Darkness at Noon

by Arthur Koestler

  He shivered. A picture appeared in his mind’s eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer’s lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No. 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out. And himself; and No. 1.

  He was frozen and he longed for a cigarette. He saw himself again in the old Belgian port, escorted by merry Little Loewy, who was slightly hunchbacked and smoked a sailor’s pipe. He smelled again the smell of the harbour, a mixture of rotting seaweed and petrol; he heard the musical clock on the tower of the old guildhall, and saw the narrow streets with overhanging bays, from the lattices of which the harbour prostitutes hung their washing during the day. It was two years after the affair with Richard. They had not succeeded in proving anything against himself. He had kept silent when they beat him up, kept silent when they knocked the teeth out of his head, injured his hearing and broke his glasses. He had kept silent, and had gone on denying everything and lying coldly and circumspectly. He had marched up and down his cell, and crawled over the flagstones of the dark punishment cell, he had been afraid and he had gone on working at his defence; and when cold water woke him from unconsciousness, he had groped for a cigarette and gone on lying. In those days he felt no surprise at the hatred of those who tortured him, and did not wonder why he was so detestable to them. The whole legal machinery of the dictatorship ground its teeth, but they could prove nothing against him. After his release he was taken by aeroplane to his country—to the home of the Revolution. There were receptions and jubilant mass-meetings and military parades. Even No. 1 appeared repeatedly in public with him.

  He had not been in his native country for years and found that much was changed. Half the bearded men of the photograph no longer existed. Their names might not be mentioned, their memory only invoked with curses—except for the old man with the slanting Tartar eyes, the leader of yore, who had died in time. He was revered as God-the-Father, and No. 1 as the Son; but it was whispered everywhere that he had forged the old man’s will in order to come into the heritage. Those of the bearded men in the old photograph who were left had become unrecognizable. They were clean-shaven, worn out and disillusioned, full of cynical melancholy. From time to time No. 1 reached out for a new victim amongst them. Then they all beat their breasts and repented in chorus of their sins. After a fortnight, when he was still walking on crutches, Rubashov had asked for a new mission abroad. “You seem to be in rather a hurry,” said No. 1, looking at him from behind clouds of smoke. After twenty years in the leadership of the Party they were still on formal terms with each other. Above No. 1’s head hung the portrait of the Old Man; next to it the photograph with the numbered heads had hung, but it was now gone. The colloquy was short, it had lasted only a few minutes, but on leaving No. 1 had shaken his hand with peculiar emphasis. Rubashov had afterwards cogitated a long time over the meaning of this handshake; and over the look of strangely knowing irony which No. 1 had given him from behind his smoke-clouds. Then Rubashov had hobbled out of the room on his crutches; No. 1 did not accompany him to the door. The next day he had left for Belgium.

  On the boat he recovered slightly and thought over his task. Little Loewy with the sailor’s pipe came to meet him on his arrival. He was the local leader of the dockworkers’ section of the Party; Rubashov liked him at once. He showed Rubashov through the docks and the twisting harbour streets as proudly as if he had made it all himself. In every pub he had acquaintances, dock workers, sailors and prostitutes; he was everywhere offered drinks and returned salutations by raising his pipe to his ear. Even the traffic policeman on the marketplace winked at him as they passed, and the sailor comrades from foreign ships, who could not make themselves understood, slapped him tenderly on the deformed shoulder. Rubashov saw all this with a mild surprise. No, Little Loewy was not odious and detestable. The dockworkers’ section in this town was one of the best organized sections of the Party in the world.

  In the evening Rubashov, Little Loewy and a couple of others sat in one of the harbour pubs. A certain Paul was amongst them, the section’s organization Secretary. He was an ex-wrestler, bald-headed, pock-marked, with big sticking-out ears. He wore a sailor’s black sweater under his coat, and a black bowler on his head. He had the gift of waggling his ears, thereby lifting his bowler and letting it drop again. With him was a certain Bill, an ex-sailor who had written a novel about the sailor’s life, had been famous for a year and then quickly forgotten again; now he wrote articles for Party newspapers. The others were dock workers, heavy men and steadfast drinkers. New people kept coming in, sat down or stood at the table, paid a round of drinks and lounged out again. The fat pub-keeper sat down to their table whenever he had a free moment. He could play the mouth-organ. Quite a lot was drunk.

