been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried
to save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would send the
razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds before the
guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into him with a sort
of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held it would be cut to the
bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from
the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade
even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to
moment, accepting another ten minutes" life even with the certainty that
there was torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the
walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost count at
some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what time
of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight
outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In
this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It
was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to
recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His
cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it
might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself
mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his
body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened
with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smar