by Gerald Kersh
“If you look closely,” said the jailer, “you will see that these are not old carvings. They were done by the last prisoner here. He died . . . I forget exactly when; about ten years back. I forget his name. It was John something-or-other. I don’t remember what he was here for. It was something to do with politics. He was condemned to perpetual solitary confinement. He was a young man of very good family. I was jailer here when they first brought him in. ‘Jan,’ they said to me, ‘Jan, this one’s for the Black Hole.’ (That’s what they called this cell, gentlemen, The Black Hole.) ‘This one’s for the Black Hole,’ they said. ‘No communications. Life imprisonment. Lock him up.’ So I said: ‘He won’t be out of this in a hurry,’ I said. ‘I’ve always done my duty, thank God.’ And so I have, gentlemen.
“Well, at first he said nothing. You could see he was a proper gentleman. He would look at me as if I was dirt when I brought him his meals. But I said to myself: ‘You wait, my fine sir: you’ll be glad enough to talk to me sooner or later.’ And so he was.
“After a month of it, he said to me, one morning: ‘What day is it?’ Now no communications means no conversation, so I said nothing and went out.
“Next day he said: ‘For the love of God, what day is it? Have I been here a year yet?’ I couldn’t help laughing. A year! And he hadn’t been here five weeks.
“By the end of the second month he would have given anything for a chat. Yes, gentlemen, I’m only a humble warder of a jail, but I’ve had the nobility on their knees before me in my time.
“He went and fell on his knees, and said: ‘For the love of God, talk to me!’ I shook my head. Duty is duty. And I used to hear him laughing and crying. Cruel, sir? Maybe so. But if I’m employed to keep a man without communications, I keep a man without communications.
“After three months he was offering me fortunes. ‘Be human,’ he’d say. ‘Be kind. Talk, and I’ll pay you well. I’m innocent, I swear! I’ll pay you thousands. I’ll pay you a thousand for a word, one word.’ But I’m incorruptible. Besides, where would he get thousands from? Well, gentlemen, after that he raved and shouted a bit; and in the end he shut up again.
“You understand, I was told that if he wanted to do away with himself, that was quite all right. He had a knife, fork, spoon, and so on. One morning he asked for a new knife. I looked at the old one, and saw it was worn right down to the handle. Aha, I thought. He’s trying to cut a way out; and I laughed a bit, for these walls are solid granite, fourteen feet thick, with a moat above them.
“I flashed my light around, and saw that he had been trying to scratch a face on the wall; it was quite lifelike. He was occupying his mind, as the saying goes. So I asked for instructions, for I had no orders about new knives, and at last I got him one, and he kept quiet again.
“Mind you, every week or so he’d burst out with: ‘Have I been here ten years yet?’ and ‘Have I been here twenty years yet?’ and ‘Is my hair white yet?’ but that got less and less as time went on. He went on scratching his little pictures on the walls, just like you see; face after face, figure after figure. It’s quite a novelty, really, seeing as he did every stroke of it in the dark, for we didn’t let him have a light. I had no instructions about that.
“But the carving kept his mind occupied. He started to wear out too many knives, so we gave him wooden knives to eat with and old nails and screws to play about with. Many’s the bushel he must have worn out on these walls, gentlemen, in the thirty years he was here.”
We looked around us at the damp walls of impregnable stone. We felt, already, a frightful sensation of halted time. The tomb-like smell of the place seemed to stick to the roofs of our mouths. The dank air got through our overcoats and clung to our skin.
“Thirty years,” I said. “God have mercy!”
“Thirty-seven,” said the jailer. “I remember now, thirty-seven, because he came here on my little girl’s tenth birthday.
“He filled up all four walls. And do you know what? When we had instructions to remove him to the Infirmary ten years ago—you’ll laugh at this bit—he kicked and struggled. He bruised my knee, he did. And do you know what he said? He said: ‘Go away! Can’t you leave me in peace for five minutes?’ He died on the road. It’s my belief the air killed him.
“Now, gentlemen, if you’re ready, we’ll go along to the torture-chamber . . .”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, in 1911. He left school and took on a series of jobs—salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter—and at the same time was writing his first two novels. His career began inauspiciously with the release of his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, published when Kersh was 23: the book was withdrawn after only 80 copies were sold when Kersh’s relatives brought a libel suit against him and his publisher. He gained notice with his third novel, Night and the City (1938) and for the next thirty years published numerous novels and short story collections, including the comic masterpiece Fowlers End (1957), which some critics, including Harlan Ellison, believe to be his best.
Kersh fought in the Second World War as a member of the Coldstream Guards before being discharged in 1943 after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. He traveled widely before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, because “the Welfare State and confiscatory taxation make it impossible to work [in Great Britain], if you’re a writer.”
Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age 57 in 1968 of cancer of the throat.