  Rubashov had been introduced by Little Loewy as a “comrade from Over There” without further commentary. Little Loewy was the only one who knew his identity. As the people at the table saw that Rubashov either was not in a communicative mood, or had reasons not to be, they did not ask him many questions; and those which they did ask referred to the material conditions of life “over there”, the wages, the land problem, the development of industry. Everything they said revealed a surprising knowledge of technical detail, coupled with an equally surprising ignorance of the general situation and political atmosphere “over there”. They inquired about the development of production in the light metal industry, like children asking the exact size of the grapes of Canaan. An old dock worker, who had stood at the bar for a time without ordering anything until Little Loewy called him over for a drink, said to Rubashov, after having shaken hands with him: “You look very like old Rubashov.” “That I have often been told,” said Rubashov. “Old Rubashov—there’s a man for you,” said the old man, emptying his glass. It was not a month ago that Rubashov had been set free, and not six weeks since he knew that he would remain alive. The fat pub-keeper played his mouth-organ. Rubashov lit a cigarette and ordered drinks all round. They drank to his health and to the health of the people “over there”, and the Secretary Paul moved his bowler hat up and down with his ears.

  Later on Rubashov and Little Loewy remained for some time together in a café. The owner of the café had let down the blinds and piled the chairs on the tables, and was asleep against the counter, while Little Loewy told Rubashov the story of his life. Rubashov had not asked him for it, and at once foresaw complications for next day: he could not help it that all comrades felt an urge to tell him their life history. He had really meant to go, but he felt suddenly very tired—he had, after all, overrated his strength; so he stayed on and listened.

  It turned out that Little Loewy was not a native of the country, although he spoke the language like one and knew everybody in the place. Actually he was born in a South German town, had learnt the carpenter’s trade, and had played the guitar and given lectures on Darwinism on the revolutionary youth club’s Sunday excursions. During the disturbed
months before the Dictatorship came to power, when the Party was in urgent need of weapons, a daring trick was played in that particular town: one Sunday afternoon, fifty rifles, twenty revolvers and two light machine guns with munitions were carried away in a furniture-van from the police station in the busiest quarter of the city. The people in the van had shown some sort of written order, covered with official stamps, and were accompanied by two apparent policemen in real uniforms. The weapons were found later in another town during a search in the garage of a Party member. The affair was never fully cleared up, and the day after it happened Little Loewy vanished from the town. The Party had promised him a passport and identity papers, but the arrangement broke down. That is to say, the messenger from the upper Party spheres who was to bring him passport and money for the journey, did not appear at the pre-arranged meeting-place.

  “It’s always like that with us,” added Little Loewy philosophically. Rubashov kept quiet.

  In spite of that, Little Loewy managed to get away and eventually to cross the frontier. As there was a warrant of arrest out for him, and as his photograph with the deformed shoulder was posted up in every police station, it took him several months of wandering across the country. When he had started off to meet the comrade from the “upper spheres” he had just enough money in his pocket for three days. “I had always thought before that it was only in books that people chewed the bark of trees,” he remarked. “Young plane trees taste best.” The memory impelled him to get up and fetch a couple of sausages from the counter. Rubashov remembered prison soup and hunger strikes, and ate with him.

  At last Little Loewy crossed over the French frontier. As he had no passport, he was arrested after a few days, told to betake himself to another country and released. “One might just as well have told me to climb to the moon,” he observed. He turned to the Party for help; but in this country the Party did not know him and told him they would first have to make inquiries in his native country. He wandered on; after a few days he was arrested again and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He served his sentence, and gave his cell companion, a tramp, a course of lectures about the resolutions of the last Party Congress. In return the latter let him into the secret of making a living by catching cats and selling their skins. When the three months were over, he was taken by night to a wood on the Belgian frontier. The gendarmes gave him bread, cheese and a packet of French cigarettes. “Go straight on,” they said. “In half an hour you will be in Belgium. If we ever catch you over here again, we’ll knock your head off.”

  For several weeks Little Loewy drifted about in Belgium. He again turned to the Party for help, but received the same answer as in France. As he had had enough of plane trees, he tried the cat trade. It was fairly easy to catch cats, and one obtained for a skin, if it were young and not mangy, the equivalent of half a loaf of bread and a packet of pipe tobacco. Between the capture and the selling, however, lay a rather unpleasant operation. It was quickest if one grasped the cat’s ears in one hand, and its tail in the other, and broke its back over one’s knee. The first few times one was seized by nausea: later on one got used to it. Unfortunately, Little Loewy was arrested again after a few weeks, for in Belgium, too, one was supposed to have identity papers. Followed in due course expulsion, release, second arrest, imprisonment. Then one night two Belgian gendarmes took him to a wood on the French frontier. They gave him bread, cheese and a packet of Belgian cigarettes. “Go straight on,” they said. “In half an hour you will be in France. If we catch you over here again, we’ll knock you head off.”

