The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man Page 6

  The researcher stood up slowly, went over and bent down to the harrow. “You see,” said the officer. “It’s actually a pair of needles repeated many times over. Each long one has a short one beside it. The long one inscribes and the short one sprays water to wash away the blood and keep the writing clear. The mixture of blood and water then runs down into these little grooves, which all lead into this drain, and that flows out of the waste pipe into the ditch underneath.” With his finger, the officer traced the route that the liquid had to follow. When he, trying to make it as easy as possible to visualize, cupped his hands beneath the waste pipe, the researcher lifted his head away from the machine and, with one hand out behind him, groped his way back into the chair. At that moment, he saw to his horror that the condemned man had also taken up the officer’s invitation to have a closer look at the workings of the harrow. He’d tugged the sleepy soldier holding the chain forward a little and was leaning down over the glass. The researcher could see him uncertainly trying to make out whatever the two gentlemen had just been inspecting, but because he hadn’t had it explained, he couldn’t make any sense of it. He bent over one part and then another. His eyes kept running across the glass harrow. The researcher wanted to shoo him away because what he was doing was probably punishable. But the officer held the researcher back with one hand, picked up a lump of earth with the other and threw it at the soldier. The soldier opened his eyes with a start, saw what the condemned man had dared to do, dropped his rifle, braced the heels of his boots against the ground and yanked him back so hard he immediately fell over, then stood over him as he writhed on the ground, jangling his chains. “Stand him up!” yelled the officer, because he noticed that the researcher was becoming unhelpfully distracted by the condemned man. The researcher even leant past the harrow, not paying it any attention at all, just to see what was happening to him. “Be careful with him,” the officer yelled again. He went around the machine, grabbed the man under the armpits himself and, with the soldier’s help, finally got him on his feet, even though he kept falling over again.

  “So now I understand the whole process,” said the researcher when the officer came back to him.

  “Apart from the most important thing,” said the officer, taking the researcher by the arm and pointing to the top of the machine. “Up there in the engraver is the actual gear train that regulates the harrow’s movements; and that gear train is configured to match the drawing of the sentence. As I mentioned, I’m still using the sketches made by the old commandant. Here they are,”—he took several sheets of paper from the leather portfolio—“Unfortunately, I can’t let you hold them yourself, they’re the most precious thing I have. But please sit down and I’ll show them to you from this distance, you’ll be able to see everything just fine.” He held up the first sheet. The researcher would have liked to say something complimentary, but all he could see were labyrinthine lines criss-crossing each other and covering the paper so thickly it was hard to see any white space at all. “Read it,” said the officer.

  “I can’t,” said the researcher.

  “But it’s perfectly clear.”

  “It’s very elaborate,” said the researcher, dodging the demand. “But I’m afraid I can’t decipher it.”

  “Yes,” the officer said, then laughed and put the portfolio away again. “It’s no primary school calligraphy, that’s for sure. You’ve got to spend a long time reading it. I’m sure you’d be able to see it in the end. Of course, the lettering can’t be too simple; after all, it’s not supposed to kill at once, on average it takes somewhere in the region of twelve hours; the turning point comes after about six. So there have to be many, many embellishments surrounding the script itself; the actual text only marks the body in quite a narrow band; the rest of the body is for the flourishes. Can you see now why the work of the harrow and the machine is so special?—Look at this!” He jumped onto the ladder, turned a wheel and shouted down: “Watch out, move to the side!” The whole thing started to move. If the wheel hadn’t screeched, it would have been magnificent. The officer shook his fist at the screeching wheel as though it were a surprise to him, then spread his arms apologetically towards the researcher and hurriedly climbed back down to watch the machine’s motion from the ground. Something only he noticed still wasn’t quite right; he climbed back up, reached into the interior of the engraver with both hands, then, instead of using the ladder, quickly slid down one of the poles and, to make himself heard, shouted excitedly into the researcher’s ear: “Do you understand the process? The harrow starts writing; once it has finished applying the script to the man’s back for the first time, the cotton wool tilts and slowly turns his body to the side, to present a new area to the harrow. Meanwhile, the raw areas are pressed against the cotton wool, which, because of the way it has been prepared, immediately stops the bleeding and prepares the skin so the script can be deepened. Then, when the body is turned again, the prongs at the edge of the harrow, here, rip the cotton wool off the wounds and fling it into the ditch, letting the harrow get back to work. Going back and forth like this, it inscribes the sentence ever more deeply over the course of twelve hours. For the first six, the condemned man lives in much the same way as he did before, except that he’s in pain. After two hours, we take the felt block out of his mouth because he won’t have the strength to scream any more. Also, here at the head end, we put a kind of warm rice porridge into this electrically heated pot, so that the man can lap it up with his tongue if he wants to. No one has ever passed it up. At least, I’ve never heard of anyone, and my experience with this is pretty extensive. It’s only after around six hours that he’ll lose his interest in food. I’ll usually be kneeling down here so I can observe this phenomenon. The man rarely swallows his last mouthful, he’ll just turn it over in his mouth for a while and finally spit it into the ditch. I’ve got to be careful, otherwise I’d get sprayed in the face. You’ll see how quiet the man gets in the sixth hour! Understanding starts to dawn on even the stupidest ones. It begins around their eyes and spreads out from there. It’s a sight that might tempt you to lie down next to him under the harrow. Nothing much happens from then on, just that the man slowly deciphers the script, he purses his lips as if he’s listening. You’ve seen yourself that it’s not easy to decipher the script by looking at it; our man deciphers it from his wounds. It’s a lot of work; it’ll take him another six hours to get it done. At that point, the harrow skewers him completely and tosses him into the ditch, where he slaps down onto the bloody water and the cotton wool. That’s the end of the execution and we, the soldier and I, shovel some earth over him.”

  The researcher had tilted one ear towards the officer and was watching the machine with his hands in his pockets. The condemned man watched it too, but without understanding what it did. He crouched a little and followed the movements of the swinging needles until the soldier, at a signal from the officer, used a knife to cut through his shirt and trousers from behind so they fell off him; he tried to grab at the falling clothes to cover himself, but the soldier lifted him into the air and shook the last scraps of fabric off him. The officer paused the machine and in this new quiet the condemned man was laid down under the harrow. His chains were taken off and replaced with straps; at first, this seemed to strike the condemned man as an improvement. Then the harrow lowered itself a little further, because the man was comparatively thin. When the needles touched him, a shudder ran across his skin; the soldier was busy securing his right hand, but his left stretched out without knowing what for; it happened to reach in the direction of the researcher. The officer watched the researcher constantly from the corner of his eye, as if trying to see what impression the execution, which had been at least superficially explained, was making on him.

  The strap for the man’s right wrist snapped; the soldier had probably pulled it too tight. The soldier held up the torn strap, asking for help. The officer went over to him and, his face turned towards the researcher, said, “The machine has lots of moving
parts, it’s inevitable that something rips or breaks from time to time, but you can’t let that skew your overall opinion of it. A strap like this we can replace straight away; I’ll use a chain instead, even though that’ll make the bed’s motion a little less smooth for the right arm.” And while he fastened the chain, he added: “Our resources for maintaining the machine are very limited these days. Under the old commandant, I had an unlimited budget solely for repairs. We had a small warehouse where we kept all kinds of replacement parts. I admit that I almost got wasteful with it all, I mean before, not now, whatever the new commandant likes to claim; he’ll use anything as a pretext to attack the old way of doing things. These days he oversees the repair budget himself and if I put in a request for a new strap, I have to present the broken one as evidence it’s needed, then it’ll take ten days for a new one to arrive, and when it does it’ll be terrible quality and basically useless. As for how I’m supposed to keep the machine going in the meantime, that’s something no one bothers about.”

  The researcher considered. Intervening in other people’s affairs is always a dubious proposition. He was neither a resident of the penal colony nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution or even try to prevent it, they could have said to him: you’re a foreigner here, keep your opinions to yourself. He would have had no response to that; at most he could have added that he was a little surprised by his own behaviour, because the purpose of his travels was to act as an observer and in no way to try and get mixed up in other countries’ judicial processes. But in this instance it was very tempting. The injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the sentence were beyond doubt. Nobody could have suspected the researcher of having any vested interests, since the man was a stranger to him, not a compatriot of his and not someone who inspired any particular compassion. The researcher himself had arrived with letters of recommendation from the highest officials, had been welcomed here with the greatest respect, and the fact that he had been invited to watch this execution seemed to suggest that he was being asked his opinion of what was going on. That was all the more likely since the commandant, as he’d heard all too clearly, was no supporter of this process and seemed to be treating the officer with something bordering on hostility.

