Darkness at Noon

by Arthur Koestler

  “In other words: you yourself don’t believe the story of the plot against No. 1,” said Rubashov. “Then, why don’t you confront me with this mysterious X, who made this alleged confession?”

  “Think it over a bit,” said Ivanov. “Put yourself in my place—after all, our positions might equally well be reversed—and find out the answer for yourself.”

  Rubashov thought it over. “You were given definite instructions from above for the handling of my case,” he said.

  Ivanov smiled. “That’s a bit too sharply put. In actual fact, it is not yet decided whether your case should belong to category A or category P. You know the terms?”

  Rubashov nodded; he knew them.

  “You begin to understand,” said Ivanov. “A means: administrative case, P means: public trial. The great majority of political cases are tried administratively—that is to say, those who would be no good in a public trial…. If you fall into category A, you will be removed from my authority. The trial by the Administrative Board is secret and, as you know, somewhat summary. There is no opportunity for confrontations and that sort of thing. Think of …” Ivanov cited three or four names, and gave a fugitive glance at the light patch on the wall. When he turned towards Rubashov again, the latter noticed for the first time a tormented look in his face, a fixedness in his eye, as though he were not focusing him, Rubashov, but a point at some distance behind him.

  Ivanov repeated again, in a lower tone, the names of their former friends. “I knew them as well as you did,” he went on. “But you must allow that we are as convinced that you and they would mean the end of the Revolution as you are of the reverse. That is the essential point. The methods follow by logical deduction. We can’t afford to lose ourselves in judicial subtleties. Did you, in your time?”

  Rubashov said nothing.

  “It all depends,” Ivanov went on, “on your being classed in category P, and on the case remaining in my hands. You know from what point of view those cases are selected, which are given a public trial. I have to prove a certain willingness on your part. For that I need your deposition with a partial confession. If you play the hero, and insist on giving the impression that there is nothing to be done with you, you will be finished off on the grounds of X’s confession. On the other hand, if you make a partial confession, a basis is given for a more thorough examination. On this basis, I shall be able to obtain a confrontation; we will refute the worst points of the accusation and plead guilty within certain carefully defined limits. Even so, we shan’t be able to make it cheaper than twenty years; that means, in fact, two or three years, and then an amnesty; and in five years you will be back in the ring again. Now have the goodness to think it over calmly before answering.”

  “I have already thought it over,” said Rubashov. “I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don’t want to play this game any more. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell.”

  “As you like,” said Ivanov. “I did not expect that you would agree at once. This kind of conversation usually has a retarded effect. You have a fortnight’s time. Ask to be taken to me again when you have thought the matter over, or send me a written declaration. For I have no doubt that you will send one.”

  Rubashov stood up; Ivanov also rose; again he ranged half a head above Rubashov. He pressed an electric bell next to his desk. While they waited for the warder to come and fetch Rubashov, Ivanov said:

  “You wrote in your last article, a few months ago, that this next decade will decide the fate of the world in our era. Don’t you want to be here for that?”

  He smiled down at Rubashov. In the corridor steps were approaching; the door was opened. Two warders came in and saluted. Without a word, Rubashov stepped between them; they started the march back to his cell. The noises in the corridors had now died out; from some cells came a subdued snoring, which sounded like moaning. All over the building the yellow, stale electric light was burning.

  The Second Hearing

  When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.

  DIETRICH VON NIEHEIM, BISHOP OF VERDEN: De schismate libri III, A.D. 1411

  1

  Extract from the diary of N. S. Rubashov, on the fifth day of imprisonment

  “… The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

  “But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.

  “It is said that No. 1 has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country; the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it. We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason—that was our greatness; the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism. That is why we will in the end be absolved by history; but not they….

  “Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it. We are sailing without ballast; therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.

  “A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs. In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate of potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war. If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him, and the execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. If he was wrong …

  “It is that alone that matters who is objectively in the right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he recommended nitrogen. If he was not, according to their ethics he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that nitrogen would have been better after all. If he was in good faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be ruined by it….

  “That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit; it was our law.

  “History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.

