Chapter 8（1）
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
在一條小巷盡頭的什麼地方，有一股烘咖啡豆的香味向街上傳來，這是真咖啡，不是勝利牌咖啡。溫斯頓不自覺地停下步來。大約有兩秒鐘之久，他又回到了他那遺忘過半的童年世界。接著是門砰的一響，把這香味給突然切斷了，好象它是聲音一樣。
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
他在人行便道上已經走了好幾公里，靜脈曲張發生潰瘍的地方又在發癢了。三星期以來，今天晚上是他第二次沒有到鄰里活動中心站去：這是一件很冒失的事，因為可以肯定，你參加中心站活動的次數，都是有人仔細記下來的。原則上，一個黨員沒有空暇的時間，除了在床上睡覺以外，總是有人作伴的。凡是不在工作、吃飯、睡覺的時候，他一定是在參加某種集體的文娛活動；凡是表明有離群索居的愛好的事情，哪怕是獨自去散步，都是有點危險的。新話中對此有個專門的詞，叫孤生，這意味著個人主義和性格孤癖。但是今天晚上他從部里出來的時候，四月的芬芳空氣引誘了他。藍色的天空是他今年以來第一次看到比較有些暖意，於是突然之間，他覺得在中心站度過這個喧鬧冗長的夜晚，玩那些令人厭倦吃力的遊戲，聽那些報告講話，靠杜松子酒維持勉強的同志關係，都教他無法忍受了。他在一時衝動之下，從公共汽車站走開，漫步走進了倫敦的迷魂陣似的大街小巷，先是往南，然後往東，最質又往北，迷失在一些沒有到過的街道上，也不顧朝什麼方向走去。
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.
他曾經在日記中寫過，「如果有希望的話，希望在無產者身上。」他不斷地回想起這句話，這說明了一個神秘的真理、明顯的荒謬。他現在是在從前曾經是聖潘克拉斯車站的地方以北和以東的一片褐色貧民窟里。他走在一條鵝卵石鋪的街上，兩旁是小小的兩層樓房，破落的大門就在人行道旁，有點奇怪地使人感到象耗子洞；在鵝卵石路面上到處有一灘灘髒水。黑黝黝的門洞的里里外外，還有兩旁的狹隘的陋巷裡，到處是人，為數之多，令人吃驚——鮮花盛開一般的少女，嘴上塗著鮮艷的唇膏；追逐著她們的少年；走路搖搖擺擺的肥胖的女人，使你看到這些姑娘們十年之後會成為什麼樣子；邁著八字腳來來往往的駝背彎腰的老頭兒；衣衫襤縷的赤腳玩童，他們在污水潭中嬉戲，一聽到他們母親的怒喝又四散逃開。街上的玻璃窗大約有四分之一是打破的，用木板釘了起來。大多數人根本不理會溫斯頓；有少數人小心翼翼地好奇地看他一眼。有兩個粗壯的女人，兩條象磚頭一般發紅的胳膊交叉抱在胸前，在一個門口城著閒談。溫斯頓走近的時候聽到了她們談話的片言隻語。
'Yes, I says to 'er, 'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same problems as what I got.'
「『是啊，』我對她說，『這樣好是好，』我說。『不過，要是你是我，你就也會象我一樣。說別人很容易，』我說，『可是，我要操心的事兒，你可沒有。』」
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is.'
「啊，」另一個女人說，「你說得對。就是這麼一回事。」
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?'—and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.
刺耳的說話突然停止了。那兩個女人在他經過的時候懷有敵意地看著他。但是確切地說，這談不上是敵意；只是一種警覺，暫時的僵化，象在看到不熟悉的野獸經過一樣。在這樣的一條街道上，黨員的藍制服不可能是常見的。的確，讓人看到自己出現在這種地方是不明智的，除非你有公務在身。如果碰上巡邏隊，他們一定要查問的。「給我看一看你的證件。好呀，同志？你在這裡於什麼？你什麼時候下班的？這是你平時回家的路嗎？」——如此等等。並不是說有什麼規定不許走另一條路回家，但是如果思想警察知道了這件事，你就會引起他們的注意。
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.
突然之間，整條街道騷動起來。四面八方都有報警的驚叫聲。大家都象兔子一般竄進了門洞。有今年輕婦女在溫斯頓前面不遠的地方從一個門洞中竄了出來，一把拉起一個在水潭中嬉戲的孩子，用圍裙把他圍住，又竄了回去，這一切動作都是在剎那間發生的。與此同時，有個穿著一套象六角手風琴似的黑衣服的男子從一條小巷出來，他向溫斯頓跑過來，一邊緊張地指著天空：
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!』
「蒸汽機！」他嚷道。「小心，首長！頭上有炸彈，快臥倒！」
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.
「蒸汽機」是無產者不知為什麼叫火箭炸彈的外號。溫斯頓馬上撲倒在地。碰到這種事情，無產者總是對的。他似乎有一種直覺，在好幾秒鐘之前能預知火箭射來，儘管火箭飛行的速度照說要比聲音還快。溫斯頓雙臂抱住腦袋。這時一聲轟隆，仿佛要把人行道掀起來似的，有什麼東西象陣雨似的掉在他的背上。他站起來一看，原來是附近窗口飛來的碎玻璃。
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
他繼續往前走。那顆炸彈把前面兩百公尺外的一些房子炸掉了。空中高懸著一股黑煙柱，下面一片牆灰騰空而起，大家已經開始團團圍住那堆瓦礫了。在他前面的人行道上也有一堆牆灰，他可以看到中間有一道猩紅色的東西。他走近一看，原來是一隻齊腕炸斷的手。除了近手腕處血污一片，那隻手完全蒼白，沒有血色，象石膏制的一樣。
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs', they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.