  At that moment, he heard the officer give a cry of rage. He had just, not without effort, pushed the felt block into the condemned man’s mouth when the latter succumbed to an irresistible nausea, closed his eyes and vomited. The officer hastily tore the block from his mouth and tried to turn the man’s head towards the ditch, but it was too late, the vomit had already spattered the machine. “It’s all the commandant’s fault!” shouted the officer and started wildly rattling one of the brass poles in his fury. “They’re making my machine as dirty as a cowshed.” With trembling hands, he showed the researcher what had happened. “Haven’t I spent hours trying to make the commandant understand that prisoners shouldn’t be given anything to eat for a day before the execution? But no, this new mild approach means they have other ideas. Before the man’s led away, the commandant’s ladies stuff him full of sweets. His whole life, he’s lived on stinking fish and now he’s got to eat sweets! That’s not a catastrophe, I wouldn’t complain, but why don’t we ever get a new block, something I’ve spent three months asking for? How could you not be disgusted, putting something in your mouth that more than a hundred men have sucked and bitten on while they died?”

  The condemned man was resting his head and looked peaceful; the soldier was busy using the man’s shirt to wipe the machine. The officer went over to the researcher who, suspecting something, stepped back a little. But the officer took him by the hand and pulled him aside. “I’d like to have a word with you in confidence,” he said, “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” said the researcher, and listened with his eyes lowered.

  “This procedure and this execution you’ve been given the opportunity to admire no longer has any public supporters here in our colony. I’m its only defender, and the only one standing up for the old commandant’s legacy. I can no longer hope to develop the procedure any further, it takes all my strength just to preserve what we already have. When the old commandant was still alive, the colony was full of his supporters; I may have some of his powers of persuasion, but I don’t have any of his authority; as a result, all his supporters have gone underground, there are still lots of them, but no one admits to it. Today—that is, an execution day—if you go to the tea house and listen in, all you’re likely to hear is ambivalent chatter. Those are all supporters, but under the current commandant and given his current attitude, they’re completely useless. So I ask you: should the arrival of this commandant and the ladies who influence him mean that a life’s work”—he gestured at the machine—“is destroyed? Can you allow that to happen? Even if you’re a foreigner who’s only spending a few days on our island? Believe me, there’s no time to lose; they’re already concocting an attack on my judicial authority; they hold discussions I’m not invited to in the commandant’s office; even your visit today is typical of the whole situation; they’re cowards and so they prefer to send you, a stranger, in their place.—You should have seen how different the executions were in the old days! A day before the execution had even started, this valley would be full of people; everyone came to watch; the commandant and his ladies would appear early in the morning; the camp was woken with fanfares; I reported that everything was ready; the colony’s best people—not one senior official would miss it—arranged themselves nearest to the machine; this pile of chairs is a miserable remnant from that time. The machine would be gleaming, freshly polished: I’d use some replacement parts for almost every execution. In front of hundreds of pairs of eyes—the spectators would be standing on tiptoe all the way to the cliffs—the condemned man would be laid under the harrow by the commandant himself. The work that these days is done by a common soldier was assigned to me, the president of the court, and was considered an honour. And then the execution began! There was no screeching to disturb the smooth running of the machine. Some people didn’t even watch, just lay there in the sand with their eyes closed; but they all knew: justice is being done. In the hush all you could hear was the groaning of the condemned man, muffled by the block. These days the machine can’t even elicit any groans that the block won’t stifle; back then, the writing needles discharged an acid that we’re not allowed to use any more. Well, and then the sixth hour came around! It was always impossible to find room for everyone who wanted to watch from close up. The commandant, with his usual wisdom, ordered the children to be let through; for my part, I got to be there because of my duties; I’d often be sitting right there with a small child in each arm. How attentively we watched the transfiguration of their tormented expressions; how close we kept our own faces to the splendour of that justice, which was already fleeting in the moment it was finally achieved! What good times, old friend!” The officer had plainly forgotten who was standing in front of him; he’d put his arm around the researcher and rested his head on the researcher’s shoulder. The researcher was extremely embarrassed and impatiently looked past the officer to the others. The soldier had finished cleaning up and was pouring more rice porridge from a can into the bowl. As soon as the condemned man noticed this—he seemed to have completely recovered—he again began to slurp up the porridge with his tongue. The soldier kept pushing him away, because the porridge was meant for later on, but he didn’t seem to be behaving properly either as he scooped up the prisoner’s porridge with his dirty hands and ate it himself.

