Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler [22]
round two poles: the desperate thirst for a cigarette and the sentence: I shall pay. Memories overwhelmed him; they hummed and buzzed subduedly in his ears. Faces and voices came up and vanished; wherever he tried to hold them they hurt him; his whole past was sore and festered at every touch. His past was the movement, the Party; present and future, too, belonged to the Party, were inseparably bound up with its fate; but his past was identical with it. And it was this past that was suddenly put in question. The Party's warm, breathing body appeared to him to be covered with sores--festering sores, bleeding stigmata. When and where in history had there ever been such defective saints? Whenever had a good cause been worse represented? If the Party embodied the will of history, then history itself was defective. Rubashov gazed at the damp patches on the walls of his cell. He tore the blanket off the bunk and wrapped it round his shoulders; he quickened his pace and marched to and fro with short, quick steps, making sudden turns at door and window; but shivers continued to run down his back. The buzzing in his ears went on, mixed with vague, soft voices; he could not make out whether they came from the corridor or whether he was suffering from hallucinations. It is the orbitalis, he said to himself; it comes from the broken-off root of the eye-tooth. I will tell the doctor about it tomorrow, but in the meantime there is still a lot to do. The cause of the Party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard andpure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked. ... He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind's eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer's lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No. 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels..They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead.Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out.And himself; and No. 1. He was frozen, and he longed for a cigarette. He saw himself again in the old Belgian port, escorted by merry Little Loewy, who was slightly hunchbacked and smoked a sailor's pipe. He smelled again the smell of the harbour, a mixture of rotting seaweed and petrol; he heard the musical clock on the tower of the old guildhall, and saw the narrow streets with overhanging bays, from the lattices of which the harbour prostitutes hung their washing during the day. It was two years after the