想的使用規則。

女指導員又叫他們立正了。「現在看看哪位能用手觸到自己的腳趾！」她滿腔熱情地說，「同志們，把腰彎下來！一、二！一、二！……」

溫斯頓討厭這項運動，每每伸手去觸腳趾的時候，強烈的刺痛都會從腳踝一直竄到臀部，讓他劇烈地咳嗽起來。剛從冥思中得來的那半點樂趣，都被這疼痛和咳嗽聲給衝散了。他突然想到，「歷史不單單是被篡改，而是完全徹底地被毀滅了」。除了自己的記憶外，別無記錄可尋，該如何確立一個明顯的事實呢？他開始撓頭苦思，自己是在何年何月同老大哥第一次見面。他想，那一定是在60年代的某天，但他也不是特別肯定。當然，在黨史上，老大哥在很早以前就被捧為革命事業的精神領袖和舵手了。他的功績，應該能夠追溯到寓言般的三四十年代吧，那時資本主義大佬常戴著怪異的圓筒帽子，坐著閃閃發亮的機動車或玻璃裝飾的四輪馬車，穿梭於倫敦街區。不過，大概沒人能夠確切地知道，這傳說究竟有多少是真的？又有多少是胡編亂造出來的？溫斯頓已經記不清黨到底是誕生於何年何月了。他覺得自己在1960年以前，沒聽過「英社」這個字眼兒，但聽過舊語中的「英國社會主義」倒是可能的，那也就是說，這是在更早的時候了。反正記憶中的每件事，都是雲裡霧裡的。不過，說真的，有時你真的可以當面戳穿明明擺在那裡的謊言。比如黨史文獻中說，是黨發明了飛機。但他記得，飛機這玩意兒在他還是個孩子的時候就已經有了，但卻無法辯駁，當然也沒有證據。他一生中，僅有一次機會抓到了黨篡改歷史的鐵證。恰恰在這個時候——

附录广播体操和篡改历史

《历史的先声》

全过程民主

IV

WITH THE DEEP, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite toward him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of wastepaper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of wastepaper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialed “back numbers” on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a “categorical pledge” were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed; always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.

But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.

Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and meters, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the teleprograms section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who coordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working; but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning.

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.

In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:

The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the press or on the telescreen. That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special showpieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.

Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper clip. In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a single person; on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.

Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps—what was likeliest of all—the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in the words “refs unpersons,” which indicated that Withers was already dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time forever. Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. It was better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with its original subject.

He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of overproduction in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite toward him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them (“What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lessons—which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc—that,” etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At six—a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules—he had joined the Spies; at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches and all—an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and singlemindedness of Comrade Ogilvy’s life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.

Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit; in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.

Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way of knowing whose version would finally be adopted, but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

第四章

在他辦公室裡有三個這樣的輸送管孔。讀寫器右邊的小孔，是專門用來傳輸書面備忘文件的，左邊那個大一點的輸送孔，是專門用來傳遞報紙的，另一個則在牆壁側面，溫斯頓伸手可及的地方，這是一個橢圓形的輸送孔，上面罩著鐵線柵欄，是專門留作廢紙處理用的。整個大廈中，類似這樣的輸送孔數以千計，或是數以萬計，不但每個辦公室裡有，就連走廊裡，每隔一小段兒都要放上一個。不知是誰，還給它起了個綽號，叫「忘懷洞」。一旦發覺某些文件需要馬上銷毀，或者發現有紙屑在隨處飄蕩，任何一個人都會本能地把它拾起來，轉身放入忘懷洞中。只要把這些東西放進去，它們就會隨著一股暖流被捲送到大廈深處某個隱蔽的大熔爐裡去。

溫斯頓仔細查看著剛才整理過的4份材料。每份材料，都有一兩行文字信息，這些信息基本上都用簡短的術語寫就，所謂術語不全是新語，但大部分都是，僅供真理部內部使用。字條上寫道：

泰晤士報17.3.84老大哥演講誤報非洲核正

泰晤士報19.12.83三年計劃預測83年四季度修正政策驗證當今議題

泰晤士報14.2.84富部誤引巧克力核准

泰晤士報3.12.83老大哥授勳雙重不足涉及非人推倒重來呈上留存

看到第四份材料時，溫斯頓略感滿足。茲事體大，容稍後再議，暫且擱置一旁。另外3份材料都是例行公事，只有第二份材料相對繁瑣冗長，晦澀難懂，需要借助大量統計數據才能處理。

溫斯頓在電屏中撥了一個號碼——應該是過去的書刊字號，估計他需要調閱《泰晤士報》往期的報紙吧。他撥完號，沒過幾分鐘，資料就從輸送孔裡傳了出來。他收到的材料的主要問題，大都可以歸結如下：文章或新聞某一版面，由於這樣或那樣的原因，需要做必要的修改訂正，需要變換敘事的口吻，即有些東西需要用官方的口吻來寫。現以《泰晤士報》3月份第十七期為例進行說明，報上是這樣寫的：老大哥在他前日的演說中預言，南印度前線會相安無事，不會發生意外軍事變動，歐亞國將會馬上在北非發動攻勢。但是，實際情況卻和老大哥預言得截然相反，歐亞國高級統帥在南印度發動了攻勢，而在北非卻按兵不動。由此看來，眼下更正老大哥的演說內容就顯得很有必要了。這樣做的目的只有一個，就是為了證明老大哥料事如神。再比如，《泰晤士報》12月第十九期，公佈了1983年四季度各項消費品產量的官方預測報告。這一季度，剛好是第九個三年計劃的第六個季度。今天的報紙公佈了實際產量，這組數字與預測數字相去甚遠，這就說明預測報告出了問題，有必要進行訂正。溫斯頓的工作就是更正預測數據，使更正後的數字和實際產出一致，沒有什麼紕漏。對於第三份材料而言，問題主要出在一個小小的錯誤上，這個基本上兩分鐘就可以搞定。這是二月份頭幾天的事，當時，富裕部承諾（官方用的是「絕對保證」）1984年的巧克力供應配額絕對不會減少。實際情況卻是，正如溫斯頓已經得知的那樣，本週末巧克力供應將由原來的30克減到20克。而此時溫斯頓需要做的，就是把原來的「絕對保證」換成「提醒」，最終的意思就變成了——因情勢所需，巧克力供應配額在四月份可能會調減。

溫斯頓很快就把手頭的這3份材料處理完了。他把讀寫器打印的校正稿和《泰晤士報》的原刊夾在一起，投入到輸送孔中。然後，他近乎無意識地輕微一動，把剛才接收到的資料以及手寫的修訂筆記投到忘懷洞中，這些東西頃刻間灰飛煙滅。

文件被放到傳輸孔後，後續的事情又是在哪裡處理的呢？對於細節，他也不是很清楚，只是瞭解個大概。據他所知，待所有的修訂稿都收齊以後，那些之前刊發的、有必要對個別數字進行更正的《泰晤士報》都要被銷毀掉，然後用修正過的版本替換掉有問題的版本。這種修正方法不但適用於報紙，還適用於書籍、期刊、手冊、海報、傳單、影片、錄音帶、卡通畫、照片，總之，任何帶有政治色彩或涉及意識形態的文獻和文件，都在修訂範圍之內。於是，過去每天發生的一切，不，是過去每分鐘發生的一切，都必須和實際情況沒有出入。如此這般，黨的任何預言都變得準確無誤，且有文獻可查。因此，任何與現實相悖的新聞和意見表達都不會被記錄，都上不得檯面。現在的歷史就像一塊黑板，可以擦得乾乾淨淨，也可以在需要時重新寫上去。而且歷史一經篡改，就很難找到證據證明它被篡改了。記錄科是最大的一個部門，員工數量比溫斯頓所在的部門人數多得多，他們的主要職責是搜集廢棄的書籍、報紙以及類似的文件，然後拿去銷毀。由於政治結盟發生變數，或者由於老大哥的預言失誤，許多期《泰晤士報》存放在文件夾裡，上面記錄的原始日期還清晰易見。這些《泰晤士報》已經修改校訂了很多次了，因此你不會找到和現存版本相悖的記錄。書籍總是被召回銷毀，被一而再、再而三地改寫，與之相對應，官方對修改行為卻從來不認賬，從來不承認動過手腳。溫斯頓一直都是在收到現成的訂正指令後，便按部就班地開展工作，那指令也從來沒有告訴或暗示他要偽造什麼。他的訂正基本上都集中在修改漏頁、錯誤、錯版、引用錯誤上，雖然沒有大的改動，可這些都是保證文獻材料準確性的必要之舉。

實際上，溫斯頓也覺得對富裕部的數字進行簡單的修改不能算作偽造。充其量，是用一組毫無意義的數字替換另一組毫無意義的數字而已。你手頭處理的材料，甚至與現實世界沒有一點兒關係，更不要說這種所謂的關係中，還藏著彌天大謊了。對於這些人來說，第一眼或是修訂後看到的統計數據，並沒有什麼兩樣，它們都是些沒有意義的符號。大部分時間裡，這些數據都是你拍著腦門憑空捏造出來的。就拿富裕部的預測來說吧，原來預計本季度能生產1.45億雙靴子，可實際上呢，只生產了6 200萬雙。但溫斯頓更正預測的時候，就要把預計產量寫成5 700萬雙，這樣就能蒙蔽眾人的眼睛，讓他們感覺到今年富裕部又超額完成了任務。其實，單就6 200萬這個數字來說，本身不比五5 700萬更接近預計產量，也不比5 700萬更現實，更有意義，很可能他們連一雙靴子都沒生產出來。鬼才知道到底生產了多少雙靴子，大家對這個沒有實際意義的數字根本不感興趣。大家知道的只有一點，那就是每季度有關於靴子產量的天文數字都會見諸報端，然而全國卻有近一半的人打著赤腳。其實所有事情都一樣，不論大事還是小事，都以同樣的方式處理。總之，世間的一切都被淹沒在這陰暗的現實中，在這裡面待久了，最終你連今夕是何年都不敢確定了。

溫斯頓朝走廊裡望了一眼。在走廊對面的小房間裡，一個身材矮小、下巴黑黑的男人正在一絲不苟地努力工作。他叫蒂洛森，膝蓋上放著一張折過的報紙，嘴巴離讀寫器的話筒很近。他顯出一副像是生怕洩露了什麼玄機的樣子，擔心別人聽到他講的話。他抬起頭來，透過眼鏡飽含敵意地朝溫斯頓這個方向瞪了一眼。

溫斯頓對蒂洛森幾乎一無所知，當然也不曉得他具體負責哪方面的工作。通常在記錄科，人們是不願談論與自己工作相關的事情的。在冗長、昏暗的走廊裡，有兩列小房間，各個房間裡都充斥著翻動紙頁的沙沙聲響和對著讀寫器諾諾的潺潺之音。對這些同事，有不少他甚至叫不上名字。儘管他幾乎每天都能看到他們匆忙地往返穿梭於走廊之中，或是在「兩分鐘仇恨」裡舉手示意。對於隔壁房間那個淺褐色頭髮的小女人所做的工作，他倒是清楚得很。她每天忙個不停的工作，就是從報刊中找出已經「蒸發」的人的名字，然後把它們刪除掉，讓他們似乎全然沒在這世界上存在過一樣。她倒是適合這份工作，因為似乎她的丈夫就是在兩年前被蒸發掉的。不遠處的房間裡有一位面相憨厚、混混沌沌、整日形同夢遊的人，叫安普福斯。他耳朵裡長著長長的毛，但人不可貌相，他深諳詩歌韻律，天稟異常，主要負責詩歌修訂工作，即把詩歌修訂成他們需要的形式，也就是他們所謂的最終版本。這些詩都是意識形態裡的異端，但不知是出於什麼考慮，竟然被保留在詩選中。在這條長廊裡，大約有50個工作人員，但這只是記錄科的一個分支而已，如果把龐大而複雜的記錄科比作生命體的話，這些人充其量只能算作分佈在生命體中的單個細胞了。除了這層樓以外，樓上樓下還有數不清的員工，就像蜜蜂擠在蜂房裡，做著不可思議的工作。這裡有規模龐大的印刷廠，各類人員和各種裝備一應俱全，有助理編輯，有排版專家，還有專門用來修改照片的設備精良的工作室。電影科更是人才濟濟，既有工程師，又有製作人，同時還有強大的演員團隊，那些演員可都是經過精挑細選的，特別善於模仿別人的聲音。此外，還有浩浩蕩蕩的文獻室大軍，他們的工作簡單概括起來就是列明單子，標注清楚即將回收的書籍、期刊名稱。大廈裡有很多大的儲藏室，是專門用來存放修訂過的文件的，此外還有很多隱蔽的忘懷洞，那些被替下來的原件都是在那裡被銷毀的。當然，還有不得不提的機要重地，那裡可是首腦們運籌帷幄的地方。這麼說吧，他們制訂的政策通常會決定歷史的命運，哪部分歷史該保留，哪部分歷史該修正，又有哪些歷史該徹底抹去，都是由他們說了算。

再說，記錄科不過是真理部下屬的一個分支機構，別被後者的名字誤導，它的首要職責不是重構歷史，而是為大洋國的國民提供包括報紙、影片、教科書、電屏節目、戲劇、小說等在內的精神所需，就連你想像不到的信息服務、教育服務以及娛樂服務，也由他們一手包辦。可以說，從雕像到口號，從抒情詩到生物學專著，從孩子的啟蒙書籍到新語字典，都由他們操控。真理部不但要滿足黨的多樣性需求，同時還要為無產者服務，即以通俗易懂的形式，把他們做給黨的那一套東西重新做給無產者。為此，真理部還設有一些專屬機構，以滿足無產者在文學、音樂、戲劇及娛樂方面的需求。你所能讀到的那種除了體育、犯罪、占卜等內容外再無其他新鮮感可言的垃圾報紙，就是出自他們之手。當然，5分錢一本公然叫賣的奇幻小說，和充斥著性元素的齷齪電影，也是他們的傑作。此外，還有他們那噁心的煽情音樂，調子簡直不能用古板來形容，據說它們是用一種叫萬花筒的譜曲器造出來的。記錄科還有一個小組，新語叫做「黃社」，專門幹一些生產低級趣味色情電影的勾當。這些電影是見不得人的，通常都是用密封的包裹寄出去的，除了參與製片的人員外，黨員一律禁止觀賞。

溫斯頓專注於工作時，又有3卷材料從輸送孔裡吐出來，任務都簡單得很，對他來說信手拈來，不費吹灰之力。在「兩分鐘仇恨」節目開始之前，他就早早地把這些工作處理好了。在「兩分鐘仇恨」節目結束之後，他回到了辦公室，隨手從書架上拿下一本新語字典，然後把讀寫器推到一邊，擦了擦眼鏡，專心致力於他今天上午最重大的任務。

溫斯頓生命裡最大的樂趣，莫過於工作了。雖然大部分時間裡，他都要重複這些單調的公事，做些單調乏味的工作，但有時也會遇到一些傷腦筋的複雜問題，他不免要絞盡腦汁，思考應對之策，猶如思考高深莫測的數學題。所謂傷腦筋的問題，是指在毫無訂正指示的情況下，全憑他對英社理論的理解和對黨的路線方針的判斷，來參悟訂正工作中極為微妙的東西。溫斯頓倒是很擅長做這樣的事情。有時他甚至被予以重托，來訂正全部用新語寫成的《泰晤士報》。他隨即打開之前放在一旁的資料，上面寫道：

泰晤士報3.12.83老大哥授勳雙重不足涉及非人推倒重來呈上層留存

用舊語——即標準英語——可以這樣表述：

《泰晤士報》1983年12月3日，老大哥授勳章的事情有些不合要求，提及的人壓根就不存在。現在要推倒重來，在報道歸檔之前，將草稿提交上級審閱。

溫斯頓把那令人作嘔的文章通篇瀏覽了一遍。老大哥那天的嘉獎，主要是頒給一個被稱作浮動堡壘後勤委員會的組織，他們曾為浮動堡壘的海軍戰士提供香煙和其他慰問品。嘉獎令中被提名的同志叫威瑟斯，是一名內黨成員，他從眾多候選者中脫穎而出，榮獲特殊成就二等勳章。

三個月後，浮動堡壘後勤委員會卻莫名其妙地解散了。人們猜測，可能是因為威瑟斯和他的同僚們得罪了上級，但是報紙和電屏節目卻將真相遮掩得嚴嚴實實，一點兒風聲都不往外漏。不過這也在意料之中，畢竟按著慣例，政治犯是沒有機會被送上法庭的，當然也不會被公然批鬥。大清洗運動讓很多人受到牽連，有著叛國罪行和思想罪行的人都要接受公開審判，在他們可憐巴巴地認罪之後，等待他們的就只有伏法了。當然想要被公開審判也不是件容易的事，即便在特殊時期也要兩年才能有那麼一次。這要在平時，只要你得罪了黨，你就得消失，就得從人間蒸發，也就是說，你會被他們清理得乾乾淨淨，世間再也找不到丁點兒有關你的線索。但有時，失蹤並不意味著死亡。對溫斯頓而言，倘若不把他父母算在內的話，光他認識的，大概就有30多個人失蹤了。

溫斯頓用文件夾輕輕地蹭了蹭鼻子。對面辦公室的蒂洛森同志，仍然鬼鬼祟祟地蜷伏在讀寫器面前。他抬頭張望了一下，那充滿敵意的目光又像剛才那樣朝溫斯頓射過來。溫斯頓想，是不是蒂洛森所做的工作也和他一樣呢？這的確有可能。因為如此難辦的事情，絕不會單單交給他一個人，但同時，如果把這見不得光的事授權給一個專門的委員會來做的話，未免就有些興師動眾了，那樣反倒會露出馬腳，不就等同於公開承認他們在篡改歷史了嘛。很可能，有十幾個人正在一個偏僻的角落裡競相為老大哥的演講詞出謀劃策。而此刻，或許內黨的首腦正在從這十幾個人的策劃案裡挑選中意的版本，挑出來以後再拿去修改，修改的過程非常複雜，且人多手雜，其間的對照檢錄肯定是免不了的，總的原則是統一思想、消除雜音。經過如此操作以後，他們就這樣把人為製造的謊言變成永久的檔案，甚至永久的事實了。

溫斯頓也不知道威瑟斯為什麼會失寵，可能是因為貪腐墮落或無能。不過，這也有可能是老大哥除去受歡迎的人的一種托辭。又或者，威瑟斯或是他的同夥被懷疑且被揪住了異端思想的小辮子。再或者，當然這也是最有可能的，事情之所以會發生，僅僅是因為清洗與蒸發是大洋國政府維護國家機器運轉的必要手段。現在的唯一的線索，就是「涉及非人」這句話，這說明威瑟斯已經不在人世了。但你也不能簡單地認為，這就是他們被捕後的唯一下場。有時他們會被釋放出來，重獲自由，但是這自由相對短暫，可能只有一兩年的時間，他們最終還是要被政府處死。讓人意想不到的是，你明明覺得有些人已經死了，卻突然幽靈般地出現在公審法庭，像瘋狗一樣亂咬一通，把數以百計的人拖下水，然後就永遠地從人間消失。現在威瑟斯已經是一個非人了。他已經不復存在了，他從未在世上存在過。溫斯頓覺得，單單改變老大哥的演說風格是遠遠不夠的，最好能捎帶著講一些題外之話。

他可以像往常一樣，把對叛國者和思想罪犯的譴責都附加到演講稿當中，但這樣一來，捏造的痕跡就無疑太過顯眼了。然而偽造一個前線重大勝利，或者是捏造一個實現第九個三年計劃成功增產的捷報，則會使演講稿變得太過複雜，訂正的難度也隨之增加，畢竟這些都是憑空捏造的腦力活。突然一個念頭從他腦海裡迸發出來，一個像是提前就已經安排好的形象呈現在眼前，沒錯，就是奧格威同志。他在最近的戰役中英勇地犧牲了。有時，老大哥會在授勳令中緬懷一些品格謙遜、寒門出身的黨員，在肯定他們對黨的事業「鞠躬盡瘁，死而後已」的精神的同時，還不忘呼籲其他黨員學習他們的高風亮節。今天老大哥要紀念的人應該就是奧格威同志。事實上，世上從未有奧格威同志存在過，然而，兩行大字以及一些偽造的照片，就足以把一個幻想之中的奧格威不費吹灰之力地帶到世上。

溫斯頓沉思片刻，然後把讀寫器朝胸前的方向拉了拉，緊接著用老大哥慣用的方式口述了一通。這種方式既有軍人的威嚴，又有學究的迂腐。此外，他有自問自答的習慣，比如，他會問「同志們，我們從以上事實中得到什麼教訓？這教訓，同時也是英社的基本原則之一，就是……」在對老大哥的習慣有了深刻的領悟以後，溫斯頓模仿起他來也就簡單多了。

奧格威同志3歲時，就開始對玩具不感興趣了，當然，除了一面鼓、一挺機關鎗以及一架直升機模型以外。他6歲時，由於放鬆准入制度的關係，提前一年加入了特務營。9歲時，他就成隊長了。11歲時，他向思想警察檢舉了他的叔父，因為他無意中偷聽到了對他來說像是帶有犯罪傾向的談話。17歲時，他成了青年反性聯盟的區域組織者。19歲時，他設計了新式手榴彈，據說已被和平部應用於實戰了，至於它的威力，初次試驗就顯露鋒芒，一次炸死了31個歐亞國的敵人。23歲時，他以身殉國。當時他在印度洋海域上空執行重要任務，被巡邏的敵軍轟炸機窮追不捨，為避免秘密洩露，他拖著沉重的身軀，背負著他那把機關鎗，從直升飛機上縱身跳下，沉入海底—— 一切都結束了。老大哥說，他死得其所，令人崇拜不已。隨後，老大哥對奧格威思想的純粹以及他矢志不渝盡忠黨國的精神，又額外高度評價了一番。他是一個徹底的禁酒主義者和禁煙主義者，除了每天1小時的體育鍛煉外，再無別的消遣娛樂。他篤定地孤老一生，拒絕婚姻，認為婚姻及照看家庭會花掉太多心思，以至於沒辦法為黨的事業盡心竭力。他認為對黨的忠誠是一天24小時都必須做的事情，耽誤一點兒都不成。他開口閉口不離英社思想，彷彿在他的生命中，除了擊敗宿敵歐亞國，緝拿間諜、陰謀作亂者、思想罪犯以及叛徒外，再無別的目標可以追求了。

此刻，溫斯頓正在為是否要頒發給奧格威同志一枚突出貢獻勳章而糾結，索性還是算了吧，因為這勢必會帶來一系列不必要的麻煩，畢竟你要在保證說法前後呼應的問題上花點兒心思。

他又看了對面辦公室裡的對手一眼。某種跡象表明，蒂洛森和他做的工作一模一樣。誰都不知道自己的策劃案能否被首腦採納，但溫斯頓卻深信，最終首腦會選擇他的。奧格威同志在一個小時之前還不存在，現在卻變成現實的了。他突然被這離奇的事情驚了一下，編排死人順手拈來，保護活人他卻無能為力了。奧格威不曾在世間存在過，卻被寫進了歷史裡，一旦人們忘記了當局篡改歷史的勾當，那奧格威就變成真實存在了。他在歷史上的存在，就和查理曼或是凱撒一樣查有實據了。

附录回收文件、内参消息、统计数据造假、雷锋

如题。

V

IN THE LOW-CEILINGED canteen, deep under ground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

“Just the man I was looking for,” said a voice at Winston’s back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps “friend” was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades; but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

“I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,” he said.

“Not one!” said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. “I’ve tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.”

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the “free” market.

“I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,” he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the edge of the counter.

“Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?” said Syme.

“I was working,” said Winston indifferently. “I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.”

“A very inadequate substitute,” said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. “I know you,” the eyes seemed to say, “I see through you. I know very well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.” In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, the trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

“It was a good hanging,” said Syme reminiscently. “I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue—a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.”

“Nex’, please!” yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. Onto each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a metal pannikin of pinkish-gray stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

“There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,” said Syme. “Let’s pick up a gin on the way.”

The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays onto the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston’s left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

“How is the dictionary getting on?” said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

“Slowly,” said Syme. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.”

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

“The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,” he said. “We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ’excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-colored bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

“Except—” began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say “Except the proles,” but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

“The proles are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as “I think you’re so right, I do so agree with you,” uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth, it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase—“complete and final elimination of Gold-steinism”—jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front—it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.

“There is a word in Newspeak,” said Syme. “I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”

Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter, but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. “Here comes Parsons,” he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, “that bloody fool.” Parsons, Winston’s fellow tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room—a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery “Hullo, hullo!” and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Center you could always tell when he had been playing table tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink pencil between his fingers.

“Look at him working away in the lunch hour,” said Parsons, nudging Winston. “Keenness, eh? What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that sub you forgot to give me.”

“Which sub is that?” said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

“For Hate Week. You know—the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our block. We’re making an all-out effort—going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.”

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

“By the way, old boy,” he said, “I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact I told him I’d take the catapult away if he does it again.”

“I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,” said Winston.

“Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhampstead way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.”

“What did they do that for?” said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:

“My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent—might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her onto him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes—said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

“What happened to the man?” said Winston.

“Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if—” Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

“Good,” said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

“Of course we can’t afford to take chances,” agreed Winston dutifully.

“What I mean to say, there is a war on,” said Parsons.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.

“Comrades!” cried an eager youthful voice. “Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than twenty per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs—”

The phrase “our new, happy life” recurred several times. It had been a favorite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at a hundred grams a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe up to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too—in some more complex way, involving doublethink—Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier, Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-colored gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient—nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beedelike man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favored. It was curious how that beedelike type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

“The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,” he said with a knowing shake of his head. “By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades you can let me have?”

“Not one,” said Winston. “I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks myself.”

“Ah, well—just thought I’d ask you, old boy.”

“Sorry,” said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry’s announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs. Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beedelike men who scuttled so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries—they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department—she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish, though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant that she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about; perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

“Did I ever tell you, old boy,” he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, “about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That’s a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays—better than in my day, even. What d’you think’s the latest thing they’ve served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night—tried it out on our sitting room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it’s only a toy, mind you. Still, gives ’em the right idea, eh?”

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette.

第五章

「你的辭典編得怎麼樣了？」溫斯頓克服掉噪音，提高聲調問。

「慢得很，」塞姆回答，「我負責形容詞這部分，很有意思。」

一提到新語，他馬上精神百倍。他把盤子推到一旁，纖細的手一隻抓起麵包，一隻拿著奶酪，他傾過身子靠近桌面跟溫斯頓交談起來，這樣不用大喊大叫。

「第十一版是最終定稿版。」他說。

「我們正努力讓新語成為大洋國的唯一通用語言，我們編完後，像你這樣的人將不得不重新學習它。我敢說，你肯定會認為我們的主要工作是創造新詞。那你就錯了，我們是在消滅舊詞——每天數以百計地銷毀。我們把語言刪減到了極致，以確保第十一版所含的每一個詞在2050年以前都不會被淘汰。」

他貪婪地咬著麵包，吞了兩口之後，繼續擺出一副學究的姿態侃侃而談。他那消瘦灰暗的臉上充滿了生氣，眼睛收斂了往日嘲弄的神情，變得如同夢遊一般迷離。

「把陳舊的詞刪掉，這是一件美妙的事情。當然，文字中最大的浪費是動詞和形容詞。但是，有大量的名詞同樣也是可以刪掉的。不僅僅是同義詞，反義詞也未嘗不可。倘若一個詞通過自身變換，就可以表達相反的意思，那我們為什麼還要為它的反義詞的取捨而花費心思呢？就拿『好』來說吧。如果有『好』這麼一個詞，就必須存在與之相反的『壞』這個詞嗎？說『不好』，同樣可以，而且它也完全表達了相反的意思，甚至比另一個詞「壞」表達得更準確。或者，如果你想要表達『好』的不同強度，那也容易。絕對不必像過去那樣麻煩，要用什麼『卓越』或是『精彩』之類的詞彙，表達起來模糊不清。現在，「加好」就完全能覆蓋這類形容詞的含義，如果你想進一步強調這『好』的程度，那『雙倍加好』完全能夠滿足意思表達的需要。當然，我們現在已經開始採用這種形式了。但在最終版的新語字典裡，就必須用這種形式。到那時，全部精華的好與壞的概念，只用6個詞就能涵蓋：好，加好，加倍加好；不好，加不好，雙倍加不好——事實上，這僅僅與一個詞有關：『好』。難道你不認為，這是一個美妙的想法嗎，溫斯頓？當然，這個是老大哥的英明決斷。」他隨後又補充了一句。溫斯頓料想，他是斷然不敢獨貪這功勞的。

溫斯頓一聽到塞姆提及老大哥，臉上立即露出一種近似麻木的熱情。然而，塞姆此時似乎也已經察覺出了溫斯頓的敷衍了事、佯作歡顏了。

「其實你並不是很欣賞新語，溫斯頓，」塞姆近乎憂傷地說，「即便你呈現在紙面上的是新語，但你卻依然習慣使用舊語思考，不是嗎？我偶爾也拜讀過一些你發表在《泰晤士報》上面的文章，寫得相當不錯，但在我看來不過是舊語的翻譯而已。其實，在你內心深處，你更傾向於使用含混不清的、冗雜無用的舊語。這也就不難理解，你為什麼無法領會消滅多餘的文字是多麼美妙的一件事情了。你難道不知道，新語是世上唯一一種詞彙每年都在減少的語言嗎？」

溫斯頓當然知道，但只是輕輕地撇了下嘴角。他沒開口，唯恐自己冒出什麼叛逆的話來，但願他臉上流露的附和之意，能迎合塞姆的心思。塞姆又啃了一口那塊黑麵包，嚼了兩口繼續說：

「難道你不知道，新語存續的意義，就在於縮小思想的邊界嗎？最終，世上也就不會有思想罪了，至少從字面上來看是這樣，因為你根本沒有辦法用現有的詞彙把它完整地表達出來。每一個需要表達的觀念，現在只能用一個確切的字眼來表達，這個字眼的意思必須是明確的，且沒有任何延伸意義的。好在第十一版新語字典就要出版了，到那時，我們離現在的目標也就不遠了。但是這又是一個漫長的過程，甚至等到你我早已遠離人世，我們的銷毀事業還要繼續。詞彙一年少於一年，人們的意識空間也一年小於一年。雖然即便在當前情況下，我們也沒有理由或借口去犯思想罪，這是上升到個人自我約束與現實控制的問題。但最終，甚至就連個人道德層面的東西，也將用不到了。語言趨於完美，革命水到渠成。新語即是英社，英社即是新語。」他補充道，臉上洋溢著神秘的滿足感，「溫斯頓，你有沒有想過，到2050年，最晚到那時，世上再沒有人能夠聽懂我們現在的談話了。」

「除了——」溫斯頓滿臉疑惑，嘴裡冒出兩個字，但又停了下來。

他想說「除了無產者」，儘管這話就在嘴邊，但他還是嚥了回去，他機警地想了想，因為他也不確定如此妄加反駁會不會給自己招致麻煩，被扣上一頂崇尚異端的帽子。然而，塞姆此時好像已經猜到了溫斯頓想說什麼。

「無產者根本就不能算作人類，」他口無遮攔地說道，「到2050年，或者更早，現存的所有由舊語闡述的思想都將消失。整個歷史文化將被徹底顛覆。喬叟、莎士比亞、彌爾頓、拜倫，他們的著作只能以新語的形式存於世上，確切地說，他們所表達的意思，將會與他們過去想要表達的意思截然相反。甚至有關黨史的記載也會完全改變。相應地，黨的口號也會發生變化。在『自由』這個概念消失後，便不會再有『自由即奴役』這樣的口號了，這樣說你會懂嗎？到那時，整個思想風氣將變得截然不同。事實上，那時根本不會有思想存在，至少不會有我們現在所能認知的思想存在。正統即意味著不加思考，當然也不用你去思考。正統即無意識。」

這些天以來，溫斯頓一直有一個想法，而且這個想法他從未如此堅信過，那就是，塞姆將被蒸發。他太自作聰明，他想得太多，說得也太過直白。黨不會喜歡這樣的人。終有一天，他會消失，這是明明白白地寫在他臉上的。

……

「瞧瞧，這位夥計在午餐後還要繼續工作呢。」帕森斯用手推了下溫斯頓說道，「老夥計，你看什麼看得那麼投入啊？我想，肯定是我看不懂的吧？史密斯，你知道我為什麼來找你嗎？告訴你一聲，你忘記捐款了。」

「捐什麼款？」溫斯頓本能地摸了一下錢袋問道。他每個月都要拿出四分之一的薪水，來應付各種自願捐獻，但是捐獻的名目實在是太過繁多了，以至於很難記清哪些款捐過了，哪些沒有捐。

「你曉得的，就是仇恨周戶戶串聯基金啊，咱們區的資金籌措工作由我負責。我們打算大搞一番，到時候，一定會讓你看到極具震撼力的表演。對了，到時候如果勝利大廈的旗幟不是整個街區最多的，你大可以把賬算在我頭上。老夥計，你可是答應過捐兩塊錢的呀！」

溫斯頓翻出兩張皺巴巴、髒兮兮的紙鈔，隨手遞給帕森斯。帕森斯接過鈔票，打開一個小筆記本，用利落的筆跡把溫斯頓的名字記下來。

「老夥計，順便道個歉，」他說，「聽說，我家那個小鬼昨天拿彈弓打你了。我狠狠地把他訓斥了一頓。我已警告過他，下不為例，否則沒收他的彈弓。」

「我可以理解，他是因為沒去看絞刑，才會這麼不高興的。」溫斯頓說。

「的確，我也是這麼想的，這正是他愛國精神的體現，不是嗎？不管怎麼說，這兩個小鬼太淘氣了。但他們對黨對國家，絕對是忠心耿耿的！他們整天把特務營和戰爭的事都放在心上。你知道我那小女兒上週六做了什麼轟動的事情嗎？那天特務營組織城外郊遊，她和另外兩個小姑娘一起去溜冰，突然看見一個形跡可疑的男人，於是她們花了整整一下午的時間去跟蹤他。她們一直尾隨其後，跟了兩個多小時，穿過叢林，在阿默捨姆邊境地區把他交給了巡邏警察。太了不起了！」

「她們為什麼要跟蹤他呢？」溫斯頓稍顯吃驚地回問道。帕森斯一臉得意狀，繼續說道：

「當時，我那小女兒覺得他是一個敵特奸細，可能是通過降落傘過來的。她發現他穿的鞋子怪怪的，破綻就在這，她說從來沒見過有人穿這種鞋，懷疑他可能是外國人。真是太出人意料了，真是人小鬼大啊，是不是？」

「後來那個形跡可疑的人怎麼樣了？」溫斯頓問。

「啊哈，這個我當然說不出來了。不過對於結果，你我都不會感到意外——」說著，帕森斯示範了一個瞄準開槍的動作，並用舌頭「嗒」了一聲，模仿槍聲響起的場景。

「哦。」塞姆心不在焉地說了一句。他連頭都沒抬一下，一直盯著紙條看。

「當然，我們絕不能大意。」溫斯頓附和著表示贊同。

「就是就是，我們不能麻痺大意，畢竟現在是戰時狀態嘛！」帕森斯說。

說來也怪，這時他們頭頂的電屏裡傳出了刺耳的號聲，好像是專門為了印證帕森斯的話而響起的，不過這聲音和帕森斯沒一點兒關係，和前方打勝仗也沒有一點兒關係，只是富裕部公告的一個前奏而已。

「同志們，」一個熱血沸騰的青年，鬼哭狼嚎地高聲呼喊道，「同志們，注意了！有一則好消息要告訴大家。我們已贏得了增產戰役的徹底勝利！今年消費品的產出成果喜人，照這樣來看，今年的生活水平至少要提高百分之二十以上。今天早晨，大洋國舉國上下都沉浸在無比興奮的喜悅之中。他們自發地組織起來，奔走相告。工人們已經從辦公室和工廠走向街頭，手舉標語，高聲吶喊，爭相表達他們對老大哥的敬意，感謝老大哥的領導，是他的英明神武才有了我們如今的幸福新生活。下面，請允許我把這些驕人的數字通報給大家。糧食——」

「幸福新生活」這個詞，在電屏中出現了好幾次，這個詞現在已經成了富裕部的口頭禪，人人張口必講「幸福新生活」。此時，帕森斯的注意力早已被電屏中的小號聲所吸引，正襟危坐，一本正經地聽著電屏的通報。他雖然聽不懂這些數字的真實含義，卻能明顯地感覺到，這絕對是一份令人滿意的大成就。他拿出他那個又髒又大的煙斗，剩下半斗燒焦的煙葉清晰可見。這也難怪，每週100克的煙草供給，根本不夠填滿他的大煙斗。溫斯頓現在吸的是勝利紙煙，每次他都橫拿著紙煙，生怕煙絲從煙卷裡散落出來。下次的香煙配給，要到明天才能領到，目前他手頭的存貨也只剩4支了。此刻，他凝神注視著電屏裡傳出的新聞和數字，遠處嘈雜的鴨語聽不到了。電屏裡播報的，好像是感謝老大哥把巧克力配給提高到每週20克的聲明。如果沒有記錯的話，他昨天聽到的跟現在聽到的可不一樣，昨天明明說的是巧克力供給減少到每週20克嘛。僅僅過了24小時，同一件事情卻有了不同的說法，公眾可能會相信這再明顯不過的偽造嗎？是的，他們相信了。至少帕森斯就很輕易地相信了，他簡直就是一個比動物還蠢的糊塗蛋。溫斯頓左後方，那個沒有眼睛或者說有眼無珠的傢伙也相信了，看他那副狂熱無比、激情洋溢的樣子，你就能肯定這一點。不光如此，如果有人膽敢再提起上周供應配額是30克，上頭肯定會過來拿人，並馬不停蹄地審判，緊接著讓你從人間蒸發。塞姆也信了，但他信得有點兒糾結，可能會牽扯到雙重思想。此刻，難道只有溫斯頓是旁觀者清嗎？

這些天花亂墜的數據，還在從電屏中不斷地傾瀉出來。相較於去年，今年有了更多的食物，更多的布料，更多的馬匹，更多的財富，更多的廚具，更多的燃料，更多的艦船，更多的直升飛機，更多的書籍，更多的新增人口，總之，除了疾病、犯罪、精神錯亂，有了更多的一切。人和事都在嗖嗖地向上增長著。溫斯頓開始效仿塞姆，拿起羹匙，在桌上那攤骯髒的就要淌到桌下的燉菜汁裡不停地攪動著，循環往復地畫著長線。他憤懣地思考著，心裡暗暗地質疑著當前物質生活的真相。難道過去也是這個樣子嗎？過去的食物，也像現在這麼難吃嗎？他環顧了一下廳堂：低矮壓抑的頂棚，擁擠的空間，被無數食客信手塗畫的骯髒的牆面，破舊的金屬桌椅，彎曲的湯匙，坑坑窪窪的托盤，粗糙不堪的白杯子，油膩膩、縫隙裡夾著污垢的桌面。空氣中有種酸酸的難以名狀的怪味，劣質的杜松子酒味、發霉的咖啡味、燉菜的鐵腥味和髒衣服的汗臭味混雜在一起，讓他感到噁心。你的肚子以及你的皮膚，無時不在向你抗議，覺得被剝奪了本該屬於它們的權利。不過說真的，他好像也找不出什麼東西，來證明過去和現在有什麼不同，哪怕是一點點清晰的記憶也好。好像從他記事時起，他就從來沒填飽過肚子，他穿過的襪子和睡衣都是帶著破洞的，用過的傢俱都是破舊不堪、靠在牆根才能夠勉強站住的，房間都是冷冰冰、猶如冰窖的，電車裡都是人擠人的，牆體碎片從天而降是常有的事，麵包是一如既往的深黑色，茶葉都是一片難求，咖啡總有種臭烘烘的怪味，就連香煙也是經常供應不上。這麼說吧，除了人工勾兌的杜松子酒以外，沒有什麼東西是富裕的，也沒有什麼是廉價的。當然，當你上了年紀，一天比一天老的時候，健康狀況每況愈下，你會發現生活的窘迫會讓你更難以承受。但這不也正說明，事情已經完全超出了本來的秩序嗎？每每想到骯髒的環境，匱乏的物資，漫長的寒冬，黏乎乎的襪子，隔三差五出毛病的電梯，從沒有熱水的澡堂子，砂礫般粗糙的肥皂，稍有不慎就掉渣的煙卷，充斥著噁心味道的伙食，你的心就涼了一大截。為什麼我們面對如此景況會難以忍受？一定是老祖宗們留下的記憶在提醒我們——過去遠非現在這個樣子。

……

他最初的想法又縈上心頭：可能她確實不是思想警察，或許用業餘特務來形容會更貼切一些，但這比思想警察更令人可怕。他不知道這個女人盯了他多久，可能是五分鐘，或許其間他的表情太過異常，才招惹了她的關注。不管怎麼說，在公共場合或是在電屏的監視下神遊，總歸是一件危險的事情。稍有不慎就會讓你送命。一次因緊張而引起的抽搐，一個無意中表露出的焦慮神情，乃至於一個自言自語的習慣，都可能被視作行為反常、有意隱瞞真相的證據。譬如，前方告捷而你半信半疑，你臉上可能會露出不合時宜的神情，那你要倒霉了，因為你犯罪了。在新語裡，專門有這樣一個詞彙來定義這種罪，叫做——臉罪。

黑髮女人又背他而坐了。可能她不是在有意盯他的梢，也許這兩天，她坐在他的近旁僅是巧合而已。指縫間的香煙已經熄滅，他小心翼翼地把剩下的一小截放在桌角上。工作之後，他還可以拿來繼續消遣。鄰桌坐著的那個男人，極有可能是個思想警察，而他也極有可能被這個男人帶到仁愛部的密室，去接受秘密審判，想到這裡，他突然冒出一種想法，現在絕不該浪費香煙，能多吸一口是一口吧。塞姆此時把他手中的紙條折好，重新放回衣袋裡。帕森斯又滔滔不絕地講起話來。

「老夥計，我之前跟你說過嗎？」他叼著煙斗，皮笑肉不笑地說，「我是說，我家那兩個革命小將，在自由市場上把一個女人的裙子燒了，因為他們發現她正在用老大哥的頭像包香腸！他們小心翼翼地走到她身後，瞅準時機，點起火來，足足用了一盒火柴呢！我猜，她肯定被燒得夠嗆！真是小痞子行徑，不是嗎？但是，小小年紀就有這麼高的革命熱情和思想覺悟，還是值得表揚的。他們在特務營的受訓效果可真不賴，比我那會兒不知要好多少呢。你猜，特務營給他們裝備了什麼新鮮玩意兒？是鑰匙孔竊聽器！有一天晚上，我家那小姑娘就帶回來一個，還在我家臥室的門上實驗了一下，她說效果比用耳朵貼近監視孔要好得多。當然了，這也只是一個玩具而已，不過倒是別出心裁，你覺得呢？

此時，電屏裡傳出一陣刺耳的哨子聲。是時候回去工作了。這三個男人急忙起身，隨著擁擠的人群來到電梯旁。溫斯頓剩下那截兒煙卷裡的煙絲，早已掉光了。

附录消灭漢字、自愿捐款、北韩播音员、哭脸犯罪

如题。

VI

WINSTON WAS writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I—

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back: a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five or forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief case. They were a few meters apart when the left side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: that poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.

He drew in his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She—

His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married—had been married, at any rate; probably he still was married, for so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odor of the basement kitchen, an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.

When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labor camp: not more, if you had committed no other offense. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. But—though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to—it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and—though the principle was never clearly stated—permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And so far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in their married life he had decided—though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. “The human sound track” he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—sex.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She used even to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was “making a baby,” and the other was “our duty to the Party” (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.

Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I—

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine’s white body, frozen forever by the hypnotic power of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deeply ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.

But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:

I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light—

After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step toward her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out; for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do—!

It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.

He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

第六章

黨的目標，絕不僅僅限於阻止私通的男女結成山盟海誓的關係，以免讓黨陷入被動的難以控制的局面，還在於消除所有由性行為產生的樂趣。雖然黨從未當眾承認過，但這一點毋庸諱言。在黨看來，沒有愛情的生理慾望才是罪魁禍首，不論是在夫妻之間，還是在婚姻以外的其他關係層面上。所有黨員之間的婚姻，都必須事先通過「婚委會」批准，儘管黨從來沒有明確地解釋過原由。但並不是每對黨內男女都能通過審批，如果「婚委會」認為，這對夫婦互相吸引對方的僅僅是他們彼此的肉體的話，他們依然不可能有機會在一起。唯一能讓他們承認的結婚目的，恐怕就是製造新生兒來為黨服務。對此，夫妻二人應該把行房視同灌腸一樣的小手術。雖然這種觀念從未被明確提出，卻被以一種間接的方式，從小就灌輸進了每一位黨員的思想中。青年反性聯盟作為黨在這一問題上的發言人，倡導禁慾思想和男女獨身主義。所有的孩子，都要經過人工授精的方式生育(在新語裡，人工授精被叫作「人授」)，然後由公共機構撫養成人。溫斯頓心裡明白，雖然這樣做的意義不大，卻契合了黨對意識形態的統治要求。黨的真正意圖，無非是扼殺人們的生理本能，倘若扼殺不成，就乾脆將其扭曲。他不知道黨為什麼要這樣做，但在他看來，他們這樣做了也不足為奇。至少對女性而言，黨所作的這些努力，在很大程度上可以說是成功的。

溫斯頓又想起了凱瑟琳。從他們分手至今，大概有9年，10年或是11年了吧。不過說來也奇怪，他很少想到她。有時他甚至懷疑，他們是不是曾經結過婚。細細算來，他們在一起的時間，充其量也就有15個月。一般來講，黨並不允許黨員離婚，但在沒有孩子的情況下，卻鼓勵他們分居。

……

溫斯頓站在灰暗的燈光下，那股夾雜著臭蟲和廉價香水的氣味，再一次朝他的鼻孔襲來。此刻，他心裡突然騰起一種挫敗感和怨恨之情，他忍不住將這感覺與凱瑟琳白色的胴體聯繫起來——那個被黨的催眠的力量永久冰封起來的胴體。為什麼總是這樣？為什麼他不能擁有一個真正屬於自己的女人，而偏偏要每隔兩年，就出來跟這些骯髒的女人廝混一回呢？但是，那些真正能使人產生愛情的好事，是不會眷顧自己的。女性黨員的思想，都整齊劃一地一致，沒有什麼差別。她們的貞操觀，就像對黨的忠誠一樣，牢固不可動搖。她們在很小的時候，就受這些觀念的影響，包括玩遊戲以及洗冷水浴的時候，學校、特務營和青年反性聯盟輪番向她們灌輸這種垃圾思想，之後，她們參加的一系列活動，諸如演講、遊行、頌歌、喊口號、聽軍樂等，又加深了她們對此的認識，之前還微乎存留於她們心中的那份人之常情，也隨之蕩然無存了。他的理智告訴自己，一定會有例外的，但是他的心卻總也不肯相信。她們養成了一種牢不可破的情感意志力，而這也正是黨所樂於見到的。與其說溫斯頓渴望得到愛情，不如說，他更想推倒女黨員心中的那堵「貞操牆」。如果生平能有一次這樣的機會，他也就無憾了。倘若能夠跟一個女黨員發生一次關係，那麼也就意味著這反抗成功了。慾望是思想犯罪。儘管凱瑟琳是他的妻子，但如果能有辦法將她的慾望喚醒，這也形同誘姦了。

附录三教共性——婚

三教统治下的人们结婚都需要教士集团同意。

VII

If there is hope [wrote Winston] it lies in the proles.

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflecion of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—!

He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices—women’s voices—had burst from a side street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud “Oh-o-o-o-oh!” that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamored round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favoritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

He wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished; divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”

Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children’s history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs. Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:

In the old days [it ran], before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters, who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as “Sir.” The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and—

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope’s toe. There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dust bins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.

He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today forty per cent of adult proles were literate; before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been fifteen per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only a hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been three hundred—and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed—after the event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been—at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

The story really began in the middle Sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counterrevolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding, no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles in the Times, analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic early days of the Party. The glamor of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavored with cloves which was the speciality of the café. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in the Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes—slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats—even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats—an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging sloping bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the café at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out, but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it—but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note; in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:

“Under the spreading chestnut tree

I sold you and you sold me:

There lie they, and here lie we

Under the spreading chestnut tree.”

The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

A little later all three were rearrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their re-lease. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube onto his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of the Times of about ten years earlier—the top half of the page, so that it included the date—and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them; in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.

The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston’s memory because it chanced to be Midsummer Day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair, so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort; but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident—a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance—would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.

