by John Fowles
Lily bowed her head, then stood up and spoke to the others. She glanced at me briefly, as if I was a diagram on a blackboard. ‘During my relationship with the subject I experienced a certain degree of counter-transference. I have analysed this with the help of Doctor Marcus and we think that this emotional attachment can be broken into two components. One originated in a physical attraction for him, artificially exaggerated by the role I had to play. The second component was empathetic in nature. The subject’s self-pity is projected so strongly on his environment that one becomes contaminated by it. I thought this was of interest in view of Professor Ciardi’s comment.’
The old man nodded. ‘Thank you.’ She sat down. He looked up at me. ‘All this may seem cruel to you. But we wish to hide nothing.’ He looked at Lily. ‘As regards the first component of your attachment, sexual attraction, would you describe to the subject and to us your present feelings?’
‘I consider that the subject would make a very inadequate husband except as a sexual partner.’ Ice-cold; she looked at me, then back to the old man. I had a dreadful, lancing memory of her standing against me; the night, the rain, the slow caress.
Dr Marcus intervened. ‘He has basic marriage-destructive drives?’
‘Yes.’
‘Specifically?’
‘Infidelity. Selfishness. Inconsiderateness in everyday routines. Possibly, homosexual tendencies.’
The old man: ‘Would the situation be altered if he had analysis?’
‘In my opinion, no.’
The old man turned. ‘Maurice?’
Conchis spoke, staring at me. ‘I think we are all agreed that he has been an admirable subject for our purposes, but he has masochistic traits that will get pleasure even out of our discussion of his faults. In my opinion our further interest in him is now both harmful to him and unnecessary.’
The old man looked up at me. ‘Under narcosis it was discovered that you are still strongly attached to Doctor Maxwell. Some of us have also been concerned about the effect that the loss of the young Australian girl, for which, I must also tell you. you feel deeply guilty in your unconscious, and now the second loss of the mythical figure you know as “Julie”, may have on you. I refer to the possibility of suicide. Our conclusion has been this: that your attachment to self-gratification is too deep to make any other than a hysterical attempt at suicide likely. And against this we advise you to guard.’
I gave a sarcastic bow of thanks. Dignity, keep some remnant of dignity.
‘Now … does anyone wish to say anything more?’ He looked both ways down the table. They all shook their heads. ‘Very well. We have come to the end of our experiment.’ He gestured for the ‘board’ to stand, which they did. The ‘audience’ remained sitting. He looked at me. ‘We have not concealed our real opinion of you; and since this is a trial we have of course been acting as witnesses against ourselves. You are, I remind you once again, the judge, and the time has now come for you to judge us. We have, first of all, selected a pharnmkos. A scapegoat.’
He looked to his left. Lily took off her glasses, stepped round the table and came and stood at the foot of the dais in front of me, with a bowed head; the white woollen dress, a penitential. Even then I was so stupid that I saw some fantastic new development; a mock wedding, some absurd happy ending … and I thought grimly what I would do if they dared try that on.
‘She is your prisoner, but you cannot do what you like with her, because the code of medical justice under which we exist specifies a precise type of punishment for the crime of destroying all power of forgiveness in the subject of our experiments.’ He turned round to Adam, who stood near the archway. ‘The apparatus.’
Adam called something. The other people behind the table stood to one side; in a compact group, facing the ‘students’, with the old man at their head. Four black-uniformed men came in. They quickly moved the sedan-coffin and two of the tables, so that the centre of the room was left free. The third table was lifted in front of me, beside Lily. Then two of the men left and returned carrying a heavy wooden frame, like a door frame, on bracketed legs. Six or seven feet up, at the top of the uprights, were iron rings. Lily turned and walked to where they set it, some halfway down the room. She stood in front of it and held up her arms. Adam handcuffed her wrists to the rings, so that she was crucified against it, with her back to me. Then a kind of stiffened leather helmet, with a down-projecting back piece that covered the nape of her neck, was put on her head; a protector.
It was a flogging frame.
Adam then left; returned in two seconds.
I could not see what he was holding at first, but he swung it loose as he came towards me. And I understood the incredible last trick they were playing.
It was a stiff black handle ending in a long skein of knotted lashes. Adam unravelled two or three that were tangled, then laid the foul thing on the table, handle towards me. Then he went back to Lily -everything was carefully planned to be in this sequence – and pulled down the zip in the back of her dress to her waist. He even unhooked the bra, then folded it and the dress carefully aside, so that her bare back was fully exposed. I could see the pink lines on her skin where the strap had crossed.
I was the Eumenides, the merciless Furies.
My hands began to sweat. Once again I was plunged hopelessly out of my depth. Always with Conchis one went down, and it seemed one could go no farther; but at the end another way went even lower.
The Smuts-like old man came forward again and stood in front of me.
