1984Age-adapted version

It was a cold, bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, thirty-nine years old, hurried through the heavy glass doors of Victory Mansions. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage—a thin, watery smell that clung to your clothes and followed you all day. On the wall hung a poster of an enormous face. The man had a black mustache and eyes that stared right at you. Beneath it read: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

The elevator wasn't working, so Winston limped up seven flights of stairs. His leg ached where his vein bulged, but he didn't dare show pain. Showing pain was weak. And weak people were noticed. On every landing he met the same eyes from the poster, as if they followed him up the stairs, into the apartment, into his head.

In the apartment, the telescreen was on. It could be turned down, but never completely off. It spoke with a fresh, fruity voice about how much iron the country had produced. Winston knew it wasn't just sending out sound—it was also receiving. Everything you said, everything you did, could be heard and seen. Even when you breathed, someone could hear that you were breathing too fast, or too slow, or in the wrong way.

He walked to the window. There, far away, loomed the Ministry of Truth, a tall white pyramid against the gray sky. On its wall were three sentences written in large, dark letters: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. He muttered them to himself. They felt heavy in his mouth. He also knew the names of the four ministries—all had short, practical names: Truth (Minitrue), Peace (Minipax), Plenty (Miniplenty), and Love (Miniluv). All were enormous. The Ministry of Love was the scariest. It had no windows.

In the small kitchen nook, Winston found some dark bread. He poured himself a mug of Victory Gin. It smelled sweet and nasty, like something rotten that had been sweetened to hide the taste. He drank it anyway. The liquid burned his throat, and he coughed, but he emptied the mug. Afterwards, he lit a Victory Cigarette. Half the tobacco fell out onto the floor. He lit another, more carefully.

He sat down at a small table on the left side of the telescreen. It was a corner of the room where the screen couldn't see him fully—only hear him. From there, he pulled out a book he had bought at a junk shop in an old, forgotten district. The book was beautiful in an old-fashioned way. It had a red spine and a cover with a marble pattern, like stone from a time that no longer existed. Just owning it was dangerous. Writing in it was even more dangerous.

Winston wanted to start a diary. Nothing was directly forbidden—for there were no real laws. But everyone knew you could be sent to forced labor or disappear entirely for much less. He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote in small, clumsy letters: *April 4, 1984*. He wasn't entirely sure of the year. He only knew for sure that he was thirty-nine.

He tried to write for someone in the future. For those not yet born. But the words got stuck. His hand shook. He hurriedly scribbled down what he remembered from a film at the cinema: boat refugees in the Mediterranean bombed from the air. A large man in the water was shot through the body while the audience laughed.

A lifeboat with children was hit by a bomb. A small arm flew into the air. A woman from the proles had shouted that they shouldn't show such things when children were present. The police had thrown her out.

"No one cares what proles say," wrote Winston.

He stopped. Then other memories came.

He thought of two people from work who had arrived just before the Two Minutes Hate began. One was the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department. She was about twenty-seven, had freckles and quick movements, and wore a scarlet sash from the Junior Anti-Sex League. Winston immediately disliked her. Her quick sideways glances frightened him.

What if she was a hobby spy, someone who did it in her spare time, like others knitted? The other was O'Brien. He was in the Inner Party.

Large, powerful, thick neck, face coarse, humorous, and slightly brutal. He had a way of pushing his glasses back on his nose that seemed civilized, like an aristocrat from old times—if one could remember what an aristocrat actually looked like. Winston hoped—or believed—that O'Brien's orthodoxy wasn't entirely perfect. Perhaps he was someone you could talk to, if you could trick the telescreen.

Suddenly the screen beeped, and the Hate began.

The face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, filled the entire screen. He was the great traitor, always in the background, they whispered. He spoke in a gull-like manner and ridiculed everything the Party stood for. Behind him, troops from the enemy country marched. Within thirty seconds, half the room was shouting in rage.

It was impossible not to howl along. The Hate swept through everyone like a current, and you were carried along, even if you didn't want to be.

