“No,” the officer said again, paused for a moment as if to let the researcher clarify his reasons for asking that, then added: “It would be pointless to tell him. He’s going to get it written on his own skin.”
The researcher would have let it go, but he felt the condemned man look across at him; he seemed to be asking whether the researcher could condone the procedure he’d just had explained. So the researcher, who’d already leant back in his chair, shifted forward again and asked, “But that he’s been sentenced for something, surely he knows that?”
“Not that either,” said the officer, and smiled at the researcher as if starting to expect peculiar comments from him.
“No,” said the researcher, wiping his hand across his forehead. “So this man also doesn’t know whether his defence was successful?”
“He hasn’t been given an opportunity to defend himself,” said the officer, glancing off to the side as if he were speaking to himself and didn’t want to embarrass the researcher by telling him such obvious things.
“But he must have had some opportunity to defend himself,” said the researcher, and stood up from his chair.
The officer saw the danger that his explanation of the machine’s workings would be considerably delayed; he went over to the researcher, took him by the arm and pointed at the condemned man, who, now that he was plainly being discussed, stood to attention while the soldier pulled his chains taut. The officer said, “The way it works is this. I’ve been appointed judge here in the penal colony. Despite my youth. Because I helped the old commandant on all punishment-related matters and also because I know the machine better than anyone else. The principle on which I make my decisions is this: the defendant’s guilt is never in doubt. Other courts can’t follow that principle because they have more than one member and they also have higher courts above them. It’s not like that here, or at least it wasn’t under the old commandant. The new one, admittedly, has shown some signs of wanting to interfere in my court, but I’ve managed to hold him off so far, and I should be able to keep that up. — You wanted to have this case explained; it’s as simple as they all are. This morning, a captain reported that this man, who’s assigned to him as a steward and sleeps in front of his door, slept straight through one of his duties. You see, he’s supposed to get up on the hour and salute in front of the captain’s door. Hardly an onerous duty and certainly a necessary one, because it keeps him fresh both for his guard duty and as a steward. Last night, the captain wanted to check whether this man was discharging his duty properly and found him crouched down, fast asleep. He fetched his riding crop and hit him across the face. Instead of getting up and begging for forgiveness, this man grabbed his superior officer by the legs and shouted: ‘Throw away the whip or I’ll eat you.’ — Those are the facts. The captain came to me an hour ago, I took down his statement and wrote out the judgment. Then I had the man put in chains. It was all very straightforward. If I’d first made the man appear in front of me and questioned him, it would only have created confusion. He would have lied, and if I’d managed to catch him lying, he would have told different lies, and so on. This way I’ve got him and won’t let him go again. — Does that answer your questions? We’re running a bit behind, the execution should have begun already, and I haven’t finished explaining how the machine works.” He urged the researcher to sit back down in the chair, and continued: “As you can see, the harrow matches the shape of a person; this is the harrow for the upper body; these are the harrows for the legs. For the head, there’s only this little spike. Is that all clear?” He bent down to the researcher and smiled encouragingly, ready to explain in any amount of detail.
The researcher looked at the harrow with a wrinkled brow. The description of the judicial process hadn’t satisfied him. But he said to himself that, after all, this was a penal colony, that special measures were necessary here and that everything had to be handled in a rigorously military fashion. He also placed some hope in the new commandant, who was obviously trying, albeit slowly, to introduce a new system that went beyond the limited thinking of this officer. From out of this train of thought he asked, “Will the commandant attend the execution?”
“It’s not certain either way,” said the officer, who seemed to find this unexpected question painful, and his friendly expression turned into a grimace. “That’s another reason why we’ve got to get on with it. I’m sorry to say I’ll even have to cut short some of the explanation. But tomorrow, once the machine has been cleaned—the fact that it gets so dirty is its only failing—I could fill you in on the details later. But just the essentials for now.—When the man lies on the bed and it has started to shake, the harrow is lowered down to his body. It automatically positions itself so that the tips of the needles are only just touching him; once the set-up is complete, this steel chain locks to become a rod. And then the performance begins. Someone without the necessary background wouldn’t notice any difference between different punishments. It looks like the harrow is doing the same job each time. As it shakes, it jabs the tips of the needles into the body, which is also being shaken by the bed. And so you can view the sentence as it’s being inscribed, the harrow itself is made of glass. That caused us several technical problems, especially when it came to attaching the needles, but after many attempts we finally managed it. We left no stone unturned. And now anyone can look through the glass to see the sentence being written on the skin. Wouldn’t you like to come closer and see the needles for yourself?”
The researcher stood up slowly, went over and bent down to the harrow. “You see,” said the officer. “It’s actually a pair of needles repeated many times over. Each long one has a short one beside it. The long one inscribes and the short one sprays water to wash away the blood and keep the writing clear. The mixture of blood and water then runs down into these little grooves, which all lead into this drain, and that flows out of the waste pipe into the ditch underneath.” With his finger, the officer traced the route that the liquid had to follow. When he, trying to make it as easy as possible to visualize, cupped his hands beneath the waste pipe, the researcher lifted his head away from the machine and, with one hand out behind him, groped his way back into the chair. At that moment, he saw to his horror that the condemned man had also taken up the officer’s invitation to have a closer look at the workings of the harrow. He’d tugged the sleepy soldier holding the chain forward a little and was leaning down over the glass. The researcher could see him uncertainly trying to make out whatever the two gentlemen had just been inspecting, but because he hadn’t had it explained, he couldn’t make any sense of it. He bent over one part and then another. His eyes kept running across the glass harrow. The researcher wanted to shoo him away because what he was doing was probably punishable. But the officer held the researcher back with one hand, picked up a lump of earth with the other and threw it at the soldier. The soldier opened his eyes with a start, saw what the condemned man had dared to do, dropped his rifle, braced the heels of his boots against the ground and yanked him back so hard he immediately fell over, then stood over him as he writhed on the ground, jangling his chains. “Stand him up!” yelled the officer, because he noticed that the researcher was becoming unhelpfully distracted by the condemned man. The researcher even leant past the harrow, not paying it any attention at all, just to see what was happening to him. “Be careful with him,” the officer yelled again. He went around the machine, grabbed the man under the armpits himself and, with the soldier’s help, finally got him on his feet, even though he kept falling over again.