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

He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed ¹ down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O'Brien was standing ² at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe., ,Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval ³. But whether the intervals ⁴ were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing., ,With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimes -- espionage ⁶, sabotage ⁷, and the like -- to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession ⁸ was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously ⁹. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing ¹⁰ his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge ¹¹ the kicks, and simply inviting ¹² more and yet more kicks, in his ribs ¹³, in his belly ¹⁴, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine ¹⁵. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook ¹⁶ him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere ⁵ sight of a fist drawn ¹⁷ back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth ¹⁸ a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps ²⁰ of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable ²¹. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate ²² for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor ²³. He remembered a cell with a plank ²⁴ bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids ²⁵, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep., , ,There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them., ,He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous ⁴¹. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up., ,Once the aim is fixed,we should not change it arbitrarily.目标一旦确定 ，我们就不应该随意改变 。,After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着
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