DARKNESS AT NOON
The First Hearing
Nobody can rule guiltlessly.
SAINT-JUST
1
THE CELL DOOR SLAMMED BEHIND RUBASHOV.
He remained leaning against the door for a few seconds, and lit a cigarette.
On the bed to his right lay two fairly clean blankets, and the straw mattress looked newly filled.
The wash-basin to his left had no plug, but the tap functioned.
The can next to it had been freshly disinfected, it did not smell.
The walls on both sides were of solid brick, which would stifle the sound of tapping, but where the heating and drain pipe penetrated it, it had been plastered and resounded quite well; besides, the heating pipe itself seemed to be noise-conducting.
The window started at eye-level; one could see down into the courtyard without having to pull oneself up by the bars.
So far everything was in order.
He yawned, took his coat off, rolled it up and put it on the mattress as a pillow.
He looked out into the yard.
The snow shimmered yellow in the double light of the moon and the electric lanterns.
All round the yard, along the walls, a narrow track had been cleared for the daily exercise.
Dawn had not yet appeared; the stars still shone clear and frostily, in spite of the lanterns.
On the rampart of the outside wall, which lay opposite Rubashov’s cell, a soldier with slanted rifle was marching the hundred steps up and down; he stamped at every step as if on parade.
From time to time the yellow light of the lanterns flashed on his bayonet.
Rubashov took his shoes off, still standing at the window.
He put out his cigarette, laid the stump on the floor at the end of his bedstead, and remained sitting on the mattress for a few minutes.
He went back to the window once more.
The courtyard was still; the sentry was just turning; above the machine-gun tower he saw a streak of the Milky Way.
Rubashov stretched himself on the bunk and wrapped himself in the top blanket.
It was five o’clock and it was unlikely that one had to get up here before seven in winter.
He was very sleepy and, thinking it over, decided that he would hardly be brought up for examination for another three or four days.
He took his pince-nez off, laid it on the stone-paved floor next the cigarette stump, smiled and shut his eyes.
He was warmly wrapped up in the blanket, and felt protected; for the first time in months he was not afraid of his dreams.
When a few minutes later the warder turned the light off from outside, and looked through the spy-hole into his cell, Rubashov, ex-Commissar of the People, slept, his back turned to the wall, with his head on his outstretched left arm, which stuck stiffly out of the bed; only the hand on the end of it hung loosely and twitched in his sleep.
2
An hour earlier, when the two officials of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior were hammering on Rubashov’s door, in order to arrest him, Rubashov was just dreaming that he was being arrested.
The knocking had grown louder and Rubashov strained to wake up.
He was practised in tearing himself out of nightmares, as the dream of his first arrest had for years returned periodically and ran its course with the regularity of clockwork.
Sometimes, by a strong effort of will, he managed to stop the clockwork, to pull himself out of the dream by his own effort, but this time he did not succeed; the last weeks had exhausted him, he sweated and panted in his sleep; the clockwork hummed, the dream went on.
He dreamed, as always, that there was a hammering on his door, and that three men stood outside, waiting to arrest him.
He could see them through the closed door, standing outside, banging against its framework.
They had on brand-new uniforms, the becoming costume of the Praetorian guards of the German Dictatorship; on their caps and sleeves they wore their insignia: the aggressively barbed cross; in their free hand they carried grotesquely big pistols; their straps and trappings smelled of fresh leather.
Now they were in his room, at his bedside. Two were overgrown peasant lads with thick lips and fish-eyes; the third was short and fat.
They stood by his bed, holding their pistols in their hands, and breathing heavily at him. It was quite still save for the asthmatic panting of the short, fat one.
Then someone in an upper story pulled a plug and the water rushed down evenly through the pipes in the walls.
The clockwork was running down. The hammering on Rubashov’s door became louder; the two men outside, who had come to arrest him, hammered alternatively and blew on their frozen hands.
But Rubashov could not wake up, although he knew that now would follow a particularly painful scene: the three still stand by his bed and he tries to put on his dressing-gown.
But the sleeve is turned inside out; he cannot manage to put his arm into it.
He strives vainly until a kind of paralysis descends on him: he cannot move, although everything depends on his getting the sleeve on in time.
This tormenting helplessness lasts a number of seconds, during which Rubashov moans and feels the cold wetness on his temples and the hammering on his door penetrates his sleep like a distant roll of drums; his arm under the pillow twitches in the feverish effort to find the sleeve of his dressing-gown; then at last he is released by the first smashing blow over the ear with the butt of the pistol. ...
With the familiar sensation, repeated and lived through again a hundred times, of this first blow—from which his deafness dated—he usually woke up.
For a while he would still shiver and his hand, jammed under the pillow, would continue to strain for the dressing-gown sleeve; for, as a rule, before he was fully awake, he still had the last and worst stage to go through. It consisted of a dizzy, shapeless feeling that this awakening was the real dream and that in fact he was still lying on the damp stone floor of the dark cell, at his feet the can, next to his head the jug of water and a few crumbs of bread. ...
This time also, for a few seconds, the bemused condition held, the uncertainty whether his groping hand would touch the can or the switch of his bedside lamp.
Then the light blazed on and the mist parted.