Julia

by Sandra Newman

She had the old memory of the exiles dancing to the gramophone, heavy rain blowing at the windows, and Julia peering from beneath a nest of coats to spy on the anarchist man as he danced with his wife, too slowly for the music, and she changed under his hands. He changed, and everyone gave them room.

Julia felt horror and joy together, and the joy felt threatening, while the horror felt like a kind of security.

Proles generally despised the Party, but loved Big Brother without reserve, believing he was their only defense against the depredations of the “blues.”

Still worse was a pair of shabby tables with a banner reading SMALL PORK, above which were strung a few dozen narrow carcasses with the unmistakable forms of roasted rats.

Please do be taken by surprise, or it will cause a great deal of pointless trouble. He can’t know you are with us. You are to be his last illusion.”

Still, we can hardly let a man go when his own children say he’s called for the Leader’s death, can we? And if the children are found to have made a false report, well, there are penalties for that too. So it will all come right in the end.”

By the scant moonlight, one saw only the river’s surface as a restless shape. She remembered the Kubla Khan poem, its sunless sea, its caverns measureless to man. For the first time, she thought she understood. It was not a place on earth: it was death.

She was still searching her mind for a poetic name to give him when he rose and hurried fearfully away. In a moment he was lost in the crowds of proles coming back from the evening executions.

The dimmest schoolchild could have told you as much, though they might not have said it aloud. The futile tone of it wearied her more than anything. It tasted of the stale breath of men for whom opinions trumped life.

“Do you remember the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?” “He wasn’t singing to us. He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.” “The birds sing, the proles sing, but Party members don’t sing. Did you ever think of that?”

Her mind jabbered, repeating what had happened. He had punched her—punched her in the stomach, when she was pregnant with Big Brother’s child!

This wasn’t capture; it was rescue. She was carried down the stairs, gasping gratefully even as her head was carelessly knocked into a wall. She even laughed at their clumsiness. At the bottom, they dumped her on the floor. When a boot smashed into her back, she cried out angrily—that was an error! Then, uncomprehendingly, she saw the flash of another boot and tried to scramble clear as it flew blackly into her face.

She sobbed gratefully. How she loved him! Oh, he was here! But he raised his foot and neatly, deliberately, set it down on her broken hand.

Another boot slammed into her head, and that small pain was newly terrifying. It told her she couldn’t make it stop. It wouldn’t stop.

Far above, his eyes dwelled on her and narrowed with intellectual pleasure. It was the face of the sated spider looking down curiously at the beetle’s husk.

Once there was a little comedy when a Class A prisoner greeted his interrogator by crying out in sorrow, “They got you, too?” only to have the interrogator light a cigarette and smoke casually while guards beat the man bloody.

She pointed to the drain in the floor with a flourish. “We cleaned them off these floors and washed the bits into the sewer.”

A few of us were having a whisky after golf, and it came to me: ‘If you’d like an image of the future, think of a boot stamping eternally on a human face.’ I might have known Bill O’Brien would steal it. The man never had an original idea in his life. See here, if he says it to you later on, will you tell him from me he’s a mediocrity and a thief of others’ ideas?”

Even I—do you think I’m here because I’ve opposed the government? Hardly. I’m not an ingrate, nor am I a fool. I see the need for this government. Anyone who’s lived through the fifties sees it. There are no atom bombs falling on you anymore! You’re welcome! That’s our sterling work.

“No, I love this Party more than any of them. And, God help me, I love Big Brother. I love him as I did in ’51, when we drove down from Oxford in Rutherford’s Anglia to man the barricades together. I’ve been in a bloody gun battle with him, with nothing but a single Enfield rifle between us. Love Big Brother? I’ve had him climb in my bedroom window and fuck me, without saying a goddamned word. How do you like that? Oh, he was a man back then.

In my day, there were men who were real men, who hurled atom bombs at each other and breathed the ashes of the millions burned in the conflagration and didn’t bl...

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, JULIA CAME TO UNDERSTAND she was bad at being tortured.

“That’s no good,” he said regretfully. “That is just what you must master. You must know the pain you cause, and wish it on other people. You must long for their suffering.”

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Still, she was proud of being able to walk, when so many unpersons had to go on all fours. Julia stubbornly refused to crawl even when she got to the hostel steps.

He was clearly fresh from Love; the places where his hair had been torn from his head were still bloody.

“But it isn’t gone. You see that I remember it.” “No,” he said simply. “They told me I had killed it, and it’s true. The poetry is all gone from it. Even when I remember the words, they are quite dead.”

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

He had loved birdsong and woods. Of all that Love had done to him, the most cynical perhaps was confining their affair in that dingy, infested room, when he might have made love to her in meadows all summer and swum with her in streams.

The baby kicked hectically, beating like a heart, and it hurt in a way that was glee, that was death to her enemies. It was a pain that would rule for a thousand generations.

But it was all right, everything was all right. She had won the victory over herself at last. She hated Big Brother.

The Ministry of Plenty was a thirty-story glass tower, with a colossal statue at the front of a naked man brandishing a scythe and holding a sheaf of grain that decorously concealed his groin. Proles called it Bare-Arsed Death, and told their families it walked at night and harvested the heads of ill-behaved children.

“Listen, Harriet. Have you any idea what’s happening?” “Yes,” said Harriet negligently. “War is happening. Didn’t you guess?” Julia grimaced, and Harriet gave her an unpleasant smile, saying, “Yes, it’s not very nice when war affects you, is it? One does wish one knew what was going on, doesn’t one? We always wished to know. But we just got bombed, and never did learn why.”

She stood a minute entirely bare, feeling the drizzle on her skin and luxuriously shivering, running her fingers over the gooseflesh on her arms, finding the shallow scars on her breasts and belly. She was still herself. She was alive.

All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended.

She didn’t have the freedom to think of what was right. She must do what was safe. It was as Ampleforth had said: one had no choice, one must only live through it as if one had.