Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler [91]
last much longer, your honour. They have crushed us because we are reactionaries, and because the old days when we were happy must not come back. ..." "Were you really so happy in those days?" asked Rubashov; but the peasant only murmured something unintelligible, while his Adam's apple slid up and down his throat several times. Rubashov watched him from the side; after a time he said: "Do you remember the part in the Bible where the tribes in the desert begin to cry: Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt"? The peasant nodded eagerly and uncomprehendingly. ... Then they were conducted back into the building. The effect of the fresh air vanished, the leaden drowsiness, the giddiness and nausea returned. At the entrance Rubashov bent down, picked up a handful of snow, and rubbed it on his forehead and burning eyes. He was not taken back to his cell as he had hoped, but straight to Gletkin's room. Gletkin was sitting at his desk, in the same position as Rubashov had left him in--how long ago? He looked as though he had not moved during Rubashov's absence. The curtains were drawn, the lamp burning; time stood still in this room, as in a putrefying pond. While sitting down again opposite Gletkin, Rubashov's glance fell on a damp patch on the carpet. He remembered his sickness. So it was, after all, but an hour since he had left the room. "I take it that you feel better now," said Gletkin. "We left off at the concluding question of the motive for your counter-revolutionary activities." He stared in slight surprise at Rubashov's right hand, resting on the arm of the chair and still clenching a tiny lump of snow. Rubashov followed his glance; he smiled and lifted his hand to the lamp. They both watched the little lump melting on his hand in the warmth of the bulb. "The question of motive is the last," said Gletkin. "When you have signed that, we will have finished with one another." The lamp radiated a sharper light than it had for a long time. Rubashov was forced to blink. "... And then you will be able to rest," said Gletkin. Rubashov passed his hand over his temples, but the coolness of the snow was gone. The word "rest", with which Gletkin had ended his sentence, remained suspended in the silence. Rest and sleep. Let us choose a captain and return into the land of Egypt. ... He blinked sharply through his pince-nez at Gletkin: "You know my motives as well as I do," he said. "You know that I acted neither out of a ‘counter-revolutionary mentality', nor was I in the service of a foreign Power. What I thought and what I did, I thought and did according to my own conviction and conscience." Gletkin had pulled a dossier out of his drawer. He went through it, pulled out a sheet and read in his monotonous voice: " ‘... For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That was our law. ...' You wrote that in your diary shortly after your arrest." Rubashov felt behind his eye-lids the familiar flickering of the light. In Gletkin's mouth the sentence he had thought and written acquired a peculiarly naked sound--as though a confession, intended only for the anonymous priest, had been registered on a gramophone record, which now was repeating it in its cracked voice. Gletkin had taken another page out of the dossier, but read only one sentence from it, with his expressionless gaze fixed on Rubashov: " ‘Honouris: to serve without vanity, and unto the last consequence.' " Rubashov tried to withstand his gaze. "I don't see," he said, "how it can serve the Party that her members have to grovel in the dust beforeall the world. I have signed everything you wanted me to sign. I have pleaded guilty to having pursued a false and objectively harmful policy. Isn't that enough for you?" He put on his pince-nez, blinked helplessly past the lamp, and ended in a tired, hoarse voice: "After all, the name N. S. Rubashov is itself a piece of Party history. By dragging it in dirt, you besmirch the history of the Revolution." "To that I can also reply with