Darkness at Noon (27 page)

“So that is what you are aiming at: I am to play the Devil in your Punch and Judy show—howl, grind my teeth and put out my tongue—and voluntarily, too. Danton and his friends were spared that, at least.”

Gletkin shut the cover of the dossier. He bent forward a bit and settled his cuffs:

“Your testimony at the trial will be the last service you can do the Party.”

Rubashov did not answer. He kept his eyes shut and relaxed under the rays of the lamp like a tired sleeper in the sun; but there was no escape from Gletkin's voice.

“Your Danton and the Convention,” said the voice, “were just a gallant play compared to what is at stake here. I have read books about it: those people wore powdered pigtails and declaimed about their personal honour. To them, it only mattered to die with a noble gesture, regardless of whether this gesture did good or harm.”

Rubashov said nothing. There was a buzzing and
humming in his ears; Gletkin's voice was above him; it came from every side of him; it hammered mercilessly on his aching skull.

“You know what is at stake here,” Gletkin went on. “For the first time in history, a revolution has not only conquered power, but also kept it. We have made our country a bastion of the new era. It covers a sixth of the world and contains a tenth of the world's population.”

Gletkin's voice now sounded at Rubashov's back. He had risen and was walking up and down the room. It was the first time this had happened. His boots creaked at every step, his starched uniform crackled and a sourish smell of sweat and leather became noticeable.

“When our Revolution had succeeded in our country, we believed that the rest of the earth would follow suit. Instead, came a wave of reaction, which threatened to swamp us. There were two currents in the Party. One consisted of adventurers, who wanted to risk what we had won to promote the revolution abroad. You belonged to them. We recognized this current to be dangerous, and have liquidated it.”

Rubashov wanted to raise his head and say something. Gletkin's steps resounded in his skull. He was too tired. He let himself fall back, and kept his eyes shut.

“The leader of the Party,” Gletkin's voice went on, “had the wider perspective and the more tenacious tactics. He realized that everything depended on surviving the period of world reaction and keeping the bastion. He had realized that it might last ten, perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty years, until the world was ripe for a fresh wave of revolution. Until then we stand alone. Until then we have only one duty: not to perish.”

A sentence swam vaguely in Rubashov's memory: “It is the Revolutionary's duty to preserve his own life.” Who had said that? He, himself? Ivanov? It was in the name of that principle that he had sacrificed Arlova. And where had it led him?

“… Not to perish,” sounded Gletkin's voice. “The bulwark must be held, at any price and with any sacrifice. The leader of the Party recognized this principle with unrivalled clearsightedness, and has consistently applied it. The policy of the International had to be subordinated to our national policy. Whoever did not understand this necessity had to be destroyed. Whole sets of our best functionaries in Europe had to be physically liquidated. We did not recoil from crushing our own organizations abroad when the interests of the Bastion required it. We did not recoil from co-operation with the police of reactionary countries in order to suppress revolutionary movements which came at the wrong moment. We did not recoil from betraying our friends and compromising with our enemies, in order to preserve the Bastion. That was the task which history had given us, the representative of the first victorious revolution. The short-sighted, the aesthetes, the moralists did not understand. But the leader of the Revolution understood that all depended on one thing: to be the better stayer.”

Gletkin interrupted his pacing through the room. He stopped behind Rubashov's chair. The scar on his shaven skull shone sweatily. He panted, wiped his skull with his handkerchief, and seemed embarrassed at having broken his customary reserve. He sat down again behind the desk and settled his cuffs. He turned down the light a little, and continued in his usual expressionless voice:

“The Party's line was sharply defined. Its tactics were determined by the principle that the end justifies the means—all means, without exception. In the spirit of this principle, the Public Prosecutor will demand you life, Citizen Rubashov.

“Your faction, Citizen Rubashov, is beaten and destroyed. You wanted to split the Party, although you must have known that a split in the Party meant civil war. You know of the dissatisfaction amongst the peasantry, which has not yet learnt to understand the sense of the sacrifices imposed on it. In a war which may be only a few months away, such currents can lead to a catastrophe. Hence the imperious necessity for the Party to be united. It must be as if cast from one mould—filled with blind discipline and absolute trust. You and your friends, Citizen Rubashov, have made a rent in the Party. If your repentance is real, then you must help us to heal this rent. I have told you, it is the last service the Party will ask of you.

“Your task is simple. You have set it yourself: to gild the Right, to blacken the Wrong. The policy of the opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language which the masses understand. If you begin to talk of your complicated motives, you will only create confusion amongst them. Your task, Citizen Rubashov, is to avoid awakening sympathy and pity. Sympathy and pity for the opposition are a danger to the country.

“Comrade Rubashov, I hope that you have understood the task which the Party has set you.”

It was the first time since their acquaintance that
Gletkin called Rubashov “Comrade”. Rubashov raised his head quickly. He felt a hot wave rising in him, against which he was helpless. His chin shook slightly while he was putting on his pince-nez.

“I understand.”

“Observe,” Gletkin went on, “that the Party holds out to you no prospect of reward. Some of the accused have been made amenable by physical pressure. Others, by the promise to save their heads—or the heads of their relatives who had fallen into our hands as hostages. To you, Comrade Rubashov, we propose no bargain and we promise nothing.”

“I understand,” Rubashov repeated.

Gletkin glanced at the dossier.

“There is a passage in your journal which impressed me,” he went on. “You wrote: ‘I have thought and acted as I had to. If I was right, I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I shall pay.'”

He looked up from the dossier and looked Rubashov fully in the face:

“You were wrong, and you will pay, Comrade Rubashov. The Party promises only one thing: after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published. Then the world will learn what was in the background of this Punch and Judy show—as you called it—which we had to act to them according to history's text-book….”

He hesitated a few seconds, settled his cuffs and ended rather awkwardly, while the scar on his skull reddened:

“And then you, and some of your friends of the older generation, will be given the sympathy and pity which are denied to you to-day.”

While he was speaking, he had pushed the prepared statement over to Rubashov, and laid his fountain-pen beside it. Rubashov stood up and said with a strained smile:

“I have always wondered what it was like when the Neanderthalers became sentimental. Now I know.”

“I do not understand,” said Gletkin, who had also stood up.

Rubashov signed the statement, in which he confessed to having committed his crimes through counter-revolutionary motives and in the service of a foreign Power. As he raised his head, his gaze fell on the portrait of No. 1 hanging on the wall, and once again he recognized the expression of knowing irony with which years ago No. 1 had taken leave of him—that melancholy cynicism which stared down on humanity from the omnipresent portrait.

“It does not matter if you don't understand,” said Rubashov. “There are things which only that older generation, the Ivanovs, Rubashovs and Kieffers have understood. That is over now.”

“I will give order that you are not to be troubled until the trial,” said Gletkin after a short pause, again stiff and precise. Rubashov's smiling irritated him. “Have you any other particular wish?”

“To sleep,” said Rubashov. He stood in the open door, beside the giant warder, small, elderly and insignificant with his pince-nez and beard.

“I will give orders that your sleep must not be disturbed,” said Gletkin.

When the door had shut behind Rubashov, he went back to his desk. For a few seconds he sat still. Then he rang for his secretary.

She sat down in her usual place in the corner. “I congratulate you on your success, Comrade Gletkin,” she said.

Gletkin turned the lamp down to normal.

“That,” he said with a glance at the lamp, “plus lack of sleep and physical exhaustion. It is all a matter of constitution.”

“Asked whether he pleaded guilty, the accused Rubashov answered ‘Yes' in a clear voice. To a further question of the Public Prosecutor as to whether the accused had acted as an agent of the counter-revolution, he again answered ‘Yes' in a lower voice….”

The porter Wassilij's daughter read slowly, each syllable separately. She had spread the newspaper on the table and followed the lines with her finger; from time to time she smoothed her flowered head-kerchief.

“… Asked whether he wanted an advocate for his defence, the accused declared he would forgo that right.
The court then proceeded to the reading of the accusation….”

The porter Wassilij was lying on the bed with his face turned to the wall. Vera Wassiljovna never quite knew whether the old man listened to her reading or slept. Sometimes he mumbled to himself. She had learnt not to pay any attention to that, and had made a habit of reading the paper aloud every evening, “for educational reasons” even when after work at the factory she had to go to a meeting of her cell and returned home late.

“… The Definition of the Charge states that the accused Rubashov is proved guilty on all points contained in the accusation, by documentary evidence and his own confession in the preliminary investigation. In answer to a question of the President of the Court as to whether he had any complaint to make against the conduct of the preliminary investigation, the accused answered in the negative, and added that he had made his confession of his own free will, in sincere repentance of his counter-revolutionary crimes….”

The porter Wassilij did not move. Above the bed, directly over his head, hung the portrait of No. 1. Next to it a rusty nail stuck out of the wall: until a short time ago the photograph of Rubashov as Partisan-commander had hung there. Wassilij's hand felt automatically for the hole in his mattress in which he used to hide his greasy Bible from the daughter; but shortly after Rubashov's arrest the daughter had found it and thrown it away, for educational reasons.

“… At the Prosecutor's request, the accused Rubashov now proceeded to describe his evolution from an opponent of the Party line to a counter-revolutionary and
traitor to the Fatherland. In the presence of a tense audience, the accused began his statement as follows: ‘Citizen Judges, I will explain what led me to capitulate before the investigating magistrate and before you, the representatives of justice in our country. My story will demonstrate to you how the slightest deflection from the line of the Party must inevitably end in counter-revolutionary banditry. The necessary result of our oppositional struggle was that we were pushed further and further down into the morass. I will describe to you my fall, that it may be a warning to those who in this decisive hour still waver, and have hidden doubts in the leadership of the Party and the Tightness of the Party line. Covered with shame, trampled in the dust, about to die, I will describe to you the sad progress of a traitor, that it may serve as a lesson and terrifying example to the millions of our country….'”

The porter Wassilij had turned round on the bed and pressed his face into the mattress. Before his eyes was the picture of the bearded Partisan-commander Rubashov, who in the worst sort of mess knew how to swear in such a pleasant way that it was a joy to God and man. “Trampled in the dust, about to die….” Wassilij groaned. The Bible was gone, but he knew many passages by heart.

“… At this point the Public Prosecutor interrupted the accused's narrative to ask a few questions concerning the fate of Rubashov's former secretary, Citizen Arlova, who had been executed on the charge of treasonable activities. From the answers of the accused Rubashov, it appears that the latter, driven into a corner at that time by the watchfulness of the Party, had laid the responsibility of his own crimes to Arlova's charge, so as to save his head
and be able to continue his disgraceful activities. N. S. Rubashov confesses to this monstrous crime with unashamed and cynical openness. To the Citizen Prosecutor's remark: ‘You are apparently quite without any moral sense,' the accused answers with a sarcastic smile: ‘Apparently.' His behaviour provoked the audience to repeated spontaneous demonstrations of anger and contempt, which were, however, quickly suppressed by the Citizen President of the Court. On one occasion these expressions of the revolutionary sense of justice gave place to a wave of merriment—namely, when the accused interrupted the description of his crimes with the request that the proceedings might be suspended for a few minutes, as he was suffering from ‘intolerable toothache'. It is typical of the correct procedure of revolutionary justice that the President immediately granted this wish and, with a shrug of contempt, gave the order for the hearing to be interrupted for five minutes.”