  The officer quickly got a grip on himself. “I wasn’t trying to influence you emotionally,” he said. “I know it’s impossible to make someone now understand what those times were like. And after all, the machine’s work continues and it speaks for itself. It speaks for itself even if there’s no one else here. And at the end, the body will still make its strangely gentle descent into the ditch, even if there are no longer hundreds
of flies gathering around it like there used to be. Back then, we had to put up a handrail around the ditch; it’s long gone now.”

  The researcher wanted to turn his face away from the officer, and looked around aimlessly. The officer thought he was looking at the empty valley; he took the researcher’s hands, moved round to catch his eye, and asked, “So you can feel it, then, what a disgrace this is?”

  But the researcher said nothing. The officer left him alone for a moment. With his legs wide apart, his hands on his hips, he stayed quiet and stared at the ground. Then he gave the researcher an encouraging smile and said, “I was standing nearby yesterday when the commandant invited you to watch. I heard the invitation. I know the commandant. I understood the point of the invitation right away. Although he is actually powerful enough to act against me, he doesn’t dare, and instead he wants to expose me to the judgment of a respected outsider like yourself. It’s very calculating of him; this is your second day on the island, you didn’t know the old commandant or his thinking, you’re imbued with European attitudes, you might even be a principled opponent of the death penalty and especially of this kind of execution by machine; moreover, you’re watching this execution be carried out without any public participation, sadly, on a run-down machine—and taking all these things together (this is how the commandant thinks), isn’t it very possible that you would disapprove of this process? And if you did disapprove of it (I’m still speaking about how the commandant thinks), perhaps you wouldn’t keep that to yourself, because you presumably have faith in your well-honed convictions. You must have seen many idiosyncrasies among many different peoples and learnt to be respectful, so you probably won’t speak out with full force against this process in the way you would at home. But the commandant doesn’t even need you to do that. If you just said something in passing, one careless phrase, that would be enough. It wouldn’t even need to express what you really think as long as it seemed to correspond to his ideas. He’ll question you with all the cunning he can muster, I’ve got no doubt of that, and his ladies will sit in a circle around you with their ears pricked up. You might say, for example, ‘In my country, the judicial process is rather different,’ or ‘In my country, the accused is examined before sentencing,’ or ‘Our prisoners are allowed to know their sentence,’ or ‘We have several punishments other than the death penalty,’ or ‘We only had torture till the Middle Ages.’ All these comments are absolutely correct, and to you seem like innocent, matter-of-fact statements that don’t touch on my work here. But how will the commandant react to them? I can see him now, the good commandant, quickly pushing his chair aside and hurrying out onto the balcony; I can see his ladies streaming after him; I can hear him talking—his ladies say he has a voice like thunder—and what he’ll say is: ‘An eminent Western researcher studying judicial systems around the world has just said that our traditional way of doing things is inhumane. Having heard this opinion from such a prominent expert, I can naturally no longer allow that process to continue. I hereby decree, with immediate effect, that…’ and so on. You’ll want to intervene, you didn’t say what he’s announcing, you didn’t call my process inhumane, on the contrary, because of your deep insight you think it’s the most humane and most dignified you’ve ever seen, and you also admire the actual machinery—but it’s too late; you can’t even get out onto the balcony, which is packed with his ladies; you want to raise a protest; you want to shout; but a lady’s hand holds your mouth shut—and I and the old commandant’s work will be lost.”