A Sofa in the Park

A Sofa in the Park

The war had already been over for nearly five years, and the feeling of giddy relief that peace had brought was long gone. Even though there was no fear of being bombed anymore, the country was still destroyed and food was hard to come by. It was going to be a long time before things were back to normal again. Still, people had learnt that life was too short not to be enjoyed, and therefore, on the first sunny day in March, every excuse was a good one to take a stroll outside. The weather was still cold, but the city's parks were crowded like they hadn't been in months with warmly-dressed people determined to take advantage of every bit of sun.

In one of these parks a strange sight was to be seen. On the side of one of the main paths, there was a sofa. It was a green velvet sofa. It looked like a warm and comfortable sofa. It was strange to think that someone had just left it there. Quite apart the fact that it was extremely uncivil behaviour to abandon furniture in a park, it was a good sofa and nobody would have wasted it.

A man had settled himself comfortably on the sofa. He was enjoying the weather, no doubt, just like everybody else. He had been sitting there for quite a few hours. His clothes marked him as rather well-to-do and his pose suggested the nonchalance of a young aristocrat lounging in his aunt's living room. He had folded his right leg over his left and was holding the book he was reading open on his knee. It must have been an engrossing book, for he seemed oblivious to the besuited men striding by with their lunch packets, the women strolling and chatting, their children who were running and falling and screaming, the birds hopping around fighting for bread crumbs. In his left hand a cigarette was smouldering, completely forgotten.

The odd thing was that no one seemed to pay him any attention either. The sofa didn't get a single surprised or disapproving glance, and even though the man was very handsome, not a single of the young mothers or nannies turned to look at him. In fact, the eyes of the people walking past him went from one extremity of the sofa to the other as if it occupied no space. The birds, who would usually keep a respectful distance from humans, happily hopped around his legs as if he wasn't even there.

After a while, he turned the last page of the book and finished it. Then he looked up and took a drag from his cigarette.

It was good to be back in London, he thought. In fact, it kept getting better every time he came back. This time, he had indulged in luxury. The best clothes, the best meals, the best hotel room, the best cigarettes. Even the book he'd picked up at the bookstore was quite good.

The title had seemed quite catchy. 1984. Well, it was bound to be a good year. He'd still be around, for one, and by that time he would have dealt with his enemies, if they hadn't died naturally. It was not as if they were getting any younger.

The story was entertaining enough. It was set in the end of the twentieth century. The author had imagined that England was living according the principle of what was called "English Socialism" or "Ingsoc". It meant that the lives and thoughts of people were directly controlled by "the Party". War was constantly being waged against some foreign country or other. The Party was a ruling class that, in its turn, was divided in two sub-classes: the Upper Party and the Lower Party. The hero (if you could call him that) was a member of the Lower Party. He secretly hated the Party and lived in constant terror of being caught. At some point he met a woman with whom he had an affair. The pair deluded themselves into thinking that they could become rebels against the regime. Of course, they fell into the first trap that was laid for them and they got caught. In the last part of the book, the main character was taught how to be a good citizen by the man who had set the trap on him, a member of the Upper Party, was released and then shot.

There were several good ideas in the book. The telescreens, for instance. He pictured them like heads appearing in a fireplace, like he had seen so many times when he worked at Borgin and Burkes. They would be the heads of Legilimenses, of course. The way he imagined it, it was impossible to apply. He had no idea how the author had made the telescreens work, but it made sense to make people believe that every movement, every thought could be watched. And above all that, every movement and every thought could be punished. He'd always found that terror was a useful way to control people. It didn't even matter if the telescreens really worked, as long as they were believed to work.

The other thing he'd approved of was Hate Week. Hate was definitely worth devoting a holiday to. No force could get you further than hatred. Wasn't it with the teachers he'd hated most that he had worked the hardest to surpass them? He remembered the foolish, self-indulgent, meddling Slughorn. He'd always wondered how the despicable Potions master had ended up in Slytherin, let alone become Head of the House. The man had no ambition other than eat crystallized pineapple. Yet, had he not bested Slughorn in the end? And then there was Dumbledore! Was there any reason not to hate him? There was no subject he had worked harder on than Transfiguration, and in his seventh year he had finally managed to surprise even Dumbledore.

What he'd liked less in the book was the characters. The main one, Winston Smith, was a pathetic fool. It was a given in a novel. One of the reasons he seldom read them was that they were never about someone clever or truly ambitious. Even so, Smith was particularly cockroach-like. Not only was he ugly, stupid and living in a squalor that was hardly imaginable, he was also content with whining about his condition instead of trying to make it better. He took pleasure when it came his way but even then he had to give it an intellectual gloss and a rebellious air that was downright laughable. Of course, the author had thought it necessary to give him a self-sacrificing mother who had died for him. How he hated that tired cliché of motherly love! Who on earth could fall for such a trite and superfluous plot-device? He had skipped the pages where Smith wallowed in self-pity about her. In the last part of the book Smith got himself caught in the most obvious way by the authorities with a forbidden book that told him nothing he didn't know already with the female character, Julia. She was an animal. A cunning animal, like all women were, but an animal nonetheless. She didn't even have a last name!

The only really interesting character was O'Brien. O'Brien was a member of what was called the inner Party (or, in other words, the ruling class) who first gained Smith's trust by appearing in his dreams, giving him the forbidden book and then proceeding to groom Smith until there was nothing left of him but what he ultimately was: a weak creature whose fate it was to be a slave.

It was funny, how O'Brien possessed supreme power over the minds of others (and the Muggle who had written the book probably had no idea how real that power could be) and yet he didn't claim supreme power for himself. He fanatically believed in what he called "the collective power of the Party" while the only one holding supreme power was Big Brother, the mysterious and ubiquitous ruler of Oceania.

How could you be content in serving Big Brother? You didn't even know if he was real! He would not rest before he held power himself. He had already fashioned himself a name, Lord Voldemort. It referred to his noble ancestry. It would strike admiration in the heart of his servants. His enemies would fear to speak it. Unlike Big Brother, everyone would know he was real. Unlike Big Brother, he wouldn't bother with a masquerade of love and freedom. But like Big Brother, he would be immortal.

He looked at the people walking past his bench, and thought how different he was from any of them. How more lasting. How infinitely more powerful. He remembered when he had made his first Horcrux at sixteen. He had watched all his teachers go about their businesses, ignorant of what had happened under their very noses. He had watched all his classmates, oblivious to the change in him, and had thought, "I am immortal". Then he had made his second Horcrux and had watched how nobody noticed they were next to the most powerful wizard in the world. He had especially enjoyed evading Dumbledore's notice. Dumbledore, the powerful Legilimens. Dumbledore, who could do anything. Dumbledore, who could scare anyone. Every time, the thrill was so exquisite that he had to keep himself from turning anyone into a Horcrux. It wouldn't do to have millions of Horcruxes. The power would be too scattered.

No, he couldn't see how anyone could fool themselves into believing in "collective power". Power was concentrated or it wasn't. He remembered the Muggle government of Germany when he'd been a child. Before he went to Hogwarts he used to read every article about Hitler and the National Socialist Party. It had been fascinating to see how he had groomed the German people in a gigantic machine. It had been his dream, as a child, to become just like him. He couldn't imagine that Hitler did not possess the same powers as him. Later, at Hogwarts, he'd had other interests, but during the holidays he had seen the destruction Hitler's machine was capable of. He'd walked and walked through the ruins of the air-bombed London, in awe at the destruction that had been the work of a mere Muggle. Everywhere he went buildings had crumbled down. Entire streets had been wiped off the map. Thousands of people wandered through the city, looking for food, shelter or their family. In the end, the orphanage had moved to the place in the country where they had often gone on holiday. That summer, a nurse had come to meet him at King's Cross Station. She'd hurried him into a car and they had left London at full speed. It was not only London that had been crushed. Liverpool and Manchester were no more. He heard of foreign cities that had once been rich and glamourous and that were left flattened: Paris, Rotterdam, Leningrad... It was with a mixture of amusement and excitement that he had listened on the wireless how the British and the Americans reacted by bombing Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Rome...And all this had been triggered by a mere Muggle.

Later, he'd learnt that it was madness that had caused Hitler's defeat, but upon reflection it wasn't all that surprising. Hitler was just a Muggle, after all. Muggles were by definition weak. They could not stand to be the recipient of so much power; they were not strong enough to contain it. But a wizard like him would be much stronger... It was in his nature to be powerful. Even among wizards he was one of the most powerful. Had he not started channelling his powers consciously at an age where others were still startled at their random outburst? He could do so much better than be a mere recipient of power, that could be destroyed as soon as it was done with you! He could tame power and use it at will. He would never run the risk of becoming mad. His frame was too strong. His mind was too cool and analytical for that.

He snapped out of his reverie and glanced at the book in his hands. How had he come to think of Hitler? Oh, yes, it was because of O'Brien. It was only to be expected that O'Brien was mad. How would he not, when he was wielding supreme power over others but still be a mere pawn in the hands of a superior organization? Was it even possible that, outside the Ministry of Love, O'Brien was forbidden to use power and meekly obeyed these orders?

The power to make 2+2=5 indeed! Who cared how Smith calculated? It was only an illusion, anyway. Power was not about making people believe false mathematical statements. Every schoolteacher held that power. The most incompetent wizard could throw a Confundus Charm and have everybody go around doing calculations wrong! He had done it himself often enough when he was working at Borgin and Burkes! He had even been able to decide whether 2+2 made 5 or 3. Power was about turning 2+2 into 5 for real. It was about rearranging matter to suit your will. No Muggle was ever going to understand that.

Besides, he saw what it had made of Smith. He had become another gormless, mindless follower. Those were necessary, certainly, but where were the intelligent, sane Party Members who were at the Party's mercy? If they were able to create a war with Eurasia or Eastasia, how come they had not come up with an Authority that threatened people and made them turn to the Party as their last resort? At Hogwarts, the teachers, the prefects and the caretaker formed a natural authority figure that nobody wanted to cross. All he needed to do was spy on people and find out the naughty secrets that would land them in detention. Then, all you had to do was a bit of blackmail and they were at your mercy. His position as Prefect and later as Head Boy had made it all the more easy for him. It was an early learnt lesson that you needed more capable servants to do the more tricky jobs. And it was so easy to ensure yourself against their betrayal!

His cigarette had gone out. He threw it on the ground and lit another one. Still, there was something that the book had gotten right. It had a very lucid view on human nature. The book was further proof that all those fabled things that people usually held as the core of humanity, like love, bravery and friendship, were nothing but dreams to make men feel more important. They did not exist and it was easy to wipe out all pretence of them. It was a sign of how pathetic a fool Smith was for holding on so sentimentally to his mother and to Julia. Where were they at the end of the book? He had milked his mother and his sister for all they were worth and he had betrayed Julia. In the end, there were only two things left - power and fear. The word brought him back to Room 101, where Smith had caved in. He wondered what O'Brien had threatened him with. It was obviously Smith's worst fear. He realized that he had never properly experimented with that. He'd toyed several times with mutilation, but as he would never have gotten away with it, he had never carried out the threat. He took a notepad and a pencil out of his pocket. He wrote down "Boggarts" and underlined the word twice.

As he stowed away his writing gear, he reflected that the book was certainly proving inspirational. What would Dumbledore think of it? He was almost tempted to owl it to him, but that would be dangerous. He was safe in London. The last thing he wanted was Dumbledore to remember him in a time of weakness. The old fool was bound to wonder how "dear Tom" was doing and ask awkward questions. Maybe later.

The sun was slowly sinking behind the trees. It was getting dark and cold. The sensible thing to do now was to go back to the hotel, order a meal in his room and call it a night. He stood up with difficulty and Transfigured the sofa back in to a bench. In one twirl of his wand, he lifted all the Muggle Repelling Charms he'd cast around him.

The muscles in his legs were aching with every step he took to walk away. He wondered how long it would last. It was definitely getting worse every time. With the diary, he'd just felt tired for a week. When he'd made the ring, he'd spent a week in the Hospital Wing. This time, he'd been out cold for several hours. The memory of waking up in a forest in the middle of the night gave him a shudder. He hated forests. He felt so much better in the city, where at least he knew where he was and the noises were familiar. Well, it was over, now. Merrythought had the honour of joining his collection and he'd know next time that he'd have to wait to be somewhere safe to perform the spell.

Well, he'd have to rest and get better. Afterwards he'd devise a hiding place for the locket in his breast pocket. At least, his recovery was going to be an agreeable one.