The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘Even if they are innocent, Citizen Examiner?’

  ‘Whether they are innocent or guilty is for the party to decide, Mr Budd’.

  ‘In other words’, said Lanny, ‘there are Russians whom the party intriguers for some reason wish to put out of the way, and they use me as a convenient means of making them appear guilty’.

  The elderly M.G.B. man looked grieved. ‘I am sorry you persist in putting it that way, Mr Budd. I am trying to save you a dreadful lot of suffering, and you should be grateful to me’.

  ‘I am sorry too’, said Lanny. ‘I have no appetite for suffering, but I am unwilling to sign my name to charges I know are not true’.

  Said the other, ‘I will give you time to think this over. Examine your own mind and see whether it is pride, or stubbornness, or the intensity of your hatred of our regime which causes you to give this refusal’.

  ‘I assure you, Citizen Examiner, it is none of those things. It is a phenomenon which your expert psychologists may have overlooked. We call it conscience’.

  ‘We have not overlooked it, Mr Budd’, was the reply; ‘but we have subordinated our conscience to the interest of a party which has been formed for the purpose of helping the proletariat to break the chains of wage-slavery throughout the world’.

  Lanny said, ‘I am sorry, sir, to disoblige you; but I have not joined the party, and I must obey my conscience. I might as well give my answer now. I cannot do what you ask’.

  The inquisitor pressed a button, and the two warders came in.

  IV

  Back in his little cell on the straw mattress Lanny could lie and think about this illuminating interview. He could understand without difficulty the technique that was being employed. A few minutes ago he had been keyed up. His spiritual hands, so to speak, had been clenched; his will was determined to resistance. But now he would lie here in uncertainty, thinking things over and beginning to doubt and to dread. He would know that the torturers were coming for him again, but he wouldn’t know when they were coming, and he would be in a continual state of suspense. His will would begin to weaken, and they would choose just the right time; they wouldn’t give him enough time to sleep and recover his strength; they would come soon enough, but not too soon.

  Lanny knew now how he was going to thwart them. He was going on with his prayers, not excitedly, not with tenseness or agitation that would wear him out, but quietly, calmly, firmly. His mind went back a little more than three years, to the time of the dreadful war’s ending. He had driven to the Dachau concentration camp, one of the hellholes of history. Some ten thousand men had been held there under conditions of deliberately contrived torment and degradation. Thousands of them had been picked out and used in the most diabolical experiments ever contrived in the name of science. All kinds of men had been there, rich and poor, old and young, of a score of nations and every variety of religious faith. Two had died every hour, and the supply had been constantly renewed.

  Lanny had talked with the American Army officers who were in charge of the newly delivered camp and its inmates. There were medical men among both captives and deliverers, and they were interested in the problem of how human beings managed to endure such torments. All, whether they were religious or not, agreed that those who had stood it best had been the religious. And the reason was obvious; if you believed that your body was all, then the weakening of your body meant the weakening of your whole being; you gave way to despair and went to pieces and soon died. But if you believed that your body was merely the dwelling place of your immortal soul, and that by your suffering you were earning a martyr’s crown in eternal life, then you no longer feared your tormentors but devoted yourself to helping others to share your faith.

  Lanny wasn’t sure if he believed in an eternal life, but he did believe that there was a Power in this world greater than himself, and that it was a Power which worked for righteousness. He believed that he could use that Power, and he had made up his mind that he was going to try. ‘Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief!’ He recalled one after another the stories of martyrs and heroes he had read; he recalled their words of courage and faith. He was going to show these sophisticated and clever disciples of despotism that there was something in this world greater than all their party apparatus and governmental machinery. He would be the first man to overcome them; he would show them that they could not break his spirit.

  V

  He had only a few minutes’ rest before they came for him again. They took him back to the same investigation room; but there was another examiner. Lanny could guess that the last one had been a higher official who had tried a special technique. Now there was to be a change.

  This new one was as different as a man could be. He had a long head and a weasel’s face; he glared at Lanny, and before he spoke he bared his teeth like an animal. His first words were: ‘Sit down, ti sobaka! You dirty Fascist dog!’ He turned on the light at once, and when Lanny put up his hands over his eyes he shouted, ‘Put your hands down’. When Lanny said naïvely, ‘The light hurts me’, he replied, ‘You will keep your hands down; if you put them up again I will have them handcuffed behind your back’.

  So it was to be war this time; what William Blake called ‘mental fight’. Lanny braced himself to face that dreadful light; he clenched his hands, and set his teeth, and he started a clamour of petition inside himself. The man sensed what was going on, and it made him furious; he raged and stormed; but Lanny went on with his silent cries, ‘God is helping me! God is helping me!’

  The man went over all the old ground, making fantastic charges and demanding that Lanny admit them. He asked a hundred questions about Fritz Meissner; Fritz, he knew, had been one of Lanny’s agents in the plot to take Stalin’s life. Where had Fritz Meissner gone, whom had he met, what had he said, what had he done? Lanny had planted firmly in his mind, both the conscious and the unconscious, that he must make no statement whatever about Fritz Meissner, for the lad might still be alive. The only wise thing was to say that Fritz had been trying to locate paintings for Lanny, and nothing else.

