Nineteen Eighty-Four 一九八四 Part 3, Chapter 1

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry ¹ of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain ². Concealed ³ lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory ⁴ pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall., ,There was a dull aching in his belly ⁵. It had been there ever since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing ⁶, unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed., ,He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But the craving ⁷ for food was growing upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread. He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls ⁸. It was even possible -- he thought this because from time to time something seemed to tickle ⁹ his leg -- that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a hand into his pocket., , ,He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being brought here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge ¹¹ the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling place. They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in, but filthily ¹² dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too preoccupied ¹³ by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings ¹⁴ were impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled ¹⁶ food which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle ¹⁷ cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery ¹⁸, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit ¹⁹ alcohol distilled ²⁰ from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters ²¹ and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals., ,There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous wreck ²² of a woman, aged ²³ about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold of her one at each corner. They wrenched ²⁵ off the boots with which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted ²⁶ herself upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F -- bastards ²⁷!' Then, noticing that she was sitting on something uneven ²⁸, she slid off Winston's knees on to the bench., ,We probed the Air Ministry statements.我们调查了空军部的记录。,These porcelain plates have rather original designs on them.这些瓷盘的花纹很别致 。