That was ten—eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes—two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O’Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O’Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O’Brien—to O’Brien; it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and took its color from that fact.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

第七章

他覺得，這兩句話簡直就像從黨的教科書中硬生生抄下來的一樣。當然，黨一直在宣稱，恰恰是黨把無產者從奴役中解放了出來。革命前，無產者遭受資本家無情的壓迫，他們挨打受餓，婦女被強迫到煤礦去做苦力（事實上，如今仍有婦女在煤礦被強制勞動），孩子剛滿六歲就被賣到工廠裡做工。但同時，黨卻運用雙重思想教導黨員，要將無產者視作下等人。是下等人，就要像牲畜般勞作，就要受到一些特定法例的制約。事實上，他們對無產者的瞭解微乎其微，當然他們也沒必要瞭解得更多。無產者存在於世的意義，就在於永無休止地勞作，以及永無休止地繁殖將來用於勞作的廉價勞力，黨所在乎的其實就這麼多。如果讓他們自生自滅，他們會像阿根廷平原上被放逐的牛群一樣，回歸到符合他們自然天性的生活方式之下—— 一種自古就有的生活方式。他們自打出生起，就在貧民窟長大，12歲開始參加勞動，在經歷了短暫的青春期後，20歲結婚，30歲進入中年期，60歲左右大部分人就會死掉。繁重的體力勞動，照顧家小，因為瑣碎的小事跟鄰居爭吵，看電影，踢足球，喝啤酒，以及參與過癮有趣的賭博，這就是他們生活的真實寫照。要想控制他們並不難，只需把一些思想警察埋伏在他們中間，散佈謠言，暗中記下危險分子的名字，伺機將其除掉即可。但是，黨並沒有向他們灌輸意識形態的想法，讓無產者具有強烈的政治意識是不可取的。他們只要有簡單的愛國心腸，在必要的時候，能夠接受更長的勞動時間和更少的定量配給，就足夠了。即便當他們產生不滿情緒時，這種不滿也不會製造什麼麻煩，因為他們沒有成體系的概括性的思維。他們凡事從小處著眼，他們只關注具體而瑣碎的事物，而注意不到那些真正值得他們關注的更大的罪惡。大部分無產者的家中，並不會安裝電屏，甚至巡邏警察也很少去干涉他們的生活。倫敦是一個犯罪高發的地區，諸如黑吃黑的小偷和強盜、娼妓、販毒以及各式各樣的敲詐等等；但是，即便這些都發生在無產者身上，也沒必要大驚小怪。凡是與道德相關的問題，都可以沿用他們祖傳的準則去裁決。此外，黨員所過的清教徒一般的性生活，也沒有被強加給他們。即使他們亂交，也不會受到懲罰，離婚也是被許可的。通過上面的事實可以看出，如果無產者公開表明他們有宗教信仰的需要的話，那麼一樣可以得到滿足。你實在沒有必要猜疑或是警惕無產者，正如黨的一句口號所說：「無產者和動物都是自由的。」

……

他伸手去抓癢得要命的腳踝。電屏夜以繼日地在你耳邊轟炸，力求用一些統計數字向你證明，如今的生活水平的確有了質的提升，人們吃得飽，穿得暖，居住環境得到了改善，娛樂生活也豐富多彩——總之，與50年前相比，人們的壽命延長了，工時縮短了，身材更高了，身體更壯了，心靈更健康了，生活更快樂了，教育更進步了。黨聲稱，如今有40%的成年無產者都受到過教育；而在革命前，這個數字僅僅是15%。黨還聲稱，當今的嬰兒死亡率僅僅有160‰，而在革命之前卻是300‰；諸如此類。這看起來，就像一個條件和結果都是未知數的方程式，因而也沒有什麼東西是確定無疑的。歷史書上的每一句話，甚至是人們不加質疑地全盤接受的所有事實，現在看來，全都是靠不住的。或許，他剛才想到的「初夜權」法規，對資本家的鮮活描畫以及高禮帽這些玩意兒，壓根兒就是不存在的。

一切都藏匿在迷霧中。歷史已經被篡改，就連篡改這回事兒，也已經被人們徹底遺忘了，謊言變成了真理。有一回，那是他生平第一次，抓到了足以證明黨篡改過歷史的鐵證。他曾將這把柄握在手裡，捏了足足有半分鐘。那應該是在1973年吧，總之是在他跟凱瑟琳分手之後不久。與真相有關的日期，應該比這早七八年。

故事開始於60年代中期。那時，大清洗運動正如火如荼，許多革命功勳都在運動中被排擠掉了。到了1970年，除了老大哥本人以外，其餘反叛人士都已被悉數消滅，一個也沒有留下來。這些人統統是以叛國罪和反革命罪被揭發的。戈斯坦逃跑了，沒有人知道他藏在哪裡，至於其他人，有幾個失蹤了，但大部分都被抓去公審了，公審過後，接下來的環節就是坦白、認罪、伏法。他們中間有三個人僥倖活了下來：瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福。這三人遭到逮捕，應該是1965年的事情。跟之前的情形一樣，他們消失了一年多，生死未卜。而後，他們又突然出現在公眾面前，承認自己犯有通敵罪（那會兒的敵人也是歐亞國）、盜用公款罪以及謀殺黨內同志罪，承認在革命之前曾陰謀顛覆老大哥的領導權，也承認正是因為他們利慾熏心，曾致使數以萬計的無辜者被殘忍殺害。在交代了上述罪行後，黨對他們給予了寬大處理，非但恢復了他們的黨籍，還委以「要職」，這些所謂「要職」聽起來冠冕堂皇，但實際只是徒有虛名而已。他們三人各自在《泰晤士報》上刊載了一篇冗長的檢討書，分析犯罪的原因和經過，並承諾今後一定要洗心革面，重新做人，並保證會將功贖罪。

這三人被開釋之後，溫斯頓的確在栗樹咖啡館見過他們。他還記得，他們身上那濃郁的傳奇色彩既讓人著迷，又讓人害怕，溫斯頓只敢以眼角的餘光去看他們。他們的年紀都比他要大，簡直稱得上是古代世界的遺族，或者說，是黨的英雄史冊上留下來的最後樣本。在他們身上，依稀駐留著當年黨在開展艱苦卓絕的地下鬥爭和國內戰爭時所展現出來的魅力。儘管他們對事情的經過，以及事情發生的確切日期有些模糊了，但在溫斯頓看來，他們成名的那個年代，似乎比老大哥還要早很多。可到頭來，他們卻淪為歹徒、敵人，甚至是人人避之唯恐不及的危險分子。他們注定在一兩年後，會從這個世界上徹底消失。凡是落在思想警察手裡的人，沒有一個人能僥倖逃脫。眼下，他們只不過是幾具被延遲送進墳墓的行屍走肉而已。

在咖啡館裡，沒人敢坐在他們旁邊，顯然，和這些人離得太近是不明智的。三個人呆坐在一旁，默不作聲，面前擺著三杯摻著丁香葉的杜松子酒——這是栗樹咖啡館的特色酒品。這三個人中，溫斯頓對盧瑟福的印象最為深刻。他曾經是知名的諷刺漫畫家，作品以線條鋒利著稱，在革命興起之前和革命進行過程中，他曾不止一次地鼓舞和激發著人們的革命鬥志。即便是當前，他的漫畫也會偶爾出現在《泰晤士報》上。只不過，他眼下的作品只是簡單地模仿早期的風格，題材死板，毫無生氣。他的漫畫表現的，都是過時的主題：貧民窟，挨餓的孩子，街頭的打鬥，頭戴高禮帽的資本家——就連性命都要靠街頭路障來保護，他們還是堅持戴著高禮帽。總之，即便他知道自己在做無益的掙扎，但還是一心想退回到從前去。盧瑟福身材高大，一頭油膩膩的花白頭髮，滿臉皺紋，厚厚的嘴唇高高隆起。當初他肯定是個身強體壯的漢子，如今，這魁梧的身材看起來卻臃腫虛胖，除了鼓起的肚皮外，身體的各個部位都下垂得很明顯，看上去像是一座大山要在眼前崩塌似的。

15點，這個時間的咖啡館顯得有些冷清。溫斯頓也不知道自己為何會選擇在這個時間到那裡去。咖啡館裡空空蕩蕩。電屏裡正放著輕音樂。三個人幾乎一動不動地坐在角落裡，也不言語。服務員倒是慇勤得很，不用招呼，就主動給他們端來一滿杯杜松子酒。他們旁邊的桌子上放著棋盤，棋子已經擺好，然而並沒有人動過。大約過了半分鐘，電屏更換了節目，曲調和音色也變了，換成一種難以描述的聲音。那是一種罕見的、沙啞的、調侃的怪聲怪氣，暗地裡，溫斯頓叫它「黃色小調兒」。這時，電屏裡傳出這樣的歌聲：

斑駁的栗樹蔭底，

你出賣我，我出賣你。

他們躺在那裡，

我們躺在這裡，

斑駁的栗樹蔭底。

三人依然沒動。但是，當溫斯頓的目光再次瞥向盧瑟福那疲憊的臉時，竟看到他的眼裡噙滿了淚水。這時他才發現，阿諾遜和盧瑟福兩人的鼻子，已經被打得坍塌了。他心裡猛地一陣戰慄，但是，他說不上來這戰慄為何而生。

沒過多久，這三人又被逮捕了。據說，他們剛被釋放後不久，就又參與了新的陰謀活動。在第二次審訊時，他們再一次坦白了原有的罪行，還供認了一大堆新的罪行。他們被處以死刑。他們連同他們的命運，一同被載入了黨史之中，算是懲前毖後吧。事發後五年，確切地說是在1973年，有一天，輸送孔意外地將一卷文件吐到了溫斯頓的桌子上。他翻開文件恰巧發現了一塊紙片，那顯然是別人夾在其中而忘記撿出來的一張剪報。打開紙片，溫斯頓立即意識到它的重要意義。這大概是十年前從《泰晤士報》上裁下來的半頁剪報——恰巧剪的是上半版，因此，年份和日期也都保留了下來，除了文字，剪報上還有一張黨的代表團在紐約開會時的照片。照片中央的重要位置上，便是瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福。應該不會有錯，照片下面的文字說明裡還有他們的名字。

問題在於，他們三人於兩次公審中都一致供認，就在剪報上所記的那一天，他們是在歐亞國的領土上。他們從加拿大的一個秘密機場起飛，到西伯利亞的某個地點碰頭，去跟歐亞國指揮部的重要將領會面，並將重要的軍事情報賣給了他們。這個日期溫斯頓記得很清楚，因為，那一天剛好是聖約翰施洗者節。會議過程一定會被其他與會國家詳細記載，對此，唯一可能的結論就是：他們三個人的供詞全是假的。

當然，單就這件事情而言，其實算不上什麼重大發現。甚至，當時的溫斯頓也並不確信，那些在大清洗運動中被處死的犯人是否真的干了如他們在供詞裡所坦白的那些壞事。但這卻是一個實實在在的證據，是能將歷史扳倒的一個證據。它算得上是過去的一個碎片，猶如地質學家在一塊意想不到的地層中發現了骨骼化石，因而之前建立的理論都該通通被否定一樣。如果能用什麼方式，將這張照片公佈於眾，讓民眾瞭解它存在的重要意義的話，我們就能從根本上讓黨名譽掃地。

他本來正忙於工作，但當看到這張照片並立刻明白這意味著什麼時，他知道自己要做的是用紙把它蓋上，以免映入他人眼簾。幸運的是，當他再次展開這片報紙時，從電屏的角度來看，照片上面的內容恰恰是上下顛倒的。

他把打草稿用的便簽本放在膝蓋上，將椅子推得離電屏盡可能遠。保持表面上的輕鬆坦然並不難，只要你肯努力，甚至連呼吸也能調節得很平穩，但是，你卻沒有辦法控制住過快的心跳，況且電屏的收聽效果極佳，它完全能夠測聽到心臟的跳動。他坐了約摸有10分鐘，一直擔心會出什麼岔子，將自己推到大庭廣眾之前——比如突然一陣風刮過桌子，就會使他之前所作一切掩飾的努力白費。他沒有再次掀開蓋在照片上的那張紙，而是一股腦地將它們扔進了忘懷洞。只一會兒工夫，這張照片就會化為一撮灰燼。

那是發生在10到11年前的事了。倘若在今天，他就會把這張照片保留下來。然而，那張照片和那半版文字早已經不復存在了，可對他來說，至今仍有著深遠影響。他有時也曾懷疑過自己，難道會因為一份已化為灰燼的證據的存在，就覺得黨對歷史的控制不再那麼牢不可破嗎？

但是在今天看來，即便我們能夠以某種方式，將這張已化為灰燼的照片復原，它也算不上是改變歷史的證據了。因為在他發現照片的時候，大洋國就早已不再跟歐亞國交戰了，而盧瑟福等三個已被處死的傢伙，則被控向歐亞國的特務機關出賣了自己的祖國。再說，從那以後，歷史曾有過多次訂正——兩次，或者三次，他已經記不清到底是幾次了。極有可能，他們供認的罪行早已被黨一改再改，以至於最初的事實和時間，已經不再具有任何意義了。歷史不僅僅是被改變了一下子，而是在連續不斷地被改變。最令他感到像夢魘一樣備受折磨的，是他一直也沒弄明白，黨為什麼要花費如此多的精力去玩這種偷天換日的把戲。篡改歷史的直接功用讓人一目瞭然，但至於最終目的是為哪般，就不得而知了。於是他提起筆，在記事本上寫道：

我理解怎樣做的，但是我不理解，為什麼要這樣做。

他懷疑，甚至以前無數次地懷疑過，自己是不是瘋了。或許，瘋的僅僅是少數幾個持有異議的人。在以前，如果你相信地球繞著太陽轉的話，那麼我們會說你瘋了；而現在，倘若你相信歷史是一成不變的話，那麼我們同樣會說你瘋了。你極有可能是獨自一個人堅持著這樣的看法，但如果真是這樣，那你就是一個瘋子了。然而，把自己看做瘋子的想法並不可怕，可怕的是，你的想法從一開始就是錯的。

他拿起那本兒童歷史書，看了一眼印在扉頁上的老大哥的肖像。老大哥催眠的眼睛注視著他，彷彿有一股巨大的力量向你襲來，它穿透你的顱骨，擾亂你的思想，動搖你的信仰，這股力量似乎在逼迫你去否認直覺的存在。終有一天，黨會宣佈二加二等於五，那時你要完全相信。黨遲早會這樣宣佈的，這是不可避免的。這種邏輯推理，是完全符合黨的需要。從本質上來說，他們的哲學絕不僅僅是否認經驗的可靠性，而更要否認客觀事物存在的真實性。異端邪說，反倒成了公認的常識。你若不那樣認為，他們便會殺死你。這固然可怕，但更可怕的是他們的話可能是對的。總之，你怎麼能肯定，二加二就一定等於四？你怎麼能肯定，地心引力就一定存在？同理，你又怎麼能肯定，歷史真的不可被篡改呢？如果歷史和客觀世界全存在於我們的思想中，而我們的思想又是可控制的，那接下來又該如何呢？

不，不是的！他鼓起勇氣。奧布萊恩的面孔突然在他的腦海裡浮現出來，這顯然不是巧合。他比之前更加確定，奧布萊恩是站在自己這邊的。於是他可以確定了，自己正是在向奧布萊恩寫下這些日記——致奧布萊恩。它像是一封長信，沒有人會讀到，但是因為已經有了上款，有了傾訴對象，所以基調和內容也就定了下來。

黨要求你，去抵制那些所看到和聽到的證據，這是黨的最基本的命令。他一想到自己即將面臨的反對壓力，心就禁不住往下沉。那些黨內的知識分子，可以輕而易舉地把他駁倒。他們的那些辯論方法詭異得很，保證他聽不懂便是，他根本無從辯駁。但是，他是對的！他們是錯的，他才是對的。明顯的、簡單的和真實存在的事實，是一定要維護的。真理就是真理，要堅持不能放棄！物質世界是客觀存在的，客觀規律是不容改變的。石頭是硬的，水是液態的，懸空的物體是要朝著地心降落的。他感覺自己是在跟奧布萊恩講話，同時，也是在為後世留下一條重要的格言，他寫道：

自由就是二加二等於四，承認了此理，其他便會迎刃而解。

VIII

FROM SOMEWHERE at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

He had walked several kilometers over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Center: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Center were carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Center, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself along unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

“If there is hope,” he had written in the diary, “it lies in the proles.” The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-colored slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

“‘Yes,’ I says to ’er, ’that’s all very well,’ I says. ‘But if you’d of been in my place you’d of done the same as what I done. It’s easy to criticize,’ I says, ‘but you ain’t got the same problems as what I got.’”

“Ah,” said the other, “that’s jest it. That’s jest where it is.”

The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. “May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?"—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route, but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.

Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran toward Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.

“Steamer!” he yelled. “Look out, guv’nor! Bang over’ead! Lay down quick!”

“Steamer” was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly traveled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms about his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered onto his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred meters up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming round the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking shops which the proles frequented (“pubs,” they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

“Can’t you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain’t won for over fourteen months!”

“Yes, it ‘as, then!”

“No, it ‘as not! Back ‘ome I got the ‘ole lot of ’em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar as the clock. An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven—”

“Yes, a seven ‘as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February—second week in February.”

“February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An’ I tell you, no number—”

“Oh, pack it in!” said the third man.

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty meters. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the Party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling onto that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighborhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer’s shop not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white mustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the Fifties and Sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He would say to him: “Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”

Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and crossed die narrow street. It was madness, of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered, the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.

“I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?” said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. “You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?”

“And what in hell’s name is a pint?” said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

“‘Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.”

“Never heard of ’em,” said the barman shortly. “Liter and half-liter—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.”

“I likes a pint,” persisted the old man. “You could ‘a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ‘ave these bleeding liters when I was a young man.”

“When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,” said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.

There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston’s entry seemed to disappear. The old man’s white-stubbled face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught him gently by the arm.

“May I offer you a drink?” he said.

“You’re a gent,” said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston’s blue overalls. “Pint!” he added aggressively to the barman. “Pint of wallop.”

The barman swished two half-liters of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about Lottery tickets. Winston’s presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.

“‘E could ‘a drawed me off a pint,” grumbled the old man as he settled down behind his glass. “A ‘alf liter ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. And a ‘ole liter’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.”

“You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Winston tentatively.

The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the barroom that he expected the changes to have occurred.

“The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer—wallop we used to call it—was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.”

“Which war was that?” said Winston.

“It’s all wars,” said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. “‘Ere’s wishing you the very best of ’ealth!”

In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-liters. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full liter.

“You are very much older than I am,” said Winston. “You must have been a grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in the old days, before the Revolution. People of my age don’t really know anything about those times. We can only read about them in books, and what it says in the books may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty—worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the great mass of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them hadn’t even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands—the capitalists, they were called—who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats—”

The old man brightened suddenly.

“Top ‘ats!” he said. “Funny you should mention ’em. The same thing come into my ’ead only yesterday, I donno why. I was jest thinking, I ain’t seen a top ‘at in years. Gorn right out, they ‘ave. The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was—well, I couldn’t give you the date, but it must’a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only ‘ired for the occasion, you understand.”

“It isn’t very important about the top hats,” said Winston pa-tiently. “The point is, these capitalists—they and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them—were the lords of the earth. Everything existed for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—were their slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if they chose. They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o’-nine-tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist went about with a gang of lackeys who—”

The old man brightened again.

“Lackeys!” he said. “Now there’s a word I ain’t ’eard since ever so long. Lackeys! That reg’lar takes me back, that does. I recollect—oh, donkey’s years ago—I used to sometimes go to ‘Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to ’ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians—all sorts there was. And there was one bloke—well, I couldn’t give you ‘is name, but a real powerful speaker ’e was. ‘E didn’t ‘alf give it ’em! ‘Lackeys!’ ’e says, ‘Lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!’ Parasites—that was another of them. And ‘yenas—’e definitely called ’em ‘yenas. Of course ’e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.”

Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross purposes.

“What I really wanted to know was this,” he said. “Do you feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top—”

“The ‘Ouse of Lords,” put in the old man reminiscently.

“The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them ‘Sir’ and take off your cap when you passed them?”

The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his beer before answering.

“Yes,” he said. “They liked you to touch your cap to ’em. It showed respect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough. Had to, as you might say.”

“And was it usual—I’m only quoting what I’ve read in history books—was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?”

“One of ’em pushed me once,” said the old man. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. It was Boat Race night—terrible rowdy they used to get on Boat Race night—and I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue. Quite a gent, ’e was—dress shirt, top ‘at, black overcoat. ‘E was kind of zigzagging across the pavement, and I bumps into ‘im accidental-like. ‘E says, ‘Why can’t you look where you’re going?’ ’e says. I says, ‘Ju think you’ve bought the bleeding pavement?’ ‘E says, ‘I’ll twist your bloody ’ead off if you get fresh with me.’ I says, ‘You’re drunk. I’ll give you in charge in ‘alf a minute,’ I says. ‘An if you’ll believe me, ’e puts ‘is ‘and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to ‘ave fetched ‘im one, only—”

A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information. The Party histories might still be true, after a fashion; they might even be completely true. He made a last attempt.

“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up. Would you say, from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?”

The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant, philosophic air, as though the beer had mellowed him.

“I know what you expect me to say,” he said. “You expect me to say as I’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, if you arst ’em. You got your ’ealth and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it ‘as me out of bed. On the other ‘and there’s great advantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t ‘ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d credit it. Nor wanted to, what’s more.”

Winston sat back against the window sill. It was no use going on. He was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The extra half-liter was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops, interspersed among dwelling houses. Immediately above his head there hung three discolored metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk shop where he had bought the diary.

A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.

The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.

“I recognized you on the pavement,” he said immediately. “You’re the gentleman that bought the young lady’s keepsake album. That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was. Cream laid, it used to be called. There’s been no paper like that made for—oh, I dare say fifty years.” He peered at Winston over the top of his spectacles. “Is there anything special I can do for you? Or did you just want to look round?”

“I was passing,” said Winston vaguely. “I just looked in. I don’t want anything in particular.”

“It’s just as well,” said the other, “because I don’t suppose I could have satisfied you.” He made an apologetic gesture with his soft-palmed hand. “You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you and me, the antique trade’s just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock either. Furniture, china, glass—it’s all been broken up by degrees. And of course the metal stuff’s mostly been melted down. I haven’t seen a brass candlestick in years.”

The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floor-space was very restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty picture frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends—lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like—which looked as though they might include something interesting. As Winston wandered toward the table his eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight, and he picked it up.

It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the color and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.

“What is it?” said Winston, fascinated.

“That’s coral, that is,” said the old man. “It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn’t made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.”

“It’s a beautiful thing,” said Winston.

“It is a beautiful thing,” said the other appreciatively. “But there’s not many that’d say so nowadays.” He coughed. “Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars. I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was—well, I can’t work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays—even the few that’s left?”

Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four dollars. Winston realized that he would have accepted three or even two.

“There’s another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,” he said. “There’s not much in it. Just a few pieces. We’ll do with a light if we’re going upstairs.”

He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly armchair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.

“We lived here till my wife died,” said the old man half apologetically. “I’m selling the furniture off by little and little. Now that’s a beautiful mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it. But I dare say you’d find it a little bit cumbersome.”

He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob, utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

“There’s no telescreen!” he could not help murmuring.

“Ah,” said the old man, “I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’d have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.”

There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated toward it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed.

“Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all—” he began delicately.

Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.

“The frame’s fixed to the wall,” said the old man, “but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.”

“I know that building,” said Winston finally. “It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.”

“That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in—oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time. St. Clement’s Dane, its name was.” He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!”

“What’s that?” said Winston.

“Oh—Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s. That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. It was a kind of a dance. They held out their arms for you to pass tinder, and when they came to Here comes a chopper to chop off your head they brought their arms down and caught you. It was just names of churches. All the London churches were in it—all the principal ones, that is.”

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.

“I never knew it had been a church,” he said.

“There’s a lot of them left, really,” said the old man, “though they’ve been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I’ve got it!

Oranges and lemons, say the hells of St. Clement’s,

You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s—

there, now, that’s as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a small copper coin, looked something like a cent.”

“Where was St. Martin’s?” said Winston.

“St. Martin’s? That’s still standing. It’s in Victory Square, alongside the picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars in front, and a big flight of steps.”

Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds—scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses, waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.

“St. Martin’s in the Fields it used to be called,” supplemented the old man, “though I don’t recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.”

Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not Weeks—as one might have gathered from the inscription over the shopfront—but Charrington. Mr. Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head: Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.

He got away from Mr. Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitering the street before stepping out of the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval—a month, say—he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Center. The serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place, after buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the shop could be trusted. However—!

Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps of beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St. Clement’s Danes, take it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacket of his overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr. Charrington’s memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out onto the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even started humming to an improvised tune—

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,

You owe me three farthings, say the—

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten meters away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Winston was too paralyzed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure back street, kilometers distant from any quarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the pub as well.

It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon. But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.

The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several seconds wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable. He could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty and would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community Center and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a partial alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.

It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer. But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.

It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough; but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to think of O’Brien, for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him away. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the groveling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?

He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O’Brien. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” O’Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco promptly fell out onto his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O’Brien. Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting, but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache? Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

第八章

他沿著人行道走了幾公里，靜脈曲張的患處又有點癢了。這已經是他三周內第二次錯過社區活動中心的晚會了。缺勤實在是莽撞之舉，因為出席活動的次數一準會被活動中心記錄下來。黨員從來都是沒有閒暇時間的，當然除了睡覺這一類不能集體參與的活動以外。黨的原則是，除了工作、吃飯、睡覺外，你—定要參加一些公社的集體活動。

……

他們三個在為彩票投注的事爭論不休。溫斯頓走出三十米後，回頭望去，發現他們還在爭吵，個個青筋暴起，面紅耳赤。說到彩票，每週都會開出巨獎，對無產者而言，這也算是擺在檯面上的大事件了吧，無產者對於彩票投注可謂極其上心。或許對於他們來說，彩票投注可以算是生存下去的主要理由了吧，如果不是唯一理由的話。或者說，彩票是他們快樂的根本，是他們愚蠢的明證，是他們療傷的止痛片，是他們知覺的興奮劑。只要提及與彩票有關的事，這群原本連自己名字都不會讀寫的人，就會表現出他們精於複雜計算以及過目不忘的超群技藝，的確匪夷所思。在無產者中間確實有這麼一群人，專門以推銷指南、預測吉號、兜售幸運符為生。溫斯頓對彩票發行的情況一無所知，他的工作與彩票沒有一點關係，像這樣的大事專門由富裕部負責運作，但是他卻知道，當然黨內的每位黨員也都知道，所謂的巨獎，只不過是憑空捏造出來的彌天謊言。小額獎金的確有人中過，對於大獎，都屬於那些原本不存在的人。大洋國的各個地區，明顯缺乏必要的交流與溝通，因此這種詭詐的把戲也就不難安排了。

……

他們都是在晚上來抓人的，一直都是在晚上。如果你必須死亡，最體面的方式就是在他們到來之前自我了斷。毫無疑問，有些人就是這麼選擇的。很多失蹤的人，實際上都是自殺了。但是，這需要你有視死如歸的勇氣，因為在這個陰森專制的國家，要獲得槍械或是但求速死的毒藥，是完全不可能的。他驚奇地發現，生理意義上的痛苦與恐懼完全無用，因為肉身總會在關鍵時刻變節，每每需要它拚命一搏的時候，它卻總是在退縮。如果剛才他動作麻利的話，他本可以悄無聲息地就把那個黑髮女人解決掉，然而，在極度的恐懼面前，他卻沒有了行動的力氣。他突然意識到，每逢災難降臨時，我們的對手不是迎面的敵人，而是我們自己的身體。現在，即便剛喝過杜松子酒，肚子裡的痛楚，還是讓他不能系統地思考。他想，在所有表面看來英勇或悲壯的場合下，情況也都是一樣的。在戰場上，在刑訊室裡，或是在沉船上，你所為之奮鬥的目標常會被遺忘掉，因為你的精力和體力都被集在軀殼上，根本無心也無力達到你的目標。即使你沒有因為恐懼而癱作一團，也沒有因為痛苦而聲嘶力竭，但是，你總要應付飢餓、寒冷、失眠、胃痛和牙疼呀。

他翻開記事本，覺得有必要寫些東西了。電屏中的女人，開始唱下一首歌了。她的聲音，有如玻璃鋸齒刺進他的大腦，讓他痛苦不堪。他試著把思緒轉向奧布萊恩，日記就是寫給他或為他而寫的，但他沒有立即下筆，而是在想思想警察把他帶走後的情形。如果他們立刻殺死他，給他個痛快倒也好了，這是他想要的死法。但是在死之前，招供認罪的程序還是免不掉的（雖然沒人明說，其實大家都心知肚明）：你會像狗一樣趴在地板上，哀嚎著乞求寬恕，你的腿已被打斷，牙也被打碎，頭髮上結著血塊。

你為什麼要忍受這一切，既然橫豎都是個死？你為什麼不選擇少活幾天，或是幾個星期呢？據他所知，沒有人能躲過監視，也沒有人能逃脫俯首認罪的命運。一旦你犯下了思想罪行，受死是遲早的事，你逃不過的。既然逃避改變不了什麼，為什麼還要苟延殘喘？

他的腦海裡慢慢浮現奧布萊恩的形象，而且比先前清晰得多。「我們將在沒有黑暗的地方會面。」奧布萊恩對他說。他懂這話的意思，或者，是他認為自己懂了。他所說的沒有黑暗的地方，其實就是想像中的未來，雖然你永遠都不會看到，但可以預見，你會不知不覺地神遊其中。電屏傳出來的噪聲，還在折磨著他的鼓膜，此刻他已經跟不上思考的節奏了。他捏起一根香煙往嘴邊送，一不小心，一半的煙絲掉在了舌頭上，該死的煙草沫子，掉進去就很難吐出來。此刻，取代奧布萊恩浮現在他腦海中的，是老大哥。他突然想起幾天前他從衣兜裡掏出來的那個硬幣，便又取出來凝神看了很久。老大哥在盯著他，厚重的臉龐流露出鎮定的神情，然而煞有戒備。他形容不出來，那藏在黑鬚背後的究竟是怎樣一副笑容？那三句標語，有如鉛一般沉重的喪鐘在他心頭響起：

戰爭即和平

自由即奴役

無知即力量

第二部Two

I

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go to the lavatory.

A solitary figure was coming toward him from the other end of the long, brightly lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk shop. As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because it was of the same color as her overalls. Probably she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were “roughed in.” It was a common accident in the Fiction Department.

They were perhaps four meters apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow color against which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.

A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him; in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

“You’re hurt?” he said.

“It’s nothing. My arm. It’ll be all right in a second.”

She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned very pale.

“You haven’t broken anything?”

“No, I’m all right. It hurt for a moment, that’s all.”

She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained some of her color, and appeared very much better.

“It’s nothing,” she repeated shortly. “I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!”

And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and hitched the speakwrite toward him. “Five minutes,” he told himself, “five minutes at the very least!” His heart bumped in his breast with frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization, Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death—still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.

He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He readjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work toward him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I love you.

For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really there.

For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled canteen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week. He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big Brother’s head, two meters wide, which was being made for the occasion by his daughter’s troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.

The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifying a series of production reports of two years ago in such a way as to cast discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party who was now under a cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible to think this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at the Community Center. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried off to the Center, took part in the solemn foolery of a “discussion group,” played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled “Ingsoc in relation to chess.” His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had had no impulse to shirk his evening at the Center. At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when he was home and in bed—in the darkness, where you were safe even from the telescreen so long as you kept silent—that he was able to think continuously.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you. Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.

Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not be repeated. If she had worked in the Records Department it might have been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in the building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit. Actually, few people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he did not know the girl’s name, let alone her address. Finally he decided that the safest place was the canteen. If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round—if these conditions endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words.

For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the next day she did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having already blown. Presumably she had been changed onto a later shift. They passed each other without a glance. On the day after that she was in the canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image. He did not touch the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no inquiry he could make. She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania—worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had a band of sticking plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not very full. The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he had not received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table. He walked casually toward her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three meters away from him. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called, “Smith!” He pretended not to hear. “Smith!” repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round. A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pickaxe right into the middle of it. The girl’s table filled up a few minutes later.

But she must have seen him coming toward her, and perhaps she would take the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly moving, beedelike man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl’s table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further away, but something in the little man’s appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl’s table.

He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since she had first approached. She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur Winston began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few necessary words in low expressionless voices.

“What time do you leave work?”

“Eighteen-thirty.”

“Where can we meet?”

“Victory Square, near the monument.”

“It’s full of telescreens.”

“It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.”

“Any signal?”

“No. Don’t come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don’t look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.”

“What time?”

“Nineteen hours.”

“All right.”

Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table. The girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to smoke a cigarette. They did not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another.

Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother’s statue gazed southward toward the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian airplanes (the Eastasian airplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared. Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and got a sort of pale-colored pleasure from identifying St. Martin’s church, whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed “You owe me three farthings.” Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated. There were telescreens all round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.

Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square. Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm’s length of the girl, but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.

A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with submachine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks, utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg irons. Truckload after truckload of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there, but he saw them only intermittently. The girl’s shoulder, and her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was almost near enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen. She began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get Sunday afternoon off?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen carefully. You’ll have to remember this. Go to Paddington Station—”

With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside the station; two kilometers along the road; a gate with the top bar missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes; a dead tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her head. “Can you remember all that?” she murmured finally.

“Yes.”

“You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate’s got no top bar.”

“Yes. What time?”

“About fifteen. You may have to wait. I’ll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?”

“Yes.”

“Then get away from me as quick as you can.”

She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war criminals; the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labor camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded, and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze.

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of calluses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what color the girl’s eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

第一章

這天上午，上班的時間剛過了一半，溫斯頓離開辦公室，起身去廁所。

燈火通明的狹長走廊的另一端，一個孤單的身影朝他走來。正是那個黑髮女郎。自從那天晚上，在加林頓先生的雜貨鋪門口碰面後，他已經有四天沒見到她了。待她走近後，他發現她的右胳膊上打了繃帶，由於繃帶跟制服是同一個顏色，從遠處還看不清楚。或許，她是在編造小說的萬花筒機器旁壓傷了手，這在小說科早已是司空見慣的事情了。

在離他還有大概四米遠的地方，黑髮女郎腳底突然絆了一下，險些趴倒在地上。她疼得尖叫起來，一定是摔到那條受傷的右胳膊了，溫斯頓立刻停了下來。她已經用膝蓋將身體撐了起來，臉色蠟黃，嘴唇因此顯得比原先更紅潤了。她的目光充滿了祈求，緊緊盯著他，那神情看起來與其說是出於疼痛，不如說是出於恐慌。

溫斯頓心底泛起無可名狀的複雜情感。這就是要害他的那個人，然而，眼前的她也是一個活生生的遭受骨折痛苦的受害者。他本能地朝她走過去，想幫她一把。看到她摔到了打著繃帶的胳膊，他覺得這疼痛像是發生在自己身上一樣。

「你受傷了？」他問。

「沒事兒，我的胳膊摔了下，一會兒就好了。」

說話時，她的心似乎也在砰砰直跳，她的臉色是那麼蒼白。

「不會摔壞吧？」

「不會，沒事兒，疼一會兒就好了，真的。」

她把那只好手遞給他，他把她扶了起來。她的臉色看起來比剛才好多了。

「沒事兒，」她立刻說道，「就是手腕兒撞了一下，謝謝啦，同志！」

說完，她又朝原來的方向走去，動作輕快，好像真的一點事兒都沒有。整個過程不到半分鐘的時間。不讓心情顯現在臉上，似乎已經成為她後天養成的習慣和本能。事發時，他們正巧站在電屏前面，因此不管怎麼說，要想一點驚詫都不顯露出來還是很難的——就在他扶起她的那一刻，女郎把一件東西塞到了他手裡，那是個扁平的小東西。毫無疑問，她是故意摔倒的。他走進廁所，把這個小東西藏到衣兜裡，並用手指捏了捏，是一張被折成方形的紙條。

他站在溺池前邊，設法在兜裡把這張紙條展開。顯然，紙條上面是寫了什麼東西的。此刻，他甚至想冒險閃進抽水馬桶間，看看上面到底寫了什麼。但他轉念一想，這樣做簡直愚不可及，於是打消了那個念頭。因為他知道，在大洋國，抽水馬桶間和其他地方一樣，電屏會24小時不間斷地盯著你。

他回到辦公室的工位上，坐了下來，把方形紙條隨便扔在桌子上的文件堆裡，然後戴上眼鏡，把讀寫器拉到身前。「5分鐘，」他對自己說，「至少要等5分鐘。」他的心跳得厲害，聲音大得令人吃驚。幸運的是，現在他手頭的工作僅是例行公事而已，確切地說，是訂正一長串數字，因此他不必多費心思。

不管那上面寫了什麼，肯定與政治相關。他想，她寫紙條的用意，無外乎有兩種。一種是，當然也是最有可能的一種，黑髮女郎是思想警察，正如他所擔心的那樣。他不知道，思想警察為什麼會以這樣的方式給他投遞紙條，當然了，他們這樣做總歸會有他們的理由。紙條說不定是一封恐嚇信，或者是一張法院的傳票，或者是一道讓他自殺的命令，再不然，就是請君入甕的圈套。第二種可能，雖然想起來有些荒唐得離譜，但還是讓他熱血沸騰，任他怎麼去平抑心裡的這種想法都無濟於事。那就是，這張紙條根本就不是思想警察送來的，而是來自於某個秘密的地下組織！也許兄弟會確乎存在！也許，黑髮女郎就是其中的一員！毫無疑問，這個想法很荒謬，但不可否認，他接到紙條的第一感覺就是這樣的。接下來，他又開始猜測其他的可能。現在，儘管他的理智告訴他，這個信息可能意味著死亡，但是他仍然不予置信，那個不合情理的希望仍然揮之不去。他的心簡直要跳出來了，在對著讀寫器低聲說一些數字時，他還是很難抑制住自己聲音的顫抖。

他將處理完的文件捲起來，隨手丟進輸送孔裡。從他把紙條丟進文件堆到現在，已經有8分鐘了。他正了正鼻樑上的眼鏡，歎了口氣，把下一摞待處理的文件拉到面前，順手把文件堆裡的紙條展開了。只見，上面歪歪扭扭地寫著幾個大字：

我愛你

他著實被嚇著了，足足有幾秒鐘沒有醒過神來，甚至忘記將這招禍的東西扔進忘懷洞。等他想起要把它扔掉的時候，還是忍不住又看了一遍，儘管他很清楚，對紙條上的東西表現出過分的興趣會招致危險，但他只是想確定一下，上面寫的是否真的是那幾個字。

上午餘下的時間，他很難再繼續工作下去了。讓他集中注意力去處理那些瑣碎的事情確實很難，但更難的是，他需要在電屏前掩飾激動無比的情緒。他現在覺得，腹部彷彿有一團火在燃燒。食堂裡酷熱、擁擠、一片嘈雜，留在這裡吃午飯簡直是活受罪。他想趁吃午飯的時候單獨待會兒，但不巧的是，那個笨蛋帕森斯一屁股坐在了他身邊。這傢伙身上的汗臭味，完全蓋過了燉菜僅有的一點香味，況且他嘴裡還沒完沒了地嘮叨著仇恨周的準備工作。他特別起勁地講著，他女兒所在的特務營為老大哥做了個面具，足有兩米多寬呢。惱人的是，在喧鬧嘈雜的環境中，溫斯頓根本就聽不清他在說什麼，他不得不讓他把那些愚笨的話再重複一遍。恰在此時，溫斯頓看到了黑髮女郎，她正和兩個女人坐在食堂的遠端，但她好像並沒有看見溫斯頓，他索性也就不再朝她那個方向多看一眼了。

下午還算好過一點。剛吃完午飯，便有一件繁難的工作從輸送孔裡吐了過來。這份文件至少要花費他幾個小時的時間，他必須把手頭上的其他事情暫時放在一邊了。這份文件要求偽造一份兩年前的生產報告，籍此來詆毀一位黨內地位顯赫的內黨成員，這個人如今已經落難了。這是溫斯頓最擅長的工作，但還是耗費了他兩個小時的時間，期間他無暇想起黑髮女郎。待工作完成之後，她的音容笑貌又一次浮現在他的腦海中。現在，他迫切地希望能單獨待上一會兒，以便把事情的來龍去脈理出個頭緒來。今晚，社區活動中心有活動，按規定，他要去參加。於是他溜到食堂，端起食之無味的晚餐，狼吞虎嚥地吃完，就匆匆忙忙地朝活動中心趕去了。他參加了表面嚴肅而內裡愚不可及的「討論小組」，玩了兩局網球，灌了幾杯杜松子酒，聽了一場題為《英社與象棋的關係》的報告。活動內容無疑都是老套路，讓人厭煩透頂。不過這期間，他倒是平生第一次沒有開小差。自從看到「我愛你」那三個字後，他渴望活下來的意志，就變得強烈起來，哪怕冒一點點兒小風險都是不值當的。直到晚上23點，他才回到宿舍，終於有機會思考了——在黑暗中，只要沉默不語，就能夠躲開電屏的監視，就能把思緒一直延續下去。

現在，有一個實際問題亟待解決，那便是如何去跟黑髮女郎接觸，如何悄無聲息地和她幽會。他已經不再想她會給自己設置某種圈套的可能了。他知道，那是不可能的，因為在她遞給他那張紙條的時候，她同樣顯得激動不安。不難發現，她有點兒害怕。她當然會這樣。他從沒想過要拒絕她的示愛。5天前，他還計劃著用石塊砸爛她的腦殼呢，不過現在看來，這已經無關緊要了。他突然想到了她那富有青春氣息的身體，就如同他在夢中見過的那樣。曾幾何時，他把她當成傻瓜看待，認為她跟別的女人沒什麼兩樣，滿腦袋充斥著謊言和仇恨，滿肚子裝的都是冰塊。但是，他一想到自己可能會失去她，一想到她那雪白而年輕的身體可能會從自己手中溜走，他的心就被會某種焦躁的狂熱所佔據。眼前，如果他仍然不能有所回應的話，那麼她很可能會因此變心，這才是他最擔心和害怕的。但是，要跟她約會又何談容易，這好比下棋，已經被置於死地，還妄想著再跳一步。要知道，不論你走到哪兒，電屏都會目不轉睛地盯著你。事實上，在他讀完紙條5分鐘後，他就把所有可能與她聯絡上的辦法都想了一遍，只是直到現在，他才有時間把所有辦法的可行性逐一審視一番，就像掂量閣樓上擺著的一堆工具，看看究竟哪一件更合用。

很顯然，類似今天早晨那種「邂逅」的辦法，是行不通了。如果她也在記錄科工作，那事情就好辦多了，但問題是她在小說科，而他根本不知道小說科的門是向哪兒開的，他只是極其模糊地知道它在大樓裡。再說，他也沒有借口到那裡去。如果他知道她住在哪裡，什麼時間下班，他就可以想辦法，在她下班回家的路上同她見上一面。但是，要是在她下班時跟著她就未免有點不妥，因為這意味著他要在真理部門外等上一陣子。如此一來，不免會引起別人的注意。至於到郵局去給她寄上一封信，那就更不可能了。因為所有的信件，在郵寄過程中都要被拆開檢查，這樣的例行公事早已是公開的秘密了。其實，現在已經鮮有人寫信了。倘若你偶爾需要傳遞一些信息時，你只需在預制的明信片上，把其中不相干的句子劃掉便是。但是，他現在連黑髮女郎的名字都不知道，更不要說得知她的確切住址了。最後，他突然想到食堂是碰頭的安全之所。如果她獨自一人坐在桌旁，地點在食堂的正中央，離電屏又不是太近，周圍又很嘈雜——倘若這樣的條件能夠持續上30秒鐘的話，他就有機會和她搭幾句話。

……

溫斯頓按約定，提前趕到了勝利廣場。到了以後，他便在大石柱子底下徘徊。柱子頂端刻著老大哥的雕像，他正凝視著南方的天際——據說，在「第一航道戰役」中，大洋國殲滅了進犯的歐亞國飛機（幾年前，還聽說是東亞國的飛機）。在紀念碑前的街道上，還有一座騎士塑像，一個男人坐在馬背上，據說這個人是奧利弗·克倫威爾。約定的時間已經過了5分鐘，女郎還沒有露面。溫斯頓不覺又擔心起來。她沒有來，想必是變了主意了！他慢慢踱到了廣場北面，認出了眼前的建築就是聖馬丁教堂。難道，這就是當年鐘聲鳴奏著「你欠我三法新」的地方？他因自己有這樣的辨識能力而頗感欣慰。突然，他看見黑髮女郎站在紀念碑底座前，正在讀張貼在柱子上的海報，也沒準兒是假裝。那裡聚集的人不多，顯然，現在靠近她是不安全的。要知道，紀念碑四周遍佈著電屏。可就在此時，紀念碑左邊某個地方傳來了一陣吆喝聲，同時伴有隆隆的重型卡車聲。突然間，人們開始向廣場對面跑去。女郎也機敏地繞過紀念碑底座附近的獅子雕像，跑進了人群。溫斯頓緊跟其後。他一邊跑，一邊從眾人的喊話中得知，歐亞國的戰俘要從這裡經過。

熙攘的人群，早已把廣場南部圍得水洩不通。要是平日逢上這樣的情況，溫斯頓想躲都來不及呢。但是這次，他卻一反常態，拚命向擁擠的人群中鑽去。現在，他和黑髮女郎之間僅有一隻手臂的距離，然而中間被兩個無產者的大塊頭隔開了。這倆胖子應該是一對夫妻吧，他們像堅固的肉盾一般，把溫斯頓的路堵了個嚴嚴實實。他側了側身，猛一用力，硬生生地在兩塊肥肉間撕了個口子，鑽過去了。此時，他感覺五臟六腑像是被兩個胖子肥碩的臀部擠成了肉漿。不過還好，雖然大汗淋漓，但好歹是擠過來了。現在他已經挨著女郎了，他們肩並著肩地緊挨著，眼睛卻還是盯著前方。

一隊卡車緩慢地駛過街道。車上站滿了手執輕機槍、面無表情、站得筆直的警衛。一群穿著破舊不堪的軍綠制服的小個子黃種人，蹲在車上，擠成一團。他們將那近乎哀傷的蒙古人種的臉龐一律朝向車外，全然沒有一點兒好奇的樣子。行駛途中，卡車稍有顛簸，便發出一陣金屬撞擊的叮噹聲——原來，所有戰俘都戴上了腳鐐。一車接著一車的悲傷的面孔，從溫斯頓面前閃過。溫斯頓知道卡車上滿載戰俘，但他只是偶爾抬眼觀望一下。女郎的肩膀和胳膊，緊緊地挨在他身上，甚至她的臉頰也湊到了他身前，因為他可以明顯地感覺到她的呼吸。她立即控制住了局面，就像上次在食堂那樣不露聲色地低聲和溫斯頓交談著，嘴唇絲毫看不出動的痕跡。因為這樣的細聲低語，很容易在隆隆的車聲中被掩蓋過去。

「能聽見嗎？」

「能。」

「週日下午有時間嗎？」

「有。」

「那，聽好了，記住去這個地方：帕丁頓火車站。」

她交代給他要走的方向和路線，精確程度不亞於軍事部署，這著實讓他吃了一驚。先坐半小時的火車，出站後向左轉；再走兩公里的公路，進入一個沒有門樑的大門；田野裡有條小路，穿過雜草叢生的小巷；再走過灌木叢中的一條小路，前面臥著一顆上面長滿苔蘚的枯樹。她的腦袋裡，彷彿裝著一張地圖。「你能全記住嗎？」最後她低聲問。

「能。」

「你左轉，再向右，再向左轉，門上沒有橫樑。」

「知道了，幾點鐘？」

「15點左右，你可能要等會兒。我得走另一條路。你確定都記住了嗎？」

「是的。」

「那你快走吧。」

其實不用她說，他也想走。但眼下他們被夾在人群中，根本沒法脫身。卡車依然不停地從面前駛過，人們依然看得津津有味。開始的時候，還有人「噓」，有人「呸」，但這僅僅來自於人群中的少數黨員之口。沒過多久，他們就自動閉嘴了。現在，人們對眼前的場面，只剩下了簡單的好奇而已。在他們眼中，外國人，不管是來自歐亞國還是東亞國，都是新奇的動物。平日裡，他們難得一見外國人，就算是見到了，也是藉著觀看囚犯遊街或是執行死刑的機會，匆匆一瞥便過去了。沒人知道他們的下場，除了作為戰犯被絞死外，其餘的便失蹤了，大概是被送進了勞改營了吧。蒙古人模樣的戰俘陸續從眼前過去後，緊接著，便是一群歐洲人模樣的戰俘。他們的臉髒兮兮的，鬍子拉碴，顯得疲憊不堪，臉頰上長滿了毛茸茸的短鬚，目光徑直朝溫斯頓這邊投過來，給人一種陌生的熾熱感。不過這種感覺很快就消逝了，囚車隊總算快過完了。在最後一輛卡車上，溫斯頓看見上面站著一個老人。老人的鬍鬚和頭髮都已斑白，他兩手交叉在胸前，似乎已經習慣了這種束縛。該是溫斯頓跟黑髮女郎分開的時候了。可是在最後的那刻，趁著人潮不斷衝向他們的時候，女郎伸手摸到他的手，趁他不備快速地捏了一下。

這個動作，持續時間不過10秒鐘，他卻感覺握了很久。就在這短暫的時間內，他清楚地感受到了她手掌的每一處細節——修長的手指，整齊的指甲，手心由於幹粗活而形成的老繭，手腕處的嫩滑皮膚。他雖然沒有看見，只是摸了一下，但那感覺，就彷彿他仔細端詳過一樣。此時，他又想到，自己還不知道她的眼睛是什麼顏色。大概是棕色吧，不過大多數黑頭髮的人都有一雙藍眼睛。此時再回頭看她一眼，未免有點危險。他們緊握著手，湮沒在嘈雜的人群中，直視著前方，彼此不敢看對方一眼。倒是那個年邁的戰俘，他悲哀的目光透過亂蓬蓬的斑白頭髮，一直在凝視著溫斯頓。

II

WINSTON PICKED HIS WAY up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of them the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves.

He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about the journey, and the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he would normally have been. Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe place. In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than a hundred kilometers it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not being followed. The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of the summery weather. The wooden-seated carriage in which he traveled was filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon with “in-laws” in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston, to get hold of a little black-market butter.

The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him of, a mere cattle track which plunged between the bushes. He had no watch, but it could not be fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick underfoot that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt down and began picking some, partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might be the girl, or he might have been followed after all. To look round was to show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.

He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as a warning that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way along the narrow track into the wood. Obviously she had been that way before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed, still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back after all. The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him. Already, on the walk from the station, the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and forced apart the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening. When Winston followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely. The girl stopped and turned.

“Here we are,” she said.

He was facing her at several paces’ distance. As yet he did not dare move nearer to her.

“I didn’t want to say anything in the lane,” she went on, “in case there’s a mike hidden there. I don’t suppose there is, but there could be. There’s always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice. We’re all right here.”

He still had not the courage to approach her. “We’re all right here?” he repeated stupidly.

“Yes. Look at the trees.” They were small ashes, which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them thicker than one’s wrist. “There’s nothing big enough to hide a mike in. Besides, I’ve been here before.”

They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to her now. She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her face that looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act. The bluebells had cascaded onto the ground. They seemed to have fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.

“Would you believe,” he said, “that till this moment I didn’t know what color your eyes were?” They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes. “Now that you’ve seen what I’m really like, can you still bear to look at me?”

“Yes, easily.”

“I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.”

“I couldn’t care less,” said the girl.

The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down onto the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women—he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.

“Never mind, dear. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the whole afternoon. Isn’t this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred meters away.”

“What is your name?” said Winston.

“Julia. I know yours. It’s Winston—Winston Smith.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I expect I’m better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?”

He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love offering to start off by telling the worst.

“I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.”

The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.

“Not the Thought Police! You didn’t honestly think that?”

“Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance—merely because you’re young and fresh and healthy, you understand—I thought that probably—”

“You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed. Banners, processions, slogans, games, community hikes—all that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I’d denounce you as a thought-criminal and get you killed off?”

“Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that, you know.”

“It’s this bloody thing that does it,” she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it onto a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.

“Where did you get this stuff?” he said.

“Black market,” she said indifferently. “Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I’m good at games. I was a troop leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”

The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston’s tongue. The taste was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one’s eye. He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not.

“You are very young,” he said. “You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?”

“It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.”

Them, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words that you saw chalked up in dripping alleyways. He did not dislike it. It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering again through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other’s waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood. She stopped him.

“Don’t go out into the open. There might be someone watching. We’re all right if we keep behind the boughs.”

They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women’s hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming.

“Isn’t there a stream somewhere near here?” he whispered.

“That’s right, there is a stream. It’s at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.”

“It’s the Golden Country—almost,” he murmured.

“The Golden Country?”

“It’s nothing, really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.”

“Look!” whispered Julia.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five meters away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had only spoken in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beedelike man was listening intently—listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

Winston put his lips against her ear. “Now,” he whispered.

“Not here,” she whispered back. “Come back to the hide-out. It’s safer.”

Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

“Have you done this before?”

“Of course. Hundreds of times—well, scores of times, anyway.”

“With Party members?”

“Yes, always with Party members.”

“With members of the Inner Party?”

“Not with those swine, no. But there’s plenty that would if they got half a chance. They’re not so holy as they make out.”

His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew? Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

“Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

“Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m corrupt to the bones.”

“You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself?”

“I adore it.”

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.

The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

第二章

……

「朱麗亞。我知道你叫什麼。你叫溫斯頓——溫斯頓·史密斯。對吧？」

「你怎麼知道我的名字？」

「可能我的調查能力比你強吧，親愛的。告訴我，在我給你遞紙條之前，你對我什麼感覺？」

他覺得自己沒有理由騙他，告訴她最壞的答案，也未嘗不是表達愛意的方式。

「第一次見到你時，我很討厭你，」他說，「我想強姦你，然後把你殺掉。兩周以前，我曾認真地考慮過要用鵝卵石打破你的頭。如果你真想知道原因的話，我可以告訴你，因為我懷疑你和思想警察有關係。」

朱麗亞大笑起來，顯然，這是對她掩飾技藝的一種恭維。

「思想警察！你真的覺得我是思想警察嗎？」

「嗯，差不多吧。從你的外貌看起來，至少是這樣。因為你年輕貌美，健康又有活力，你知道的，這難免不讓我想你是一個——」。

「你覺得我是一個好黨員，是吧？言行如一，純潔無瑕，對吧？你覺得我熱心於打標語、上街遊行、喊口號、做遊戲、參加徒步旅行這類事情，對吧？你認為只要我一有機會，就會到思想警察那裡告發你，把你當成思想罪犯抓起來，然後把我幹掉，是吧？」

「是的，差不多就是這樣。你知道的，很多年輕女人都是這樣做的。」

「全是這猩紅的東西在作怪。」她說。接著，她解下束在腰間的青年反性聯盟的標誌性猩紅腰帶，隨手一扔，剛好掛在了榛樹枝頭。剛才解腰帶的瞬間，像是提醒了她什麼似的，她從制服衣兜裡拿出一塊巧克力來，一折兩半，一半留給自己，一半給了溫斯頓。在還沒接過來之前，他就知道，這塊巧克力的味道和平時吃的巧克力會不大一樣，因為這塊是放在錫紙裡的，黑色的表面泛著光澤。通常，大洋國的巧克力都是棕色的，且容易折碎，味道很難聞，真不知道要怎麼形容才好，說味同嚼蠟，恐怕一點兒也不誇張。但是，他好像記得過去曾吃過這樣的巧克力。淡淡的清香，勾起了他對過往的回憶，只是這回憶有點兒模糊，都想不出是在什麼時候了。但是，那感覺卻很強烈，揮之不去。

「你在哪兒搞到的？」他說。

「自由市場，」她滿不在乎地說，「表面看來，我的確是你說的那種人。我精於各種遊戲，在特務營做過隊長，每週都會拿出3個晚上到青年反性聯盟做義工，我會花掉大把時間，在倫敦的大街小巷張貼標語，我會在遊行時舉著大標語牌，會在活動時表現得熱情高漲，從不落後，會跟在隊伍後面一起瘋狂吶喊。這就是我想說的，也是我在做的，可是，這是自保的唯一辦法。」

巧克力在溫斯頓的舌尖融化，味道簡直棒極了。然而，仍然有種揮之不去的回憶，在他的意識邊緣遊蕩，他現在可以強烈地感受到，卻不可捉摸，有如睜開眼睛卻看不到事物的輪廓。他從剛才的胡思亂想中掙脫出來，他知道，這是一種讓他欲罷不能的記憶。

「你的確很年輕，」他說，「你應該比我年輕10歲或15歲吧，是什麼緣故，讓你看上我這樣一個男人呢？」

「可能是你臉上流露出來的神情吧，為此，我決定冒一次險。你知道，我可是精於看人的，我能看出誰是和我們一道的，誰不是。當我見你第一面時，就覺得你與眾不同，你是反對那幫傢伙的。」

顯然，她所說的「那幫傢伙」是指黨，尤其是內黨。她不加掩飾地發洩自己憤怒的方式，倒是讓溫斯頓不安起來，儘管他知道這裡是安全的。可如果她這樣講話，他還真不敢保證，這裡還是不是安全的。最讓他詫異的是，她竟然敢用如此粗俗的字眼兒，來形容「那幫傢伙」。照常理來說，黨員是不該有如此粗口的，至少溫斯頓就不敢這樣。然而，朱麗亞每次提起黨，尤其是內黨，用的都是塗畫在小巷牆壁的「反動言論」裡的咒罵之詞。溫斯頓並不因此而討厭她。這僅僅是她的一種發洩方式而已，用以反抗黨及與黨有關的一切。從某種意義上說，這樣的方式看起來很自然，沒有什麼不健康的，就好比馬兒嗅到發霉的草味兒打了一個噴嚏一樣。他們離開那片空地，漫步於樹蔭之下，每每走到寬敞一些、容得下兩人並行的地方，他們就彼此摟著對方的腰。現在，他突然覺得她的腰肢比解掉腰帶之前柔軟多了。他們一路低語，因為朱麗亞說過，離開空地，就要警覺一些，說話最好小聲點兒。這時，他們已經來到樹林邊上。她停了下來。

「不要走出樹林，可能有人在盯著我們，只要留在樹林裡，我們就是安全的。」

……

他們立刻起身，偶爾踩到枯枝，發出啪啪的聲響。他們又回到了剛才那片被灌木包圍的空地。她轉過身來，面對著他。他們兩個喘著粗氣，朱麗亞的嘴角又掛回了剛才的笑容。她站在那裡，看了他好一會兒，這時，她正在把制服的拉鏈向下拉動著。是的，這就是他夢中經歷的情景。在他還沒回過神來的時候，她已經扯掉衣服，赤身裸體地暴露在他面前。好一具迷人的身體，足可以把整個英社文化通通毀掉。她的胴體在陽光下泛出白亮的光澤，他的眼睛沒有在上面過度停留，倒是她那略帶雀斑的微笑臉龐，讓他覺得看不夠。他跪在她面前，托著她的雙手。

「你之前做過這個嗎？」

「當然。上百次吧，少說也有幾十次。」

「是和黨員做的嗎？」

「就是和黨員一起。」

「內黨？」

「你說那些豬玀？絕沒可能。但是，那些豬玀只要有半點機會，就會過來搖尾乞求。他們表面一副道貌岸然的樣子，實際只是一群衣冠禽獸。」

他的心怦怦跳個不停。她竟然只做了幾十次！他倒希望是成百上千次！凡事只要與腐敗相關，就讓他覺得大有希望。誰知道呢？或許黨的內部早已經腐爛了。極力宣揚和倡導的勵精圖治與忘我奉獻，不過是它藏污納垢的一塊兒遮羞布。倘若，他一個人能將麻風或是梅毒傳給他們中的每一個，他真心願意這麼做。只要能讓他們腐敗、墮落、滅亡，什麼事兒他都肯幹。他把她拉倒在地上，兩個人跪在地上彼此看著對方。

「聽著，和你做過的人越多，我越愛你，你懂我的意思嗎？」

「當然！」

「我憎恨純潔！憎恨！我沒指望世間還有道德會留下來！我希望每一個人都腐朽到骨子裡。」

「那再好不過了，我就是腐朽到骨子裡的人。」

「你喜歡做這件事嗎？我的意思是說不光和我。單就這件事本身而言？」

「它真讓人銷魂。」

這恐怕是他最想聽到的話了。愛情和性的本能，兩種本無差別的慾望，卻是能讓黨頃刻顛覆的力量。他把她按在風信子凋落的草地上，這一刻，再無生理障礙的困擾。不一會兒，他們躁動的心房漸漸歸於平靜，兩個人滿身疲憊地癱躺在草地上，帶著一種從未有過的滿足。此刻，陽光變得越來越溫暖。他們兩人累得昏昏欲睡。他伸手扯過放在一旁的制服，半露半蓋地搭在她的身上。他們很快就睡著了，睡了大概有半小時。

溫斯頓先醒過來。他坐起身，注視著她略帶雀斑的臉龐，而她還枕著手臂，安然地睡著。除了嘴唇，她現在算不上漂亮，如果你近身去看，可以明顯地看到她眼角的魚尾紋。她那頭深色的短髮，出奇地濃密且柔軟。他現在突然想起來，自己還不知道她姓什麼，住在哪裡。

看到眼前這個年輕健康卻又無助的身體酣睡的模樣，他突然心生愛憐，他甚至想到要去保護她。但是，他剛才在榛樹下聽畫眉唱歌時所感知的那份柔情，卻一去不復返了。他把蓋在她身上的制服拿走，饒有興致地打量著她那柔滑美白的腰身。過去，他總覺得女人的胴體是令男人神往的，但今天，他不再這麼想了。世間沒有純潔的愛情，因為，總會有恐懼與仇恨摻雜進來。他們親熱的過程，就好像是一場戰役，而高潮就是勝利。這是給黨的沉重一擊，是一次政治行動。

III

“WE CAN COME HERE once again,” said Julia. “It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.”

As soon as she woke up her demeanor had changed. She became alert and businesslike, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes. The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. “Never go home the same way as you went out,” she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.

She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.

“And now I must go,” she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. “I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn’t it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you. Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-by, my love, good-by!”

She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.

As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hiding place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruined church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called “talking by installments.” She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side street (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia’s face a few centimeters from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him, and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston’s working week was sixty hours, Julia’s was even longer, and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the Junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and suchlike activities. It paid, she said; it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralyzing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the arrow slits and make sure that no one was coming.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (“Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was “not clever,” but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

She had no memories of anything before the early Sixties, and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

“What are these books like?” said Winston curiously.

“Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear—not even enough for that.”

He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the head of the department, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

“They don’t even like having married women there,” she added. “Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway.”

She had had her first love affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. “And a good job too,” said Julia, “Otherwise they’d have had my name out of him when he confessed.” Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; “they,” meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that “they” should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston’s wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.

“What was she like, your wife?” said Julia.

“She was—do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?”

“No, I didn’t know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.”

He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things; Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.

“I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,” he said. He told her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. “She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it—but you’ll never guess.”

“Our duty to the Party,” said Julia promptly.

“How did you know that?”

“I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.”

She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it was:

“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.

It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop often or twenty meters, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrongdoing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colors, magenta and brick red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.

“Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see they’re two different colors?”

She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest, sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him….

“Why didn’t you give her a good shove?” said Julia. “I would have.”

“Yes, dear, you would have. I would have, if I’d been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would—I’m not certain.”

“Are you sorry you didn’t?”

“Yes. On the whole I’m sorry I didn’t.”

They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

“Actually it would have made no difference,” he said.

“Then why are you sorry you didn’t do it?”

“Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

“We are the dead,” he said.

“We’re not dead yet,” said Julia prosaically.

“Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

“Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?”

She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigor into his.

“Yes, I like that,” he said.

“Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we’ve got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We’ve given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I’ve got it all planned out. You take the train—but look, I’ll draw it out for you.”

And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon’s nest began drawing a map on the floor.

第三章

……

她撲在他的懷裡，使勁兒親吻著他。緊接著，她撥開灌木叢，不聲不響地淹沒在叢林中。事到如今，他甚至還不知道她姓什麼，住在哪兒。不過無所謂了，反正他們也不會在室內見面，或者有什麼書信方面的交流。

事實上，他們再也沒有回到過那片林間的空地。整個5月，他們僅有一次機會再發生關係。這一次，也是朱麗亞所熟悉的一個隱蔽場所——30年前，這裡曾爆炸過一顆原子彈，建築幾乎被夷為平地。炸毀的廢墟中，有一座教堂鐘樓，矗立在無人問津的鄉間一角。那是理想的幽會之所，但是，要走到那裡卻很危險。大部分時間，他們只能在街道上約會，而且每晚都約在不同的地點，每次約會的時間也不會超過半小時。在大街上，他們通常只是說說話而已。在擁擠的人行道上，他們慢慢地向前移動，但絕不會並肩而行，也不會看對方一眼，談話時斷時續，就像指示燈塔和船隻進港的信號燈的閃爍一樣，你一言我一語地聊著。如果遇見身著制服的黨員，或是見到附近有電屏，他們會立即閉嘴，等到遠離監視以後再繼續未完成的談話。到了約定分手的地方，他們也會自動終止談話，下一次不用任何提示，繼續往下聊。朱麗亞似乎已習慣這樣的談話方式，她把這種談話方式稱作「分期聊天」。她那不必翻動嘴唇就能說出話來的本事，真叫嫻熟，實在讓人吃驚。他們在晚間的約會，差不多進行了一個多月，但僅僅親吻過一次。那天他們默默地穿過一條胡同（每次他們穿過主街時，朱麗亞從來都是沉默不語），突然傳來一聲震耳欲聾的爆炸聲，天崩地裂，把溫斯頓嚇得摔倒在地，擦傷了皮肉。一定是附近落了顆火箭彈。突然間，他發現朱麗亞就躺在離自己幾米遠的地方，她面色慘白，像是塗了一層白灰，嘴唇也是白的。她一定是死了！他把她摟過來，親吻她，發現她的臉還是熱的，她還活著。但是，他的嘴唇卻因為親吻她而沾滿了塵土。原來，他們的臉上全蒙著一層厚厚的灰泥。

約會並不是每次都能成功。有時候，他們到了約會地點，但又不得不折回去，互相連個招呼都打不上。原因是，街角恰巧來了巡邏警察，或是有直升機在頭頂盤旋。除卻這些危險不說，找到合適的時間約會，也是件比較困難的事情。溫斯頓一周要工作60個小時，朱麗亞甚至更久，休息日都要根據工作情況而定。他們通常都不能同時休息。無論如何，朱麗亞極少有整個晚上都閒來無事的時候。她要把大量的時間花費在聽演講、參加遊行、為青年反性聯盟發傳單、為仇恨周準備旗幟、為節約運動籌集捐款等工作上。她說，這樣做是值得的，因為這樣可以更好地偽裝自己。如果你遵守了小的規則，你就能打破大的規則。她甚至勸溫斯頓也要每週犧牲一晚，去和其他「熱心」的黨員一起參加組裝軍火的志願活動。他聽從了她的建議，於是每週都有一個晚上，溫斯頓要花上4個小時的時間去裝炸彈的引線。工作悶得要死，裝配車間很是簡陋，裡面燈光昏暗，到處都是鐵錘沉悶的敲擊聲。當然，還有電屏傳出的吵鬧的音樂聲。他要做的，就是把小零件擰在一起——這是安裝引線的全部工作。

……

朱麗亞26歲，跟30個女孩子擠在一個公寓裡。「到處充滿了女人的臭味，不管你逃到哪裡。我真痛恨女人！」她補充道。她的工作，就像他先前猜測的那樣，是在小說科保養小說創作機。她很喜歡這份工作，她的主要工作職責是負責毛病不斷的高壓電機的運轉和維修。她說她並不聰明，只是很善於動手，喜歡操作機器。她對小說的製造過程瞭然於胸，從計劃委員會下發指示開始，到潤色小組的校對修改，她都能講得頭頭是道。但是，她對完成的小說並不感興趣，她說她「不喜歡讀書」。書籍，不過是一種應時的產品罷了，就像果醬和鞋帶一樣。

60年代早期的事，她全無記憶。她所認識的人中，只有爺爺總是經常跟她講革命前的事情。不過在她8歲的時候，爺爺就失蹤了。上學時，她是曲棍球隊的隊長，連續兩年得過體操獎盃。她還做過特務營的小頭目，在參加青年反性聯盟前，還做過青年團支部的秘書。總之，她工作出色，沒有任何不良記錄。下面的這件事，就能很好地印證這一點：黃社看中了她，挑選她到黃社工作。那種部門專門生產色情文學，並廉價供給無產者，在裡面工作的人，將那裡命名為「垃圾處理站」，她說。她在這工作了一年，協助生產了一批「作品」，如《打屁股的故事》 《女校春宵》之類。它們被密封後寄送出去，被無產者中的年輕人偷偷摸摸地買回去。這群年輕人倒是對這些垃圾貨很感興趣，他們將其奉若禁書，讀起來饒有興致。

「那些書上都寫了些什麼？」溫斯頓好奇地問。

「統統是垃圾。他們真是無聊透頂。每本書，都無一例外地包括六個情節，經黃社的人隨便交換或混雜一下情節，就又成了一本新書。當然，我只是負責萬花筒部分，從來沒在改寫小組做過。我沒有什麼文學造詣，親愛的，這種事我的確做不來。」

據說，黃社的員工清一色地全是女孩，當然除了部門領導以外。這著實讓他大吃一驚。照他們的理論來講，男人對性的本能反應要強於女人，比女人更難於控制，因此，也更容易受到他們自己所製造的垃圾的影響與蠱惑。

「他們甚至不喜歡用結過婚的女人，」她補充說，「女孩子總被認為是最純潔的，當然，除我以外。」

她第一次和男人發生關係，只有16歲，是跟一個60多歲的黨員，之後那老頭畏罪自殺了。「他幹得不錯，」朱麗亞說，「否則，他一認罪就會把我供出來。」在那以後，她還和其他人做過。在她看來，生活其實很簡單，只要好好地享受便是了。可是「那幫傢伙」（即黨）偏偏不遂你願，那麼，你就只有打破規則的制約，去找尋生活的快樂了。她覺得，「那幫傢伙」總想扼殺你的快樂，就像你總是在避免被抓住一樣，其實，這二者都是再自然不過的事情。她痛恨黨，總是用最粗俗的話來咒罵它，但也僅僅限於言語層面，她從未公然對黨進行過批判。她對黨的信條毫無興趣，除非有些觸及到她的生活領地。他還注意到，她從來不用新語，除了幾個流行於日常生活中的詞彙。她也從未聽說過兄弟會，因為她不相信會有這樣的組織存在。在她看來，任何反黨的秘密組織注定都是要失敗的，如此形式的反抗，實在稱不上是明智之舉。最聰明的做法，莫過於對黨的種種束縛搞一點小破壞，好活得舒服一點點。他隱隱覺得，持這種想法的人，在年輕人中不在少數。他們生長於革命年代，除了革命外，便一無所知。黨才是這個世界的思想主宰，在他們的頭腦中根深蒂固，就像頭頂的天空一樣，它是超乎能力之外的存在。黨的權威是不容對抗的，你能做的，只是想方設法地躲避，就像兔子躲開獵狗那樣。

他們並沒有談論結婚的可能性，這太遙遠，不值得去思考。即便凱瑟琳已經不在了，讓婚委會批准這樣的婚姻，也是絕無可能的，這簡直就是毫無指望的白日夢。

「你的妻子，她是怎樣的一個人？」朱麗亞問。

「她是——你知道新語裡有個詞叫『好思想』嗎？意思就是生來正統，沒有半點兒壞思想。」

「不，我不知道這個詞，但我相當瞭解這種人。」

他開始給她講與凱瑟琳結婚後的生活，但令他奇怪的是，她似乎已經知道他們生活的細節。她甚至向溫斯頓做這樣的求證：你一碰到凱瑟琳，她的身體就像殭屍一樣硬起來，即便她緊緊抱著你的時候，你也會覺得，她是在用全力將你推開。她說的這些，就像她曾親眼看見或者親自感覺過一樣。同朱麗亞在一起，溫斯頓不覺得講這些是令人難為情的事情。不管怎樣，凱瑟琳早已不再是他痛苦的回憶了，充其量，只算一樁令人不快的記憶罷了。

「如果不是因為這一點，我還是可以忍下去的。」他說。他講了凱瑟琳每星期都有一個晚上，要例行公事地逼他幹那事兒。「她討厭那事兒，但又苦於沒有理由停下來不去幹。她通常叫它什麼——你都猜不到。」

「我們對黨的義務。」朱麗亞馬上回答。

「你是怎麼知道的？」

「我也受過這樣的教育，親愛的。在學校裡，16歲以上的姑娘每月都要聽一次性教育講座。青年團裡就有，他們成年累月地給你灌輸這些思想。我確信，這對於很多人來說還真管用。當然，誰也不說出來，很多人都是偽君子。」

她開始大肆借題發揮起來。對於朱麗亞而言，任何事情，都會被她回歸到性意識上去。不論在何種情況下，只要說起性，她都會變得非常敏銳。與溫斯頓不同，她已經洞悉了黨在禁慾方面的良苦用心：性的本能，不僅僅會創造自己的生活，還會讓人擺脫黨的控制，因此，只要有可能，黨總會想方設法地毀掉它。而更重要的是，性行為被剝奪後，能夠讓人歇斯底里起來，而這正是黨所需要的，它能將人的這種狀態，轉變為對戰爭的狂熱和對領袖的崇拜。

「當你做愛時，你就會耗費精力；而事後你會感到愉快，會置所有事情於不顧。他們不能允許你有這樣的感覺，他們想讓你時時刻刻都精力旺盛，他們讓你賣力地去遊行，揮旗子，喊口號，藉此，讓你把積壓的性苦悶統統發洩出來。如果你心裡感到快樂，那你又何必把老大哥、三年計劃和兩分鐘仇恨節目這些爛事兒放在心上，不是嗎？」

說得很有道理，他想。在身心純潔和政治正統之間，還真的有某種直接緊密的聯繫。如果不把他們強大的性慾控制住，黨又怎麼能將民眾的恐懼、仇恨和瘋狂的信仰玩弄於股掌，並將其轉化為動力呢？生理的衝動，對於黨的統治來說是危險的，必須加以整治。他們在為人父母者的本能上，也耍了同樣的伎倆。家庭制度顯然無計根除，事實上，他們仍然鼓勵人們用舊社會那種老派的方式去疼愛孩子。然而，他們又用另一種手段，去教唆孩子反對他們的父母，監視他們，並告發他們的異端思想。實際上，家庭早已失去了它本來的含義，成了思想警察的延伸。這種策略意味著，日日夜夜監視你、包圍你、隨時將你告發的人，恰恰是你身邊最親近的人。

他的思緒，突然又回到了凱瑟琳身上。凱瑟琳太過愚蠢，沒有發現他思想裡的異端成分，否則，她一定會毫不猶豫地向思想警察揭發他。他此刻想起凱瑟琳，也是有一定客觀原因的。下午的天氣，悶熱得讓人窒息，他腦門不停地滴著汗。他告訴朱麗亞一件11年前的事情，那同樣發生在一個酷熱難耐的下午，或者說是幾乎要發生。

……

他們並肩坐在滿是灰塵的地板上。他把她摟得更緊了一些。她的頭枕在他的肩膀上，她頭上的香水味使他忘記了鴿子糞。他想她還很年輕，對生活還有期望，她不會理解，把一個讓人厭煩的人推下懸崖是根本解決不了問題的。

「事實上，那不會有什麼不同。」他說。

「那你為什麼會後悔？」

「那是因為，我喜歡積極的事物勝過消極的事物。遊戲中，我們注定都是敗者，只不過，某些失敗要比其他的失敗更好一些，僅此而已。」

朱麗亞聳了聳肩，表示異議。當他說到這類事情時，朱麗亞總是以此來反駁他。對他所謂的個人應該對自然法則所注定的失敗聽之任之觀點，她並不認可。但話又說回來，此刻她也能意識到自己的命運，她注定會失敗，思想警察會抓到她，被蒸發也是早晚的事。與此同時，她腦海中還存有另一種想法，那就是，她幻想自己能夠建造一個隱秘的世界，在那裡過上自己想要的生活。當然，這需要足夠幸運、狡猾和勇敢。她不知道，在這種制度下根本就得不到她所謂的幸福，就算這種制度有朝一日會被推翻，那也是遙遙無期的事情，那時，可能她已不在人世了。自從你打算向黨宣戰的那一刻起，你就應該把自己當成是一具屍體了。

「我們已經死了。」他說。

「我們還沒死呢。」朱麗亞以平淡的口吻說道。

「不是肉體上的死亡。半年，一年或者五年，你可以想像得到的。我很害怕死。你還年輕，肯定比我怕死。當然，我們可以盡自己所能，把死亡向後推得越久越好。但是這沒有太大的分別，只要我們還想活得像個人，生和死也都一樣。」

「噢，荒謬！一會兒睡覺時，你想跟誰睡？跟我，還是跟骷髏？你不喜歡活著？你不喜歡有感覺嗎？這是我，是我的手，我的腿，真實的我，實實在在的我，活著的我！你不喜歡這些？」

她扭轉身子，把胸脯壓過來。隔著衣服，此刻，他能感覺到她堅鋌而飽滿的胸部正抵著他，她的身體正在向他發射著青春的能量。

「當然，我喜歡這些。」他說。

「咱們別談論死什麼的啦。聽我說，親愛的，我們還是安排好下次見面的時間和地點吧。還是到上次約會的那個樹林裡吧，已經好長時間沒去了。不過這次你得走另一條路，我已經計劃好了。你坐火車——看！我給你畫個圖。」

她就地取材，東拼西湊了一些小土塊，又從鴿子窩上取下來一根小樹枝，開始在地上畫圖，為他指引路線。

IV

WINSTON LOOKED ROUND the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington’s shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr. Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock’s hands said seven-twenty, it was nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr. Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the backyard, which gave on an alley.

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothesline, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

“It was only an ‘opeless fanty,

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred

They ‘ave stolen my ’eart awye!”

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having a hiding place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work onto everybody. Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted toward one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.

“It’s all off,” she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. “Tomorrow, I mean.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I can’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, the usual reason. It’s started early this time.”

For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years’ standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now, but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Charrington’s room had occurred to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it; and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, willful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was carrying a tool bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool bag.

“Half a second,” she said. “Just let me show you what I’ve brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan’t be needing it. Look here.”

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sandlike stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.

“It isn’t sugar?” he said.

“Real sugar?” Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread—proper white bread, not our bloody stuff—and a little pot of jam. And here’s a tin of milk—but look! This is the one I’m really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because—”

But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passageway before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

“It’s coffee,” he murmured, “real coffee.”

“It’s Inner Party coffee. There’s a whole kilo here,” she said.

“How did you manage to get hold of all these things?”

“It’s all Inner Party stuff. There’s nothing those swine don’t have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and—look, I got a little packet of tea as well.”

Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.

“It’s real tea. Not blackberry leaves.”

“There’s been a lot of tea about lately. They’ve captured India, or something,” she said vaguely. “But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don’t go too near the window. And don’t turn round till I tell you.”

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

“They sye that time ’eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years

They twist my ’eartstrings yet!”

She knew the whole driveling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.

“You can turn round now,” said Julia.

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face.

She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen and a woman’s cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

“Scent, too!” he said.

“Yes, dear, scent, too. And do you know what I’m going to do next? I’m going to get hold of a real woman’s frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I’ll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.”

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meager body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discolored patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. “It’s sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?” said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays except in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood; Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.

Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary. Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.

“Half that water’s boiled away,” she said. “I’ll get up and make some coffee in another moment. We’ve got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?”

“Twenty-three thirty.”

“It’s twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because—Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!”

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.

“What was it?” he said in surprise.

“A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There’s a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.”

“Rats!” murmured Winston. “In this room!”

“They’re all over the place,” said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. “We’ve even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren’t leave a baby alone for two minutes. It’s the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes always—”

“Don’t go on!” said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.

“Dearest! You’ve gone quite pale. What’s the matter? Do they make you feel sick?”

“Of all horrors in the world—a rat!”

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was, but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “It’s nothing. I don’t like rats, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry, dear, we’re not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I’ll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I’ll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.”

Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged armchair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.

“What is it, do you think?” said Julia.

“I don’t think it’s anything—I mean, I don’t think it was ever put to any use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.”

“And that picture over there—” she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall—“would that be a hundred years old?”

“More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can’t tell. It’s impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.”

She went over to look at it. “Here’s where that brute stuck his nose out,” she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. “What is this place? I’ve seen it before somewhere.”

“It’s a church, or at least it used to be. St. Clement’s Dane its name was.” The fragment of rhyme that Mr. Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: “Oranges and lemons, say the hells of St. Clement’s!”

To his astonishment she capped the line:

“You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey—”

“I can’t remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’”

It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after the bells of Old Bailey. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr. Charrington’s memory, if he were suitably prompted.

“Who taught you that?” he said.

“My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight—at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,” she added inconsequently. “I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.”

“I can remember lemons,” said Winston. “They were quite common in the Fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.”

“I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it,” said Julia. “I’ll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it’s almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I’ll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.”

Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over toward the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

第四章

……

那一刻，他懊惱得要死。幾個月以來，他突然發現，他和她幽會的目的已經發生了本質的改變。起初，他們的約會很少有性的成分在裡面。他們發生的第一次性關係，僅僅是靠著意志才完成的。但是第二次之後，他發現他對她以及對性的認識，已經發生了改變。現如今，她的髮香、她的紅唇以及她身體柔滑的觸感，已經滲入了他的每一寸肌膚，甚至是他周圍的空氣之中。她開始變成他的生理所需，他甚至覺得自己已經不是在想得到她，而是在主張自己有權佔用她。當她說去不了的時候，他甚至在想，她是在有意地欺騙自己。就在這時，擁擠的人群把他們倆個硬生生地擠在了一起，真是天公作美，兩人的手竟然意外地搭在了一起。她機敏地握住了他的指尖，此刻，他覺察到這是出於柔情，絕非慾念。他明白過來，其實以這樣的理由宣告約會的告吹，是再正常不過的事情。他對她生出前所未有的愛憐之情。他多麼希望，他們是結髮十年的夫妻，多麼希望，他們可以像現在這樣攜手走在街上，說些家庭瑣事，一起置辦家用，一切都心安理得，一切都無須擔驚受怕。他更希望，能夠擁有僅僅屬於他們兩個的私密空間，不必再像履行義務一般，一見面就匆匆地做愛，然後提起褲子走人。他知道，這有些不切實際，但接下來的幾天，他腦海中一直盤旋著要去租下加林頓先生那個小破房間的念頭。當他把這事原原本本告訴朱麗亞時，她居然同意了，如此爽快，確實出乎他的意料。其實他們都無比明白——這麼做，簡直愚蠢至極。這似乎意味著，他們又故意向墳墓邁近了一步。就在他坐在床邊等她到來的那一刻，他突然想起仁愛部的密室來。還真是奇怪，明明知道災難注定要降臨，它卻偏偏縈繞在你的腦海裡，揮之不去，真是折磨人。事情就明明白白地擺在那兒，厄運會在將來確定的某時來臨，這就好比99之後就是100那樣確定無疑。既然無法逃避，索性就推延它的到來吧。然而，人們卻總在故意做著與之相反的事情，讓厄運來得更快一些。

朱麗亞快步上樓，突然闖進房間。她手裡帶了一個棕色的帆布工具箱。他記起來了，在真理部大樓，他曾見她拎著這工具箱，在他的視線範圍內來回走過好幾趟。他張開雙臂迎上前去，但讓他意外的是，她卻匆忙地掙脫出來，可能是手裡正拿著工具箱的緣故。

「親愛的，稍等片刻，」她說，「快看看，我給你帶什麼好東西了。你是不是帶那噁心的勝利咖啡了？我就猜你一定會帶。不過現在好了，你可以把它丟得遠遠的了，因為我們已經不需要了。看，這是什麼！」

她跪在地上，打開工具箱，把放在上面的扳手和螺絲刀拿到一邊，下面露出了好幾個紙袋子。她拿起其中一個，遞給溫斯頓，裡面散發出一種奇怪但似乎又很熟悉的味道。袋子裡的東西很重，感覺像砂礫，伸手一捏，卻又軟綿綿的。

「這不會是糖吧？」他說。

「是真正的糖，不是糖精。你看，這還有一條麵包，這可是上好的白麵包，不是我們食堂供應的勞什子，還有一罐果醬。這還有一聽牛奶。不過，這一個才是我真正得意的，我必須拿紙把它們包起來。因為——」

然而，她沒有必要告訴他為什麼要把它包起來，其實他早就理解了。此刻，房間裡到處都瀰漫著它的醇香，這味道，像是來自於久遠的孩提時代，雖然現在偶爾也能聞到一點兒。有的時候，你會在窄廊裡聞到這種味道，當然這得在房主把門關上之前；有的時候，在擁擠的街道上也能聞到，只不過往來的行人太多，不一會兒就把它給衝散了。

「這是咖啡，」他低聲說道，「真正的咖啡。」

「沒錯，是內黨專用咖啡，這一桶可足有1公斤的份量呢。」她說

「你是怎麼搞到這些東西的？」

「全是內黨的東西。說真的，就沒有這群豬玀搞不到的東西。從來沒有！當然了，諸如隨從、傭人之流，也有機會揩一點油。瞧，這裡還有一小包茶葉。」

溫斯頓蹲在她的身旁，撕開紙包的一角。

「的確是真正的茶葉，不是糟心的黑莓葉子。」

「最近茶葉還真不少呢，據說，軍隊已經佔領了印度的某些地方。」她含含糊糊地說道，「但是，親愛的，聽著，我想要你轉過身去，3分鐘後再轉過來，坐到床那邊去，不要離窗子太近。聽見我叫你時，再轉過來。」

……

溫斯頓並沒有馬上起床，而是等了幾分鐘。此時，房間內漸漸暗了下來。他朝著有亮光的方向翻過身來，仔細打量著那塊玻璃鎮紙。其實，最讓他感興趣的不是裡面那片珊瑚，而是玻璃本身。它給人一種捉摸不透的感覺，幾乎像空氣一樣純淨。玻璃表面恰似天穹，裡面包含著一個微小的世界，甚至連空氣都一模一樣。他突然覺得，自己能夠走進這個小世界，事實上，他已然置身其中了。紅木大床、折疊桌、老式掛鐘、鋼版雕刻畫以及玻璃鎮尺本身，都盡在其中。在他看來，眼下所停留的這個房間就好比是那層玻璃，朱麗亞和他，就好比玻璃裡面的珊瑚，而他們將永遠地存活於這個具體而微觀的世界裡。

V

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, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumors 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 rumors.

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 meters 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 meters 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 theater in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood 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 rumor 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 counterattack.

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 maneuvrings 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 connection 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 airplanes. (In his own school-days, 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 airplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that airplanes 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 airplanes? 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 airplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switch-over 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 re-painted, 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 generation 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.

第五章

塞姆被蒸發了。一天早晨，他沒來上班。當時，還有幾個沒腦子的同事提起此事。第二天，沒有人再提起他了。到了第三天，溫斯頓到記錄科查看佈告欄。有張佈告，上面列出了象棋委員會的名單，以前塞姆便是其中的會員之一。如今，這張名單跟以前沒什麼兩樣，而塞姆的名字已經不在其中了，這充分證明：塞姆不在了，他從來就沒有存在過。

天氣仍是酷熱難耐。迷宮般的真理部大廈，連個窗子都沒有，但因為有空調的緣故，室溫和平時差不多。但是，大廈外面的人行道卻熱得燙腳。上班高峰時，地鐵旁邊下水道的臭氣跟人們的汗臭味混雜在一起，幾乎要把人熏倒。仇恨周的準備工作，正在全力進行中，真理大廈各科室全員出動，加班加點。示威遊行、集會、閱兵、報告、蠟像展覽、紀錄片放映、電屏節目等所有這些，都要準備妥當。此外，還要架起看台，建起雕像，更新標語，譜寫新歌，散佈謠言，偽造照片。朱麗亞所在的小說科，已經不再生產小說了，而是忙於趕製一本揭露敵人暴行的小冊子。溫斯頓除了正常的分內之事外，每天還要花費很長的時間去翻查《泰晤士報》的舊檔案，修改領導演講時所引用的新聞稿。直到深夜，大批的無產者還在大街上閒逛，使這座城市的上空，更是凝聚著一股奇怪的熱浪。火箭彈的襲擊，比以前更頻繁了。有時，從遠處傳來震耳欲聾的爆炸聲，沒人能解釋那是什麼在爆炸，有的也只是一些謠言罷了。

為仇恨周譜寫的新歌（叫《仇恨之歌》）已經完成，一天到晚在電屏上播放個不停。歌曲的節奏，聽起來簡直像野獸在嚎叫，這實在算不上是音樂，倒是像大吹大擂的聲響。音樂響起時，數以百計的嗓子大聲齊吼，再配以行軍操練的腳步聲，聽起來真叫人毛骨悚然。無產者對這支曲子倒情有獨鍾，在午夜的街道上，這支《仇恨之歌》完全可以跟此前流行的《本無所謂希望》相媲美。帕森斯家的孩子們，竟然用梳子夾著廁紙一天到晚地吹奏這支曲子，真讓人受不了。溫斯頓晚上的時間，安排得比以前更滿了。帕森斯正帶著志願者，為迎接仇恨周的到來做著籌備工作：縫製旗子，畫海報，在屋頂上豎旗桿，全不顧危險地將鐵絲拉過街道，以便懸掛長旗子。帕森斯還誇下海口，稱僅僅是勝利大廈所懸掛的旗子，就有400百米長。這種事情，正是他所擅長的，他也樂在其中。炎熱的天氣加上繁重的體力活，給了他可以在晚上穿短褲和襯衫的借口。在哪兒你都能見到他在推、拉、鋸、捶，忙得不可開交。他做事八面玲瓏，對人稱兄道弟，無非是為了讓人加緊幹活。他身上的肥肉打著褶子，四處散發著汗臭。

新繪製的海報很快貼滿倫敦的街頭巷尾。海報有三四米高，上面沒有文字說明，只是畫了一個腰挎衝鋒鎗、足登大軍靴、長著一副漠然的蒙古臉的歐亞國士兵。無論你從哪個角度看它，那經過放大的槍口，都像是在瞄準你。海報遍及倫敦街頭的空白牆面，數量之多，堪比老大哥的肖像。無產者對於戰事通常都是漠不關心的，可如今這種週期性的煽動，一時間也刺激了他們的愛國神經。為了與這種同仇敵愾的氣氛相協調，火箭彈炸死人的事情，也比平時更多了。其中，僅是落在斯特尼一家影院裡的那一枚，就直接把幾百人送進了現成的墳墓。鄰近社區的人們，都出來為死難者送葬。他們排著長長的隊伍，走了好幾個小時，葬禮儼然成了聲討大會。另外一枚落在從前荒廢的廣場上——它剛巧被改成了遊樂場，結果有十幾個孩子被炸得粉身碎骨。這激起了無產者的憤怒。他們焚燬了戈斯坦的雕像，把數百張歐亞國士兵的大海報撕下來，丟進了火坑裡。在那場騷亂中，有人趁火打劫，許多店舖被洗劫一空。事後不久，黨便放出話來，說有間諜用無線電控制火箭彈，其中，一對有著外國血統的老夫婦的嫌疑最大。結果自然不難猜想，他們的房子被付之一炬，人也被活活熏死。

一有機會，朱麗亞就跟溫斯頓到加林頓先生樓上的房間去幽會。天氣悶熱難耐，他們打開窗戶，脫得精光，並排躺在床上。老鼠再沒有出現過，但在炎熱的天氣下，臭蟲卻孳生得很多，讓人噁心至極。不過，這些都不是問題。不論骯髒也好，乾淨也罷，這裡永遠勝似天堂。他們走進房間，先在房間的各個角落灑滿從黑市買來的胡椒粉，然後迫不及待地扯下衣服，大汗淋漓地做起愛來，再然後，就酣然入睡。等他們醒來，發現臭蟲已經重整旗鼓，大舉反攻過來。

整個六月，他們總共約會了四、五、六——七次吧。溫斯頓已經改掉了喝杜松子酒的習慣，他似乎覺得已無此必要。他的身體比原來發福了，靜脈曲張的患處也已經痊癒，只在踝關節處留下一塊褐色的疤痕。清晨咳嗽的毛病也沒有了。現在他的生活，不再像之前那樣難以忍受，索性，他也就沒有對著電屏做鬼臉或者拉開嗓門罵髒話的衝動了。如今，他們有了安全隱蔽的藏身之所，和在家裡沒什麼兩樣。雖然他們只是偶爾見面，雖然每次只有一兩個小時，但他們不再苛求更多。只要這房間還在，沒有被思想警察發現，那就依然安全，依然和家一樣。這個房間就是一個獨立的世界，完全稱得上是史前遺跡，專門供已經滅絕的動物作自由漫步之用。溫斯頓覺得，加林頓先生就是這樣一個已經滅絕的動物。他上樓時，經常會停下來跟加林頓先生聊上幾句。老店主似乎很少出門，或者根本從不出門，當然這裡也沒什麼客人光顧。他整日如幽靈般，在狹窄幽暗的鋪子與後廚間進進出出。除了炊具外，令人難以置信的是，廚房裡還有一台古老的留聲機，喇叭大得驚人。每每有和別人搭話的機會，加林頓先生總顯得興奮異常。長長的鼻子，厚厚的眼鏡，天鵝絨夾克，彎腰勾背地在雜貨鋪裡踱來踱去，他給人的印象不像是商人，倒像是位收藏家。有時，他會熱情地指著那些老古董給溫斯頓看，像瓷器瓶塞，破鼻煙盒的雕漆蓋子，或是裝著一撮夭兒頭髮的鍍金小盒——他從不勸說溫斯頓買下這些東西，只是請溫斯頓欣賞一下而已。跟他聊天，感覺就像聽古董八音盒奏出的叮叮咚咚的樂聲一樣。溫斯頓還真的從老店主模糊的記憶角落裡，套出了很多早已忘卻的歌謠的隻言片語。其中，一首是關於24只烏鴉的故事，一首是關於一頭弄彎了角的牛的故事，還有一首，是關於大公雞羅賓之死的故事。每當在店主想起某個片段，便會不大自信地微笑著說：「我想，你會對這個感興趣吧。」但是，他記起來的每一個片段，都不會超過三兩行。

溫斯頓和朱麗亞彼此心裡清楚，「究竟發生了什麼」的疑問，在他們的腦子裡都是揮之不去的，而且他們也知道，這種情況不會持續太久。有好幾次，死亡的迫近，似乎比他們睡在床上的事實更加真實。他們緊緊地抱在一起，這是一種絕望的肉慾，就好比在喪鐘敲響前的5分鐘裡，一個罪惡的靈魂，總不會放過最後一根縱慾的草刺一樣。但有時候，他們也會有安全和永存於世的幻覺。他們覺得，只要老老實實躲在這裡，災難就不會降臨到他們頭上。誠然，通往這個房間的路艱難且極度凶險，但如今，這間屋子做了他們的唯一庇護之所。每當溫斯頓望著玻璃鎮紙裡的珊瑚發呆的時候，他都會天真地以為，自己可以躲進這個玻璃世界中，而且當他進去之後，時間也會隨之靜止不前。他們經常做著僥倖脫險的白日夢。他覺得，好運必定會眷顧他們，在有生之年，他們的露水姻緣會一直持續下去。說不定，什麼時候凱瑟琳離開人世，他只要稍動一下腦筋，就能和朱麗亞結婚。或者，他們可以一起自殺，一同離開這個邪惡的世界。或者，他們可以一起失蹤，改頭換面，叫別人認不出來，學著無產者的腔調講話，然後在工廠裡找一份差事，住在永不被人注意的後街裡。他們知道，想像的這些東西沒有一丁點兒實用價值，全都是妄想。實際上，他們還是無法逃脫死亡的命運。即便自殺這個計劃是可行的，但他們並未打算付諸實踐。他們渾渾噩噩，得過且過，將就一天是一天，多活一周是一周。既然已無前景可圖，索性不如拖延時間吧。這其實是一種無法抑制的本能，就好比只要還有空氣，人總是想再呼吸一口。

有時，他們也會談論如何與黨抗爭，但是，他們卻不知如何邁出艱難的第一步。即便傳說中的兄弟會是確實存在的，如何入會對他們來說，卻是另外一件難事。他向她講述自己與奧布萊恩之間若有若無的奇怪的心靈感應，他說，有時他甚至有這樣一種衝動：他要當著奧布萊恩的面，宣稱自己是黨的敵人，請求他的幫助。出人意料的是，朱麗亞倒不覺得這樣做有多麼荒唐，她認為這大可一試。朱麗亞過去一向擅長「以貌取人」，由此她似乎覺得，溫斯頓單靠一個眼神就堅定地認為奧布萊恩是可以生死相托的盟友，這事情並不難理解。而且，她還想當然地認為，大洋國的每個人，或者說是幾乎每一個人，都在背地裡憎恨著黨，一旦時機成熟，他們絕對就會有所行動。但是，她不認為會有全國範圍的、可以公然反抗黨的組織。她覺得，有關戈斯坦以及他的秘密軍隊的傳說，只不過是黨為了自身利益而蓄意編造的瞎話而已，而你不得不假裝這是真的。在黨的集會和自發組織的遊行活動中，她不止一次地奔走呼號，要求將這些叛徒處以極刑，可實際上呢，這些所謂的叛徒的名字她從來都沒聽說過，至於強加在他們頭上的「應有罪名」，也全都是編造出來的。每逢公審大會舉行之時，她都身先士卒，自告奮勇地夾在青年團的派遣隊之中，圍著法院從早站到晚，嘴裡一直不停地喊著「打倒賣國賊」。在「兩分鐘仇恨」節目中，她也會搶在前面，聲討戈斯坦的良心淪喪和倒行逆施。可聲討過後，她腦海中突然又閃出這樣一個模糊的疑問：戈斯坦是為何人，他所代表的「主義」又是什麼？她成長於革命後的大環境中，那時她還小，根本不記得五六十年代意識形態領域所爆發的那些鬥爭。諸如獨立政治鬥爭這種事，她是無法理解的。無論什麼時候，黨都會戰無不勝。結果就是這樣，也只能是這樣。於是，小船終究掀不起大浪，你只能通過背地裡的抗爭，單槍匹馬地製造一點暴力行為，比如，殺了某人，炸掉某處，來發洩你心中的積怨。

有時候，朱麗亞比溫斯頓要心思縝密得多，不為黨的宣傳所蠱惑。一次，他碰巧提起對歐亞國的戰事時，她竟然吃了一驚，還說在她看來，這場戰爭壓根就沒有發生過。至於倫敦街區時而爆炸的火箭彈，她認為，這些有可能都是大洋國政府投下的。他們這樣做的目的只有一個，即「讓人們時刻保持恐懼」。對於溫斯頓而言，他從來都沒敢這麼想過。她甚至對溫斯頓講，兩分鐘仇恨節目，對她最大的考驗莫過於繃住嘴不笑出聲來，這讓溫斯頓覺得有點嫉妒。然而，最讓她心裡不快的，就是黨的教化方式，尤其當那種教化直接干涉到她的生活時。她願意接受黨的那些鬼話，而僅僅是因為，無論那是真理還是謊言，對她來說都沒有什麼分別。例如，她在課堂上得知飛機是黨發明的，於是她就真的相信飛機是黨發明的。其實溫斯頓記得，在他還是個學生的時候，那可以追溯到50年代，黨只是宣佈他們發明了直升飛機。十幾年過後，當朱麗亞成為一名學生的時候，黨便宣佈是他們發明了飛機，說不定再過上幾十年，黨會宣佈連蒸汽機都是他們搞出來的呢。當溫斯頓告訴她，飛機早在革命以前就已經誕生，並且已經存在了好長時間時，她竟然沒有一點兒反應，連個目瞪口呆的表情都沒有。歸根結底，誰發明的飛機跟她又有什麼關係呢？此外，還有一件更讓溫斯頓震驚的事情：他在一次偶然的談話間得知，她竟然不記得，4年前的大洋國是和東亞國打仗，而與歐亞國結盟的事情了。其實，在她看來，所有的戰爭都是編出來的瞎話。這樣一來，他就對她不知道敵人的名字已經變化這事兒不感到奇怪了。「我覺得，我們一直在和歐亞國打仗。」她含含糊糊地說道。她的回答著實讓他吃了一驚。飛機固然是在她出生以前被發明了的，但是戰爭對手的改變，卻才只是4年前的事，那時她已經完全長大了。為這件事，他們足足爭論了15分鐘。最後，他終於讓她想起來，過去確有一段時間，大洋國在和東亞國交戰，而不是歐亞國。但是，這對她的看法沒有任何改觀。「誰又會在乎這些？」她厭倦地說道，「戰爭一場接著一場，誰知道哪個消息是真的？」

有時，他會向她談起記錄科，以及他所做的那些見不得人的偷天換日的勾當。這些事情，好像並不能使她感到奇怪。即便他做的是將謊言變成現實的工作，她也不覺得腳下的地獄之門會為他打開。他也向她講起瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福的事情，向她講起當初曾有一張關係重大的紙條在他指尖停留過的事，但她似乎對此沒有興趣。起初，她甚至無法領會故事背後的深意。

「他們是你的朋友？」她問。

「不是，我不認識他們。他們都是內黨黨員，比我年長很多。革命前，他們生活在前一個時代。我只是在看到的時候，才認得出他們。」

「那你為什麼憂心忡忡？隨時都有人失蹤，不是嗎？」

他努力讓她明白他的意思，「這是個例外，這不是單純的有人被殺的問題。難道你沒發現，可以追溯到昨天的真實歷史，都已經被抹掉了嗎？倘若你還能找到歷史的影子的話，就只能靠那些不能言語的東西了，比如那塊玻璃鎮紙。如今，我們幾乎對革命本身與革命前的事情一無所知。每一條記錄，都是被毀掉或是被篡改過的；每一本書，都是重新編校過的；每一幅畫，都是重新著墨過的；每座雕像、每條街道、每幢建築，都是重新命名過的;每一個日期，都是被替換過的。而且這顛覆歷史、改頭換面的工作，還照舊在週而復始地進行著。歷史已經停滯了。現在，除了黨是正確的以外，其他都不復存在了。當然，我心裡清楚，歷史已經被篡改了，但是我卻無法出來指正，因為，我同樣也是這群篡改者的幫兇。歷史被篡改，卻沒有證據來證明。唯一的證據就在我的腦子裡，我不知道是否有人願意分擔我的記憶。我這一生，大概也只有那一次，在事後確確實實地抓到了證據——雖然，此證據與事實已相去多年。」

「那又有什麼用呢？」

「毫無用處，因為我一會兒就會將其拋於腦後。但是，倘若同樣的事情今天再重新來過的話，我會毫不遲疑地把它記住。」

「我可不會像你這樣！」朱麗亞說，「我只會為我認為值得的事情冒險，絕不為了那幾張破報紙而不顧死活。即便你真的記下了，那又能怎麼樣呢？」

「也許不能怎麼樣，但這確實是證據，這無疑會遍地種下懷疑的種子，假如我真的敢將它給別人看的話。有生之年，我不指望我們可以改變什麼。但我們可以想像，一旦反抗的力量如雨後春筍般湧現，一發而不可收拾，一旦星星之火呈現燎原之勢，之後，子孫後代定然會沿著前輩的路一直走下去。」

「我並不關心什麼下一代，親愛的，我只關心我們自己。」

「你的叛逆只限於下半身。」他對她說。

她覺得這話再風趣不過，於是，高興地鑽進他懷裡。

她對黨的理論的細枝末節，全不感興趣。當他談起黨的基本理論和雙重思想，說起黨雌黃歷史、否定現實、推行新語等事情的時候，她都會極不耐煩，顯得一臉困惑。她說，她從不關心這些。誰都知道，這是廢話，幹嘛還要操那麼多心呢？她只要知道在什麼場合應該歡呼，在什麼場合應該咒罵就夠了，一切見機行事。如果他非要堅持和她談論這些，她倒頭便睡。這確實是一個好習慣，她是一個天塌下來都能安心入睡的人。他總覺得，每次交談時，她只能理解「正統」的表面意思，卻不曉得其真正的含義何在。換句話說，黨成功地將這種世界觀移植到了這些讀不懂它的人身上。他們能接受那些明顯違背現實的荒唐事，因為他們全然不知道黨對他們做了什麼，也不去理會身邊究竟發生了什麼大事。因為缺乏理解，所以他們安分守己。他們可以吞下一切，甚至連渣都不剩，這些東西也不會對他們構成傷害，就像鳥兒硬生生地吞下一顆谷粒，又有何妨？

VI

IT HAD HAPPENED at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry, and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abrupdy and turned. It was O’Brien.

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of speaking. O’Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston’s arm, so that the two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.

“I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,” he said. “I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?”

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. “Hardly scholarly,” he said. “I’m only an amateur. It’s not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language.”

“But you write it very elegantly,” said O’Brien. “That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.”

Again Winston’s heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. O’Brien’s remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a code word. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now O’Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put into the gesture, he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:

“What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak dictionary?”

“No,” said Winston. “I didn’t think it had been issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department.”

“The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?”

“Very much so,” said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.

“Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs—that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address.”

They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absent-mindedly O’Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out the page, and handed it to Winston.

“I am usually at home in the evenings,” he said. “If not, my servant will give you the dictionary.”

He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.

They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O’Brien’s address. This was necessary, because except by direct inquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. “If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,” was what O’Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

He knew that sooner or later he would obey O’Brien’s summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay—he was not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought; the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening; or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to O’Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

第六章

……

溫斯頓的心被攪得一陣難受。還有什麼可想的，這個被忘記了名字的人，不是塞姆又會是誰？但是，塞姆不僅死了，還被蒸發了，已經變成了「非人」。任何提到他的名字的人，都會性命不保。奧布萊恩的談話，顯然帶有某種暗示，像是一個代碼。通過共享一個小的思想犯罪行為，他便輕易地把溫斯頓拖下了水，成為他的從犯。

……

他心裡明白，服從奧布萊恩的指揮是早晚的事。也許明天，也許很久以後，他不確定。剛剛發生的事情，僅僅是多年前開始的一個進程的延續。起初，它還只是一個秘密，是一種無意識的反動思想。之後，便是寫日記。他已經完成了從思想到言語的轉變，現在他要從言語向行動轉變。如此下去，他就差被投到仁愛部的監獄裡去了。他已經默認了這些事實，結局自然不難預見。但不管怎麼說，他還是有點兒害怕，確切地說，他即將嘗試死亡的滋味，體驗生不如死的過程。當他真正領會了奧布萊恩話中之意的時候，禁不住打了個冷戰。他感覺，自己正慢慢地朝陰森恐怖的墳墓走去，他知道，這簡直是一定的。

VII

WINSTON HAD WOKEN up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been “What’s the matter?”

“I dreamt—” he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by—indeed, in some sense it had consisted in—a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

“Do you know,” he said, “that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?”

“Why did you murder her?” said Julia, almost asleep.

“I didn’t murder her. Not physically.”

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.

His father had disappeared some time earlier; how much earlier, he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance—above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oilcake.

When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed—cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece—always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist’s lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close smelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered his mother’s statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a sniveling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, “the boy,” should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate. He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister’s hand and was fleeing for the door.

“Winston, Winston!” his mother called after him. “Come back! Give your sister back her chocolate!”

He stopped, but he did not come back. His mother’s anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now she was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was, that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even his mother’s overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labor camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centers, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war; or she might have been sent to the labor camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.

The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.

He told Julia the story of his mother’s disappearance. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

“I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,” she said indistinctly. “All children are swine.”

“Yes. But the real point of the story—”

From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage stalk.

“The proles are human beings,” he said aloud. “We are not human.”

“Why not?” said Julia, who had woken up again.

He thought for a little while. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it’s too late, and never see each other again?”

“Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I’m not going to do it, all the same.”

“We’ve been lucky,” he said “but it can’t last much longer. You’re young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years.”

“No. I’ve thought it all out. What you do, I’m going to do. And don’t be too downhearted. I’m rather good at staying alive.”

“We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess they’ll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they’ll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the slightest difference.”

“If you mean confessing,” she said, “we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.”

“I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

She thought it over. “They can’t do that,” she said finally. “It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.”

“No,” he said a little more hopefully, “no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”

He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

第七章

溫斯頓醒來，眼睛裡流著淚。朱麗亞翻身緊緊地倚靠著他，睡眼惺忪地問道：「怎麼啦？」

「我夢見——」他沒有說完，就停了下來。一切都太複雜了，很難用語言表達清楚。除了夢本身以外，在他醒後的幾秒鐘裡，還有一些記憶湧現在他的腦海裡。

他躺了下來，閉上眼睛，彷彿還在夢中。夢境清晰，持續了好長一段時間。在夢裡，他的整個生命，猶如仲夏黃昏雨後的景像一般，展現在他眼前。一切記憶，彷彿都裝在那塊玻璃鎮紙裡面。玻璃的表面隆起似蒼穹，裡面充滿了清晰而柔和的光芒。從外面向裡看，一眼望不到頭。夢境很複雜——既有媽媽揮動手臂的身影，還有30年前他在新聞紀錄片裡所看到的一幕，一位猶太婦女為了保護她的小男孩，母子雙雙被直升機炸死了。

「你知道嗎？」他說，「以前，我一直以為是我殺了我的母親。」

「你為什麼要殺她？」朱麗亞半睡半醒間說道。

「我的意思是害死，不是殺死。」

在夢裡，他還記得最後一次看到母親的情形。醒後幾分鐘，所有與此相關的記憶都潮湧般向他襲來。這是多年來他一直想忘掉的記憶。那究竟是什麼時候的事，他也記不清了。但是事情發生時，他至少應該有10歲了吧，也可能是12歲。

父親失蹤，應該是比這更早的事情，但究竟有多早，他也記不起來了。他只清楚地記得，那個時候社會亂得很，到處都是一團糟，空襲簡直是家常便飯，人們不得不躲到地鐵裡。瓦礫堆積成山，佈告貼滿街道，只是那時，他還不認得上面寫的是什麼。成群結隊的年輕人，穿著清一色的襯衫在街頭遊蕩，麵包店門口排著可怕的長隊，遠處不時傳來機關鎗的掃射聲。最令他記憶猶新的是，他一直吃不飽肚子。他記得，每天下午都要跟其他男孩子一起，花很長的時間，在附近的垃圾箱和垃圾場裡撿菜幫子和土豆皮，運氣好一點，還能撿到發了霉的碎麵包，擦一擦上面的爐灰渣，便狼吞虎嚥地吃下去了。除此之外，他們還會去運牲畜飼料的卡車的必經之路上等待。卡車顛簸時，會灑落下來一些油渣餅的碎片。

父親失蹤的時候，母親並沒有表現出意外，也沒有太難過，但是她卻好像變了個人似的，看起來很沮喪，整日無精打采。溫斯頓能明顯感覺到，她在等待著某種在劫難逃的厄運降臨。每天該做的事情，她還是照做不誤——做飯、洗衣、縫補、整理床鋪、打掃房間、擦壁爐——不過她動作遲鈍，了無生趣，簡直像個活動的工藝人。她原先高大勻稱的身材，也顯得毫無活力。她抱著溫斯頓的小妹妹坐在床上，幾個小時都不動一下。那會，妹妹也就兩三歲的樣子，極其瘦小，體弱多病，不愛說話，臉瘦得看起來像隻猴子。母親偶爾也會把溫斯頓摟在臂彎裡，緊緊地抱著，不說一句話。儘管他當年還很小，不懂得為別人擔心，母親也從未提及什麼，但他似乎已經意識到，這一定與即將發生的事情有關係。

他記得，那時他們住在一個黑暗、潮濕且擁擠的房間裡，光那張罩著白色被單的床，就佔去了一半空間。房子裡，還有個煤氣爐和放食物的架子。屋外的平台上，放著一個褐色的陶瓷水槽，幾家共用。他還記得，母親彎下優雅的腰身在煤氣爐邊用平底鍋燒飯的情景。溫斯頓總是忘不掉當時那種飢腸轆轆的感覺。吃飯簡直跟打仗一樣，他經常對著母親大吵大鬧，不停地質問為什麼飯總不夠吃。他要麼又喊又叫，要麼哭哭啼啼（他甚至記得自己的聲音，過早地變了音，有時會發出奇怪的動靜），他這麼做目的只有一個，就是為了多分到一點食物。其實，母親每次都會多分給他一些。她認為男孩子本就該多吃些，但不管母親給他多少，他還是嚷嚷著不夠。每次吃飯時，母親都懇求他別那麼自私，多為生病的小妹妹著想，她也需要吃東西，但是這話沒用。當他看到母親停止給他盛飯時，他就會大哭大鬧，把勺子從母親手裡搶過來，他還試圖掰開妹妹的手，把她的飯菜倒在自己的盤子裡。他明知道，那樣做會把母親和妹妹餓死，但還是那樣做了；他甚至覺得，那是理所應當的。提著餓得咕咕叫的肚子，難免讓人獸性大發。在兩餐之間，趁母親不備，他甚至會從架子上偷一些食物，藏起來自己偷吃。

有一天，家裡配發了定量供應的巧克力，已經有幾周甚至是幾個月，沒有這樣的配額供應了。他記得相當清楚，那個時候的巧克力，儘管只是小小的一塊，也是彌足珍貴的。一塊巧克力大約有兩盎司重（那時他們還用盎司來計量），卻是三個人的份量。突然間，溫斯頓腦海中突然冒出一個邪惡的念頭，他要將整塊巧克力據為己有，於是他大嚷大叫起來。母親讓他不要如此貪心。她一邊哄著他，一邊給他講道理，但溫斯頓卻管不了那麼多，他又是叫嚷，又是乞求，又是哭鬧，又是抗議，絲毫聽不進去母親的話。此時他的小妹妹，雙手摟著母親，像小猴子一般轉過頭來，瞪著哀傷的大眼睛望著他。最終，母親將四分之三的巧克力分給了溫斯頓，把剩下的那塊給了他妹妹。小姑娘癡癡地望著手中的巧克力，可能她還不知道那是什麼東西。溫斯頓站在那兒看了她一會兒，突然快速地跳起來，從妹妹手中搶過巧克力，奪門而逃。

「溫斯頓，溫斯頓！」母親在身後喊，「回來！把巧克力還給你妹妹！」

他停了下來，但是沒有回去。母親焦灼的眼睛一直盯著他。直到現在他回想起這一切，都不知道下一刻將會發生什麼事情。這時，妹妹意識到東西被搶了，才有氣無力地抽泣起來。母親摟著她，把她的小臉緊貼在胸前。母親的這個舉動似乎在告訴他，妹妹已經不行了。他轉身跳下台階，手裡的巧克力已經被他攥得融化了，黏糊糊的。

此後，他再也沒有見過母親。等狼吞虎嚥地吃完巧克力後，他為自己這樣的行為感到萬分羞愧。因為不敢面對母親，他在街上逛了足足有幾個鐘頭，直到餓得挨不住了才鼓起勇氣回家。當他回到家後，母親已經失蹤了。那時，失蹤彷彿已經成了再正常不過的事情。屋子裡除了母親和妹妹不見了以外，沒有其他任何改變，她們沒帶走任何衣服，連母親的大衣也都留下來了。時至今日，他也不確定母親是死是活。說不定，她被送到勞改營了。至於他的妹妹，可能跟溫斯頓一樣，流落到孤兒院了（他們稱之為感化中心）——這是內戰後建立起來的機構。或許，她也跟隨著母親一同進了勞改營，再不然就是被丟在了什麼地方，或者已經死了。

此時，夢境在他腦海中依然清晰可辨，尤其讓他難忘的是母親摟著妹妹、保護著她的那個姿勢，這似乎涵蓋了整個夢境的全部意義。他又想到了兩個月前做過的那個夢，那裡面，母親不是坐在鋪著白色被單的床上，而是坐在將要沉沒的船上，妹妹也是那樣緊緊地貼在她懷裡。她們在他下面很遠的地方，船慢慢下沉，然而，母親透過黑色的海水，一直抬頭望著他。

他跟朱麗亞講母親失蹤的事情。朱麗亞沒有張開眼睛，只是翻身，換了個讓自己更舒服的姿勢躺著。

「我認為，你在那一刻就是個禽獸。」她嘟嘟囔囔地說道，「所有的孩子都是禽獸。」

「是的，但問題的關鍵是——」

通過她的呼吸聲，溫斯頓斷定她又睡著了。他很希望她能繼續聽他講有關母親的事情。在他的記憶裡，母親算不上是個非同尋常的女人，並非特別聰明，卻有一種純潔且高貴的氣質。這是因為，她心中一直恪守著人性。她的感情只屬於自己，從來不受外界環境的影響。那些不切實際的行為，或者沒有意義的的行動，從來都不會在她身上發生。如果你愛一個人，就用心去愛她，即便當你一無所有時，你還可以把愛給她。當最後一塊巧克力被搶走後，母親能做的，就是緊緊地抱著小妹妹。那一刻，做什麼都毫無意義，她什麼都改變不了，她既不能生產更多的巧克力，也不能使自己或者孩子免於死亡的命運。但是，她還是緊緊地抱著妹妹，而且顯得天經地義。電影中，船上那個逃難的婦女仍然用她的胳膊掩護著小男孩，儘管她的胳膊在槍林彈雨中薄得像紙片一般。黨所做的事情之所以可怕，便在於它既讓你看到感情用事毫無實際意義，同時，又剝奪了你享受物質世界的權利。一旦你為黨所挾制，你便失去了判斷力，事情做與不做，都沒有任何區別。不管發生什麼，即便是失蹤了，你跟你的行為也都無人知曉。你已然被拋進了歷史的洪流中，從這個世界上銷聲匿跡。但是，對於上兩代人而言，歷史看起來似乎還非常重要，因為他們還沒有修改歷史的習慣。他們對個人忠誠的信奉毋庸置疑，他們重視人與人之間的關係，一個毫無用處的姿勢，一個擁抱，一滴眼淚，對瀕死者說的一句安慰話，都極具意義。他突然想到，無產者，就是至今還保有這種信念的群體。他們不是忠於一個政黨或者一個國家，也不是忠於一個抽像的概念，他們只忠於彼此。於是，溫斯頓生平第一次不再鄙視無產者，或者僅僅將他們看作一種充滿惰性的力量。他們不但有突然覺醒並改變世界的潛在力量，更重要的是，他們保全了人性。他們沒有變得冷血無情。無產者仍然保持著原始的情感，當然，這也是他現在有必要重新學習的情感。這時，他突然想起一件與眼下的所思所想無幹的事：幾個星期以前，他在人行道上看見一隻被炸斷的血淋淋的手臂，而他卻冷血地把它踢進了排水溝，像踢一個白菜根一樣。

「無產者才是人，」他大聲喊，「我們不是人。」

「我們為什麼不是？」朱麗亞又醒來了，問他。

他想了一小會兒。「你有沒有想過，」他說，「對於我們來說，最好的選擇就是趁早離開這裡，從此不再見面？」

「當然想過，親愛的，我已經想過好幾次了，但我仍然不捨得離開。」

「我們很幸運，」他說，「但是，幸運不會總降臨在我們頭上。你還年輕，看上去又正常又純潔，如果避開我這樣的人，你可能會再活上50年。」

「不，我都想開了，你去做什麼，我就做什麼。不要太悲觀，我很擅長照顧自己。」

「我們還會在一起半年——或者一年——誰知道呢。最終，我們肯定會分開的。你有沒有想過，那時候，我們會多麼地孤獨？如果有一天，他們真的抓住了我們，那我們就毫無辦法，也絕無辦法為彼此做任何事。如果我招認了，他們會把你槍斃；如果我不說，他們同樣會槍斃你。不管我做什麼，說什麼，或者即便什麼也不說，都不會讓死神晚點降臨，哪怕5分鐘都不能。那時候，我們兩個人都不知對方是死是活。我們沒有任何辦法，唯一能做的事情，就是不要出賣彼此，儘管最後的結果沒有任何差別。」

「如果你招供呢？」她說，「我們都會這樣做。每個人都得招供，誰也沒辦法，他們會用酷刑折磨你。」

「我說的意思不是招供，招供也不意味著背叛。不論你說了什麼，做了什麼，都沒關係，感情才是最重要的。如果他們能夠讓我停止愛你——那才是真正的背叛。

她仔細想了一下。「他們不能那麼做，」她最後說，「有一件事，他們辦不到。他們能逼你招認任何事——任何事情——但是，他們不能逼你相信自己講的話是真的或假的，他們鑽不進你的腦子裡。」

「這倒是真的，」他心裡多了一絲希望，「鑽不進去，這倒是真的。」他們鑽不進你心裡。如果你覺得保全人性是值得的，即便沒有任何結果，不管怎樣，都已經將他們打敗了。

他想起那只從來不休息的耳朵——電屏。他們可以日日夜夜地窺探你，但是，如果你能把持住自己的頭腦，你就已經戰勝了他們。黨固然聰明，但是，他們還沒有發明出能夠控制人類思維的秘密機器。當然，如果你真的落在他們手上，事情也許不會這樣簡單。沒人知道在仁愛部裡會發生什麼，但也不難猜到：酷刑，毒品，測量神經的精密儀器，然後是關禁閉，沒日沒夜的審訊，不讓你睡覺，直到精神崩潰。總之，無論如何，任何實情都藏不住。他們可以通過跟蹤追捕，並且動用酷刑迫使你說出事情的真相。但是，如果你認為人的價值不止在於活命，而在於保全人性，那麼，不管他們使用什麼樣的手段，最終都是徒勞的。他們改變不了你的感情，就此而言，即便你自己想去改變，也都是無法做到的。他們可以最大限度地窺察你所說、所做和所想的每一件事情的細節，但是，你的內心卻是他們攻不破的，因為它玄妙得讓你自己都無法感知。

VIII

THEY HAD DONE IT, they had done it at last!

