for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night.
The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the
lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the
vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: vapourized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in
a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of
the neck i dont care down with big brother--

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he starte