I’ll get on more quickly now.
I came to grips with poverty when I was eighteen, after an easy life till then.
I tried all sorts of jobs, and I didn’t do too badly.
But my real interest in life was the death penalty; I wanted to square accounts with that poor blind owl in the dock.
So I became an agitator, as they say.
I didn’t want to be pestiferous, that’s all.
To my mind the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder.
That was my view, others had told me so, and I still think that this belief of mine was substantially true.
I joined forces with a group of people I then liked, and indeed have never ceased to like.
I spent many years in close co-operation with them, and there’s not a country in Europe in whose struggles I haven’t played a part.
But that’s another story.
“Needless to say, I knew that we, too, on occasion, passed sentences of death.
But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be.
That also was true up to a point—and maybe I’m not capable of standing fast where that order of truths is concerned.
Whatever the explanation, I hesitated.
But then I remembered that miserable owl in the dock and it enabled me to keep on.
Until the day when I was present at an execution—it was in Hungary—and exactly the same dazed horror that I’d experienced as a youngster made everything reel before my eyes.
“Have you ever seen a man shot by a firing-squad?
No, of course not; the spectators are hand-picked and it’s like a private party, you need an invitation.
The result is that you’ve gleaned your ideas about it from books and pictures.
A post, a blindfolded man, some soldiers in the offing.
But the real thing isn’t a bit like that.
Do you know that the firing-squad stands only a yard and a half from the condemned man?
Do you know that if the victim took two steps forward his chest would touch the rifles?
Do you know that, at this short range, the soldiers concentrate their fire on the region of the heart and their bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist?
No, you didn’t know all that; those are things that are never spoken of.
For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life.
Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o’ nights, mustn’t they?
Really it would be shockingly bad taste to linger on such details, that’s common knowledge.
But personally I’ve never been able to sleep well since then.
The bad taste remained in my mouth and I’ve kept lingering on the details, brooding over them.
“And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I’d believed with all my soul that I was fighting it.
I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I’d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that way.
Others did not seem embarrassed by such thoughts, or anyhow never voiced them of their own accord.
But I was different; what I’d come to know stuck in my gorge.
I was with them and yet I was alone.
When I spoke of these matters they told me not to be so squeamish; I should remember what great issues were at stake. And they advanced arguments, often quite impressive ones, to make me swallow what nonetheless I couldn’t bring myself to stomach.
I replied that the most eminent of the plague-stricken, the men who wear red robes, also have excellent arguments to justify what they do, and once I admitted the arguments of necessity and force majeure put forward by the less eminent, I couldn’t reject those of the eminent.
To which they retorted that the surest way of playing the game of the red robes was to leave to them the monopoly of the death penalty.
My reply to this was that if you gave in once, there was no reason for not continuing to give in.
It seems to me that history has borne me out; today there’s a sort of competition who will kill the most.
They’re all mad over murder and they couldn’t stop killing men even if they wanted to.
“In any case, my concern was not with arguments.
It was with the poor owl; with that foul procedure whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to die, and scientifically arranged things so that he should die, after nights and nights of mental torture while he waited to be murdered in cold blood.
My concern was with that hole in a man’s chest.
And I told myself that meanwhile, so far anyhow as I was concerned, nothing in the world would induce me to accept any argument that justified such butcheries.
Yes, I chose to be blindly obstinate, pending the day when I could see my way more clearly.
“I’m still of the same mind.
For many years I’ve been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.
As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody.