Free Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Page A

the capture and the selling, however, lay a rather unpleasant operation. It was quickest if one grasped the cat’s ears in one hand, and its tail in the other, and broke its back over one’s knee. The first few times one was seized by nausea: later on one got used to it. Unfortunately, Little Loewy was arrested again after a few weeks, for in Belgium, too, one was supposed to have identity papers. Followed in due course expulsion, release, second arrest, imprisonment. Then one night two Belgian gendarmes took him to a wood on the French frontier. They gave him bread, cheese and a packet of Belgian cigarettes. “Go straight on,” they said. “In half an hour you will be in France. If we catch you over here again, well knock your head off.”
    In the course of the next year, Little Loewy was smuggled backwards and forwards over the frontier three times, by complicity of the French authorities or, as the case might be, the Belgian. He gathered that this game had been played for years with several hundred of his kind. He applied again and again to the Party, for his chief anxiety was that he should lose contact with the movement. “We received no notification of your arrival from your organisation,” the Party told him. “We must wait for the answer to our inquiries. If you are a Party member, keep Party discipline.” Meanwhile Little Loewy continued his cat trade and let himself be shoved to and fro across the frontier. Also the dictatorship broke out in his own country. A further year passed and Little Loewy, slightly the worse for his travels, began to spit blood and dream of cats. He suffered from the delusion that everything smelled of cats, his food, his pipe and even the kindly old prostitutes who sometimes gave him shelter. “We have still received no answer to our inquiries,” said the Party. After another year it turned out that all those comrades who could have given the required information about Little Loewy’s part were either murdered, locked-up or had disappeared. “We are afraid we cannot do anything for you,” said the Party. “You should not have come without an official notification. Perhaps you left even without the Party’s permission. How can we know? A lot of spies and provocateurs try to creep into our ranks. The Party must be on its guard.”
    “What are you telling me this for?” asked Rubashov. He wished he had left before.
    Little Loewy fetched himself beer from the tap, and saluted with his pipe. “Because it is instructive,” he said. “Because it is a typical example. I could tell you of hundreds of others. For years the best of us have been crushed in that way. The Party is becoming more and more fossilized. The Party has gout and varicose veins in every limb. One cannot make a revolution like that.”
    I could tell you more about it, thought Rubashov, but said nothing.
    However, Little Loewy’s story came to an unexpectedly happy end. While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one’s arms through the opponent’s armpits from behind, locking one’s hands behind his neck, and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done. Little Loewy and ex wrestler Paul became friends. It turned out that Paul was the Administrative Secretary of the Dockers’ Section of the Party; when they came out, he procured papers and work for Loewy and obtained his reintegration in the Party. So Little Loewy could again lecture to the dockers on Darwinism and on the latest Party Congress as though nothing had happened. He was happy and forgot the cats and