Darkness at Noon Read Free

on the tiles.
    At seven o’clock in the morning—two hours after he had been brought to cell 404—Rubashov was woken by a bugle call. He had slept dreamlessly, and his head was clear. The bugle repeated three times the same blaring sequence. The trembling tones re-echoed and died out; a malevolent silence remained.
    It was not yet quite day; the contours of the can and of the wash-basin were softened by the dim light. The window grate was a black pattern silhouetted against the dingy glass; top left a broken pane had a piece of newspaper stuck over it. Rubashov sat up, reached for the pince-nez and the cigarette stump at the end of his bed and lay back again. He put on the pince-nez and managed to make the stump glow. The silence lasted. In all the whitewashed cells of this honeycomb in concrete, men were simultaneously arising from their bunks, cursing and groping about on the tiles, yet in the isolation cells one heard nothing—except from time to time retreating footsteps in the corridor. Rubashov knew that he was in an isolation cell and that he was to stay there until he was shot. He drew his fingers through his short, pointed beard, smoked his cigarette-end and lay still.
    So I shall be shot, thought Rubashov. Blinking, he watched the movement of his big toe, which stuck up vertically at the end of the bed. He felt warm, secure and very tired; he had no objection to dozing straight off into death, there and then, if only one let him remain lying under the warm blanket. “So they are going to shoot you,” he told himself. He slowly moved his toes in the sock and a verse occurred to him which compared the feet of Christ to a white roebuck in a thornbush. He rubbed his pince-nez; on his sleeve with the gesture familiar to all his followers. He felt in the warmth of the blanket almost perfectly happy and feared only one thing, to have to get up and move. “So you are going to be destroyed,” he said to himself half-aloud and lit another cigarette, although only three were left. The first cigarettes on an empty stomach caused him sometimes a slight feeling of drunkenness; and he was already in that peculiar state of excitement familiar to him from former experiences of the nearness of death. He knew at the same time that this condition was reprehensible and, from a certain point of view, unpermissible, but at the moment he felt no inclination to take that point of view. Instead, he observed the play of his stockinged toes. He smiled. A warm wave of sympathy for his own body, for which usually he had no liking, played over him and its imminent destruction filled him with a self-pitying delight. “The old guard is dead,” he said to himself. “We are the last.” “We are going to be destroyed.” “For golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. ...” He tried to recall the tune of “come to dust ...”, but only the words came to him. “The old guard is dead,” he repeated and tried to remember their faces. He could only recall a few. Of the first Chairman of the International, who had been executed as a traitor, he could only conjure up a piece of a check waistcoat over the slightly rotund belly. He had never worn braces, always leather belts. The second Prime Minister of the Revolutionary State, also executed, had bitten his nails in moments of danger. ... History will rehabilitate you, thought Rubashov, without particular conviction. What does history know of nail-biting? He smoked and thought of the dead, and of the humiliation which had preceded their death. Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to hate No. 1 as he ought to. He had often looked at the colour-print of No. 1 hanging over his bed and tried to hate it. They had, between themselves, given him many names, but in the end it was No. 1 that stuck. The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the