39925 84 304 GO: there was no telescreen but there

MUST BE HIDDEN MICROPHONES:
besides, they could be seen? It did not matter, nothing mattered!

They could have lain down on the ground and done thàt if they had wanted to.
His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a log scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened.

He remembered how once, after the explosion of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone than flesh.

Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been? He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back across the grass she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes!

They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.

¨I betrayed you,¨ she said baldly.

¨I betrayed you,¨ he said.

She gave him another look of dislike... Sometimes,¨ she said, ¨they threaten you with something - something you can´t stand up to, can´t even think about. And then you say, ¨Don´t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.¨ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn´t really mean it. You think there´s no other way of saving yourself, and you´re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don´t give a damn what théy suffer. All you care about is yourself.¨

¨Àll yóu care about is yoursèlf,¨ he echoed...

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12 mrt 2021 - bewerkt op 19 mrt 2021 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 79 jaar
   
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