In
the Heart
of Darkness
,
ANDRE MALRAUX
KASSNER opened his eyes.
There was nothing with a cutting edge. Neither a- rope
nor a handkerchief. Open his veins with his fingernails? He
felt that these were not yet long enough.
Was there nothing else? A friend of his had asked that
one of his veins be opened after his death, to be sure that
circulation had ceased. Kassner remembered the assistant's
scalpel (the doctor had refused) seek:ing the fine, white vein
in flesh that no longer bled. Thus with his bloody fingertips
he would seek one of his own full and throbbing veins,
without seeing it.
His body, which had appeared to him so vulnerable, now
lived with a dully invincible animation, his heart and respira-
tion protected by its cage of bones. "Nature acts as though
men were always anxious to commit suicide ....
"
He felt a need both to die in peace and to sink his thumbs
into the throat of the first guard who entered, without letting
go, no matter what happened ....
How could he make his
death useful? In this hole, it was impossible to help anyone.
"To have had so many opportunities to die ....
" How badly
fate chose. He would have to fall back on his fingernails.
It would not be so very simple. He went up to the streak
of light that outlined the door and was able to make out his
hand with its outspread fingers, its nails which felt very
short. He would use the nail of his little finger like a vac-
cination needle. He tried to make it penetrate his flesh, at the
wrist. In vain. It was too short, but also too round, too
blunt: the flesh was both more elastic and harder than he
thought. He would have to sharpen the nail by rubbing it
against the wall. At least two more days.
He was still trying to see his fingers, whose tips barely
emerged from the total darkness as though they had belonged
to a strange hand. His courage had assumed the form of
death. And he looked with fascination at that almost invisible
flesh which was his and on which the nail which would
enable him to kill himself was slowly to grow.
Once more he began to pace the floor. His hand which was
becoming fate hung beside him like a satchel. The hour that
was approaching would be the same as this; the thousand
smothered sounds that teem like lice beneath the silence of
the prison would repeat to infinity the pattern of their
crushed life; and suffering, like dust, would cover with an
even anguish the immutable domain of nothingness.
He leaned baclq against the wall and returned to the
stagnant hours. . . •
The light carne from a lamp at the end of the corridor.
Outside it was night, no doubt.
10
The guard, standing with legs apart, was examining him.
This fellow is looking for some fun, thought. Kassner. He
knew stories of prisoners who are made to walk: on all fours.
The guard took a step forward.
Kassner felt certain that he was standing face to face
with cruelty or the craving for humiliation, and yet he could
barely maIce out anything of the man's features but the
brutal expression into which they composed. He drew back
a step to keep his distance, throwing his body forward and
raising his left heel: if he speaks, he said to himself, I won't
answer, but if he tries to touch me I'll ram my head into
his belly. We'll see what happens after that.
The guard understood perfectly: in the recoil of fear the
torso is held back, not forward. Something fell limply.
"Work.
Unravel," he said. The door closed.
The very moment Kassner thought he was closest to sui-
cide, reality had sufficed to give him back his strength. Before,
when the SA-men had come into his cell, all fear-and his
anguish-had left him, in spite of the screams from the neigh-
boring cells, the moment they had entered. He knew the
world of insomnia and had been haunted by sensations of
distress inexhaustibly reiterated,
with an insect's precision:
this was the world in which he was now struggling, and the
effectiveness of his efforts could not lie in achieving a calm
which was obviously beyond his reach, but in the possibility
of knowing that his head and his fists were there, ready to
strike. And he had forgotten the sense of touch so completely
that he would have struck as a hungry man eats.
He went over to the object that the guard had dropped, and
picked it up: it was a piece of rope.
Could one not eat a rope, well broiled? A purple slice of
roast meat, beads of water forming on the decanters, anise
and mint sherbets in the evening by the trees! How many'
times had he been fed since he was here? Hunger threw him
back into the brutish fever of violent aversions, but only
for short moments. "Work ....
"
It occurred to him that unraveling the rope would wear
down his fingernails, as though suicide had returned to look
for some object within him that it had forgotten. The me-
tallic clicks of doors slammed shut followed one another in
a rising scale in the dense, black silence: no doubt the guards
were distributing rope. Did the suicidal urge enter with
them into all these holes, at its appointed hour, the same
for almost all, like despair and degradation,
each coming
at its appointed hour? Did not the waves of madness, which
had left Kassner, drag his companions into their maelstrom,
lower and lower, farther and farther from the men they
were? Did they not grasp the rope, did they not become mad
before that Nazi rope, on finding that their sale gesture of
liberty had been foreseen, that they were robbed of their
death, as they had been robbed of life? ...
There were those
who had been longer in the cells than he had, and the very
young and the sick ....
In each cell there was a rope, and
Kassner could do nothing more than to strike the wall.
Blow after blow. He hardly dared to listen. Yet either he
had lost his mind, or something was answering.
From the
same direction as a while ago. While he listened with all
his might, he was afraid to hear: would not those knocks
cease once more? Once already he had thought he heard the
FEBRUARY,
193
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