“So we should kill preventively so as not to be killed?” concluded Melkior with a smile freezing on his lips. “But kill whom? By what criterion?”
“By a simple criterion, medical. There are symptoms. How does a surgeon know where to cut? Does he need a criterion? He simply pins down where the illness is hidden and what it is that is endangering the organism. This is largely a matter of talent, knowledge, intuition — but very often of simple cunning. The killer is lying in wait and the thing to do is provoke him. You’ve got to tease him out of the armor of his quiescence, to prod his murderous wishes awake. You will of course have observed such a character on the tram: sitting there with his legs stretched across the aisle, blocking the passage of others, everything there is his. Not that he does this purposely — he just feels like it. He doesn’t think of his legs as an obstacle, for people to step over, around, grumbling at having to adapt to him. So you trod on his foot on purpose. Step on it good and hard, with all your weight! But you apologize right away, awfully sorry, didn’t mean to, an accident, and so on … and then look at his face, look into his eyes: if you know how to look you’ll discover a murderer. What a pleasure it would be for him to kill you, given half the chance! There’s your ‘criterion’ for you!”
Don Fernando fell silent, wearing a sort of quiet sadness on his face, like someone who has had a good cry.
“Wait a minute,” said Melkior without irony, indeed with concern, “who could possibly catch them all?”
“You’re talking like a policeman!” frowned Don Fernando. “Then again, why not? That’s what the job should be of any intelligent police force which genuinely protects people’s safety — to catch murderers before they’ve committed the crime, instead of producing detective stories after the murder and inventing police geniuses and criminal heroes to tickle the fancy of small-time delinquents and romantic onanists.”
“So what you’re saying is … tread on people’s feet in trams and then peer into their eyes? But isn’t that a rather unreliable method, telling potential criminals by their eyes? There used to be this thing about low foreheads and beetle brows and skull shape … the so-called Lombrosian type …”
“There’s something in that, too. But a man with a nasty look in his eyes is undoubtedly a potential murderer,” said Don Fernando with certainty. “Just give him a chance, take a bit of a risk. Step on his foot — not literally, of course, not on a tram — I mean in a metaphorical sense … Incidentally, there’s a way that is more reliable still. You mentioned low foreheads and beetle brows … and I say: whoever’s been physically marked by Nature in any way ought to be put under surveillance. All those ill-matched arms, uneven legs, floppy ears, enormous noses (puny ones as well, mind), hunched backs, squinting eyes, and particularly — and I say particularly—anyone under five foot five. I can well understand the suffering of midgets and I believe it was one of them who invented crime. Just look at them in their platform shoes, their craning necks, their broadly inclusive sweeping gestures, settling issues in a ‘manly’ way; even their voices sound stentorian and heroic. But that’s not enough. They’re after other deeds, the real, acknowledged kind, the ones that inspire fear and awe. They aspire to greatness rather than to being normal; they would rule us, whatever the cost. They gave us Napoleon and, so it seems, Caesar the epileptic, too. Therefore beware the marked, particularly the diminutive. They are haters and will stop at nothing.”
“You’d end up with a large chunk of mankind ‘under surveillance,’” remarked Melkior acidly. “But who would be doing the job? By what right?”
“By the right of the majority …” said Don Fernando vaguely, as if he himself didn’t entirely believe this.
“But what makes you think the majority of people look ‘nice’?”
“History, that’s what!” Don Fernando sprang back to life, fortified by a fresh idea. “Every historical blackguard eventually paid his debt to mankind! But always too late, only after he’d been up to his eyes in human blood. Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just were too busy going after one another to notice the ambitious pint-sized general, and out he slipped between their legs to slaughter half of mankind for his greatness. Hitler should have been bumped off ten years ago (if not before) and Mussolini should have been given a resounding thrashing ten years before that until he cried and begged for mercy. He would have, too. As things stand, it will take a war and a victory at God knows what price (if we even win!) to finally strangle those two historical apes. It will be too late again, too late … because of that very same Hamlet-like inertia and naïveté.”
“Do you think, then, that anything can be achieved, on a large scale, through personal terrorism and assassination?”
“Assassination, assassination, yes of course!” Don Fernando agreed with a curious kind of rage. “Give the scoundrel a taste of fear on his own hide! It’s always educational! This seems to be the only kind of pedagogy these villains understand. Fear. Your fear and mine, that’s what the scoundrel should be made to feel! If nothing else, it would give me satisfaction—‘tremble, tremble, scoundrel,’ as they sing in the opera.”
Don Fernando took a breath. He was profoundly agitated, his face flushed bright red, the corners of his lips flecked with foam. He used a handkerchief to wipe his mouth, forehead, and cheeks, as if wiping a mask from his face. His features did in fact regain the exalted expression of his serene internal glow. He was now embarrassed by his excitement, letting the breeze of a kindly smile play over his face and conceal the shame.
“You seem, however, to prefer fairy tales of one sort and another,” he said superciliously.
“What fairy tales?” said Melkior in surprise.
“Oh, Russian fairy tales about various forms of goodness … Such as the one about Alyosha Karamazov, the little monk. You even gauge that drunken cynic Maestro using the little monk as a standard. But he doesn’t fit the standard, it’s too narrow for him. Your standards are too strict, my dear Eustachius — and too regular. People are like stones: irregular in shape, heavy, scattered. It’s the devil’s own job bringing order to the lot, assembling them in one place and arranging them by this or that rule — and it’s even worse hewing each individual stone. Indeed it’s impossible to carve out what people like to call a ‘moral profile.’ Illusory is what it is.”
This is something he has going on with himself, thought Melkior. I’ve never spoken to him about “goodness” or “standards.” He must be struggling with some “little monk” of his own.
“Incidentally, you haven’t asked me how all this fits in with my actual political convictions,” asked Don Fernando suddenly, giving a dry and somehow malicious laugh.