Darkness at Noon

In Chapter 9, we learn through a series of flashbacks where exactly Rubashov saw the Pietà. He was at a secret meeting at a “picture gallery of a town in southern Germany on a Monday afternoon” in 1933 (31), a week before his first arrest. Rubashov is meeting with Richard, a nineteen-year-old Party member whose pregnant, seventeen-year-old wife has been arrested for their subversive activities. Despite this sacrifice and Richard’s desperation, Rubashov has come to tell him that he has been ousted from the Party for not distributing the approved Party materials. Throughout their conversation, Rubashov tries to see around Richard’s head to the Pietà on the wall behind him, but can only see “the Madonna’s thin hands, curved upwards, hollowed to the shape of a bowl” (34). He leaves the gallery without seeing the picture in full. When he leaves Richard, he gets into a taxi whose driver is sympathetic to the Party. The driver does not charge Rubashov for the ride and tells Rubashov that he is also willing to help Richard if he needs it. Instead of accepting the free ride and shaking the man’s hand, Rubashov pays him “without a word” (49) and heads into the train station.

Rubashov’s memory of the conversation with Richard is interspersed with moments from his present situation: he continues pacing his prison cell and peers out of the judas-hole in his cell door, looking in vain for No. 407, whose outstretched hands had reminded him of the Pietà and Richard. At one point, midway through his remembrance, he sees a bloodied prisoner being escorted back to his cell. The chapter ends with Rubashov’s recollection of a dream he had on the train while dozing with a toothache after leaving Richard: he is running in front of the train instead of riding on it, with Richard and the taxi-driver in the engine behind him, “want[ing] to run him over because he had cheated them of the fare” (49).

In Chapter 10, we learn that Rubashov has been thinking about Richard and their meeting for four hours, pacing all the while—a phenomenon he calls the “day-dreams of imprisonment” (49). Rubashov notes, however, that prison day-dreams are “nearly always of the future—and of the past only as it might have been, never as it actually had been” (50), so he is surprised that his day-dream is an accurate recollection of his actual past. He looks out of his window to the exercise yard and sees “an emaciated man with a yellow skin and a hare-lip” (50) who looks up at Rubashov’s window, as if searching for him. Rubashov asks No. 402 the identity of the prisoner in the exercise yard. Hare-lip is a political prisoner and No. 402’s neighbor in cell 400; he was tortured the day before by steambath. The news prompts Rubashov consideration of his own torture, which he wishes would begin soon, and he again remembers the dream of being pursued by Richard and the taxi-driver, thinking, “I will pay my fare” (53). He takes his cigarette, the last one in the pack he brought with him when he was arrested, and extinguishes it on the back of his hand. It takes thirty seconds, but his hand does not twitch once.

At the start of Chapter 11 Rubashov is passed over again at meal time, so he asks for cigarettes, which he is told he cannot have until his money is converted to prison vouchers; then they can be purchased for him from the canteen. He asks No. 402 for cigarettes and is refused. Rubashov then imagines what No. 402 must be thinking and calculates how many of 402’s “people” he had shot during the war—estimating that it was between seventy and a hundred. These deaths Rubashov holds on a different plane than Richard’s, and he decides that “he would do it again to-day” (55). 

No. 402 relents and tries to have the warder pass Rubashov cigarettes, but the warder refuses. His kindness prompts Rubashov to ruminate on whether he must “also pay for deeds which were right and necessary” (57). Then No. 402 taps to tell Rubashov that Hare-lip, the prisoner Rubashov saw in the exercise yard outside his window, sends his greetings, though he refuses to give his name.