‘In this world,’ Jansci interrupted. ‘And soon.’
‘Take him away,’ the commandant ordered curtly. ‘The man goes mad already.’
Michael Reynolds was going insane, slowly but inevitably insane, and the most terrible part of it was that he knew he was going insane. But since the last forced injection shortly after they had been strapped in their chairs in that underground cellar, there had been nothing he could do about the relentless onset of this madness, and the more he fought against it, the more resolutely he struggled to ignore the symptoms, the pains, the agonizing stresses that were being set up in mind and body, then the more acutely he became aware of the symptoms, the deeper into his mind dug these fiendish claws, chemical claws, claws that were tearing his mind apart.
He was secured to his high-backed chair hand and foot, by a thigh belt and by a waist-belt and he would have given all he ever had or would have for the blessed release of throwing off these bonds, of flinging himself to the floor, or against a wall, or of contorting, convulsing his body in every fashion conceivable, of flexing and stretching, flexing and stretching every muscle he had, anything in a desperate attempt to ease that intolerable itch and frightening tension set up by ten thousand jumping, jangling nerve-ends all over his body. It was the old Chinese torture of tickling the soles of the feet magnified a hundredfold, only here there were no feathers, only the countless insidious probing needles of Actedron jabbing every screaming nerve-end into a frantic frenzy, an undreamed-of pitch of phrenetic excitability.
Waves of nausea swept over him, his inside felt as if a wasp’s nest had been broken there and a thousand buzzing wings were beating against the walls of his stomach, he was having difficulty with his breathing and, more and more frequently now, his throat would constrict in a terrifying fashion, he could feel himself choke for want of air while waves of panic surged through him, then at the last instant release would come and the air surge gaspingly into his starving lungs. But his head, his mind – that was the worst of all. The inside of his head seemed dark and confused, the edges of his mind ragged and woolly and increasingly losing contact with reality, for all his conscious, desperate attempts to cling on to what shreds of reason the Actedron and Mescaline had left him. The back of his head felt as if it were being crushed between a vice, and his eyes ached abominably. He could hear voices now, voices calling from afar, and as the last vestiges of his reason slipped away from his powerless grasp and down into the darkness he knew, even as his power of knowing left him, that the dark shroud of madness had completely enveloped him in its thick and choking folds.
But still the voices came – even down in the black depths, still the voices came. Not voices, something seemed to tell him, not voices but just a voice, and it wasn’t speaking to him or whispering insanely in the dark corners of his mind as all the other voices had been, it was shouting at him, calling him with a strength that penetrated even through the folds of madness, with a desperate, compelling urgency that no man with life at all left in him could possibly ignore. Again and again it came, endlessly insistent, seeming to grow louder and louder with every moment that passed, until at last something reached deep down into Reynolds’ darkness, lifted a tiny corner of the shroud and let him recognize the voice for a passing moment of time. It was a voice he knew well, but a voice he had never heard like this before: it was, he just dimly managed to realize, Jansci’s voice, and Jansci was shouting at him, over and over again. ‘Keep your head up! For God’s sake, keep your head up! Keep it up, keep it up!’ over and over again like some insane litany.
Slowly, ponderously, inch by agonizing inch as if he were lifting some tremendous weight, Reynolds lifted his head off his chest, his eyes still clamped shut, until he felt the back of his head press against the high chairback. For a long moment he stayed in that position, fighting for breath like a long-distance runner at the end of a gruelling race, then his head started to droop again.
‘Keep it up! I told you to keep it up!’ Jansci’s voice was vibrant with command, and Reynolds was suddenly aware, clearly and unmistakably aware, that Jansci was projecting towards himself, making a part of himself, some of that fantastic will-power that had taken him from the Kolyma Mountains and brought him back alive across the uncharted, sub-zero wastes of the Siberian deserts. ‘Keep it up, I tell you! That’s better, that’s better! Now, your eyes – open your eyes and look at me!’
