“What is the matter with you? You cannot be taken to the doctor before to-morrow.”
“Toothache,” said Rubashov.
“Toothache, is it?” said the warder, shuffled out and banged the door.
Now I can at least remain lying here quietly, thought Rubashov, but it gave him no more pleasure.
The stale warmth of the blanket became a nuisance to him, and he threw it off.
He again tried to watch the movements of his toes, but it bored him.
In the heel of each sock there was a hole.
He wanted to darn them, but the thought of having to knock on the door and request needle and thread from the warder prevented him; the needle would probably be refused him in any case.
He had a sudden wild craving for a newspaper.
It was so strong that he could smell the printer’s ink and hear the crackling and rustling of the pages.
Perhaps a revolution had broken out last night, or the head of a state had been murdered, or an American had discovered the means to counteract the force of gravity.
His arrest could not be in it yet; inside the country, it would be kept secret for a while, but abroad the sensation would soon leak through, they would print ten-year-old photographs dug out of the newspaper archives and publish a lot of nonsense about him and No. 1.
He now no longer wanted a newspaper, but with the same greed desired to know what was going on in the brain of No. 1.
He saw him sitting at his desk, elbows propped, heavy and gloomy, slowly dictating to a stenographer.
Other people walked up and down while dictating, blew smoke-rings or played with a ruler.
No. 1 did not move, did not play, did not blow rings. ...
Rubashov noticed suddenly that he himself had been walking up and down for the last five minutes; he had risen from the bed without realizing it.
He was caught again by his old ritual of never walking on the edges of the paving stones, and he already knew the pattern by heart.
But his thoughts had not left No. 1 for a second, No. 1, who, sitting at his desk and dictating immovably, had gradually turned into his own portrait, into that well-known colour-print, which hung over every bed or sideboard in the country and stared at people with its frozen eyes.
Rubashov walked up and down in the cell, from the door to the window and back, between bunk, wash-basin and bucket, six and a half steps there, six and a half steps back.
At the door he turned to the right, at the window to the left: it was an old prison habit; if one did not change the direction of the turn one rapidly became dizzy.
What went on in No. 1’s brain?
He pictured to himself a cross-section through that brain, painted neatly with grey water-colour on a sheet of paper stretched on a drawing-board with drawing pins.
The whorls of grey matter swelled to entrails, they curled round one another like muscular snakes, became vague and misty like the spiral nebulae on astronomical charts. ...
What went on in the inflated grey whorls?
One knew everything about the far-away nebula; but nothing about the whorls.
That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science.
Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables of statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections.
The teacher would draw on the blackboard an algebraic formula representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular. period:
“Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process.”
And, pointing with his ruler to a grey foggy landscape between the second and third lobe of No. 1’s brain:
“Now here you see the subjective reflection of these factors. It was this which in the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the triumph of the totalitarian principle in the East of Europe.”
Until this stage was reached, politics would remain bloody dilettantism, mere superstition and black magic. ...
Rubashov heard the sound of several people marching down the corridor in step.
His first thought was: now the beating-up will start.
He stopped in the middle of the cell, listening, his chin pushed forward.
The marching steps came to a halt before one of the neighboring cells, a low command was heard, the keys jangled.
Then there was silence.
Rubashov stood stiffly between the bed and the bucket, held his breath, and waited for the first scream.
He remembered that the first scream, in which terror still predominated over physical pain, was usually the worst; what followed was already more bearable, one got used to it and after a time one could even draw conclusions on the method of torture from the tone and rhythm of the screams.
Towards the end, most people behaved in the same way, however different they were in temperament and voice: the screams became weaker, changed over into whining and choking.
Usually the door would slam soon after. The keys would jangle again; and the first scream of the next victim often came even before they had touched him, at the mere sight of the men in the doorway.
Rubashov stood in the middle of his cell and waited for the first scream.
He rubbed his glasses on his sleeve and said to himself that he would not scream this time either, whatever happened to him. He repeated this sentence as if praying with a rosary.
He stood and waited; the scream still did not come.
Then he heard a faint clanging, a voice murmured something, the cell-door slammed.
The footsteps moved to the next cell.
Rubashov went to the spy-hole and looked into the corridor.
The men stopped nearly opposite his cell, at No. 407. There was the old warder with two orderlies dragging a tub of tea, a third carrying a basket with slices of black bread, and two uniformed officials with pistols.
There was no beating-up; they were bringing breakfast. ...