Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler [45]
lowered to her breast, stuck out steeply like a dead woman's. But the light, sisterly scent of her body was familiar to him, even asleep. The next day and all the following days, she sat again in her white blouse, bent over the desk; the next night and all the following nights the paler silhouette of her breast was raised against the dark bedroom curtain. Rubashov lived by day and by night in the atmosphere of her large, lazy body. Her behaviour during work remained unaltered, her voice and the expression of her eyes was the same; never did they contain the least suggestion of an allusion. From time to time, when Rubashov was tired by dictating, he stopped behind her chair and leaned his hands on her shoulders; he said nothing, and under the blouse her warm shoulders did not move; then he found the phrase he had been searching for, and, resuming his wandering through the room, he went on dictating. Sometimes he added sarcastic commentaries to what he was dictating; then she stopped writing and waited, pencil in hand, until he had finished; but she never smiled at his sarcasm and Rubashov never discovered what she thought of them. Only once, after a particularly dangerous joke of Rubashov's, referring to certain personal habits of No. 1's she said suddenly, in her sleepy voice: "You ought not to say such things in front of other people; you ought to be more careful altogether. ..." But from time to time, particularly when instructions and circulars from above arrived, he felt a need to give vent to his heretical witticisms. It was the time of preparation for the second great trial of the opposition. The air in the legation had become peculiarly thin. Photographs and portraits disappeared from walls overnight; they had hung there for years, nobody had looked at them, but now the light patches leaped to the eye. The staff restricted their conversation to service matters; they spoke to each other with a careful and reserved politeness. At meals in the Legation canteen, when conversation was unavoidable, they stuck to the stock phrases of official terminology, which, in the familiar atmosphere, appeared grotesque and rather uneasy; it was as though, between requests for salt-cellar and mustard-pot, they called out to each other the catch-words of the latest Congress manifesto. Often it happened that somebody protested against a supposed false interpretation of what he had just said, and called his neighbours to witness, with precipitate exclamations of "I did not say that", or "That is not what I meant". The whole thing gave Rubashov the impression of a queer and ceremonious marionette-play with figures, moving on wires, each saying their set piece. Arlova alone, with her silent, sleepy manner, seemed to remain unchanged. Not onlythe portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discreetly, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves--their author, the People's Commissar for Finance, had just been arrested; also nearly all old Party Congress reports treating the same subject; most books and reference-books on the history of antecedents of the Revolution; most works by living authors of jurisprudence and philosophy; all pamphlets dealing with the problems of birth control; the manuals on the structure of the People's Army; treatises on trade unionism and the right to strike in the People's state; practically every study of the problems of political constitution more than two years old, and, finally, even the volumes of the Encyclopaedia published by the Academy--a new revised edition being promised shortly. New books arrived, too; the classics of social science appeared with new footnotes and commentaries, the old histories were replaced by new histories, the old memoirs of dead revolutionary leaders were replaced by new memoirs of the same defunct.