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. Who taught you that? he said. My grandfather.He used to say it to me when I was a little girl.He was vaporized when I was eightat any rate, he disappeared.I wonder what a lemon was, she added inconsequently. I ve seen oranges.They re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin. I can remember lemons, said Winston. They were quite common in the fifties.They were so sour thatit set your teeth on edge even to smell them. I bet that picture s got bugs behind it, said Julia. I ll take it down and give it a good clean some day.Isuppose it s almost time we were leaving.I must start washing this paint off.What a bore! I ll get thelipstick off your face afterwards.Winston did not get up for a few minutes more.The room was darkening.He turned over towards thelight and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment ofcoral but the interior of the glass itself.There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent asair.It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with itsatmosphere complete.He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, alongwith the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweightitself.The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia s life and his own, fixed in a sort ofeternity at the heart of the crystal.Syme had vanished.A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless peoplecommented on his absence.On the next day nobody mentioned him.On the third day Winston went intothe vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board.One of the notices carried a printed listof the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one.It looked almost exactly as it hadlooked before nothing had been crossed out but it was one name shorter.It was enough.Syme hadceased to exist: he had never existed.The weather was baking hot.In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kepttheir normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one s feet and the stench of the Tubes at therush hours was a horror.The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all theMinistries were working overtime.Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays,film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, sloganscoined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.Julia s unit in the Fiction Department hadbeen taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.Winston, inaddition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of The Times andaltering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches.Late at night, when crowds ofrowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air.The rocket bombs crashed oftener thanever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain andabout which there were wild rumours. The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had alreadybeen composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens.It had a savage, barking rhythm whichcould not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum.Roared out by hundreds of voices tothe tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying.The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets itcompeted with the still-popular It was only a hopeless fancy.The Parsons children played it at all hours ofthe night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper.Winston s evenings were fuller thanever.Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitchingbanners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street forthe reception of streamers.Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metresof bunting.He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt inthe evenings.He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollyingeveryone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed aninexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London.It had no caption, and represented simply themonstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionlessMongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip.From whatever angle youlooked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight atyou.The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits ofBig Brother
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