  In the course of the next year, Little Loewy was smuggled backwards and forwards over the frontier three times, by complicity of the French authorities or, as the case might be, the Belgian. He gathered that this game had been played for years with several hundred of his kind. He applied again and again to the Party, for his chief anxiety was that he should lose contact with the movement. “We received no notification of your arrival from your organisation,” the Party told him. “We must wait for the answer to our inquiries. If you are a Party member, keep Party discipline.” Meanwhile Little Loewy continued his cat trade and let himself be shoved to and fro across the frontier. Also the dictatorship broke out in his own country. A further year passed and Little Loewy, slightly the worse for his travels, began to spit blood and dream of cats. He suffered from the delusion that everything smelled of cats, his food, his pipe and even the kindly old prostitutes who sometimes gave him shelter. “We have still received no answer to our inquiries,” said the Party. After another year it turned out that all those comrades who could have given the required information about Little Loewy’s part were either murdered, locked-up or had disappeared. “We are afraid we cannot do anything for you,” said the Party. “You should not have come without an official notification. Perhaps you left even without the Party’s permission. How can we know? A lot of spies and provocateurs try to creep into our ranks. The Party must be on its guard.”

  “What are you telling me this for?” asked Rubashov. He wished he had left before.

  Little Loewy fetched himself beer from the tap, and saluted with his pipe. “Because it is instructive,” he said. “Because it is a typical example. I could tell you of hundreds of others. For years the best of us have been crushed in that way. The Party is becoming more and more fossilized. The Party has gout and varicose veins in every limb. One cannot make a revolution like that.”

  I could tell you more about it, thought Rubashov, but said nothing.

  However, Little Loewy’s story came to an unexpectedly happy end. While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one’s arms through the opponent’s armpits from behind, locking one’s hands behind his neck, and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done. Little Loewy and ex-wrestler Paul became friends. It turned out that Paul was the Administrative Secretary of the Dockers’ Section of the Party; when they came out, he procured papers and work for Loewy and obtained his reintegration in the Party. So Little Loewy could again lecture to the dockers on Darwinism and on the latest Party Congress as though nothing had happened. He was happy and forgot the cats and his anger against the Party bureaucrats. After half a year, he became Political Secretary of the local section. All’s well that ends well.

  And Rubashov wished with his whole heart, old and tired as he felt, that it should end well. But he knew for what task he had been sent here, and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception He looked quietly at Little Loewy through his glasses. And while Little Loewy, who did not understand the meaning of this look, became slightly embarrassed and saluted smilingly with his pipe, Rubashov was thinking of the cats. He noticed with horror that his nerves were going wrong and that he had perhaps drunk too much, for he could not get rid of the obsession that he must take Little Loewy by his ears and legs and break him over his knee, deformed shoulder and all. He was feeling ill and stood up to go. Little Loewy saw him home; he gathered that Rubashov was in a sudden fit of depression and was respectfully silent. A week later Little Loewy hanged himself.

  Between that evening and Little Loewy’s death lay several undramatic meetings of the Party cell. The facts were simple.

  Two years ago the Party had called up the workers of the world to fight the newly established dictatorship in the heart of Europe by means of a political and economic boycott. No goods coming from the enemy’s country should be bought, no consignments for its enormous armament industry should be allowed to pass. The sections of the Party executed these orders with enthusiasm. The dock workers in the small port refused to
load or unload cargoes coming from that country or destined for it. Other trade unions joined them. The strike was hard to carry through; conflicts with the police resulted in wounded and dead. The final result of the struggle was still uncertain when a little fleet of five curious, old-fashioned black cargo boats sailed into the port. Each of them had the name of a great leader of the Revolution painted on its stern, in the strange alphabet used “over there”, and from their bows waved the flag of the Revolution. The striking workers greeted them with enthusiasm. They at once began to unload the cargo. After several hours it came to light that the cargo consisted of certain rare minerals and was destined for the war industry of the boycotted country.

  The dockers’ section of the Party immediately called a committee meeting, where people came to blows. The dispute spread through the movement all over the country. The reactionary Press exploited the event with derision. The police ceased their attempts to break the strike, proclaimed their neutrality and let the harbour workers decide for themselves whether they would unload the cargo of the curious black fleet or not. The Party leadership called the strike off and gave orders to unload the cargo. They gave reasonable explanations and cunning arguments for the behaviour of the Country of the Revolution, but few were convinced. The section split; the majority of the old members left. For months the Party led the shadow of an existence; but gradually, as the industrial distress of the country grew, it regained its popularity and strength.

  Two years had passed. Another hungry dictatorship in the south of Europe began a war of plunder and conquest in Africa. Again the Party called for a boycott. They received an even more enthusiastic response than on the previous occasion. For this time the governments themselves in nearly every country in the world had decided to cut off the aggressor’s supply of raw materials.