Winston found himself both hating Goldstein and feeling sorry for him at the same time. He forced himself to transfer all his anger onto the dark-haired girl. He hated her because she was young and pretty and always so clean, because he wanted to sleep with her and never would be allowed—and because she wore that red sash around her supple waist.

The Hate peaked. Goldstein's face transformed into the face of a sheep, and then into a fierce enemy soldier. People recoiled in horror. Then the image melted, and the face of Big Brother emerged: big mustache, dark hair, a face full of power and calm. The three slogans glowed again: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. A small, fair-haired woman threw herself forward. "My Savior!" she whispered, clasping her hands.

Later, back in his cubicle at work, Winston discovered he had written the same thing in big letters over and over: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

Panic stabbed him like a needle in his chest. He knew it no longer mattered. Thoughtcrime was committed the moment the thought was thought. When they came, they came at night. People just disappeared. Washed away.

"They're going to shoot me, I don't care," he scratched down without a period.

Then there was a knock at the door. His heart hammered, but his face remained calm. He opened it. It was his neighbor, Mrs. Parsons, with dust in the wrinkles of her face. She needed help with a clogged kitchen sink. Winston went over. In the living room, her children ran around in Spy uniforms shouting "Traitor!" and "Thought criminal!" at him. The boy aimed a toy gun at him, and as Winston was leaving, shot a rubber band at his neck. Mrs. Parsons looked terrified, as if she were afraid of her own children. This was completely normal now. Children denounced parents, and every week there was a story about a "child hero" on the screen.

That evening the news said we had won a great victory, and the chocolate ration would be increased—but it was actually reduced from thirty grams to twenty. Winston looked out the window. Everywhere there were eyes watching, and voices speaking.

"There is nothing that belongs to you, except a few cubic centimeters inside your head," he thought.

Finally he wrote in the diary: *To the future or the past, to a time when thought is free. From the age of solitude and Big Brother—greetings!* He knew he was already dead. But perhaps he could live a little longer and keep the truth alive.

That night he dreamed of his mother.

He was a greedy child, always hungry, and he had taken nearly all the chocolate that was left. His mother held his sick little sister close. When he came back after running away, they were gone. In the dream they sank down somewhere beneath him, like a ship going to the bottom, while he stood up in air and light. He understood that their lives had been sacrificed for his, and that such deep feelings had existed before, but not now. Now there was fear, hate, and pain, but not dignity in sorrow.

Then came another dream: The golden meadow. An old meadow with bluebells, a path, and swaying trees. The dark-haired girl came toward him, and with a single movement she tore off her clothes, without shame, as if she were merely brushing away an entire poisoned world with her arm.

Winston woke up with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips.

The next morning the telescreen beeped and called for Physical Morning Exercises. Winston coughed so hard his body almost broke. A stern woman in sneakers demonstrated the exercises. As he stretched, he tried to remember his childhood. Everything before the end of the fifties was blurry. The country had always been called Airstrip One, but he remembered the word *England*.

He was quite sure we had been allied with an enemy only four years earlier, but now the Party denied it. If all papers said one thing, it became the truth, even if you knew otherwise.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

To achieve that, they needed doublethink: to know and not know, to lie sincerely, to forget and remember as needed.

At the Ministry of Truth, Winston worked at a speakwrite. Pipes spewed out small paper rolls with messages about things to be corrected: speeches, numbers, old newspapers. Mistakes were never called lies. They were "typographical errors" or "inaccuracies." Documents that needed to disappear went down holes in the wall, memory holes, and were burned in large furnaces.

His job was to make the past fit the present, every single day. One day he had to rewrite an old pep talk from Big Brother because it hadn't "foreseen" a battle correctly. Another time he had to replace promises that chocolate wouldn't be cut. He did it routinely, without thinking.

Sometimes it was more demanding. A Party hero, Comrade Withers, had suddenly fallen out of favor. Now there was no such person. Winston solved it by inventing an entirely new hero: Comrade Ogilvy. He made up a story about him as a boy: plays only with drum and toy machine gun, joins the Spies early, denounces his uncle, dies bravely in battle at a young age. Within a couple of minutes, Ogilvy "existed." Fake pictures and a bit of printing ink, and he was as real as anyone else in the archives.

