“Why don’t you eat?” the woman asked again. “It’s all over now.” She said this without compassion, as if the girl were a fool not to eat when the food was there.
“I’m not hungry.”
The wardress shrugged. “You may have a long journey,” she observed, “and not much at the other end.”
“What do you mean?”
“The workers are starving in England,” she declared complacently. “The capitalists let them starve.”
Liz thought of saying something but there seemed no point. Besides, she wanted to know; she had to know, and this woman could tell her.
“What is this place?”
“Don’t you know?” The wardress laughed. “You should ask them over there.” She nodded toward the window. “They can tell you what it is.”
“Who are they?”
“Prisoners.”
“What kind of prisoners?”
“Enemies of the state,” she replied promptly. “Spies, agitators.”
“How do you know they are spies?”
“The Party knows. The Party knows more about people than they know themselves. Haven’t you been told that?” The wardress looked at her, shook her head and observed, “The English! The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food–that’s what’s happened to the English.”
“Who told you that?”
The woman smiled and said nothing. She seemed pleased with herself.
“And this is a prison for spies?” Liz persisted.
“It is a prison for those who fail to recognize socialist reality; for those who think they have the right to err; for those who slow down the march. Traitors,” she concluded briefly.
“But what have they done?”
“We cannot build communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.”
Liz looked at her in astonishment.
“Who told you all this?”
“I am Commissar here,” she said proudly. “I work in the prison.”
“You are very clever,” Liz observed, approaching her.
“I am a worker,” the woman replied acidly. “The concept of brain workers as a higher category must be destroyed. There are no categories, only workers; no antithesis between physical and mental labor. Haven’t you read Lenin?”
“Then the people in this prison are intellectuals?”
The woman smiled. “Yes,” she said, “they are reactionaries who call themselves progressive: they defend the individual against the state. Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counterrevolution in Hungary?”
Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk.
“He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.”
“Who will they shoot now?” Liz asked quickly. “After the trial?”
“Leamas,” she replied indifferently, “and the Jew, Fiedler.” Liz thought for a moment she was going to fall but her hand found the back of a chair and she managed to sit down.
“What has Leamas done?” she whispered. The woman looked at her with her small, cunning eyes. She was very large; her hair was scant, stretched over her head to a bun at the nape of her thick neck. Her face was heavy, her complexion flaccid and watery.
“He killed a guard,” she said.
“Why?”
The woman shrugged.
“As for the Jew,” she continued, “he made an accusation against a ioyal comrade.”
“Will they shoot Fiedler for that?” asked Liz incredulously.
“Jews are all the same,” the woman commented. “Comrade Mundt knows what to do with Jews. We don’t need their kind here. If they join the Party they think it belongs to them. If they stay out, they think it is conspiring against them. It is said that Leamas and Fiedler plotted together against Mundt. Are you going to eat that?” she inquired, indicating the food on the desk. Liz shook her head. “Then I must,” she declared, with a grotesque attempt at reluctance. “They have given you a potato. You must have a lover in the kitchen.” The humor of this observation sustained her until she had finished the last of Liz’s meal.
Liz went back to the window.
In the confusion of Liz’s mind, in the turmoil of shame and grief and fear, there predominated the appalling memory of Leamas as she had last seen him in the courtroom, sitting stiffly in his chair, his eyes averted from her own. She had failed him and he dared not look at her before he died; would not let her see the contempt, the fear perhaps, that was written on his face.