他把它踢到邊上，然後躲開人群，拐到右手的一條小巷裡，三、四分鐘以後他就離開了挨炸的地方，附近街道人來人往，一切如常，好象什麼事情也沒有發生一樣。這時已快到二十點了，無產者光顧的小酒店裡擠滿了顧客。黑黑的彈簧門不斷地推開又關上，飄出來一陣陣尿臊臭、鋸木屑、陳啤酒的味兒。有一所房子門口凸出的地方，角落裡有三個人緊緊地站在—起，中間一個人手中拿著一份摺疊好的報紙，其他兩個人伸著脖子從他身後瞧那報紙。溫斯頓還沒有走近看清他們臉上的表情，就可以知道他們是多麼全神貫注。他們顯然是在看一條重要的新聞。他走到距他們只有幾步遠的時候，這三個人突然分了開來，其中兩個人發生了激烈爭吵。看上去他們幾乎快要打了起來。
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!』
「你他媽的不能好好地聽我說嗎？我告訴你，一年零兩個月以來，末尾是七的號碼沒有中過彩！」
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
「中過了！」
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in seven——'
「不，沒有中過！我家裡全有，兩年多的中彩號碼全都記在一張紙上。我一次不差，一次不漏，都記下來了。我告訴你，末尾是七的號碼沒有——」
'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February—second week in February.'
「中過了，七字中過了！我可以把他媽的那個號碼告訴你。四 O 七，最後一個數目是七。那是在二月里，二月的第二個星期。」
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I tell you, no number——'
「操你奶奶的二月！我都記下來了，白紙黑字，一點不差。我告訴你— —」
『Oh, pack it in!』 said the third man.
「唉，別吵了！」第三個人說。
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
他們是在談論彩票。溫斯頓走到三十公尺開外又回頭看。他們仍在爭論，一臉興奮認真的樣子。彩票每星期開獎一次，獎金不少，這是無產者真正關心的一件大事。可以這麼說，對好幾百萬無產者來說，彩票如果不是他們仍舊活著的唯一理由，也是主要的理由。這是他們的人生樂趣，他們的一時荒唐，他們的止痛藥，他們的腦力刺激劑。一碰到彩票，即使是目不識丁的人也似乎運算嫻熟，記憶驚人。有整整一大幫人就靠介紹押寶方法、預測中獎號碼、兜售吉利信物為生。溫斯頓同經營彩票無關，那是富裕部的事，但是他知道(黨內的人都知道)獎金基本上都是虛構的。實際付的只是一些末獎，頭、二、三等獎的得主都是不存在的人。由於大洋國各地之間沒有相互聯繫，這件事不難安排。
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tiredlooking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junkshop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
但是如果有希望的話，希望在無產者身上。你得死抱住這一點。你把它用話說出來，聽起來就很有道理。你看一看人行道上走過你身旁的人，這就變成了一種信仰。他拐進去的那條街往下坡走。他覺得他以前曾經來過這一帶，不遠還有一條大街。前面傳來了一陣叫喊的聲音。街道轉了一個彎，盡頭的地方是一個台階，下面是一個低洼的小巷，有幾個擺攤的在賣發蔫的蔬菜。這時溫斯頓記起了他身在什麼地方了。這條小巷通到大街上，下一個拐角，走不到五分鐘，就是他買那個空白本子當作日記本的舊貨鋪子了。在不遠的一家文具鋪里，他曾經買過筆桿和墨水。
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middleaged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He would say to him: 『Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?'
他在台階上面停了一會兒，小巷的那一頭是一家昏暗的小酒店，窗戶看上去結了霜，其實只不過是積了塵垢。一個年紀很老的人，雖然腰板挺不起來，動作卻很矯捷，白色的鬍子向前挺著，好像明蝦的鬍子一樣，他推開了彈簧門，走了進去。溫斯頓站在那裡看著，忽然想起這個老頭兒一定至少有八十歲了，革命的時候已入中年。他那樣的少數幾個人現在己成了同消失了的資本主義世界的最後聯繫了。思想在革命前已經定型的人，在黨內已經不多。在五十年代和六十年代的大清洗時期，老一代的人大部分已被消滅掉，少數僥倖活下來的，也早已嚇怕，在思想上完全投降。活著的人中，能夠把本世紀初期的情況向你作一番如實的介紹的，如果有的話，也只可能是個無產者。突然之間，溫斯頓的腦海里又浮現了他從歷史教科書上抄在日記中的一段話，他一時衝動，象發瘋一樣：他要到那酒店裡去，同那個老頭兒搭訕，詢問他一個究竟。他要這麼對他說：「請你談談你小時候的事兒。那時候的日子怎麼樣？比現在好，還是比現在壞？」
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.
他急急忙忙地走下台階，穿過狹窄的小巷，唯恐晚了一步，心中害怕起來。當然，這樣做是發瘋。按理，並沒有具體規定，不許同無產者交談，或者光顧他們的酒店，但是這件事太不平常，必然會有人注意到。如果巡邏隊來了，他可以說是因為感到突然頭暈，不過他們多半不會相信他。他推開門，迎面就是一陣走氣啤酒的乾酪一般的惡臭。他一進去，裡面談話的嗡嗡聲就低了下來。他可以覺察到背後人人都在看他的藍制服。屋裡那一頭原來有人在玩的投鏢遊戲，這時也停了大約有三十秒鐘。他跟著進來的那個老頭兒站在櫃檯前，同酒保好象發生了爭吵，那個酒保是個體格魁梧的年輕人，長著鷹勾鼻，胳膊粗壯。另外幾個人，手中拿著啤酒杯，圍著看他們。