  That infuriated the man. He seemed to sense that this wasn’t true. Or perhaps it was just his technique; he had trained himself to work up these furies; they were his stock-in-trade. He tried his best to frighten Lanny; he threatened him with all kinds of physical torments, with beatings and mutilations; he went into the details about torturing techniques. He became terribly abusive and revealed the fact that his imagination was captured by ideas of filth, of excrements, sexual perversions, and other nastiness. When he didn’t know the German words he used the Russian words, and as it happened Lanny didn’t know the four-letter words in Russian; he could only observe that they appeared to have many more letters.

  The menaces had no effect, because the prisoner had passed beyond the possibility of fear; he no longer cared what they might do to him. His pride had been aroused, or his self-will. He had been like a man clinging to an overturned boat in a raging sea; he had been battered and half smothered, but now the storm had become like something in a dream; he was aloof from it, he could look at it and not fear it. His eyes were like two balls of fire, and every bone in his body ached, but he was above it all, away from it all; he was rapt in a kind of ecstasy, saying to himself that God was here, and God was living, and God was helping him. The more the examiner raged and stormed the greater became Lanny’s exaltation. God really was hearing him, God really was helping him! ‘Through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.… For lo, thine enemies, O Lord, for, lo, thine enemies shall perish!… Yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them.… And the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out of the middle of a sling’.

  This went on for hours; time did not matter, time no longer existed. It went on until the inquisitor’s voice began to crack. He showed signs of exhaustion; it was a violent act that he was putting on. He pressed a button, and an attendant came, and he ordered food—food for both himself and his
victim—a singular thing, almost comical. He was threatening to kill his victim, but the victim had to be kept alive in order to hear the threats of killing. He must not be allowed to die—not until he had signed the confession they wanted.

  So the attendant brought food; he put it on the end of the desk, in front of Lanny, and stood solemnly and watched him eat every morsel of it. Lanny had known of nothing stranger since the days of the suffragettes in England, when they had not been permitted to die on a hunger strike.

  He asked to go to the lavatory, and the attendant took him and then brought him back. He was seated again on the torture stool, and the demon man hit the desk with his fist and started on his routine. He went over all the details of Lanny’s dastardly conspiracy. The examiner called him all the foul names he could think of, in German, in Russian, and a few English. He told him what a scoundrel and an assassin he was, and what a harlot his mother had been. He described all of his physical organs and how they would be crushed and destroyed; and through all the screaming and the pounding Lanny lifted himself to the high dwelling place of that Power which had made and which sustained him, giving him that ‘courage never to submit or yield, and what is else not to be overcome?’

  VI

  Apparently the torturer had no watch. He went on until the warders came and told him his time was up. Lanny was escorted back to his cell and more food was brought; as before, the warders stood and watched him eat it, and stood for some time afterward, apparently having the idea that Lanny might try to get rid of it.

  Lanny lay down and got a blessed rest, but he was sure it wouldn’t last for long; and so it was. Almost immediately, it seemed, he was reawakened and led back to the torture chamber. It was Number One again, the man who had been alternately polite and angry.

  When the examiner turned on the light again he insisted that he had been ordered to do it and had no alternative. He was very sorry indeed that Accused Budd persisted in subjecting himself to this unpleasant experience. It was all so needless, all so futile; all he had to do was to sign the confession which would be prepared; he was going to have to sign it anyway in the end, so why not sooner? The whole reel was played over again, but this time Lanny was weaker, and several times he came near toppling off the stool. A warder had to come and hold him by the shoulders while the questons were asked. This was a fatherly procedure, but Lanny was hardly aware of it; he had lost the awareness of his own body, which was a bundle of pain and had to be left in a place off by itself.

  The questioner had gone back to Moscow, to those days when Lanny and Laurel had been flown there from China. To the inquisitor it seemed inconceivable that a man could have talked with Stalin and failed to be completely converted to the Communist cause. That he had gone away and become an enemy of the Soviet regime could mean only that he had an enemy all the time, that he had had treachery in his heart, and had been using his opportunity to find out everything he could about where Stalin lived, what his habits were, and how it might be possible for a hired assassin to get access to him. That was the thesis that Lanny was being invited to subscribe to, and his refusal could mean only that he was the more stubborn, the more dangerous foe. Hundreds of questions were asked of him, all centred around that one supreme personality, that substitute God who had been set up for the Soviet people to worship.

  Whom had he met in Moscow? He could guess, of course, that this question meant trouble and suspicion for any person he named. One person had been his Red uncle, Jesse Blackless; Jesse was dead—Stalin had told Lanny that on Lanny’s last visit to Moscow. Maybe it wasn’t true, but anyhow the Russians well knew that Jesse was Lanny’s uncle, and Lanny could add to his trouble by naming him. Also, he had met Hansi and Bess in Moscow and had attended a concert which they had given there, almost within sound of the guns; but he wasn’t going to name them.