In the canteen, Winston ate with Syme, a small, sharp man who worked on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Syme glowed as he talked about cutting words. Not creating new ones. Removing. Tightening. When there is only one word for everything, and no more nuances, it becomes impossible to think dangerous thoughts, he said.

"By 2050, no one will understand a conversation like this," he said proudly.

Winston realized that Syme was too clever for his own good. Such people disappeared.

Parsons, his sweaty and naive neighbor, also came by. He bragged about his daughter in the Spies. She had followed a suspicious man for hours. Suddenly the telescreen screamed that the standard of living had risen twenty percent, and that the chocolate had been "increased" to twenty grams. But yesterday it had been *reduced* to twenty grams. Everyone around swallowed it as if it had always been that way.

Winston thought: Am I the only one who remembers something else?

He also thought about sex, and about his marriage to Katharine. She was pretty on the surface, but empty and stiff, full of slogans. They had done their "duty to the Party" every week, without pleasure. No marriage was approved if the couple seemed attracted to each other. All to make desire ugly. Outside marriage, it was forbidden, but Winston had once gone to a woman who had too much white powder on her face and holes in her mouth where her teeth should have been.

He did it anyway. It wasn't just to be loved; it was because desire itself was a small act of rebellion.

He wrote: *If there is hope, it lies in the proles. They were the majority. They sang and lived. If they realized how strong they were, they could shake the Party off like flies. But they argued about saucepans at the market, not about freedom.*

Once, Winston had found something in the archives that proved that three men—Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—who confessed to terrible crimes had lies written about them. An old newspaper clipping with a photo showed they were in a different place than they had "confessed" to being. A real piece of evidence. Still, he had sent it down the memory hole. Thus truth disappeared. He became afraid that he was crazy—or that the Party was right.

Finally he wrote in the book: *Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If I can say it aloud, the rest follows.*

One spring evening, he skipped going to the Community Center. Instead, he walked through slum streets where children played in puddles. A rocket bomb fell, and Winston saw a hand lying on the pavement, white as plaster. In a prole pub, he bought beer for an old man to ask about life before the Revolution. The old man only remembered small things: that beer was better before, and that he had once been pushed off the sidewalk. It gave him no great answers.

He left the pub and went into the junk shop where he had bought the diary. The shopkeeper, Mr. Charrington, was mild and calm, and the room smelled warm of lamp oil. Winston saw a heavy glass paperweight with a small pink coral inside. A paperweight. Almost useless. Precisely because of that, it felt precious and free. He bought it. It was like a piece of a world before the Party, a world where things could be beautiful just because they were beautiful, not because someone said they should be.

The old man took him upstairs to the second floor. There was a room with a bed, a fireplace, a small bookcase, a picture on the wall—and no telescreen. Winston felt a calm he had almost forgotten. Mr. Charrington began to recite an old nursery rhyme Winston had never heard: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's…" He only knew a little of it, but the melody lodged in Winston like a door to a forgotten London with churches and bells that once rang.

As Winston walked out onto the street, the dark-haired girl came walking straight toward him. He froze. She must have been following him. His stomach twisted with pain. Maybe she was going to denounce him. He could do nothing but go home and drink more gin. The nights were always the worst.

That was when they came for you. He thought about ending it all, but there were no weapons, no fast-acting poison. He began to write to O'Brien in his thoughts. "We shall meet where there is no darkness," O'Brien's voice had said in a dream. Perhaps it meant the future.

Four days later, something happened in a corridor at work. The girl came toward him with her arm in a sling. As they nearly met, she stumbled and fell. Winston helped her up. Her face was pale, her mouth red. She said it was nothing. At that moment, while he held her, something slipped into his hand. He put it in his pocket without looking. Back at his desk, he waited five minutes before smoothly sliding out the piece of paper and reading.

In large, somewhat clumsy letters, it said: I LOVE YOU.

The whole day was agony. He could barely get lunch down. He had to go to the Community Centre in the evening, forced himself through table tennis and discussions, because now he no longer wanted to die. He had to live.

The next day he sneaked into the canteen hoping to sit with her. At first he was stopped by a colleague who called out to him, but the next day he managed to sit at her table after a small man tripped between them. They didn't meet each other's eyes. Between cautious spoonfuls of soup, they whispered.

"When do you finish?" "18:30." "Where can we meet?" "Victory Square, by the monument." "There are telescreens everywhere." "In a crowd, no one sees us." "Time?" "19:00." "Fine."

Two days later, Winston stood in Victory Square. The girl was there too, and suddenly everyone started running and shouting: trucks with prisoners from the enemy country were driving by. She pressed her shoulder against his in the crowd and whispered directions: a small station, a field path, a gate with a missing crossbar, a small grove where they could hear people coming a hundred metres away. She said: "Sunday." He repeated the directions until she was sure he knew them by heart. When the trucks were gone, she was gone too.

Sunday, Winston walked through bluebells and stripes of light under the trees. He felt dirty and pale next to all the green. Then twigs crackled. He picked his way further, and a hand landed on his shoulder. She stood there.

She led him to a small, grassy mound surrounded by thin trees. "We're safe here," she said.

Her name was Julia.

He awkwardly told her about himself: thirty-nine years old, married to a wife he couldn't get rid of, varicose veins, false teeth. "I don't care about that," she said and put her arms around his neck. She tore off her red belt and laughed that he had thought she was a spy.

He admitted he had hated her because she seemed so pure and straight. She told him she played the good girl: Youth League leader, voluntary work, always smiling. It was the only way to be left alone. Since she was sixteen, she had had secret lovers, even Party members.

"The more the better," said Winston suddenly. "I hate purity and virtue. I want everything to be dirty all the way through."

She understood him. "Then I'm right for you. I'm rotten to the core," she said, and at that moment, Winston felt that their desire was more than just lust. It was a quiet break with everything the Party demanded.

When a bird nearby burst into song, strong and free, just to sing, they looked at each other and knew they were on the same side against something big and cold.

Afterwards, Julia became practical. They must never go home the same way they came. They must meet rarely, briefly, and never look at each other in public. They only managed once more in May to be alone in a hidden place, in the clock tower of a ruined church. Most of the time they talked in snippets while walking each to their own or standing on a corner.

Winston worked sixty hours a week. Julia worked even more. She said: "If you follow the little rules carefully, you can break the big ones now and then." She had worked for a year in a department that produced cheap pamphlets for proles. She told him bluntly that it was foolish to dream of a great uprising. The smart thing was to stay alive and rebel in small ways.

Winston told her about his wife, Katharine, and how she stiffened every time he touched her. "That's why they hate love," said Julia. "When two people love, they become calm and happy and don't care about all the noise they make to drive us into a herd."

One afternoon, Winston was on his way to the junk shop again. He decided to rent the room upstairs. Mr Charrington immediately understood what they needed and said with a small smile that there were two entrances. A whole room without a telescreen! In summer, a sturdy prole woman lay in the backyard hanging up diapers while singing lustily to a new, boring tune from the Versificator. Winston thought her voice made the song beautiful anyway.

Julia came with a bag full of treasures she had got on the black market: real coffee, sugar, a tin of milk, white bread. Even some proper tea. She smiled mischievously and put on makeup for him. "I want to be a woman for you, not a comrade," she said. They slept in the big bed with posts from a completely different time, as though the paperweight of glass held everything still under its glass dome.

When a rat suddenly scurried across the floor, Winston froze. Rats were his nightmare. "Don't talk about them," he begged. Julia nodded understandingly and put a cloth over the hole.

Syme was suddenly gone. No one mentioned him. His name was simply missing one day from the chess committee list. He was wiped out. At the same time, preparations for Hate Week increased. New posters with a giant soldier appeared on every wall. Rocket bombs fell more often. Everyone worked until late at night.

