1984. Адаптированная книга для чтения на английском языке. Уровень B1. Джордж Оруэлл

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СКАЧАТЬ knew that millions of boots were produced on paper, while half the people in Oceania went barefoot.

      Winston looked across the hall. In the cubicle on the other side a small man named Tillotson was working. He had a newspaper on his knee and his mouth was very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He looked as if he was trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked at Winston in an unfriendly way.

      Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he did. People in the Records Department did not talk about their jobs. There were some people whom Winston saw every day, but did not even know by name. He knew that in the cubicle next to him there worked the little woman with sandy hair. She deleted from the Press the names of people who had been vapourized. She was somehow the right person to do the job. Her own husband had been vapourized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away Ampleforth, a man with very hairy ears, corrected poems that were against the Party ideas, but could not be destroyed. And it was only one subsection of the Records Department. There were many more. There were many more people whose job was simply to write lists of books and magazines. There were the rooms with the corrected documents and rooms where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other there were the people who coordinated the whole process.

      And the Records Department was only one PART of the Ministry of Truth. Its job was to publish newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels for the citizens of Oceania. There were also departments that worked on proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. They published newspapers with almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, cheap stories, films with sex in them, and songs which were composed on a versificator, a special kind of machine. There was Pornosec that made the lowest kind of pornography, which no Party member was allowed to look at, other than those who worked on it.

      While he was working, Winston got three more messages, but they were simple, and he had finished working on them before the Two Minutes Hate. After the Hate he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and started his main job of the morning.

      Winston loved his work. Most of it was boring, but there were also some difficult tasks. He could lose himself in them, he knew the principles of Ingsoc and he understood what the Party wanted him to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. He had even rectified the Times leading articles, which were written from beginning to end in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had put aside earlier. It said:

      times 3.12.83 reporting bb day order doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

      In Oldspeak (or standard English) it was:

      The article in the Times of December 3rd 1983 on Big Brother's Order for the Day is very unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

      In his Order for the Day, Big Brother had spoken about FFCC. It was an organization, which supplied cigarettes and other things to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a member of the Inner Party, had been awarded the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

      Three months later FFCC had suddenly stopped existing. There had been no report of it in the Press or on the telescreen. People who had done something against the Party usually simply disappeared and you never heard of them again, public trials were rare and happened only when the Party needed them. One never knew what had happened to those people. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people Winston personally knew had disappeared at one time or another.

      Winston was lost in thought. In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still working. He raised his head for a moment: again the same unfriendly look. Winston asked himself whether Comrade Tillotson was doing the same job as himself. It was possible. A single person couldn't do such a job. A committee couldn't work on it either, because they would then have to admit that they falsified facts. Very likely several people were now working away on different versions of the Order for the Day. Then someone in the Inner Party would choose one of the versions, re-edit it, and then the chosen lie would become truth.

      Winston did not know what had happened to Withers. There were many possibilities. What Winston knew for sure was that Withers had already been dead. He knew it from the words «refs unperson». You don't talk of someone as an unperson when they were arrested. Sometimes they were released for a year or two years before they were executed. Withers, however, did not exist: he had never existed. Winston decided that it was better to make Big Brother's speech deal with something totally different from its original subject.

      Big Brother might have spoken about traitors and thoughtcriminals, about a victory at the front, or about the Ninth Three- Year Plan. But that was either too obvious or too complicated. It should rather be pure fantasy. Suddenly Winston thought of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle as a hero. Today Big Brother should speak about Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that Comrade Ogilvy didn't exist, but a few lines of print and a couple of photographs that had never been taken would soon change it.

      Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother's military and pedantic style. It was easy to imitate, because Big Brother often asked questions and then answered them («What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson that», etc., etc.).

      At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had played only with a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six – a year early – he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had reported his uncle to the Thought Police. At seventeen he had been an active member of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which the Ministry of Peace had started using and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners at once. At twenty-three he had died in action. Big Brother added that Comrade Ogilvy hadn't drunk or smoked, had never been married, and had been devoted to the Party. He had only spoken to his comrades about the principles of Ingsoc, and had fought the Eurasian enemy and hunted down spies, thought-criminals, and traitors.

      Winston thought for a moment whether he should award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit, but he decided against. It would make it too complicated.

      Once again he looked at Tillotson in the opposite cubicle. Winston was sure that Tillotson was busy on the same job as himself. He couldn't know whose job would be chosen as a final version, but he felt that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy was now a fact. Winston found it curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past. When the act of falsification was forgotten, he would exist just as Charlemagne[3]or Julius Caesar[4] existed.

      Chapter  5

      The canteen with its low ceiling was full and it was very noisy. People were waiting in line for their meal and Victory Gin.

      «There you are», said a voice at Winston's back.

      He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps «friend» was not the right word. You did not have friends anymore, you had comrades: but there were some comrades who you liked more than others. Syme was a specialist in Newspeak. He was now working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large eyes. It seemed that his eyes searched your face, when he spoke to you.

      «Have you got any razor blades?» he asked.

      «Not one!» said Winston quickly. «I've tried everywhere. They don't exist any longer».

      Everyone СКАЧАТЬ