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O’Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.

Winston’s heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O’Brien’s doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro—everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O’Brien’s servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.

O’Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite toward him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:

“Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusful estimates machinery overheads stop end message.”

He rose deliberately from his chair and came toward them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O’Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark; beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretense that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia’s presence was impossible to explain. As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside, and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

“You can turn it off!” he said.

“Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.”

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.

“Shall I say it, or will you?” he said.

“I will say it,” said Winston promptly. “That thing is really turned off?”

“Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”

“We have come here because—”

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O’Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

“We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.”

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.

“Martin is one of us,” said O’Brien impassively. “Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes.”

The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servantlike air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man’s whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O’Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding—a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.

“It is called wine,” said O’Brien with a faint smile. “You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.” His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: “I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.”

Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr. Charrington’s half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.

“Then there is such a person as Goldstein?” he said.

“Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.”

“And the conspiracy—the organization? It is real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?”

“No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently.” He looked at his wristwatch. “It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade”—he bowed his head to Julia—“will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?”

“Anything that we are capable of,” said Winston.

O’Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

“You are prepared to give your lives?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to commit murder?”

“Yes.”

“To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?”

“Yes.”

“To betray your country to foreign powers?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?”

“Yes.”

“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face—are you prepared to do that?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock worker?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?”

“No!” broke in Julia.

It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally.

“You did well to tell me,” said O’Brien. “It is necessary for us to know everything.”

He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:

“Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the color of his hair—even his voice would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.”

Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin’s Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O’Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.

“Good. Then that is settled.”

There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air O’Brien pushed them toward the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O’Brien looked at his wristwatch again.

“You had better go back to your pantry, Martin,” he said. “I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades’ faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.”

Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man’s dark eyes flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him. O’Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.

“You understand,” he said, “that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for, and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.”

He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage. “This is unavoidable,” his voice seemed to say; “this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.” A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston toward O’Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O’Brien’s powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. O’Brien went on:

“You will have heard rumors of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by code words or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a very few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.”

He halted and looked for the third time at his wristwatch.

“It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,” he said to Julia. “Wait. The decanter is still half full.”

He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.

“What shall it be this time?” he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. “To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?”

“To the past,” said Winston.

“The past is more important,” agreed O’Brien gravely. They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O’Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.

“There are details to be settled,” he said. “I assume that you have a hiding place of some kind?”

Winston explained about the room over Mr. Charrington’s shop.

“That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It is important to change one’s hiding place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of the hook”—even O’Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics—“Goldstein’s book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunts them down and destroys them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief case to work with you?” he added.

“As a rule, yes.”

“What is it like?”

“Black, very shabby. With two straps.”

“Black, two straps, very shabby—good. One day in the fairly near future—I cannot give a date—one of the messages among your morning’s work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief case. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say, ‘I think you have dropped your brief case.’ The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein’s book. You will return it within fourteen days.”

They were silent for a moment.

“There are a couple of minutes before you need go,” said O’Brien. “We shall meet again—if we do meet again—”

Winston looked up at him. “In the place where there is no darkness?” he said hesitantly.

O’Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. “In the place where there is no darkness,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. “And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?”

Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask; still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O’Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr. Charrington’s shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:

“Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s?”

Again O’Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,

You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,

When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.”

“You knew the last line!” said Winston.

“Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.”

As Winston stood up O’Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston’s palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O’Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could see the writing table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O’Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.

第八章

事情發生了，終究還是發生了！

他們站在一個長方形的房間裡，屋內充滿柔和的燈光，模糊的電屏低低地響著。他們的腳下是厚厚的藍色地毯，軟綿綿得像是天鵝絨。此刻，奧布萊恩正坐在房間遠端的桌子旁，桌上放著一盞綠罩子的檯燈，另一邊則放著一大摞文件。當僕人把溫斯頓和朱麗亞引進房間時，他連頭都沒抬。

此刻，溫斯頓的心砰砰地跳著，他擔心自己一會兒會因為太過緊張而說不出話來。事情發生了，終究還是發生了！一切都如他預料得那樣。但不管怎麼說，他們還是太過魯莽了。他們一起到這裡來，簡直是愚蠢至極，儘管他們是分頭來到奧布萊恩的公寓前的。說實話，來到這裡需要勇氣。他確實鮮有機會光顧內黨黨員的寓所，平時甚至連他們住的街區都很少去。這公寓裡的整體氛圍和其他地方很不一樣，眼前儘是華麗的擺設，大廳寬敞明亮，美味的珍饈和上等的煙草散發著特別的香味，電梯上上下下，沒有噪音且速度飛快，身著白制服的行人也來去匆匆，總之，這公寓裡的一切都讓你望而生畏。雖然，溫斯頓早已想好了拜訪的理由，但是心中的恐懼還是讓他亂了陣腳。他總覺得，身穿黑制服的警衛會從拐角處突然冒出來，向他索要出入證，然後強行將他趕出門外。可是，令他想不到的是，奧布萊恩的僕人沒有盤問就把他倆直接帶進了房間。那個僕人身材矮小，一頭黑髮，穿著白制服，長著一雙菱形的眼睛，臉上木訥得毫無表情，看起來應該是一個華裔。他引著他們穿過走廊。走廊裡鋪著柔軟的地毯，兩邊牆壁貼著奶油色的牆紙，接近地面的牆上裝著白色的護圍，總之，一切看起來都很乾淨。他又不自覺地望而生畏了。溫斯頓真的不知道，哪裡還能有這樣潔白乾淨的走廊，他能想到的地方，都因為人來人往而變得髒兮兮的。

奧布萊恩手裡拿著一份文件，正低著頭聚精會神地看著。一張大臉進入溫斯頓的視線，他可以清楚地看到他鼻子的輪廓，給人既威嚴又智慧的感覺。他坐在椅子上一動不動，足有二十幾秒鐘。這時，他把讀寫器往自己胸前拉了一下，用真理部的慣用術語念道：

「第一逗號第五逗號第七項完全核准句號停止建議第六項雙倍加謬接近思犯取消句號取得機器費用充分估計前不進行建設句號完了。」

他小心翼翼地從椅子上站起來，踏著踩上去沒有聲音的地毯朝他們走來。念完新語後，他似乎收斂起一些派頭，但表情卻比平時嚴肅得多——看起來，此刻他不想被打擾。溫斯頓剛才的恐懼還沒消散，又平白多了些尷尬。他覺得，自己犯了一個愚蠢的錯誤。所有跡象表明，眼前的奧布萊恩是一個實打實的政治陰謀家。或者，也只有那樣一個眼神以及模稜兩可的談話真實地發生在他倆中間，除此以外，恐怕全是他夢裡的憑空想像吧。他禁不住回想起，奧布萊恩要把字典借給自己的那件事，這可以算作一個借口吧，但似乎，朱麗亞緣何來此又無法解釋。當奧布萊恩從電屏前走過的時候，他像是突然想到了什麼，停下腳步，轉身按了一下牆上的開關。「啪」地一聲，電屏閉嘴了。

朱麗亞突然驚奇地輕叫了一聲。即便溫斯頓此時還未從恐懼中緩過神來，他還是忍不住問了一句。

「您能關掉電屏？」他問。

「是的，」奧布萊恩說，「我能關掉電屏。我們有這個權限。」

他走到他們面前。他高大魁偉的身體矗立在那，居高臨下地看著他倆，臉上的表情仍是深不可測，像是在等溫斯頓開口。但是，他想讓自己說什麼呢？顯而易見，他是個大忙人。難道，他迫切地想知道他們為什麼如此唐突地打斷他的工作？此時的房間，鴉雀無聲，誰也沒有開口說話。電屏關閉後，房間死一般寂靜。眼下的幾秒鐘，像是幾萬年般漫長。溫斯頓好不容易才敢正視奧布萊恩。過了一會兒，一絲微笑突然衝破他臉上的陰雲。奧布萊恩用他的標誌性動作，推了推夾在鼻子上的眼鏡。

「我先說呢，還是您先說？」他問道。

「還是我先說吧，」溫斯頓立即回答道，「電屏真的關上了嗎？」

「是的，關上了，沒有人能聽到您講話，除了我們幾個。」

「我們之所以來這兒，是因為——」

他停了下來，突然發現自己的動機不明。其實，他也不知道自己想從奧布萊恩這裡尋求什麼幫助，也完全說不清楚，自己為什麼鬼使神差地來到了這裡。雖然他意識到，眼下自己說話是多麼地軟弱無力且造作，但他還是繼續著：

「我們覺得眼下有一個密謀，某個秘密組織正在從事反黨的活動，而你就參與其中。我們也想加入組織，想為它賣命。我們是黨的敵人，不相信英社的信條。我們是思想罪犯，還是偷情者。我之所以對你說這些，就是想把命交到你手上。如果你打算控告我們有罪，那好，你來吧，我們已經做好了準備。」

溫斯頓停了下來，用眼睛的餘光朝身後瞄了一下，他感覺門被打開了。是的，那個小個子亞裔僕人沒敲門就進來了。溫斯頓見他手裡拿著一張餐盤，上面放著酒瓶，還有幾隻玻璃杯。

「馬丁是我們的人，」奧布萊恩面無表情地說道，「馬丁，把酒端到這邊來！放在圓桌上吧。椅子夠嗎？一會兒我們可以坐下來，舒舒服服地談一談。馬丁，你也挪一把椅子過來吧，這是正經事兒。接下來的十分鐘，你先停一下，不必再當僕人了。」

小個子男人坐了下來，沒有一點兒拘束，不過仍然不脫僕人的樣子，只是他的神態還是有別於一般的奴僕，因為他的主子是特權人士。溫斯頓用眼角的餘光瞟了他一眼，突然覺得，眼前的這個人一生都將帶著僕人樣，而一旦他真的放下僕人不做，對他而言也是極為難受的。奧布萊恩握住酒瓶，向杯子裡倒滿了暗紅色的液體。這讓溫斯頓模糊地記起來。很久以前，他在牆上或廣告牌上看到的什麼東西—— 一隻由若干燈泡組成的大瓶子，撲通一下就倒出一杯酒來。杯中的液體從上面看是黑色的，但裝在瓶子裡像極了紅寶石，發出微弱的紅色光芒來。這東西聞起來還不錯，有著一股酸甜甜的味道。此刻，他看見朱麗亞正端起酒杯，好奇地注視著裡面的紅色液體。

「這是葡萄酒，」奧布萊恩勉強笑道，「你們一定在書本裡看過吧。外黨黨員是鮮有機會享用的。」話音剛落，他臉上的表情又如方纔那般嚴肅起來。他舉起杯，說：「讓我們為健康乾杯，為我們的領袖艾曼紐爾·戈斯坦乾杯！」

溫斯頓心潮澎湃地端起酒杯。之前，他的確在書中讀到過葡萄酒，當然也偶爾夢見過。如那塊玻璃鎮紙，以及加林頓先生所記得的隻言片語的歌謠一樣，它們都屬於已然消逝的、羅曼蒂克的過去，溫斯頓喜歡稱之為舊時光的過去。不知為什麼，溫斯頓一直以為葡萄酒的味道該是甜甜的，跟黑莓果醬的味道相仿，而且喝下去就能把人灌醉。實際上，當他一口吞下去的時候，酒的味道卻讓他很失望。可能是喝慣了杜松子酒的緣故，他消受不了這葡萄酒。他把空杯子放在桌上。

「果真有戈斯坦其人嗎？」他問。

「是的，確有此人，他還活著。至於在哪兒，我就不知道了。」

「那所謂的秘密組織呢？也是真的嗎？不會是思想警察憑空捏造的吧？」

「不，是真的，我們稱之為兄弟會。除了知道它確實存在以及自己便是其中一員以外，您不要指望將來會對它瞭解得更多。關於這一點，我一會兒再說。」他看了一下手錶，「即便對於一個內黨黨員來說，關掉電屏超過半個小時也是很不明智的。你們兩個不該一起到我這兒來的，等走的時候，一定要分開走。您，同志——」他朝朱麗亞點頭示意了一下，「一會兒您先走。現在我們有20分鐘可以利用。您應該清楚，我必然是要問您幾個特定的問題的。總的來說，你們打算做什麼？」

「只要我們能做的，我們都肯做。」溫斯頓回答道。

奧布萊恩坐在椅子上稍稍轉了轉身，以便更好地看著溫斯頓。此刻，他似乎忽略了朱麗亞，想當然地以為溫斯頓能代表她。過了一會兒，奧布萊恩的眼皮低垂下來。他開始發問了，聲音低沉，絕無感情，像是在例行公事，也像是課堂提問，因為他其實早已知道了答案。

「您準備為革命事業獻身嗎？」

「是的。」

「您準備去殺人嗎？」

「是的。」

「您準備搞破壞活動嗎？這可能會誤傷數以百計的無辜平民？」

「是的。」

「您會背叛自己的國家嗎？」

「是的。」

「您準備欺騙、偽造、敲詐、腐化兒童的心靈嗎？您準備販賣毒品嗎？您會縱容賣淫嗎？您會傳播性病嗎？總之，您準備去做使黨墮落、削弱其力量的任何事情嗎？」

「是的。」

「假如，為了我們自身的利益，需要您朝孩子臉上潑硫酸——您也願意做嗎？」

「是的。」

「您願意隱瞞你的身份，以僕人或是碼頭工人的身份，度過您的餘生嗎？」

「是的。」

「您願意自我了斷嗎？如果到時我們要您這麼做？」

「是的。」

「你們兩個願意就此分手、永不相見嗎？」

「不！」朱麗亞突然插話道。

溫斯頓停頓了許久，默不作聲。此刻，他彷彿覺得自己像是被剝奪了說話的權利。雖然舌頭在動，但說不出話來，雖然想好要發這個字的第一音節，卻偏偏發出了另一個字的第一音節。他試了好幾次，可結果還是一樣。當他能夠表達出來時，又不知從何說起。最後，他說了一個「不」字。

「您已經把您的心思傳達給我了，」奧布萊恩說，「我們有必要知道您的一切。」

他把頭轉向朱麗亞，比剛才略帶感情地講道：

「您知道，即便最後僥倖活了下來，他也早已不是現在的他了，說不定會變成另外一個人，我們有責任賦予他一個新的身份。他的面容，他的舉止，他的手掌輪廓，他的頭髮顏色，乃至於他的聲音，都會和現在不一樣。而您也有可能變成另外一個人，我們的外科醫生能讓您變樣，有時這樣的改變是極為必要的。有時，我們甚至需要犧牲掉自己的雙腿或者雙臂。」

溫斯頓忍不住又瞥了一下馬丁那蒙古人種的面龐。在他臉上，他看不到疤痕。此刻朱麗亞臉色煞白，雀斑也越發明顯，但是，她還是在勇敢地注視著奧布萊恩，像是深表贊同地自言自語著。

「好吧，那就這麼說定了。」

桌上放著一包錫紙盒包裝的香煙。奧布萊恩一副心不在焉的樣子，把香煙推到每個人面前，自己也拿了一支，站起身來，在房間裡來回踱著步。他似乎更樂於站著思考。這絕對是上等的香煙，煙絲濃密，包裝精細，捲煙紙更是少有的柔軟。奧布萊恩又看了一下手錶。

「馬丁，你現在該回到廚房去了，」他說，「再過15分鐘，我就要把電屏打開。在離開之前，你最好熟悉一下同志們的面孔。你還會見到他們的，而我可能就不會了。」

如剛才在門口那般，小個子男人睜開菱形的眼睛，出於使命，在他們臉上細細地打量了一番。他眼裡沒有一絲友好的跡象，只是單純地要記住他們的面孔而已。其實，他對他們是誰根本不感興趣，他們也沒有讓他感興趣的東西。溫斯頓在想，可能他的臉也做過整形手術吧，以致於僵硬得沒有任何表情，連基本的交談與寒暄都不會。馬丁走出房間，輕聲帶上門。奧布萊恩在房間裡來回踱著步，一隻手插在黑制服兜裡，一隻手夾著香煙。

「我想您是知道的，」奧布萊恩說，「您將在黑暗中戰鬥，且一直身處黑暗之中。您只需接受命令，然後執行命令，不要問為什麼。稍後，我會給您一本書，從中您會知道我們到底生活在怎樣的世界中。當然，它也會教您如何去摧毀這個世界。當您讀完這本書後，您就是兄弟會的一員了。但是，除了我們為之奮鬥的總體目標，以及當下我們要付諸實踐的計劃以外，您不會知道更多。我可以告訴您，兄弟會是真實存在的，但我不能告訴您會眾到底是100個還是1000萬個。就您而言，您永遠不會認識10個以上的會員，您可能只和三四個人保持聯絡，而且他們只有面孔在變化，人數卻始終是三四個，一個消失了另一個會頂上去。馬丁是您最早認識的，他不會更換。一旦您接到命令，您只需知道，是我發出的就可以了。如果我們覺得有必要與您取得聯繫，我會通過馬丁去聯絡您。假如，您最後被捕了，您肯定會認罪，這是不可避免的。但是除了您自己的行動而外，您能坦白的東西卻很有限。充其量，您只能出賣一些不重要的人，可是您沒有機會出賣我。到那時，可能我早已經死了，也可能變成了一個陌生人，帶著一副完全不同的面孔。」

奧布萊恩繼續在柔軟的地毯上踱步。雖說他體格健碩如牛，舉手投足卻也稱得上優雅，風度翩翩。他的手無論是插在衣兜裡，還是在指縫間夾著香煙，都是對其風度最好的詮釋。除了身體的強壯外，他給人一種信心滿滿、善解人意的感覺。當然，說他善解人意可能有點諷刺。雖然他對什麼事情都表現得一本正經，但遠沒專心到偏執的地步，當他言及暗殺、自殺、性病、截肢乃至易容的事情時，隱隱讓人覺得有一種戲謔的感覺。「這是不可避免的，」言外之意，他是在說，「這就是我們不惜捨命的事業，我們是為現實所迫不得已而為之。」此刻，溫斯頓對他肅然起敬，崇拜之情油然而生。他已經忘掉了戈斯坦帶給他內心的陰影。當你目視奧布萊恩充滿力量的肩膀以及直率坦然的臉龐時，你會覺得他很醜陋，但又很文雅，簡直不相信他會被打敗。他才是真正的王者。你會肯定地認為，沒有什麼詭計是他不能識破的，沒有什麼危險是他不曾預見到的。此刻，甚至連朱麗亞都對他萬分欽佩，她熄掉手中的香煙，心無旁騖地聽他講著。

他繼續說道：「想必，您之前也聽過兄弟會的傳言吧。顯然，您在自己心中早已形成了對它的獨特印象。您可能會以為，它應該是一個龐大的地下組織，人數眾多，經常在地窖裡秘密會面，在牆上塗寫反抗標語，用暗號或者是特殊手勢接頭。但我告訴您，這些都是不存在的。兄弟會的會員，根本無法認識其他的會員，任何一個會員，都不可能說他認識好多人。就拿戈斯坦來說吧，即便有一天他真的落入了思想警察手裡，他也拿不出兄弟會的全部名單，提供不出任何與之有關的信息。因為所謂的名單，根本就不存在。兄弟會之所以不會被清洗，很大程度上，是因為它不是一般意義上的組織。可以說，除了不可摧毀的理想以外，沒有什麼特別的東西讓這些人抱成一團，是信念支撐著他們一直走下去。在那裡，不會有同志間的友誼，也得不到什麼鼓勵，甚至當您被捕的時候，都沒有人能幫到您。我們從不營救我們的會員，除非，當我們覺得閉嘴是讓他保持沉默的最好選擇時，我們偶爾會把一片剃鬚刀帶進監獄裡。您現在必須要習慣沒有結果的付出，甚至是沒有希望的生活。可能，您剛投入工作不久，就會被捕，就會招供，就會死去，這些後果都是您應該預見到的。在有生之年，我不覺得我們能得以目睹世界發生的可觀變化。我們早已變成死人，我們唯一的、真正意義上的生命，在於將來。我們是以一把泥土和幾根朽骨的模樣，來享受未來生活的。但是，這未來究竟有多遠，誰又會知道呢？可能會在千年以後吧。如今我們唯一能做的，就是讓頭腦清醒的人越來越多。我們不能集體行動，只能把自己的思想，一個一個地傳遞，一代一代地傳承。面對思想警察，我們別無選擇。」

他停了下來，看了看手錶，這是第三次了。

「同志，您該離開了，」他對朱麗亞說，「請等一下，這兒還有半瓶酒。」

他往杯子裡斟滿酒，端起自己的酒杯。

「這次是為什麼乾杯呢？」他說道，帶著一絲嘲諷的口氣，「為思想警察的混亂？為老大哥的滅亡？為人類？為將來？」

「為了過去。」溫斯頓說。

「過去尤為重要。」奧布萊恩一臉嚴肅地表示贊同。

他們一飲而盡。緊接著，朱麗亞起身準備離開。奧布萊恩從書架上拿起一個小盒子，從中取出一粒白藥片，叫她含在嘴裡。他說，最好別讓人聞出酒味兒，這很重要，要當心電梯裡那些善於捕風捉影的僕人。當她關上門離開後，他似乎馬上忘了她的存在。他又往前走了兩步，然後停下來。

「有些細節問題需要解決，」他說，「我想，您現在應該有隱身之所吧？」

溫斯頓如實向他說了加林頓雜貨鋪上面的那個房間。

「您現在可暫居此處，日後，我會給您另行安排地方，經常更換藏身地點，對您來說很重要。同時，我還要給您一本書。」溫斯頓發覺，奧布萊恩像是在用著重的語氣強調，「是戈斯坦的書，您會很快拿到，幾天後我就會給您。現在我們手頭的書不多，想必您也能想得到。思想警察一直在秘密搜尋這些書，毀書的速度簡直比印書還快。不過沒關係。書是不能被毀滅的。假如，最後一本書真的被銷毀了，即便口口相傳，我們也能讓它重現於世。您上班帶公文包嗎？」他又問道。

「大多數情況下是帶的。」

「是什麼樣子的？」

「黑色的，很舊，有兩根帶子。」

「黑色的，兩根帶子，很舊，好的，我記下了。不久之後的一天，我只能這麼說，現在也不能確切告訴您究竟是哪一天，早晨上班的時候，您會收到一則印刷錯誤的消息，您就要求重發。第二天，您就不要帶公文包上班了。在那天的某個時候，街上會有個人拍您的肩膀，說：『我發現您的公文包丟了。』他會給您一個公文包，裝著戈斯坦的書。不過您要記得，書要在14天內歸還。」

他們同時沉默了片刻。

「現在還有兩分鐘，兩分鐘過後，您就該離開了，」奧布萊恩說，「我們還會再見面的——倘若，我們還有機會再見的話——」

溫斯頓抬頭望著他。「在沒有黑暗的地方？」他猶豫了一下，問道。

奧布萊恩點了點頭，臉上沒有半點驚訝的表情。「在沒有黑暗的地方。」他說，似乎他對自己的話早已明白，「離開之前，您還有什麼想說的嗎？什麼信息？或是疑問？」

溫斯頓想，此刻，他也沒有什麼問題可問了，也不想冒失地去討好。此刻溫斯頓心中想到的，不是與奧布萊恩或兄弟會相關聯的東西，而是極其複雜的一幅場景。其中既有他母親彌留之際待過的小黑屋的影子，又有他從加林頓先生那裡租下的那個房間的痕跡，甚至連玻璃鎮紙和裝在紅木框裡的鋼版雕刻畫，也都在裡面。他幾乎不經意地說道：

「您聽過這樣一首老兒歌嗎？開頭是這樣的：聖克萊門特響著鐘，橘子與檸檬！」

奧布萊恩隨即點點頭，嚴肅又謙遜地附和道：

「聖克萊門特響著鐘，橘子與檸檬！

聖馬丁鐘聲敲得緊，你欠我三法新。

老貝利街鐘聲直叫喚，你何時還我錢？

肖迪奇鐘聲嚷嚷著，我發了財再說。」

「您竟然知道這最後一句！」溫斯頓說。

「是的，我知道最後一句，但現在，我想您該離開了。等一等，您最好也在嘴裡含一粒這樣的小藥片。」

溫斯頓站起身，同時，奧布萊恩伸出一隻手。他的大手很有勁，這一握，差點捏碎溫斯頓的手骨。走到門口，溫斯頓回頭看了一下，奧布萊恩並未再加理會，看上去要把他忘記了。此刻，他正把手放在開關旁，準備打開電屏。溫斯頓看見，他身後的桌子上放著那盞罩子檯燈、讀寫器以及堆滿文件的鐵筐。奧布萊恩一會兒將重新坐回桌邊，繼續為黨做著那暫時中斷的重要的工作了。

IX

WINSTON WAS GELATINOUS with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.

He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr. Charrington’s shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief case that he was carrying bumped against his knees at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large, bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beastlike roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your brief case.” He took the brief case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors; meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing onto the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat-enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.

By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief case containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.

With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr. Charrington’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove, and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently; meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief case.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE

OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN

Winston began reading.

Chapter 1.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable—

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children; in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at the third chapter. He went on reading:

Chapter 3.

WAR IS PEACE.

The splitting-up of the world into three great superstates was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three superstates are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

In one combination or another, these three superstates are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting, and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centers of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.

To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three superstates could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case, each of the three superstates is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labor power. Between the frontiers of the superstates, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly populated regions, and of the northern ice cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.

All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labor. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labor power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored; but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heard and of each superstate always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labor of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labor the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while^‹wir remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency toward mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labor that would build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labors another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy—his large well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motorcar or helicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call “the proles.” The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for “Science.” The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armor-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an airplane as independent of its base as a sailing ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometers away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s center.

But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three superstates ever gains a significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the Nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centers, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable battle-ship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.

None of the three superstates ever attempts any maneuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three superstates. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and colored slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three superstates are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three superstates not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always colored and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three superstates is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-story windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war,” therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter 1 when he heard Julia’s footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another.

“I’ve got the book,” he said as they disentangled themselves.

“Oh, you’ve got it? Good,” she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.

They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.

“We must read it,” he said. “You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.”

“You read it,” she said with her eyes shut. “Read it aloud. That’s the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.”

The clock’s hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading:

Chapter 1.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

“Julia, are you awake?” said Winston.

“Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvelous.”

He continued reading:

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no re-form or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then arose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.

The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favored some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe in it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labor, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historic change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

After the revolutionary period of the Fifties and Sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before; but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport—everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program, with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter 3), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.

Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party, its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than two per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as “the proles,” numbering perhaps eighty-five per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low, for the slave populations of the equatorial lands, who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.

In principle, membership in these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the preindustrial ages. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called “class privilege,” assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behavior toward his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanor, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand, his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behavior. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, “reality control.” In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able—and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years—to arrest the course of history.

All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude toward the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favored workers whom we call “the proles” are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Mnistry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is: why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?

Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists…

Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.

“Julia.”

No answer.

“Julia, are you awake?”

No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why. Chapter 1, like Chapter 3, had not actually told him anything that he did not know; it had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl’s smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring “Sanity is not statistical,” with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

第九章

溫斯頓累得像一攤漿糊。漿糊這個比喻，用來形容他眼下的狀態，簡直再貼切不過了，他不由得想起這個字眼。此刻，他的身體不但像漿糊般癱軟，而且還有點兒半透明，甚至，他覺得把手抬起來，藉著燈光便可以看穿。整日無休止的工作，幾乎熬幹了他的血液和淋巴液，他只剩下一副由神經、皮膚、枯骨構成的乾癟的軀殼。他總覺得渾身上下不自在，制服磨著肩膀，人行道的地磚硌得腳掌發癢，就連活動一下手掌，都覺得關節咯崩咯崩地響。

5天的時間裡，他已經連續工作了90多個小時，真理部的其他同事也是如此。一切都忙完了，他現在無事可做，在明天早晨到來之前，都不會有公事纏身了。他可以去加林頓先生雜貨店樓上那個房間，在那裡待上6個小時，然後再回到公寓睡9個小時。午後的陽光照著大地，沿著髒兮兮的街道，他慢慢地朝加林頓雜貨鋪的方向走去，不時警惕地提防著巡邏警察。他不敢保證，今天下午就是安全的。每走一步，沉重的公文包就蹭一下他的膝蓋，讓他覺得腿上的皮膚在隱隱作痛。公文包裡放著戈斯坦的那本書，他已經拿到6天了，卻一直沒有時間翻看。

眼下，已進入仇恨周活動的第六天，大家都受夠了遊行、演說、吶喊、頌歌、搖旗、招貼、電影、蠟像、擂鼓、鳴號、跺足、坦克轟鳴、飛機盤旋以及槍炮隆隆的折磨了。6天過後，人們已經亢奮到了極點，對歐亞國的仇恨，也已經到了將近走火入魔的地步。如果讓那2000名將於活動最後一天被絞死的歐亞國俘虜落在他們手上，他們一定會像野獸一樣把他們撕碎。然而就在這時，大洋國政府突然宣佈：交戰對像不是歐亞國，而是東亞國，歐亞國實則是他們的盟友。

當然，沒人會承認交戰對像已經發生實質性的改變。人們只是知道，變化極為突然，好像頃刻之間便發生了，他們真正的敵人是東亞國，而非歐亞國。溫斯頓記得，當時他正在倫敦市中心的某個廣場參加示威。時值夜間，蒼白的面孔和猩紅的標語被泛光燈照亮，形象鮮明。廣場上聚集著數以千計的人，其中包括一群身著特務營制服的學生，估計有1000人之多。一個內黨黨員站在紅布鋪就的講台上，聲嘶力竭地訓話。他是一個瘦小的男人，長胳膊簡直與身高不成比例，零星的幾縷細發，粘在他光光的頭頂上。他是一個典型的侏儒怪物，一個充滿仇恨的變態狂，一手抓著擴音器，一手在頭頂邪惡地揮舞著。跟骨瘦如柴的胳膊相比，那隻手簡直大得誇張。他的聲音從擴音器裡傳出來，直刺每一位聽眾的耳膜。他沒完沒了地痛斥著敵人的種種暴行，如瘋狂的殺戮、毫無人性的驅逐、強盜般的趁火打劫、強姦、嚴刑逼供、殺戮平民、肆意編造謊話、師出無名的侵略以及背信棄義、單方毀約等，諸如此類的無恥行徑。聽了他的演講，在場的人們先是深信不疑，緊接著迸發出癲狂的憤怒。不一會兒，人們的憤怒已達到沸點，他們炸了鍋。他的聲音，頓時被人群中所爆發出來的野獸般的嘶號聲所淹沒。其中，大部分嘶號聲都來自於那群學生。訓話大概持續了20多分鐘。這時，一個報信人匆忙衝上講台，將一張小紙條塞在他手裡。在聲音和表情沒有絲毫改變的情況下，甚至連講話的內容都沒發生改動，交戰對象的名字就被悄然替換掉了。無須再費唇舌，人們的憤怒如潮水一般，一浪接著一浪地席捲而來。大洋國竟然是在和東亞國交戰！緊接著，人群中一陣騷動。廣場四周懸掛的標語以及張貼的海報，竟然全是錯的！有一半以上的海報畫錯了臉！一定是戈斯坦搞的鬼！隨即人群憤怒地衝向牆邊，一把扯下掛在牆上的海報以及標語，當即撕得粉碎，之後還不忘踏上幾腳。特務營那幫學生更是來勁兒，直接爬上房頂，以迅雷不及掩耳之勢，剪斷了掛在煙囪上還在飄拂的絲帶。但是，僅僅過了兩三分鐘，這樣的宏大聲勢就偃旗息鼓了。訓話的人還在繼續，手裡依然緊握著擴音器，肩膀依然佝僂向前。他的那隻手，依然在頭頂揮舞著，伴隨著聲音的低昂而起伏。1分鐘過後，方才平息下來的野獸般的咆哮再次從人群中爆發出來。仇恨依然像之前那樣強烈，只是這仇恨的對象，卻已經改變了。

溫斯頓回想當時的場面，最令他印象深刻的，莫過於演說者竟然在講話中途變換了名字，且沒有一點兒停頓，甚至連之前的語言邏輯都沒有被打亂。正當溫斯頓陷入思考的時候，另一件事情進入了他的思緒。就在人群混亂地衝向海報、把它撕得粉碎的時候，一個男人（他根本來不及看清對方的面孔）朝他肩膀拍了一下，說道：「打擾了，我想是您丟了公文包吧。」他一臉茫然地接過來，什麼都沒有說。他知道，要等幾天以後才能看公文包裡的東西。此時，遊行示威已宣告結束，他徑直朝真理部大樓走去。現在差不多是23點鐘，部裡的其他同事都回來了。電屏裡發出指令，要他們各就各位，不過在他看來，發出這樣的指令完全沒有必要。

大洋國在和東亞國交戰，自始至終，大洋國都是在和東亞國交戰。5年來的政治文獻，現在看來，大部分都已經不合時宜了。與此相關的報道和記錄、報紙、書籍、宣傳冊、電影、錄音以及照片，都必須以極快的速度進行訂正。儘管上面的指令還沒有下達，但不難預料，部門首腦們一定會要求他們在一周內，把與歐亞國交戰、與東亞國結盟的記錄統統抹掉，也就是說，要盡快完成與事實完全相悖的資料的訂正。工作量簡直大得嚇人，因為這些材料全都需要改頭換面。於是記錄科的所有同事，每天都要工作18個小時，只在中間休息兩次，各3個小時。為了應對如此浩大的工程，床墊都被搬到了走廊裡，就連午餐也不勞你動身去食堂裡吃了，由工作人員推著滾輪車直接送到辦公室，標準是幾塊三明治麵包和一杯勝利咖啡。每次，溫斯頓都是把堆在桌上的文件處理乾淨之後再去睡覺，但當他睡眼惺忪、腰酸背痛地回到辦公桌前，卻總能發現桌上的文件又已堆積如山，有時甚至淹沒了讀寫器，或者乾脆滑落到地板上。因此，他醒來的第一件事往往是先把文件整理好，以便騰出地方來辦公。讓他頭疼的事情是，手頭上的工作絕非可以機械地應付了事。通常情況下，訂正工作不單單是換名字，許多事件的細節需要你細心琢磨，開動大腦，充分發揮你的想像力。你需要通曉地理常識，因為你不能光在嘴上交待交戰對像從一方轉向另一方，相應地，還要在地圖上指出來究竟是從哪裡轉移到了哪裡。

訂正工作進行到第三天時，他的眼睛已經痛到不行。過幾分鐘，他就要擦拭一次眼鏡。現在，這工作倒像是壓得你喘不過氣來的體力活了，你有權利拒絕不幹，可你又神經質般地急於將它早點兒弄完。就他記憶所及，他並未因自己編造謊言而心存不安，儘管早有明證在前。他低聲對著讀寫器講的每一句話，甚至他用蘸水鋼筆寫的每一筆，都可以揭穿謊言。現在，他和科裡其他的同事一樣焦慮不堪，但願這訂正工作能快點結束，中途別出現什麼岔子。訂正工作進行到第六天上午，堆在桌子上的文件高度明顯地降了下來。有那麼半個小時，傳輸孔什麼都沒有吐出來，接著又吐出一卷資料，再之後就沒了。現在，其他同事的情況基本和他一樣，他們能夠很明顯地感到擔子已經減輕了。他們不禁暗暗舒了一口長氣。就要大功告成了，當然，這些只有他們自己知道，誰都不會對外提及。現在，誰都不可能拿出大洋國曾和歐亞國交戰的證據了。到了中午12點，科裡竟然出人意料地宣佈：下午休息，明天早上再來上班。

溫斯頓手裡提著公文包，包裡是他收到的那本書。他走到哪兒，就把書帶到哪兒，工作時把它夾在兩腳中間，睡覺時乾脆壓在身下。溫斯頓回家後，刮了刮鬍子，去浴室沖了個澡，儘管水溫有點兒涼，但他差點在浴缸裡睡著了。

當他走在加林頓先生雜貨店的樓梯上時，關節處不時發出咯吱咯吱的響聲，同時伴著難以忍受的疼痛。他今天滿身疲憊，卻絲毫沒有睡意。他打開窗子，伸手拭去落在煤油燈上的灰塵，然後燒了一平底鍋水，準備弄杯咖啡，以緩解身體的疲憊。朱麗亞馬上就要到了。他坐在那把舊扶手椅上，隨手解開公文包上的兩條皮帶。

這是一本黑色封皮的厚書，裝訂水平看起來相當業餘，封面上既沒有作者也沒有書名。書頁的字體，印刷得也不是很規範。書角處磨損嚴重，稍有不慎，就會將它弄得脫頁，看起來這本書已幾經轉手。書的扉頁上寫著：

寡頭政治集體主義的理論與實踐

艾曼紐爾·戈斯坦著

溫斯頓開始讀：

第一章

無知即力量

觀諸人類有記載之歷史，可追溯至新石器時代，世界上有三種人：上等、中等和下等人。此三者又可以細分為多種人，稱謂隨著時代變遷而演化。每種人的相對人數，以及此一種人對彼一種人的態度，雖然因時代而異，但究其社會的基本結構，卻從未發生改變。儘管社會經歷重大變革，一切看似不可逆轉，其基本模式卻難有改變，且好比一隻陀螺儀，不管你如何推它，它終將歸於平衡。

此三種人之根本矛盾，不可調和……

溫斯頓讀到這裡，停了下來，主要是為了享受一下此刻既舒服又安全的閱讀體驗。房間裡只有他一個人，沒有電屏的監視，沒有人在鎖眼處偷聽，更不用擔心有人監視，無需聽到一點風吹草動便把手捂在書上。夏日甜蜜的空氣，親吻著他的臉頰。遠處某個地方傳來孩子們模糊的嬉鬧聲，此時，房間裡一片寂靜，只有老式掛鐘滴答滴答的響聲。他把身體埋在扶手裡，然後把腳搭在爐柵上，感覺真是如在天堂。這就是他想要的永恆。拿到一本好書,總忍不住要先亂翻一通,他隨手一翻,是第三章。他繼續讀道：

第三章

戰爭即和平

如今，世界呈三個超級大國鼎立的局面，想必在20世紀中葉以前便可預料到了。在俄羅斯鯨吞歐羅巴、美利堅蠶食不列顛以後，三個超級大國中的兩極已經形成，即歐亞國和大洋國，如今它們已確乎存在。第三極就是東亞國，在經歷了10年艱苦卓絕的鬥爭後，它的存在也成為不爭的事實。三個超級大國的邊界，在某些地方是比較隨意的，然而在某些地方，它的劃定全部聽憑戰爭的結果。但總體而言，它們依然循著地理界線而定。歐亞國佔據整個歐亞大陸的北部，領土邊界從葡萄牙延伸至白令海峽。大洋國的疆域，則包括美利堅、大西洋諸島（包括不列顛群島、澳大利亞、非洲南部）。較之於前兩者，東亞國領土面積則要小得多，且其西部邊界存在著極大的不確定性，它包括中國、南亞諸國、日本群島以及廣袤且動盪的外蒙古國的大部。

倘若三國中，一國與另一國修好，那麼必與第三國交戰。三個大國混戰不休，想來，如此應該有25年了。然而，旨在顛覆他國政權的戰爭僅僅出現在20世紀前葉。如今的戰爭，已不再關乎你死我亡，而僅僅局限於特定目標，因為他們清楚，單憑一己之力根本吃不掉對方。如今的戰爭，既無物質動因，亦不存在真正意義上的意識形態較量。當然，這倒不是說戰事本身或是主流趨勢使然，讓戰爭少了一點血腥，或是多了一點肝膽道義。相反，戰爭的癔病一直在延續，在各個國家內部也是普遍存在的，諸如強姦、搶劫、殺戮兒童、奴役人民、報復囚犯（把他們投進油鍋裡或是生生活埋），都是再正常不過的現象，而且通常，他們都是自己人殘害自己人，根本不需要假借敵人之手。然而，讓人難以想像的是，自相殘殺竟被視作衡量功績的標尺。實際意義上的戰爭，只波及一小部分人群，基本上都是雙方訓練有素的人員之間的較量，因此，只會造成相對小規模的傷亡。戰爭，倘若有的話，也大多發生在邊境爭議地界，或是海上航道中用於保衛戰略要地的浮動堡壘附近，至於具體戰場之所在，人們也只能靠猜想而已。在世界文明的中心，戰爭不過意味著消費品越來越匱乏，天上時時會掉下來幾顆火箭彈，然後，就是一些人會死掉。實際上，戰爭的特點已經發生了根本的改變。確切地說，戰爭發動與否，全憑當權者對局勢緩急的判定。這一戰爭動機在20世紀初期的幾次大戰中已經出現，只是至今才居於主導地位，如今的決策者更有此意識，也更懂得見機行事。

儘管每隔幾年敵友組合就會發生變化，但參與者並沒有什麼不同，因此，戰爭也沒有什麼變化。為了清楚理解現代戰爭的本質，我們首先必須意識到，這場戰爭是看不到結果的。三個超級大國中，想必還沒有哪個國家敢保證，通過結盟便能將第三國徹底征服。他們勢均力敵，世界因此保持著平衡，況且，他們的自然防禦能力也各有所長。歐亞國憑借廣闊的大陸得以保全，大洋國仰仗大西洋和太平洋的天然屏障隔岸觀火，東亞國則依靠人口稠密、任勞任怨而開疆拓土。其次，從物質慾念角度來講，沒有什麼東西值得他們生死相搏。隨著自給自足的經濟形態的形成，生產和消費相互配合，戰爭以爭奪市場為目的的時代，早已一去不復返。如今，就連原材料的爭奪也不算是生死攸關的大事了。總之，這三個超級大國地大物博，資源豐富，於國內便可獲得滿足其所需的原材料供應。由某種意義上來說，戰爭僅剩下一個直接的經濟目的，即掠奪勞動力。在超級大國接壤的地方，存在著一個四邊形區域，即以摩洛哥的丹吉爾、剛果的布拉柴維爾、澳洲的達爾文、中國的香港為四個頂點的四方形。這個區域內，人口約占世界人口的五分之一，卻沒有哪個超級大國能一直將其獨佔。為了佔領人口稠密地區以及廣袤的北極區域，三個超級大國戰火不斷。可事實上，沒有哪個國家能完全統治這片爭議區域。四邊形內的某些區域經常易主，趁虛而入，撈取利益，無疑是三國縱橫捭闔的重要原因。

所有爭議區域，都蘊含著豐富的資源，有些區域是農產品的重要產地。且以橡膠而言，在寒冷區域合成橡膠，通常要比熱帶地區勞財費力。更重要的是，後一區域有著不可估量的廉價勞動力。如果哪個國家控制了近赤道的非洲地區，或是中東地區，或是南印度地區，再或是印度尼西亞群島，那麼，它也就控制了當地的苦力，這可是數以億計的價格低廉又肯賣力的勞動力。此間的土著居民，從某種意義上來說，已經公開地淪為奴隸，他們甚至被當作物品在佔領者間互相授受，他們像礦藏和石油一般被消耗著，為佔領者生產更多的軍備武器。多佔領土地，多控制勞動力，然後再生產更多的軍備武器，佔領更多的土地，如此反覆，永無休止。顯然，戰爭從未離開過爭議地區。歐亞國的邊境線，總是在剛果盆地與地中海北岸間來回移動；印度洋群島以及太平洋地區的歸屬，也總是在大洋國和東亞國的角力中不斷交替；歐亞國與東亞國在蒙古地區的分界線，向來就沒有安寧過；最為複雜的地區，莫過於北極，三國都宣稱自己對該地區享有無可爭議的主權，然而實際上，這裡大部分都是無人居住和尚未開發的荒涼之地。不過，總而言之，三個超級大國的力量保持著相對平衡，互相牽制，因此，任何一國的中心區域都未曾有過被他國入侵的事情。此外，實際上赤道附近地區的勞動力也並非推動全球經濟增長的必然條件，其對世界財富的增長沒有任何裨益，因為無論他們創造出多少物質財富，最終都要被投諸戰爭，而發動戰爭的目的，無非是佔據有利位置，伺機發動下一場戰爭。所以說，那裡的勞動力數量只能一再加快戰火重燃的頻率。但是，設想一下，假如他們不曾存在，那整個社會的結構以及維繫社會結構穩定的方式，亦不見得有何不同。

現代戰爭的主要目標（按照雙重思想之基本原則，這一目標既被內黨高層認可，又被其所否定），就是在未提高人民整體生活水平的情況下，耗光機器生產的所有產品。殆自19世紀末期，如何處理過剩產品，便己成為掩埋在工業社會的定時炸彈。今時今日，可能只有少數人得以果腹，所以不會有這類問題；或許假設一下，既已發生的人為破壞活動沒有取得成效，所以也不會有什麼問題。與1914年以前的社會相比，現今的世界，就是一個赤裸裸的、充滿飢餓的、腐朽不堪的社會。當然，如果和人們所期冀的本不存在的未來相比的話，現如今的社會便顯得更加噁心。在20世紀初期，未來世界的藍圖無疑是美好、安逸、秩序井然、高效率的。幾乎每個受過教育的人，都會認為未來世界應該是一個由玻璃、鋼筋、混凝土構成的晶瑩剔透、光彩奪目的世界。科學技術以前所未有之速度向前發展，他們想當然地認為，自身也能夠獲得全面、持續的發展，享受發展所帶來的生活富足。然而，此一切不過是海市蜃樓、肥皂泡沫而已。因為，一方面，無休止的戰爭以及革命導致貧困日復一日加劇；另一方面，科學技術發展需依賴於經驗積累，而此一條件，在一個管制森嚴的社會裡是不可能實現的。如今的社會文明，甚至比五十年前還要落後。雖說有些落後產業確實獲得了長足發展，但一定程度上來說，這是經戰爭及警察間諜等特殊需要刺激而產生的結果，雖然這些產業發展顯著，但是實驗發明卻在極大程度上停滯了。50年代原子彈爆炸所留下的殘跡，至今尚未完全復原，此戰爭技術如此進步，但機器裡的設計瑕疵卻依然存在，從未得到妥善的解決。自打機器問世起，那些有遠見的人便清清楚楚地告訴大家，其是用來代替人類勞動的，因此，機器的產生將在很大程度上促進人與人之間的平等。而事實上，之前的美好願望，一個都沒能實現。倘若機器果真如預想的那樣投入使用，不消幾代人的時間，則一定可以把飢餓、勞累、污穢、文盲以及疾病一一消滅。雖然機器並沒有被用在這上面，但在19世紀末到20世紀初的50年，由於某種自發機制的存在，不斷增長的財富確實分配到了普通人手中，由此言之，機器的存在也確乎增加了普通民眾的福祉。

但還有一件事情我們同樣清楚，財富的全面增長，破壞了——從某種意義上講，的確是破壞 —— 社會的等級結構。假如在這個世界上，人人盡可通過短時間的工作，過上不愁吃穿的日子，住在有浴室、冰箱的大房子裡，擁有私人小汽車乃至私人飛機，那麼，社會上最顯而易見且最重要的社會現象 —— 不平等，將會消失不見。一旦財富惠及眾人，那麼，他們彼此也就沒必要非得分出三六九等來了。當然，你腦海中可能會聯想及這樣一個社會，就個人財富及奢侈品來說，財富是平均分配的，然而，權利卻保留在一小部分特權階層手中。而實地裡，這樣的社會是沒法長治久安的。因為，一旦人們享受到生活的安逸和富足，那麼，之前因貧窮而愚昧的一大部分人便會轉而去學習知識，開始思考，且一旦他們這麼做了，便遲早會察覺到，少數特權階層乃是禍國殃民的廢物，緊接著，他們就會盡力將此等渣滓清除掉。由此觀之，等級社會是存續在貧窮及無知的基礎上的。20世紀初，有些思想家曾夢想回到過去的農業經濟時代，然而，這實在是有意躲避矛盾的無用之舉，更何況，這種想法和當前的工業化趨勢背道而馳。在如今的全球範圍內，工業化早已深入人心，甚至已經成為社會發展的本能選擇。此外，如果一個國家的工業化程度較低下，那麼它在軍事上也不可能有話語權，必然為其他先進國家直接或間接地左右。

然而，通過控制商品產出，讓廣大民眾繼續深陷於貧困的泥潭，實在並非解決問題的理想之法。粗略地估算一下，在1920至1940年的20年裡，亦即後資本時期，此種做法曾被大範圍地推行。許多國家聽任經濟停滯，致使土地荒蕪，設備資本投入中斷，大批工人失業，靠著國家救濟勉強過活。與此同時，經濟的蕭條又造成了軍事的羸弱。因此，當局對經濟發展不管不顧以陷民眾於貧困的做法顯然不妥，也勢必會招致他們的反對。如今，當局面臨的問題，是如何在不增加整個社會實際財富的前提下，又讓經濟發展的車輪滾滾向前。產品是一定要生產的，但決不容許分配給民眾，實際上，要想達到此目的，唯一可行的方法便是無休止地征戰了。

戰爭的本質就是毀滅。這毀滅的目標，未必是人的生命，而是人的勞動成果。戰爭就是要將人們的生活必需品炸得粉碎，讓毀滅的氣味瀰漫於天空，漂浮於深海。因為豐裕的物質供給，會讓民眾生活得太過安逸，且從長期來看，也會讓他們變得越發聰明。即便在戰爭中，武器裝備很少遭到破壞，然而生產武器的機器卻一直隆隆運轉，從未間斷，因為這樣既可以消耗掉勞動力，又可以有效抑制消費品的產出水平。且以浮動堡壘言之，建造它所需要的勞動力足可以建造上百艘貨輪。而事情還不止如此，這些浮動堡壘最終的命運就是報廢，可以說，這樣的工程不能給民眾帶來一點點物質上的好處。儘管如此，勞民傷財的事情還會繼續，還有新的浮動堡壘需要建設，還要有更多的勞動力投入其中。一般而言，戰爭的計劃通常會如此達成，即在滿足民眾基本生活需要後，耗光所有剩餘產品。而實際上，民眾的基本生活需要總是被低估的，有接近一半的生活必需品長期匱乏，但是對於那些特權階層來說，這卻是一件天大的好事。想必，如此的制度安排讓特權階層煞費苦心，因為只有普遍匱乏的狀態才能凸顯特權的重要性，哪怕是極其微小的權力。這樣，也就越發能誇大一個群體之於另一個群體的尊貴程度。參照20世紀初期的必需品供給標準，即便你是一個內黨黨員，也要過著簡樸、操勞的生活。不過，他們也有幾樣拿得出手的奢侈品，比如可以住在寬敞明亮、設備齊全的宿舍，穿著用料考究的衣服，享用上好的飯食，消費尚算體面的酒水和香煙，配備兩三個僕人，甚至還會擁有自己的小汽車或是飛機，總之，會讓他們置身於一個完全不同於外黨黨員的世界。而較之生活於水深火熱之中的民眾，外黨黨員的生活，還是要比這些所謂「無產者」體面得多。現今的社會，是等級森嚴的鐵扳一塊，甚至連能否得到一塊馬肉，都可以作為貧富貴賤的判斷標準。與此同時，忌憚於戰爭和危險，人們將全部權力移交給一個小階層，便成為為了活命再自然不過卻又不得不如此的選擇。

如我們所見，戰爭很好地完成了其毀滅使命，而且，這種毀滅方式從心理角度而言是不難接受的。一般來說，消耗掉世間剩餘的勞動力的確不算什麼難事，大可以讓他們去修建廟宇或金字塔，或者挖個大坑然後再將其填平，或者開動馬達恢復產能，生產出大批商品，然後付之一炬，然而，這樣做卻僅僅能夠維繫等級社會的經濟基礎，維繫不了感情基礎。當然，他們大可不必顧及民眾的情緒，只要這些勞動力能夠安心工作，持何種態度皆不重要，他們只需要顧及黨員的情緒。即便是最基層的黨員，也要具備勝任工作的能力，也需要具有勤勉的品格，且在合理的極小的限度內，還要足夠聰明。但是，光是如此還不夠，蒙昧地輕信與盲從也是極為必要的。他們需要此等人，需要黨員有恐懼、仇恨、阿諛奉承，以及欣喜若狂的情緒。換言之，有一種戰時的情緒，是極為必要的。戰爭是否真的在進行之中，這不重要，戰爭能否取得決定性的勝利，也不重要，會在乎這些！真正重要的，是一種持續存在的戰時狀態。黨之於其黨員的要求，是心智的分裂，這種狀態在戰爭氣氛的渲染下很容易實現，如今它對於黨員個體而言，簡直就是小菜一碟，對於黨內職務高級的黨員而言，這種情況就更明顯了。確切地說，戰爭癔病以及仇敵情緒，在內黨成員身上表現得最為強烈。尤其是對內黨高層人士而言，在知道這條或那條戰爭新聞是虛構出來的同時，在明白整個戰爭是偽造出來的、壓根兒就沒有發生過的同時，在清楚戰爭的目的完全不是事先所宣揚的那樣的同時，他需要動用雙重思想，來消除上述這些認識。此時，任何一個黨員都應不假思索地相信，戰爭是真實存在的，且戰爭終究會取得勝利。毋庸置疑，大洋國將是這個世界的主宰。