  He bethought himself of the various Soviet officials he had met. To name them might get them into trouble, but he owed them no particular duty. To have refused to name any of them would have looked suspicious and made more trouble for himself; and surely he had enough already. If he made trouble for Soviet officials, why should he worry? If he helped a little to disorganise their government, that would be so much to the good. So he came down from his heavenly dwelling place and named everybody he could think of with whom he had discussed the political situation in Moscow, everyone with whom he had so much as shaken hands. He saw that this gave great satisfaction to the inquisitor—he was getting something after all! Lanny thought, Let them stew in their own juice. And he went away again to dwell in the secret recesses of his soul.

  That continued until he fainted again and toppled off the stool. The polite inquisitor was able to catch him, so he did no more harm to his sore shoulder. The warders were summoned, and the prisoner was taken back to his cell and fed again—more cabbage soup and bread. Then he was allowed to drop down on his cot, while the warders stood outside and watched him through the little window in the steel door. This process of in and out, off and on, continued until the victim lost all sense of time and everything in his memory became a blur.

  VII

  But his subconscious mind continued to be active; and the subconscious mind of a human being, any human being, is a mysterious and wonderful thing, the least studied and perhaps the most significant of all things in the universe. It performs an infinitude of complicated tasks; it keeps the heart beating, fast or slow according to the body’s needs; it keeps the chest expanding and the diaphragm pressing down to draw breath into the lungs; it keeps the blood circulating at unbelievable speed through a multitude of tiny channels; it sorts out the needed food elements and supplies them to exactly the right places; it picks out the waste elements and ejects them through the appointed vents. Above all, it cherishes millions of memories and supplies them on request. Who, for example, could count the millions of musical notes that were stored away in the mind of a musician like Hansi Robin, enabling him to stand before an audience with the certainty of producing tens of thousands of them in precisely the right order and at precisely the right fraction of a second?

  Two ideas had been planted in the confused mind of Lanny Budd. These ideas had sunk down into his subconscious; they had taken root there, and after the fashion of living things they had begun to grow and develop a life, a pattern, of their own. The first of these ideas was that it could do no harm to name Communists and to cause them confusion; they were causing him all the confusion they could, having a philosophy of bringing confusion to their opponents. In the old and more robust days of England there had been a stanza in the national anthem which proposed trouble for that island’s enemies:

  Confound their politics,

  Frustrate their knavish tricks,

  On Thee our hopes we fix,

  God save us all.

  That surely described the attitude of the modern Reds, though they had a new Trinity to call upon—Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And surely it was right for Lanny to turn their techniques against themselves, to hoist them with their own petard! And that applied to all Communists—to every last single one!

  The second idea had to do with the Reds in America. The Number Three Examiner, the vile-tempered one whom Lanny had taken to calling ‘the Weasel’, had brought up this subject for the first time. This Weasel had full information about Bess, her activities, her trial and conviction, and he took it as proof of a special malignance on the part of her brother that he had had such an opportunity to understand the Communist movement and yet spurned it. The torturer had demanded Lanny’s explanation of the phenomenon and had suggested that Lanny might have been one of those who betrayed Bess to the class enemy. So he had planted a seed in Lanny’s mind, and it had dropped to the place where ideas took on a life of their own and began to combine with other ideas and form projects, solutions, hypotheses, inventions—all those phenomena which are sometimes called proofs of genius and sometimes of insanity.

  However this may be, when Lanny was aroused from his slumber and led a
way to his next torment, he found in his mind a project, complete, mature, perfectly formed, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. He didn’t have to consider it, to debate it with himself, to change it in any way; it was all ready for him, a free gift, a miracle. And who could blame him if he took it as an answer to his prayers?

  VIII

  He was led to the examination room. It was the turn of Number Two, the elderly man who was so polite and pretended to be fatherly. Lanny had hoped that it might be this one, and it was another answer to prayer. He was seated on the stool, and the warders went out, and the light was turned into his eyes.

  ‘Citizen Examiner’, said Lanny promptly, ‘I have to tell you of a change of mind. I have decided that your advice was good. I am no longer able to go on, and I have a proposition to make to you’.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the other, beaming. ‘That is happy news indeed, Mr Budd. If only you had listened to me earlier!’

  ‘I am sorry, but I had to make the test. I don’t know whether you will be willing to accept my proposition. It will take some time to state it, and I would like to ask a favour in the meantime’.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I should like to be allowed to lie down on the floor. This stool has become a torment to me, and I am really not able to think while sitting on it’.

  ‘The proposal is somewhat irregular, Mr Budd; but since you have a concession to make I suppose I may make one also’.

  So Lanny let himself down gently on his back and lay flat. The light was turned off, and he began, ‘Citizen Examiner, I cannot accept your proposition that I plotted to kill Stalin because that is not true, and I cannot bring myself to sign a statement accusing myself of such an infamy. But it has occurred to me what I can do that may have great importance to you: I can tell you what I know about the Communist party in the United States’.