He got up, opened the drawer of the low table where he kept his opium tray, above a collection of small cactuses. Under the tray, a photograph: Kyo. He pulled it out, looked at it without any precise thoughts, sank bitterly inta the certainty that, at the point he had reached, no one knew anyone-and that even the presence of Kyo, which he had so longed for just now, would have changed nothing, would only have rendered their separation more desperate, like that of friends whom one embraces in a dream and who have been dead for years. He kept the photograph between his fingers: it was as warm as a hand. He let it drop back into the drawer, took out the tray, turned out the electric light and lit the lamp.
Two pipes. Formerly, as soon as his craving began to be quenched, he would contemplate men with benevolence, and the world as an infinite of possibilities. Now, in his innermost being, the possibilities found no place: he was sixty, and his memories were full of tombs. His exquisitely pure sense of Chinese art, of those bluish paintings on which his lamp cast only a dim light, of the whole civilization of suggestion which China spread around him, which, thirty years earlier, he had been able to put to such delicate uses-his sense of happiness- was now nothing more than a thin cover beneath which anguish and the obsession of death were awakening, like restless dogs stirring at the end of their sleep.
Yet his mind hovered over the world, over mankind with a burning passion that age had not extinguished.
It had long been his conviction that there is a paranoiac in every man, in himself first of all. I–Ie had thought once-ages ago-that he imagined himself a hero. No. This force, this furious subterranean imagination which was in him (were I to go mad, he had thought, this part of me alone would remain..) was ready to assume every form, like light. Like Kyo, and almost for the same reasons, he thought of the records of which the latter had spoken to him; and almost in the same fashion, for Kyo’s modes of thought were born of his own. Just as Kyo had not recognized his own voice because he had heard it with his throat, so he-Gisors-probably could not reduce his consciousness of himself to that which he could have of another person, because it was not acquired by the same means. It owed nothing to the senses. He felt himself penetrating into a domain which belonged to him more than any other. With his intruding consciousness he was anxiously treading a forbidden solitude where no one would ever join him. For a second he had the sensation that it was that which must escape death.. His hands, which were preparing a new pellet, were slightly trembling. Even his love for Kyo did not free him from this total solitude. But if he could not escape from himself into another being, he knew how to find relief: there was opium.
Five pellets. For years he had limited himself to that, not without difficulty, not without pain sometimes. He scratched the bowl of his pipe; the shadow of his hand slipped from the wall to the ceiling. He pushed back the lamp a fraction of an inch; the contours of the shadow became lost. The objects also were vanishing: without changing their form they ceased to be distinct from himself, joined him in the depth of a familiar world where a benign indifference mingled all things-a world more true than the other because more constant, more like himself; sure as a friendship, always indulgent and always accessible: forms, memories, ideas, all plunged slowly towards a liberated universe. He remembered a September afternoon when the solid gray of the sky made a lake’s surface appear milky, in the meshes of vast fields of water-lilies; from the moldy gables of an abandoned pavilion to the magnificent and desolate horizon he saw only a world suffused with a solemn melancholy. Near his idle bell, a Buddhist priest leaned on the balustrade of the pavilion, abandoning his sanctuary to the dust, to the fragrance of burning aromatic woods; peasants gathering water-lily seeds passed by in a boat without the slightest sound; at the edge of the farthest flowers two long waves grew from the rudder, melted listlessly in the gray water. They were vanishing now in himself, gathering in their fan al the oppressiveness of the world, but an oppressiveness without bitterness, brought by opium to an ultimate purity. His eyes shut, carried by great motionless wings, Gisors contemplated his solitude: a desolation that joined the divine, while at the same time the wave of serenity that gently covered the depths of death widened to infinity.
Half past four in the morning
Already dressed as government soldiers with waterproofs, the men were going down one by one into the big launch rocked by the eddies of the river.
“Two of the sailors are members of the Party. We’ll have to question them: they must know where the firearms are,” said Kyo to Katov. Except for the boots, the uniform did not greatly modify the latter’s appearance.
His military blouse was as badly buttoned as the other. But the brand-new cap solemnly sitting on his head, which was usually bare, made him look foolish. “Astonishing combination, a Chinese officer’s cap and such a nose! ” thought Kyo. It was pitch dark.
“Slip on the hood of your waterproof,” he said nevertheless.
The launch eased off from the wharf and sped into the night. It soon disappeared behind a junk Cruisers- the shafts of light from the projectors, crossed like sabers, swung in a flash from the sky to the chaotic port.
In the bow, Katov kept his eyes glued to the Shtm- tung, which seemed gradually to be approaching. While the smell of stagnant water, fish and smoke from the port, which was gradually replacing the coal smell of the dock, seemed to go through him, his mind was obsessed by the memory which the approach of every battle called forth in him. On the Lithuanian front his battalion had been taken by the White forces. The disarmed men were standing in line on the barely visible expanse of snow against the greenish dawn. “Communists, leave the ranks!” Death, they knew. Two-thirds of the battalion had advanced. “Take off your coats.” “Dig the pit.” They had dug. Slowly, for the ground was frozen. The White Guards, a revolver in each hand (the shovels might become weapons), uneasy and impatient, were waiting, to right and left-the center empty because of the machine-guns leveled at the prisoners. The silence was limitless, vast as the snow that stretched out as far as the eye could reach. Only the clods of earth fell with a brittle sound, more and more hurried. In spite of death, the men were hurrying to get warm. Several had begun to sneeze. “That’s good now. Halt!” They turned round. Behind them, beyond their comrades, women, children and old men from the village were herded, scarcely clad, wrapped in blankets, mobilized to witness the example. Many were turning their heads, as though they were trying not to look, but they were fascinated by horror. “Take off your trousers!” For uniforms were scarce. Many hesitated, because of the women. “Take off your trousers! ” The wounds appeared, one by one, bandaged with rags: the machine-guns had fired low and almost all were wounded in the legs. Many folded their trousers, although they had thrown their cloaks. They formed a line again, on the edge of the pit this time, facing the machine-guns, pale on the snow: flesh and shirts. Bitten by the cold, they were now sneezing uncontrollably, one after the other, and those sneezes were so intensely human, in that dawn of execution, that the machine-gunners, instead of firing, waited-waited for life to become less indiscreet. At last they decided to fire. The following evening the Reds recaptured the village: seventeen of the victims who were still alive- among them Katov-were saved. Those pale shadows on the greenish snow at dawn, transparent, shaken by convulsive sneezes in the face of the machine-guns, were here in this rain, in this Chinese night, before the shadow of the Shantung.