Reynolds opened his eyes and looked at him. It was as if someone had covered his eyes with thick sheaths of lead, the effort was so great, but open them he finally did and peered with unfocused gaze across the gloom of the cellar. At first he could see nothing, he thought his eyes were gone, there was only a misty vapour swimming across his eyes, and then suddenly he knew it was a misty vapour, and he remembered that the stone floor was covered in six inches of water and the entire cellar festooned with steam pipes: the steaming, humid heat, worse by far than any Turkish bath he had ever known, was part of the treatment.
And now he could see Jansci: he could see him as if he were seeing through a misted, frosted glass, but he could see him, perhaps eight feet away, in a chair the duplicate of his own. He could see the head continually shaking from side to side, the jaws working constantly, the hands at the end of the pinioned arms opening and closing convulsively as Jansci sought to release some of the accumulated tension, the exquisitely agonizing titillation of his over-stimulated nervous system.
‘Don’t let your head go again, Michael,’ he said urgently. Even in his distress, the use of his Christian name struck Reynolds, the first time Jansci had ever used it, pronouncing it exactly as his daughter had done. ‘And for heaven’s sake keep your eyes open. Don’t let yourself go, whatever you do, don’t let yourself go! There’s a peak, a crisis of some kind to the effects of these damned chemicals, and if you get over that – don’t let go!’ he shouted suddenly. Again Reynolds opened his eyes: this time the effort was fractionally less.
‘That’s it, that’s it!’ Jansci’s voice came more clearly now. ‘I felt just the same a moment ago, but if you let go, yield to the effects, there’s no recovery. Just hang on, boy, just hang on. I can feel it going already.’
And Reynolds, also, could feel the grip of the chemicals easing. He had still the same mad urge to tear loose, to convulse every muscle in his body, but his head was clearing, and the ache behind his eyes beginning to dwindle. Jansci was talking to him all the while, encouraging him, distracting him, and gradually all his limbs and body began to quieten, he grew cold even in the fierce tropical heat of the cellar and bouts of uncontrollable shivering shook him from head to foot. Then the shivering faded and died away, and he began to sweat and grow faint as the humidity and the heat pouring from the steam pipes increased with every moment that passed. He was again on the threshold of collapse – a clear-headed, sane collapse this time – when the door opened and gum-booted warders came splashing through the water. Within seconds the warders had them free and were urging them through the open door into the clear, icy air and Reynolds, for the first time in his life, knew exactly what the taste of water must seem like to a man who had been dying of thirst in the desert.
Ahead of him he could see Jansci shrugging off the supporting hands of the warders on either side of him, and Reynolds, though he felt like a man after a long and wasting bout of fever, did the same. He staggered, all but fell when the support of the arms was withdrawn, recovered and steeled himself to follow Jansci out into the snow and bitter cold of the courtyard with his body erect and his head held high.
The commandant was waiting for them, and his eyes narrowed in swift disbelief as he saw them come out. For a few moments he was at a loss, and the words so ready on his lips remained unsaid. But he recovered quickly, and the professorial mask slipped effortlessly into place.
‘Candidly, gentlemen, had one of my medical colleagues reported this to me, I should have called him a liar. I would not, I could not have believed it. As a matter of clinical interest, how do you
feel?’
‘Cold. And my feet are freezing – maybe you hadn’t noticed it, but our feet are soaking wet – we’ve been sitting with them in water for the past two hours.’ Reynolds leaned negligently against a wall as he spoke, not because his attitude reflected his feelings, but because without the wall’s support he would have collapsed on to the snow. But not even the wall lent him the support and encouragement that the approving gleam in Jansci’s eye did.
‘All in good time. Periodic alternations of temperature is part of the – ah – treatment. I congratulate you, gentlemen. This promises to be a case of unusual interest.’ He turned to one of the guards. ‘A clock in their cellar, and where they can both see it. The next injection of Actedron will be – let me see, it’s now midday – will be at 2 p.m. precisely. We must not keep them in undue suspense.’