‘You see the scapegoat and you see the instrument of punishment. You are now both judge and executioner. We are all here haters of unnecessary suffering; as you must try to understand when you come to think over these events. But we are all agreed that there must be a point in our experiment when you, the subject, have absolute freedom to choose whether to inflict pain on us – and a pain abhorrent to all of us – in your turn. We have chosen Doctor Maxwell because she best symbolizes what we are to you. Now we ask you to do as the Roman emperors did and to raise or lower your right thumb. If you lower it, you will be released and free to carry out the punishment as severely and brutally as you wish, up to ten strokes. That is sufficient to ensure the most atrocious suffering, and permanent disfigurement. If you raise your thumb in the sign of mercy, you will, apart from one last short process of disintoxication, be free of us for evermore. You will equally be free if you choose to punish, which will also demonstrate the satisfactory completion of your disintoxication. Now I ask one last thing of you: that you think carefully, very carefully indeed, before you choose.’
At some unseen signal the students all rose. Everyone in the room stared at me. I was aware that I wanted to make a right choice; something that would make them all remember me, that would prove them all wrong. I knew I was judge only in name. Like all judges, I was finally the judged; to be judged by my own judgment.
I saw at once that the choice they were offering me was absurd. Everything was fixed to make it impossible for me to punish Lily. The only punishment I wanted to inflict on her was to make her cry forgiveness; not cry pain. In any case I knew that even if I put my thumb down, they would find some way of stopping me. The whole situation, with all its gratuitously sadistic undertones, was a trap; a false dilemma. Even then, through all my seething resentment and anger at being so mercilessly exposed in the village stocks, I had a feeling that was certainly not forgiveness of them, even less gratitude, but a recrudescence of that amazement I had felt so often before: that all this could be mounted just for me.
Not without hesitation, thinking, gauging whether I was free to choose, and feeling sure that this was not a preconditioning, I turned my thumb down.
The old man stared at me a long moment, then signed to the guards and went back to the group. My wrists were freed. I stood up and rubbed them, then tore the gag off. The tape ripped at the stubble on my chin, and for a moment all I could do was blink foolishly with pain. The guards made no move. I rubbed t
he skin round my mouth, and looked round the room.
Silence. They expected me to speak; so I would not speak.
I went down the wooden steps and picked up the cat. I had half expected it to be a stage property. But it was surprisingly heavy. The handle, of plaited leather over wood; a knop end. The thongs were worn, the knots as hard as bullets. The thing looked old, a genuine Royal Navy antique from the Napoleonic wars. As I handled it, I calculated. The most likely solution was that they would put the lights out; there would be a scuffle. The four men and Adam were by the door and it would be impossible to escape.
Without warning I picked up the cat and swung it down on the table. A savage hiss. The thrash of the lashes on the deal table-top sounded like a gun. It made one or two of the students jump. I saw one of them, a girl, look away. Yet no one moved nearer. I began to walk towards where Lily was. I did not expect to get to her.
But I did. Still no one moved, I was suddenly within hitting range and the nearest person was thirty feet away. I stood as if measuring my distance, with my left foot forward, turned to strike. I even gave the beastly thing a little testing reach, so that the thongs brushed the middle of her back. Her face was hidden by the head-protector. I swung the cat back over my shoulder, as if I was going to swing it down with all my force on that white back. I half expected a shout to ring out, to see or hear someone dash for me. But no one moved and I knew, as they must have known, that it would have been too late. Only a bullet could have stopped me. I looked round, half expecting to see a gun. But the eleven, the guards, the ‘students’, all stood immobile.
I looked back at Lily. There was a very real devil in me, an evil marquis, that wanted to strike, to see the wet red weals traverse the delicate skin; not so much to hurt her as to shock them, to bring them to a sense of the enormity of what they were doing; almost of the enormity of making her risk so much. ‘Anton’ had said it: Very brave. I knew they must be absolutely certain of my decency, my stupid English decency; in spite of all they had said, all the bandillera they had planted in my self-esteem, absolutely sure that not once in a hundred thousand years would I bring that cat down. I did bring it down then, but very slowly, as if making sure of my distance again, then took it back. I tried to determine whether once again I was preconditioned not to do it, by Conchis; but I knew I had absolute freedom of choice. I could do it if I wanted.
Then suddenly.
I understood.
I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern, I was in a sunlit square ten years before and in my hands I held a German submachine-gun. And it was not Conchis who was now playing the role of Wimmel. Wimmel was inside me, in my stiffened, backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what I had done to Alison.
The better you understand freedom, the less you possess it.
And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost, whatever eighty other parts of me must die, whatever the watching eyes might think of me; even though it would seem, as they must have foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated, their dupe. I lowered the cat, and I could feel tears gathering – tears of rage, tears of frustration.
All Conchis’s manoeuvrings had been to bring me to this; all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the guerilla, unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are strange times for the calling in of old debts; and even stranger prices to pay.
The group of eleven, standing by the wall; standing with the sedan half-hidden in their centre, as if they were guarding it from me. I saw June, who had the grace not to meet my look. I somehow knew that she was frightened; she for one had not been sure.
The white back.