所有內黨成員，都要把即將到來的勝利當做顛撲不滅的人生信條。勝利一定會實現，只要一步一步地擴張領土，只要積聚起壓倒性的優勢力量，只要發明某種新式的無敵武器。為此，新式武器的研製一定要鍥而不捨地堅持下去，凡是有創造性思維或是喜歡探索的人，都該為其過剩的智力尋找一條出路，這是為數不多的僅存的活動之一。在如今的大洋國，舊式科學早已不見蹤影，新語詞彙乾脆取締了「科學」這個詞語。因為過去的科學成果，是建立在經驗的思維方式基礎上的，而這種思維方式恰好與英社的基本原則勢不兩立。即便真的有科學進步成果投入使用，那也是用在了限制民眾自由上面。在實用技藝領域，科學要麼是停滯不前，要麼就是開倒車，土地由馬拉犁耕種，書籍卻用機器來寫。但是，就至關重要的事情——戰爭及警察間諜活動——而言，實際上，經驗的思維方式是被鼓勵的，或者至少是黨所許可的。黨的目的有兩個，一是征服整個地球，一是杜絕獨立思考。因此，它也面臨兩個亟待解決的問題：一是窺伺人們有悖於它的所思所想；一是在不動聲色的情況下，讓幾億人瞬間蒸發。倘若說還有什麼科學研究在繼續進行的話，那麼，這便是目前科學研究的主要課題。如今的科學家，要麼是心理學家與刑訊官結合的怪胎，他們善於從細微處洞察人們的面部表情、手勢以及聲調背後所隱藏的真實意圖，也樂於驗證測謊藥物、震盪療法、催眠、嚴刑拷打的逼供效果；要麼就是集化學家、物理學家與生物學家於一身的劊子手，只關心與殺人奪命相關的研究課題。在和平部的大實驗室內，在巴西雨林深處的試驗站裡，在澳大利亞的沙漠中，或是在南極洲人跡罕至的荒島上，有一支支專家隊伍在夜以繼日、不知疲倦地工作著。有的專家在制定與未來戰爭相關的作戰計劃；有的在設計型號越來越大的火箭彈、越來越有殺傷力的炸藥、越來越難以打穿的鋼板；有的在研發新型的致命毒氣，可以讓地球上的植物瞬間死掉的可溶性毒藥，或是繁殖讓所有抗體失靈的病毒細菌；有的在研製一種新型裝備，可以遁行於地下，像潛水艇游弋於深海一樣，或是研製能在空中懸停的飛機，好比船停在水中；有的則在探尋太空數千公里之外，架設透鏡反射台聚焦太陽光線以用於戰爭的可能性，或是探尋通過深入地心，人為製造地震和海嘯的可能性。

但是，這一切尚都停留在想像之中，幾乎沒有一項研究即將完成。三個超級大國中的任何一方，都不曾聚積起領先其他兩方的壓倒性力量。不過，毋庸置疑的是，三個超級大國都擁有原子彈，這是比現在任何潛在發明都具有殺傷力的武器。儘管黨一貫聲稱，原子彈是它發明的，但事實上，其於1940年以前便已經存在了，雖然其首次大規模使用是在1950年前後。彼時，有數百枚原子彈投在了歐俄、西歐以及北美的工業中心。原子彈的投放，讓各國的統治階層深信，再有幾顆這樣的炸彈便足可以毀滅整個世界，當然，隨之一起毀滅的還有他們的特權世界。自此以後，雖然各方沒有訂立正式或秘密的協議，但原子彈一直沒有被再投放過。於是，三個超級大國繼續生產原子彈，將其囤積起來，等待決定性時刻的到來，他們深信，這個時刻遲早會來。與此同時，三四十年內，戰爭裝備似乎也沒有什麼長足發展。直升飛機比以前得到了更為廣泛的應用，轟炸機大都被自動投彈器所取代，既笨拙又脆弱的戰艦也被幾乎不會沉淪的浮動堡壘所取代，除此而外，就再無半點進步可言了。坦克、潛艇、魚雷、機關鎗甚至是步槍和手榴彈，都在使用之中。雖然無休止的殺戮常見諸報端或是電屏之中，然而像戰爭早期那種孤注一擲的、一周間動輒就有數十萬乃至數百萬人喪命的戰爭，再也見不到了。

三個超級大國均不認為，自己會被擊潰滅亡。倘若真的有大行動的話，恐怕也就只有對盟國的突然襲擊了。三國所採取的策略，或是假裝採取的策略，都是相同的，即綜合運用武力爭鬥、談判，把握時機反戈一擊，獲取一系列基地，然後把敵國戰略性地完全圍起，再然後擺出一副友好的姿態簽訂和平協議，保持幾年和平光景，藉此以麻痺敵國。與此同時，裝置原子彈的火箭會架在所有戰略據點，最後萬箭齊發，一陣火拚之後讓對方遭受毀滅性的打擊，喪失還手之力。不用說，這種想法簡直是白日做夢，根本無從實現。況且，除了在赤道或是兩極地區以外，各方從未將戰火蔓延及他處，對敵國領土也從未有過侵犯。這也剛好可以解釋，為什麼超級大國間的某些邊界會如此任意地劃定。比如，歐亞國完全可以不費吹灰之力佔領不列顛島，因為由地緣上來講，這是歐洲的一部分，再如，大洋國也可以把邊界隨意推進到萊茵河乃至於維斯瓦河畔。但是，這類行為從某種程度上來講，是違反各方一致奉行的文化完整性規定的，雖然這種規定從來都是不成文的。假使，大洋國佔領了過去曾被稱為法國或是德國的土地，那麼就有必要消滅掉那裡的土著居民，這是一項極具操作難度的任務，再或是將這上億的人口同化掉，而彼此的技術發展水平實在又不相上下。這個問題，對三個超級大國來說都是一樣的。就它們的社會結構而言，國民除了偶爾圍觀一下戰俘以及有色人種奴隸以外，是絕不容許跟外國人有任何接觸的，即便接觸到的是眼下的盟友，也要遭到嚴重懷疑。除了戰俘以外，大洋國的平民根本不敢朝歐亞國人或是東亞國人看一眼,政府更不准他們學習外國語言。因為倘若有機會接觸外國人，你便會發現，他們也是和自己幾乎一模一樣的人，便會發覺之前被灌輸的關於外國人的說法全都是謊言。倘若這樣，他所生存的封閉世界就會毀掉，寄托於其精神的恐懼、仇恨及偽善，也會隨之化為烏有。因此，三個超級大國都已意識到，雖然諸如波斯、埃及、爪哇、錫蘭等地經常易主，但除了扔上幾顆炸彈以外，彼此的主要疆界誰也不敢貿然越過。

除了文化完整性原則以外，還有一個從未公開聲明的事實，但背地裡，大家都心照不宣，那就是三個超級大國的生活狀況都是大同小異。大洋國流行的哲學信條稱作「英社」，歐亞國的信條稱作「新布爾什維克」，東亞國的信條是一個中文稱謂，可譯作「死亡崇拜」，不過譯成「自我滅亡」會更確切一些。大洋國的民眾，是不准知曉另外兩個國家的哲學信條的，他們為政府所教唆，去斥責另外兩國在道德及常識上的野蠻行徑。實際上，此三種哲學思想並無明顯不同，各自支撐的社會制度也半斤八兩。不管在哪一個國家，都是相同的金字塔式社會結構，都存在著對領袖瘋狂盲目的崇拜，都有著依托於戰爭又服務於戰爭的經濟發展模式。由此可以看出：任何一個超級大國，都不可能侵佔其他兩者，這樣做也毫無益處。相反，這三個超級大國像三腳架一般，在鬥爭中共存。另外兩個超級大國的統治階層也像大洋國一樣，既對所有事情洞如觀火，又好像一無所知。他們畢生致力於征戰，然而心裡也清楚，戰火不斷是國家存續下去的必要手段，只需要進行下去，不需要什麼勝利。與此同時，既然沒有被征服的危險，那就大有機會歪曲事實，這恰恰是英社理論及其他兩國哲學信條最為顯著的特徵。在此，有必要重提前面講到的一點，即無休止的征戰從根本上改變了戰爭的性質。

回顧歷史，戰爭之所以為戰爭，是因為我們可以清楚地知曉，它遲早會有結束的一日，只不過是結果不同，或勝或敗。在過去，戰爭是人類社會接觸現實世界的主要途徑。不可否認，任何時代的統治者，都試圖將錯誤的世界觀強加於其臣民，但如果這種錯誤的世界觀可能損害軍事效率，他們便不會鼓勵。因為，戰敗意味著喪失獨立，當然也可能導致其他不願意看到的結果，因此，對戰敗的考量與提防，是一件極為嚴肅且認真的事情。他們對事實不可能視而不見。就哲學、宗教、倫理或是政治方面而言，2加2等於5是可說可信的，但具體到槍支或是飛機等實物，2加2只能等於4。國家的低效率勢必導致國土的淪喪，為提高國家效率就該摒棄錯誤觀念。此外，以史為鑒，可以讓人清楚地明白，提高國家效率的是多麼的必要。通常，歷史會相對準確地告訴我們過去到底發生了什麼，我們可從中汲取經驗。當然，報紙和歷史教科書有時可能會戴著有色眼鏡看待問題，但其記載依然有一定的參考價值。較之如今，過去這般公然地篡改歷史。可以說，戰爭是保持神志清醒的安全保障，就統治階層而言，戰爭可謂最為重要的安全保障。不管戰爭結果如何，或勝或敗，統治階層都不可能推卸其責任。

但是，假如戰爭真的永遠繼續下去，便不會有危險性可言，更無所謂必要性了，如此，科技進步便可以名正言順地停止，甚至，一些極易被民眾發現馬腳的事情，他們也可以矢口否認或是視而不見了。正如我們前面提到的那樣，那些科學研究（勉強稱之）藉著戰爭之名依然如火如荼地進行著。不過就本質而言，這充其量算是白日做夢，因為研究有無結果毫不重要了。效率，甚至是軍事效率，現如今也變得不再是必需的了。在大洋國，除了思想警察外，簡直無甚效率可言。由於三個超級大國中的任何一個都是不可戰勝的，實際上，每個國家都成了一個獨立個體，由此，你可以肆無忌憚地去散佈歪理邪說，而不必擔心遭到敵國或是盟國的駁斥。現實只能通過日常起居對你產生壓力——畢竟你要吃飯喝水，要有棲身之所，要穿衣，要警惕誤食毒藥，也要提防不小心從高樓的窗子跌出去。在生與死之間，在物質歡愉與心理病痛之間，還存在著明顯的差別，但是，這也就是當下的人們所能感受到的全部的差別了。斷絕與外界的聯繫後，當歷史被篡改而雙眼被蒙蔽，大洋國的民眾，此刻像是存在於遙遠宇宙空間內的太空人，分不出何處是南北，何處又是東西了。其統治者之專橫跋扈，連疇昔的埃及法老或凱撒都望塵莫及。他們不想讓眾多子民體面地活著，但也不想讓他們餓死，因為那樣會讓他們很被動，以致於出現不希望的不利局面；他們可以讓軍事技術在較低層次上停滯不前，只要水平和敵國不相上下；做到了這一點，他們便可以敢肆無忌憚地隨著自己的意思去扭曲事實。

如果我們以過去的標準來評判如今的戰爭，無疑它是一場騙局，是一個彌天大謊。簡直好比兩隻反芻動物之間的戰鬥，它們的犄角事先已轉向某個無害的角度，即便搏鬥場面轟轟烈烈，也難以弄傷彼此。如此的戰爭雖說是不真實的，虛張聲勢的，然而卻並非毫無意義的。至少，一方面它可以消耗掉所有的剩產品，另一方面，又能維持等級社會所需的的道德氛圍。戰爭，下文將會提及，不過是一場純粹的內耗而已。過去，任何一個國家的統治階層出於共同利益的考慮，即便兵戎相見，也不會過於殘酷無情，會盡力降低戰爭的破壞程度。他們那才是真的在打仗，而且，戰勝國一方也總是在向戰敗國一方索取利益。眼下我們所見的戰爭，敵人並不是外國，而是我們自己。戰爭的目的，也不是侵略與反侵略的關係，而是保持現有社會結構的完整性與統一性。因此「戰爭」這個詞會讓人產生誤解，與其說戰爭連綿不斷，不如說戰爭從來沒有發生，這樣或許更準確一些。自新石器時代以來至20世紀早期，曾帶給人類持續壓力的戰爭，已經悄然消失，甚至被一些截然不同的東西所代替。如果三個超級大國偃旗息鼓，釋甲牧馬，坐下來相安無事，各守疆土，結果又會怎樣呢？可以肯定地說，其後果與如今連綿不斷的戰爭並無分別。在此情況下，既然每個國家自成一體，自給自足，自然不希望受到外界危險侵擾，思想的任何波動都會威脅國家的安全。因此永久的和平無異於永遠的戰爭。這便是對黨的口號——「戰爭即和平」之內在涵義的精準詮釋，絕大多數黨員只是膚淺地理解這句話的含義，卻未必能知其深層內涵。

溫斯頓停止了閱讀，沉思片刻。遠處某個地方，傳來火箭彈爆炸的隆隆聲。此刻，洋溢在他內心深處的興奮還未消散，他極其享受手捧禁書、獨自躲在沒有電屏監視的房間裡盡情閱讀的感覺。與世隔絕的超然與安全，是他此刻的全部感覺。身體的綿綿倦意，躺在手扶椅上的鬆軟感覺，以及微風吹拂臉頰的愜意，讓他好不自在。這本書著實讓他著迷，更確切地說，這本書讓他更有信心。書裡並沒有什麼讓他感到新奇的東西，然而這正是讓他著迷的原因。因為書上寫的正是他的心聲，倘若他把腦中雜亂的思緒整理一番，結果便會是書上寫的這個樣子。寫這書的人，有著與自己相同的思想，只不過書中的論述更震撼人心，更為系統，更能讓人無所畏懼。在他看來，它之所以能被稱為好書，就在於它講出了自己心中想說卻沒說出來的話。他把書頁重新翻回到第一章時，聽到樓梯上傳來朱麗亞的腳步聲，他隨即從扶手椅裡起身，迎接她的到來。她把棕色的工具包甩在地板上，逕直鑽到溫斯頓懷裡。自上次一別，他們已經有一周多沒見了。

「我拿到那本書了。」在他們深情地擁抱過後，他鬆開手說道。

「噢，已經拿到了？不錯。」她似乎完全不感興趣，話音未落，她已經迫不及待地蹲在煤油爐旁準備煮咖啡了。

待他們在床上躺了半個小時之後，才又回到有關書的話題。今晚天氣有些涼爽，於是他們把床單扯起來蓋在身上。樓下，傳來他所熟悉的洗衣婦人的歌聲以及鞋子磨在石板上的擦擦聲。溫斯頓第一次來這裡時看到的那個挽著袖子袒露手臂的胖婦人，依然立在院子裡，她彷彿成了這裡經久不變的擺設了。她似乎整日一刻不停地在洗衣盆與晾衣線間奔波，此外，只要她拿去口中銜著的夾子空出嘴，便會引吭高歌起來。朱麗亞躺靠在床的一邊，昏昏欲睡。他伸手去夠放在地板上的那本書，靠著床頭板坐起身來。

「我們應該好好讀一下這本書，」他說，「你也應該讀一下，兄弟會的所有會員都應該讀一下的。」

「那你就讀吧，」她眼也不睜地說道，「你讀的時候聲音大一點兒，這是再好不過的閱讀方式了。順便，你還可以向我講解一番。」

老式掛鐘的指針，指向下午6點鐘，按現行的計時方式來看，應該是下午18點。他們在一起的時間還有三四個小時。他把書攤在膝蓋上，開始大聲朗讀：

第一章

無知即力量

觀諸人類有記載之歷史，可追溯至新石器時代，世界上有三種人：上等、中等和下等人。此三者又可以細分為多種人，稱謂隨著時代變遷而演化。每種人的相對人數，以及此一種人對彼一種人的態度，雖然因時代而異，但究其社會的基本結構，卻從未發生改變。儘管社會經歷重大變革，一切看似不可逆轉，其基本模式卻難有改變，且好比一隻陀螺儀，不管你如何推它，它終將歸於平衡。

「朱麗亞，你還醒著嗎？」溫斯頓問道。

「是的，親愛的，我在聽。你繼續，這本書簡直不可思議。」

於是他繼續讀道：

這三種人之根本矛盾，不可調和。上等人的奮鬥目標是維繫其在社會中的地位，中等人的奮鬥目標是取代上等人，而下等人的奮鬥目標是——倘若他們有目標的話，因為他們大部分時間都被苦役纏身，根本無暇顧及日常生活以外的事情——消除世間一切差別，創造一個人人平等的社會。縱觀人類歷史，軌跡大體相同的鬥爭，週而復始地發生著。長久以來，上等人樂享權力，高枕無憂，但遲早有一天他們會喪失信仰，或喪失有效掌控社會的能力，或是二者兼而有之。他們會被中等人推翻，其權力會被中等人廢黜，因為中等人精於煽動下等人的伎倆，把下等人拉到他們一邊，以自由平等之名，行陰謀竊權之實。一旦中等人的陰謀得逞，他便就會像之前的上等人一樣，將下等人重新踢回原來的被奴役的深淵，自己搖身一變成為新的上等人。屆時，又有一個中等人階層，從上等人和下等人階層分化出來，新一輪的奪權鬥爭過程便又開始反覆了。當然，在三個階層中，唯獨下等人沒有達成他們的目標，哪怕是短暫的成功也好，因此，他們所期望的人人平等的社會從末實現過。但若就此斷言，歷史中絕對找不到下等人的物質生活得到改善的痕跡，這話確實有些失實。因為，即便是在物質生活水平急劇下降的今日，普通民眾的生活水平，也遠遠好過幾個世紀之前。不過，財富的增加、當權者態度的改變、改革運動乃至於徹底革命，這些都未帶動人人平等的理念向前邁進半步。由下等人的角度觀之，其歷史地位從未發生過實質性的改變；歷史的變化，僅限於當權者名字的改變。

至19世紀晚期，這一週而復始的模式化改變已被歷史觀察者所窺破。再然後，不少歷史思想學派湧現，認為歷史演變是一個週期性的過程，他們認為不平等的社會現象是無法更改的人類社會法則。當然，持這種觀點的人自古就有，但現如今，從某種意義上來講，其表述方式已發生了重大的變化。過去，社會等級劃分純粹是為迎合上等人的統治需要，除了皇族貴胄大肆對之宣揚以外，寄生於政權之上的傳教士以及律師也奔走呼號，他們甚至以「倘若真心信服，來世天堂超度」之類的鬼話，來蠱惑人們接受它。再說中等人，過去他們出於陰謀奪權之目的，常常拋出「自由」「平等」「博愛」的口號。然而現如今，那些尚未掌權但又希望自己日後掌權的人，已經可以紛紛站出來公然抨擊「博愛」的觀念了。過去，中等人肩扛「平等」大旗舉事，待舊政權被推翻後，其轉而又建立起一個全新的、更為暴力的政權，玩弄著以暴易暴的把戲。因此，尤具諷刺意味的是，如今的中等人階層乾脆連這欺騙的環節也免掉了，在革命之初就悍然宣稱他們要建立一個以暴易暴的社會。社會主義理論出現在19世紀早期，其源起可追溯至古代的奴隸起義思想，深受往日烏托邦思想的影響。但是，細數社會主義理論在1900年以後的重大轉變，其繼承者們日漸摒棄了自由平等的觀念。進入20世紀中葉，伴隨著新的社會運動的興起，一些新的思想開始出現，比如大洋國之有英社主義，歐亞國之有新布爾什維克主義，東亞國之有死亡崇拜主義，它們都無一例外地在奮鬥目標中暴露出反自由、反平等的思想。當然，新興社會運動的思想，是從舊思想中衍生而來的，就其服務對像而言，二者都為意識形態服務，都將伺機阻撓歷史向前發展、冰封歷史真相，作為行事目標。歷史的變更，一如機械的鐘擺，在固定的空間內來回擺動。通常，上等人最終會淪落為中等人，而中等人則會搖身一變，成為上等人。然而，歷史的角色變換也並非一直如此，出於有意識的戰略考慮，上等人決心永久保持他們的統治地位。

新學說的產生，某種程度上是人們歷史知識積累以及歷史觀念增強的結果，這些在19世紀之前幾乎都是不存在的，且於當時的歷史背景下也是難以想像的。歷史的週期性運動規律是顯而易見的，至少看起來是這樣。既然能夠洞悉歷史，那麼就一定能改變歷史。當然，最為基本、最為重要的原因就是，在20世紀早期，人類追求自由平等已經有了技術上的可能。的確，人生來就是不平等的，各有所長，在整個社會範圍內，有些人能夠主動選擇自己喜歡的角色，而有些人只能被迫接受社會的安排。但是，階級差別實在沒有必要，貧富差距如此之大也沒有必要。在早先的年代裡，階級差別是必然的，亦是必要的，不平等是因社會文明局限而不得不付出的代價。但是，隨著機器大工業突飛猛進的發展，此種情況也隨之改變了。即便社會經濟發展方式決定了社會分工必然存在，然而同時，保有社會或經濟水平差距似乎已大可不必了。可是，從那些即將當權的人的觀點來看，追求人類的自由平等已然不是其理想了，反而成為威脅其政權穩定存續的危險因素。在絕大多數的早期社會裡，建立平等而又和平的世界，是每個人心中的美好夙願，儘管這在彼時的社會狀況下是不可能的，人們卻對此深信不疑。幾千年以來，人類嚮往一個彼此間如兄弟般友愛、沒有法律制約、不用像畜力般勞作的人間天堂。持此種想法的人大有人在，因為每一度歷史變革之時，他們都能從中撈到好處。法國革命、英國革命、美國革命的繼任者們，基本上都很認同關於天賦人權、言論自由、法律面前人人平等之類的學說，甚至在某種程度上，他們的行為也都深受其影響。但至於20世紀40年代，政治思想的主流就變成了獨裁主義，其出現之後，人間天堂的幻想也就不足為信了。其實，就每一種新興的政治理論而言，不管其作何稱謂，都無一例外地要將政治帶回到原來的等級與專制當中。大約在1930年前後，倒退的跡象明顯表現出來，許多早已被摒棄的做法，甚至是廢止了幾百年的做法，又死灰復燃，變得普遍起來。如不加審訊的監禁、將戰俘視作奴隸、公開處決、刑訊逼供、綁架人質、將大批人驅逐出境等。甚至，許多起初自稱具有遠見卓識、思想進步的人也容忍了這些做法，不作任何辯駁了。

在世界各地大規模地爆發國際戰爭、國內戰爭、革命與反革命戰爭的十年後，英社理論和其他兩個超級大國的理論，開始作為成熟的政治理論體系出現在世界上。這些理論集獨裁主義思想之大成，自本世紀早期便開始初露端倪，而且，從當時動亂的世界時局中，已經可以明顯看出這些思想的產生有其歷史必然性。當然，對於何人將主宰世界，同樣可以清晰預見。新的統治階層大部分將由官僚、科學家、技師、工會組織者、宣傳家、社會學家、教師、新聞記者以及專職政客構成。這些人，往往來源於工薪中產階級，或是勞動階層的精英人士，如今為中央集權政府及壟斷資本主義企業所收買，為新的政權效力。與以前的被其取代的統治階層人士相比，他們不會那麼貪得無厭，也不會輕易受到富貴蠱惑，但他們對權力的慾望，卻比其前任飢渴許多。總之，他們很清楚自己的定位，知道哪些事情該做，一心想著讓被他們踩在腳下的人永世不得翻身。當然還有一點分別，這也是最主要的，那就是與現在的暴政相比，以前的暴政顯然不夠徹底，對底層人的鎮壓根本就是三心二意，且毫無效果。過去的統治階層由於對自由思想耳濡目染，難免要受其影響，做什麼事情都留有餘地。他們只在乎公然的反抗，而對被統治者的作何思想則根本不感興趣。即便是中世紀的天主教廷，相較於現今標準而言，也是寬宏大量的。究其原因，很大程度上在於，過去政府無法將廣大民眾置於有效的監視之下。然而，印刷術的發明使得統治階層能夠輕易地操控所謂民意，而電影和無線電的出現，又讓政府對民眾的操控更進了一步。隨著電屏產業的發展以及技術的進步，在同一設備上接受信號並傳遞信號已變得稀鬆平常，自此，世界再無隱私可言。每位民眾，至少是需要「重點關照」的每一位民眾，每天24小時都將置身於警察的監視之下，或是淹沒於官方的宣傳報道之中，其他一切可與外界溝通的渠道一概被掐斷。可以說，電屏技術的出現，第一次使得民眾被迫完全順從國家的意志，而讓民眾意見達成驚人的一致也由此成為可能。

在經歷過20世紀五六十年代的革命之後，社會又像往常一樣分化為三種人，即上等人，中等人和下等人。與上任統治者所不同的是，新的上等人階層完全不是依直覺行事，他們已深諳保全統治地位之道。一直以來，他們都將寡頭集體主義奉為政權存續不倒的基石。當財富和權力為統治階層成員所共有後，他們可以很輕鬆地為自己辯護，如此一來，中等人和下等人就再也找不出質疑或反對的話柄了。20世紀中葉出現的所謂的「廢除私有制」運動，究其實質，不過是統治階層所玩弄的讓財富集中於更少數人手上的障眼法而已。論及二者的區別，原因恐怕在於新的財富所有者是一個群體，而之前的所有者，只是眾多分散的個體罷了。就個體而言，單個黨員除了一些零星的個人財產外，一無所有，就集體主義而言，黨則擁有大洋國的一切，可以隨心所欲地處置國內的一切產品。革命結束的幾年後，黨之所以順理成章地佔據了大洋國的統治地位，且沒有招致任何反對，全因為它把這個過程標榜為集體主義。假使資本家階層真的覆滅了，社會主義接踵而至，毫無疑問，他們的財產也會被剝奪。工廠、礦山、土地、房屋、運輸——所有的一切，都會從他們手中被接管過來，自此以後，這些便不再屬於私有財產範疇，而應該算作公共財產了。英社理論，誕生於早期的社會主義運動中，秉承這個運動的名詞術語，可以說是第一個踐行社會主義公有化的政權。而結果正如之前所預料和期望的那樣：經濟的不平等永久存續了下來。

然而，維持等級社會的長治久安也絕非易事。通常有四種可能會讓政權易主：一是被外國征服，二是上層統治無方導致民眾揭竿而起，三是強大而對現狀不滿的中等人階層嘩然思變，四是自身喪失繼續統治的信心和意願。一般而言，這四種可能都不是單獨發揮作用的，某種程度上，一個政權大廈的傾覆通常是以上四種因素綜合作用的結果。統治階層只有掌控這四種因素，方能確保權力的永久性。由此言之，最終起決定性作用的，還在於統治階層自身的心態。

本世紀中葉後，第一個風險已不復存在。三個超級大國將世界一分為三，任何一個國家，實際上都是不容侵犯和不可征服的，除非是通過人口的緩慢變化，但只要一國政府依然權力在握，這種變化也可以輕易避免。對於第二個風險，也僅存理論上的可能。民眾不會自發舉事造反，因為他們一直處於被鎮壓的狀態，絕無造反的機會。再者說，如果他們沒有可以參照的標準，他們甚至都不會意識到他們生活於專制的桎梏中。過去週期性爆發的經濟危機顯然已不再可能，而且，現在的政府也不會讓它輕易發生，但是其他的大範圍經濟衰退依然會發生，只不過不再會帶來任何政治後果而已。因為，民眾的不滿根本無從發洩。對於產品過剩的問題，它其實早在機器大工業起步發展之時，便已經潛伏在社會之中了。對此問題，無休止的征戰已經給予了解決（見第三章），當然那也是讓民眾情緒持續高漲的必要手段。在如今的當權者看來，他們真正的危險，來自於從原來階層分化出來的、經過重組而成的新生階層，他們有能力，但是未被重用，因此對權力的渴望極其強烈。另一個危險，則源於統治階層內部，自由主義及懷疑主義思想，已在其內部恣意蔓延開來。對於這個危險因素，從某種意義上來講，是一個教育問題，是對領導層以及人數眾多的執行層持續灌輸思想便可以解決的問題。至於群眾的思想覺悟，這根本不成問題，只需從反面誘導就可以了。

理解這一背景後，便不難推斷大洋國的整體社會結構，即便你之前對此一無所知。在金字塔式社會結構頂端的是老大哥，老大哥永不犯錯且無所不能，每一次成功，每一個成就，每一個勝利，每一個重大科學發現，所有知識，所有智慧，所有歡愉，所有美德，無不出自他的領導與感召。沒有人親眼見過老大哥，人們只可能在佈告欄或是電屏上看到他的音容笑貌，他永遠活著，卻鮮有人知道他生於何時。老大哥只不過是黨用來向世界昭示自己存在的提線木偶，其存在的意義，便在於充當愛情、恐懼、復仇等情感的焦點，因為這些情感以一個人為焦點，很容易感知得到，若換成一個組織，則很難被體會到。在金字塔式的社會結構中，老大哥下面恐怕就要數內黨了。內黨成員人數不會超過600萬，基本上佔大洋國人口的2%。在內黨以下，則是外黨。倘若將內黨比作國家機器的大腦，那麼外黨無疑更像是國家機器的雙手。外黨下面，是默不作聲的勞苦大眾，通常他們被稱為「無產者」，人數大概相當於全國人口的85%。在最初的金字塔式的社會等級結構中，無產者居於最底層，但由於赤道地區經常在你征我伐中易手，因此，此間的被奴役人口通常是作為社會等級結構中的非必要組成部分而存在的。

一般而言，這三類人的身份不是世襲的。從理論上講，父母是內黨成員，他們的孩子卻未必就一定是內黨成員，因為無論是加入內黨還是加入外黨，都要經歷嚴格的遴選，且要等到他16歲時，才有資格提出入黨申請。通常，黨對黨員的出身沒有種族上的歧視，亦沒有地域上的限制。黨的高層領導不乏猶太人、黑人以及純印第安血統的南美洲人，且每個地方的行政長官，都是從當地選拔出來的。因此，大洋國的民眾並不會覺得自身處於殖民統治之下，也不會覺得是有人從相距甚遠的首都發號施令。大洋國沒有首都，其首腦僅僅停留在名義層面，沒有人知道他們的行蹤動向。除了作為其主要語言的英語和作為其官方語言的新語外，它沒有其他統一人心的工具。總之，大洋國的統治，是靠信仰來維繫的，而非血統。固然，大洋國是等級社會，等級森嚴之程度令人咂舌，乍看起來，就像是靠世襲血統來安排的。不同階層之間鮮有人員的流動，相比於資本主義時代或是前大工業時代，目前人口的流動方式確實有些特別，內黨與外黨之間的人員交換並不常見。黨出於長久存續的考慮，有些人確實不宜繼續留在內黨，因此有必要讓雄心勃勃的外黨黨員取而代之，但有一個前提，那便是外黨成員可以向上爬，但不可以危害國家。實際上，無產者基本沒有機會進入黨員隊伍，他們中的精英人士可能會成為不滿人群的領導核心，但黨絕不會將他們吸收進來，而是假思想警察之手讓他們徹底從人間蒸發。但也並非事事盡然，這不是處理此類事情的唯一準則。如今的黨，已不同於過去意義上的黨，它不會將權力世襲給後代，倘若黨內沒有才能出眾的人脫穎而出，它也完全樂於從無產者階層中挑選能擔此經理邦國大任的繼任者。在黨上台執政的關鍵時期，這種非世襲制的政權交接方式，確實一定程度上削弱了民眾的反抗情緒。老一輩的社會主義者被灌輸過這樣一種思想，即要與「階級特權」抗爭到底，凡不是世襲的東西就該長期永存。然而他們沒有想到，寡頭集體主義政體的延續並非依賴於自然人，也沒有想到，世襲政體一向是短命的，反而像天主教那樣的選任組織，卻能存續數百年乃至千年。寡頭集體主義政體的實質，不是父業子承的世襲，而是特定世界觀與生活方式的傳承與延續，由死人傳至活人。統治階層之所以是統治階層，便因為只要它指定繼任者，政權就可以延續。黨所在意的不是血統在政治上的維繫，而是黨本身的存在。由誰掌權並不重要，重要的是，保持社會等級制度始終如一。

反映時代特徵的所有信念、習慣、趣味、感情、思想狀態，無非都是為了保持黨的神秘，謹防民眾參透當前社會的真正本質。實地意義上的起義，以及為謀劃起義而做的準備工作，如今看來，都是不太現實的。至少，統治階層不必對無產者過分恐懼。如果你不去招惹他們，他們會一代又一代、一個世紀又一個世紀地勞作不止，繁衍生息，然後死去，全然沒有造反的衝動，也沒有瞭解一個全新世界的能力。只有當工業技術進步賦予其更多的受教育機會時，他們才會真正變得令人恐懼。但是，由於軍事對抗及商業競爭已不再重要，實際上，人們的受教育水平是走下坡路的。不管民眾怎麼想，或者是什麼都不想，都已經無關緊要了。於是，統治階層想當然地認為，無產者既然沒有理解力，不妨就給他們思想自由。但是，對黨員，他們眼裡卻揉不得一粒沙子，即便是他們對無關緊要的問題發表一些無足輕重的看法，也是不能容忍的。

黨員從生至死，都在思想警察的監視下，即便獨處一隅，也不能確定在場的只有自己。不管身在何地，睡覺或是醒著，工作或是休息，洗澡或是躺在床上，他都有可能受到監視。事前沒有警示，事後也無從察覺。沒有一件事情，能夠逃過思想警察的眼睛。與朋友的交際，自娛自樂的消遣方式，在妻兒面前的舉手投足，隻身一人時臉上顯露的表情，睡覺時的囈語，乃至於身體習慣性的動作，都可能引起監視者的猜疑。自身的行為不端以及怪癖自然更是逃不掉監視，任何心理活動，哪怕是習慣的微小變化，緊張的神情，都可能盡收別人的眼底。何去何從，亦毫無選擇的自由，不管通常黨員的行為並不受法律的約束。大洋國自始至終，就沒有法律。某些思想和行為一經查實，便意味著當事者已離死亡不遠。無休止的清洗、逮捕、刑訊逼供、監禁以及蒸發，並非是對他所犯罪過的懲罰，而是清除一個人的方法，即便他現在什麼罪也沒犯，他們也是以其人將來可能會犯的罪行來懲處他的。一名合格的黨員不單要有正確的思想，同時還要有敏銳的直覺。黨要求黨員秉承的眾多信念及態度，不會直截了當地說出來，因為一旦說得太直白，就會讓暗含在英社理論中的自相矛盾之處徹底暴露在公眾面前。假如黨員的思想足夠正統（用新語來講，即「好思想者」），那麼不論何種情況，他心裡都會清楚什麼是真正的信仰，什麼是真正需要的情感。如果一個人自孩提時就接受精心準備的精神訓練，整日接觸新語裡稱為「犯罪停止」「黑白」「雙重思想」之類的教條，那麼，他肯定不願意也不能夠對事情本身進行深刻的思考。

作為一名黨員，應該摒棄一切個人情感，對於革命的熱情不能有絲毫懈怠。他應該始終生活於對外侮內敵極度仇視、對勝利歡呼雀躍、對黨的英明神武五體投地的精神狂熱之中。任何因生活乏味引發的不滿，都可以通過「兩分鐘仇恨節目」發洩出來。任何懷疑或是造反的想法，都應該通過早期接受的心理訓練提前消除掉。在訓練過程中，第一階段也是內容最為簡單易學的階段，用新語叫做「犯罪停止」，連小孩子也一學就會。「犯罪停止」，是指在危險念頭蠢蠢欲動的一剎那，本能地懸崖勒馬的能力。其包括不以相互比較的方式去認識事物，不對邏輯上的錯誤究根問底，將與英社原則相悖的、哪怕是極為簡單的爭論有意曲解，自覺摒棄一系列可能會引導自己走向異端的思想。總之，「犯罪停止」便是極具自我保護意識地裝聾賣傻。但是只有裝聾賣傻還不夠，因為完整的正統思想還包含這樣一層意思，即一個人控制自己的思想，要像體操運動員控制自己的身體彎曲一樣自如。大洋國的立國之本，在於始終秉持「老大哥是無所不能的，黨是絕對可靠的」這一思想，但實際上，老大哥並非無所不能，黨也並非絕對可靠，因此黨員在看待任何事情時，都應時刻保持伸縮性，不能太過絕對。由此，「黑白」思想應運而生。和其他新語詞彙一樣，「黑白」這個詞也有兩層自相矛盾的意思：用在對手身上時，便是指責對手顛倒黑白、混淆是非、不顧事實的意思；用在黨員身上時，便意味著對黨的忠貞不二，在黨需要時他們寧可把黑說成白。這也意味著，黨員應該有相信黑即是白的能力，承認黑就是白的事實，忘記黑白相對的本來記憶。要做到黑就是白，就需要連續不斷地篡改歷史，而要篡改歷史，只有用那種囊括一切的思想方法才能辦到，這便是眾人皆知的「雙重思想」。

篡改歷史的必要性可歸納為兩點：一是輔助性原因，也可以說成是出於防範目的。輔助性原因是指黨員之所以和無產者一樣能夠逆來順受，很大程度上，是因為他們同樣沒有比較的標準。為了讓黨員相信他比祖先過得好，物質生活水平顯著提高，就必須使之與歷史隔絕，就如同他和國外隔絕一樣，讓他找不到可以參照的標準。此外，黨篡改歷史更重要的原因，在於滿足黨捍衛自身絕對正確形象的需要。這便需要讓演講稿、統計數字、各式記錄時刻與黨的需求保持一致，永遠不過時，從而蒙蔽民眾，讓他們相信，黨的言論無論什麼時候都是絕對正確的。同時，也不能承認在理論上或是政治敵友關係上有任何改變。因為一旦改變自己的想法，或是改變政策的走向，就等於將自己的弱點明顯地暴露於公眾面前。例如，歐亞國——或東亞國——是大洋國現在的敵人，那麼它就一直是大洋國的敵人。倘若事實與先前大洋國宣稱的不一致，那麼事實就必須做出改變。因此，歷史在這樣的思想指引下就必須不斷地改寫。由真理部主導的篡改歷史的工作，如同仁愛部負責的鎮壓以及刺探工作一樣，成為維持大洋國政權長期穩定的不可或缺的一部分。

篡改歷史是英社理論的核心原則。這一原則認為，歷史事實並非是客觀存在的，它只存在於書寫的記錄中以及人類的記憶中。因此只要記錄與記憶一致，便可稱之為歷史。由於黨完全掌控著記錄以及黨員的思想，這就意味著黨會牽著歷史的鼻子走，黨需要什麼樣的歷史，歷史就會變成什麼樣子。同時，這也意味著即便歷史是經過篡改的，他們也從來不會承認自己做過手腳。因為出於實際需要他們會篡改歷史，但是篡改過後，先前的篡改就會成為歷史，而既然他們不承認歷史，那也就是說任何不同樣子的歷史從未存在過。一件事情可能在一年內被篡改過好幾次，甚至到了面目全非的地步，但是他們絕不會承認。一直以來，黨都宣稱它掌握著絕對真理，但明眼人一下子就能看出，絕對的真理不可能朝令夕改，其也不可能絕對到與現實迥然相異的程度。下文將會提到，對歷史的掌控是建立在對記憶力掌控的基礎之上的。確保書面記錄與正統思想的高度統一，的確是一項機械的差事，除了必要的篡改技能外，你還應將不該記住的東西忘記。如果有必要改變一個人的記憶，或是有必要篡改記錄，那麼，同樣也有必要忘掉自己先前所篡改過的東西。這種自欺欺人的把戲，較之其他思想控制方面的技術，並不難掌握。想必絕大多數黨員都深諳此道，那些既正統又聰明的人都悉數知曉。坦率地講，舊語裡稱篡改歷史為「現實控制」，而在新語裡這叫「雙重思想」。除此而外，「雙重思想」還被賦予了更豐富的涵義。

「雙重思想」，是指一個人的思想中同時存在著相互矛盾的觀點但又對之全都接受的一種認知模式。黨的知識分子知道，自己的記憶該朝什麼方向改變，也知道自己在篡改歷史，但在運用雙重思想之後，他會欣然聲稱歷史其實並未發生偏離。他清楚篡改歷史的過程其實是自覺的，否則就不能保證完全精確，但這個過程同時又是不自覺的，否則便會為偽造歷史而心存愧疚。雙重思想是英社理論的核心思想，因為黨的核心工作，就是借完全誠信可靠之名行有意欺騙之實，而黨不但不覺羞愧，反而表現得異常堅定。黨總是處心積慮地編造謊言，並表現出對之深信不疑的態度。它會把歷史事實遠遠地丟在一邊，也會將它從被遺忘的角落裡撿回來，這樣做，並不是因為黨承認客觀事實的存在，而僅僅是出於自身需要的考慮。黨總是在否定客觀事實的存在，也總是將已被它否定的事實重新搬出來，佐證其言論的真實可靠——所有這一切都是絕對必要的。甚至，在使用雙重思想這個字眼時，也有必要用雙重思想的思維模式加以看待。因為當他使用這個字眼時，他心如明鏡，知道自己正在幹著篡改歷史的勾當，但當他用雙重思想重新考量一番，之前的負罪感就會瞬間消散；如此反覆，無休無止。黨總是讓謊言的那一重，優先於真理的那一重前面。最終的結果將會是，正如我們所知曉的那樣，黨可以借助雙重思想綁架歷史，這種狀況完全可以持續下去幾千年。

過去的所有寡頭政體喪失權力，或許是因為當權階層故步自封，或許是因為統治政策過於軟弱。所謂故步自封，是指他們變得愚昧、傲慢，根本不能審時度勢地適應歷史形勢的改變，以致政權最後被被統治階層推翻；所謂軟弱，是指他們過於放縱自由主義，做起事來膽小怕事，本該對民眾動用武力，卻一再退縮，結果依舊逃脫不掉被推翻的命運。這就是說，他們之所以倒台，要麼出於自覺，要麼出於不自覺。為了不重蹈這一的覆轍，黨創造性地建立了雙重思想的思想體系，讓兩種狀況同時共存，不至於顧此失彼。黨僅僅依靠雙重思想，無需其他思想基礎，便可以讓統治永久存續。如果黨要統治，或者想要進一步維持統治，那麼它就必須先把「現實」這潭水攪渾。因為黨的秘密統治絕學，就是讓民眾信其無所不能又絕對可靠，不給民眾留下一絲汲取歷史經驗的餘地。

不用說，將雙重思想運用到極致的人，恰恰是那些發明雙重思想且深知自己在進行一系列有預謀的精神欺騙的人。在我們現今的社會，對實際情況最瞭如指掌的人，恰恰是那些背離實際看待世界的人。一般而言，他們對世界認識得越透徹，對民眾的欺騙與蠱惑就越多，他們顯得越聰明，做起事來便也越不靠譜。這一點，有一個事實可以清楚地說明：你在社會中地位越高，所知道的歇斯底里的戰爭也就越多。對於戰爭的態度，恐怕只有爭議區域的人群才算是近乎理性的。對於這群人而言，戰爭所帶來的災難，就像潮水漫過身體又退去，轉而又席捲過來。他們根本不會關心勝負的結果，也不想知道到底鹿死誰手。他們心裡清楚，政權的更替無關乎他們的福祉以及社會地位的改變，他們依然要為新的主子做牛做馬，單就這一點來說，這與舊制度下的生活境況毫無二致。那些略受優待的工人，我們稱其為「無產者」，也僅僅是間歇性地關注戰爭的進行。如果有必要，他們可以表現出恐懼與仇恨的狂熱，但如果無人脅迫，他們可以很長時間都對戰爭不聞不問。只有在黨內，尤其是內黨，才可以發現真正對戰爭的狂熱。堅信大洋國能夠征服世界的人，往往是那些事先已知道這事可望而不可及的人。這種獨特的怪現象，即知與不知合一，憤世嫉俗與狂熱一體，正是大洋國的主要社會特點。官方的意識形態哲學裡，充滿了自相矛盾，儘管有時並沒有必要這麼做。因此，黨會以社會主義的名義，反對並詆毀社會主義運動之初所倡導的一切主張。黨公然散佈蔑視勞動階級的言論，此種情況幾個世紀以來史無前例，卻又效仿勞動階級工服的樣子為黨員定做制服，其之所以這樣做，或許正是出於蔑視的緣故。暗地裡，黨在有計劃地破壞民眾家庭的和睦，而明面上，它卻賦予黨內高層極具家庭感情的稱呼。甚至，統治我們的四個部門的名字也離奇得到了厚顏無恥的地步，和平部負責戰爭，真理部編造謊言，仁愛部刑訊逼供，富裕部製造飢餓。這些自相矛盾的東西既非出於偶然，也非源於通常意義上的偽善，他們處心積慮地踐行著雙重思想。因為，只有調和矛盾才能將權力緊緊地握在手中，才能江山永固，打破過往歷史的舊循環，除此之外，別無他法。若想讓「人人平等」永遠成為一句空話，若上等人想要永久地維持其地位，那麼，眼下必須對精神狀態加以控制。

但是，此刻似乎有一個問題被我們忽略掉了，那便是為什麼要避免人人平等呢？倘若關於機械大工業進步的描述沒有錯的話，那麼這群苦心孤詣想凍結歷史的人的動機，又是什麼呢？

這裡，我們揭開了一個重大秘密。正如上面所提及的，黨的神秘之處，尤其是內黨的神秘之處，在於他們自始至終秉持雙重思想。但是，還有一些深層次的東西值得我們發掘思考，我們不禁要問，起初的爭權奪利，後來的雙重思想、思想警察、連綿戰火以及其他一切必要的附帶產物，這一切產生的原始動機是什麼？人們對之不加懷疑的本能又是什麼？這種動機實際上包括……

溫斯頓此刻感覺到周圍一片寂靜，就好像突然之間，聽到一種新的聲音似的。他覺得，朱麗亞躺在床上已經許久沒有作聲了。她側臥著，腰身以上裸露在被單外面，臉頰枕在手心，一縷秀髮從眼前垂過，胸脯緩慢且有節奏地起伏著。

「朱麗亞。」

沒有回答。

「朱麗亞，你還醒著嗎？」

依然沒有回答，她已經睡著了。他合上書，小心翼翼地把它放在地板上，然後躺下，扯過被單蓋在他們兩個身上。

他想他還是不知道最終的秘密，雖然他知道方法，但他卻不知道原因。其實第一章和第三章並未告訴他什麼新的東西，這些東西他之前就已經知道，它們只不過是幫他把之前的想法系統地梳理了一下而已。但是，當他讀過這些文字之後，他更加確定自己沒有病，也沒有瘋。雖然持這種荒誕想法的人只是少數，但即便是一個人的少數，他也沒有瘋。世間既有真理的存在，也有謬論的存在，如果你堅持真理，即便整個世界都反對你，你也沒有瘋。落日的餘暉穿透玻璃窗灑落在枕頭上。他閉上了眼睛。陽光照射在臉頰上的愜意，以及朱麗亞柔滑的身軀貼在自己身上所感到的舒適，讓他頓時萌發出一種強烈的、昏昏欲睡的、信心滿懷的感覺。他想，自己現在是安全的，一切歸於平靜。他嘴裡低聲咕噥著，「一個人頭腦是否清醒，與統計數字無關」，頓時感到這句話裡蘊含著深刻的智慧，念著念著，就進入了夢鄉。

X

WHEN HE WOKE it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a little while; then the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below:

“It was only an ‘opeless fang,

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred

They ‘ave stolen ny ’eart awye!”

The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the “Hate Song.” Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s make some more coffee. Damn! The stove’s gone out and the water’s cold.” She picked the stove up and shook it. “There’s no oil in it.”

“We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.”

“The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I’m going to put my clothes on,” she added. “It seems to have got colder.”

Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:

“They sye that time ’eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years

They twist ny ’eartstrings yet!”

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

“She’s beautiful,” he murmured.

“She’s a meter across the hips, easily,” said Julia.

“That is her style of beauty,” said Winston.

He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distances. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the hook, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came, the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen: strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

“Do you remember,” he said, “the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?”

“He wasn’t singing to us,” said Julia. “He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.”

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan—everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

“We are the dead,” he said.

“We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.

“You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.

“You are the dead,” repeated the iron voice.

“It was behind the picture,” breathed Julia.

“It was behind the picture,” said the voice. “Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.”

It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late—no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind it.

“Now they can see us,” said Julia.

“Now we can see you,” said the voice. “Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.”

They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia’s body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman’s singing had stopped abrupdy. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.

“The house is surrounded,” said Winston.

“The house is surrounded,” said the voice.

He heard Julia snap her teeth together. “I suppose we may as well say good-by,” she said.

“You may as well say good-by,” said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in: “And by the way, while we are on the subject, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

Something crashed onto the bed behind Winston’s back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.

Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone mattered: to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prizefighter’s jowl in which the mouth was only a slit paused opposite him, balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one’s hands behind one’s head and one’s face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearthstone.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimeter, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like: the terrible, agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her.

He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr. Charrington. He wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time—had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.

There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr. Charrington came into the room. The demeanor of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Charrington’s appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.

“Pick up those pieces,” he said sharply.

A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr. Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.

