Orwell's Revenge (3 page)

But for the alcove, Blair knew he would never have dared accept the package. Razor blades would have been bad enough. Nobody could get razor blades except from the proles, and
trading was officially forbidden. Yet somehow his search for blades had produced this package instead, and Blair knew it contained something infinitely more compromising. The package contained a book—
the book,
the book without a title,
the compendium of all heresies against the Party, against Oceania, against Big Brother himself. It was the diary of the archtraitor Winston Smith. Smith had been hanged, of course—the execution had taken place years ago, in Victory Square. But somehow his diary had survived.

Blair slid the slim volume out of the brown paper wrapping. It was amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The handwritten text inside had evidently been copied by some photographic means. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book
had passed through many hands. Where was the original? Who had found it? A tremor passed through
Blair's bowels. To begin reading was the decisive act. He opened the book.

At the top of the first page was a date: April 4, 1984. There followed a
rambling passage describing a routine piece of newsfilm— something to do with fighting at the eastern front. But at the bottom of the page, printed in bold letters, were the words:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Blair flipped forward in the book. Then he read:

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 sat back, weak with indecision. A sense of complete helplessness descended upon him. Was this the future that Smith had in mind? Men certainly did not live alone now In the age of Big Brother no one lived alone. But this was a matter of
doublethink.
Men lived with Big Brother every second of their lives, and they lived alone too—utterly alone, with no empathy, no links of understanding, no connections of any kind, except to the Ministry, which was connected to everyone.

For some time Blair sat
gazing stupidly at the page. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music, and he breathed in time with the tinny racket until he felt calmer. It was curious, he thought, how his ability to read Oldspeak had atrophied. The words on the page seemed jumbled and hard to pronounce, though distantly familiar, as if his understanding had been scattered and confounded. He was conscious of nothing except the blaring of the music and a slight booziness caused by the gin. The
seconds were ticking by

He put his hand to his face, and grimaced as he felt the tender surface of his cheek. To be done in by
razor blades! It was sublimely ridiculous. For an instant Blair felt an overwhelming desire to laugh. Then his stomach tightened again as he thought of the morning.

It had
happened just before eight hundred, if anything so nebulous
could be said to happen. The scraping of the six-week-old blade on his raw face had finally been too much. Staring with a wretched frustration at the points of blood appearing on his neck behind the plow of the blade, he had thrown the razor down, wiped his half-shaved face with a towel, and ventured out to the market.

Officially, the market didn't exist. Officially, the parasites and profiteers had been banished, the speculators cleared out, to protect goodthinking people from ruthless exploitation. Unofficially, the proles' market flourished in the very heart of London. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the little stalls and shops inside the
four-mile radius of the inner city.

For a long time the market had been confined to one or two narrow streets away from any main thoroughfare. Blair remembered having visited it once years before, in a derelict alley in the east of London. Two miserable stalls were set up, small folding tables that could be quickly removed at any sign of trouble. On one of them were wilted cabbages. But that had been years ago.

This morning, Blair had made his way down Bond Street and the length of Waterloo Road. He passed through Victory Square. There were always a number of prostitutes there—the unsuccessful ones, who couldn't earn enough for a night's bed. One woman who had been lying on the ground overnight was crying bitterly, because a man had gone off without paying her fifty-cent fee. Toward morning some of the girls did not even get that, but only a cup of tea or a cigarette.

By a small bake shop an old, very ugly woman was violently abusing two of the other women because they could afford a better dinner than she could. As each dish was brought out to them she would point at it and shout accusingly, “There goes the price of another fuck! We don't get hash for dinner, do we girls? 'Ow do you think she paid for them kippers? That's that there toff that
'as 'er for a tanner.”

Blair headed down toward the river, through one of the most desolate parts of the city. The buildings here were broad and solid, and might once have been imposing, but their window frames were
rotting apart, and the broken windows gaped dark and menacing. Rubbish blew along the deserted street, and a small, dark form slid into a hole in the wall as his steps approached. In the middle of a dreary square was an oval building with rectangular apertures where the windows had been torn out. It had a small tower in front. The pavement around it was broken and uneven, and weeds sprouted up through the cracks. He wondered what its purpose had been. A vague tune came into his head, a singsong melody about oranges and lemons. Clouds covered the watery sun and the day darkened.

The wind was stronger now, and blew dust into his face. The river gave off a thick, sweetish, unhealthy smell, and green slime clung to the pillars that supported the bridges. There was no railing to protect the walker from the turbid brown water, though discolored pits on the parapet suggested there once had been. Eventually the road turned away from the river, and the large dilapidated buildings and wide thoroughfares gave way to rows of brick houses, huddled shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other as if for support.

The streets became narrow alleys, and people appeared again. A great fat woman with hair sprouting on her lip and chin was pegging washing to a sagging line, shouting in a husky voice to an unseen neighbor. A couple of thin children offered cabbage leaves to a mangy cat, which they held on a string. The cat crouched beside them sullenly, and turned its face away from their offering with pointed dislike. In another alley the smell of an overflowing drain made Blair's stomach turn. He met some men going the other way with some tools and pipes, and wondered if they could possibly be doing repairs. Were the proles capable of that? The Ministries were barely able to keep the plumbing in Party flats in working order.

Blair walked under high brick arches that carried rail lines, his nose wrinkling at the stench of urine and rotting garbage. He trailed back southward, knowing he would sooner or later hit Whitechapel Road. The gray apartments gave way to slums of terraced brown two-story houses.