I walked towards them, towards Conchis. I saw ‘Anton’, who was standing beside him, tilt forward infinitesimally. I knew he was getting on to the balls of his feet ready to spring. Joe was watching me like a hawk, too. I stood in front of Conchis and handed him the cat, handle first. He took it, but he never moved his eyes from mine. We stared at each other for a long moment; that same old stare, simianly observing.
He expected me to speak; to say the word. But I would not. Could not.
I looked round the faces of the group. I knew they were only actors and actresses, but that even the best of their profession cannot in silence act certain human qualities, like intelligence, experience, intellectual honesty; and they had their share of that. Nor could they take part in such a scene without more inducement than money; however much money Conchis offered. I sensed a moment of comprehension between all of us, a strange sort of mutual respect; on their side perhaps no more than a relief that I was as they secretly believed me to be, behind all the mysteries and the humiliations; on my side, a dim conviction of having entered some deeper, wiser esoteric society than I could without danger speak in. As I stood there, close to their eleven silences, their faces without hostility yet without concession, faces dissociated from my anger, as close-remote and oblique as the faces in a Flemish Adoration, I felt myself almost physically dwindling; as one dwindles before certain works of art, certain truths, seeing one’s smallness, narrow-mindedness, insufficiency in their dimension and value.
I could see it in Conchis’s eyes; something besides eleutheria had been proved. And I was the only person there who did not know what it was. I looked for it in his eyes; but that was like looking into the darkest night. A hundred things trembled on my lips, in my mind; and died there.
No answer; no movement.
Abruptly I went back to the ‘throne’.
I watched the ‘students’ go out, I watched Lily being unfastened. June helped her dress, and they rejoined the others. The frame was removed. Finally only the group of twelve remained. Once again, as drilled as a Sophoclean chorus, they bowed, then turned and walked out.
The men stood aside for the women to lead the way at the arch and Lily was the first to disappear. But when the last of the men had gone, she came back for a moment in the archway, staring at me as I stared at her, her face without expression, without gratitude, leaving a dozen reasons in the air as to why she might have given me this last glimpse; or herself this last glimpse of me.
62
I was alone with the same three guards who had brought me. They waited a minute, two minutes. Adam offered me a cigarette. I smoked, racked between an anger and a relief, between a feeling that I should have made some excoriating denunciation of them and all their practices and a feeling that I had done the only thing that could leave me any dignity. The cigarette was almost finished when Adam looked at his watch, then at me.
‘Now
He pointed at the handcuffs that were still dangling from the supports of the armrests.
‘Look. Finished. No more of this.’ I stood up, but my arms were caught at once. I took a deep breath. Adam shrugged.
‘Bitte.’
I let myself be handcuffed to the two men. Then he came with the gag. That was too much. I began to struggle, but they simply jerked me sharply back on to the throne; once again choiceless, I submitted. He slipped the gag over my head, this time without taping it. Then I was masked, and we set off. We walked through the archway, but outside we turned right, not left; we were not going back the way we came. Twenty or thirty paces, then down five steps and apparently into yet another large room or cistern.
I was forced backwards, there was a fiddling with the handcuffs. Then my left arm was abruptly raised, there was a click, and with an icy new apprehension I realized what they had done. I had been fastened to the flogging frame. I really began to struggle then. I kicked and kneed, I wrenched at the man to whose wrist I was still attached. They could have beaten me up at will. There were three of them and I couldn’t see and it was ridiculous. But they must have been under orders to do things as gently as possible. Eventually they forced my other arm up and linked it to the second ring. The mask was taken off.
It was a very long narrow room, another cistern, but lower
-vaulted; eighty feet long and about twenty wide. Halfway down was a white cinema screen, like the one that had been used at Bourani. Three-quarters way down, a pair of drawn black curtains stretched the width of the room. The obscure end-wall was just visible over their tops. It was an enlarged version of the chapel at Moutsa with the iconostasis. I was fixed to the frame, but frontways on, and it had been set against the wall. Just in front of me and slightly to my right was a small cinema projector with a reel of 16-mm. film. What light there was came from through the doorway I could see to my left.
My trio of blackshirts wasted no time. They went to the projector, switched it on, checked that the film was correctly fed and then set it going. It began with the black wheel on white, as if it was a film company emblem. One of the men adjusted the lens focus a little. Adam came back and stood in front of me – out of reach of any kick I might attempt – and spoke.
‘The final disintoxication.’
I understood that I had been forced to ‘forgive’ so that I could be moved on to this ultimate humiliation; a metaphorical, if not a literal, flogging.
I had still not reached the bottom.
I was alone with the whirring projector and whatever lay beyond the curtains. The emblem faded and words appeared.
POLYMUS FILMS
PRESENT
The screen went white for a moment. Then:
THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH
The black wheel. Then:
WITH
THE FABULOUS WHORE
IO
A blank.
WHOM YOU WILL REMEMBER AS
ISIS
ASTARTE
KALI
A long blank.
AND AS THE CAPTIVATING
‘LILY MONTGOMERY’
There was a brief shot of Lily kneeling behind a man. It had almost ended before I realized that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, most have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited from The Tempest. I remembered she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera.