Julia

by Sandra Newman

All her life, Julia had obeyed the unwritten rules that kept her far from guilt. She had known who was safe, and felt an unfeigned disgust for unsafe people. Instinctively she’d loved the lucky and clever. If she ever took a risk, it wasn’t for fools. It wasn’t for the dead or those half dead. It was actually cruel to give them hope.

She loved him because she was forbidden to do it. She loved him to be fearless.

Such were Julia’s thoughts in the days before she did the thing that killed them.

Why was the damned man always complaining? He was as well off as one could be without being Inner Party. And all his talk of abolishing the Party was the purest vanity. “If there is any hope, it must lie in the proles”—all that meant was that Winston wanted the proles to do his fighting for him.

She was also a girl in love; that was certainly part of what was wanted. Julia knew it with the instinct of someone who had hidden such feelings all her life.

One saw he would give himself up to whatever this man chose for him. Here was love, if you liked: love’s reality. For the first time she knew with certainty that he had never loved her, and was soothed.

It made her conscious, as she’d never been before, that thoughtcrime was nothing to do with crime. It wasn’t even a prelude to real crime.

How many Winstons had beamed in gratitude at O’Brien’s lies? How many women had played Julia’s part, and where were those women now?

Anything was possible when one was never told the truth.

“That’s the horrid thing. One has no choice, and yet one must live through it exactly as if one had.”

In that moment, she felt something pass from her, some resistance of which she had not been aware. She saw how to free him from her. It was obvious, once one cared.

Twenty-seven years it had taken her to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the black moustache. But it was all right, everything was all right. She had won the victory over herself at last. She hated Big Brother.