At that moment, he heard the officer give a cry of rage. He had just, not without effort, pushed the felt block into the condemned man’s mouth when the latter succumbed to an irresistible nausea, closed his eyes and vomited. The officer hastily tore the block from his mouth and tried to turn the man’s head towards the ditch, but it was too late, the vomit had already spattered the machine. “It’s all the commandant’s fault!” shouted the officer and started wildly rattling one of the brass poles in his fury. “They’re making my machine as dirty as a cowshed.” With trembling hands, he showed the researcher what had happened. “Haven’t I spent hours trying to make the commandant understand that prisoners shouldn’t be given anything to eat for a day before the execution? But no, this new mild approach means they have other ideas. Before the man’s led away, the commandant’s ladies stuff him full of sweets. His whole life, he’s lived on stinking fish and now he’s got to eat sweets! That’s not a catastrophe, I wouldn’t complain, but why don’t we ever get a new block, something I’ve spent three months asking for? How could you not be disgusted, putting something in your mouth that more than a hundred men have sucked and bitten on while they died?”
The condemned man was resting his head and looked peaceful; the soldier was busy using the man’s shirt to wipe the machine. The officer went over to the researcher who, suspecting something, stepped back a little. But the officer took him by the hand and pulled him aside. “I’d like to have a word with you in confidence,” he said, “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” said the researcher, and listened with his eyes lowered.
“This procedure and this execution you’ve been given the opportunity to admire no longer has any public supporters here in our colony. I’m its only defender, and the only one standing up for the old commandant’s legacy. I can no longer hope to develop the procedure any further, it takes all my strength just to preserve what we already have. When the old commandant was still alive, the colony was full of his supporters; I may have some of his powers of persuasion, but I don’t have any of his authority; as a result, all his supporters have gone underground, there are still lots of them, but no one admits to it. Today—that is, an execution day—if you go to the tea house and listen in, all you’re likely to hear is ambivalent chatter. Those are all supporters, but under the current commandant and given his current attitude, they’re completely useless. So I ask you: should the arrival of this commandant and the ladies who influence him mean that a life’s work”—he gestured at the machine—“is destroyed? Can you allow that to happen? Even if you’re a foreigner who’s only spending a few days on our island? Believe me, there’s no time to lose; they’re already concocting an attack on my judicial authority; they hold discussions I’m not invited to in the commandant’s office; even your visit today is typical of the whole situation; they’re cowards and so they prefer to send you, a stranger, in their place.—You should have seen how different the executions were in the old days! A day before the execution had even started, this valley would be full of people; everyone came to watch; the commandant and his ladies would appear early in the morning; the camp was woken with fanfares; I reported that everything was ready; the colony’s best people—not one senior official would miss it—arranged themselves nearest to the machine; this pile of chairs is a miserable remnant from that time. The machine would be gleaming, freshly polished: I’d use some replacement parts for almost every execution. In front of hundreds of pairs of eyes—the spectators would be standing on tiptoe all the way to the cliffs—the condemned man would be laid under the harrow by the commandant himself. The work that these days is done by a common soldier was assigned to me, the president of the court, and was considered an honour. And then the execution began! There was no screeching to disturb the smooth running of the machine. Some people didn’t even watch, just lay there in the sand with their eyes closed; but they all knew: justice is being done. In the hush all you could hear was the groaning of the condemned man, muffled by the block. These days the machine can’t even elicit any groans that the block won’t stifle; back then, the writing needles discharged an acid that we’re not allowed to use any more. Well, and then the sixth hour came around! It was always impossible to find room for everyone who wanted to watch from close up. The commandant, with his usual wisdom, ordered the children to be let through; for my part, I got to be there because of my duties; I’d often be sitting right there with a small child in each arm. How attentively we watched the transfiguration of their tormented expressions; how close we kept our own faces to the splendour of that justice, which was already fleeting in the moment it was finally achieved! What good times, old friend!” The officer had plainly forgotten who was standing in front of him; he’d put his arm around the researcher and rested his head on the researcher’s shoulder. The researcher was extremely embarrassed and impatiently looked past the officer to the others. The soldier had finished cleaning up and was pouring more rice porridge from a can into the bowl. As soon as the condemned man noticed this—he seemed to have completely recovered—he again began to slurp up the porridge with his tongue. The soldier kept pushing him away, because the porridge was meant for later on, but he didn’t seem to be behaving properly either as he scooped up the prisoner’s porridge with his dirty hands and ate it himself.