But in the warm room above the shop, there was a pocket of the past, of peace. They met as often as they could, seven times in June. Winston drank less gin. The wound on his ankle healed. He hardly coughed. They talked a little about how everything could end at any moment, but also about small unlikely dreams, like that one day they could share a small flat or disappear among the proles.

Julia didn't believe in great secret groups running everything. She suspected the rocket bombs were fired by their own side to keep people scared.

Winston looked at her with admiration. She often laughed during the Two Minutes Hate. She didn't care what was true in books as long as she could live here and now. "You're a rebel from the life downwards," Winston teased. She laughed and hugged him.

One day in the corridor, a small cough came behind Winston. He stopped. O'Brien walked beside him. "I read your article about Newspeak. There were two old words you used correctly," said O'Brien, almost kindly, and then mentioned "a friend" who was an expert – a friend who didn't really exist anymore. It was like a secret greeting.

O'Brien wrote an address on a small block and gave it to him. Right under the telescreen, so that anyone watching would think it was innocent. Winston memorized the address and threw away the slip. He was terrified and happy at the same time. Maybe the rebellion was real.

He dreamed again of his mother and sister, and clearly remembered how as a boy he had demanded all the chocolate, and how his mother had still stroked his sister's hair and held her tighter when he ran out. Something told him that day that his sister would die. He told Julia about it.

He said that people once held on to love even when it didn't "pay". It had value in itself. She listened, but for her everything was simple: "I want to be with you. I care about us. Not about big slogans I can't do anything about."

Winston replied: "If they get us, they can make us say and do anything. But they can't make us stop loving each other."

Julia nodded, completely sure: "They can't get inside your head."

They went to O'Brien's apartment. It was soft and quiet. O'Brien turned off the telescreen with a switch. Julia gasped. "We can do that," said O'Brien calmly. He offered wine. He asked them softly and without emotion what they were willing to do for the Brotherhood that fought against the Party. They said yes to almost everything he suggested: risk their lives, destroy the enemy's property, live in hiding. But when he asked if they were willing to separate forever, they said no.

O'Brien said he had to know the truth about them. "We are the dead," he said quietly. He gave Winston instructions on how he would one day receive a book – a forbidden book by Emmanuel Goldstein – and agreed on a sign. Then he took up the rest of the rhyme Winston had learned: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's... Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

Winston felt the rhyme sting, like cold water. But O'Brien's voice was gentle.

During Hate Week, everything was turned on its head in the middle of a speech. A speaker was shouting into a microphone, and suddenly he got a note. Without pausing, the words were changed. The enemy was no longer Eurasia, but Eastasia. Posters and banners were "wrong". People tore them down in utter confusion and trampled on them. The loud shouts just continued, as if nothing had happened. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. All papers from five years suddenly became "wrong".

Winston worked night and day to change everything. The corridors were full of mattresses. Food was wheeled around on trolleys. His fingers grew stiff from altering and altering. When everything calmed down, he went to the room above the shop. In his bag, he finally had the black, heavy book. He opened it.

It said: *Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism*, by Emmanuel Goldstein.

The book said that there have always been three kinds of people: the High, the Middle, and the Low. Their names change, but the pattern is the same. The High will stay High. The Middle will change places with the High. The Low will create equality, but are used and forgotten every time the Middle win. And then it all begins again.

Winston leafed through. In one chapter it said that the world was now divided into three great powers that were always at war. War was no longer to win outright, but to burn up the surplus of goods so that people always lacked a little and never became free enough to think freely. Large, expensive weapons were made and scrapped without being used.

The point was that machines could have made life easy and rich, but that would remove the foundation for a society where a few ruled. Hence an endless war that used up everything that could make the people too comfortable. That was what WAR IS PEACE really meant.

Winston read and felt a strange peace. Finally everything was systematic. What he had thought but never managed to gather. He read aloud to Julia in bed. She almost fell asleep, but asked him to read anyway and "explain it" along the way. She cared least about the words. She cared about the two of them, and about coffee and sugar and about managing to go on living.

