Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [103]

On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which – one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how – was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 103

Note

The sweat ‘of some person not present at the moment’ — a telling detail that links the Parsons’ domestic space to Parsons himself (whose sweat lingers after he’s gone, per the later paragraph). The physical absence registering as smell is a subtle way of showing objects/people existing primarily as traces.