  “We have learnt history more thoroughly than the others. We differ from all others in our logical consistency. We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation. Therefore we concentrated all our efforts
on preventing error and destroying the very seeds of it. Never in history has so much power over the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands as in our case. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death. We were held for madmen because we followed every thought down to its final consequence and acted accordingly. We were compared to the inquisition because, like them, we constantly felt in ourselves the whole weight of responsibility for the superindividual life to come. We resembled the great Inquisitors in that we persecuted the seeds of evil not only in men’s deeds, but in their thoughts. We admitted no private sphere, not even inside a man’s skull. We lived under the compulsion of working things out to their final conclusions. Our minds were so tensely charged that the slightest collision caused a mortal short-circuit. Thus we were fated to mutual destruction.

  “I was one of those. I have thought and acted as I had to; I destroyed people whom I was fond of, and gave power to others I did not like. History put me where I stood; I have exhausted the credit which she accorded me; if I was right I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I will pay.

  “But how can the present decide what will be judged truth in the future? We are doing the work of prophets without their gift. We replaced vision by logical deduction; but although we all started from the same point of departure, we came to divergent results. Proof disproved proof, and finally we had to recur to faith—to axiomatic faith in the rightness of one’s own reasoning. That is the crucial point. We have thrown all ballast overboard; only one anchor holds us: faith in one’s self. Geometry is the purest realization of human reason; but Euclid’s axioms cannot be proved. He who does not believe in them sees the whole building crash.

  “No. 1 has faith in himself, tough, slow, sullen and unshakable. He has the most solid anchor-chain of all. Mine has worn thin in the last few years….

  “The fact is: I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost.”

  2

  The day after the first hearing of Rubashov, the Examining Magistrate Ivanov and his colleague Gletkin were sitting in the canteen after dinner. Ivanov was tired; he had propped his artificial leg up on a second chair and undone the collar of his uniform. He poured out some of the cheap wine which the canteen provided, and silently wondered at Gletkin, who sat straight up on his chair in his starched uniform, which creaked at every movement. He had not even taken off his revolver belt, although he must have been pretty tired, too. Gletkin emptied his glass; the conspicuous scar on his clean-shaven head had reddened slightly. Besides them, only three other officers were in the canteen at a distant table; two were playing chess, the third looking on.

  “What is to happen about Rubashov?” asked Gletkin.

  “He is in rather a bad way,” answered Ivanov. “But he is still as logical as ever. So he will capitulate.”

  “That I don’t believe,” said Gletkin.

  “He will,” said Ivanov. “When he has thought out everything to its logical conclusion, he will capitulate. Therefore the essential thing is to leave him in peace and not to disturb him. I have allowed him paper, pencil and cigarettes—to accelerate the process of thought.”

  “I consider that wrong,” said Gletkin.

  “You don’t like him,” said Ivanov. “You had a scene with him a few days ago, I believe?”

  Gletkin thought of the scene when Rubashov had sat on his bunk and pulled his shoe over his ragged sock. “That does not matter,” he said. “His personality does not matter. It is the method which I consider wrong. It will never make him give in.”

  “When Rubashov capitulates,” said Ivanov, “it won’t be out of cowardice, but by logic. It is no use trying the hard method with him. He is made out of a certain material which becomes the tougher the more you hammer on it.”

  “That is just talk,” said Gletkin. “Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist. I have never seen one. Experience shows me that the resistance of the human nerve system is limited by Nature.”

  “I wouldn’t like to fall into your hands,” said Ivanov smilingly, but with a trace of uneasiness. “Anyhow, you are a living refutation of your own theory.”

  His smiling glance rested for a second on the scar on Gletkin’s skull. The story of that scar was well-known. When, during the Civil War, Gletkin had fallen into the enemy’s hands, they had tied a lighted candlewick on to his shaven skull, to extract from him certain information. A few hours later his own people recaptured the position and found him unconscious. The wick had burnt right to the end; Gletkin had kept silence.

  He looked at Ivanov with his expressionless eyes. “That’s only talk, too,” he said. “I did not give in because I fainted. If I had stayed conscious another minute, I should have spoken up. It is a question of constitution.”

  He emptied his glass with a deliberate gesture; his cuffs crackled as he put it down on the table again. “When I came to, I was convinced at first that I had spoken. But the two N.C.O.s who were freed together with me asserted the contrary. So I was decorated. It is all a question of constitution; the rest is just fairy tales.”

  Ivanov was drinking too. He had already drunk quite a lot of the cheap wine. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Since when have you had this notable constitution theory? After all, during the first years these methods did not exist. At that time we were still full of illusions. Abolition of punishment and of retaliation for crime; sanatoriums with flower gardens for the a-social elements. It’s all humbug.”

