7

change on the walls. The book describes the Torture Sounds,
beginning with personal screams, people you can recognize,
the rhythm gives you the methodology but in the end the
impersonal whine, every man sounding the same. The morning
sounds, the morning thoughts, death, body, humiliation. He
is prison-wise and does not indulge in games of "justice" and
when number 402 next door gives him three taps in the very
code that he knows, and the very one that we used, and his
answer to the question "Who?", Nicholas Salmanovitch
Rubashov is met with silence. The man next door, a rather
strange person, a Czarist dandy, is apparently terror stricken
because he now is in colusion with the great Rubashov. Whether
he likes it or not he cannot enjoy the benevolent quarantine
of which walls are rights. Rubashov thinks that this terror
stricken companion is probably "still of the simple belief
that his subjective guilt or innocence makes a difference and
has no idea of the higher interests which are really at stake."
Those that are at stake are consistency, face, nation,
politics. I remember Rabbit one time saying to me, "Are you
shitting me?" I talk about the party and read on page 34 and
page 61. They say they are hooked to one another not only
for the sake of colusion and the fear it brings, but on the
necessity for communication and love (page 21) and comradeship
(page 113) as they announce the man going by the cell.

6