guard's step, and he had been mistaken. Hope itself was a
form of suffering.
Full of infinite patience, the patience of a prisoner, the
invisible hand began again:
Five-two--two,
six-nine-ten-one,
four-one-four
-two,
six-nine.
Nine was separated from ten by a longer pause than two
from six.
While he was knocking, Kassner had not sought the al-
phabet. That did not greatly matter, and the essential thing
was that communication should be established: he was freeing
his companion, he was freeing himself, from nothingness as
effectively by listening as by knocking. The groups of two
figures: two-six,
one-four,
no doubt did not belong to a
system of dividing the alphabet, since they were followed by
isolated figures. They almost surely indicated numbers. 5-2-
26-9-10. He had already forgotten the others.
He knocked once more.
Once more the neighbor answered.
5-2-26; 9-10; 14-14; 26-9.
Over and over again he tapped out the numbers until
Kassner had repeated them.
The latter was contracting the muscles round his eyes
with all his might, till his temples ached, trying to visualize
these figures in order. It was not in their names but in their
signs that the key to their meaning lay. And he felt in him-
self the soul of a miserly insect that accumulates its wealth
in its hollow in the stone, its legs folded-like his fingers
against.his chest at this moment-over
these numbers, which
the weakness or the olrer-excitement of his memory might
blot out, like an awakening. Hanging by some imperceptible
and precarious thread in back of his eyes, they nevertheless
flooded the darkness, flowed over him as though he should
have to hold on to them to save himself, and his hands were
repeatedly missing them. He tried all the keys; a figure addd
to the number of letters of the alphabet, or else subtracted;
multiplication; division of the alphabet into sections. Think-
ing, searching for figures, escaping the intolerable emptiness
was such a relief that every obstacle. by comparison, seemed
ridiculous. The alphabet read backwards? ...
He discovered
that he only knew the alphabet by heart by reading it for-
ward.
W'hat if the man who was knocking was craz;y?
He remembered a former anarchist comrade who, while
lying sick in a military hospital, had persuaded several of
those in the nearby beds to become conscientious objectors.
He had been found out and afterwards moved to a bed
between the wall and an insane man.
And why might not one of the guards be knocking mean-
inglessly, on purpose, in answer to his taps?
The knocks were beginning again. This blind, stubborn
patience could only be that of a prisoner; and such care,
such concentration on the manner of knocking could not be
those of a lunatic.
By dint of patience he would find it! If he did not confuse
the figures whose meaning he was seeking, through the suc-
cessive guesses--to find himself at last stripped, naked, so
near to this tireless brotherhood ....
And meanwhile every noise in the prison was becoming
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
like a distant knock, and the entire prison like that night-
meeting in Hamburg,
where every man had struck a match
at his request, and all had been able to gauge the size of
the crowd by the myriad tiny flames that flickered for a
moment in the night as far as the eye could reach ....
He
remembered a street in a workers'
district near Alexander-
platz with its closed cigar-stores in the moonlight, on a night
of battle. The communists had just left the street and the
last lights were going out as the rumble of the police trucks
was approaching.
Scarcely had the latter roared past when
from one end of the street to the other the windows hurler
their rectangles of light gashed by silhouettes down on tht:
sidewalks. Holding back a little because of the bullets, the
street population had appeared all at once with its tense
faces, the unbidden children a little lower. Doors opened
for comrades who might have hidden in recesses. And then,
as suddenly as it had appeared, this brotherly demonstration
had returned to the night; a new police truck was arriving,
which passed at full speed between the houses that had fallen
back into the moonswept indifference.
Hours and hours, eaten away by the ant-like numbers with
the occasional passing of the guards. And slowly, almost ac-
cidentally, as though it had taken shape within him of its
own accord, the idea came to him that 5 might very well in-
dicate, not that 1 was the fifth letter, but that it was after
five letters that the alphabet began. F would then be 1; G.
2 ... Z, 21; A, 23 ...
E, 26. Once more the other prisoner
was knocking and Kassner'
listened, following the knocks
one by one on his fingers and spelling:
2-G;
26-E;
9-N.
G-E-;\!-O-S-S-E:
Comrade.
Translated by Haakon Chevalier
Why the Druids All Died
I t is a gray tree-trunk wilderness
Of men, sapless, almost barkless,
Duplicated in shifty shadows-
Perfect to totem-tattoo
With series of red white and blue
Pricks representing breeze-tossed flags
And if there's room a pair of elastic hips and legs.
These men, all but their eyes, seem dead.
When buying Boston for thirteen smackers
They must watch to get the right change back.
There is no substitute for a business head.
Th~y ;Ire in no way exceptional: they hate hate,
Love love, fear fear, follow faith,
They are not articulate:
hello
to neighbors,
Yes
to big-shots, echo to the morning-paper,
1'1l never never again
to priests, snorts to beggars,
They are not useful: loathe to begin,
Bungle the doing, stumble at ending.
When shall we uproot this deadwood, dynamite
The stumps, plant saplings on the site?
Reforesting is hard work, with distant gain,
But indispensable as April rain.
KERKER QUINN
II
