Rage burning inside my skull. Rage and the hot bright light.
My head had been dropping on to my chest and at first I had pulled it up again from habit to avoid that bloody man's voice up there where the light was; then I had let it rest there, my head, and nothing had happened, he hadn't yelled at me to wake up. I might even have slept, but I didn't know for how long. Not long: the urge to drop my head again and sleep and go on sleeping was overwhelming, but I couldn't do that: I had to work.
Rage against myself, of course, for getting it wrong, for not thinking, for not realizing they must have a closed-circuit television camera behind the dark glass of the window: they wouldn't be so stupid as to leave one of their colonels in there with people who might not like him.
They'd been worried about him but he'd just said I'm all right and walked out of the room without looking at me, as if I didn't exist, as if I hadn't just tried to kill him. I got the point: he'd been obliged to brush off a fly. We hadn't known each other for long but we'd learned things about each other and he'd learned I had a streak of pride and was therefore sensitive.
Work, yes.
I let my head fall again, and waited, but the man didn't shout. I shut my eyes and waited again, but nothing happened. He might not be there. He might not be watching me.
The median cubital artery runs down the inside of the arm and it's easy to reach it with the mouth but the action is obvious, so I took off my shoe and lobbed it up at the light and made sure it missed the bulb before I caught it.
'Stop that! What do you think you're doing?'
Message received.
'It's too bloody bright,' I said, and sat down again on the stool and put my shoe on and turned round to face the wall and let my head go down. That seemed to be all right because he didn't say anything. I was to be watched but not forced to stay awake or face the light. What had he said? The Serbsky Institute. Where the clowns worked.
When?
There was nothing in here I could drain into. There were only the walls and the floor and this stool and the lamp. I was sitting with my back to him now and I could fold my arms and let my head go down, heavy with sleep, until my mouth was against the inside of one wrist, and he might not see the movement of my jaws from behind; but once it started flowing there'd be a gallon and a half and there was nothing to drain into: he'd see it dripping on to the floor and he'd have time to come in here and use the pressure point and call for help and Vader would ask for a transfusion because he wasn't finished with me yet, he'd only just started. They wanted to find Schrenk and they thought I knew where he was.
I could feel the heat of the lamp on the back of my head. My shadow was clear cut, swelling and contracting against the wall as I swayed an inch forward, an inch back, trying to stay awake, trying to think. It became a slow rhythm, and at some time I must have slept, still more or less upright on the stool, backwards and forwards, rocking like an animal in a cage. The footsteps came out of a dream and into reality, thudding from the distance along the corridor outside my cell.
Then voices.
I stayed where I was: it was comfortable here against the wall, with my companionable shadow. This had become my home, my querencia: this place, defined by my shadow's height and my shadow's width, was part of my identity now. They mustn't -
'Out!'
Mustn't take me away.
`Stand up! Out!'
I hadn't heard them opening the door. I suppose I'd been asleep, dreaming about identity.
When I looked round I saw Colonel Vader there with three other men, two of them in uniform. He stood gazing in at me with that predatory stare for a moment; then a look of disgust came to his face. 'He stinks! Put him under a shower and find some sort of clothing for him, and don't be long about it!' He turned and went out.
He shouldn't have said that.
`Come on, out!'
I went with them along the corridor to the prisoners' ablutions: a stone floor and zinc basins and open toilets and a row of showers, the water freezing, hitting me like a burst of glass fragments, shrinking my head and roaring in my ears, he shouldn't have said that, the block of abrasive soap scouring my skin, the face wound burning and throbbing but my eyes resting, soothed at last after the glare of that blinding light. A strip of sacking for a towel and my hair still wet when they took me away and threw me a sweater to wear instead of my shirt: it had been soaked in sweat and that was why he'd said what he had, correction, that was the excuse.
My whole body tingling and most of the torpor gone from my mind, remember London, 'Come on, in here!' Back in the cell again, not mine this time: a smaller one with no window, a slatted bench with one leg at an angle and bloodstains across the top and repeated on the wall, the smell of the human animal that had been in here, Schrenk? There was no means of knowing, there were fifty of these cells in the ground-floor block. 'Wait here.'
No option: they slammed the door and locked it.
I realized, yes, that with my shirt like that I was stinking to high heaven, but he shouldn't have pointed it out. He had done it to humiliate me, crossing the dividing line between the area where the captor and the captive are two civilized men and the area where one is a man and the other has become a pig. It's a critical stage in the business of interrogation, and he had introduced it deliberately, I knew that. But it didn't make any difference.
I walked from wall to wall in the narrow cell, seven paces and back from the door to the window. Drops of water still fell from my wet hair, and I pulled off the sweater they'd given me and tousled my head with it, putting it on again and feeling the dampness against my chest and my back. The lamp in here was a naked bulb of low wattage and gave no heat; I began shivering, and walked faster. There wasn't anything else I could do: I could see his eyes every time I moved towards the door, watching from the oblong panel above it.
They came for me soon afterwards, three plainclothes men and Vader, still in uniform and now wearing a greatcoat and peaked cap.
'Is he washed?'
'Yes, Colonel.'
'Bring him, then. Hurry.'
It was some time in the night: pilot lamps were burning along the corridors and the big high windows were dark, with a seepage of neon light from the streets along their frames.
'Tell this man where we are taking him, Grekov.'
One of them spoke from beside me. 'We are taking you to the Serbsky Institute.' He was a squat man in a dark coat; I could smell tobacco on him. The two others had an air of higher rank, walking in front of us, one on each side of Vader.
'Tell him he will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress.'
'You will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress,' grunted the man beside me. But the sense of it didn't get through to me: I was thinking of the other thing Vader had said. The man beside me was armed: I could smell the gun oil. They would all be armed. They walked in step with Vader, but I didn't follow the rhythm. Once, as we passed the main offices near the entrance to the building, the squat man looked down and gave my foot a quick little kick, to get me into step, but I didn't do what he wanted.