Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

Lost in thought, they continued their walk through the torn-up courts where children no longer played.

They arrived. The clerk led them into the back room of the shop. They remained standing amid the lamps, their brief-cases under their arms; finally they put them down, cautiously. Suan and Pei squatted on the floor, Chinese fashion.

“Why are you laughing, Ch’en?” asked Pei, with anxiety.

He was not laughing, he was smiling, worlds removed from irony. To his amazement, he found himself possessed by a radiant exaltation. Everything became simple. His anguish had vanished. He knew the uneasiness to which his comrades were prey, in spite of their courage: throwing bombs, even in the most dangerous way, was adventure; the resolution to die was something else — he opposite, perhaps. He began to pace back and forth. In the back room there was only the light which came through the shop-now livid, as before a storm. In the difused half-light the bellies of the storm lamps glowed with a curious effect-rows of inverted question-

marks. Ch’en’s shadow, too indistinct to be a silhouette, was moving above the anxious eyes of the other two.

“Kyo is right: what we lack most is the sense of hara- kiri. But the Japanese who kills himself risks becoming a god, and that’s the beginning of filth and corruption. No: the blood must fall back upon men-and remain." Whenever Ch’en expressed a passionate conviction in Chinese, his voice took on an extraordinary intensity.

“I would rather try to succeed," said Suan, “-to suc- ceed-in several attempts than to make up my mind to die in one attempt."

Yet Suan felt beneath Ch’en’s words a current towards which he was being drawn. Where it led he did not know. He was sitting in rapt attention, vibrating to the sound of Ch’en’s words rather than to their meaning.

“I must throw myself under the car," answered Ch’en.

They followed him with their eyes, as he came and went, without turning their necks; he no longer looked at them. He stumbled on one of the lamps standing on the floor, caught his balance by putting his hands out to the waU. The lamp feU and broke with a tinkle. But there was no room for laughter. His righted shadow stood out indistinctly against the last rows of lamps. Suan was beginning to understand what Ch’en expected of him. Nevertheless, either through mistrust of himself or to put off what he foresaw, he said:

“What do you want?"

Ch’en suddenly realized that he did not know. He felt himself struggling, not against Suan, but against his idea, which was escaping him. At last:

“That this should not be lost."

“You want Pei and me to make a pledge to imitate you? Is that it?"

“It’s not a promise that I expect. I expect you to feel — a need.”

The reflections on the lamps were disappearing. It was growing darker in the windowless room-no doubt the clouds were piling up outside. Ch’en remembered Gisors: “Close to death, such a passion aspires to be passed on. ” Suddenly he understood. Suan also was beginning to understand:

“You want to make a kind of religion of terrorism?” Ch’en’s exaltation was growing. All words were hollow, absurd, too feeble to express what he wanted of them.

“Not a religion. The meaning of life. The. ”

His hand made the convulsive gesture of molding something, and his idea seemed to pulsate.

“. the complete possession of oneself. Total. Absolute. To know. Not to be looking, looking, always, for ideas, for duties. In the last hour I have felt nothing of what used to weigh on me. Do you hear? Nothing.” He was so completely carried away by his exaltation that he was no longer trying to convince them otherwise than by speaking about himself:

“I possess myself. But I don’t feel a menace, an anguish, as always before. Possessed, held tight, tight, as this hand holds the other. (he was pressing it with all his might). it’s not enough-like. ”

He picked up one of the pieces of glass from the broken lamp. A large triangular fragment full of reflections. With one stroke he drove it into his thigh. His tense voice was charged with a savage certainty, but he seemed much more to possess his exaltation than to be possessed by it. Not at all mad. Now the other two could barely see him, and yet he filed the room. Suan began to be afraid:

“I am less intelligent than you, Ch'en, but for me … for me, no. I saw my father hung by his hands, beaten on the belly with a rattan-stick to make him tell where his master had hidden the money which he didn’t have. It's for those to whom we belong that I’m fighting, not for myself.”

“For them, you can’t do better than to make up your mind to die. No other man can be so effective as the man who has chosen that. If we had made up our minds to it, we should not have missed Chiang Kai-shek a while back. You know it.”

“You-perhaps you need that. I don’t know. ” He was struggling with himself. “If I agreed, you see, it would seem to me that I was not dying for all the others, but. ”

“But?”

Almost completely obliterated, the feeble afternoon light lingered without completely disappearing.

“For you.”

A strong smell of kerosene recalled to Ch’en the oil cans for the burning of the station, the first day. of the insurrection. But everything was plunging into the past, even Suan, since he would not follow him. Yet the only thing which his present state of mind did not transform into nothingness was the idea of creating those doomed Executioners, that race of avengers. This birth was taking place in him, like all births, with agony and exalta- tion-he was not master of it. He could no longer endure any presence. He got up.

“You who write,” he said to Pei, “you will explain.”

They picked up their brief-cases. Pei was wiping his glasses. Ch’en pulled up his trouser-leg, bandaged his thigh without washing the wound-what was the use? It would not have time to get infected-before going out.

“One always does the same thing,” he said to himself, disturbed, thinking of the knife he had driven into his arm.

“I shall go alone,” he said, “and I shall manage alone, tonight.”

“I’ll organize something, just the same,” Suan answered.

“It will be too late.”

In front of the shop, Ch’en took a step to the left. Pei was following him. Suan remained motionless. A second step. Pei still followed him. Ch’en noticed that the youth, his glasses in his hand-so much more human, that youngster’s face, without glasses over his eyes-was weeping in silence.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m coming.”

Ch’en stopped. He had always believed him to be of Suan’s opinion; he pointed to the latter.

“I shall go with you,” Pei persisted.

He avoided speaking any more than was necessary, his voice broken, his Adam’s apple shaken by silent sobs.

“Pledge yourself.”

He clutched Pei’s arm.

“Pledge yourself,” he repeated.

He turned away. Pei remained on the sidewalk, his mouth open, still wiping his glasses, comical. Never had Ch’en thought one could be so alone.

Clappique had expected to find Kyo at home. But he was still out. In the large room strewn with sketches which a disciple in a kimono was picking up, Gisors was 184

conversing with his brother-in-law, the painter Kama. “Hello, old dear! Into my arms!”

He sat down quietly.

“Too bad your son isn’t here.”

“Do you want to wait for him?”

“Let’s try. I need to see him like the devil. What is that new little c-cactus, under the opium-table? The collection is becoming worthy of respect. Ravishing, my dear friend, r-ravish-ing! I must buy one. Where did you find it?”