The scene changed abruptly as he entered the area of the market. Suddenly the sidewalk stalls were so numerous they almost spilled over on to each other.
His nose was assailed by smells of sweat and coffee. He glimpsed the stall he wanted between two great solid females, who beamed at each other and parted. He caught his breath in amazement. There at the top of the stall, lined up against a wooden plank, was chocolate. Real chocolate, eight solid bars, not the Party's dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.

Blair diffidently made his way forward, and was pressed by the crowd against the trestle table that supported the goods.

“
'Ullo, mate,” the heavy, red-faced stallkeeper said amiably. “Can I 'elp you?”

Blair cleared his throat. His voice, when it came, sounded to him stilted and pedantic. “Well yes,” he replied. “The thing is, you see, I need some razor blades. . . . I, ah, have these light bulbs here . . .” Feeling foolish, he pulled a light bulb out of the big pocket of his raincoat.

“Sorry, sir, I just parted with me last ones,” the stallkeeper said politely.

The frustration was almost too much to bear. The anticipation of a comfortable shave had become solidly fixed in Blair's mind. The stall owner seemed to understand, even as Blair began to turn away in disgust.

“I can 'ave some for you tomorrow if you like. I'll put 'em aside,” he added.

What nonsense! By tomorrow the man would have forgotten all about that promise. Tomorrow, always tomorrow, there would be full employment, exemplary public health, universal education, and free entertainment—Big Brother promised, the Ministry of Plenty solemnly promised. No one ever delivered. No one remembered anything any more. And even if by chance the stallkeeper remembered his promise, why on earth should he bother to keep it? Promises were worth as much as dollars these days, and dollars were worth nothing at all.

As these thoughts flashed through his mind, Blair felt a surge of hate—the kind of blind, gripping hate you felt when the face of Kenneth Blythe leered at you from the telescreen during the Two Minutes Hate. Not hate for this particular stallkeeper, fool though he was,
but hate for the Party, hate for the Ministry of Plenty, hate for Love Week, hate for everything that combined to make Blair shave his sore face with a blade that was six weeks old.

And then he had said it. A lunatic impulse had taken hold of him, and the words had shot out of his mouth, faster than he could even think, an ejaculation of bitterness bursting like pus from a boil.

“Like the Jam!” Blair had shouted. “Just like the Jam! We get jam every
other
day, don't we! Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow But never any jam today, because today isn't any
other
day, now, is it?” Then, in a spasm of sheer insanity he had added: “I suppose Big Brother'11 have blades for me tomorrow, too!” A sharp burst of laughter had followed the words out of his mouth, before the horror of what he had said gripped his throat back into silence.

It was exactly at this moment that
the significant thing had happened. Blair had caught the stallkeeper's eye. For a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen, Blair knew—yes, he
knew
—that the stallkeeper 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. “I am with you,” the stallkeeper seemed to be saying to him. “I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust— and about the soreness of your face. But don't worry, I am on your side.” A second later the flash of intelligence was gone, and the stallkeeper's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.

“Don't worry, mate, they'll be here,” the stallkeeper said sympathetically. Then, without looking downward, he had reached under the stall and pulled out the package. He had calmly placed it into Blair's hands. And perhaps because his mind had still been reeling at his own outburst, Blair had taken the package without comment, thrust it into his coat pocket, and turned back toward Victory Mansions.

Now, as he sat at the desk in the alcove of his room with the taste of
gin in his mouth, Blair felt paralyzed again by the memory of his outburst. He was a dead man.

He stared again at the book in front of him. The gin was seething in
his stomach, and he let out a belch. For a moment he was tempted to destroy the book, quickly and silently But that was useless. Whether he destroyed it or continued reading 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 opened the book—the essential crime that
contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime,
they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. Sooner or later they were bound to get you.

He wondered again: Had it always been like this? Had London always had this horrible atmosphere of suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, air-raids, machine-guns, enormous food-queues, milkless tea, shortages of cigarettes, and prowling
gangs of armed men? Had men always lived under the shadow of the Thought Police? The next moment Blair 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. Blair's entrails
seemed to grow cold. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was expressionless. He got up and moved
heavily toward the door.

The gin is foul, flat, sickly, and oily, like a
sort of Chinese rice-spirit. It makes your lips purple and grows not less but more horrible with every
mouthful you drink. Still, you drink it in gulps, like doses of vile medicine. You breathe it out of your skin in place of sweat, and cry it from your eyes
in place of tears. When you wake with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seems to be broken, it is impossible even to rise from the horizontal, but for the bottle and teacup placed beside
your bed overnight.

Big Brother drinks from a different cup. His thirst is quenched by The Thing that is not Gin. Big Brother has the telescreen.

The telescreen is the key to everything else in
1984.
The word “telescreen” (or “screen”) occurs 119 times in Orwell's book, which is to say, on almost every other page. “Big Brother” appears only 74 times. Other related words get far fewer mentions: “the Thought Police,” 39; “The Spies” youth group, 14; “spy” in other contexts, 9; “watching” in the context of snooping, 8; “thoughtcrime” or “crimethink,” 14; “betray,” 24; “slogan,” 19; “propaganda,” 4. “Newspeak” appears 46 times in the body of the book and another 33 in the Appendix. The three slogans of the Party—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—occur 6, 7, and 6 times respectively. Other related phrases get only occasional mentions: “memory holes,” 6; “mutability of the past,”
3; “informers,” 2; “Thought Police helicopters,” 1; “ear trumpets,” 1; “snoop,” 1; “eavesdropping,” 1. Even the cardinal principle of all Oceania—“doublethink”—appears only 31 times, or about as often as “gin,” with 34 occurrences. From a strictly engineering perspective, the telescreen is the scaffold. It is the single, ubiquitous techno-spy that makes possible Big Brother's absolute control.