Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“Yes. And you?”

“No. Under the empire, I was a mandarin. ”

Kyo was getting used to the darkness. Indeed, the man was well along in years-an old white cat, almost without a nose, with a thin mustache and pointed ears.

“. I sell women. When things are good, I give money to the police and they leave me alone. When things are bad, they think I keep the money and they throw me in prison. But as long as things are bad I prefer to be fed in prison rather than die of hunger in freedom. ”

“Here!”

“You know, one gets used to it. Outside, it’s not so good, when you’re old, like me, and feeble. ” “How is it that you’re not with the rest?”

“I sometimes give money to the clerk at the entrance. Also, every time I come here I get the same fare as the ‘temporaries.’ ”

The warder was bringing the food: he passed between

the bars two small bowls filled with a mud-colored doughy mass exuding a steam as fetid as the atmosphere. He dipped his ladle into a pot, tossed the compact porridge into a bowl with a “plop,” and thereupon passed it to the prisoners in the other cage, one by one.

“No use my taking any,” said a voice: “it’s for tomorrow.”

(“His execution,” said the mandarin to Kyo.)

“Me too,” said another voice. “So you could very well give me a double portion, couldn’t you? It makes me hungry?”

“Do you want my fist in your face?” asked the warder.

A soldier entered, asked him a question. He passed into the right-hand cell, kicked a limp body:

“He stirs,” he said. “No doubt he’s still alive. ”

The soldier left.

Kyo looked with concentrated attention, tried to see to which of those shadows belonged those voices so close to death-like himself, perhaps. Impossible to make out: those men would die without having been anything to him but voices.

“Aren’t you eating?” asked his companion.

“No.”

“In the beginning it’s always that way. ”

He took Kyo’s bowl. The warder entered, gave him a violent slap in the face and went out again carrying the bowl, without a word.

“\Vhy didn’t he touch me?” asked Kyo in a low voice.

“I was the only guilty one, but it’s not that: you’re a political prisoner, temporary, and you’re well dressed. He’s going to try to get money out of you or your friends. But that doesn’t prevent. Wait. ”

Money pursues me even into this hole, thought Kyo.

So true to the legend, the warder’s vileness did not seem to him altogether real; and, at the same time, it seemed to him a foul fatality, as if power were enough to change almost every man into a beast. Those obscure beings who stirred behind the bars, disturbing like the colossal insects and crustaceans in his childhood dreams, were no more human. Complete solitude and humiliation. “Look out,” he thought, for already he felt himself weaker. He felt certain that, had he not been the master of his death, terror would have gotten the better of him in this place. He opened the buckle of his belt, and slipped the cyanide into his pocket.

“How, how, how are you?” called the voice again.

“Enough!” came a chorus of shouts from the prisoners in the other cell. Kyo was by now used to the darkness, and the number of the voices did not astonish him: there were more than ten bodies lying on the bench behind the bars.

“Are you going to shut up?” shouted the warder.

“How, how, how are you?”

The warder got up.

“Is it a joke, or is he pig-headed?” asked Kyo in a low voice.

“Neither,” answered the mandarin: “crazy.”

“But why. ”

Kyo did not ^aish. His neighbor was stopping up his ears. A sharp, raucous cry, both of terror and pain, filled the whole place. While Kyo was looking at the mandarin, the warder had entered the other cage with his whip. The thong cracked, and the same cry rose again. Kyo did not dare to stop up his ears, and waited, clutching two bars, for the dreadful cry which was about to run through him again, and make his finger-nails tingle.

“Beat him up good and plenty,” said a voice, “so he’ll leave us in peace! ”

“Put a stop to it,” said four or five voices, “we want to sleep!”

The mandarin, with his hands still stopping up his ears, leaned towards Kyo:

“It’s the eleventh time he has beat him in seven days, it seems. I’ve been here two days-it’s the fourth time. And in spite of everything, you can’t help hearing it a little.

•. I can’t shut my eyes, you see: it seems to me that by looking at him I’m helping him, that I’m not deserting ^m. ”

Kyo was also looking, hardly able to see anything.

• • • “Compassion or cruelty?” he wondered, terrified. ^What is base, and also what is susceptible to fascination in every man was being appealed to with the most savage vehemence, and Kyo was struggling with his whole mind against human ignominy-he remembered the effort it had always required of him to get away from tortured bodies seen by chance: he had literally had to tear himself away. That men could stand by and watch the flogging of a harmless lunatic, who, judging by his voice, was probably old, and approve such torture, called forth in him the same terror as Ch’en’s confidences, the night in Hankow-“the octopuses. ” Katov had told him what a constraint the medical student must exercise upon himself the first time he sees an abdomen cut open and the living organs exposed. It was the same paralyzing horror, quite different from fear, an all-powerful horror even before the mind had appraised it, and all the more upsetting as Kyo was excruciatingly aware of his own helplessness. And yet his eyes, much less- accustomed to the gloom than those of his companion, could make out only the dash of the leather, coming down like a hook, tearing out agonizing howls. Since the first blow he had not stirred: he stood clinging to the bars, his hands level with his face.

“Warder,” he shouted.

“You want some, too, do you?”

“I want to speak to you.”

“Yes?”

While the warder was furiously securing the enormous lock, the prisoners he was leaving were roaring with delight. They hated the “political” prisoners, who were not of them.

“Go to it! Go to it, warder! Let’s have some fun.”

The man was in front of Kyo, his figure cut vertically by a bar. His face expressed the most abject anger, that of a fool who thinks his power is being contested; but his features were not base-they were regular, anonymous.

“Listen,” said Kyo.

They were looking each other in the eye, the warder taller than Kyo, whose hands he saw stil clutching the bars on each side of his head. Before Kyo knew what was happening, he felt his left hand paralyzed by an unbearable shot of pain. The whip, held behind the warder’s back had come down with full force. He could not help crying out.

“Good work!” bellowed the prisoners on the other side. “Not always the same ones.”

Both Kyo’s hands had pulled back and fastened themselves to his sides, without his even being aware of what he was doing.

“You stil have something to say?” asked the warder.

The whip was now between them. Kyo clenched his teeth, and with the same effort that it would have required to lift an enormous weight, still keeping his eyes steadily on the warder, again raised his hands to the bars. While he was slowly lifting them, the man drew back imperceptibly to give himself room. The whip cracked-on the bars this time. The reflex had been too strong for Kyo: he had withdrawn his hands. But already he was raising them again, with an exhausting tension of his shoulders, and the warder understood by his look that this time he would not withdraw them. He spat in his face and slowly raised the whip.