Despite the evident hurry with which he took off his tunic and then undressed fully, he still handled every item of clothing with great care, even running his fingers across the silver braid on his jacket and shaking a tassel into place. What didn’t really fit with this carefulness, however, was that as soon as he’d finished folding a piece of clothing, he reluctantly tossed it into the ditch. The last thing he had left was his short sword and the belt it hung from. He pulled the sword out of the scabbard, snapped it, gathered everything together—the pieces of sword, the scabbard and the belt—and threw it all down so it jangled at the bottom of the ditch.
Now he stood there naked. The researcher bit his lip and said nothing. He knew what was going to happen, but he had no right to prevent the officer from doing anything he’d decided to. If the judicial process the officer was so devoted to really was about to be halted—possibly as a result of intervention by the researcher, something he still felt he had to do—then the officer’s behaviour was entirely correct; in his place the researcher would have acted no differently.
The soldier and the condemned man didn’t understand right away; they weren’t even watching to begin with. The condemned man was delighted to have the handkerchiefs back, but he didn’t get to enjoy them for long, because the soldier quickly snatched them out of his hand. The man tried to pull them back out of the soldier’s belt, where he’d tucked them in, but the soldier was on his guard. So they squabbled, half joking. Only when the officer was completely naked did they start to pay attention. The condemned man in particular seemed struck by a sense that a great reversal of fortunes was taking place. What had happened to him was now happening to the officer. Perhaps the process would be carried through to its conclusion. The foreign researcher had probably given the order. This was his revenge. Although he himself hadn’t been made to suffer to the end, he was going to be avenged in full. An expression of broad, silent laughter appeared on his face, and didn’t fade.
The officer, for his part, had turned to the machine. Although it had been obvious enough beforehand how well he knew its workings, now it was almost upsetting to see how lovingly he handled it and how eagerly it obeyed. He just put his hand near the harrow and it adjusted itself until it found the right height to receive him; he barely touched the side of the bed and it immediately began to tremble; the block of felt approached his mouth, it was clear the officer didn’t really want it, but his hesitation only lasted a moment, then he acquiesced and opened his mouth. Everything was ready except that the straps were still hanging loose down the machine’s sides, but it seemed they weren’t needed, the officer didn’t need to be restrained. Then the condemned man noticed the loose straps; in his view the execution wasn’t being performed properly if the straps weren’t done up; he waved at the soldier and together they went to strap the officer in. The officer had been stretching out his foot to kick the lever that set the engraver in motion; when he saw these two coming, he pulled back his foot and let himself be tied down. But now he couldn’t reach the lever any more; neither the soldier not the condemned man would be able to find it; and the researcher had decided not to move a muscle. It turned out not to be necessary; as soon as the straps had been tightened, the machine went into operation; the bed shook, the needles danced on his skin; the harrow swooped down and up. The researcher had been staring for a while when he remembered that one of the gears in the engraver should have been screeching; but everything was quiet, there wasn’t even a hum from the machine.
It was so quiet that he was able to take in what else was going on. The researcher looked over at the soldier and the condemned man. The condemned man was the livelier of the two, everything about the machine interested him and he bent down over it, or stretched up to see the higher parts, and he kept pointing his finger to show things to the soldier. The researcher found it painful to watch. He was determined to stay till the end, but he couldn’t have stood the sight of these two for long. “Go home,” he told them. The soldier might have been ready to leave, but the condemned man seemed to consider the order to be a punishment. He begged to be allowed to stay, bringing his hands together in supplication, and when the researcher shook his head and refused to relent, the condemned man got down on his knees. The researcher saw that orders would do no good here, he would have to go over and chase them away. At that moment, he heard a noise from the engraver. He looked across. Was the gear playing up after all? But it was something else. The engraver’s lid rose slowly and eventually flipped completely open. You could see the teeth on one of the gears, which lifted itself up until the whole wheel was in sight; it was as if some force were squeezing the engraver so that there was no space left inside for the gear; it kept turning until it reached the edge of the engraver, then fell, rolled a short distance in the sand and toppled over. But another one was already rising out of the top, and it was followed by many more, big, small, some practically identical; the same happened with all of them; each time it seemed that the engraver must now be empty, but then another especially numerous group of gears appeared, rose out of the box, fell to the ground, rolled in the sand and toppled over. Watching this, the condemned man forgot that the researcher had ordered him to leave; the gears fascinated him, he kept wanting to touch them, and called the soldier to help him, but then pulled his hand back in fright, because another gear popped out and scared him as it rolled closer.
The researcher, on the other hand, was deeply disconcerted; the machine was obviously shaking itself apart; its smooth operation was an illusion; he felt he had to take over since the officer could no longer look after himself. But he hadn’t been watching the rest of the machine while the gears were falling; now that the last of them seemed to have left the engraver, the researcher got another, worse surprise. The harrow wasn’t writing, only stabbing; and the bed wasn’t rolling the officer’s body, only lifting it trembling into the needles. The researcher wanted to intervene, maybe stop the whole thing: this wasn’t the torture the officer had wanted, this was simple murder. He reached out his hands. But the harrow was already lifting the skewered body to the side, as it usually only did after twelve hours. Blood was streaming from a hundred wounds (unmixed with water; the little tubes had also failed). And now the final stage also malfunctioned: the body didn’t drop from the needles, just hung over the ditch, pouring out blood, without dropping. The harrow tried to return to its original position but, as if noticing that it was still carrying this weight, it stayed above the ditch. “Help me!” the researcher shouted to the soldier and the condemned man, and took hold of the officer’s feet. He wanted to push from the feet while the other two pushed from the officer’s head, so they could slowly slide him off the needles. But the other two couldn’t make up their minds to come; the condemned man turned away; the researcher had to go over to them and force them to attend to the officer’s head. There, almost against his will, he saw the corpse’s face. It was like it had been in life (there was no sign of the promised redemption); what all the others had found in the machine, the officer hadn’t; his lips were pressed together, his eyes open, alive-looking, his expression calm and assured, and through his forehead protruded the tip of the big iron spike.
When the researcher, with the soldier and the condemned man following him, reached the first buildings of the colony, the soldier pointed at one of them and said, “That’s the tea house.”
On the ground floor of this building was a deep, low-ceilinged, cave-like room with walls and ceiling blackened by smoke. One whole side was open to the street. Although the tea house was little different from the colony’s other buildings, which, except for the commandant’s palatial headquarters, were all fairly run down, it still evoked a sense of history in the researcher and he felt the draw of a previous era. He walked up to it, followed by his two companions, went past the unoccupied tables that stood on the street outside, and breathed in the cool, musty air that came from the interior. “The old man is buried here,” said the soldier. “The priest wouldn’t let him have a spot in the graveyard. For a while, no one could decide where to bury him and eventually he was buried here. That’s something the officer definitely didn’t tell you anything about, because that’s what he was most ashamed of. A few times, he even came here at night and tried to dig up the old man, but they always chased him away.”