Collected Stories (26 page)

‘And how does the sentence run?’ asked the explorer.

‘You don’t know that either?’ said the officer in amazement, and bit his lips. ‘Forgive me if my explanations seem rather incoherent. I do beg your pardon. You see, the Commandant always used to do the explaining; but the new Commandant shirks this duty; yet that such an important visitor’ – the explorer tried to deprecate the honor with both hands, the officer, however, insisted – ‘that such an important visitor should not even be told about the kind of sentence we pass is a new development, which —’ He was just on the point of using strong language but checked himself and said only: ‘I was not informed, it is not my fault. In any case, I am certainly the best person to explain our procedure, since I have here’ – he patted his breast pocket – ‘the relevant drawings made by our former Commandant.’

‘The Commandant’s own drawings?’ asked the explorer. ‘Did he combine everything in himself, then? Was he soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist, and draughtsman?’

‘Indeed he was,’ said the officer, nodding assent, with a remote, glassy look. Then he inspected his hands critically; they did not seem clean enough to him for touching the drawings; so he went over to the bucket and washed them again. Then he drew out a small leather wallet and said: ‘Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. This prisoner, for instance’ – the officer indicated the man – ‘will have written on his body:
HONOR THY SUPERIORS
!’

The explorer glanced at the man; he stood, as the officer
pointed him out, with bent head, apparently listening with all his ears in an effort to catch what was being said. Yet the movement of his blubber lips, closely pressed together, showed clearly that he could not understand a word. Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: ‘Does he know his sentence?’ ‘No,’ said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: ‘He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?’ ‘No,’ said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: ‘There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.’ The explorer intended to make no answer, but he felt the prisoner’s gaze turned on him; it seemed to ask if he approved such goings-on. So he bent forward again, having already leaned back in his chair, and put another question: ‘But surely he knows that he has been sentenced?’ Nor that either,’ said the officer, smiling at the explorer as if expecting him to make further surprising remarks. ‘No,’ said the explorer, wiping his forehead, ‘then he can’t know either whether his defense was effective?’ ‘He has had no chance of putting up a defense,’ said the officer, turning his eyes away as if speaking to himself and so sparing the explorer the shame of hearing self-evident matters explained. ‘But he must have had some chance of defending himself,’ said the explorer, and rose from his seat.

The officer realized that he was in danger of having his exposition of the apparatus held up for a long time; so he went up to the explorer, took him by the arm, waved a hand toward the condemned man, who was standing very straight now that he had so obviously become the center of attention – the soldier had also given the chain a jerk – and said: ‘This is how the matter stands. I have been appointed judge in this penal colony. Despite my youth. For I was the former Commandant’s assistant in all penal matters and know more about the apparatus than anyone. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have
higher courts to scrutinize them. That is not the case here, or at least, it was not the case in the former Commandant’s time. The new man has certainly shown some inclination to interfere with my judgments, but so far I have succeeded in fending him off and will go on succeeding. You wanted to have the case explained; it is quite simple, like all of them. A captain reported to me this morning that this man, who had been assigned to him as a servant and sleeps before his door, had been asleep on duty. It is his duty, you see, to get up every time the hour strikes and salute the captain’s door. Not an exacting duty, and very necessary, since he has to be a sentry as well as a servant, and must be alert in both functions. Last night the captain wanted to see if the man was doing his duty. He opened the door as the clock struck two and there was his man curled up asleep. He took his riding whip and lashed him across the face. Instead of getting up and begging pardon, the man caught hold of his master’s legs, shook him, and cried: “Throw that whip away or I’ll eat you alive.” – That’s the evidence. The captain came to me an hour ago, I wrote down his statement and appended the sentence to it. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all quite simple. If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I’ve got him and I won’t let him go. – Is that quite clear now? But we’re wasting time, the execution should be beginning and I haven’t finished explaining the apparatus yet.’ He pressed the explorer back into his chair, went up again to the apparatus, and began: ‘As you see, the shape of the Harrow corresponds to the human form; here is the harrow for the torso, here are the harrows for the legs. For the head there is only this one small spike. Is that quite clear?’ He bent amiably forward toward the explorer, eager to provide the most comprehensive explanations.

The explorer considered the Harrow with a frown. The explanation of the judicial procedure had not satisfied him.
He had to remind himself that this was in any case a penal colony where extraordinary measures were needed and that military discipline must be enforced to the last. He also felt that some hope might be set on the new Commandant, who was apparently of a mind to bring in, although gradually, a new kind of procedure which the officer’s narrow mind was incapable of understanding. This train of thought prompted his next question: ‘Will the Commandant attend the execution?’ ‘It is not certain,’ said the officer, wincing at the direct question, and his friendly expression darkened. ‘That is just why we have to lose no time. Much as I dislike it, I shall have to cut my explanations short. But of course tomorrow, when the apparatus has been cleaned – its one drawback is that it gets so messy – I can recapitulate all the details. For the present, then, only the essentials. – When the man lies down on the Bed and it begins to vibrate, the Harrow is lowered onto his body. It regulates itself automatically so that the needles barely touch his skin; once contact is made the steel ribbon stiffens immediately into a rigid band. And then the performance begins. An ignorant onlooker would see no difference between one punishment and another. The Harrow appears to do its work with uniform regularity. As it quivers, its points pierce the skin of the body which is itself quivering from the vibration of the Bed. So that the actual progress of the sentence can be watched, the Harrow is made of glass. Getting the needles fixed in the glass was a technical problem, but after many experiments we overcame the difficulty. No trouble was too great for us to take, you see. And now anyone can look through the glass and watch the inscription taking form on the body. Wouldn’t you care to come a little nearer and have a look at the needles?’

