Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

He had opened the buckle of his belt and was holding the cyanide in his hand. He had often wondered if he would die easily. He knew that if he made up his mind to kill himself, he would kill himself; but knowing the savage indifference with which life unmasks us to ourselves, he had not been without anxiety about the moment when death would crush his mind with its whole weight and finality.

No, dying could be an exalted act, the supreme expression of a life which this death so much resembled; and it was an escape from those two soldiers who were approaching hesitantly. He crushed the poison between his teeth as he would have given a command, heard Katov still question him with anguish and touch him, and, at the moment when, suffocating, he wanted to cling to him, he felt his whole strength go outward, wrenched from him in an all-powerful convulsion.

The soldiers were coming to fetch two prisoners in the crowd who could not get up. No doubt being burned alive entitled one to special, although limited, honors: transported on a single stretcher, almost on top of each other, they were laid down at Katov’s left; Kyo, dead, was lying at his right. In the empty space which separated them from those who were only condemned to death, the soldiers crouched near their lantern. Little by little, heads and eyes fell back into the darkness, now emerging only rarely into this light which marked the place of the condemned.

Katov, since the death of Kyo-who had panted for at least a minute-felt himself thrown back into a solitude which was all the stronger and more painful as he was surrounded by his own people. The Chinaman whom they had had to carry out in order to shaken by a nervous attack, obsessed him. And yet he felt in this complete desertion a sense of repose, as if for years he had been awaiting just this; a repose he had encountered, found again, in the worst moments of his life. Where had he read: “It was not the discoveries, but the sufferings of explorers which I envied, which attracted me. ”? As if in response to his thought, the distant whistle reached the hall for the third time. The two men on his left started. Very young Chinamen; one was Suan, whom he knew only through having fought by his side in the Post; the second, unknown. (It was not Pei.) Why were they not with the others?

“Organizing combat groups?” he asked.

“Attempt at Chiang Kai-shek’s life,” Suan answered.

“With Ch’en?”

“No. Hewanted tothrow his bomb alone. Chiang was not in the car. I was waiting for the car much further on. They caught me with the bomb.”

The voice which answered him was so choked that Katov scrutinized the two faces: the young men were weeping, without a sob. Suan tried to move his shoulder, and his face contracted with pain-he was wounded also in the ann.

“Burned,” he said. “To be burned alive. The eyes, too, the eyes, you understand. ”

His comrade was sobbing now.

“One can be burned by accident,” said Katov.

It seemed as if they were speaking, not to each other, but to some invisible third person.

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No: it’s not so good.”

“The eyes too,” the young man repeated in a lower voice, “the eyes. each finger, and the stomach, the stomach. ”

“Shut up!” said the other with the voice of a deaf man.

He would have liked to cry out, but could not. His hands clutched Suan close to his wounds, causing the latter’s muscles to contract.

“Human dignity,” Katov murmured, thinking of Kyo’s interview with KOnig. The condemned men were no longer speaking. Beyond the lantern, in the darkness that was now complete, the murmur of the wounded continued. He edged still closer to Suan and his companion. One of the guards was telling the others a story: their heads close together, they were between the lantern and the condemned: the latter could no longer even see one another. In spite of the hum, in spite of all these men who had fought as he had, Katov was alone, alone between the body of his dead friend and his two terror-stricken companions, alone between this wall and that whistle far off in the night. But a man could be stronger than this solitude and even, perhaps, than that atrocious whistle: fear struggled in him against the most terrible temptation in his life. In his turn he opened the buckle of his belt. Finally:

“Hey, there,” he said in a very low voice. “Suan, put your hand on my chest, and close it as soon as I touch it: I’m going to give you my cyanide. There is abs’lutely enough only for two.”

He had given up everything, except saying that there was only enough for two. Lying on his side, he broke the cyanide in two. The guards masked the light, which surrounded them with a dim halo; but would they not move? Impossible to see anything; Katov was making this gift of something that was more precious than his life not even to bodies, not even to voices, but to the warm hand resting upon him. It grew taut, like an animal, immediately separated from him. He waited, his whole body tense. And suddenly, he heard one of the two voices:

“It’s lost. Fell.”

A voice scarcely affected by anguish, as if such a catastrophe, so decisive, so tragic, were not possible, as if things were bound to arrange themselves. For Katov also it was impossible. A limitless anger rose in him, but fell again, defeated by this impossibility. And yet! To have given that only to have the idiot lose it!

“When?” he asked.

“Before my body. Could not hold it when Suan passed it: I’m wounded in the hand too.”

“He dropped both of them,” said Suan.

They were no doubt looking for it in the space between them. They next looked between Katov and Suan, on whom the other was probably almost lying, for Katov, without being able to see anything, could feel beside him the bulk of two bodies. He was looking too, trying to control his nervousness, to place his hand flat, at regular intervals, wherever he could reach. Their hands brushed his. And suddenly one of them took his, pressed it, held it.

“Even if we don’t find it. ” said one of the voices.

Katov also pressed his hand, on the verge of tears, held by that pitiful fraternity, without a face, almost without a real voice (all whispers resemble one another), which was being offered him in this darkness in return for the greatest gift he had ever made, and which perhaps was made in vain. Although Suan continued to look, the two hands remained united. The grasp suddenly became a tight clutch:

“Here!”

О resurrection!. But:

“Are you sure they are not pebbles?” asked the other.

There were many bits of plaster on the ground.

“Give it to me! ” said Katov.

With his fingertips, he recognized the shapes.

He gave them back-gave them back-pressed more strongly the hand which again sought his, and waited, his shoulders trembling, his teeth chattering. “If only the cyanide has not decomposed, in spite of the silver paper,” he thought. The hand he was holding suddenly twisted his, and, as though he were communicating through it with the body lost in the darkness, he felt that the latter was stiffening. He envied this convulsive suffocation. Almost at the same time, the other one: a choked cry which no one heeded. Then, nothing.

Katov felt himself deserted. He turned over on his belly and waited. The trembling of his shoulders did not cease.

In the middle of the night, the officer came back. In a clatter of rifles striking against one another, six soldiers were approaching the condemned men. All the prisoners had awakened. The new lantern, also, showed only long, vague forms-tombs in the earth already turned over-and a few reflections in the eyes. Katov managed to raise himself. The one who commanded the squad took Kyo’s ann, felt its stiffness, immediately seized Suan’s; that one also was stiff. A rumble was spreading, from the first rows of prisoners to the last. The chief of the squad lifted the foot of one of the men, then of the other: they fell back, stiff. He called the officer. The latter went through the same motions. Among the prisoners, the rumble was growing. The officer looked at Katov: