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:
“Dead?”
Why answer?
“Isolate the six nearest prisoners!”
“Useless,” answered Katov: “I gave them the cyanide.'’
“And you?” he finally asked.
“There was only enough for two,” answered Katov with deep joy.
(“I’m going to get a rifle-butt in my face,” he thought to himself.)
The rumble of the prisoners had become almost a clamor.
“Come on, let’s go,” said the officer merely.
Katov did not forget that he had been condemned to death before this, that he had seen the machine-guns leveled at him, had heard them fire. “As soon as I’m outside, I’m going to try to strangle one of them, and to hold my hands tightened to his throat long enough so they will be forced to kill me. They will burn me, but dead.” At that very moment one of the soldiers seized him by the waist, while another brought his hands behind his back and tied them. “The little fellows were lucky,” he said to himself. “Well! let’s suppose I died in a fire.”
He began to walk. Silence fell, like a trap-door, in spite of the moans. The lantern threw Katov’s shadow, now very black, across the great windows framing the night; he walked heavily, with uneven steps, hindered by his wounds; when the swinging of his body brought him closer to the lantern, the silhouette of his head vanished into the ceiling. The whole darkness of the vast hall was alive, and followed him with its eyes, step by step. The silence had become so great that the ground resounded each time his foot fell heavily upon it; all the heads, with a slight movement, followed the rhythm of his walk, with love, with dread, with resignation. All kept their heads raised: the door was being closed.
A sound of deep breathing, the same as that of sleep, began to rise from the ground: breathing through their noses, their jaws clenched with anguish, motionless now, aU those who were not yet dead were waiting for the whistle.
The next day
For more than five minutes, Gisors had been looking at his pipe. Before him, the lighted lamp (“which doesn’t mean that I will use it”), the little open box of opium, the clean needles. Outside, the night; in the room, the light of the small lamp and a great bright rectangle at one end-the open doorway to the next room, where they had brought Kyo’s body. The yard had been cleared for new victims, and no one had objected to the removal of the bodies thrown outside. Katov’s had not been found. May had brought back Kyo’s, with the precautions she would have taken for one severely wounded. He lay there, stretched out, not serene as Kyo, before killing himself, had thought he would become, but convulsed by the suffocation, already something else than a man. May was combing his hair before the preparation of the body for burial, speaking with her mind to the last presence of this face with horrible maternal words that she did not dare to pronounce, afraid herself to hear them. “My love,” she murmured, as she would have said, “my flesh,” knowing full well that it was something of herself, not foreign, which was torn from her; “my life. ” She perceived that it was to the dead that she was saying this. But she had long been past tears.
All grief that helps no one is absurd, Gisors was thinking, hypnotized by his lamp, finding refuge in this fascination. “Peace is here. Peace.” But he did not dare to advance his hand. He believed in no survival, had no respect for the dead; but he did not dare to advance his hand.
She came towards him, her mouth distorted by grief, her eyes staring into space. She placed her fingers gently on his wrist.
“Come,” she said in an anxious voice, almost a whisper. “It seems to me he feels a little warmer.”
He looked up into her face, so human, so grief- stricken, but betraying no delusion. She was looking at him calmly, less with hope than with the attitude of prayer. The effects of poison are always uncertain; and she was a doctor. He got up, followed her, guarding himself against a hope so strong that it seemed to him he would be unable to endure its being withdrawn. He put his hand on Kyo’s bluish brow, that brow which would never be touched by wrinkles: it was cold, with the special coldness of death. He did not dare to withdraw his fingers, to meet May’s eyes, and he kept his own eyes fastened upon Kyo’s open hand, in which the lines had already begun to disappear.