“I don’t see,” he said, “how it can serve the Party that her members have to grovel in the dust before all the world.
I have signed everything you wanted me to sign.
I have pleaded guilty to having pursued a false and objectively harmful policy.
Isn’t that enough for you?”
He put on his pince-nez, blinked helplessly past the lamp, and ended in a tired, hoarse voice:
“After all, the name N.
S.
Rubashov is itself a piece of Party history.
By dragging it in dirt, you besmirch the history of the Revolution.”
“To that I can also reply with a citation from your own writings.
You wrote:
“ ‘It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. For consumption by the masses, the political processes must be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair.’ ”
Rubashov was silent. Then he said:
“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.