The officer quickly got a grip on himself. “I wasn’t trying to influence you emotionally,” he said. “I know it’s impossible to make someone now understand what those times were like. And after all, the machine’s work continues and it speaks for itself. It speaks for itself even if there’s no one else here. And at the end, the body will still make its strangely gentle descent into the ditch, even if there are no longer hundreds of flies gathering around it like there used to be. Back then, we had to put up a handrail around the ditch; it’s long gone now.”
The researcher wanted to turn his face away from the officer, and looked around aimlessly. The officer thought he was looking at the empty valley; he took the researcher’s hands, moved round to catch his eye, and asked, “So you can feel it, then, what a disgrace this is?”
But the researcher said nothing. The officer left him alone for a moment. With his legs wide apart, his hands on his hips, he stayed quiet and stared at the ground. Then he gave the researcher an encouraging smile and said, “I was standing nearby yesterday when the commandant invited you to watch. I heard the invitation. I know the commandant. I understood the point of the invitation right away. Although he is actually powerful enough to act against me, he doesn’t dare, and instead he wants to expose me to the judgment of a respected outsider like yourself. It’s very calculating of him; this is your second day on the island, you didn’t know the old commandant or his thinking, you’re imbued with European attitudes, you might even be a principled opponent of the death penalty and especially of this kind of execution by machine; moreover, you’re watching this execution be carried out without any public participation, sadly, on a run-down machine—and taking all these things together (this is how the commandant thinks), isn’t it very possible that you would disapprove of this process? And if you did disapprove of it (I’m still speaking about how the commandant thinks), perhaps you wouldn’t keep that to yourself, because you presumably have faith in your well-honed convictions. You must have seen many idiosyncrasies among many different peoples and learnt to be respectful, so you probably won’t speak out with full force against this process in the way you would at home. But the commandant doesn’t even need you to do that. If you just said something in passing, one careless phrase, that would be enough. It wouldn’t even need to express what you really think as long as it seemed to correspond to his ideas. He’ll question you with all the cunning he can muster, I’ve got no doubt of that, and his ladies will sit in a circle around you with their ears pricked up. You might say, for example, ‘In my country, the judicial process is rather different,’ or ‘In my country, the accused is examined before sentencing,’ or ‘Our prisoners are allowed to know their sentence,’ or ‘We have several punishments other than the death penalty,’ or ‘We only had torture till the Middle Ages.’ All these comments are absolutely correct, and to you seem like innocent, matter-of-fact statements that don’t touch on my work here. But how will the commandant react to them? I can see him now, the good commandant, quickly pushing his chair aside and hurrying out onto the balcony; I can see his ladies streaming after him; I can hear him talking—his ladies say he has a voice like thunder—and what he’ll say is: ‘An eminent Western researcher studying judicial systems around the world has just said that our traditional way of doing things is inhumane. Having heard this opinion from such a prominent expert, I can naturally no longer allow that process to continue. I hereby decree, with immediate effect, that…’ and so on. You’ll want to intervene, you didn’t say what he’s announcing, you didn’t call my process inhumane, on the contrary, because of your deep insight you think it’s the most humane and most dignified you’ve ever seen, and you also admire the actual machinery—but it’s too late; you can’t even get out onto the balcony, which is packed with his ladies; you want to raise a protest; you want to shout; but a lady’s hand holds your mouth shut—and I and the old commandant’s work will be lost.”