The explorer got up slowly, walked across, and bent over the Harrow. ‘You see,’ said the officer, ‘there are two kinds of needles arranged in multiple patterns. Each long needle has a short one beside it. The long needle does the writing, and the short needle sprays a jet of water to wash away the blood and keep the inscription clear. Blood and water
together are then conducted here through small runnels into this main runnel and down a waste pipe into the pit.’ With his finger the officer traced the exact course taken by the blood and water. To make the picture as vivid as possible he held both hands below the outlet of the waste pipe as if to catch the outflow, and when he did this the explorer drew back his head and feeling behind him with one hand sought to return to his chair. To his horror he found that the condemned man too had obeyed the officer’s invitation to examine the Harrow at close quarters and had followed him. He had pulled forward the sleepy soldier with the chain and was bending over the glass. One could see that his uncertain eyes were trying to perceive what the two gentlemen had been looking at, but since he had not understood the explanation he could not make head or tail of it. He was peering this way and that way. He kept running his eyes along the glass. The explorer wanted to drive him away, since what he was doing was probably culpable. But the officer firmly restrained the explorer with one hand and with the other took a clod of earth from the rampart and threw it at the soldier. He opened his eyes with a jerk, saw what the condemned man had dared to do, let his rifle fall, dug his heels into the ground, dragged his prisoner back so that he stumbled and fell immediately, and then stood looking down at him, watching him struggling and rattling in his chains. ‘Set him on his feet!’ yelled the officer, for he noticed that the explorer’s attention was being too much distracted by the prisoner. In fact he was even leaning right across the Harrow, without taking any notice of it, intent only on finding out what was happening to the prisoner. ‘Be careful with him!’ cried the officer again. He ran around the apparatus, himself caught the condemned man under the shoulders, and with the soldier’s help got him up on his feet, which kept slithering from under him.

‘Now I know all about it,’ said the explorer as the officer came back to him. ‘All except the most important thing,’ he answered, seizing the explorer’s arm and pointing upwards:
‘In the Designer are all the cogwheels that control the movements of the Harrow, and this machinery is regulated according to the inscription demanded by the sentence. I am still using the guiding plans drawn by the former Commandant. Here they are’ – he extracted some sheets from the leather wallet – ‘but I’m sorry I can’t let you handle them, they are my most precious possessions. Just take a seat and I’ll hold them in front of you like this, then you’ll be able to see everything quite well.’ He spread out the first sheet of paper. The explorer would have liked to say something appreciative, but all he could see was a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other, which covered the paper so thickly that it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them. ‘Read it,’ said the officer. ‘I can’t,’ said the explorer. ‘Yet it’s clear enough,’ said the officer. ‘It’s very ingenious,’ said the explorer evasively, ‘but I can’t make it out.’ ‘Yes,’ said the officer with a laugh, putting the paper away again, ‘it’s no calligraphy for school children. It needs to be studied closely. I’m quite sure that in the end you would understand it too. Of course the script can’t be a simple one; it’s not supposed to kill a man straight off, but only after an interval of, on an average, twelve hours; the turning point is reckoned to come at the sixth hour. So there have to be lots and lots of flourishes around the actual script; the script itself runs around the body only in a narrow girdle; the rest of the body is reserved for the embellishments. Can you appreciate now the work accomplished by the Harrow and the whole apparatus? – Just watch it!’ He ran up the ladder, turned a wheel, called down: ‘Look out, keep to one side!’ and everything started working. If the wheel had not creaked, it would have been marvelous. The officer, as if surprised by the noise of the wheel, shook his fist at it, then spread out his arms in excuse to the explorer, and climbed down rapidly to peer at the working of the machine from below. Something perceptible to no one save himself was still not in order; he clambered up again, did something with both hands in the interior of the Designer, then slid down
one of the rods, instead of using the ladder, so as to get down quicker, and with the full force of his lungs, to make himself heard at all in the noise, yelled in the explorer’s ear: ‘Can you follow it? The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the man’s back, the layer of cotton wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written on lies on the cotton wool, which is specially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script. Then these teeth at the edge of the Harrow, as the body turns further around, tear the cotton wool away from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and there is more work for the Harrow. So it keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole twelve hours. The first six hours the condemned man stays alive almost as before, he suffers only pain. After two hours the felt gag is taken away, for he has no longer strength to scream. Here, into this electrically heated basin at the head of the Bed, some warm rice pap is poured, from which the man, if he feels like it, can take as much as his tongue can lap. Not one of them ever misses the chance. I can remember none, and my experience is extensive. Only about the sixth hour does the man lose all desire to eat. I usually kneel down here at that moment and observe what happens. The man rarely swallows his last mouthful, he only rolls it around his mouth and spits it out into the pit. I have to duck just then or he would spit it in my face. But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. By that time the Harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit,
where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool. Then the judgment has been fulfilled, and we, the soldier and I, bury him.’