The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, he felt better now. Nobody would ever hear the truth that he was saying. It was important for him not to be heard, but to stay sane. He went back to the table and wrote:
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 there is truth:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of loneliness, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – hello!
He was already dead, he thought. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not involve death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man and it became important to stay alive as long as possible. He had ink on two fingers of his right hand. It might betray him. He went to the bathroom and carefully washed the ink away with the dark-brown soap.
He put the diary away. He could not hide it, but he could at least make sure that it would not be discovered too quickly.
Chapter 3
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He was ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, rather silent woman with slow movements and beautiful fair hair. His father was dark and thin, dressed always in dark clothes and wearing spectacles. Winston remembered his mother better than his father. The two of them disappeared in the fifties. A lot of people disappeared during that time.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down under him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all. Both of them were looking up at him. They were somewhere under the ground, and this place was moving downwards. They were in a sinking ship, looking up at him through the water. There was still air in the ship, they could still see him and he them. He was out in the light and air, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see it in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die so that he was alive.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that his mother and his sister gave their lives for his own. When he woke up, he realized that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still love and friendship. It was tragic, because his mother had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there was fear, hatred, and pain, but no deep sorrows. All this he saw in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, who looked up at him through the green water.
Suddenly he was standing on a pasture, on a summer evening. He saw this landscape in his dreams very often and he was never sure whether or not he had seen it in the real world. He called it the Golden Country.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards him across the field. She tore off her clothes and threw them aside. Her body was white and soft, but he didn't even look at it. He admired the gesture. It was graceful and careless and it also belonged to the ancient time. It seemed to him that she tore off Big Brother, and the Party, and the Thought Police. Winston woke up with the word «Shakespeare» on his lips.
From the telescreen Winston heard a whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, time for office workers to get up. Winston slept naked, for a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons a year, and pyjamas were 600. He took his dirty clothes from a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next moment he started coughing. It happened nearly always soon after he woke up. He had to lie down on his back and breathe deeply.
«Take your places, please!» shouted a youngish woman dressed in tunic and gym-shoes from the telescreen. «Take your places, please». One had to look as if one enjoyed the exercise, because was proper during the Physical Jerks. «One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!.».
The rhythmic movements made Winston remember his dream. He tried to remember his early childhood, but it was very difficult. Everything that happened before the late fifties disappeared. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.
Winston could not remember a time when his country had not been at war. He remembered that there had been an air raid which had taken everyone by surprise. So during his childhood the country had been at peace for quite a long time. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester[2]. He remembered that his father had taken him by the hand and that they had hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth. His mother was following a long way behind them. She was carrying his baby sister – or perhaps blankets: he was not sure whether his sister had been born then. Finally they had come into a noisy place with a lot of people. He realized it had been a Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the floor, and other people were sitting on metal bunk beds, one above the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the floor. Near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side. The old man smelled of gin. He looked scared and Winston could see that he was in pain. Someone whom the old man loved – a little granddaughter, perhaps – had been killed. Every few minutes the old man said to the woman that they shouldn't have trusted someone. Winston could not now remember who it had been.
Since about that time, war had continued without an end, but it had not always been the same war. But Winston could never say who was fighting whom at any given moment. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania and Eastasia were at war with Eurasia. Four years ago Oceania and Eurasia had been at war with Eastasia. Officially, however, the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Winston was now doing an exercise for back muscles.
What if the Party could say that this or that event had never happened? It was frightening.
The Party said that Oceania had never been at peace with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been at peace with Eurasia four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only inside his head. And if all others accepted the lie, if all records told the same tale, then the lie became truth. «Who controls the past», ran the Party slogan, «controls the future: who controls the present controls the past». And yet the past never had been changed. It was quite simple. You just had to win against your own memory. «Reality control», they called it: in Newspeak it was called «doublethink».
The exercise was over. Winston breathed deeply. He thought about the word «doublethink». To know and not to know, to know the truth and tell lies, to have two opinions at the same time, to know that they were contradictory and to believe in both of them, to use logic against logic, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party protected democracy, to forget what it was necessary to forget, to remember it when it was necessary to remember and then to forget it again. Even to understand the word «doublethink» you had to use doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. «And now let's see which of us can touch our toes!» she said. «Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One- two! One-two!.».
Winston hated this exercise. His often started coughing after he did it. The past, he thought, had not just been changed, it had been destroyed. He tried to remember in what year he had first heard of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in