This concluded the hearing of evidence and the Court was adjourned.
After the re-opening of the sitting, the Citizen Public Prosecutor begins his summing-up. ...”
Old Wassilij was not listening to the Prosecutor’s speech.
He had turned to the wall and gone to sleep.
He did not know afterwards how long he had slept, how often the daughter had refilled the lamp with oil, nor how often her forefinger had reached the bottom of the page and started on a new column.
He only woke up when the Public Prosecutor, summing up his speech, demanded the death sentence.
Perhaps the daughter had changed her tone of voice towards the end, perhaps she had made a pause; in any case, Wassilij was awake again when she came to the last sentence of the Public Prosecutor’s speech, printed in heavy black type:
“I demand that all these mad dogs be shot.”
Then the accused were allowed to say their last words.
“... The accused Kieffer turned to the judges and begged that, in consideration of his youth, his life be spared He admitted once again the baseness of his crime and tried to attribute the whole responsibility for it to the instigator Rubashov.
In so doing, he started to stammer agitatedly, thus provoking the mirth of the spectators, which was, however, rapidly suppressed by the Citizen President Then Rubashov was allowed to speak. ...”
The newspaper reporter here vividly depicted how the accused Rubashov “examined the audience with eager eyes and, finding not a single sympathetic face, let his head sink despairingly”.
Rubashov’s final speech was short It intensified the unpleasant impression which his behaviour in court had already made.
“Citizen President,” the accused Rubashov declared, “I speak here for the last time in my life.
The opposition is beaten and destroyed.
If I ask myself to-day, ‘For what am I dying?’ I am confronted by absolute nothingness.
There is nothing for which one could die, if one died without having repented and unreconciled with the Party and the Movement.
Therefore, on the threshold of my last hour, I bend my knees to the country, to the masses and to the whole people.
The political masquerade, the mummery of discussions and conspiracy are over.
We were politically dead long before the Citizen Prosecutor demanded our heads.
Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
I have only one justification before you, Citizen Judges: that I did not make it easy for myself.
Vanity and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a moving swan-song on your lips; pour out your heart and challenge your accusers.
That would have been easier for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation.
With that my task is ended. I have paid; my account with history is settled.
To ask you for mercy would be derision.
I have nothing more to say.”
“... After a short deliberation, the President read the sentence.
The Council of the Supreme Revolutionary Court of Justice sentenced the accused in every case to the maximum penalty: death by shooting and the confiscation of all their personal property.”
The old man Wassilij stared at the rusty hook above his head.
He murmured: “Thy will be done.
Amen,” and turned to the wall.
2
So now it was all over.
Rubashov knew that before midnight he would have ceased to exist.
He wandered through his cell, to which he had returned after the uproar of the trial; six and a half steps to the window, six and a half steps back.
When he stood still, listening, on the third black tile from the window, the silence between the whitewashed walls came to meet him, as from the depth of a well.
He still did not understand why it had become so quiet, within and without.
But he knew that now nothing could disturb this peace any more.
Looking back, he could even remember the moment when this blessed quietness had sunk over him.
It had been at the trial, before he had started his last speech.
He had believed that he had burnt out the last vestiges of egotism and vanity from his consciousness, but in that moment, when his eyes had searched the faces of the audience and found only indifference and derision, he had been for a last time carried away by his hunger for a bone of pity; freezing, he had wanted to warm himself by his own words.
The temptation had gripped him to talk of his past, to rear up just once and tear the net in which Ivanov and Gletkin had entangled him, to shout at his accusers like Danton:
“You have laid hands on my whole life.
May it rise and challenge you. ...”
Oh, how well he knew Danton’s speech before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
He could repeat it word for word.
He had as a boy learnt it by heart:
“You want to stifle the Republic in blood.
How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones?