Читать книгу 1984 - Джордж Оруэлл, George Orwell - Страница 7

Winston was writing in his diary:

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I—

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them. He wanted to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and throw the inkpot through the window.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you could turn into some visible symptom.

He drew his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She—

He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married—had been married: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead.

When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act.

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and permission was always refused if the couple seemed physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to make children for the service of the Party.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. They had only been together for about fifteen months.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—sex.

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. They must, Katharine said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.

Winston sighed. He picked up his pen again and wrote:

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I—

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of this? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. Desire was thoughtcrime.

But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:

I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light—

For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out.

What he had suddenly seen was that the woman was OLD. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had no teeth at all.

He wrote hurriedly:

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.