第十章

……

他摟著朱麗亞柔軟的腰身，而她也順勢把半個身體緊緊地貼在溫斯頓身上。他們可以有身體的結合，但決不能生孩子。這是他們永遠都不可能做到的事情，他們只能靠口頭或內心的靈犀，來交流這個心事。下面的那個女人可能沒有思想，有的只是強壯的手臂，溫暖的心以及多產的肚皮。他想知道，她究竟生過多少個孩子？少說也有15個吧。她也曾有過短暫的絢麗迷人的花期，或許只有一年，漂亮得如山裡的野玫瑰。但是現在，她胖得像肥料澆灌出來的果實，身體堅硬，皮膚發紅而又粗糙不堪。她的生活被洗衣、燒飯、縫補、打掃、擦地、漿洗、熨燙這些瑣事給填滿了。先是為子女，之後為孫兒，她就這樣三十年如一日地度過了人生的大好時光。不過還好，在漫長的人生旅途中，她一直有歌聲相伴。溫斯頓突然對她產生了一種神秘的崇敬感，不知何故，這種感覺被摻雜在清澈碧藍的天空，隨著炊煙一起飄散。想來也怪，對每一個人來說，天空別無二致，不管是在歐亞國、東亞國還是在大洋國。普天之下，人們大同小異，儘管人口數以億計，但他們之間毫無差別，只是彼此不知曉對方的存在而已，被仇恨和謊言所隔離。儘管不懂得思考，他們的內心卻時刻積聚著力量，這力量終有一日可以改變世界。倘若世間尚有希望，那麼它必寄於無產者身上！雖然他沒有把這本書看完，但他敢肯定，戈斯坦最後會這樣說：未來屬於無產者。但是，他又怎麼能夠保證，當無產者時代到來後，他們所建立的世界，會和現在的世界不一樣呢？又怎麼能肯定，那個世界會讓他融入其中呢？當然，無論如何，它至少建立的應該是一個明智的，不至於太瘋狂的世界。哪裡有平等，哪裡就是明智的。力量終會歸於理性，這是遲早的事情。無產者是不朽的力量，看看院子裡那勇敢的形象，你就會對此深信不疑。他們覺醒的日子最終會到來，儘管這一天可能要等上幾千年。不過，他們會克服一切阻力，像鳥類一樣，把黨無法佔有的、無法扼殺的生命力，一個接一個地傳承下去。

「你還記得嗎？」他說，「在我們約會的第一天，有只畫眉在樹林邊上對著我們唱歌？」

「它才沒對著我們唱呢，」朱麗亞說，「它是因為高興，才對著自己唱歌。也不是，它只是在唱歌。」

鳥兒在唱歌，無產者在唱歌，黨卻沒有唱歌。縱觀整個世界，在倫敦和紐約，在非洲和巴西，在神秘的邊境線以外的禁區，在巴西和柏林的街道上，在廣袤無垠的俄羅斯平原的村落裡，在中國和日本的集市中——到處都站立著一個結實的不可征服的母親，儘管繁重的勞動和不斷的生兒育女，讓她的身軀變得臃腫，然而從出生到死亡，她卻始終在歌唱，並會一直唱下去。總有一天，覺醒的一代會從這強健的腰身裡誕生他摟著朱麗亞柔軟的腰身，而她也順勢把半個身體緊緊地貼在溫斯頓身上。他們可以有身體的結合，但決不能生孩子。這是他們永遠都不可能做到的事情，他們只能靠口頭或內心的靈犀，來交流這個心事。下面的那個女人可能沒有思想，有的只是強壯的手臂，溫暖的心以及多產的肚皮。他想知道，她究竟生過多少個孩子？少說也有15個吧。她也曾有過短暫的絢麗迷人的花期，或許只有一年，漂亮得如山裡的野玫瑰。但是現在，她胖得像肥料澆灌出來的果實，身體堅硬，皮膚發紅而又粗糙不堪。她的生活被洗衣、燒飯、縫補、打掃、擦地、漿洗、熨燙這些瑣事給填滿了。先是為子女，之後為孫兒，她就這樣三十年如一日地度過了人生的大好時光。不過還好，在漫長的人生旅途中，她一直有歌聲相伴。溫斯頓突然對她產生了一種神秘的崇敬感，不知何故，這種感覺被摻雜在清澈碧藍的天空，隨著炊煙一起飄散。想來也怪，對每一個人來說，天空別無二致，不管是在歐亞國、東亞國還是在大洋國。普天之下，人們大同小異，儘管人口數以億計，但他們之間毫無差別，只是彼此不知曉對方的存在而已，被仇恨和謊言所隔離。儘管不懂得思考，他們的內心卻時刻積聚著力量，這力量終有一日可以改變世界。倘若世間尚有希望，那麼它必寄於無產者身上！雖然他沒有把這本書看完，但他敢肯定，戈斯坦最後會這樣說：未來屬於無產者。但是，他又怎麼能夠保證，當無產者時代到來後，他們所建立的世界，會和現在的世界不一樣呢？又怎麼能肯定，那個世界會讓他融入其中呢？當然，無論如何，它至少建立的應該是一個明智的，不至於太瘋狂的世界。哪裡有平等，哪裡就是明智的。力量終會歸於理性，這是遲早的事情。無產者是不朽的力量，看看院子裡那勇敢的形象，你就會對此深信不疑。他們覺醒的日子最終會到來，儘管這一天可能要等上幾千年。不過，他們會克服一切阻力，像鳥類一樣，把黨無法佔有的、無法扼殺的生命力，一個接一個地傳承下去。

「你還記得嗎？」他說，「在我們約會的第一天，有只畫眉在樹林邊上對著我們唱歌？」

「它才沒對著我們唱呢，」朱麗亞說，「它是因為高興，才對著自己唱歌。也不是，它只是在唱歌。」

鳥兒在唱歌，無產者在唱歌，黨卻沒有唱歌。縱觀整個世界，在倫敦和紐約，在非洲和巴西，在神秘的邊境線以外的禁區，在巴西和柏林的街道上，在廣袤無垠的俄羅斯平原的村落裡，在中國和日本的集市中——到處都站立著一個結實的不可征服的母親，儘管繁重的勞動和不斷的生兒育女，讓她的身軀變得臃腫，然而從出生到死亡，她卻始終在歌唱，並會一直唱下去。總有一天，覺醒的一代會從這強健的腰身裡誕生出來。未來是屬於他們的。如果你能一直保持清醒的頭腦，把2加2等於4的真理傳遞下去，你就可以分享他們的未來。

「我們已經死了。」他說。

「我們已經死了。」朱麗亞附和說。

「你們已經死了。」他們身後一個冷冷的聲音說。

他們馬上跳開了。溫斯頓的五臟六腑彷彿在一瞬間結了冰。

他看到朱麗亞的眼角煞白，臉色蠟黃。此時，她頰骨上留下的脂粉格外醒目，彷彿跟下面的皮膚毫不相干。

「你們已經死了。」那個冰冷的聲音重複道。

「在版畫後面。」朱麗亞低聲說。

「在版畫的後面。」那個聲音說，「站在那兒別動。」

開始啦，終於開始了！他們除了站在那裡注視彼此的眼睛外，手足無措。逃命吧，趁現在逃到屋外去——他們都沒有這樣的想法。違抗牆壁後面那個聲音的命令，簡直是不可思議的事。突然卡嚓一聲，好像是門把手轉動的聲音，又像是玻璃破碎的聲響，版畫掉到了地板上，後面原來是電屏。

「現在，他們看得見我們了。」朱麗亞說。

「現在，我們可以看到你們了。」那個聲音說，「站到屋子中間去，背靠背站著，把手放在腦袋後面。」

他們並沒有身體上的接觸，但是，他覺得朱麗亞的身體在發抖，或許是他自己的身體在發抖的緣故吧。他拚命阻止自己的牙齒顫抖，可是，他怎麼也控制不住打晃的雙腿。樓下的屋子裡，傳來沉重的皮靴響聲，好像滿院子都是人。他聽到有重物拖過石板的聲音，胖女人的歌聲也隨之停止了。緊接著，又傳來一串東西滾動的聲音，似乎是洗衣盆被一腳踢出了院子。院子裡充滿了憤怒的斥責聲與痛苦的呼喊聲，但沒過多一會兒，便停止了。

「屋子被包圍了。」溫斯頓說。

「屋子被包圍了。」那個聲音說。

他聽見朱麗亞咬牙的聲音，「我們得在此告別了。」她說。

「你們得在此告別了。」那個聲音說。這時，另一個完全不同的聲音響起，微弱卻很文雅，這聲音似曾相識，溫斯頓以前好像在哪裡聽見過：「既然說到告別，那麼這句兒歌，『蠟燭照你進被窩，一刀砍掉你腦殼！』還記得嗎！」

溫斯頓背後，有什麼東西砸到床上，是一張梯子。梯子的前端捅破了窗戶，砸破了窗框。有人通過梯子從窗戶爬進了屋子，樓梯內也響起了靴子聲，屋子裡擠滿了身穿黑制服、腳蹬鐵掌靴、手持警棍的大漢。

溫斯頓已不再發抖，他的眼睛甚至已經凝滯了。此刻，必須要記住一點：保持不動，免得給他們製造打你的借口。一個下巴光溜溜的、長出來。未來是屬於他們的。如果你能一直保持清醒的頭腦，把2加2等於4的真理傳遞下去，你就可以分享他們的未來。

「我們已經死了。」他說。

「我們已經死了。」朱麗亞附和說。

「你們已經死了。」他們身後一個冷冷的聲音說。

他們馬上跳開了。溫斯頓的五臟六腑彷彿在一瞬間結了冰。

他看到朱麗亞的眼角煞白，臉色蠟黃。此時，她頰骨上留下的脂粉格外醒目，彷彿跟下面的皮膚毫不相干。

「你們已經死了。」那個冰冷的聲音重複道。

「在版畫後面。」朱麗亞低聲說。

「在版畫的後面。」那個聲音說，「站在那兒別動。」

開始啦，終於開始了！他們除了站在那裡注視彼此的眼睛外，手足無措。逃命吧，趁現在逃到屋外去——他們都沒有這樣的想法。違抗牆壁後面那個聲音的命令，簡直是不可思議的事。突然卡嚓一聲，好像是門把手轉動的聲音，又像是玻璃破碎的聲響，版畫掉到了地板上，後面原來是電屏。

「現在，他們看得見我們了。」朱麗亞說。

「現在，我們可以看到你們了。」那個聲音說，「站到屋子中間去，背靠背站著，把手放在腦袋後面。」

他們並沒有身體上的接觸，但是，他覺得朱麗亞的身體在發抖，或許是他自己的身體在發抖的緣故吧。他拚命阻止自己的牙齒顫抖，可是，他怎麼也控制不住打晃的雙腿。樓下的屋子裡，傳來沉重的皮靴響聲，好像滿院子都是人。他聽到有重物拖過石板的聲音，胖女人的歌聲也隨之停止了。緊接著，又傳來一串東西滾動的聲音，似乎是洗衣盆被一腳踢出了院子。院子裡充滿了憤怒的斥責聲與痛苦的呼喊聲，但沒過多一會兒，便停止了。

「屋子被包圍了。」溫斯頓說。

「屋子被包圍了。」那個聲音說。

他聽見朱麗亞咬牙的聲音，「我們得在此告別了。」她說。

「你們得在此告別了。」那個聲音說。這時，另一個完全不同的聲音響起，微弱卻很文雅，這聲音似曾相識，溫斯頓以前好像在哪裡聽見過：「既然說到告別，那麼這句兒歌，『蠟燭照你進被窩，一刀砍掉你腦殼！』還記得嗎！」

溫斯頓背後，有什麼東西砸到床上，是一張梯子。梯子的前端捅破了窗戶，砸破了窗框。有人通過梯子從窗戶爬進了屋子，樓梯內也響起了靴子聲，屋子裡擠滿了身穿黑制服、腳蹬鐵掌靴、手持警棍的大漢。

溫斯頓已不再發抖，他的眼睛甚至已經凝滯了。此刻，必須要記住一點：保持不動，免得給他們製造打你的借口。一個下巴光溜溜的、長得像個職業拳擊手的傢伙站在他面前，拇指和食指之間夾著警棍，似乎在等待著一顯身手的機會。溫斯頓看著他的眼睛，手背在腦後，臉和身體在他們面前暴露無疑，那感覺，與被人扒光了衣服赤條條地示於眾人面前無異，讓人難以忍受。那人伸出白色的舌頭，舔了舔嘴唇，便走開了。這時，又傳來一陣巨大的爆裂聲。一個大漢拿起桌上的玻璃鎮紙向壁爐砸去，它被摔得粉碎。

一塊珊瑚的碎片——微小的粉紅色顆粒，像蛋糕上面糖制的玫瑰花苞那樣——滾在地板上。它一直這麼小嗎？溫斯頓想。他聽到後面「砰」地一聲，接著是一聲叫喊，他被別人在腳踝上踢了一腳，痛得他幾乎失去了平衡，差點兒摔倒在地上。一個傢伙掄起拳頭，朝朱麗亞的太陽穴砸去，痛得她彎下腰去。她倒在地板上，拚命地掙扎著，幾乎喘不過氣來。溫斯頓不敢轉頭看她，但能感覺到，她那憋得烏青的臉就在眼前。她的疼痛，就跟發生在自己身上一樣，但他更擔心的是她喘不過氣來，這比疼痛更讓他著急。他領教過這種滋味，她一直在遭受這種難以忍受的疼痛。然而，現在的當務之急是令她馬上恢復呼吸。此時，兩個大漢抓住她的腿和肩膀，像拎麻袋一樣將她拎出屋外。溫斯頓瞥見她那翻著的臉，已經變得扭曲和蠟黃。她緊閉著雙眼，臉上還殘留著來不及抹去的脂粉。這是他最後一次看她。

他紋絲不動地站著，旁邊的人還沒有出手打他。毫無意義的想法，不自主地浮現在他的腦海中。他想知道，加林頓先生是否也被捕了？他想知道，他們把院子裡的那個洗衣服的胖女人怎麼樣了？他意識到，此刻他最想做的事情便是撒尿，說來也真是奇怪，不是在兩三個小時之前已經撒過了嗎？他注意到，壁爐架上方的老式掛鐘指向9點，也就是21點鐘。但這會兒的光線似乎還很強。8月的夜間21點，天不是該已經黑了嗎？他想知道，是不是他和朱麗亞弄錯了時間——他們連續睡了一整天？本來該是次日早晨的8點30分，卻被誤認為是頭天的20點30分。但是，他並不想繼續想下去，就算弄清楚了，也不會有什麼意義。

通道裡傳來一陣輕緩的腳步聲，加林頓先生走進房間，身著黑制服的大漢頓時變得溫馴起來。加林頓先生的外表，發生了一些改變，他的目光落在了被擊碎的玻璃碎片上。

「把這些碎片撿起來。」他厲聲說。

一個大漢躬身從命。加林頓先前濃重的倫敦口音不見了，溫斯頓突然辨認出，這個聲音，就是幾分鐘前在電屏中聽見的那個。他身上穿的，還是那件舊的黑色天鵝絨夾克，但是，他的頭髮卻由以前的斑白變成了黑色，眼鏡也摘掉了。他用銳利的眼光瞥了溫斯頓一眼，彷彿在核實他的身份，之後就再也沒有更多地注意他。他還能認出加林頓，但是，他已不再是那個自己之前所認識的加林頓了。此時，他的腰桿兒突然變得筆直起來，看起來好像也長高了一些，就連臉上也呈現出了一絲微小的變化，而且，那神情已經大不相同了。黑色的眉毛不再那樣濃密，皺紋也消失了，整個臉部輪廓都發生了改變，甚至連鼻子似乎也變短了。這是一張警覺又冷酷的臉，看起來約莫有35歲。溫斯頓想，這是他平生第一次見到表明了身份的思想警察。

第三部Three

I

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, evil-smelling 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 demeanor 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 spy-hole 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-labor 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 were bribery, favoritism, and racketeering of every kind, there were 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 onto 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 toward 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-labor 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 groveling 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 must 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 guards 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 meter 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 himself 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 offense, 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 track, 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.

Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the middle distance.

“What are you in for?” said Winston.

“Thoughtcrime!” said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: “You don’t think they’ll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don’t shoot you if you haven’t actually done anything—only thoughts, which you can’t help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’ll know my record, won’t they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years, don’t you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labor camp. They wouldn’t shoot me for going off the rails just once?”

“Are you guilty?” said Winston.

“Of course I’m guilty!” cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. “You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?” His froglike face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. “Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,” he said sententiously. “It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit—never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?”

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.

“‘Down with Big Brother!’ Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I’m glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? ‘Thank you,’ I’m going to say, ’thank you for saving me before it was too late.’”

“Who denounced you?” said Winston.

“It was my little daughter,” said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.”

He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his shorts.

“Excuse me, old man,” he said. “I can’t help it. It’s the waiting.”

He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his face with his hands.

“Smith!” yelled the voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.”

Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective, and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.

Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to “Room 101,” and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different color when she heard the words. A time came when, if it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six prisoners in the cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there. His pale-gray eyes flitted timorously from face to face, and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone’s eye.

The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.

The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston. Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting toward the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up, waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man.

There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused the gift.

“Bumstead!” roared the voice. “2713 Bumstead J! Let fall that piece of bread.”

The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.

“Remain standing where you are,” said the voice. “Face the door. Make no movement.”

The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless man, and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man’s mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.

The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees. The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-colored mass with a black hole in the middle of it. From time to time a little blood dripped onto the breast of his overalls. His gray eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised him for his humiliation.

The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.

“Room 101,” he said.

There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.

“Comrade! Officer!” he cried. “You don’t have to take me to that place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I’ll confess it straight off. Write it down and I’ll sign it—anything! Not Room 101!”

“Room 101,” said the officer.

The man’s face, already very pale, turned a color Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.

“Do anything to me!” he yelled. “You’ve been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t care who it is or what you do to them. I’ve got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!”

“Room 101,” said the officer.

The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He flung out a lean arm.

“That’s the one you ought to be taking, not me!” he shouted. “You didn’t hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and I’ll tell you every word of it. He’s the one that’s against the Party, not me.” The guards stepped forward. The man’s voice rose to a shriek. “You didn’t hear him!” he repeated. “Something went wrong with the telescreen. He’s the one you want. Take him, not me!”

The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just at this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose, but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the man had no breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a different kind of cry. A kick from a guard’s boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.

“Room 101,” said the officer.

The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his crushed hand, all the fight gone out of him.

A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was taken away, it was morning; if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. He would get up because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O’Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering, perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He thought: “If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.” But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason whatever that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.

The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O’Brien came in.

Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.

“They’ve got you too!” he cried.

“They got me a long time ago,” said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.

“You knew this, Winston,” said O’Brien. “Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it—you have always known it.”

Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard’s hand. It might fall anywhere: on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow—

The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

第一章

他不知道自己身在何處，想必是在仁愛部，但也不好確定。他被關在一個天花板很高、沒有窗戶、四周牆壁的瓷磚閃閃發光的牢房裡。不知從哪裡照進來的燈光，在牆壁的映射下發出冰冷的光芒，屋子裡的嗡嗡聲不絕於耳，可能是與室內空調的聲響有關。牆壁四周，裝有僅能坐下身來的木架，也可以說是板凳。除了剛進門的地方外，板凳足足繞了房間一周。門口對面，是個沒有坐圈的馬桶。四個電屏分佈在四面牆上。

他的肚子一直隱隱作痛，自從被他們綁著裝進廂式貨車以來，從沒停止過。此時，他飢餓難耐，從上次進食到現在足足有24小時了，或者是36小時。他甚至搞不清，或許永遠也不會搞清，他被捕時到底是早晨還是晚上。反正，他只記得自己被捕時沒有吃東西。

他雙手交叉放在膝蓋上，靜靜地坐在狹長的板凳上。他已學會了安靜。因為即便你不經意地動一下，電屏那邊都會傳來呵斥的聲音。渴望吃東西的願望，越來越強烈。他現在多麼渴望有一塊麵包啊。他突然想到，制服的口袋裡好像還有一些麵包屑。真有可能——因為他不時地感覺到有什麼東西在蹭他的腿——也許有很大一塊呢。最終，尋找麵包屑的誘惑戰勝了恐懼，他竟然將一隻手伸到了口袋裡。

「史密斯！」電屏裡的一個聲音厲聲喊道，「6079史密斯！手不能插進口袋。」

他只能把手拿出來，像剛才那樣，把雙手交叉放在膝蓋上。在被帶到這個牢房之前，他曾被帶去另一個地方。那裡一定是普通監獄，或者是巡邏警察的臨時拘留所。他不知道在那裡待了多久，大概有幾個小時吧，那裡既沒有鐘錶，也見不到亮光，想要知道或者估摸時間，還真是難上加難。印象中，那是個又髒又臭的地方。他之前待的牢房，格局和現在這個差不多，不過要更髒更臭，而且擠了很多人，怎麼說也有10個或者15個人。他們大多都是普通罪犯，當然也有一些政治犯。他靜靜地靠牆坐著。剛剛被投進來的犯人，拖著髒兮兮的身體在他面前晃來晃去。可能是由於過度害怕和忍受著腹部疼痛的緣故，他沒把太多心思放在周圍的這群人身上，不過，他還是注意到了黨員罪犯跟其他普通罪犯在舉止上的不一樣。黨員罪犯看起來極度恐懼和安靜，而普通罪犯則擺出一副對任何人都不以為然的樣子。他們敢在東西被沒收時，對著獄卒大喊大罵，敢在地板上寫一些污言穢語，敢私自偷吃藏在衣服裡的食物，還敢奚落電屏中為使他們保持秩序而向他們喊話的獄卒。當然，話又說回來，他們也與某些獄卒保持著很好的關係，敢直呼他們的綽號，為了門縫裡遞進來的那幾隻香煙，他們也會笑臉相迎地去拍他們的馬屁。獄卒也是如此，他們對某些普通罪犯百般容忍，儘管有時會因為職責所繫對他們動粗。溫斯頓在那裡聽得比較多的談話內容，便是勞改營，大概他們中的多數，最終都會被送到那裡去。他想，勞改營也「相當不錯」，只要你肯拉關係，懂得內部規則，諸如行賄、徇私枉法、敲詐勒索、男娼女妓的勾當，都會在勞改營裡發生，在那裡，甚至可以搞到用馬鈴薯釀製的違禁酒品。在勞改營裡，掌權的基本都是普通罪犯，尤以詐騙犯和殺人犯最為常見。他們在那裡如同貴族一般，所有的髒活累活，都交給政治罪犯去做。

牢房裡，各色的罪犯不斷進進出出：毒販子、小偷、盜竊犯、黑市奸商、酒鬼以及妓女等。有的醉鬼耍起酒瘋，只有囚犯聯合起來才能將其制服。這時，溫斯頓見一個身材碩大的老婦人被4個獄卒抬進來。她看起來60歲上下，兩隻肥碩的乳房墜在胸前，她不停地亂踢亂喊著，因不斷掙扎使得一頭蜷曲的白髮披散下來。獄卒拉下試圖拚命踢他們的靴子，一較勁兒，順勢把她掀翻在溫斯頓的膝蓋上。這大個子婦人落在他的膝蓋上，差點兒把他的骨頭砸斷了。老婦人撐起身子，在他們後面破口大罵：「你們這些野種！」待獄卒離開後，她突然覺得自己坐的地方有些不平坦，趕緊從溫斯頓的膝蓋上滑下來，坐到板凳上去。

「對不住了，小寶貝兒。」她說，「不是我有意要坐在你腿上的，全怪那幫雜碎把我摔在這兒。他們專會欺負一個老太太，對不對？」她停頓了一下，拍了拍胸脯，打了個嗝。「對不住了，」她說，「真是不好意思。」

她身體前傾，吐了滿滿一地。

「現在好多了。」她靠著牆壁閉著眼睛說，「當胃裡忍不住的時候，就像這樣吐出來才會好受些。」

待精神恢復了一些後，她轉過頭來，看了溫斯頓一眼，像是對他產生了好感。她伸出粗壯的胳膊摟住他的肩膀，把他拉到身前。濃重的啤酒味和嘔吐味，朝溫斯頓直撲過來。

「你叫什麼名字，小寶貝兒？」她問。

「史密斯。」溫斯頓回答。

「史密斯？」老婦人重複著，「這麼巧，我也叫史密斯。」她動情地補充了一句，「呀！沒準我是你的媽媽。」

確有可能，溫斯頓想到，她的年齡和體型，都跟母親很像，在勞改營裡待上20年，母親很有可能會變成現在這個樣子。

除了老婦人，還沒有人跟溫斯頓說過話。令他感到意外的是，普通罪犯竟然無視黨員罪犯的存在。無產者對溫斯頓這類人根本不感興趣，甚至還很蔑視，稱他們為「黨棍」。黨員囚犯似乎害怕跟任何人說話，更害怕跟別的黨員說話。在他的印象中，好像只有一個例外：有兩個女黨員緊挨著坐在板凳上，他聽到她們在嘈雜聲中匆忙低語，只講了一兩句話，說的是什麼，他也沒搞清楚，只聽見好像談到了「101室」。

他被帶到現在的牢房，應該是兩三個小時之前的事吧。他的肚子仍舊隱隱作痛，不過時輕時重，他的思緒，也隨著肚子疼痛的輕重而時張時弛。當肚子疼得厲害時，他的腦海裡只有肉體的疼痛和對食物的渴望。當肚子疼痛減輕時，他的心中則充滿了恐懼。有時，當他預料到將要發生在自己身上的事情，那真切的感覺簡直令他窒息，甚至心跳停止。他彷彿聽到了警棍打在他手臂上的聲音，或釘著鐵掌的皮靴踏碎他的小腿骨的聲音，他彷彿看到了自己忍著疼痛，咬著被打碎的牙齒，跪在地上尖聲求饒的場景。在他們分別後的這段時間裡，他幾乎沒有想到過朱麗亞，更沒有辦法把思緒集中在她身上。他愛過她，不會背叛她，但這僅僅是一個事實，就像他知曉運算法則是一個事實一樣。此刻，他已感覺不到自己對她的愛，甚至想不到去關心她的現狀。他倒是把希望寄托在奧布萊恩身上。想必，奧布萊恩現在已經知道他被捕了吧。記得奧布萊恩曾經說過，在兄弟會，他們從來不會去營救會員，但是有刀片，如果可能，他們會把刀片送進來。在獄卒衝進來之前，他只需5秒牢房裡，各色的罪犯不斷進進出出：毒販子、小偷、盜竊犯、黑市奸商、酒鬼以及妓女等。有的醉鬼耍起酒瘋，只有囚犯聯合起來才能將其制服。這時，溫斯頓見一個身材碩大的老婦人被4個獄卒抬進來。她看起來60歲上下，兩隻肥碩的乳房墜在胸前，她不停地亂踢亂喊著，因不斷掙扎使得一頭蜷曲的白髮披散下來。獄卒拉下試圖拚命踢他們的靴子，一較勁兒，順勢把她掀翻在溫斯頓的膝蓋上。這大個子婦人落在他的膝蓋上，差點兒把他的骨頭砸斷了。老婦人撐起身子，在他們後面破口大罵：「你們這些野種！」待獄卒離開後，她突然覺得自己坐的地方有些不平坦，趕緊從溫斯頓的膝蓋上滑下來，坐到板凳上去。

「對不住了，小寶貝兒。」她說，「不是我有意要坐在你腿上的，全怪那幫雜碎把我摔在這兒。他們專會欺負一個老太太，對不對？」她停頓了一下，拍了拍胸脯，打了個嗝。「對不住了，」她說，「真是不好意思。」

她身體前傾，吐了滿滿一地。

「現在好多了。」她靠著牆壁閉著眼睛說，「當胃裡忍不住的時候，就像這樣吐出來才會好受些。」

待精神恢復了一些後，她轉過頭來，看了溫斯頓一眼，像是對他產生了好感。她伸出粗壯的胳膊摟住他的肩膀，把他拉到身前。濃重的啤酒味和嘔吐味，朝溫斯頓直撲過來。

「你叫什麼名字，小寶貝兒？」她問。

「史密斯。」溫斯頓回答。

「史密斯？」老婦人重複著，「這麼巧，我也叫史密斯。」她動情地補充了一句，「呀！沒準我是你的媽媽。」

確有可能，溫斯頓想到，她的年齡和體型，都跟母親很像，在勞改營裡待上20年，母親很有可能會變成現在這個樣子。

除了老婦人，還沒有人跟溫斯頓說過話。令他感到意外的是，普通罪犯竟然無視黨員罪犯的存在。無產者對溫斯頓這類人根本不感興趣，甚至還很蔑視，稱他們為「黨棍」。黨員囚犯似乎害怕跟任何人說話，更害怕跟別的黨員說話。在他的印象中，好像只有一個例外：有兩個女黨員緊挨著坐在板凳上，他聽到她們在嘈雜聲中匆忙低語，只講了一兩句話，說的是什麼，他也沒搞清楚，只聽見好像談到了「101室」。

他被帶到現在的牢房，應該是兩三個小時之前的事吧。他的肚子仍舊隱隱作痛，不過時輕時重，他的思緒，也隨著肚子疼痛的輕重而時張時弛。當肚子疼得厲害時，他的腦海裡只有肉體的疼痛和對食物的渴望。當肚子疼痛減輕時，他的心中則充滿了恐懼。有時，當他預料到將要發生在自己身上的事情，那真切的感覺簡直令他窒息，甚至心跳停止。他彷彿聽到了警棍打在他手臂上的聲音，或釘著鐵掌的皮靴踏碎他的小腿骨的聲音，他彷彿看到了自己忍著疼痛，咬著被打碎的牙齒，跪在地上尖聲求饒的場景。在他們分別後的這段時間裡，他幾乎沒有想到過朱麗亞，更沒有辦法把思緒集中在她身上。他愛過她，不會背叛她，但這僅僅是一個事實，就像他知曉運算法則是一個事實一樣。此刻，他已感覺不到自己對她的愛，甚至想不到去關心她的現狀。他倒是把希望寄托在奧布萊恩身上。想必，奧布萊恩現在已經知道他被捕了吧。記得奧布萊恩曾經說過，在兄弟會，他們從來不會去營救會員，但是有刀片，如果可能，他們會把刀片送進來。在獄卒衝進來之前，他只需5秒鐘，就可以做個自我了斷。刀片割破血管時，有種冰涼的灼燒感，即便是拿著刀片的手指，也會受傷，說不定還會割到骨頭。他原本就是一個受不住皮肉之苦的男人，小小的疼痛，都會讓他覺得像是在忍受極刑。恐怕到時真的有這樣的機會，他也沒有勇氣去割開血管的。算了，與其現在擔驚受怕，還不如順其自然，多活一會兒是一會兒吧，哪怕10分鐘也好，嚴刑拷打一定是在所難免的。

有時，他試著去數牢房牆壁上的瓷磚。這本該是一件很容易的事情，結果他數著數著，就把數字弄混了。他經常想搞明白自己身在何處，現在是幾點鐘了。他感覺，外面是白天，但轉念一想，應該是黑夜才對。直覺告訴他，這個地方是不可能關燈的，這是個沒有黑暗的地方。他終於明白，為什麼奧布萊恩一下子就明白了他話中的暗示。整個仁愛部的大樓，都沒有窗戶。他所在的牢房，可能正處於大樓中或者靠近大樓的外牆，也可能位於地下10層或是地上30層。他胡思亂想著，想憑借身體去感知，此刻自己究竟懸於高空還是深埋於地下。

牢房外面傳來了靴子的聲音，鐵門「噹啷」一聲被打開了。一位年輕的、穿著整齊黑色制服的警衛走了進來，珵亮的靴子，把他整個人照得光芒四射。在皮靴亮光的映襯下，他那張輪廓筆直而蒼白的臉，倒顯得像是一副蠟質面具了。他打了個手勢，示意外面的獄卒把押來的犯人關進牢房。詩人安普福斯踉踉蹌蹌地走進牢房，牢門「噹啷」一聲又被鎖上了。

安普福斯從房間的一邊踱到另一邊，似乎在猜想這房子是否還有另外一個出口。他停下沒多一會兒，又開始在牢房裡走起來。此刻，他或許還沒有注意到溫斯頓的存在，只是一直用帶著憂鬱的眼神盯著溫斯頓頭上1米開外的牆面。他沒穿鞋，骯髒的大腳趾從襪子的破洞裡擠了出來。想必，他也有多日沒刮鬍子了吧，密密匝匝的鬍髭，將他的臉和腮部遮得嚴嚴實實，他現在這副粗獷的無賴形象，顯然與他高大虛弱的身形以及神經兮兮的舉動不太搭調。

溫斯頓勉強從昏睡中振作起來。他想，他應該上前跟安普福斯說上兩句話才是，即便要冒著被電屏呵斥的危險。說不定，安普福斯就是受兄弟會之托前來送刀片的。

「安普福斯。」溫斯頓叫道。

電屏那端並沒有呵止他。安普福斯微微頓了一下，有點吃驚，他把目光慢慢轉移到溫斯頓身上。

「啊，史密斯！你也在這兒！」

「你犯了什麼罪？」

「實話告訴你——」他笨手笨腳地坐在溫斯頓對面的板凳上。「這裡只有一種犯罪，不是嗎？」

「你犯了？」

「顯然我犯了。」

他把一隻手放在前額，按了按太陽穴，好像在回憶著什麼。

「這種事情必然會發生的。」他一臉茫然地說，「我想起了一個例子—— 一個可稱為典型的例子。毋庸置疑，都怪自己太粗心大意了。我們正準備出吉卜林詩集修訂本，我把最後一行的韻腳『亞威』給保留了，我也是無奈才出此下策的！」他憤憤地補充了一句，抬起頭來，看著溫斯頓。「這個韻腳沒辦法改，它與前面的韻腳『棍子』押韻。你知道的，在我們所用的詞彙中，只有12個詞跟這個『棍子』押韻。說實話，我絞盡腦汁想了好幾天，但始終沒找到可以用來替換的詞。」

這時，他的表情變了，之前的煩躁不安不見了，取而代之的是沾沾自喜。一種睿智的激情，在他臉上泛起亮光。書獃子一旦發現某種毫無實際價值的事實，往往就會露出這樣一幅神情，透過濃密而髒亂的鬍子顯露出來。

「你可曾想過，」他說，「整個英國詩歌的歷史，就是因為英語語言的韻腳匱乏而受到了影響？」

「沒想過。」說實話，對於這些無聊的問題，溫斯頓從來就沒花心思想過。況且，身處囹圄之中，他怎會在既無興趣又無關緊要的事情上浪費時間呢。

「你知道現在是什麼時間嗎？」他問。

安普福斯顯得有點兒驚詫，隨後他說，「我沒有想過。他們逮捕我——可能是2天前，或者是3天前。」他用眼睛的餘光，打量了一下牢房四周的牆壁，好像要找個窗戶似的。「在這種地方，白天或黑夜沒有什麼分別，時間根本沒有辦法算得清。」

他們沒頭沒腦地又聊了幾句。這時，電屏那端傳來讓他們保持安靜的命令。溫斯頓馬上安靜下來，雙手交叉坐回到板凳上，一如他剛進來時的模樣。可能是由於安普福斯身材太過高大的緣故，他不得不在狹長的板凳上扭動屁股，調整坐姿。他那雙瘦長的手，一會兒放在這個膝蓋上，一會兒又換到那個膝蓋上。但電屏絲毫不體諒他的難處，突然對他咆哮起來，命令他保持不動。時間就這樣過去了。可能過了20分鐘或者1個小時——這誰又能知道呢——外面再次響起皮靴聲。溫斯頓的心臟緊緊縮成一團，快了，很快了，可能再有5分鐘，也可能就是現在，說不定這沉重的皮靴聲就是為他而來的。

門被打開了。那個一張冷臉的年輕警衛邁進牢房，他朝安普福斯打了個簡單手勢。

「101室。」他說。

安普福斯被夾在兩個獄卒中間，笨拙地朝牢門走去,茫然的臉上帶著隱約的不安。

似乎過了很長時間，溫斯頓的肚子又開始疼了。他的思緒總是循著這幾個內容不停地轉換，就像一個球循環往復地落入一組洞裡——肚子的疼痛、麵包屑、流血和呼喊、奧布萊恩、朱麗亞以及刀片。接著，他的心臟幾乎又停止了跳動，因為沉重的靴子聲又來了。門又被打開了，一陣強烈的汗臭味飄進牢室,帕森斯走進了牢房，穿著一件卡其色短褲和一件運動衫。

此時，溫斯頓驚得幾乎張大了嘴巴。

「你也來這裡了！」他說。

帕森斯瞟了溫斯頓一眼，既不吃驚，也不感興趣，一臉愁苦的神情。他不停在屋子裡東奔西走，顯然無法安靜下來。每次當他把圓滾滾的膝蓋伸直時，你都能看到他在不停地打顫。他把眼睛瞪得渾圓，發起呆來，好像無法阻止自己去盯視前面的什麼地方。

「你犯了什麼罪？」溫斯頓問。

「思想罪！」帕森斯帶著一副哭腔說道。他講話的聲調似乎在暗示溫斯頓，他既承認自己所犯下的罪行，同時又覺得，犯下這樣的罪行實在難以置信。他面對著溫斯頓，懇切地問：「你說，他們不會槍斃我的，對吧，老夥計？如果我只是思想出了格，沒有付諸實際行動，他們是不會槍斃我的——僅僅是思想罪，我自己又不能控制。我相信，他們會給我一個公平的申訴機會的。我相信他們會的！他們知道我過去的行為記錄，是不是？你也瞭解我是一個什麼樣的人，對不對？我並不壞，只是不夠很聰明。當然，我做事很熱心。我會盡我所能去為黨辦事，對不對？我可能會被判上個5年，你覺得呢？或者是10年？像我這樣的人，在勞改營裡也能夠用得上。僅此一次犯錯誤，他們不會就此槍斃我,對不對？」

「你有罪嗎？」溫斯頓問。

「我當然有罪！」帕森斯卑躬屈膝地故意對著電屏大聲喊道。「你不會認為黨會逮捕一個無辜的人吧，對嗎？」他的青蛙臉此時稍顯平靜了些，甚至表現出了幾分虛偽的虔誠。「思想罪是很可怕的事情，老兄。」他草草地說，「它危險得很，讓你防不勝防。還沒等你反應過來，就已經跟它扯上關係了。你知道它是如何抓住我的嗎？在我睡覺的時候，是的，這是事實。我自以為我工作很賣力，盡我的努力做著分內的事——根本不曉得在我的思想裡，還會有這些壞主意。睡覺時，我竟然說了夢話。你知道他們聽見我說了什麼嗎？他壓低了聲音，那表情就像一個人為了就醫而不得不聽從醫生的吩咐，破口說了髒話一樣。

「打倒老大哥！是的，一點都不錯！貌似說了還不止一遍呢。我只是跟你說，老兄。我還是很感激的，在我還沒在歧途上走遠的時候，他們把我拉了回來。你知道我在法庭時想對他們說什麼嗎？『謝謝你們。』我會說，『謝謝你們及時拯救了我。』」

「是誰揭發的你？」溫斯頓問。

「是我的小女兒。」帕森斯的聲音帶有幾分傷感，同時還帶有幾分自豪，「她透過鑰匙孔聽見了我的夢話。聽到我的話後，第二天她就去報告了巡邏警察。才7歲的小鬼，聰明又漂亮，是吧？我沒有責備她，更不怨恨她，反而以她為榮。這也證明了不管怎樣，我對她的教育是正確的。」

他說完後，又開始坐立不安起來。好幾次，他都把目光盯在馬桶上，突然他急切地把短褲褪了下來。

「對不住了，老兄，」他說，「我實在忍不住了，我等了好久了。」說著，就把他那圓胖的大屁股夯在了馬桶上。溫斯頓趕忙用手遮住臉。

「史密斯！」電屏中的聲音叫喊道，「6079史密斯！不要捂著臉，牢房裡不准捂臉！」

溫斯頓把手放了下來。帕森斯開始方便，稀里嘩啦響個不停。真是不湊巧，牢房馬桶的抽水設備壞了，以致於之後的數小時內，牢房裡都是臭氣熏天。

帕森斯被帶走了。更多的犯人被神秘地帶來了又帶走。有個女人被送到101室，溫斯頓注意到，她在聽見「101室」這話時，臉色大變，渾身縮成了一團。溫斯頓不知道，自己被押解到這裡是在什麼時候，如果是上午，那現在就是下午；如果是下午，那現在就是晚上。現在，這間牢房總共關押著6名男女犯人，每個人都安靜地坐著。溫斯頓的對面，坐著一個下頜小到看不出來的男人，牙齒突出，暴露在外面，整個人看起來像只溫順的齧齒動物。他肥胖的面頰上，佈滿了斑點，面頰底部下垂得像個口袋，讓人沒辦法相信他沒在裡面藏了吃的。他瞪著一雙淺灰色的眼睛，羞怯地打量著每個人的面孔，一碰見別人的目光，就迅速地別過臉去。

門被打開了，又有一位犯人被帶進來。他的面貌，讓溫斯頓不禁打了個寒戰。這個人的長相很普通，但是看起來很陰險，他準是個工程師或者技術員。令人感到恐怖的是，他的臉消瘦得不見肌肉，看起來像是一個骷髏。在那張結構緊湊的臉上，還有兩片薄薄的嘴唇和一雙不成比例的大眼睛。如此失調的五官搭配，真叫人毛骨悚然。他的目光充滿殺機，似乎對某人或某事有抑制不住的仇恨。

這個人坐在離溫斯頓不遠的板凳上。溫斯頓沒有再看過他一眼，但是他那張骷髏般的面孔，仍舊在他的腦海中晃來晃去，好像就立在他眼前一樣。他突然意識到，這人快要被餓死了。牢房裡的所有犯人，似乎都意識到了這一點。所有坐在板凳上的人都不安地躁動起來。無下頜的男人不時地在這張骷髏臉上打量著，然後又極具負罪感地回過頭去，再然後，又像受到不可抗拒的誘惑一般轉過頭來。不過，他還是坐不住了，終於站起身來，搖搖晃晃地走到骷髏臉面前，把手伸到制服口袋裡，似乎有點難為情地，掏出一塊髒兮兮的麵包片，遞給了骷髏臉。

這時，電屏那頭傳來了憤怒的咆哮聲，無下頜的男人立即跳回到了原位。骷髏臉也迅速將手背在身後，表現出一副要向全世界證明他並沒有接受那片麵包的無辜樣子。

「巴姆斯特德，」電屏那頭怒吼道，「2713號的巴姆斯特德！把麵包放下來！」

無下頜的男人把麵包放在了地上。

「站在原地，」電屏那頭繼續喊著，「臉朝牢門，別動！」

無下顎的人聽此號令，一動不敢動，他口袋似的面頰禁不住地抖動著。門「匡啷」一聲打開了。年輕的警衛走進牢房，身後還跟著一個虎背熊腰的矮漢。矮漢竄到無下顎的男人面前，在得到年輕警衛的示意後，用盡渾身的力氣，朝無下頜的男人的嘴角狠狠地打了一拳。他的力氣真大，一拳就把那人打得飛離了地板，硬生生地摔到了馬桶前面。他好像昏迷過去了，血從他的口鼻中滲出，無意識地發出幾聲嗚咽的呻吟。好一會兒，他才用雙手和雙膝支撐著，跌跌撞撞地爬起來。他吐著鮮血，被打成兩半的假牙也隨之吐落在地板上。

牢房裡的其他犯人仍然安靜地坐著，兩手交叉放在膝蓋上。無下頜的男人爬回了原位。他的半邊臉開始變得淤青，腫得已經不成樣子，嘴巴像個黑洞，鮮血不時地滴落到胸前的制服上。他那淺灰色的眼睛，仍舊快速地從其他人的臉上掠過，只是比先前多了一絲負罪感，好像是要看一看，別人是不是因為他挨了揍而瞧不起他。

門又被打開了，年輕警衛向骷髏臉打了個手勢。

「101室。」他說。

溫斯頓聽到旁邊的喘息聲和一陣騷動，骷髏臉跪在地板上，雙手抱頭求饒。

「警衛同志！」他喊道，「你別再帶我去那個房間了！我不是把一切都告訴您了嗎？您還想知道什麼？我已經沒有什麼可以坦白的了，全交代了！告訴我，你們想知道什麼，只要您把想得到的東西寫下來，我什麼都簽——什麼罪我都認！我不想去101室！」

「101室。」年輕警衛重複道。

那人的臉驟然變得慘白——更確切地說，是變綠了。溫斯頓簡直難以置信，但確實如此，就是綠色。

「隨你們怎麼處置吧！」他喊道，「我已經被餓了幾個星期了，你們無非是要我死。槍斃我吧，絞死我吧，或者判我25年勞改。你們還想讓我供認誰？只要你們說出來，我會全都告訴你。我不管他是誰，也不管你們怎麼對待他。我還有妻子和3個孩子，最大的孩子還不到6歲，你可以把他們都帶來，當著我的面割斷他們的喉嚨，我絕對會站在那兒看著，不哼一聲。但別送我去101室！」

「101室。」警衛說。

骷髏臉發瘋似地環顧著其他犯人，好像打定主意要為自己找個替死鬼。他把對像鎖定在那個被打碎牙的無下頜的男人身上，揮動著消瘦的手臂，指認著他。

「你們應該送他去，而不是我！」骷髏臉叫喊道，「你們沒有聽見他挨完打在背後說了些什麼嗎？給我一次機會，我將告訴你們他說的每一句話。他才是真正反黨的人，不是我。」獄卒走上前，骷髏臉變得歇斯底里起來。「你們沒有聽到他說的話！」他重複道，「那天電屏發生了故障，他才是你們要抓的人！不是我！」

兩個魁梧的獄卒彎腰抓住他的胳膊。就在此時，他突然一個箭步衝到板凳前，躺在地上，死抓著板凳的鐵腿不放，像野獸一般咆哮著。獄卒摁住他，試圖扳開他的手，但是他卻使盡渾身力氣，緊握不放。3個人僵持了差不多有20秒鐘。其他囚犯依然靜靜地坐著，雙手交叉放在膝上，直勾勾地看著眼前發生的一切。吼聲停止了，骷髏臉除了死抓住板凳腿不放外，恐怕連吼叫的力氣也沒有了。突然，他發出一聲淒厲的慘叫，原來其中的一個獄卒抬腳踢斷了他的一根手指，這才把他拖了起來。

「101室。」警衛說。

骷髏臉被帶了出去，腳步踉蹌，耷拉著腦袋，用手捧著他那只被踢斷的手指，再無任何力氣。

時間又過了很久。如果骷髏臉被帶走時是晚上的話，那麼現在就該是早晨了；如果那是在早晨的話，那麼現在就該是下午了。牢房裡只剩下溫斯頓一個人了，而且獨自一人的狀態已經持續了好幾個小時。像這樣一直坐在狹窄的長凳上，讓他感覺很痛苦。他起身在牢房裡踱來踱去，而電屏那邊竟然沒有人訓斥他。那個無下頜的男人扔掉的麵包仍留放在原地，開始他還努力不去看它，但是現在，口渴的煎熬已經超過了飢餓的折磨。嘴巴裡黏黏的，有股子怪味。空調的嗡嗡聲和單調的白熾燈光讓他感覺頭暈目眩，腦袋裡一片空空蕩蕩。骨頭疼痛難忍，他站了起來，但又不得不馬上坐下來。他感覺天旋地轉，骨頭根本無法支撐身體站起來。每當身體的痛苦有所緩解時，他的心便被恐懼所佔據。一想到奧布萊恩和刀片，他便感覺還有一絲希望尚存，如果現在有食物送來，那麼刀片很可能就藏在裡面。有時，他也會在朦朧中想起朱麗亞。她可能正在什麼地方受著折磨，或許比他還痛苦，此刻，她可能正疼得尖叫呢。他想：「如果讓我忍受雙倍的痛苦去拯救朱麗亞，我能做到嗎？能，我肯定能。」但是這僅僅是一個理性的決斷，他知道他應該這麼做。但是，他並沒有這樣的感覺。在這種地方，你不會有任何感覺，除了痛苦和預見痛苦的到來。此外，當你在忍受痛苦之時，你會不會希望再找到一個增加你痛苦的理由呢？這個問題還沒有答案。

靴子聲越來越近，門被打開了。進來的是奧布萊恩。

溫斯頓吃驚地站起來。奧布萊恩的出現，太讓他震驚了，以至於他失去了對電屏的警戒。這是他多年來，第一次忘記了電屏的存在。

「他們把你也抓起來了！」他叫道。

「很早以前，他們就把我抓起來了。」奧布萊恩帶著溫和的、幾乎是遺憾的嘲笑口吻說。他走到一旁，剛好把赤裸著上身的獄卒閃出來，他手裡拿著一根長長的黑色警棍。

「溫斯頓，你知道的，」奧布萊恩說，「不要騙自己，你知道——你一直都清楚，會有這樣的結果。」

是呀，他現在看見了，他一直都很清楚會有今天的。但是，現在已經沒有時間思考這個問題了。他所有的注意力，都集中在獄卒手裡的那根警棍上，它可能隨時落在自己身上，天靈蓋、耳朵尖、上臂或者是肘部——

肘部！這一擊，打得他跪倒在地，幾乎癱掉，用另一隻手抓著受傷的胳膊，眼前閃著一團金光。難以置信，真是難以置信！胳膊竟然會如此疼痛！金光逐漸消失，一切又清晰起來，他看見兩個人低頭俯視著他。獄卒正在拿他那扭曲變形的臉開玩笑。那個問題有了答案！不論如何，你絕不會希望增加自己的痛苦。對於痛苦，你只有一種希望，那就是立即停下來。在世界上，沒有什麼能比身體的痛苦更糟糕，更難以忍受。面對疼痛，從來就沒有英雄，沒有英雄！他抱著受傷的胳膊，痛苦地在地上滾來滾去，反覆地考慮著這個問題。

II

HE WAS LYING ON something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O’Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.

Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.

With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimes—espionage, sabotage, and the like—to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: “I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.” Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes onto the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin washbasin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search of broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep.

The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted—he thought, he could not be sure—ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction, until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to sniveling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.

There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.

He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up.

He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxen-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards.

“Room 101,” said the officer.

The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.

He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometer wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O’Brien, Julia, Mr. Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.

He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had heard O’Brien’s voice. All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O’Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards onto Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once—Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness—a voice murmured in his ear: “Don’t worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.” He was not sure whether it was O’Brien’s voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” in that other dream, seven years ago.

He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O’Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight of fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.

“I told you,” said O’Brien, “that if we met again it would be here.”

“Yes,” said Winston.

Without any warning except a slight movement of O’Brien’s hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.

“You are afraid,” said O’Brien, watching his face, “that in another moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not, Winston?”

Winston did not answer. O’Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.

“That was forty,” said O’Brien. “You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose. If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien’s manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.

“I am taking trouble with you, Winston,” he said, “because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events, and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?”

“When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.”

“With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?”

Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.

“The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember.”

“I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that—”

O’Brien stopped him with a movement of die hand.

“Another example,” he said. “Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession—were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.”

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the Party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimeter in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

“It exists!” he cried.

“No,” said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.

“Ashes,” he said. “Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.”

“But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.”

“I do not remember it,” said O’Brien.

Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simply trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.

“There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,” he said. “Repeat it, if you please.”

“‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’” repeated Winston obediently.

“‘Who controls the present controls the past,’” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. “Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?”

Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted toward the dial. He not only did not know whether “yes” or “no” was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O’Brien smiled faintly. “You are no metaphysician, Winston,” he said. “Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?”

“No.”

“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”

“In records. It is written down.”

“In records. And—?”

“In the mind. In human memories.”

“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”

“But how can you stop people remembering things?” cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the dial. “It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!”

O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.

“On the contrary,” he said, “you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”

He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.

“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four?”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?”

“Four.”

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four.”

The needle went up to sixty.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Five! Five! Five!”

“No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”

“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”

Abrupdy he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.

“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.

“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip on his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston’s eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there; then he nodded to O’Brien.

“Again,” said O’Brien.

The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.”

“Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?”

“Really to see them.”

“Again,” said O’Brien.

Perhaps the needle was at eighty—ninety. Winston could only intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six—in all honesty I don’t know.”

“Better,” said O’Brien.

A needle slid into Winston’s arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped die pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates; somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O’Brien was looking down at him with an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.

“Do you know where you are, Winston?” he said.

“I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.”

“Do you know how long you have been here?”

“I don’t know. Days, weeks, months—I think it is months.”

“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston’s heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O’Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O’Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:

“The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O’Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

“You are thinking,” he said, “that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference—in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien smiled slightly. “You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed—Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, groveling, weeping—and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.”

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O’Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.

“Three thousand,” he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.

Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.

“This time it will not hurt,” he said. “Keep your eyes fixed on mine.”

At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.

“It will not last,” said O’Brien. “Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?”

Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania, and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.

“I don’t remember.”

“Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?”

“Yes.”

“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”

“Yes.”

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment—he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps—of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded out before O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some remote period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person.

“You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O’Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.

“Do you remember writing in your diary,” he said, “that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.”

“Any question I like?”

“Anything.” He saw that Winston’s eyes were upon the dial. “It is switched off. What is your first question?”

“What have you done with Julia?” said Winston.

O’Brien smiled again. “She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately—unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.”

“You tortured her.”

O’Brien left this unanswered. “Next question,” he said.

“Does Big Brother exist?”

“Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”

“Does he exist in the same way as I exist?”

“You do not exist,” said O’Brien.

Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, “You do not exist,” contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shriveled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O’Brien would demolish him.

“I think I exist,” he said wearily. “I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?”

“It is of no importance. He exists.”

“Win Big Brother ever die?”

“Of course not. How could he die? Next question.”

“Does the Brotherhood exist?”

“That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live, it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”

Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:

“What is in Room 101?”

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:

“You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”

He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston’s arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.