Ten minutes later, gasping in the sudden, stifling heat of the cellar after the zero cold of the yard outside, Reynolds looked at the ticking clock, then at Jansci.
‘He doesn’t miss out even the smallest refinement of torture, does he?’
‘He would be horrified, genuinely horrified, if he heard you mention the word “torture,”’ Jansci said thoughtfully. ‘To himself the commandant is just a scientist carrying out an experiment, and all he wants is to achieve the maximum efficiency from the point of view of results. He is, of course, quite mad, with the blind insanity of all zealots. He would be shocked to hear you say that, too.’
‘Mad?’ Reynolds swore. ‘He’s an inhuman fiend. Tell me, Jansci, is that the sort of man you call your brother? You still believe in the oneness of humanity?’
‘An inhuman fiend?’ Jansci murmured. ‘Very well, let us admit it. But at the same time let us not forget that inhumanity knows no frontiers, no frontiers in either time or space. It’s hardly the exclusive perquisite of the Russians, you know. God only knows how many thousands of Hungarians have been executed or tortured till death came as a welcome release – by their fellow Hungarians. The Czech SSB – their secret police – were on a par with the NKVD, and the Polish UB – composed almost entirely of Poles – were responsible for worse atrocities than the Russians had ever dreamed of.’
‘Worse even than Vinnitsa?’
Jansci looked at him in long, slow speculation, then raised the back of his hand to his forehead: he could have been wiping the sweat away.
‘Vinnitsa?’ He lowered his hand and stared sightlessly into the gloom of a far corner. ‘Why do you ask about Vinnitsa, my boy?’
‘I don’t know. Julia mentioned it – perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry, Jansci, forget it.’
‘No need to be sorry – I can never forget it.’ He broke off for a long moment, then went on slowly. ‘I can never forget it. I was with the Germans in 1943 when we dug up a high-fenced orchard near the NKVD headquarters. We found 10,000 dead in a mass grave in that orchard. We found my mother, my sister, my daughter – Julia’s elder sister – and my only son. My daughter and my son had been buried alive: it is not difficult to tell these things.’
In the minutes that followed, that dark, furnace-hot dungeon deep under the frozen earth of Szarháza did not exist for Reynolds. He forgot their ghastly predicament, he forgot the haunting thought of the international scandal his trial would bring about, he forgot the man who was bent on destroying them, he could not even hear the ticking of the clock. He could think only of the man who sat quietly opposite him, of the dreadfully stark simplicity of his story, of the shattering traumatic shock that must have followed his discovery, of the miracle that he should not only have kept his sanity but grown into the kind and wise and gentle man he was, with hatred in his heart towards none that lived. To have lost so many that he loved, to have lost the most of what he lived for, and then to call their murderers his brothers … Reynolds looked at him and knew that he did not even begin to know this man, and knew that he would never know him …
‘It is not difficult to read your thoughts,’ Jansci said gently. ‘I lost so many I loved and, for a time, almost my reason. The Count – I will tell you his story some day, has lost even more – I, at least have still Julia and, I believe in my heart, my wife also. He has lost everything in the world. But we both know this. We know that it was bloodshed and violence that took our loved ones away from us, but we also know that all the blood spilt between here and eternity will never bring them back again. Revenge is for the madmen of the world and for the creatures of the field. Revenge will never create a world in which bloodshed and violence can never take our loved ones away from us. There may be a better kind of world worth living for, worth striving for and devoting our lives to, but I am a simple man and I just cannot conceive of it.’ He paused, then smiled. ‘Well, we are talking of inhumanity in general. Let us not forget this specific instance.’
‘No, no!’ Reynolds shook his head violently. ‘Let us forget it, let’s forget all about it.’
‘And that is what the world says – let us forget. Let us not think of it – the contemplation is too awful to bear. Let us not burden our hearts and our minds and our consciences, for then the good that is in us, the good that is in every man, might drive us to do something about it. And we can’t do anything about it, the world will say, because we do not even know where to begin or how to begin – by not thinking that inhumanity is endemic to any particular part of this suffering world.
‘I have mentioned the Hungarians, the Poles and the Czechs. I might also mention Bulgaria and Roumania where nameless atrocities have taken place of which the world has never yet heard – and may never hear. I could mention the 7,000,000 homeless refugees in Korea. And to all of that you might say: It is all one, it is all communism. And you would be right, my boy.
‘But what would you say if I reminded you of the cruelties of Falangist Spain, of Buchenwald and Belsen, of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, of the Japanese prison camps, the death railways of not so long ago? Again you would have the ready answer. All these things flourish under a totalitarian régime. But I said also that inhumanity has no frontiers in time. Go back a century or two. Go back to the days when the two great upholders of democracy were not quite as mature as they are today. Go back to the days when the British were building up their Empire, to some of the most ruthless colonization the world has ever seen, go back to the days when they were shipping slaves, packed like sardines in a tin, across to America – and the Americans themselves were driving the Indian off the face of their continent. And what then, my boy?’
‘You gave the answer yourself: we were young then.’
‘And so are the Russians young today. But even today, even in this twentieth century, things happen which any respecting people in the world should be ashamed of. You remember Yalta, Michael, you remember the agreements between Stalin and Roosevelt, you remember the great repatriation of the people of the east who had fled to the west?’
‘I remember.’
‘You remember. But what you do not remember is what you have never seen, but what both the Count and I have seen and will never forget: thousands upon countless thousands of Russians and Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians being forcibly repatriated to their own homelands where they knew that one thing and one thing only awaited them – death. You have not seen as we have seen, thousands mad with fear, hanging themselves from every projection that offered, falling on their pocket knives, flinging themselves under the moving wheels of a railway wagon and cutting their throats with rusty razor blades, anything in the world, any form of painful, screaming, self-ending, rather than go back to the concentration camps and torture and death. But we have seen, and we have seen how the thousands unlucky enough not to commit suicide were embarked: they were driven aboard their transports and their cattle cars – they were driven like cattle themselves – and they were driven by British and American bayonets … Never forget that, Michael: by British and American bayonets … Let him who is without sin …’
Jansci shook his head to remove the beads of sweat which spil
led out in the climbing humidity: both of them were beginning to gasp with the heat, to have to fight consciously for each breath they took, but Jansci was not yet finished.
‘I could go on indefinitely, my boy, about your own country and the country that now regards itself as the true custodian of democracy – America. If your people and the Americans are not the world’s greatest champions of democracy, you are certainly the loudest. I could speak of the intolerance and cruelties that accompany integration in America, of the springing up of Ku Klux Klan in England which once firmly, but erroneously, regarded itself as being vastly superior to America in the matters of racial tolerance. But it is pointless and your countries are big enough and secure enough to take care of their own intolerant minorities, and free enough to publicise them to the world. The point I make is simply that cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world. There are as many evil and wicked and sadistic men in London or New York as there are in Moscow, but the democracies of the west guard their liberties as an eagle does its young and the scum of society can never rise to the top; but here, with a political system that, in the last analysis, can exist only by repression, it is essential to have a police force absolute in its power, legally constituted but innately lawless, arbitrary and utterly despotic. Such a force is a lodestone for the dregs of our society, which first join it and then dominate it, and then dominate the country. The police force is not intended to be a monster, but inevitably, by virtue of the elements attached to it, it becomes a monster, and the Frankenstein that built it becomes its slave.’
‘One cannot destroy the monster?’
‘It is hydra-headed and self-propagating. One cannot destroy it. Nor can one destroy the Frankenstein that created it in the first place. It is the system, the creed by which the Frankenstein lives that we must destroy, and the surest way to its destruction is to remove the necessity for its existence. It cannot exist in a vacuum. And I have already told you why it exists.’ Jansci smiled ruefully. ‘Was it three nights or three years ago?’
The Last Frontier Page 19