Darkness at Noon: The Second Hearing: 3 Summary & Analysis

Rubashov now has paper, pencil, soap and a towel, and he can order cigarettes and food from the canteen. The snow has been cleared from the courtyard for the prisoners to exercise: Hare-lip always looks up at Rubashov’s window. Rubashov often looks down at them, relieved not to recognize anyone.

Rubashov has always prided himself on his self-awareness, harboring no illusions about what he calls the “first person singular” and its impulses. Now, however, he begins to learn more about this phenomenon—about how monologues are actually dialogues between two elements of his own mind, including one speaking partner who’s entirely unfamiliar to him. He knows he won’t agree to Ivanov’s proposal, so he wants to spend the little time he has left alive thinking through other problems. He’s interested, for instance, in Ivanov’s personality. They were both molded by the beliefs and trajectory of the Party: they both thought the same way. He puts himself in Ivanov’s position and sees that his old friend is just as sincere, or as little sincere, with him as Rubashov himself was towards Richard or Little Loewy.

Meanwhile, Rubashov’s “first-person singular” remains silent, composed of disconnected parts: the hands of the Pietà, Little Loewy’s cats, something Arlova had once said, and so on. He dubs this half of his interior dialogue the “grammatical fiction,” which seems to begin just where logical thinking ends. Indeed, even though he has only a few weeks left to live, he’s ambushed by it and spends an entire day in a day-dream about Arlova, who, he knows, was shot.

Rubashov remembers breathing in the smell of his Trade Delegation office, along with that of Arlova’s large, well-formed body, curved over her notebook as he dictated. She was slow and passive, and had a calming effect on Rubashov. No. 1 had taken the rare step of giving him, an International man, this bureaucratic job. He felt initially out of touch: he knew how to play the game of the bourgeois world, but at the Trade Delegation he had trouble understanding what was expected of him. He felt like all his underlings treated him with exaggerated, indulgent tolerance. Arlova was least irritating to him.

One day Rubashov asked, while dictating, why Arlova never said anything. She sleepily replied that she would henceforth repeat the last word of each sentence. Rubashov pictures the curve of her neck, which was what he usually saw in the office. When he was young, women had always been comrades for Rubashov, intellectual partners. One day Rubashov, surprising himself, put his hands on Arlova’s shoulders and asked her to go out with him. She nodded silently. Later that night, she told him that he’d always be able to do what he liked with her: when he asked why, astonished, she didn’t answer.

From then on, during the day Arlova would sit bent over the desk, and at night would lie silhouetted against Rubashov’s bedroom curtain. Once in awhile he would add sarcastic asides and jokes to his dictation: she never smiled, and once she said he shouldn’t say such things in front of other people. This was during the second great opposition trial, when photographs and portraits were again disappearing. The staff all spoke to each other stiffly, politely, using stock phrases. The libraries were thinned out, and the works on foreign trade and currency were disappearing from the office shelves, as well as contemporary philosophy, pamphlets about birth control, treatises on trade unionism, and so on. Old histories and memoirs were replaced with new.

An order also came from “above” to appoint a librarian, and Arlova was chosen. Then, at one meeting, she was attacked: someone complained that No. 1’s most important speeches couldn’t be found at the library, which still contained oppositional works. These speeches all concluded that the Party’s biggest duty was to be watchful. Arlova said calmly that she’d followed every instruction, and had no evil intent: the meeting ended with the decision to give her a “serious warning.” Rubashov began to feel uneasy, and he stopped making snide comments while dictating, or putting his hands on her shoulders at work.

After a week, Arlova stopped coming to Rubashov’s apartment, saying that she had a migraine. He didn’t press her further. She only came one more time: all night he had the feeling that she was waiting for him to say something—she kept lying awake, eyes open, in the dark. The next day the Secretary told him that Arlova’s brother and sister-and-law were arrested “over there.” A few minutes later she arrived to work: Rubashov kept thinking uneasily that “over there” the condemned were shot through the neck. At the next meeting of the Party cell Arlova was dismissed from her librarian post, then, a little later, recalled.