One evening they stood by the window and looked down into the backyard. The strong prole woman was singing and hanging up diapers, her body broad and tough from work. Winston whispered that she was beautiful. Not like a thin rose blossom, but like a rose hip – solid and true and full of life.

"If there is hope, it lies in the proles," he thought again. Perhaps one day they would wake up. He put his arm around Julia's waist. The two of them would never have children. It was their words that had to go on, not their blood.

"We are the dead," he said.

"We are the dead," she replied.

"You are the dead," said a voice of iron behind them.

The picture on the wall fell down. Behind it was a hidden telescreen. A sea of black uniforms burst in. A fist hit Julia in the stomach, and she collapsed, gasping. Two men picked her up and carried her out like a sack. In the chaos, the little coral rolled out of the paperweight and across the carpet, an almost invisible pink dot. The glass thing was shattered.

Mr Charrington came in, but he was no longer old. His hair was black, his glasses gone. His face was alert and young. He had been Thought Police all along.

In the Ministry of Love, Winston sat in a white, tiled cell with no windows. Four telescreens, one on each wall, stared at him. He was hungry, thirsty. He learned to sit perfectly still. Any twitch brought a sharp voice scolding him.

Time did not exist. Sometimes the cell filled with ordinary criminals who swore, ate smuggled food and called out to the guards by nicknames. The political prisoners, like Winston, were silent and stiff.

A huge woman was dumped down and vomited on the floor. Later they wheeled in Ampleforth – the bearded poet from work – who told them his "crime" was leaving the word "God" in a line of verse because he couldn't find a rhyme. He was taken: "Room 101," said the guard. Ampleforth frowned, not quite understanding.

Finally, Parsons, the sweaty neighbour, came into the cell. "Thoughtcrime!" he sobbed, both ashamed and almost proud. His daughter had heard him mutter "Down with Big Brother" in his sleep and reported him. Still, he trusted that the Party was just. More were brought in. A skin-tight man, thinned by hunger, was led in, and a toothless man tried to give him a piece of bread.

A guard hit the toothless one to the floor so the blood flowed. "Room 101," they said to the starving man. He begged, saying they could take his wife and children instead. His fingers were broken by a boot and he was dragged out, screaming, until finally empty and silent.

Then the door opened. O'Brien came in.

"They got you too!" shouted Winston before he knew he was speaking.

"They got me a long time ago," said O'Brien gently.

A guard smashed a truncheon into Winston's elbow. Pain that he could never have imagined twisted through his body. Then he woke up on a bed. Straps held him down. O'Brien stood beside him with a dial and a switch. A click, and pain surged through him.

"That was forty," said O'Brien calmly. "I can give you anything, any time."

He called Winston sick. He said that Winston must learn, understand, and finally accept. "Which country were we at war with when you were arrested?" he asked. Winston said Eastasia. "And the week before?" Winston began to explain the switch, but O'Brien cut him off. He took out a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.

Winston shouted: "It exists!" O'Brien dropped the photograph into the memory hole. It disappeared in the flame. "Ash. It never existed," he said. "The past is whatever the Party says it is. It exists only in papers and in memories. And we control both."

He asked Winston why the Party wanted power. Winston stammered half-hearted answers about the common good. O'Brien turned the dial and called him stupid. "We want power for its own sake," he said. "Not wealth, not comfort. Only power. And real power is bending another person's will, crushing thoughts and building new ones. The future is not a paradise. If you want a picture of the future – imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."

Winston saw his own body in a three-panel mirror. It was gray and skinny, bone ridges and skin lines. His gums were bleeding. O'Brien pointed soberly: "That is the last man." Winston sobbed. "You did this to me," he said. "No," replied O'Brien. "You did it to yourself when you set yourself against us." But he added, without a grin: "One thing you are right about: you have not betrayed Julia. Yet."

That word held Winston like a lifebuoy. He slept, was washed, given new clothes, slightly better food, some cigarettes. He began to write on a white board: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE. GOD IS POWER. He practiced stopping thoughts before they started. Crimestop, they called it. He tried to mean everything the Party said. He wanted to be finished. He wanted to be shot one day, without warning, and die with hatred inside him – he thought.

