Nineteen Eighty-Four 一九八四 Part 2, Chapter 5

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed., ,The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine ¹ Ministry ² the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched ³ one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries ⁴ were working overtime ⁵. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks ⁶, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected ⁷, effigies ⁸ built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours ¹⁰ circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity ¹¹ pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of The Times and altering and embellishing ¹² news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously ¹³ febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours., ,The new tune ¹⁴ which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage ¹⁵, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably ¹⁶, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads ¹⁷ of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting ¹⁸ flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously ¹⁹ slinging ²⁰ wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions ²¹ alone would display four hundred metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark ²². The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext ²³ for reverting ²⁴ to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising ²⁵, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations ²⁶ and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat., , ,In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs ⁴² had multiplied hideously ⁴³ in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.#p#分页标题#e#, ,Four, five, six -- seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer ⁴⁴ had subsided ⁴⁵, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate ⁴⁶, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet ⁴⁷ jacket, he had always vaguely ⁴⁸ the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap ⁴⁹ of rubbish or that -- a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand ⁵⁰ of some long-dead baby's hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling ⁵¹ of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled ⁵² horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin ⁵³. 'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme., ,The streets of the Old City are narrow and labyrinthine.老城区的街道狭促曲折，好似迷宫一般。,They sent a deputation to the ministry to complain.他们派了一个代表团到部里投诉 。