he would exist just as authentically, and upon the
same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.



V

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked
slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research
Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not
have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose
society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts
now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all
over the place. They don't exist any longer.'
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused
ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months
past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party
shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was
darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades.
You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less
furtively on the 'free' market.
'I've bee