Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler [25]
to meet the comrade from the "upper spheres" he had just enough money in his pocket for three days. "I had always thought before that it was only in books that people chewed the bark of trees," he remarked. "Young plane trees taste best." The memory impelled him to get up and fetch a couple of sausages from the counter. Rubashov remembered prison soup and hunger strikes, and ate with him. At last Little Loewy crossed over the French frontier. As he had no passport, he was arrested after a few days, told to betake himself to another country and released. "One might just as well have told me to climb to the moon," he observed. He turned to the Party for help; but in this county the Party did not know him and told him they would first have to make inquiries in his native country. He wandered on, after a few days he was arrested again and sentenced to three months' imprisonment. He served his sentence, and gave his cell companion, a tramp, a course of lectures about the resolutions of the last Party Congress. In return the latter let him into the secret of making a living by catching cats and selling their skins. When the three months were over, he was taken by night to a wood on the Belgian frontier. The gendarmes gave him bread, cheese and a packet of French cigarettes. "Go straight on," they said. "In half an hour you will be in Belgium. If we ever catch you over here again, we'll knock your head off." For several weeks Little Loewy drifted about in Belgium. He again turned to the Party for help, but received the same answer as in France. As he had had enough of plane trees, he tried the cat trade. It was fairly easy to catch cats, and one obtained for a skin, if it were young and not mangy, the equivalent of half a loaf of bread and a packet of pipe tobacco. Between the capture and the selling, however, lay a rather unpleasant operation. It was quickest if one grasped the cat's ears in one hand, and its tail in the other, and broke its back over one's knee. The first few times one was seized by nausea: later on one got used to it. Unfortunately, Little Loewy was arrested again after a few weeks, for in Belgium, too, one was supposed to have identity papers.Followed in due course expulsion, release, second arrest, imprisonment. Then one night two Belgian gendarmes took him to a wood on the French frontier. They gave him bread, cheese and a packet of Belgian cigarettes. "Go straight on," they said. "In half an hour you will be in France. If we catch you over here again, well knock your head off." In the course of the next year, Little Loewy was smuggled backwards and forwards over the frontier three times, by complicity of the French authorities or, as the case might be, the Belgian. He gathered that this game had been played for years with several hundred of his kind. He applied again and again to the Party, for his chief anxiety was that he should lose contact with the movement. "We received no notification of your arrival from your organisation," the Party told him. "We must wait for the answer to our inquiries. If you are a Party member, keep Party discipline." Meanwhile Little Loewy continued his cat trade and lethimself be shoved to and fro across the frontier. Also the dictatorship broke out in his own country. A further year passed and Little Loewy, slightly the worse for his travels, began to spit blood and dream of cats. He suffered from the delusion that everything smelled of cats, his food, his pipe and even the kindly old prostitutes who sometimes gave him shelter. "We have still received no answer to our inquiries," said the Party. After another year it turned out that all those comrades who could have given the required information about Little Loewy's part were either murdered, locked-up or had disappeared. "We are afraid we cannot do anything for you," said the Party. "You should not have come without an official notification. Perhaps you left even without the Party's permission. How can we know? A lot of spies andprovocateurs try to creep into our ranks. The Party must be on its guard." "What are you telling