[David Nebenzahl]

would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to
the Community Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to
establish a partial alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A
deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home
quickly and then sit down and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights
would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the
kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to
the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice
was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the
book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper
thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did
so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed
desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick
and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of
astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery
of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is ne