“Rashe Musai,” the adjutant said to the iron stool.
“Rashe Musai,” Pandi repeated through the open door.
Rashe Musai turned out to be a thin, completely jaded little man in a tattered night robe and one slipper. As soon as he sat down, the brigadier, with his face flushed bright red, yelled at him, “So, lying low, are you, you scum?”—at which Rashe Musai started verbosely and confusedly explaining that he wasn’t lying low at all, that he had a sick wife and three children, that he worked in a factory, as a cabinetmaker, and that he wasn’t guilty of anything.
Maxim was already expecting them to let him go, but the brigadier abruptly stood up and announced that Rashe Musai, forty-two years of age, married, a worker, with a record of two arrests, having violated the terms of the decree concerning exile, was sentenced, in accordance with the law concerning preventative measures, to seven years of educational labor with a subsequent prohibition on residence in the central regions of the country.
It took Rashe Musai about a minute to grasp the meaning of this sentence, and then a terrible scene was played out. The wretched cabinetmaker wept, incoherently begging forgiveness, and attempted to go down on his knees while carrying on shouting and crying, until Pandi eventually dragged him out into the corridor. And Maxim sensed Chachu’s probing glance on him once again.
“Kivi Popshu,” the adjutant announced.
A broad-shouldered young guy, whose face was disfigured by some kind of skin disease, was shoved in through the door. He turned out to be a habitual house burglar, a repeat offender who had been caught red-handed at the scene of the crime, and he acted in a manner that was simultaneously insolent and ingratiating. Sometimes he started imploring the gentlemen bosses not to condemn him to a ferocious death, and then he suddenly started hysterically giggling, cracking jokes and telling stories from his own life, which all began in an identical manner: “I’m breaking into this building . . .” He didn’t give anyone a chance to speak.
After making several unsuccessful attempts to ask a question, the brigadier leaned back in his chair and looked to the left and the right with an indignant air. Cornet Chachu said in a flat voice, “Candidate Sim, stop his mouth.”
Maxim didn’t know how mouths were stopped, so he simply took Kivi Popshu by the shoulder and shook him a couple of times. Kivi Popshu’s jaws clattered, he bit his tongue, and he stopped talking.
Then the plainclothes man, who had been observing the prisoner with keen interest for a long time, declared, “I’ll take that one. He’ll come in useful.”
“Excellent!” said the brigadier, and ordered Kivi Popshu to be sent back to his cell.
When the young guy had been led out, the adjutant said, “That’s all the trash. Now we’ll start on the group.”
“Begin straightaway with the leader,” the plainclothes man advised. “What’s his name—Ketshef?”
The adjutant glanced into his papers and spoke to the iron stool. “Gel Ketshef.”
They brought in someone Maxim recognized—the man in the white doctor’s coat. He was wearing handcuffs, and therefore held his hands unnaturally extended in front of him. His eyes were red and his face was puffy. He sat down and started looking at the picture above the brigadier’s head.
“Is your name Gel Ketshef?” the brigadier asked.
“Yes.”
“A dentist?”
“I was.”
“And what is your relationship with the dentist Gobbi?”
“I bought his practice.”
“Why are you not practicing?”
“I sold the equipment.”
“Why?”
“Straitened circumstances,” said Ketshef.
“What is your relationship with Ordi Tader?”
“She is my wife.”
“Do you have children?”
“We did. A son.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do during the war?”
“He fought.”
“Where? In what capacity?”
“In the southwest. First as the head of a field hospital, than as the commander of an infantry company.”
“Injuries? Decorations?”
“He had all of that.”
“Why did you decide to engage in anti-state activity?”
“Because in the entire history of the world there has never been a more abhorrent state,” said Ketshef. “Because I love my wife and my child. Because you killed my friends and depraved my people. Because I have always hated you. Is that enough?”
“Yes,” the brigadier calmly said. “More than enough. Why don’t you tell us instead how much the Hontians pay you? Or are you paid by Pandeia?”
The man in the white coat laughed. It was spine-chilling laughter, the way a corpse might laugh. “Drop this comedy, Brigadier,” he said. “What do you need it for?
“Are you the leader of the group?”
“Yes. I was.”
“Which members of the organization can you name?”
“Nobody.”
“Are you certain?” the plainclothes man suddenly asked.
“Yes.”
“Listen, Ketshef,” the plainclothes man said in a gentle voice. “You are in an extremely difficult situation. We know everything about your group. We even know something about your group’s contacts. You must realize that we received this information from a certain individual, and now it depends entirely on you what name this individual will have—Ketshef or something different . . .”
Ketshef said nothing, keeping his head lowered.
“You!” Cornet Chachu croaked. “You, a former combat officer! Do you understand what you are being offered? Not life, massaraksh! But honor!”
Ketshef laughed again and started coughing, but he didn’t speak. Maxim could sense that this man wasn’t afraid of anything. Neither death nor dishonor. He had already been through all of that. He already regarded himself as both dead and dishonored . . .
The brigadier looked at the plainclothes man, who nodded. The brigadier shrugged, got to his feet, and announced that Gel Ketshef, fifty years of age, married, a dental practitioner, was sentenced to execution in accordance with the law concerning the protection of public health, the sentence to be carried out within forty-eight hours. The sentence could be commuted if the condemned individual consented to provide testimony.
After Ketshef was led out, the brigadier remarked to the plainclothes man with a discontented air, “I don’t understand you. In my opinion, he was speaking quite willingly. A typical blabber—according to your own classification. I don’t understand.”
The plainclothes man laughed and said: “Well that, old man, is why you command a brigade, and I . . . and I am where I am.”
“All the same,” the brigadier said in a resentful tone of voice. “The leader of the group . . . inclined to philosophize a bit . . . I don’t understand.”
“Old man,” the civilian said, “have you never seen a philosophizing corpse?”
“Ah, nonsense.”
“But really?”
“Perhaps you’ve seen one?” the brigadier asked.
“Yes, right now,” the civilian said. “And this is not the first time, note . . . I am alive, he is dead—what is there to talk about? That’s how Verbliben puts it, I think?”
Cornet Chachu suddenly got up, walked right up to Maxim, and hissed up into his face: “What way is that to stand, Candidate? Which way are you looking? Attention! Eyes to the front! Stop shifting those eyes around!” He scrutinized Maxim for several seconds, breathing heavily, with his pupils narrowing and expanding at a furious rate—then he went back to his place and lit a cigarette.
“Right,” said the adjutant. “That leaves: Ordi Tader, Memo Gramenu, and another two, who refused to give their names.”
“Then let’s start with them,” the civilian suggested. “Call them out.”
“Number Seventy-Three Thirteen,” said the adjutant.
> Number Seventy-Three Thirteen walked in and sat down on the stool. He was also wearing handcuffs, although one of his hands was artificial—a lean, sinewy man with unnaturally thick lips, swollen from repeated biting.
“Your name?” the brigadier asked.
“Which one?” the one-handed man merrily asked. Maxim actually shuddered—he had been certain that the one-handed man would remain silent.
“Do you have a lot of them? Then give us the real one.”
“My real name is Number Seventy-Three Thirteen.”
“Riiight . . . What were you doing in Ketshef’s apartment?”
“Lying in a faint. For your information, I’m very good at doing that. Would you like me to show you?”
“Don’t bother,” said the plainclothes man. He was very angry. “You’ll be needing that skill later.”
The one-handed man suddenly broke into laughter. He laughed with a loud, resounding laugh, like a young man, and Maxim was horrified to realize that he was laughing sincerely. The men at the table sat and listened to that laughter as if they had turned to stone.
“Massaraksh!” The one-handed man eventually said, wiping away his tears on his shoulder. “Oh, what a threat! . . . But then, you’re still a young man . . . They burned all the archives after the coup, and you don’t even know just how petty you’ve all become . . . That was a great mistake, eliminating the old cadres—they would have taught you to take a calm approach to your duties. You’re too emotional. You hate too much.
“But your job has to be done as drily as possible, formally—for the money. That makes a tremendous impression on a prisoner. It’s terrible when you’re being tortured not by your enemy but by a bureaucrat. Look at my left hand here. They sawed it off for me in good old prewar state security, in three sessions, and every action they took was accompanied by extensive correspondence. The butchers were doing a laborious, thankless job—they were bored, and while they sawed off my hand, they swore and grumbled about their miserly rates of pay. And I was terrified. It took me a great effort of will to stop myself from blabbing.
“But now . . . I can see how much you hate me. You hate me, I hate you. Wonderful! But you’ve been hating me for less than twenty years, and I’ve been hating you for more than thirty. Back then you were still walking in under the table and torturing the cats, young man.”
“I get it,” said the plainclothes man. “An old bird. The workers’ friend. I thought they’d killed you all off.”
“No chance!” the one-handed man retorted. “You need to get a bit more clued-in about the world you live in . . . but you still imagine that they canceled the old history and started a new one . . . What terrible ignorance, there’s nothing to talk to you about—”
“That’s enough, I think,” said the brigadier, addressing the plainclothes man, who made a rapid note of something on the magazine and let the brigadier read it. The plainclothes man was smiling.
Then the brigadier shrugged, thought for a moment, and turned to the cornet. “Witness Chachu, how did the accused conduct himself during the arrest?”
“He lay sprawled out, with his toes turned up,” the cornet somberly replied.
“That is, he didn’t offer any resistance . . . Riiight . . .” The brigadier thought for another moment, got up, and announced the sentence. “The accused, number Seventy-Three Thirteen, is hereby condemned to death, but no term is set for the sentence to be carried out, and until such time as the sentence is carried out, the prisoner shall be employed in educational labor.”
An expression of contemptuous bewilderment appeared on Cornet Chachu’s face, and the accused quietly laughed and shook his head as he was led out, as if to say, Well, would you believe it!
After that Number Seventy-Three Fourteen was led in. He was the man who had been shouting while writhing around on the floor. He was full of fear, but he acted defiantly. He shouted out from the threshold that he wouldn’t answer questions and wasn’t looking for leniency. And he really did remain silent, without answering a single question, even when the plainclothes man asked if he had any complaints about bad treatment. It all ended with the brigadier looking at the plainclothes man and clearing his throat in a tone of inquiry. The plainclothes man nodded and said, “Yes, send him to me!” He seemed very pleased.
Then the brigadier looked through the remaining sheets of paper and said, “Let us go and get something to eat, gentlemen. This is impossible.” The court retired and Maxim and Pandi were permitted to stand at ease.
When the cornet had also left, Pandi said, “How do you like those creeps? Worse than snakes, so help me! And what’s the worst thing about it all: if their heads didn’t hurt, how could you tell they were degenerates? It’s terrifying to think what would happen then.”
Maxim didn’t answer. He didn’t feel like talking. The picture of this world that had seemed so logical and clear only a day ago had become blurred and murky now. And in any case, Pandi didn’t need an answer from him. After removing his gloves to avoid staining them, the active private took a paper bag of sugar candy out of his pocket, treated Maxim to a piece, and started telling him how much he hated this posting. In the first place, he was afraid of catching something from the degenerates. And in the second place, some of them, like that one-hander, came on so cocky, it was almost more than he could do not to thump them. There was one time he stuck it out for as long as he could, and then did thump one—he was almost demoted to candidate. The cornet had stood up for him though: he only gave him twenty days, and another forty without leave . . .
Maxim sucked on his sugar candy, listening with half an ear and not saying anything. Hate, he thought. This side hates that side, and that side hates this side. For what? The most abhorrent state of all time. Why? Where did he get that from? They’ve depraved the people. How? What could that mean? And that man in plainclothes—he couldn’t have been hinting at torture, surely! That was a long, long time ago, in the Middle Ages . . . But then again, fascism. Yes, I recall now, it wasn’t only the Middle Ages. Maybe this is a fascist state? Massaraksh, just what is fascism? Aggression, racial theory . . . Hitler. No, Himmler. Yes, yes—a theory of racial superiority, mass exterminations, genocide, world conquest . . . lies, elevated to a basic principle of politics, the state’s lies. I remember that very clearly, that was what staggered me most of all. But I don’t think there’s any of that here. Is Gai a fascist? And Rada? No, it’s something else here—the aftermath of war, explicitly cruel manners and behavior as a consequence of the difficult situation. The majority intent on suppressing the opposition of the minority. Capital punishment, penal servitude. This is all repulsive to me, but what else could you expect?
And what exactly does the opposition consist of? Yes, they hate the existing order. But what do they actually do, in concrete terms? Not a single word was said about that. It’s strange . . . As if the judges had conspired in advance with the accused, and the accused had no problems with that. Well, it certainly looked very much that way. The accused are endeavoring to destroy the antiballistic defense system, and the judges know that perfectly well, and the accused know that the judges know that perfectly well—everybody sticks to his own convictions, there’s nothing to talk about, and all that remains is to officially confirm the existing state of their relations. They eliminate the first one, dispatch the second one to be “educated,” and the third one . . . for some reason the plainclothes man takes the third one for himself. It would be a good thing now to understand what connection exists between a pain in the head and a partiality for opposition. Why is it only degenerates who endeavor to destroy the system of ADTs? And not even all degenerates, at that?
“Mr. Pandi,” he said, “the Hontians, are they all degenerates, have you heard?”
Pandi started thinking hard. “How can I put it? . . . You see,” he eventually said, “we mostly deal with internal business concerning the degenerates, the urban ones and the ones they have down in the South. But what’s up there in Hontia or wherev
er else, they probably teach the army men about that. The most important thing you have to know is that the Hontians are the most vicious external enemies our state has. Before the war they had to knuckle under to us, and now they’re getting their own back, out of spite . . . And the degenerates are our internal enemies. That’s all there is to it. You got that?”
“More or less,” said Maxim, and Pandi immediately handed him a reprimand: in the Guards you didn’t answer like that; in the Guards you answered “affirmative” or “negative,” while “more or less” was a civilian expression. The corporal’s sister could answer you like that, but you were on duty here, so you couldn’t do that.
Probably he would have carried on pontificating for a long time—it was a gratifying subject, close to his heart, and he had an attentive, respectful listener—but at this point the gentlemen officers came back in. Pandi broke off midword, whispered “Attention,” and after performing the requisite maneuvers between the table and the iron stool, froze in his position. Maxim also froze.
The gentlemen officers were in an excellent mood. Cornet Chachu was telling the others in a loud voice, with a disdainful air, about how in the Eighty-Fourth they stuck raw dough straight onto red-hot armor plating, and it was really tasty. The brigadier and the plainclothes man objected that the spirit of the Guards was all very fine, but the Guards’ cuisine should be well up to the mark, and the fewer canned goods, the better. Narrowing his eyes, the adjutant suddenly started quoting some cookbook or other verbatim, and all the others fell silent and listened to him for rather a long time, with a strange, tender expression on their faces. Then the adjutant swallowed his own saliva the wrong way and started coughing, and the brigadier sighed and said, “Yes, gentlemen . . . But nonetheless, we have to finish up here.”
The adjutant, still coughing, opened his folder, rummaged in the papers, and announced in a strangled voice, “Ordi Tader.”
And the woman came in, just as white and almost transparent as the day before, as if she were still in a swoon, but when Pandi reached out in his customary manner to take her by the elbow and sit her down, she pulled sharply away, as if reacting to some kind of vermin, and Maxim fancied that she was going to hit Pandi. She didn’t hit him—her hands were shackled—she merely enunciated very clearly, “Don’t touch me, you lackey,” then walked around Pandi and sat down on the stool.
The Inhabited Island Page 12