But O'Brien came again. "It's not enough to obey. You must love Big Brother."

They took him to Room 101.

"In Room 101 is the worst thing in the world," said O'Brien. He knew what was worst for Winston. The guard brought in a cage with two large rats and a mask-like opening. "They will eat your face," said O'Brien calmly. "First the eyes. Then the cheeks."

The cage door made a small metallic sound. It came closer. Winston became an animal of panic. And in the middle of black terror, one thought grew: There was a way out. He had to put another person between himself and the rats. The mask approached his cheek.

"Do it to Julia!" he screamed. "Not me! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her to pieces. Just not me!"

A click sound. The door closed. Not up.

Afterwards, Winston often sat at the Chestnut Tree Café with an empty glass. His face was fuller, his skin redder. He had an easy job and better pay. He played chess alone. Sometimes he vaguely remembered something soft and warm, and pushed it away. He saw Julia in the park one day. She had a scar on her forehead. They stood and talked briefly. No tears. No hug.

She said: "I betrayed you." "I betrayed you," he said.

She explained that there was something they threatened you with that you couldn't bear, and then you really wished it would happen to the other person. After that everything becomes dead. He nodded. They went their separate ways. The old song sounded from the screen: "Under the spreading chestnut tree, there you sold me and I sold you."

He began to scribble "2+2=5" in the dust on the table. Big news came on the screen about victory at the front. Fleets, arrows on the map, numbers increasing. People cheered outside. Winston felt a kind of calm, a sweet, drunken warmth from the gin. He looked up at the face on the wall. He had been waiting for this one thing: to feel that everything was right. That the struggle inside him was over. That he had conquered himself.

Two gin-scented tears trickled down his nose.

"All is well," he thought. "I love Big Brother."

___

*After this story lies an explanation of the language that the Party created: Newspeak.*

*Newspeak was meant to fit the ideas of Ingsoc. Not to make thought richer, but to make dangerous thoughts impossible. You removed words. You narrowed meanings. The word "free" could only mean "free of lice" or "free of dirt." Not "free" as in to think or live. Grammar was simple and tight. You could say good, gooder, goodest. "Un-good" instead of "bad." "Plus-good" for "very good." You didn't need words like "excellent" or "splendid." All nuances were cut off.*

*Newspeak had three word classes. A-words were for everyday things: run, hit, dog, tree. B-words were political building blocks designed to control how you thought: Goodthink for correct opinion, Thoughtcrime for everything else. C-words were technical terms that specialists needed. Many fine words disappeared: honor, justice, science. Instead you said goodthink or thoughtcrime. That way it was possible to shout and talk correctly without thinking at all. They called it "duckspeak," to quack like a duck – a compliment if you quacked correctly, an insult if you quacked "wrong."*

*When Newspeak one day became the only language, old books could not be properly translated. Sentences about inalienable rights would just be bundled into one word: Thoughtcrime. And when you had no words, the thought was gone. That was the goal: to make all mouths say the same thing, and all brains wait for the screen's voice to know what was true today.*

*And for Winston, who once held a small pink coral in his hand and saw another kind of world inside it, everything ended with a look at a face with a black mustache, and a simple, heavy thought that filled him:*

*He loved Big Brother.*

___

*This is the story of a man who tried to hold onto something of his own where everything was seen, said, and twisted. He drank gin that stung. He hated and hoped. He loved and betrayed. He found a moment of peace in a room without a screen, in an old rhyme, in the song of a bird and the voice of a woman singing while hanging diapers.*

*He saw a world that might have been, inside a small glass paperweight. But glass breaks easily in a world of steel.*

*And yet, deep down, there are a few cubic centimeters that can remember that two and two are four, that a song can be just a song, and that love once meant holding someone even if it 'didn't help.'*

*In this story, even that room is eventually conquered. And yet, for the one who reads now, perhaps the golden field exists again somewhere: a field with bluebells, a river that glitters, a bird that sings – just because it wants to.*