  “I don’t believe it is,” said Gletkin. “You are a cynic. In a hundred years we will have all that. But first we have to get through. The quicker, the better. The only illusion was, to believe the time had already come. When I first was put here, I was also under that illusion. Most of us were—in fact, the entire apparatus up to the top. We wanted to start at once with the flower gardens. That was a mistake. In a hundred years we will be able to appeal to the criminal’s reason and social instincts. To-day we have still to work on his physical constitution, and crush him, physically and mentally, if necessary.”

  Ivanov wondered whether Gletkin was drunk. But he saw by his quiet, expressionless eyes that he was not. Ivanov smiled at him rather vaguely. “In a word, I am the cynic and you are the moralist.”

  Gletkin said nothing. He sat stiffly on his chair in his starched uniform; his revolver-belt smelled of fresh leather.

  “Several years ago,” said Gletkin after a while, “a little peasant was brought to me to be cross-examined. It was in the provinces, at the time when we still believed in the flower-garden theory, as you call it. Cross-examinations were conducted in a very gentlemanly way. The peasant had buried his crops; it was at the beginning of the collectivization of the land. I kept strictly to the prescribed etiquette. I explained to him in a friendly way that we needed the corn to feed the growing city population and for export, in order to build up our industries; so would he please tell me where he had hidden his crops. The peasant had his head drawn into his shoulders when he was brought into my room, expecting a beating. I knew his kind; I am myself country-born. When, instead of beating him, I began to reason with him, to talk to him as an equal and call him ‘citizen,’ he took me for a half-wit. I saw it in his eyes. I talked at him for half an hour. He never opened his mouth and alternately picked his nose and his ears. I went on talking, although I saw that he held the whole thing for a superb joke and was not listening at all. Arguments simply did not penetrate his ears. They were blocked up by the wax of centuries of patriarchal mental paralysis. I held strictly to the regulations; it never even occurred to me that there were other methods….

  “At that time I had twenty to thirty such cases daily. My colleagues the same. The Revolution was in danger of foundering on these little fat peasants. The workers were undernourished; whole districts were ravaged by starvation typhus; we had no credit with which to build up our armament industry, and we
were expecting to be attacked from month to month. Two hundred millions in gold lay hidden in the woollen stockings of these fellows and half the crops were buried underground. And, when cross-examining them, we addressed them as ‘citizen,’ while they blinked at us with their sly-stupid eyes, took it all for a superb joke and picked their noses.

  “The third hearing of my man took place at two o’clock at night; I had previously worked for eighteen hours on end. He had been woken up; he was drunk with sleep and frightened; he betrayed himself. From that time I cross-examined my people chiefly at night…. Once a woman complained that she had been kept standing outside my room the whole night, awaiting her turn. Her legs were shaking and she was completely tired out; in the middle of the hearing she fell asleep. I woke her up; she went on talking, in a sleepy mumbling voice, without fully realizing what she was saying, and fell asleep again. I woke her once more, and she admitted everything and signed the statement without reading it, in order that I should let her sleep. Her husband had hidden two machine guns in his barn and persuaded the farmers of his village to burn the corn because the Anti-Christ had appeared to him in a dream. That the wife had been kept waiting on her feet the whole night was due to the carelessness of my sergeant; from then onwards I encouraged carelessness of that kind; stubborn cases had to stand upright on one spot for as long as forty-eight hours. After that the wax had melted out of their ears, and one could talk to them….”

  The two chess-players in the other corner of the room threw over the chess-men and started a new game. The third man had already left. Ivanov watched Gletkin while he talked. His voice was as sober and expressionless as ever.

  “My colleagues had similar experiences. It was the only possible way to obtain results. The regulations were observed; not a prisoner was actually touched. But it happened that they had to witness—so to speak accidentally—the execution of their fellow prisoners. The effect of such scenes is partly mental, partly physical. Another example: there are showers and baths for reasons of hygiene. That in winter the heating and hotwater pipes did not always function, was due to technical difficulties; and the duration of the baths depended on the attendants. Sometimes, again, the heating and hot-water apparatus functioned all too well; that equally depended on the attendants. They were all old comrades; it was not necessary to give them detailed instructions; they understood what was at stake.”