Wassilij now lay on his back; the rusty nail stuck out of the wall straight above his head.
He squinted over to the paper, which lay spread next to the Primus stove. Then he turned his head away quickly.
“And he said: I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me. ...”
The water in the kettle began to hum.
Old Wassilij put on a cunning expression:
“Must also those sign who were in the Civil War?”
The daughter stood bent over the kettle, in her flowered head-kerchief.
“Nobody has to,” she said with the same peculiar glance as before.
“In the factory they know, of course, that he lived in this house.
The cell secretary asked me after the meeting whether you were friends until the end, and whether you had spoken much together.”
Old Wassilij sat up on the mattress with a jump.
The effort made him cough, and the veins swelled on his thin, scrofulous neck.
The daughter put two glasses on the edge of the table and scattered some tea-leaf dust into each out of a paper bag.
“What are you mumbling again?” she asked.
“Give me that damned paper,” said old Wassilij.
The daughter passed it to him.
“Shall I read it to you, so that you know exactly what is in it?”
“No,” said the old man, writing his name on it.
“I don’t want to know.
Now give me some tea.”
The daughter passed him the glass.
Wassilij’s lips were moving; he mumbled to himself while drinking the pale yellow liquid in small sips.
After they had drunk their tea, the daughter went on reading from the newspaper.
The trial of the accused Rubashov and Kieffer was nearing its end.
The debate on the charge of the planned assassination of the leader of the Party had released storms of indignation amongst the audience; shouts of “Shoot the mad dogs!” were heard repeatedly.
To the Public Prosecutor’s concluding question, concerning the motive of his actions, the accused Rubashov, who seemed to have broken down, answered in a tired, dragging voice:
“I can only say that we, the opposition, having once made it our criminal aim to remove the Government of the Fatherland of the Revolution, used methods which seemed proper to our purpose, and which were just as low and vile as that purpose.”
Vera Wassiljovna pushed back her chair.
“That is disgusting,” she said
“It makes you sick the way he crawls on his belly.”
She put aside the newspaper and began noisily to clear away Primus and glasses.
Wassilij watched her.
The hot tea had given him courage. He sat up in bed.
“Don’t you imagine that you understand,” he said
“God knows what was in his mind when he said that.
The Party has taught you all to be cunning, and whoever becomes too cunning loses all decency.
It’s no good shrugging your shoulders,” he went on angrily.
“It’s come to this in the world now that cleverness and decency are at loggerheads, and whoever sides with one must do without the other.
It’s not good for a man to work things out too much.
That’s why it is written:
‘Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatever is more than these cometh of evil.’ ”
He let himself sink back on the mattress and turned away his head, so as not to see the face his daughter would make.
He had not contradicted her so bravely for a long time.
Anything might come of it, once she had it in her mind that she wanted the room for herself and her husband.
One had to be cunning in this life, after all—else one might in one’s old age go to prison or have to sleep under the bridges in the cold.
There one had it: either one behaved cleverly or one behaved decently: the two did not go together.
“I will now read you the end,” announced the daughter.
The Public Prosecutor had finished his cross-examination of Rubashov.
Following it, the accused Kieffer was examined once more; he repeated his preceding statement on the attempted assassination in full detail. “...
Asked by the President whether he desired to put any questions to Kieffer, which he would be entitled to do, the accused Rubashov answered that he would forgo this right.