“So now I understand the whole process,” said the researcher when the officer came back to him.
“Apart from the most important thing,” said the officer, taking the researcher by the arm and pointing to the top of the machine. “Up there in the engraver is the actual gear train that regulates the harrow’s movements; and that gear train is configured to match the drawing of the sentence. As I mentioned, I’m still using the sketches made by the old commandant. Here they are,”—he took several sheets of paper from the leather portfolio—“Unfortunately, I can’t let you hold them yourself, they’re the most precious thing I have. But please sit down and I’ll show them to you from this distance, you’ll be able to see everything just fine.” He held up the first sheet. The researcher would have liked to say something complimentary, but all he could see were labyrinthine lines criss-crossing each other and covering the paper so thickly it was hard to see any white space at all. “Read it,” said the officer.
“I can’t,” said the researcher.
“But it’s perfectly clear.”
“It’s very elaborate,” said the researcher, dodging the demand. “But I’m afraid I can’t decipher it.”
“Yes,” the officer said, then laughed and put the portfolio away again. “It’s no primary school calligraphy, that’s for sure. You’ve got to spend a long time reading it. I’m sure you’d be able to see it in the end. Of course, the lettering can’t be too simple; after all, it’s not supposed to kill at once, on average it takes somewhere in the region of twelve hours; the turning point comes after about six. So there have to be many, many embellishments surrounding the script itself; the actual text only marks the body in quite a narrow band; the rest of the body is for the flourishes. Can you see now why the work of the harrow and the machine is so special?—Look at this!” He jumped onto the ladder, turned a wheel and shouted down: “Watch out, move to the side!” The whole thing started to move. If the wheel hadn’t screeched, it would have been magnificent. The officer shook his fist at the screeching wheel as though it were a surprise to him, then spread his arms apologetically towards the researcher and hurriedly climbed back down to watch the machine’s motion from the ground. Something only he noticed still wasn’t quite right; he climbed back up, reached into the interior of the engraver with both hands, then, instead of using the ladder, quickly slid down one of the poles and, to make himself heard, shouted excitedly into the researcher’s ear: “Do you understand the process? The harrow starts writing; once it has finished applying the script to the man’s back for the first time, the cotton wool tilts and slowly turns his body to the side, to present a new area to the harrow. Meanwhile, the raw areas are pressed against the cotton wool, which, because of the way it has been prepared, immediately stops the bleeding and prepares the skin so the script can be deepened. Then, when the body is turned again, the prongs at the edge of the harrow, here, rip the cotton wool off the wounds and fling it into the ditch, letting the harrow get back to work. Going back and forth like this, it inscribes the sentence ever more deeply over the course of twelve hours. For the first six, the condemned man lives in much the same way as he did before, except that he’s in pain. After two hours, we take the felt block out of his mouth because he won’t have the strength to scream any more. Also, here at the head end, we put a kind of warm rice porridge into this electrically heated pot, so that the man can lap it up with his tongue if he wants to. No one has ever passed it up. At least, I’ve never heard of anyone, and my experience with this is pretty extensive. It’s only after around six hours that he’ll lose his interest in food. I’ll usually be kneeling down here so I can observe this phenomenon. The man rarely swallows his last mouthful, he’ll just turn it over in his mouth for a while and finally spit it into the ditch. I’ve got to be careful, otherwise I’d get sprayed in the face. You’ll see how quiet the man gets in the sixth hour! Understanding starts to dawn on even the stupidest ones. It begins around their eyes and spreads out from there. It’s a sight that might tempt you to lie down next to him under the harrow. Nothing much happens from then on, just that the man slowly deciphers the script, he purses his lips as if he’s listening. You’ve seen yourself that it’s not easy to decipher the script by looking at it; our man deciphers it from his wounds. It’s a lot of work; it’ll take him another six hours to get it done. At that point, the harrow skewers him completely and tosses him into the ditch, where he slaps down onto the bloody water and the cotton wool. That’s the end of the execution and we, the soldier and I, shovel some earth over him.”
The researcher had tilted one ear towards the officer and was watching the machine with his hands in his pockets. The condemned man watched it too, but without understanding what it did. He crouched a little and followed the movements of the swinging needles until the soldier, at a signal from the officer, used a knife to cut through his shirt and trousers from behind so they fell off him; he tried to grab at the falling clothes to cover himself, but the soldier lifted him into the air and shook the last scraps of fabric off him. The officer paused the machine and in this new quiet the condemned man was laid down under the harrow. His chains were taken off and replaced with straps; at first, this seemed to strike the condemned man as an improvement. Then the harrow lowered itself a little further, because the man was comparatively thin. When the needles touched him, a shudder ran across his skin; the soldier was busy securing his right hand, but his left stretched out without knowing what for; it happened to reach in the direction of the researcher. The officer watched the researcher constantly from the corner of his eye, as if trying to see what impression the execution, which had been at least superficially explained, was making on him.
The strap for the man’s right wrist snapped; the soldier had probably pulled it too tight. The soldier held up the torn strap, asking for help. The officer went over to him and, his face turned towards the researcher, said, “The machine has lots of moving parts, it’s inevitable that something rips or breaks from time to time, but you can’t let that skew your overall opinion of it. A strap like this we can replace straight away; I’ll use a chain instead, even though that’ll make the bed’s motion a little less smooth for the right arm.” And while he fastened the chain, he added: “Our resources for maintaining the machine are very limited these days. Under the old commandant, I had an unlimited budget solely for repairs. We had a small warehouse where we kept all kinds of replacement parts. I admit that I almost got wasteful with it all, I mean before, not now, whatever the new commandant likes to claim; he’ll use anything as a pretext to attack the old way of doing things. These days he oversees the repair budget himself and if I put in a request for a new strap, I have to present the broken one as evidence it’s needed, then it’ll take ten days for a new one to arrive, and when it does it’ll be terrible quality and basically useless. As for how I’m supposed to keep the machine going in the meantime, that’s something no one bothers about.”
The researcher considered. Intervening in other people’s affairs is always a dubious proposition. He was neither a resident of the penal colony nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution or even try to prevent it, they could have said to him: you’re a foreigner here, keep your opinions to yourself. He would have had no response to that; at most he could have added that he was a little surprised by his own behaviour, because the purpose of his travels was to act as an observer and in no way to try and get mixed up in other countries’ judicial processes. But in this instance it was very tempting. The injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the sentence were beyond doubt. Nobody could have suspected the researcher of having any vested interests, since the man was a stranger to him, not a compatriot of his and not someone who inspired any particular compassion. The researcher himself had arrived with letters of recommendation from the highest officials, had been welcomed here with the greatest respect, and the fact that he had been invited to watch this execution seemed to suggest that he was being asked his opinion of what was going on. That was all the more likely since the commandant, as he’d heard all too clearly, was no supporter of this process and seemed to be treating the officer with something bordering on hostility.