第二章

他感覺，自己像是躺在一張行軍床上，離地很高，只是身體被綁著，動彈不得。此時的燈光比平時更強，照在他的臉上。奧布萊恩就站在身邊，專心地注視著他，另一邊，站著一個穿白大褂的男人，手裡拿著皮下注射器。

即便睜開了眼睛，他也只能緩慢地辨認周圍的環境。印象中，好像自己是從另一個世界游到這個房間來的，那是個深海的世界，他弄不清楚自己在那下面待了多久。自被捕至今，他還從沒見過黑夜和白天。此外，他的記憶也時斷時續。有時他的意識是存在的，有時則是空白的。空白時，甚至連殘留於睡眠中的那種意識都不存在；空白過後，意識又又會恢復過來。但究竟間隔了幾周，幾天或是僅僅幾秒，他就無從感知了。

自從肘部挨過警棍以後，他的噩夢就開始了。也恰恰是在挨過打之後，他才恍然明白，例行公事的提審僅僅是個形式而已，每個犯人都逃不掉這一環節。罪名有很多，諜報罪、陰謀破壞罪等，每一位犯人都要招認，這些都被統統視作理所應當的罪名，每個人都要往這上面靠。當然招供只是一種形式，使用酷刑才是真實的手段。他挨過多少次打，又持續了多長時間，溫斯頓已經不記得了。他只知道，每次都是五六個身著黑制服的獄卒一起向他撲過來，有時用拳頭，有時用警棍，有時用鋼管，有時用靴子。好多次，他都像一隻沒有羞恥心的動物一樣，在地板上翻滾扭動，試圖躲避他們的踢打，但這只是徒勞的，只會招致他們新一輪的踢打。他們踢他的肋骨，踢他的肚子，踢他的臂肘，踢他的小腿，踢他的腹股溝，踢他的睪丸，甚至踢他的尾椎骨。其實，當他們持續不斷地向他衝殺過來的時候，他覺得最殘酷、最不可饒恕的事情，不是那些獄卒的慘無人道的暴行，而是自己竟然沒有昏死過去。有時，他的神經竟然不受自己控制，一看見他們要對自己施暴，就開始大喊大叫地求饒，招認他犯過的和想像中的罪行。有時，他也會對強加在自己頭上的罪名矢口否認，當然，前提是他挺得住獄卒的拳打腳踢。有的時候，當他抱有試圖妥協的念頭時，他會對自己說，「我會承認的，但現在還不是時候，我必須堅持到疼痛無法忍受的時候，讓他們再多踢三兩腳，再招供也不遲。」有的時候，他被打得根本無法站立，他們就像扔一袋土豆一樣，把他丟在牢房的石板地上，待他稍微清醒之後，再拖出去打個半死。有的時候，他們給他的恢復時間會稍長一些，但究竟是多久，他也不清楚，因為那時他不是睡著了就是昏迷不醒。他記得，自己曾被關在一個小屋裡，裡面有一張木板床，牆上有個突出來的架子，還有一個洗臉盆。他吃的是熱麵湯和麵包，有時還會有咖啡。他還記得，有一個粗暴的理髮師給他刮過鬍子，剪過頭髮，還有個冷酷的穿白大褂的醫生給他把過脈，試驗過條件反射，翻過他的眼皮，摸過他身上被打折的骨頭，檢查過後，還不忘在他胳膊上打一針，讓他睡覺。

挨打的次數越來越少了，是因為他們把毆打換成了威脅和恐嚇。當然，如果他回答問題不能令他們滿意時，他們照樣還是會把他拉到一邊痛打一頓。提審他的人，已不再是那些穿著黑制服的暴徒，而換成了黨的知識分子。這些人長得矮墩墩的，動作靈巧輕快，戴著眼鏡。他們輪班審訊他——他也不確定，只是覺得審訊時間很長，一次審訊可能要持續10個或20個小時。雖說，這些審訊他的人本意並不是讓他受盡皮肉之苦，但輕微的皮肉之苦終究是避免不了的。他們有時會扇他耳光，揪他耳朵，拽他頭髮，讓他單腳站立，不讓他上廁所，用強光照他的臉直到淚流滿面。不過，他們的目的很簡單，就是要羞辱他，毀掉他的爭辯能力和推理能力。他們致命的武器，就是無休止的審訊，連續不停，一小時接著一小時，讓他落入圈套，扭曲他說話的本意，最終使他將謊言認作真理。後來，他竟然放聲痛哭起來。精神疲勞固然是原因之一，但更多的是為自己感到羞愧。有時候，僅僅一次審訊就能讓他痛哭上六七次。大多數的時候，他們都會用污言穢語辱罵他，只要他稍有遲疑，他們就威脅要把他送回到老地方，讓那群殘暴的獄卒以極端的方式教訓他。但有的時候，他們也會突發「仁慈」，突然轉變語氣，叫他同志，意圖以英社和老大哥的名義來感化他，問他對以前的所作所為是否悔過，現在對黨是否足夠忠誠，能否痛改前非，想不想洗清之前的罪行等問題。在經歷了連續數小時的疲勞審訊後，即便這樣的話語，也會讓他感激涕零。他們就是通過這樣的方式，最終將溫斯頓徹底打敗，比獄卒的拳頭和皮靴要奏效得多。最終，他們讓他說什麼他就說什麼，他們讓他簽什麼他就簽什麼，不管他們要求他做什麼，他都照做不誤。現在，他唯一關心的就是猜測他們要給自己定的罪名，趕在他們施加暴刑之前率先坦白，和盤托出。因此，他供認的罪行包括暗殺傑出的黨員，分發擾亂治安的小冊子，挪用公款，出賣軍事機密以及其他的陰謀顛覆活動。他承認，早在1968年，他就受雇於東亞國政府，是一名被安插在大洋國的間諜；他承認自己是一個虔誠的宗教信徒，崇拜資本主義，是一個性觀念與黨的信條格格不入的人；他承認自己謀殺了妻子，儘管他知道，當然審訊者也清楚，他的妻子至今還活著；他承認多年來他一直跟戈斯坦過從甚密，是地下組織的成員之一，這個組織幾乎包括了他曾經認識的所有人。承認一切臆造的罪名，然後將他認識的人統統拖下水，這簡直是輕而易舉的事，況且，從某種程度上來說，這些都是事實。再說，他已經是黨的敵人了，這也是事實。在黨的眼中，思想上的背叛跟行為的背叛沒有什麼分別。

他的腦海中又浮現出其他的模糊片段，就像照片被周圍的黑邊隔離開一樣，怎麼也連貫不起來。

他被關在一間小屋子裡，屋子裡是黑是亮，他分辨不清，因為除了一雙眼睛之外，他什麼也看不見。他手邊的某個儀器在緩慢而有規則地滴答作響。那雙眼睛越變越大，越變越亮。突然間，他像是從座位上漂浮起來，跳入那雙眼中，瞬間被吞沒了。

他被綁在一張椅子上，在刺眼的燈光下，周圍被控制板包圍著。一個身穿白大褂的人站在控制板旁待命。外面響起了沉重的靴子聲。門「匡啷」一聲打開了。一臉蠟像模樣的警衛走了進來，後面跟著兩個獄卒。

「101室。」警衛說。

穿白大褂的那個人既沒有轉身，也沒有看溫斯頓，只是盯著控制板。

溫斯頓被推進一條金色長廊，它足足有1公里長。他瘋狂大笑，大聲地招認著自己的罪行。他交代了一切，甚至將在受酷刑折磨時成功隱藏起來的那點兒秘密，也都供認出來了。他對著已經熟知自己身世的觀眾，說出了自己平生的歷史。跟他進來的，還有獄卒、審訊者、穿白大褂的人、奧布萊恩、朱麗亞和加林頓先生，他們也都瘋狂地大笑著。他所預料的一些即將發生的可怕的事情，不知何故，卻被跳過去了，居然沒有發生。一切問題都交代完了，他不用再受刑訊的煎熬，他的一切行狀細節都被揭開，並得了理解，他獲得了寬恕。

他似乎聽到了奧布萊恩的聲音，掙扎著從木板床上坐起來。在審訊過程中，他雖然沒有見過奧布萊恩，但是有一種強烈的感覺，奧布萊恩就在他身邊，只是不讓他看見而已。是奧布萊恩在幕後操控著這一切，是他派獄卒來毒打他的，也是他告訴他們不要打死他的。是他決定溫斯頓該何時受折磨，何時緩口氣，何時吃飯睡覺，何時在胳膊上注射藥物的。是他向自己提問，也是他向自己暗示答案。他是災星，是保護者，是審判官，也是朋友。有一次，溫斯頓已經不記得是在被麻醉催眠的時候，還是在正常睡覺的時候，或者是在清醒的狀態下聽見的——有一個聲音在他耳邊竊竊私語：「不要擔心，溫斯頓，你在我的手上呢，我已經監視你7年了。現在，已經到了轉折點。我將拯救你，讓你變得更完美。」他不確定，這是否是奧布萊恩的聲音，但是在7年前，在夢中同樣是這個聲音，曾對他說過：「我們將會在沒有黑暗的地方會面。」

他已經記不起來，審訊是怎樣結束的了。不過，的確有一段黑暗時期是在牢房裡度過的。眼下，他被轉移到這個小房間來了，在這裡，他周圍的一切逐漸變得真實起來。他幾乎是平臥著，動彈不得，身體的每個能活動的部位都被束縛著，甚至他的後腦勺也被什麼東西固定著。奧布萊恩俯視著溫斯頓，帶著既嚴肅又悲哀的眼神。從下往上看，奧布萊恩的皮膚粗糙得厲害，神情也很憔悴，眼袋下垂，從鼻子到下頜之間全是皺紋。他看上去，比溫斯頓之前想像的要老很多，大概有48或者50歲吧。他手下面是一個有把手的控制板，面板周圍環繞有數字。

「我告訴過你，」奧布萊恩說，「如果我們還會見面的話，那一定是在這裡。」

「我記得，」溫斯頓說。

沒有任何徵兆，除了奧布萊恩一個輕微的手勢，他全身被一陣疼痛佔據了。這種疼痛可怕極了，他不知道到底發生了什麼，也全然不知，是什麼讓他的身體受到如此致命的損傷。他不知道，這疼痛究竟是真的，還是由電波造成的。但是，他的身體顯然已經扭曲變形了，各個關節慢慢開始脫位。儘管疼痛已經使他額頭上沁滿了汗珠，但是最令他擔心的，卻是脊骨會不會因此而被拉斷。他咬緊牙關，用鼻子艱難地呼吸著，索性保持沉默吧，能多挨一分鐘是一分鐘。

「你害怕了，」奧布萊恩盯著他的臉，「下一時刻，說不定就會有什麼被折斷，你最擔心的就是你的脊骨，是吧？可能你的腦海裡，已經清晰地看見脊骨被一節一節地折斷、脊髓液一滴一滴地流出的情景。你現在想的就是這個，對不對，溫斯頓？」

溫斯頓沒有回答。奧布萊恩把控制板的手桿拉回到原處，疼痛迅速減弱了，一如來的時候那樣快。

「現在的刻度不過只是40，」奧布萊恩說，「你看，這個儀表盤的刻度能夠達到100。你最好記住，在我們談話的過程中，我可以隨心所欲地控制它，想讓你多疼都可以辦到，你的痛苦程度全由我說了算。如果你對我散謊，或者以任何方式搪塞我，或者以低於你正常智力水準的回答來糊弄我，我會立刻讓你疼得叫起來。你聽明白了嗎？」

「聽明白了。」溫斯頓回答。

奧布萊恩的態度緩和了許多。他若有所思地向上推了推眼鏡，在地上來回踱了幾步。當他再度開口時，聲音已經變得溫和且極有耐心了。那口吻，像是個醫生，甚至像個神父，旨在以理服人，而不是通過殘暴的肉體懲罰。

「溫斯頓，在你身上，我不怕花費心血，也不怕麻煩。」他說。「因為你值得我這麼做。你很清楚，自己出了什麼狀況，很多年前你就知道，只是你一直不肯承認而已。你的問題，就在於精神紊亂，記憶力衰退，該記得的事情你記不起來，偏要說服自己記住那些無中生有的事情。幸好，你還是可以治癒的，只是你從沒治癒自己，因為你自己不願意這樣做。其實，你只需在意志力上做一個小小的努力，就可以讓自己發生徹底的改變。即使是現在，我才明白，你還是在堅持著你印象中的這種病態的思想，並把它當作一種很了不起的美德。我不妨舉個例子吧，大洋國如今在跟誰交戰？」

「在我被逮捕的時候，是跟東亞國。」

「跟東亞國，很好。大洋國一直在跟東亞國交戰，對嗎？」

溫斯頓深吸了一口氣，他剛要張嘴說話，又停住了，眼睛一直盯著控制板上的數字。

「請講真話，溫斯頓。我想聽到你的真話，告訴我你所記得的和你所想到的東西。」

「我記得，在我被捕之前的一周，我們還沒有跟東亞國作戰，那時，它還是我們的盟友。我們的敵國應該是歐亞國，戰爭一直持續了4年。在此之前——」

奧布萊恩做了個讓他住口的手勢。

「再舉個例子，」他說，「幾年前，你的確產生過一次很嚴重的幻覺，你相信那3個人，就是從前被指控犯叛國罪和破壞罪的那3個黨員——瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福，他們受到了應有的懲罰，但是，你卻認為他們被指控的罪名不成立。你覺得自己看到了確鑿的證據，足以證明他們的供詞是假的。你看到一張使你產生了幻覺的照片，並且堅信事實已經被你捏在手上，那照片就像這一張一樣。」

奧布萊恩手裡，捏著一張長方形的新聞剪報。溫斯頓看了不過5秒鐘，就清楚了剪報的內容。毫無疑問，就是那張照片，不會錯的。奧布萊恩手裡拿的，就是那張照片的復本，照片上記錄了瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福在紐約參加會議的情形，那正是他在11年前偶然發現並及時銷毀的照片。雖然他只看了一眼，但是毫無疑問，他確實見過它。他感到極度痛苦，不顧一切地掙扎著要坐起來，可他絲毫都動彈不得。此刻，他甚至忘記了控制板的存在。他只想把那張照片再捏在手裡，起碼，讓他再看一眼。

「它是存在的！」他喊道。

「不！」奧布萊恩說。

他走到房間的另一端，牆上有一個忘懷洞。奧布萊恩揭開蓋子，照片復本頃刻間被一陣熱浪捲得無影無蹤，化為灰燼。奧布萊恩轉身回來。

「一切都已化為灰燼，」他說，「它並不存在，從沒存在過。」

「但它存在過，真的存在過！現在，它還在我們的記憶中，我記得它，你也記得！」

「我不記得！」奧布萊恩說。

溫斯頓感覺心在往下沉。這是雙重思想，這讓他感到非常無助。如果他能夠確定奧布萊恩在說謊的話，那似乎還不要緊。然而，奧布萊恩極可能是真的忘記了那張照片的存在，如果真是這樣，估計他連拒絕承認這張照片的起因和過程都會忘掉。那麼，溫斯頓又該怎樣確定這是否只是他耍的一個奸計？也許人類的頭腦中真就有這種顛倒錯亂的思想，而正是這種思想打敗了他。

奧布萊恩低頭打量著他，像是在深思著什麼。他的神情，極像一個老師在苦口婆心地教育一個任性但很有前途的孩子。

「有一句黨控制過去的口號，」他說，「請你重複一遍。」

「誰主宰歷史，誰就主宰未來；誰主宰現在，誰就主宰歷史。」溫斯頓順從地重複道。

「誰主宰現在，誰就主宰歷史，」奧布萊恩說，慢慢地點頭讚許道，「這是你的主張嗎？溫斯頓，歷史真的存在過嗎？」

那種無助感，再次向溫斯頓襲來。他向控制板掃了一眼。他不知道自己到底該回答「是」還是「不是」，才能將自己從疼痛中解救出來，他甚至不知道，哪個答案才是他所相信的、正確的答案。

奧布萊恩微微地笑了笑，說：「溫斯頓，看樣子，你也算不上是什麼思辨高人。直到現在，你還沒有考慮過『存在』究竟意味著什麼吧？讓我把它說得更明確些吧。歷史會具體地存在於空間裡嗎？會在某個地方，或者另一個固態物質的世界裡，繼續發展下去嗎？」

「不會。」

「那麼歷史存在於哪裡？去哪裡找？」

「在記錄裡，它們被記載下來了。」

「在記錄裡？還有呢？」

「在頭腦裡，在人們的記憶中。」

「在記憶中，很好。我們的黨控制著所有的記錄，也控制著人類的所有記憶。那麼我們控制了歷史，不是嗎？」

「但是，你們怎麼能做到讓人們一點東西都不記得呢？」溫斯頓又叫喊起來，一時忘記了控制板的存在。「記憶是無意識的，是不由自主的，你們怎麼能控制得了別人的記憶呢？我的記憶，你們就不能控制！」

奧布萊恩的表情，又變得極其嚴肅起來，他把手放在了控制板上。

「恰恰相反，」他說，「正是因為沒能控制自己的記憶，你才會被抓到這裡來。你之所以被帶到這裡，正是因為你太狂妄自大，缺乏自我約束。你不肯屈服，不肯拋棄私見來換取健全的心智。你寧願去做瘋子，做個極端的少數派。只有受過訓練的頭腦才能看得到現實，溫斯頓。你相信現實是客觀的、外部的、自然存在的。你也應該相信，現實的本質是不證自明的。當你自欺欺人地認為你看到了什麼東西，你便認為別人也跟你一樣，看到了什麼東西。但是，我告訴你溫斯頓，現實不是外在的，它存在於人的頭腦中，不存在於別處。它不只是存在於你個人的頭腦中，因為一個人的頭腦會犯錯誤，而且他遲早都會死亡：現實，它只是存在於黨的思想中，它是集體的，而黨是永垂不朽的。黨認為是真理，它便是真理。現實是你所看不見的，除了通過黨的眼睛。這是實話，你要重新學習這一點，溫斯頓。它需要你把自己毀滅掉，這得靠你的意志力，在你的心智健全以前，你要讓自己謙卑一點！」

奧布萊恩說到這裡頓了頓，好像是有意讓溫斯頓把他所說的領會一下。

「你寫在日記本裡的話，」他繼續說，「『自由就是可以說2加2等於4』， 還記得嗎？」

「記得。」溫斯頓回答。

奧布萊恩舉起他的左手，手背朝向溫斯頓，將拇指彎曲，其餘4根手指頭伸開。「我舉起了幾個手指，溫斯頓？」

「4個。」

「如果，黨說我舉起的是5個，而不是4個——那麼，現在這是幾個？」

「4個。」

還沒說完，他就疼得直喘氣了。儀表盤刻度已經指到了55。溫斯頓痛得全身冒冷汗。吸進肺裡的空氣再呼出來，就變成了呻吟。他咬緊牙，但疼痛並未因此減輕一點兒。奧布萊恩盯著他，仍舊伸出4根手指。他拉回手桿，這時，痛苦只是稍稍弱了些。

「幾根手指，溫斯頓？」

「4根。」

表盤指針已經指向60。

「幾根手指，溫斯頓？」

「4根！4根！你想讓我說是幾根？4根！」

指針刻度一定是上升了，但他看不見。他滿眼只有那張沉重的、嚴肅的面孔，和那伸出的4根手指頭。那手指，像柱子一樣豎在他眼前，巨大，朦朧，似乎還有點搖擺不定，但查其數目，的確是4個。

「幾根手指，溫斯頓？」

「4根！請停下，停下！別再繼續下去了，4根！4根！」

「有幾根，溫斯頓？」

「5根！5根！5根！」

「不，溫斯頓，那沒用，你在撒謊，其實你仍認為那是4根。好，到底有幾根手指？

「4根！5根！4根！只要你喜歡，只要能停下來，別再疼痛，幾根都可以！」

他醒來時，突然發現奧布萊恩正用手臂抱著自己坐著。他可能已經失去意識好幾秒鐘了。綁在他身上的電線之類的東西，已經被鬆開了。他覺得冷極了，身體在不斷地發抖，牙齒咯咯作響，眼淚順著臉頰往下流。一時間，他像個孩子一樣偎依在奧布萊恩的胳膊上，感到舒適無比。他覺得，奧布萊恩才是他的保護者，那些痛苦都來源於其他地方，唯有奧布萊恩，才能使他脫離痛苦的境地。

「你是接受東西很慢的人，溫斯頓。」奧布萊恩溫和地說。

「我有什麼辦法呢？」他哭泣道。「我的眼睛所看到的，2加2本來就等於4呀。」

「有時等於4，溫斯頓，有時也等於5，有時還等於3呢。總之，它可以等於任何數。你需要更加努力地學習，要讓心智變得徹底清醒起來，的確不是件容易的事情。」

他把溫斯頓放在床上，扶他躺下，然後把他的四肢重新固定好。此時，溫斯頓覺得疼痛已經消退，身體也不抖了，只是覺得全身虛弱發冷。奧布萊恩點頭向穿白大褂的男人示意。白大褂男人一直在旁邊站著，既沒有動彈，也沒有吭聲。他俯下身來，仔細觀察了一下溫斯頓的眼睛，按了按脈搏，把耳朵貼在胸部聽了聽，敲敲這兒，拍拍那兒，之後向奧布萊恩點點頭。

「再來。」奧布萊恩說。

溫斯頓的身體，再次陷入疼痛之中。控制板指針肯定是到了70或者75，這次他閉上了眼睛。他知道手指依然存在，而且依然是4根。目前最緊要的事情，是在痙攣過去後自己還能活下來。他已經沒法不讓自己叫喊出來了。疼痛減輕了，他張開眼睛。奧布萊恩已經將手桿拉回原處。

「有幾根手指，溫斯頓？」

「4根，我想就是4根。如果可能，我真想自己看見的是5根，我正努力地看見5根。」

「你希望選哪個結果，是騙我說看見了5根，還是你真實看見的是5根？」

「真的5根。」

「再來一次。」奧布萊恩命令。

可能控制板已經指到了80或90吧。溫斯頓只能間歇性地感到疼痛的發作，至於疼痛為何而來，他卻有點兒模糊了。眼皮下面，好像出現了一片手指的叢林，時而舞動，時而遠近，時而隱現。他試圖去數那究竟有幾根手指，但是，至於他為什麼要去數，他已經全然不知了。他只知道，要數清它們是不可能的事情，因為4和5之間藏著某種神秘的東西。疼痛再次減退。當睜開眼睛時，他發現自己看到的依然是剛才的事物。數不清的手指，像是飄忽不定的叢林，向各個方向交叉移動著。他再次閉上眼睛。

「我現在舉起的是幾根手指，溫斯頓？」

「我不知道，我不知道。如果再來一次，你將會殺死我。4，5，6——實話說，我真的不知道。」

「進步些了。」奧布萊恩說。

注射器刺進了溫斯頓的胳膊。與此同時，一股幸福的暖流在他的全身蔓延開來，舒服得讓他幾乎忘記了剛才忍受的痛苦。他睜開眼睛，感激地看著奧布萊恩，看見那張線條分明、既醜陋又充滿智慧的面孔，他的心裡禁不住一陣翻騰。如果他還能動，他可能會伸出手來，放在奧布萊恩的臂膀上。他從來沒有像現在這樣，對奧布萊恩充滿感激之情，這不僅僅是因為他解除了自己身體的疼痛，而是因為那種最初的感覺又回來了——那就是，不管奧布萊恩是敵是友都無關緊要，重要的是，他們可以互通心曲。這或許是因為，一個人對理解的渴求要比愛情更強烈。奧布萊恩幾乎把他折磨到了精神失常的邊緣，有一段時間差點把他殺死，但這確實沒有關係。在某種意義上，他們比朋友更甚，可以說是知己，儘管這實際的話語彼此都沒有講出來，但是總有一天，或許在某地，他們會再見，他們可能會推心置腹地聊一聊。雖然，沒有人說得上那會是在哪裡。奧布萊恩仍舊在俯視著他，那神情好像在說，你的心事我完全瞭解，我心裡想的跟你一樣。等他再次開口時，那語氣變得異常平靜，像是在聊天一樣。

「你知道你是在哪兒嗎，溫斯頓？」

「我不知道，我猜是仁愛部吧。」

「你知道你在這裡有多長時間了嗎？」

「我不知道。幾天，幾周，幾個月——我想應該是有幾個月了吧。」

「你能想像得到，為什麼我們會把犯人帶來這裡嗎？」

「讓他們招供。」

「不對，不是這個原因。再回答一次。」

「懲罰他們。」

「不對！」奧布萊恩大聲叫道，聲調頓時升高，表情也變得異常激動，但這絲毫蓋不住他那一臉的興致。

「不對！不光為了讓你們坦白，也不僅僅是為了懲罰你們。我來告訴你，把你們帶到這裡來的真正原因，是為了治癒你們腦中的頑疾，讓你們變得心智健全。明白嗎，溫斯頓？來到這裡的人，沒有一個不是被治好了才離開的？我們對於你們所犯下的那些愚蠢的罪過全無興趣。你要知道，黨對那些表面行為一點也不感興趣，我們所關注的是思想。我們要打擊敵人，更要改造敵人。你現在明白這良苦用心了嗎？」

他彎下腰，對著溫斯頓。溫斯頓躺著看他。奧布萊恩的臉，因為湊得太近而顯得大而醜陋，然而，在這張碩大無比的臉的背後，卻隱藏著另一種瘋狂的亢奮。溫斯頓的心又沉了一下子。如果可能，他真恨不得拱到床下去。他強烈地感覺到，奧布萊恩要是興奮起來，還會扳動控制板的手桿。然而，奧布萊恩卻轉身走開了。他來回踱了兩步，情緒稍稍平靜了一些，繼續鼓勵道：

「首先，你需要瞭解一點，在這個地方是沒有殉難者的。你讀過有關宗教迫害的東西嗎？比如說中世紀的宗教審判，那實屬失敗之舉。它以宣揚根除異端邪說開始，最終卻以那些東西永久存在而收場。他們燒死一個異教徒，就會有成千上萬個異教徒站出來。為什麼會這樣呢？問題就出在他們審判異教徒的方式上。他們公開殺死異教徒，卻沒有意識到，直到死時，這些異教徒依然冥頑不靈，不肯悔悟。事實上，他們正因為不肯悔悟才落得燒死的下場。燒死他們，是因為他們從未放棄過真正的信仰。自然，所有的榮耀都歸於這些死者，而所有的恥辱卻留給了那些燒死他們的審判者。在那之後，也就是20世紀，出現了極權主義者，以德國的納粹黨和俄國的布爾什維克黨為典型代表。俄羅斯對異端分子的迫害手法，比宗教法庭要殘酷得多。他們覺得，應該從過去的錯誤中汲取經驗教訓。他們知道，無論如何，都不應製造殉難者，於是他們總是在公審到來前，用盡一切辦法去毀掉犯人僅存的那點兒尊嚴。他們不但對犯人施以酷刑，還將他們禁閉起來，直到他們跪地乞求，搖尾獻媚，才肯罷休。犯人會招認一切罪行，不管是真的也好，假的也罷。除了指認別人以外，他們還會辱罵自己。不過沒過幾年，像宗教法庭迫害異教徒那樣，他們不希望看到的結果，再一次地發生了。死去的人，最終變成了殉道士，而他們遭受的侮辱與迫害大多被人們所遺忘。這又是為什麼呢？這是因為，他們所供認的罪行顯然是假的，不真實的。而我們不會犯這樣的錯誤，我們需要他們誠心悔過，至少我們要把不真實的東西變得真實。此外，我們也決不允許死去的人再站起來反對我們。因此，溫斯頓，你不要心存幻想了，後人是不會去維護你的，也不可能為你平反。他們永遠不會知道，有你這麼一個人曾經存在過。你在世上的痕跡，將被抹得乾乾淨淨。我們將會把你蒸發在大氣中，像水汽一樣。有關你的一切都將不復存在，檔案中沒有你的名字，活著的人也不會記得你。過去沒有你，將來也沒有你，因為，你從未存在過。」

那麼，為什麼還要費盡心機地折磨我？溫斯頓這樣想著，心生怨恨。奧布萊恩停下腳步，似乎聽見了溫斯頓的心聲。他那張奇大無比的醜臉又湊了過來，眼睛瞇成一條縫。

「你肯定在想，」他說，「既然我們想徹底毀滅你，你說或不說，做或不做，並沒有實質差別——那樣的話，我們為什麼還要費盡心機地去拷問你呢？你現在一定有這樣的疑問，對吧？」

「是的。」溫斯頓回答。

奧布萊恩微笑著回答：「你是我們模式中的一個缺陷，一個污點，我們必須把你清除掉。我不是已經告訴過你，現在，我們採用的迫害方式跟過去不同嗎？我們不會滿足於消極的服從，更不會滿足於卑微的屈服，我們要你誠心投降，而且這種誠心源自你的自由意志。我們絕不會因為異端分子的對抗，就不問緣由地將他消滅。只要他跟我們對抗，我們就絕不消滅他。我們會改變他，控制他的內心思想，改造他，燃燒掉他內心所有的邪惡和幻覺，把他引到我們這邊來。我們要的不是他表面上的認同，而是內心和靈魂深處的認同。在殺死他之前，我們會把他變成我們的人。我們絕不容許世界上有錯誤思想存在，即便它是隱秘的，不至於危害社會。即便在行刑的最後一刻，我們也不能允許他有任何的反抗情緒存在。在過去的歲月裡，每當異教徒走向火刑架的時候，他們總能欣喜若狂地大肆宣揚異端邪說。俄羅斯的大清洗運動就是如此，犯人儘管被帶上刑場，挨了槍子兒，但他們滿腦子還是反叛的思想。我們不一樣，我們會在砸碎他們的腦殼之前，讓他們的思想變得完美無瑕。老式專制主義的戒條是『你不能』，極權主義者的戒條是『你必須』，而我們的戒條，則是『你是我們的』。被帶到這裡的所有人，沒有一個敢繼續反抗我們,每個人的思想都被沖洗得乾乾淨淨。即使是那三個下場悲慘的叛國賊——瓊斯，阿諾遜和盧瑟福，你曾經相信他們是無辜的，但最終，他們還是被我們打垮了。我就參加過對他們的審訊。他們的意志逐漸被摧毀，趴在地上嗚咽著，哭著——最終，他們的表情裡沒有害怕和痛苦了，只剩下懺悔。在接受完審訊後，他們簡直成了行屍走肉，除了懺悔自己的罪過和對老大哥歌功頌德，什麼都沒剩下。他們對老大哥的敬愛之情，看了真讓人動容。他們只求速死，以免稍有不慎，又會玷污了自己思想的清白。」

他彷彿沉醉在自己的講述中，臉上表現出來的狂熱之情，只增不減。他不是裝出來的，溫斯頓想。他不是偽君子，他相信奧布萊恩所說的每一句話。最讓他不舒服的是，他跟奧布萊恩比起來，智力簡直低得可憐。他目視著那雙沉重的大腳，邁著優雅的步伐在房間裡走來走去。不論從哪方面來說，奧布萊恩都比自己強大。不論是他曾經有過的思想，還是可能有的思想，都一一為奧布萊恩所窺破、掌握和反駁掉。他的思想，遠遠比自己高明。在這種情況下，又怎能說奧布萊恩是瘋子呢？肯定是自己瘋了，溫斯頓想。奧布萊恩低頭看著他，語氣又變得嚴厲起來。

「不要幻想有人會解救你，溫斯頓，哪怕你徹底向我們投降。沒有一個誤入歧途的犯人，可以從這裡逃掉。即便我們允許你自由地度過餘生，你也逃不脫我們的控制。這裡有你的前科，因此，你也別指望翻身。你最好明白這一點。我們會把你徹底打垮，讓你絕無捲土重來的任何機會。事情一旦發生在你身上，便注定你的餘生不會有好日子過。你能活上幾千年，那又能怎樣？你再也不可能有像正常人那樣的情感了。任何事情對你來說，都將如同死灰：愛情、友情、活著的樂趣、歡笑、好奇心、勇氣，還有正直，這些都不再關你的事，你將變成一個空殼。我們會把你掏空，然後用我們的思想把你填滿。」

他停下來，向白大褂招手示意。溫斯頓覺察到，一台笨重的儀器被推到了身後。奧布萊恩坐在床邊，以便使他的臉跟溫斯頓的臉保持在同一水平線上。

「3000。」他對溫斯頓頭上的那個白大褂男人說道。

溫斯頓的太陽穴，貼上了兩塊濕淋淋的墊子。他本能地縮了下身體。新的疼痛又要開始了。奧布萊恩和善地將手搭在他身上，似乎帶著幾分安慰。

「這次傷不到你。」他說，「看著我。」

就在這時，溫斯頓聽到了一聲震耳欲聾的爆炸聲，或者說是像爆炸的聲音，儘管他不大確定是否真的有這聲音發出來。但不管怎麼說，他看見了一道刺眼的白光。溫斯頓沒有受傷，他本來是仰面躺著的，爆炸聲響起的瞬間，他突然感覺像是被什麼力量推到了一邊，翻到在地。此時，似乎他的腦袋也受到了影響。他的視力逐漸恢復，記起來了自己是誰，身在哪裡，也認出了面前一直盯著他的那張臉。但是，他腦子中好像有一塊空白，感覺像是那裡被挖去了一塊兒。

「這感覺不會太久。」奧布萊恩說，「看著我的眼，大洋國在跟哪個國家交戰？」

溫斯頓想了想。他知道大洋國是什麼意思，他也記得自己是大洋國的人，他甚至還記得歐亞國和東亞國，可他不知道是誰跟誰在打仗。事實上，他已經不記得曾有過戰爭了。

「我不記得了。」

「現在歐亞國在跟東亞國交戰，你能記起來嗎？」

「記得。」

「大洋國一直在跟東亞國打仗。從你出生時起，自黨誕生之日起，從有歷史記載以來，戰爭就一直持續，從未停止過。你記起來了嗎？」

「是的。」

「11年前，你給自己編了一個故事，說有3個人因為叛國罪而被處以極刑。你堅持認為，你曾經看到過一張報紙，足以證明他們是無辜的，但這份報紙從來就沒有存在過，它是你編造出來的，而後你就信以為真了。你現在還記得，最初編造它的情景嗎？還記得嗎？」

「記得。」

「剛才我舉起手給你看，你看見了5根手指對不？還記得嗎？」

「記得。」

奧布萊恩舉起他的左手，把拇指收了起來。

「看，這有5根手指，你看見的是5根手指頭嗎？」

「是的。」

他確實看到了，在轉瞬即逝的那一刻，在他腦海中的情景還沒來得及轉變之前，他真的看到了5根手指，奧布萊恩的手掌是正常的。一切都恢復正常了，先前的恐懼，仇恨和困惑一齊湧來。剛才確實曾有那麼一刻——但他不確定是多久，也許有半分鐘——奧布萊恩向他暗示的每一個觀點，都已變成了絕對的真理，填進了他腦海裡的空白處。似乎在那一刻，2加2可以輕而易舉地等於3或者等於5，只要你想這麼做的話。雖說，這種感覺在奧布萊恩的手放下之前就已經消退了，雖然他不能重新回到剛才的情景之中，但他對剛才的經歷記憶猶新，猶如耄耋老人追憶童年趣事一般清晰可見。

「現在你看到了。」奧布萊恩說，「2加2不論等於幾，都是有可能的。」

「是的。」溫斯頓回答。

奧布萊恩一臉得意地站起來。溫斯頓看見，左邊那個穿白大褂的男人打開一支玻璃瓶注射劑，把注射針頭插了進去。奧布萊恩微笑著，把頭轉向溫斯頓，習慣性地向上推了推架在鼻子上的眼鏡。

「你還記得自己在日記本上這樣寫過嗎？」他說，「『不管是敵人還是朋友，都無關緊要，重要的是有一個瞭解自己的人，可以跟你談得來。』你說的很對，我喜歡跟你談話，你的思想境界確實很高。你的思想跟我很相似，只是你現在有點精神錯亂。在這輪改造結束前，你可以問我幾個問題，只要你願意。」

「任何我想知道的問題？」

「任何。」奧布萊恩見溫斯頓一直盯著控制板，便補充道，「已經關掉了，你的第一個問題是什麼？」

「你們把朱麗亞怎樣了？」溫斯頓問。

奧布萊恩笑了起來。「她在被捕時就背叛了你，她什麼都說了，毫無保留。我還從沒見過，有誰會這麼快就站到我們這邊來。如果你再見到她，恐怕很難再認出她了。她的叛逆心理與謊言，她的愚蠢且骯髒的思想——都被我們一一清洗乾淨了，她完成了完美的轉變，簡直堪稱一本教科書。」

「你們折磨她了？」

奧布萊恩沒有回答他，「下一個問題。」他說。

「老大哥真的存在嗎？」

「當然存在，只要黨存在，老大哥就是黨的具體化身嘛。」

「他存在的方式跟我一樣嗎？」

「記得。」

奧布萊恩舉起他的左手，把拇指收了起來。

「看，這有5根手指，你看見的是5根手指頭嗎？」

「是的。」

他確實看到了，在轉瞬即逝的那一刻，在他腦海中的情景還沒來得及轉變之前，他真的看到了5根手指，奧布萊恩的手掌是正常的。一切都恢復正常了，先前的恐懼，仇恨和困惑一齊湧來。剛才確實曾有那麼一刻——但他不確定是多久，也許有半分鐘——奧布萊恩向他暗示的每一個觀點，都已變成了絕對的真理，填進了他腦海裡的空白處。似乎在那一刻，2加2可以輕而易舉地等於3或者等於5，只要你想這麼做的話。雖說，這種感覺在奧布萊恩的手放下之前就已經消退了，雖然他不能重新回到剛才的情景之中，但他對剛才的經歷記憶猶新，猶如耄耋老人追憶童年趣事一般清晰可見。

「現在你看到了。」奧布萊恩說，「2加2不論等於幾，都是有可能的。」

「是的。」溫斯頓回答。

奧布萊恩一臉得意地站起來。溫斯頓看見，左邊那個穿白大褂的男人打開一支玻璃瓶注射劑，把注射針頭插了進去。奧布萊恩微笑著，把頭轉向溫斯頓，習慣性地向上推了推架在鼻子上的眼鏡。

「你還記得自己在日記本上這樣寫過嗎？」他說，「『不管是敵人還是朋友，都無關緊要，重要的是有一個瞭解自己的人，可以跟你談得來。』你說的很對，我喜歡跟你談話，你的思想境界確實很高。你的思想跟我很相似，只是你現在有點精神錯亂。在這輪改造結束前，你可以問我幾個問題，只要你願意。」

「任何我想知道的問題？」

「任何。」奧布萊恩見溫斯頓一直盯著控制板，便補充道，「已經關掉了，你的第一個問題是什麼？」

「你們把朱麗亞怎樣了？」溫斯頓問。

奧布萊恩笑了起來。「她在被捕時就背叛了你，她什麼都說了，毫無保留。我還從沒見過，有誰會這麼快就站到我們這邊來。如果你再見到她，恐怕很難再認出她了。她的叛逆心理與謊言，她的愚蠢且骯髒的思想——都被我們一一清洗乾淨了，她完成了完美的轉變，簡直堪稱一本教科書。」

「你們折磨她了？」

奧布萊恩沒有回答他，「下一個問題。」他說。

「老大哥真的存在嗎？」

「當然存在，只要黨存在，老大哥就是黨的具體化身嘛。」

「他存在的方式跟我一樣嗎？」

III

“THERE ARE THREE STAGES in your reintegration,” said O’Brien. “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.”

As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough; it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O’Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long, indefinite time—weeks, possibly—and the intervals between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.

“As you lie there,” said O’Brien, “you have often wondered—you have even asked me—why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, ‘I understand how; I do not understand why’? It was when you thought about ‘why’ that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?”

“You have read it?” said Winston.

“I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.”

“Is it true, what it says?”

“As description, yes. The program it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge—a gradual spread of enlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason; you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is forever. Make that the starting point of your thoughts.”

He came closer to the bed. “Forever!” he repeated. “And now let us get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why.’ You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,” he added as Winston remained silent.

Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew in advance what O’Brien would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston, he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

“You are ruling over us for our own good,” he said feebly. “You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore—”

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

“That was stupid, Winston, stupid!” he said. “You should know better than to say a thing like that.”

He pulled the lever back and continued:

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

“You are thinking,” he said, “that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?”

He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.

“We are the priests of power,” he said. “God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery.’ Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body—but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter—external reality, as you would call it—is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.”

For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.

“But how can you control matter?” he burst out. “You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death—”

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.”

“But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.”

“Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.”

“But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny—helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.”

“Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

“But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.”

“Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.”

“But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever.”

“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

“For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?”

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind—surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.

“I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,” he added in a different tone. “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O’Brien went on:

“And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands—all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live forever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon—and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.”

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. “You can’t!” he said weakly.

“What do you mean by that remark, Winston?”

“You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.”

“Why?”

“It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.”

“Why not?”

“It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

“Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.”

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

“I don’t know—I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.”

“We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—irrelevant.”

“I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.”

“Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?”

“No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe—I don’t know, some spirit, some principle—that you will never overcome.”

“Do you believe in God, Winston?”

“No.”

“Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?”

“I don’t know. The spirit of Man.”

“And do you consider yourself a man?”

“Yes.”

“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are nonexistent.” His manner changed and he said more harshly: “And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?”

“Yes, I consider myself superior.”

O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound track of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child’s face. O’Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.

“Get up from that bed,” he said.

The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.

“You are the last man,” said O’Brien. “You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.”

Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.

“Go on,” said O’Brien. “Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.”

He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, gray-colored, skeletonlike thing was coming toward him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that he had gone gray as well, but it was only the scalp that was gray. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was gray all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton; the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.

“You have thought sometimes,” said O’Brien, “that my face—the face of a member of the Inner Party—looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?”

He seized Winston’s shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.

“Look at the condition you are in!” he said. “Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!” He plucked at Winston’s head and brought away a tuft of hair. “Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!”

He seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston’s jaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.

“You are rotting away,” he said; “you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.”

Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed onto a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light; but he could not stop himself. O’Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.

“It will not last forever,” he said. “You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.”

“You did it!” sobbed Winston. “You reduced me to this state.”

“No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.”

He paused, and then went on:

“We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?”

Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O’Brien.

“I have not betrayed Julia,” he said.

O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. “No,” he said, “no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.”

The peculiar reverence for O’Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston’s heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did O’Brien fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the Party—everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feeling toward her had remained the same. O’Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.

“Tell me,” he said, “how soon will they shoot me?”

“It might be a long time,” said O’Brien. “You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.”

第三章

「對你的改造，大體可分為三個階段，」奧布萊恩說，「學習階段，理解階段和接受階段。現在，該是進入第二階段的時候了。」

像往常一樣，溫斯頓平躺在木板床上。只是最近捆著他的帶子好像鬆了一些，雖然他被綁在床上，但膝蓋還能挪動一點，頭部可以來回轉動向四處張望，胳膊也可以微微抬起一點兒。現在，他對控制板倒是不那麼害怕了。只要他反應得快一些，就可以免受很多痛苦，多半是在他表現得愚不可及的時候，奧布萊恩才會拉動手中的手桿。有好幾次，在談話過程中，奧布萊恩都沒有拉動過手桿。他早已記不得，他們有過多少次談話了。總之，整個談話過程被無休止地拉長，時間也不確定——可能是幾個星期，也可能是幾天，當然也有可能是幾個小時。

「當你躺著的時候，」奧布萊恩說，「你肯定經常在想——當然你也問過我——為什麼仁愛部會在你身上花這麼多的時間。想必，在我們還你自由之身的時候，你也會為此問題所困擾。你或許瞭解當下社會的運行模式，但是，你卻搞不懂它運行的根本動機。還記得你寫在日記本上的那句話嗎？『我理解怎樣做的，但是我不理解，為什麼要這樣做。』這就是你一想到『為什麼』，就會懷疑自己的心智是否健全的原因。你已經讀過那本書了吧——戈斯坦的大作，或者至少讀過其中的一部分吧？它有沒有告訴你一些你以前所不知道的事情？」

「你也讀過嗎？」溫斯頓問。

「那是我寫的，或者換句話說，我參與過這本書的寫作。正如你所知道的，沒有哪本書是一個人單獨完成的。」

「裡面所說的都是真的嗎？」

「就其所描述的內容而言，都是真的。但是書中提出的所謂的計劃，都是瞎話。在書中，你或許可以理出這樣的頭緒：秘密地積累知識，逐步啟迪民智，煽動無產階級造反，最終把黨推翻。其實這都是廢話，鬼才相信。無產者永遠不會造反，一千年後不會，一萬年後也不會。我不需要告訴你理由，想必你已經知道了。如果你曾經產生過暴力革命的想法，我想，現在你可以把這些想法扔掉了。黨被推翻是絕對不可能發生的事情，黨的統治會永世長存，這才是你思想的根基所在。」

他走近溫斯頓床前。「永世長存。」他重複著，「現在，我們再次回到『怎樣』與『為什麼』的問題上來。你對黨如何維護自身權力的理解相當深刻，那你告訴我，我們為什麼要堅持維護權力？目的是什麼？我們為什麼需要權力？」他繼續說，但溫斯頓沒有吭聲。

之後的一兩秒鐘，溫斯頓仍然沒說話，身體的疲憊，壓得他透不過氣來。奧布萊恩的臉上，又閃現出先前的那種狂熱，他已經知道溫斯頓想對自己說什麼了。黨並沒有為自身的目的而去追逐權力，僅僅是為了更好地維護大多數民眾的利益。黨之所以尋求權力，是因為從總體上來說，民眾普遍具有軟弱怯懦的特點，他們消受不了自由，面對不了真理，必須由比他們更強勢的組織來統治他們，欺騙他們。民眾需要在自由和幸福之間做出選擇，對於多數民眾而言，他們覺得幸福更可取。而黨作為弱勢群體永久的守護者，作惡是為了帶來善行，更為了他人的幸福而犧牲了自己。現在讓溫斯頓無法忍受的是，奧布萊恩怎樣說，他就要怎樣去附和他的觀點。你從他的臉上就可以看出，奧布萊恩對一切事情都心知肚明。他比溫斯頓聰明千倍，他知道這個世界的真實面貌，知道人類已經退化到了何種程度，知道黨為延續它的權力而散佈謊言並大施暴行的把戲。他對所有的一切，都理解得清清楚楚，權衡得明明白白，其實這都無關緊要。他不擇手段，無非是為了維護他們最終的統治，為他們的殘暴辯護。面對這樣一個瘋子，一個比你的理解力更強、給你公平爭論的機會又沉迷己見、頭頭是道的瘋子，你又能有什麼辦法呢？

「黨是為了我們的福祉才統治我們的，」他無力地說，「黨相信人類是不適合統治自己的，因此才——

溫思頓這樣說著，突然變得歇斯底里起來。他感到全身一陣劇烈的疼痛，奧布萊恩已經把控制板的手桿推到了35。

「你個蠢蛋，溫斯頓，蠢蛋！」他說,「你該明白事理的，萬不該說出這樣的話來。」

他把手桿拉回來，繼續說：「現在我來告訴你答案，它是這樣的，黨尋求權力完全是出於自身利益的考慮。我們對別人的福祉並不感興趣，我們感興趣的只是權力,不是財富，不是奢華，不是長壽也不是幸福，僅僅是權力，純粹的權力。至於純粹的權力意味著什麼，不久你就會明白。我們是不同於過去的所有寡頭政治集體主義的，我們知道自己在謀求什麼。其餘的人，甚至那些看起來跟我們相近的勢力，全是偽君子和膽小鬼。德國的納粹黨和俄國的布爾什維克黨，在統治方法上跟我們很相近，但他們從來都沒有勇氣承認他們的動機。他們很虛偽，可能連他們自己都認為，他們奪取權力是迫不得已的，可能只會掌權一段時期，過不了多久，一個自由平等的人間天堂就會降臨。我們跟他們不一樣，我們知道沒有統治者喜歡玩政權交替的遊戲。權力並不是一種手段，它是我們行事的最終目的。沒有人會以捍衛革命為目的建立一個獨裁統治的政權，相反，卻有人會藉著革命的幌子建立一個獨裁統治的政權。迫害的目的就是為了迫害，酷刑的目的就是為了酷刑，權力的目的就是為了權力。現在，你明白我的意思了嗎？」

溫斯頓被奧布萊恩一臉的疲倦所吸引，一如以前被他所吸引那樣，那是無助時表現出來的內在的堅強和殘忍，充滿了智慧和控制欲。但是，這是一張何其疲倦的臉啊，他的眼袋已經開始下垂，臉頰上的皮膚也變得鬆弛。奧布萊恩彎下身子，故意讓他那張疲倦的臉靠得更近。

「你在想，」他說，「我的臉是多麼的滄桑和疲憊，是吧？你認為我能夠滔滔不絕地講權力，卻不能阻止自身容顏的蒼老，是吧？難道你還不明白嗎，溫斯頓，每個個體僅僅是作為一個細胞而存在嗎？細胞的蒼老，正意味著機體的活力。你雖然剪掉了指甲，卻不會死掉，是吧？

他轉身離開了木板床，把一隻手插在口袋裡，來回走了幾步。

「我們是權力的祭司，」他說，「權力就是亞威。不過目前，權力對你來說只是一個詞彙而已，你該瞭解一下，真正的權力意味著什麼。首先，你必須意識到權力是一個集體的概念，個人只有為集體的意志而存在，他才可能擁有權力。你知道黨的口號『自由即奴役』，你可想過將這個口號顛倒過來，『奴役即自由。』一個單獨而自由的人，早晚都會被打敗，這是一定的，每個人注定都會死掉，這便是人類最大的失敗。但如果他能夠完全服從黨，徹底擺脫個人主義，如果他能夠與黨合為一體，那他便是黨，他就會擁有至高無上的權力，可以永垂不朽。其次，你應該知道，所謂權力就是對人類的控制權。它不光控制人類的身體，更重要的是，控制人類的思想。對物質的控制——對客觀現實的控制，這個正如你所說的——不是最重要的。但是，我們對客觀物質已經有了絕對的控制權！」

此刻，溫斯頓已經忽略控制板的存在。他扭動身體，拚命掙扎著想讓自己坐起來，結果徒勞無功，反倒弄得全身疼痛。

「但是，你們怎麼控制得了物質呢？」他突然喊道，「你們控制不了氣候，也控制不了地球的萬有引力，還有疾病，疼痛和死亡——」

奧布萊恩舉手示意他停下來。「我們能夠控制物質，是因為我們控制了思想，而物質就存在於你的腦海中。溫斯頓，漸漸你就會明白的，沒有什麼是我們做不到的，隱身，漂浮——任何事情。如果我想，我就能像吹肥皂泡一樣，把這棟大廈吹浮起來。我沒有這樣做，是因為黨不需要這要做。你最好摒棄那些萬物皆有法則的19世紀觀點，因為我們創造了自己的自然法則。」

「但你們做不到，你們還沒有控制整個地球，歐亞國和東亞國呢？你們還沒有征服它們。」

「這不重要。在適當的時候，我們會戰勝它們。即便沒有征服它們，那也無關緊要，我們可以否認它們的存在，大洋國就是整個世界。」

「但是，相對於整個的宇宙來說，世界本身小如塵埃，人類更是微不足道！他們還能夠存在多久？幾百萬年之前，地球上還是渺無人跡的！」

「荒謬。我們能活多久，地球就能活多久，地球怎麼可能比我們活得更久呢？除非存在於人類的意識，否則一切都不會存在。」

「但是在地層中，到處不都是滅絕動物的化石嗎？——猛犸象、乳齒象、巨大的爬行動物，等等，它們都是在人類出現之前就已經存在於地球上的。」

「你曾見過那些骨骼化石嗎，溫斯頓？當然沒有。全是19世紀的生物學中宣揚的東西，那純粹是虛構出來的。在人類出現之前，什麼都沒有，在人類滅絕以後，什麼都不會存在。除了人類之外，世界將一無所有！」

「但是，整個宇宙都在我們之外。看那些星星！有些距離我們有100萬光年，我們永遠也觸摸不到它們。」

「什麼是星星？」奧布萊恩表情冷淡地說，「它們僅僅是幾公里以外的一點點亮光。如果我們想到達那裡，我們就能做到。或者我們乾脆將它們抹去，把地球當作宇宙的中心，讓太陽和星星都圍繞著它轉。

溫斯頓又是一陣痙攣。可這次，他什麼都沒有說。奧布萊恩像是看出了他那抗議的神情，繼續反駁：

「出於某種確切的目的，當然這也可能不對。我們在海上航行時，或是在預測日食和月食時，經常會發現或需要假設地球是繞著太陽轉的，而星星離我們有上億萬光年，但是那又算得了什麼？你設想過嗎，我們可不可以製造一個雙重的天文學系統？星星根據我們的需要，可遠可近。你認為我們的數學家做不到嗎？你忘記雙重思想了嗎？」

溫斯頓緊緊地縮在床上。無論他說什麼，都如同挨了一記悶棒，遭到奧布萊恩的迅速反駁。然而他知道，心裡十分清楚，自己才是正確的。他堅信，「意識決定物質」這種說法，在老早之前便被證明是錯誤的。很早以前，它不就已經作為一種謬論被揭穿過了嗎？對此，甚至還出現了一個新名詞，難道他忘記了。奧布萊恩低頭看著他，嘴角露出了一絲微笑。

「我告訴你，溫斯頓，」他說，「形而上學並不是你的強項。你想到的那個詞，應該是『唯心論』。但是你又錯了，這也不是『唯心論』，如果你想確切地找個詞來形容，可以叫它『集體唯心論』。但是這兩者是有區別的 —— 事實上，恰恰是截然相反的。所有這些都是題外話。」他換了種語氣補充道。「真正的權力，是我們不得不夜以繼日地為之戰鬥的權力，它不是對事物的控制權，而是對人的控制權。」他頓了頓，突然換成了教師對得意弟子發問的語氣：「一個人該如何行使凌駕於另一個人之上的權力，溫斯頓？

溫斯頓想了想。「讓他受苦。」他說。

「很好，讓他受苦。只服從是不夠的，除非他在忍受痛苦，要不然，你怎麼能知道他是在服從你的意志，還是在隨心所欲？權力，就是使他們遭受痛苦和忍受侮辱。權力，就是要把別人的思想撕成碎片，然後再按照你的模式重新拼合成新的模樣。你看出來我們正在創造一個什麼樣的世界了嗎？它是一個與那些老派的維新派想像的愚蠢的享樂主義烏托邦恰恰相反的世界，它是一個充滿了恐懼、背叛、痛苦、踐踏與被踐踏，一個在改進的過程中變得越來越殘忍的世界。在我們的世界裡，進步便意味著更深層次的痛苦。古老文明聲稱，他們是建立在仁愛和正義的基礎上的，而我們則是建立在仇恨的基礎上。在我們的世界中，除了恐懼、憤怒、勝利和自卑外，其他的感情都將不復存在。我們將摧毀一切——一切。我們已經打破了革命以前遺留下來的慣常的思維模式。我們割斷了孩子與父母，男人與男人以及男人與女人之間的聯繫紐帶。夫妻、血親、朋友之間，都不再有信任可言，在不久的將來，親人與朋友都將不復存在。孩子在出生後，就被從母親的身邊抱走，就像雞蛋生下來就從母雞身邊拿走一樣。性本能也將被根除，生育將變成一年一度的例行公事，就像配給憑證一樣，每年重新簽發一次。我們有廢除男女的性需求的能力，我們的神經學專家正在研究此事。除了忠誠於黨之外，再無其他的忠誠可講。除了對老大哥的熱愛以外，不會有任何形式的愛存在於世上。除了在敵人身上獲勝的歡笑外，再無歡笑可言。藝術、文學、科學，將在人間絕跡。當我們無所不能時，科學對我們已經毫無價值，美和丑之間沒有任何區別，也沒有好奇心與享受生活的過程，所有競爭性的快樂都將被摧毀。但是——不要忘記這點——溫斯頓，只有對權力的陶醉程度，和沉迷於其中的微妙感覺是不斷增長的，也是永遠不會消失的。總之，擁有權力，你就會時刻感受到勝利帶給人的興奮，體會到踐踏一個無助的敵人的快感。如果有一個畫面可以來描述未來，你將會看見一隻皮靴踩在一個人的臉上，不是只踩一下——而是永遠地那樣踩著。」

他停頓了一下，似乎在等著溫斯頓發話。但溫斯頓恨不得鑽到床底下去，他什麼都沒說，他的心像結了冰。奧布萊恩接著說：

「記著，是永遠地踩著，那張臉永遠在那裡，等待著被踩踏。異端分子，社會公敵，永遠在那裡，等著我們，以便隨時被我們打敗，隨時被我們凌辱。從你落到我們手上的那一刻起，你所經歷的一切不但不會停止，而且會愈演愈烈。間諜、背叛、逮捕、折磨、死刑和失蹤，從來都不會停止。世界將會變成一個恐怖的世界，更將成為一個勝利的世界。黨變得越強大，就越容不得異己的存在。反對派越弱小，專制統治就越殘酷。戈斯坦和他的異端學說，將永遠存在下去。儘管他每天，甚至每時每刻，都會被我們所打敗，侮辱，懷疑，甚至是嘲笑，但他將與黨一起永遠地存在下去。我跟你已經做了7年的拍檔，但好戲還遠未結束，還將一遍一遍不斷重演，並會一代復一代地延續下去，到時就連你自己，也免不掉稱讚自己的高超演技。我們會把越來越多的異端分子抓到這裡，看著他們垮掉，聽著他們痛苦的尖叫，撕掉他們尊嚴的面皮——最後看他們徹底懺悔。你不覺得，讓這些昔日的敵人臣服於自己腳下，卑躬屈膝地告饒很痛快嗎？這就是我們準備創造的世界，溫斯頓。一次勝利接著一次勝利的世界，最後是無止境的壓迫，壓迫，再壓迫，直到觸及權力的神經。我看得出來，你現在已經想像不出這個世界可能會變成的樣子了。但終究你會理解它，然後接受它，歡迎它，你最終會成為其中的一分子。」

溫斯頓的精神已經恢復了一些，他虛弱地反抗道：「你們不能這樣做！」

「你這樣說是什麼意思？」

「你們不能創造一個如你所口稱的世界，別做白日夢了，那是不可能的。」

「為什麼？」

「一個文明的社會，是不可能建立在恐懼、仇恨和殘酷的基礎上的，這樣的社會不會長久。」

「為什麼不會長久？」

「因為這種社會沒有生命力，它必將會瓦解，會衰亡。」

「胡說。你一直受仇恨比愛更消耗精力的觀念的影響，對不對？就算真的是這樣，那兩者又有什麼區別？假設我們選擇加快我們生命的進程呢？假設我們能加快人類生活的節奏，讓人30歲就顯出一副老態龍鍾的樣子呢？這又有什麼關係？你難道還沒理解，個人的死亡並不是真正意義上的死亡嗎？黨是永世長存的。」

一如此前，這番話又讓溫斯頓感覺很無助。另外，最令他擔心的是，他固執己見可能會惹得奧布萊恩毫不猶豫地拉動控制板的手桿。好吧，不在沉默中爆發，就在沉默中滅亡。現在，他懼怕奧布萊恩的手段是一回事，沒有任何證據來駁倒他，卻是另外一回事。不管怎樣，他還是準備予以還擊了。

「我不知道——也不在乎。我只是覺得，你們終歸是要失敗的，總有一些事會將你們擊敗，生活也會擊敗你們。」

「我們控制了生命，溫斯頓，控制了生活的每個領域。你是不是以為，所謂的人性會受不了我們的統治而衝破牢籠，把仇恨的火焰直接對準我們？但是你要知道，是我們創造了人性。人類具有無限的可塑性。或許你又恢復了先前的那些舊思想，以為無產者或那些被奴役者最終會起來推翻我們。趁早打消這些念頭吧，他們就像動物一樣孤立無援。人性就是黨，其餘的都是表面現象，不值得一提。」

「我不管。最終他們將會把你們打敗的，他們遲早會看清你們的真面目，然後將你們撕成碎片。」

「你有什麼根據認為這樣的事情一定會發生？有什麼理由認為這件事應該會發生？」

「沒有依據，但是我堅信。我知道你們終究會失敗。宇宙中有些我不知道的東西——或許是什麼精神，抑或是什麼原則——你們永遠都無法征服。」

「你相信亞威嗎，溫斯頓？」

「不相信。」

「那這個打敗我們的精神或者原則是什麼？」

「我不知道，是人的精神。」

「你認為自己是人嗎？」

「是的。」

「如果你是一個人，溫斯頓，那你將是最後一個人。你這種人已經滅絕，而我們是繼承者。你能體會到你是孤立無援的嗎？你已身在歷史之外，你是不存在的。」他的態度改變了，變得更加嚴厲起來，「你覺得你的道德，要比我們高尚許多嗎？難道是因為我們動用了謊言以及殘忍手段，你便要下此結論嗎？」

「是的，我認為我比你們高尚。」

奧布萊恩沒有說話，只聽見有兩個聲音在說話。過了一會兒，溫斯頓聽出來了，其中的一個聲音是他自己，那是在他參加兄弟會那天晚上，他跟奧布萊恩的一段錄音對話。他聽見自己在奧布萊恩面前盟誓：撒謊，盜竊，偽造，謀殺，鼓勵吸毒，賣淫，傳播性病，往孩子臉上潑硫酸……奧布萊恩做了一個不耐煩的手勢，好像覺得這種誓言實在不值一提。然後他旋動錄音機開關，聲音停止了。

「起床吧。」他說。

他身上綁著的繩子被鬆開了。溫斯頓下了床，搖搖晃晃地站在地板上。

「你是最後一個人，」奧布萊恩說，「你是人類精神的捍衛者。你看看你自己，脫下你的衣服。」

溫斯頓解開束在工作服上的繩子，制服上的拉鏈早給他們扯斷了。他已經不記得，自己被捕後是否脫過衣服，這可能還是第一次。制服底下蓋著的那些髒兮兮的黃布片，勉強還能認作是殘缺的內衣。當他完全地將這些衣服脫下時，見到房間另一端有一組三面的鏡子，他走近了一些，突然間停下，驚叫起來。

「再靠近點，」奧布萊恩說，「站到鏡子的中間來，你才能看見自己的側面。」

他停了下來，完全被嚇壞了，一個彎腰駝背，面容灰白，像骷髏模樣的怪物正面對著他。這個形象簡直把他嚇壞了，更糟糕的是，他知道這個怪物竟然就是自己。他向鏡子更近地挪動了一步。那怪物由於身體彎得像一張弓，臉部顯得更加突出。這是一張孤獨又絕望的囚犯的臉，從前額到頭頂都是光禿禿的，鷹鉤鼻子，凹陷的臉頰上嵌著一雙有神卻又警惕的眼睛。面頰上滿是皺紋，嘴巴空洞而深陷。毫無疑問，這是他自己的臉,但是外貌的改變似乎比內心的改變更令他難以接受。臉上顯現出來的感情，與內心的感受是截然不同的。他的頭已經禿了一半，起初，他只是感覺是自己的頭髮花白了，但是走近一看，其實是自己的頭皮變得灰白了。除了那雙手和那張臉以外，他的全身都是過去一段時期所留下的污垢。污垢下面，到處都是受傷後留下來的紅色傷痕，腳踝處的靜脈曲張已經潰爛了一大片，旁邊的皮膚有如魚鱗般片片剝落。但真正令人恐怖的，卻是他那骷髏般的身體。胸部已經沒有肌肉，只剩下一根根肋骨支撐著，像是一具屍骸，腿上的肌肉也已經萎縮，膝蓋看起來簡直比大腿還粗。他現在終於明白奧布萊恩讓他看自己側面的用意了。他的脊樑彎得嚇人，消瘦的肩膀向前聳立，顯得胸口像是被挖空了一樣，精瘦的脖子只剩下皮包骨頭，似乎已經承受不住頭顱的壓迫而扭曲得變了形。如果讓他猜測，他肯定會說，鏡子前的這個軀體是一個六十多歲、患有嚴重惡性病變的廢人。

「你可能有時會想，」奧布萊恩說，「我的臉——這張黨員的臉——看起來又滄桑又疲憊。那麼，你對自己現在的這張臉又作何感想呢？」

他抓住溫斯頓的肩膀，扭過他的身體，讓他面朝自己。

「看看你現在的處境吧！」他說，「看看你這污穢不堪的身體，看看你這塞滿泥垢的腳趾縫，再看看你腿上那令人噁心的膿瘡，你難道不認為，自己現在就是一隻發著臭味的爛山芋嗎？可能你還沒有注意到，看看你這瘦骨嶙峋的樣子。你看見了嗎？我用拇指和食指就足可以把你的胳膊圈起來。我輕而易舉就能像掰斷一根胡蘿蔔一樣，扭斷你的脖子。自從你落在我們手上後，你的體重至少減掉了25公斤，你的頭髮也成把地脫落，看！」說著，他抓住溫斯頓的頭髮一拉，真的扯下來一撮。「你張開嘴，9，10，11，你還剩下11顆牙齒了，你來這裡的時候有多少顆？剩下的這幾顆，也是說掉就掉，看看！」

他用拇指和食指用力捏住溫斯頓剩下的那顆門牙，溫斯頓感覺到下巴一陣劇痛，奧布萊恩將那顆本已鬆動的牙齒連根拔起，順手扔在了牢房的地板上。

「你已經開始腐爛了，」他說，「你身體的各個部位都已經癱瘓了。你現在是什麼？只不過是一具藏污納垢的皮囊而已。現在回過頭去，再看看鏡子裡面的那個形象，看看你對面的那個怪物，它已經是僅存的人類代表了。如果你還是個人，那它就是人類。現在把你的衣服穿上吧。」

溫斯頓動作遲緩地穿上了衣服。直到現在，他才意識到自己竟然是這般瘦弱。這時他的腦海中只有一個想法，那就是，他關在這裡的時間一定比想像的要長得多。當他把這些破布包裹在身上後，他突然對自己那折磨得不成樣子的身體生出憐憫之情來，緊接著，他忍不住地趴在床邊的小凳子上放聲大哭。直到現在，他才意識到自己有多醜陋，樣子有多邋遢。他不敢想像，一把衣衫襤褸的瘦骨頭坐在刺眼的白熾燈下啜泣會是什麼樣子，但是此時，他真的沒有辦法抑制自己的情感。奧布萊恩很親切地把手扶在他的肩膀上。

「事情不會總是這樣的，」他說，「不論何時，只要你肯，你就可以擺脫它。一切都取決於你自己。」

「都是你幹的！」溫斯頓嗚咽道，「是你把我弄成了現在這個樣子。」

「不對，溫斯頓，是你自作自受。從你起來反對黨的那一刻起，你就已經種下了惡果。一切後果，你都是應該可以預料到的。」

他停頓了一下，然後接著說：

「我們擊敗了你，溫斯頓。我們已經將你打垮了，你已經看到了，你的身體現在變成了什麼樣子。你的思想和身體比起來，也好不到哪去。我想，你的自尊也所剩無幾了吧。你挨過腳踢，挨過鞭打，受過侮辱，也因此而痛苦尖叫過，你甚至在自己的血液以及自己嘔吐的穢物裡打過滾。你曾跪地求饒，你背叛過跟你有關的每個人和每件事。想想吧，還有什麼更爛的事情沒在你身上發生過？」

溫斯頓停止了哭泣，儘管他的眼淚還在不斷地從眼睛裡湧出。他抬起頭看著奧布萊恩。

「我沒有背叛朱麗亞。」他說。

奧布萊恩若有所思地低頭看著他，「沒有，」他說，「沒有，這確實是真的，你沒有背叛朱麗亞。」

他對奧布萊恩的某種敬愛之情又湧上心頭，這種情感似乎是堅不可摧的。怪就怪他太聰明了，他想，怪就怪他太聰明了！奧布萊恩自始至終，都能準確地理解他的所述、所思、所想。或許地球上的任何一個人，都會迅速地說出他已經背叛了朱麗亞。在酷刑的折磨下，他還有什麼不能交代的呢？他已經交代了他所知道的關於朱麗亞的一切，包括她的個人習慣，她的性格，她過去的生活。他交代了他們曾經約會的每一個細節，以及他們彼此之間所有的對話，包括從黑市買東西吃，他們之間的通姦行為和他們密謀反黨的計劃——一切的一切。然而，按照他們之前的約定，他並沒有背叛她。他對她的愛從來都沒有停止過，對她的感覺從來都沒有改變過。奧布萊恩不需要任何解釋，便已經明白了他的意思。

「告訴我，」他說，「你們會在多久以後槍斃我？」

「這可能需要一段時間，」奧布萊恩說，「你的情況很複雜，但是不要放棄希望。每個人或早或晚都是能夠被治癒的，槍斃只是最後一道程序。」

IV

HE WAS MUCH BETTER. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days.

The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.

Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.

They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no difference, except that one’s dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous, glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien—not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored; he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.

By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometers, measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm’s length, he could not stand on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight by his hands. It was hopeless; he could not raise himself a centimeter. But after a few more days—a few more mealtimes—even that feat was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times running. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror.

His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the task of re-educating himself.

He had capitulated; that was agreed. In reality, as. he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love—and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do—he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a beede under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even … He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so: how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgments? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only—!

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be; it did not come of its own accord. He wrote:

GOD IS POWER.

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed; he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude; the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except—!

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—“the Party says the earth is flat,” “the Party says that ice is heavier than water”—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as “two and two make five” were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would shoot him. “Everything depends on yourself,” O’Brien had said; but he knew that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement; they might send him to a labor camp; they might release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment. The tradition—the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said—was that they shot you from behind, always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell.

One day—but “one day” was not the right expression; just as probably it was in the middle of the night: once—he fell into a strange, blissful reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily, with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors of the Ministry of Love; he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometer wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture. He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring, and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green pools under the willows.

Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:

“Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!”

For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.

He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?

In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them. He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that—O’Brien would understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.

He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like. In any case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face—suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach forever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.

He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a meter wide), with its heavy black mustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings toward Big Brother?

There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open with a clang. O’Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced officer and the black-uniformed guards.

“Get up,” said O’Brien. “Come here.”

Winston stood opposite him. O’Brien took Winston’s shoulders between his strong hands and looked at him closely.

“You have had thoughts of deceiving me,” he said. “That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.”

He paused, and went on in a gender tone:

“You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston—and remember, no lies; you know that I am always able to detect a lie—tell me, what are your true feelings toward Big Brother?”

“I hate him.”

“You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.”

He released Winston with a little push toward the guards.

“Room 101,” he said.

第四章

溫斯頓的氣色看起來已經好多了，身體狀況日見好轉，倘說時間還能以「日」來計算的話。

白熾燈和嗡嗡的空調聲，像往常一樣折磨著他的耐性，但是，這間牢房要比以前他住過的那些舒服多了。他所住的木板床上，多了一個枕頭和一個床墊，床邊還加了一個可以坐的板凳。他們給了他一個浴盆，讓他洗澡，並允許他時常洗洗臉和手。他們甚至會在他洗澡時，給他加點溫水。他們給他一些新的內衣和一套乾淨的制服，並給他在靜脈曲張的患處塗抹了一些藥膏，以減輕他的痛苦。剩下的幾顆牙齒，他們也幫他拔掉了，給他安了一套假牙。

這種日子，想必已經過了幾周或者幾個月吧。如果他對倒推時間還感興趣的話，計算出過去的時間，也並非不可能，因為每隔一段時間，就會有人給他送飯，他猜想應該是一日三餐吧。有時，他還是很糊塗，他們到底是在什麼時間給他吃的哪一頓飯。伙食好得出人意料，一日中的第三餐，必定會有肉。有一次，他們竟給了他一包香煙，但他沒有火柴，獄卒每次送飯時都主動給他點上火。他很長時間沒有碰過香煙了，在吸第一口的時候，被嗆個半死。但是，他還是堅持著吸下去了。每餐後吸上半支，一盒煙也夠抽一段時間了。

他們給了他一塊白色的石板，角上繫了一根鉛筆頭。起初，他沒有使用過，因為即便是在清醒的時候，他的精神也是麻痺的。他經常在吃完一頓飯後，就躺下來睡覺，一動不動，直到下頓飯端來。他有時是睡著的，有時是半清醒狀態，即便是醒著的時候，他也不願睜開眼睛。強烈的光線照在他臉上，他已經習慣了長時間在這種光線下睡覺了。對他來說，不論是在黑暗的地方還是在亮處睡覺，都無關緊要，只是在有亮光的地方睡覺，會讓夢更連貫一些而已。這段日子他睡覺經常做夢，而且夢境大多是令人愉快的。他夢見自己身處金鄉，身邊是母親、朱麗亞和奧布萊恩——他們什麼都不做，坐在陽光燦爛的廢墟上談天說地。而他醒著的時候，多半都是在回想夢中的情景。他看起來好像是喪失了思考的能力，雖然疼痛的折磨已經遠離了他。他並不覺得無聊，也不渴望做一些類似交談和消磨時光的事情。如果不受拷打和審訊，有足夠的吃喝，保持全身乾淨，即便是獨自相處，他也覺得滿足了。

漸漸地，他花在睡覺上的時間逐漸減少了，但仍舊沒有下床的衝動。他只想靜靜地躺著，等著身體一點點地恢復元氣。他經常用手指到處摸一摸，試圖證實日漸豐滿的肌肉和越發緊致的皮膚並非幻覺。最後，他毫不懷疑而且十分確定，他真的變胖了，他的大腿真的比膝蓋粗了。在那之後，他就開始有規律地做一些運動，鍛煉身體，雖然開始有些勉強。不久之後，他就可以步行走上3千米，當然這是在牢房裡踱步估算出來的。他彎曲的肩膀也逐漸挺直了。他試著做一些更複雜的運動，可讓他吃驚的是，有些運動他已經做不來了，這讓他感覺有點力不從心。他只能散散步，因為現在他連板凳都舉不起來，當然也做不了單腿站立。只要一蹲下來，大腿和小腿就疼得難以忍受，他只能盡量保持站立的姿勢。趴下來做俯臥撐對他來說更是難上加難，甚至連1厘米都撐不起來。但是他並沒有放棄，過了幾天——還不如說又吃了幾頓飯——他居然做到了。有時，一次竟能撐起6個。他開始對自己身體的恢復狀況感到自豪起來，有時，他甚至相信自己的臉也在逐漸變得圓潤起來。只是偶然，當他把手放在光禿禿的頭頂時，才會想起鏡子中那張皺巴巴的殘破的臉。

他的思想開始變得活躍起來。他坐在木板床上，背靠著牆，把石板放在膝蓋上，努力地對自己進行重新改造。

他已然投降了，這是毋庸置疑的。事實上，在他看來，在做出這個決定之前，他就準備投降了。從他被關進仁愛部的那一刻起——不，應該是在他跟朱麗亞束手無策地站在那兒，聽著電屏中那冷酷的聲音發號施令的那一刻起，他就意識到了自己的輕率。和黨作對，實在是愚蠢至極的舉動。現在他才知道，7年來，思想警察一直在監視著他，像實驗人員監視放大鏡下的甲殼蟲一樣。他的一舉一動，一言一行，無不被他們注意，甚至他的思想起伏變動，都逃不過他們的法眼。更令他想不到的是，就連他在日記本的封皮上放一小顆白色塵粒作為標記的心思，都被他們識破了，他們看完日記後又小心地將塵粒放回了原處，而他自己卻全然不知。他們放錄音給他聽，拿照片給他看。其中的一些，就是朱麗亞和他在一起時拍的。是的，甚至……他不能再跟黨作對了。況且，黨是正確的，肯定是這樣的。黨是永存的，集體主義的思想怎麼會錯誤呢？又有什麼外在的標準，能夠支持他對黨的判斷呢？頭腦的清醒與否都無關緊要，只不過要學會用他們的思想去思考問題，只是——

他感覺夾在手指間的鉛筆更沉重，更笨拙了。他決定把頭腦中浮現的這些想法寫下來，便用大寫字母笨拙地寫道：

自由即奴役

然後，他幾乎不假思索地繼續寫道：

2加2等於5

但是現在，他似乎覺得有點兒不對勁，他的思想好像在有意地迴避著什麼，根本無法集中精力。他原本知道接下來將會發生什麼事情，但是此刻他想不起來了。不過，既然結論已經擺在那，推理也就不是什麼難事了。他全無意識地寫道：

權力即亞威

他接受了一切。歷史是可以改變的。歷史從來就沒有改變過。大洋國在跟東亞國交戰。大洋國一直就在跟東亞國交戰。瓊斯、阿諾遜和盧瑟福都是思想罪犯，他們罪有應得。他從來就沒見過可以推翻他們所犯罪行的那張照片。那張照片也從來沒有存在過，是他自己虛構出來的。他只要記得當時所記憶中的證明材料，都是假的，都是自欺欺人的產物便是了。這其實是輕而易舉的事情，只要投降，任何事情都會水到渠成。這就好比逆流戲水，不論你怎麼努力掙扎，水流最終還是會把你衝回去的，如果你突然轉身，隨波逐流，結果會大不一樣，曲徑變通途。除了自己的心態，什麼都不需要改變。注定要發生的事情終究擺脫不掉。真搞不懂，當初為什麼要一根筋地去反黨，如此偏執到底有什麼好處。所有的事情都是很容易的，除了——

所有的一切都可能是真的。所謂的自然法則，不過是瞞天過海的謊話而已，萬有引力荒謬至極，根本沒有實際意義。「如果我想，」奧布萊恩說過，「我就能像吹肥皂泡一樣，把整棟大廈吹浮起來。」套用奧布萊恩的話，這麼說或許更確切一些：「如果奧布萊恩能將整棟大廈吹浮起來，而我恰恰見他這樣做過，那麼整棟大廈也就真的被吹浮起來了。」突然間，他的腦海裡迸發出這樣一個念頭，猶如久沉於海底的殘骸浮出水面一般：「大廈並沒有被吹起來，那是我們想像的，是一種幻覺。」他立即摒棄了這種想法。這是個顯而易見的謬論，因為它假定在這個想法之外的某個地方，確實存在一個真實的世界，那裡有合情合理的事情發生。但是這樣的世界，怎麼會存在呢？除了我們對事物有意識的認知外，我們還能記得什麼事情呢？所有事情無一例外地在腦海裡發生。正因為它在腦海裡發生，於是，它也就順理成章地成為真事了。

對他而言，推翻這些謬論自然算不上什麼難事，並且，也不存在屈服於這個謬論的危險。然而，他意識到，這種事情不會發生在自己身上。當這種要命的想法在腦海中呈現時，你應該乖乖地避而遠之，這個過程應該是自動的，本能的。這種行為，在新語裡他們稱之為「犯罪停止」。

他開始做「犯罪停止」的練習。他試著擺出一些命題，比如「黨說地球是扁的」「黨說冰比水重」等，他這樣訓練的目的，就是有意迴避命題中自相矛盾的東西。說實話，這可真不容易，需要強大的推理和隨機應變能力。舉例來說，像「2加2等於5」這類抽像的數學問題，就超出了他的智力範圍。」犯罪停止」練習，對於人的反應速度要求非常高，它既要求你在瞬間把邏輯運用到極致，同時，又要求你在必要的時候，對那些粗淺的邏輯錯誤視而不見。總之，愚蠢和聰明同樣重要，也同樣難以無意為之。

他的腦海中始終想著這件事情，那就是，他們什麼時候才會槍斃自己呢？「一切都取決於你自己。」奧布萊恩曾對他說過。但是他很清楚，他左右不了自己的命運，期限可能是10分鐘，也可能是10年。他們可能把他單獨囚禁幾年，也可能將他發配到勞改營，或者先把他放出來，再尋找適當的機會慢慢除掉他，就像對付瓊斯這幫人，故技重施一番：逮捕、審訊、嚴刑拷打……唯一可以確定的是，你絕不可能預料到死期何時到來。通常的——也是不言而喻的——做法是：你還不知何故，也從來沒聽他們說起過——當你從一個牢房走向另一個牢房時，毫無預警地在你的腦後打上一槍。

一天——但是「一天」或許還不是很準確，可能是在半夜吧，他突然墜入一個怪異卻又幸福的夢境裡。他走在走廊裡，等待子彈打穿他的腦袋，他知道，這一刻遲早都會來。他知道自己就要解脫了，以後不會再有懷疑，不會再有爭論，當然也不會再有恐懼和痛苦，什麼都解決了，了無牽掛，什麼都想通了，死而無憾。他的身體，從經久的肉身折磨中恢復了健康和強壯，他步履輕鬆，動作麻利，像是在陽光下散步。他不是走在仁愛部狹窄的白色走廊裡，而是走在寬敞的陽光大道上，路面足有1公里寬，他越走越興奮，像是使用了興奮劑。此刻，他感覺自己漫步在金鄉，穿過被兔子啃過的草場。和煦的陽光照在臉上，腳下富有彈力的小草踩上去軟綿綿的。草場的盡頭，是片榆樹林，樹枝在微風中輕輕地搖曳。遠處柳蔭下是綠色的池塘，雅羅魚暢遊其中。

突然間，他被恐懼硬生生地從夢中拖了出來，後背冒著冷汗。他聽見了自己大聲地喊著：

「朱麗亞！朱麗亞！親愛的朱麗亞！」

此刻，他強烈地感覺到朱麗亞就在眼前。她不但跟他在一起，還彷彿鑽進了他的身體裡，甚至是滲透進了他的每寸肌膚。在那一刻，他是那麼地愛她，可以說勝過他們在一起的任何時候。他想，朱麗亞或許還活著，正在某個地方向他招手呼救呢。

他躺在床上，極力使自己的情緒平靜下來。他都做了些什麼呀？此刻暴露出來的弱點，會給他平添多少年的苦役呀？

說不定過不了多會兒，他就會聽到外面沉重的皮靴聲。他們絕不會由他這般胡思亂想的，懲罰肯定是免不掉的。如果說，以前他們還不知道他腦子裡的那點事的話，那麼現在他們已經抓到證據了。顯然，他已經突破了他們的底線，因為他現在的所思所想，已經意味單方違約在先了。他雖然表面順從了黨，但仍舊在痛恨著黨。在此之前，他戰戰兢兢，腦子裡的思想卻都是反動的。現在他又退了一步，他把思想交到了黨的那一邊，寄希望於保持內心不受侵犯。他知道自己正在犯錯誤，但是他寧願這樣錯下去，他們肯定能看出來——至少奧布萊恩能看出來。其實，那一聲愚蠢的叫喊已經供認了一切。

他要洗心革面，從頭來過，這可能會花上幾年時間。他伸出手來摸摸自己的臉，試圖熟悉自己當前的面龐，那是一張皺巴緊縮的臉龐，顴骨高高隆起，鼻子扁平。自打上次在鏡子前看見自己後，他裝了一副假牙。如果你不能熟悉自己的容貌，想表現出高深莫測絕不是一件容易的事情，況且，在絕大多數情況下，僅僅控制表情是不夠的。他第一次認識到，若想心中保有秘密，必須先對自己保守秘密，你要意識到自己有一個秘密，但是不到必要的時候，絕對不能意識到這個秘密是什麼，不管以什麼形式。從現在起，你不但思想要正確，而且感覺和夢境也都要正確。此外，他必須把對黨的仇恨都深埋在心裡，就像身體上長的一個腫瘤，既是自己身體的一部分，又與其他部分毫無關係。

總有一天，他們會決定槍斃他的，雖然他不知道是什麼時候，但是在行刑前的幾秒鐘，總會猜得到的。按照慣例，當他走在走廊上的時候，子彈會從腦後射過來。10秒鐘便足夠了。就在這短短的10秒鐘到來之前，他的內心世界免不了要翻江倒海一番。緊接著，沒有一點兒聲響，沒有挪動半步，甚至連臉上的表情都未來得及變化——只聽見「砰」的一聲，偽裝被徹底撕碎了，巨大的仇恨，像熊熊火焰般瞬間將他吞噬。幾乎同時，隨著那「砰」的一聲，子彈射過來，腦漿塗地。子彈來得太晚了，或者是太早了。說不定，在被他們進行改造思想之前，他的腦袋就已經被打開花了。異端思想將免受懲罰，他們也沒有機會對他進行思想改造，他們永遠也改造不了。他們打出的子彈，會在他們自認為完美無缺的制度中打開一個缺口，讓人至死還在仇恨著他們——這便是自由。

他閉上了眼睛。這比任何知識訓練都更讓他更難接受。他要作踐自己，他要殘害自己，他要投身到最骯髒、最污穢的事情中去。窮其記憶，什麼才是最可怕、最令人作嘔的呢？他想起了老大哥。那張大臉（海報上總能見到那足有1米寬的臉），濃密的黑鬚，鬼鬼祟祟不時地盯著他看的眼睛，似乎不由自主地浮現在他的腦海中。他對老大哥的真情實感究竟怎麼樣呢？

走廊裡又響起了沉重的靴子聲。鐵門「匡啷」一聲被打開了。奧布萊恩走進了牢房，他身後跟著那個蠟製麵像的警衛和穿著黑制服的獄卒。

「起來，」奧布萊恩說，「到我這裡來。」

溫斯頓面對著他站著。奧布萊恩張出那雙有力的大手，抓在溫斯頓的肩膀上，不眨眼地盯著他。

「你有欺騙我的想法，」他說，「這是愚蠢的行為，站直了。看著我！」

他停了下來，繼續用一種溫和的語氣說：

「你在改變之中。在思想上，你已經沒有什麼大問題了，只是在情感上，你還差了一些。告訴我，溫斯頓——記住，別說謊，你也知道騙不了我——告訴我，對老大哥，你的真情實感是怎樣的？」

「我恨他。」

「你恨他，很好。現在該是改造你的最後環節了，你必須愛老大哥，僅僅服從是不夠的，你必須愛他。」

他把溫斯頓推向一個獄卒。

「101室。」他說。

V

AT EACH STAGE of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O’Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many meters underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.

It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a meter or two from him; the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.

For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing, Winston could not see what the thing was.

“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four meters away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

“In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

“You can’t do that!” he cried out in a high cracked voice. “You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.”

“Do you remember,” said O’Brien, “the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.”

“O’Brien!” said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. “You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?”

O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.

“By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.”

“But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know what it is?”

O’Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two meters away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat’s muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of gray.

“The rat,” said O’Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, “although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.”

There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.

O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless: every part of him, even his head, was held immovably. O’Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a meter from Winston’s face.

“I have pressed the first lever,” said O’Brien. “You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap onto your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.”

The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left—to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odor of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down; the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely snuffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.

“It was a common punishment in Imperial China,” said O’Brien as didactically as ever.

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars—always away, away, away from the rats. He was light-years distant, but O’Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

第五章

在溫斯頓被關押的每個階段中，可能是由於氣壓有輕微差別的緣故，他對自己身在何處都能猜得八九不離十，即便大樓裡沒有窗戶。獄卒毆打他的牢房，應該是在地下吧，而奧布萊恩提審他的地方，則是在高層，靠近樓頂。現在，應該是在地下很深的地方，可能是大樓的最深處。

現在的牢房，比他以前待過的都大，但是他幾乎沒有注意過周圍的環境。他所注意到的，只有他正前方的兩張小桌子，桌上鋪著綠色的桌布。一張離他僅有一兩米遠，另一張稍遠一點，靠近門口。他被直挺挺地綁在一張椅子上，動彈不得，甚至連頭都不能轉。腦袋後面被一個墊子托著，逼迫著他只能向前看。

起初，房間裡只有他自己，過了一會門被打開了，奧布萊恩走了進來。

「你曾經問過我，」奧布萊恩說，「什麼是101室，我告訴你，你早就知道答案了，每個人都知道。101室有世界上最可怕的東西。」

門再次被打開了。一個獄卒走了進來，手裡搬著一個由鐵絲編織成的類似於籃子或者是籠子之類的東西。他把它放在了離溫斯頓較遠的那張桌子上，由於奧布萊恩擋住了他的視線，溫斯頓沒有看清楚那東西到底是什麼。

「世界上最可怕的東西，」奧布萊恩說，「當然因人而異。可能是活埋，或者是火刑，或者是溺亡，或者是刺刑，總之，你有50多種不同的死法。不過有些刑罰卻是不值一提的，根本不會致命。」

他向旁邊移動了一點，以便讓溫斯頓看清桌子上的東西。那是個橢圓形的鐵籠子，上面有個把手方便拎起來。籠子前面，固定著一個看起來像是練習擊劍的人戴的面罩，不過是凹面朝外的。儘管那籠子離他足有三四米遠，他還是能夠清楚地看見籠子被縱向分為兩個隔室，每個隔室裡都裝有動物。這動物，是老鼠。

「對你而言，」奧布萊恩說，「世界上最可怕的東西恰恰就是老鼠。」

溫斯頓剛瞥見那個籠子時，心中就預感到了某種令他戰慄的恐懼。雖然他不確定他究竟害怕什麼，但是此刻，當他看到籠子前的面罩，他就知道了奧布萊恩的用意。他被嚇得五臟六腑像是化成了水。

「你不能那樣做！」他扯著嗓子大聲喊道，「你不能，你不能！那是不可能的！」

「你還記得嗎，」奧布萊恩說，「此刻的驚恐，曾經在你的夢裡出現過？你的面前有一堵黑牆，咆哮聲在你耳邊響起，在牆的背面藏著可怕的東西。你知道，那可怕的東西是什麼，但是你不敢貿然地把它們拽出來。其實，牆後就是老鼠。」

「奧布萊恩！」溫斯頓喊道，他努力地控制著自己的嗓門，「你知道的，沒有必要這樣做。你想讓我做什麼？」

奧布萊恩沒有直接回答。當他開口說話時，語氣和口吻像極了講堂上的老學究。他若有所思地看著遠處，好像是在對溫斯頓身後的聽眾示意著什麼。

「就單個人而言，」他說，「痛苦是遠遠不能使一個人屈服的。有些人偏偏骨頭硬，你越折磨他，他就越站起來反抗你，至死不渝。但是，每個人都有一些無法承受的東西，且對這些東西表現出從未有過的恐懼。這與勇氣和怯懦無關。如果你從高處落下，拚命地去抓救命的繩子，這不該算怯懦，其實這跟快溺水的人從水裡露出頭來拚命呼氣的道理是一樣的，那不過是一種你無法抗拒的本能罷了。老鼠也是如此，對你而言，老鼠就是你無法忍受的東西。這種壓力你承受不起，即便你打算抵抗，也無濟於事。讓你做什麼，你都必須去做！」

「但是，你們讓我做什麼呢？做什麼呢？如果我連做什麼都不知道，那我又該怎麼做呢？」

奧布萊恩拎起籠子，小心翼翼地把它放在了溫斯頓近旁的桌子上。溫斯頓似乎能夠聽到自己的血液在體內奔騰流動的聲響，他感覺到了前所未有的無助感，像是隻身坐在一片空曠的陽光耀眼的荒原中央，遠處各種聲響都向他傳來，在耳邊沙沙作響。然而，眼前這個老鼠籠子離他還不到兩米，這些老鼠碩大無比，它們的毛皮呈褐棕色而不是灰色，都是些牙齒鋒利、性情兇猛的傢伙。

「這些老鼠，」奧布萊恩仍然對著溫斯頓身後那些本不存在的聽眾說，「儘管只是齧齒類動物，但它們也是吃肉的。你應該知道的。想必，你也聽說過貧民街區發生的老鼠咬人的事吧。譬如在某些街道上，女人從不敢把孩子單獨留在家裡，哪怕只有5分鐘。老鼠肯定會出來攻擊他們的，只消一會兒功夫，就把他們吃得只剩骨頭。他們還會攻擊那些生病和垂死的人。它們會表現出驚人的辨識力，知道哪些人是孤弱無助的。」

籠子裡發出了老鼠吱吱的尖叫聲，溫斯頓感覺這聲音像是從遠處傳來的，原來是老鼠在打架，它們試圖跨過隔板侵佔對方的領地。此外，他還聽到了一聲絕望的呻吟聲，這聲音聽起來不像是發自他自己的身體，倒像是來自外面的某個地方。

奧布萊恩拎起籠子，把上面的什麼東西按了進去，卡嗒響了一下。溫斯頓瘋狂地掙扎著，試圖將身子從椅子的束縛中掙脫出來，但一切都是徒勞。他身體的各個部位，包括頭，都被硬生生地固定住了，根本動不了。奧布萊恩又往跟前提了提籠子，離溫斯頓的臉不到一米遠。

「我已經按下了第一個控制桿，」奧布萊恩說，「這個籠子的構造想必你已經知道了。這個面具剛好能蓋住你的臉，嚴絲合縫。當我按下下一個控制桿時，籠門就會打開，這些飢餓的傢伙會像子彈一樣射出來。你以前見過老鼠跳高嗎？它們會直接跳到你的臉上，有時它們會先咬你的眼睛，有時會咬穿你的面頰，然後鑽進去吃掉你的舌頭。」

籠子越來越近，快貼近他了。溫斯頓聽到了一陣聲嘶力竭的哭嚎聲，彷彿是從他腦袋上方的某個地方傳過來的。他極力地保持克制。快想辦法，快想辦法，哪怕只剩下一瞬間——想想，這可是唯一的希望了。突然間，鼠籠污穢、發霉的氣味直衝鼻孔。隨著一陣劇烈的噁心，他的身體也猛烈地痙攣起來，他幾乎失去了知覺，眼前一片漆黑。不消片刻，他就像發了瘋的野獸般厲聲尖叫起來。然而，從黑暗中他萌生了一個想法，或許，只有這個辦法可以拯救自己。那就是他必須拉一個人過來墊背，把這個人的身體置於他和老鼠之間。

圓形面罩大得根本看不見外面的世界，鐵絲籠門距離他的臉僅有兩巴掌遠。老鼠似乎已經知道接下來將要發生的事情了——獵物就在眼前，其中一隻上躥下跳，另一隻老態龍鍾，爪子上沾滿了下水道的污垢，它竟然站了起來，爪子扒著鐵絲，嗅來嗅去，溫斯頓能夠看到它的鬍鬚和黃牙。一陣黑色恐怖再次向他襲來。他束手無策，大腦一片空白，接著就什麼都看不見了。

「在帝制時代的中國，這是一種很普遍的刑罰。」奧布萊恩依舊帶著教誨的口吻說道。

面具緊緊地貼在了他的臉上，鐵絲觸及他的面頰。此時——不，不能就此放棄，僅存的希望，或許只有一絲希望。太晚了，或許真得太晚了。但是，他突然想到，他可以把對他的懲罰轉移到僅有的一個人身上——只有這個人才能置於他和老鼠之間。於是，他開始瘋狂地大叫起來，一遍又一遍：

「去咬朱麗亞！去咬朱麗亞！不要咬我！朱麗亞！我不在意你們對她做什麼。哪怕是撕扯她的臉，嚼碎她的骨頭。不要咬我！咬朱麗亞！別咬我！」

他身體向後仰，跌入無盡的深淵之中，擺脫了老鼠的糾纏。他仍舊被綁在椅子上，但是他已經穿過了地板，穿過了大樓的牆面，穿過了地球、海洋、大氣,落入到了太空，落入到了星際之間——遠離了老鼠，永遠……他已經遠離了不知多少光年，但奧布萊恩卻仍然站在他身邊。冰冷的鐵絲，仍然貼在他的臉上，但是黑暗中，他聽到了一聲金屬的「卡嗒」聲。他知道，籠子的門沒有打開，已經關上了。

VI

THE CHESTNUT TREE was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell yellow on dusty tabletops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens.

Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavored with cloves, the speciality of the café.

Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia; Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at terrifying speed. The midday bulletin had not mentioned any definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing Central Africa; for the first time in the whole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.

A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, it made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of those——

He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never visualized them. They were something that he was half aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him, and had regained his old color—indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of the Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston’s glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly paid than his old job had been.

The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletin from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan’s quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by ninety-eight per cent.

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. “White to play and mate in two moves.” Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much graver tone: “You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!” The tinkling music struck up again.

Winston’s heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their comunications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of feelings—but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost—struggled inside him.

The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:

2 + 2 = 5.

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever;” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out.

He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not ten meters away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign; then he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no danger, nobody would take any interest in them. She did not speak. She walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him, then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.

There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones; besides, they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have lain down on the ground and done that if they had wanted to. His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.

He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimeters and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.

“I betrayed you,” she said baldly.

“I betrayed you,” he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

“And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”

There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence; besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.

“We must meet again,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “we must meet again.”

He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Café, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty meters he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer recognizable from behind.

“At the time when it happens,” she had said, “you do mean it.” He had meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to the——

Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then—perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound—a voice was singing:

“Under the spreading chestnut tree

I sold you and you sold me—”

The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.

He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to closing time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work. He had been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. They were engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out. It was something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed inside brackets, or outside. There were four others on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished—when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels—threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.

The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map of Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram: a black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow tearing horizontally eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable that the second arrow did not even exist?

His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because—

Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing.

It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his earlier affection for her had temporarily revived. He remembered the day well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window pane and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room, pulling everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbors banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the end his mother said, “Now be good, and I’ll buy you a toy. A lovely toy—you’ll love it”; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little general shop which was still sporadically open near by, and come back with a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still remember the smell of the damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and without interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with laughter as the tiddlywinks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then came slithering down the snakes again, almost back to the starting point. They played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.

He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped onto the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.

A shrill trumpet call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet call preceded the news. A sort of electric thrill ran through the café. Even the waiters had started and pricked up their ears.

The trumpet call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened as he had foreseen: a vast seaborne armada secretly assembled, a sudden blow in the enemy’s rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black. Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: “Vast strategic maneuver—perfect co-ordination—utter rout—half a million prisoners—complete demoralization—control of the whole of Africa—bring the war within measurable distance of its end—victory—greatest victory in human history—victory, victory, victory!”

Under the table Winston’s feet made convulsive movements. He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago—yes, only ten minutes—there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment.

The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

THE END

第六章

栗樹咖啡館裡空空蕩蕩。一縷陽光透過窗戶，斜射在積滿灰塵的桌面上。15點是店裡最冷清的時光，輕柔的音樂從電屏中傳來。

溫斯頓坐在慣常的角落裡，凝視著一隻空咖啡杯。他不時地向對面牆上盯著他的那張大臉瞥上一眼,「老大哥在看著你」，下面的標題如是寫道。用不著他招呼，服務員自動走過來，將他的杯子填滿勝利杜松子酒，接著拿起另一個瓶子，搖動了幾下，拔動軟木塞，將幾粒丁香味的糖精加到酒杯中。這是栗樹咖啡館的特色酒品。

溫斯頓聽著電屏傳出的聲音。此時正播放著音樂，但是音樂隨時都有可能中斷，插播和平部發出的特殊公告。這些來自非洲前線的消息令人焦躁不安,他也整天為非洲的戰況焦慮,歐亞國軍隊（大洋國正在跟歐亞國交戰，大洋國一直在跟歐亞國交戰）正在以驚人的速度向南推進。中午的佈告,沒有交代戰爭的確切地點，但是戰火很有可能燒到了剛果海岸，布拉柴維爾和利奧波德維爾危在旦夕。不用看地圖，你也知道這意味著什麼。這不僅僅是中非淪陷的問題，而是自戰爭爆發以來，大洋國本土第一次受到了威脅。

一種強烈的感情湧上心頭，確切地說，不是害怕，而是難以言明的興奮。不過沒多久，這種感情就消退了。他索性不再去想什麼戰爭了。這段時間以來，他一直沒有辦法在某個問題上集中精力，哪怕是短短幾分鐘。他端起酒杯，一飲而盡。像往常一樣，杜松子酒令他打了個冷戰，他感覺像是要吐出來了。這東西真是可怕。丁香味跟糖精混合在一起，本來就夠讓他噁心的了，再加上杜松子酒那股油膩膩的味道，更令他難以忍受。當然這還不是最糟糕的，每次喝下杜松子酒，臭味就在他身上日夜不斷，揮之不去，使他的大腦也不時地聯想到那種東西的氣味——這才是最糟糕的。

他從來不提起那東西的名字，甚至想都不敢想，也盡量在腦海中不去把它具體化。他只是朦朦朧朧地知道那東西的存在，它爬近他的臉龐，熏人的臭味直鑽鼻孔。玫瑰杜松子酒的氣味湧上來，他張開發紫的嘴唇打了個嗝。自從被釋放後，他已經變胖了，臉上也恢復了以往的氣色——事實上，比以前還要紅潤。他的身體變得粗壯了，臉頰和鼻子上的皮膚也在粗糙中透著血色，甚至他那斑駁的頭頂也變成了深粉色。服務員走過來，把棋盤和當天的《泰晤士報》放到桌上，還將報紙翻到有棋譜的那一頁。見溫斯頓的酒杯已空，他將杜松子酒瓶拿來，再次填滿。根本無需勞煩他招呼，他們已經清楚了他的習慣。他們會把棋盤擺好等他到來，也會始終為他保留著牆角的那張桌子。即便咖啡館人滿為患，他那張桌子也不會有人占，因為沒有人願意靠近他坐下。他從來都不會刻意計算自己到底喝了幾杯酒，也懶得去數。他們會不定期地遞給他髒兮兮的紙條，就是他們所謂的賬單,但是，他總感覺他們向他索要的酒錢要遠遠多於他的實際消費。不過，即便是給他多算了錢也不打緊，對他來說，多和少本來就沒什麼分別。反正現在他不缺錢，他甚至有了一份工作，一份掛名的閒職，比他先前的酬勞還高。

電屏中的音樂停了下來，取而代之的，是另外一個聲音。溫斯頓抬頭傾聽，播放的不是前線的消息，而是富裕部的一份公告：上一個季度，第十個三年計劃的鞋帶產量超額完成了98%。

他翻開象棋棋譜，開始琢磨殘局的正解。這是一個殘局，巧妙之處令人稱道，涉及雙馬。「白子進二將死。」溫斯頓抬頭瞥了一眼老大哥的肖像。白子總是將黑子將死，他不覺地疑惑起來,從來沒有例外，總是這樣安排的。自有歷史記載以來，黑子就沒有贏過,這是否預示著這樣一個永恆的真理，即正義終將戰勝邪惡?那張大臉在背後緊緊地盯著他，眼神裡帶著無聲的威嚴。白子總是贏的。

電屏中的聲音停止了，變換成了更加莊重的音調。「15點30分將宣佈重要新聞，請大家注意收聽,15點30分！這是最重要的一條新聞,注意收聽不要錯過,15點30分！」叮咚的音樂聲又響起來了。

溫斯頓的心像是被什麼攪動了似的，忐忑不安起來。這條佈告肯定是來自前線的,直覺告訴他，這肯定是個壞消息。整日來，他一直處於亢奮之中，非洲前線潰敗的念頭一直在他的腦海裡時隱時現,他彷彿親眼看見了歐亞國的軍隊像螞蟻般蜂擁而入的場景，他們越過從未攻破過的邊境，直逼非洲最南端。為什麼不從側翼包抄呢？非洲西海岸的輪廓，在他的腦海中變得清晰起來。他撿起白子向前移動過去，這步走得沒錯。正當黑螞蟻大舉南下之時，另一支神秘之師突然插入了他們的後方，切斷了他們的海陸交通。他感覺所謂的神秘之師，只是他的一廂情願，但不管怎麼說，他們的確有必要迅速行動起來。倘若歐亞國控制整個非洲，在好望角建造飛機場和潛艇基地，那麼勢必會將大洋國切為兩截。到那時，後果將不堪設想,潰敗，瓦解，世界版圖重構，黨徹底倒台！他深深地吸了口氣,一種複雜的情感由心而生——但是，這種情感不能簡單地用複雜加以概括，或許說成是一種無法言傳的情感在他的內心深處鬥爭更確切一些。

情感的糾結漸漸平息。他把白子放回原處，但此時，他已無心鑽研殘局了。他的思想又如脫韁的野馬，放步狂奔起來。不知不覺中，他用手指在桌面的灰塵上寫著：

2加2等於5

「他們不能鑽到你的腦子裡去，」朱麗亞曾經說過，但是，他們的確已經鑽進來了。「在這裡發生的事永遠也抹不去。」奧布萊恩說過。的確是那麼回事。有些事情，只要你做了，就會變得無法補救。有些事情，只要他們做了，就會灼傷你的心靈，無法復原，讓你就此變得麻木不仁。

被釋放後，他跟朱麗亞見過面，還曾一起談過話，這樣做並沒有什麼危險。他的直覺告訴他，他們現在已經對他的所作所為不感興趣了。如果他們還有意，大可以再約見一次。實際上，他們那次相遇只是出於偶然。那是在公園裡，3月的天氣還冷得刺骨，大地堅硬得像塊鐵板，草木似乎已經枯死，沒有萌芽的跡象，幾株藏紅花頑強地從泥土裡冒出來，被寒風吹得七零八落。他步履匆匆地趕著路，手幾乎被凍僵了，眼睛也被風吹得淚水汪汪。這時，在離他不到十米遠的地方，他看見了她——朱麗亞。他突然意識到，她已經發生了某種說不出的改變。他們幾乎連聲招呼都沒打，就彼此擦肩而過。他轉過身來，繼續跟著她，但表現得並不很熱心。他知道，這樣做並沒有什麼危險，已經沒人對他的行為感興趣了。她沒有說話，轉彎抹角地穿過草地，試圖將他甩掉，但是看起來似乎又不得不接受他跟在後面這個事實。這時，他們站在光禿禿的灌木叢間，這地方既不隱蔽又不擋風。他們停了下來。天氣出奇地冷，料峭的寒風吹得樹梢嗚嗚作響，抽打著殘敗的藏紅花。他伸手摟住了朱麗亞的腰。

這裡沒有電屏，但肯定有隱藏著的竊聽器，再者說，這裡一點兒也不避人，他們完全暴露在光天化日之下。不過，這也沒什麼要緊。他們甚至可以躺下來重溫舊夢，如果他們彼此還願意。但是一想到這兒，他的肌肉似乎都驚恐得僵硬起來了。他緊緊地抱著她，可她已沒有任何反應，也沒有想過去掙脫他。他現在終於明白，究竟是什麼東西改變了她。她臉色灰黃，一道長長的傷疤從前額一直延伸到太陽穴，雖然一部分被頭髮蓋住了，但還能看得出來。單單是臉上的疤痕，還不算什麼改變，她的腰肢也變得比原來更粗壯了，而且令人吃驚的是，已經變得無比僵硬了。記得有一次，在火箭彈爆炸後，他幫人從廢墟裡拖出一具屍體，令他感到驚異的倒不是那屍體的沉重，而是它的僵硬和筆挺，已全然不像是一塊肌肉，倒像是一塊石板。此刻，朱麗亞的身體就是如此。他想，恐怕她的皮膚也跟以前大不一樣了，不像先前那般細嫩柔滑了吧。

他沒有近身吻她，也沒有說什麼。當他們穿過草地往回走時，她才第一次正面看了溫斯頓一眼，確切地說，那是短暫的一瞥，充滿了蔑視和反感。他想知道，這種反感是出於她在仁愛部的種種經歷，還是因為他水腫的臉龐，以及被風吹得不斷流淚的眼睛。他們在兩張鐵椅子上坐了下來，但是沒有挨在一起。他感覺，她好像要說什麼。她挪動了一下笨重的鞋子，故意將地上的一根小枝子踩斷，他注意到，她的腳看起來也比以前寬多了。

「我背叛了你。」她直截了當地說。

「我也背叛了你。」他說。

她又快速地朝他反感地瞥了一眼。

「有時——」她說，「有時，他們會用你所不能忍受的東西來威脅你，使你不能勇敢地面對，甚至想都不敢想。這時，你只能說，『不要這樣對我，你折磨別人去吧，應該對某某這樣。』然後你就會說出這個人的名字。事後，你可能會假裝自我安慰，說這不過是你的緩兵之計。你只是想讓他們停下來，其實這並不是你的真實意圖。但這不是真的。當事情發生時，這就是你的真實想法。當你在死亡面前無計可施的時候，你只好以這樣的方式來拯救自己，你希望這樣的折磨發生在別人身上，你才不會在乎他們會受什麼苦，你關心的只有你自己。」

「你關心的只有你自己。」他重複道。

「在那之後，難道你對那個人的感情還能跟從前一樣嗎？」

「是的，」他說，「不一樣了。」

他們沒有再繼續下去，他們還能說什麼呢？寒風刮得單薄的制服貼在身上。兩個人再這樣坐下去，未免有些尷尬。天氣太過寒冷，再這樣靜坐下去，身體也會招架不住的。朱麗亞說有事，還要趕地鐵，起身要走。

「我們下次再見。」他說。

「好，」她說，「下次再見。」

溫斯頓漫不經心地跟在她身後走著，離朱麗亞大約半步的距離。他們沒再說什麼。事實上，她沒有要甩掉他的意思，只是走得很快，不難看出，她沒想慢下腳步來和他並肩走。他本來想把她送到地鐵站的，但是突然間，他覺得，這樣大冷的天跟在她身後實在沒有意義，而且難以忍受。與其這樣無聊地跟下去，還不如盡快回到栗樹咖啡館去。那地方，從來沒有像現在這樣吸引他，他是那麼地依戀那個角落的桌椅、報紙和棋盤，以及隨時被斟滿的杜松子酒。更重要的是，那裡溫暖得很，不像這裡這般寒冷。說來也巧，迎面走過來幾個人，剛好把他和朱麗亞衝散了，他似追非追地向前趕了幾步，然後慢下來，轉身朝相反的方向走開了。大約走了50米，當他再回頭時，已經分辨不出哪個是她了，雖然眼前的街道並不算擁擠。任何一個步履匆匆的背影都可能是她，或許是因為那粗厚、僵硬的身體，他從背後已經無法辨認出她了。

「當他們折磨你時，」她剛才說，「你就會希望有人替你受罪。」他確實這樣想過。他不光那樣想過，也那樣乞求過。他那時盼望被咬的是朱麗亞，而不是自己——

電屏中的音樂突然變了調子，換成了那種帶有嘲弄意味的「黃色小調兒」。其實這也沒什麼奇怪，只是喚起了他的敏感記憶而已。這聲音突然唱道：

「斑駁的栗樹蔭底，

你出賣我，我出賣你——」

眼淚情不自禁地從他的眼裡湧出來，一個服務員剛好從身邊經過，注意到酒杯已經空了，便拿過酒瓶給他斟滿。

他端起酒杯，聞了聞。這東西全無新意，而是越發地難以下嚥，但不管怎麼說，它卻成了他生命中不可或缺的元素。這就是他的生命，他的死亡，和支撐他復活的東西。杜松子酒讓他每晚麻木入眠，讓他早晨從床上掙扎著爬起來。他幾乎很少在11點之前醒來。每次醒來時，他都會覺得眼瞼發粘，嘴巴乾燥，脊背像被折斷了一樣疼痛難忍。如果前一天晚上沒把杜松子酒放在床邊，他很難從床上爬起來。中午的時候，他同樣離不開杜松子酒，手裡拿著酒瓶，目光呆滯地坐在電屏前聽新聞。下午的時候，他會準時光顧栗樹咖啡館，直到打烊才出來。再沒有人關心他做了什麼，沒有哨子吵他起床，甚至連電屏也對他不理不睬了。偶爾，可能一周兩次吧，他會跑去真理部那間早已被人遺忘且佈滿灰塵的辦公室，做一點工作，如果那也可以算是工作的話。他被指派到一個小組委員會下的分會工作，處理編輯第十一版新語辭典的一些小問題。在真理部，為此類問題而設置的委員會多得數不勝數。溫斯頓他們正在忙於準備一份所謂的中期報告，但是究竟是要報告些什麼，他也沒有弄清楚，反正就是逗號該放在括號裡還是括號外的問題。委員會還有其他四個成員，他們的情況和身份，跟溫斯頓也差不多。有時，他們會煞有介事地集合在一起開會，不過很快就散了。坦率地講，他們根本就沒有什麼事情可做。不過，有時候他們也會裝腔作勢地坐下來熱論與報告相關的話題，然後記錄下細節。他們本來想起草一份長長的備忘錄交代一下的，但是始終沒有著手去做。開始的時候，他們還只是爭論，當離題甚遠時，爭論也就變成了吵架了。他們爭論的話題越發複雜和深奧。有時，他們會因為一個概念理解的偏差而互相說起狠話，甚至還有些要把這種小事呈報上級的衝動，可是沒多一會兒，他們就像皮球般洩了氣了，木然地坐在桌子邊，大眼瞪小眼。這是一種即將滅絕的動物的眼睛，猶如雞鳴前便會銷聲匿跡的幽靈。

電屏沉默了片刻，溫斯頓再次抬起頭來。一定是有重要的消息要發佈！但他發現不是那麼回事，僅是變換了音樂而已。他的眼前，彷彿掛著一張非洲地圖，軍隊的動向都在上面清晰地反映了出來。黑色箭頭垂直地指向南部，白色箭頭水平向東延伸，切斷了黑箭頭的尾巴。他抬起頭來，看著照片上那張泰然自若的大臉，好像是在求證自己的觀點。他突然醒過神來，質問著自己，那些白色的箭頭真的存在嗎？

他對此已經不感興趣了。他喝了一口杜松子酒，撿起白子試探性地移動著，將！但是，這步棋走得明顯不對，因為——

不知何故，往事重上心頭。他看到一個燭光閃動的房間，一張鋪著白色床罩的大床，還有他自己—— 一個9歲或者10歲的小男孩，坐在地板上，興奮地搖動著骰子盒，母親坐在他的對面，臉上掛著微笑。

那件事，一定是發生在她失蹤前的一個月吧。那時，大概是他暫時忘記抱怨挨餓而念及母子親情的時刻，也正是他和母親暫時和解的時刻。他清楚地記得，那天下著瓢潑大雨，水流順著窗子上的玻璃不斷滑落，室內燈光昏暗，不能看書，無聊的兩個孩子，躲在狹窄的臥室裡，煩悶得不行。溫斯頓又喊又鬧，吵著要吃東西，亂摔東西，使勁踢牆，吵得鄰居不得安寧，直到他們敲牆警告後，他才停了下來。此時，他的小妹妹也哭個不停。無奈之下，母親只好說：「好了，我的乖乖，我去給你們買玩具，買個可愛的玩具——你們定會喜歡的。」說完，她就冒雨衝出門外，朝小雜貨店走去。附近的小雜貨店偶爾還是會開門營業的。她抱回了一個紙盒箱，裡面裝著「蛇爬樓梯」的玩具。他現在依然記得那個充滿潮濕氣味的紙盒，拿回來時已經破爛不堪，而且，玩具的質量實在不敢恭維，旁邊的板子已經裂開了，裡面的木質骰子做工也好不到哪兒去，根本立不住，因此也就難說打出來的到底是幾點了。溫斯頓悶悶不樂地看著這個破爛貨，提不起一點興趣。眼看他又要發脾氣，母親急忙點燃一小截蠟燭，坐在地板上哄著他玩。玩了一會兒工夫，溫斯頓的興致上來了。他看著那些小蛇拚命地往樓梯上爬，眼看就要到終點了，卻突然退了回來，險些回到起點。溫斯頓興奮得手舞足蹈。他們一共玩了8局，每人贏4局。他的小妹妹太小了，還不足以發現遊戲中的樂趣，她靠坐在長枕旁，看見母親和哥哥笑，她也跟著笑。整個下午，一家三口都是在快樂中度過的。這在溫斯頓的童年記憶中，是屈指可數的幾次歡樂中的一次。

他從方纔的回憶中清醒過來，或許，這記憶原本就是假的。近來，他常常被這些假的記憶所困擾。不過這已無關緊要了，只要他知道，哪些是真、哪些是假就好。有些事情發生過，有些壓根兒就沒發生過。他又想起了那盤棋局，於是撿起了一枚白子兒，可就在這時，白子突然落到了地上，他彷彿被針紮了一下。

一陣刺耳的喇叭聲擊破長空。這是前線的公告，勝利的消息！只有在播放勝利的新聞時，才會用喇叭聲作前奏的。栗樹咖啡館裡的客人彷彿觸了電一般，一動不動，連服務員也豎起耳朵聽著。

巨大的喇叭聲，引起咖啡館裡的一陣喧嘩。電屏中傳出了播音員激動急促的聲音，但是聲音早已被外面興奮的歡呼聲所淹沒了。消息像變魔術一樣，傳遍了大街小巷。他從電屏中得知，一切都如他先前料想的那樣 —— 一支秘密的海上艦隊集結起來，突然襲擊敵人的身後，白子斬斷了敵人的退路。喧囂間，他只能聽到關於勝利的隻言片語：「偉大的戰略部署——完美的合作——最終殲滅——50萬俘虜——徹底挫敗了他們的銳氣——控制了整個非洲——戰爭結束指日可待——勝利——人類歷史上最偉大的勝利——勝利，勝利，勝利！」

溫斯頓的腿，在桌子下不停地抖動著。雖然沒有離開座位半步，但是他的心早已飛了出去，跟著外面擁擠的人群，一起興奮地狂呼，喊叫聲震耳欲聾。他抬頭看了一眼老大哥的肖像。這個橫跨世界的巨人！這個與亞洲抗爭的砥柱！就在10分鐘以前，他還在想——是的，只是10分鐘前——他心裡還犯著嘀咕，戰爭到底是勝還是敗。嘿！滅亡的可不只是歐亞國的軍隊。自從被捕進入仁愛部受審以來，他也已經改變了很多，不過他最終徹底地改變，卻是在此刻。

電屏仍在滔滔不絕地播放著有關戰爭的消息，俘虜了多少戰俘，繳獲了多少戰利品，敵人如何倒行逆施，等等。但是，外面的喊叫聲已經逐漸減弱了。服務員重新回到了自己的崗位上去，繼續做著他們分內的事，其中一個拿起瓶子給他倒滿了杜松子酒，這時溫斯頓完全沉浸在幸福的喜悅中，全然沒有注意到他的酒杯又滿了起來。他再也不用歡呼了，也用不著奔跑了。他回到了仁愛部大樓，所有的罪行都被黨赦免了，靈魂得到了淨化，潔白如雪。公審時，他坦白了一切罪行，指控了每一個人。他走在白瓷磚鋪就的走廊上，感覺像沐浴在陽光裡一般，一位荷槍實彈的警衛跟在他身後。期待已久的子彈，終於射進了他的腦袋。

他凝視著那張大臉。40年過去了，他終於看清了黑鬍鬚後面藏著的笑容。哦，以前他對老大哥的誤解是多麼殘酷，多麼沒有必要！哦，溫斯頓，你滿心想掙脫的老大哥是多麼仁愛，他的胸懷是多麼博大，你是何等頑固，何等任性！兩滴摻著杜松子酒的眼淚順著他的鼻窩淌了下來。這下好了，一切都結束了，抗爭也結束了。他已經戰勝了自己。他愛老大哥。

APPENDIX The Principles of Newspeak

NEWSPEAK WAS THE official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

The A. vocabulary

The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life—for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess—words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field—but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here; in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus, for example, speedful meant “rapid” and speedwise meant “quickly.” Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in -wise; the -wise termination was invariable. The word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.

In addition, any word—this again applied in principle to every word in the language—could be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis, doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant “warm,” while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, “very cold” and “superlatively cold.” It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well—indeed, better—expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below, all inflections followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connection with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.

The B vocabulary

The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.

The B words were in all cases compound words.* They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, “orthodoxy,” or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, “to think in an orthodox manner.” This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful, -paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they canceled by their existence.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outiook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshiped “false gods.” He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like; probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah; he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and good-sex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practiced for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex—that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman; all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical; beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labor camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i.e., Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation “good” when applied to the Party and “bad” when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological color not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprograms Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joy camp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from almost all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck.” Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

The C vocabulary

The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for “Science,” any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

FROM THE FOREGOING account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth, i.e., that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal,” or that free had once meant “intellectually free,” than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced—its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation; when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature—indispensable technical manuals, and the like—that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.