Free Fall Read online

  I began to creep round the wall again. I forced myself challengingly into each corner and I kept my eyes shut because that way they did not water so and I could imagine daylight outside them.

  Four corners, all empty.

  I knelt in my own corner, muttering to myself.

  “Well? Well then?”

  Let me find out before my mind invents anything worse, anything still unimaginable.

  I crept along the wall again, making my eighteen inches into twenty-four. There was a space in the centre no bigger than a big book. Perhaps that was what was there, a book waiting for me to read all the answers.

  I let my fingers creep out of my corner. They ate away part of the unknown patch, they went line by line and as they went they chilled and prickled. The space that might be a large book, minutely decreased.

  Fingers ate away another line of concrete.

  The feeling changed at the tips. They were in some other mode, now. Or no. The concrete was changing, was not the same, was smoother.

  Smooth. Wet. Liquid.

  My hand snatched itself back as though the snake had been coiled there, whipped back without my volition, a hand highly trained by the tragedies of a million years.

  My eye stung where a flung-back nail had grazed the ball, one deep physical automatism outsmarted by another.

  Be reasonable. Did you weep there in the centre, or did you wipe the tears of strain from your cheeks?

  Another hand crept forward, found the liquid, even rubbed a tiny distance backwards and forwards, found the liquid smooth like oil.

  Acid?

  “Nothing has happened to you yet. Be reasonable. All the torments he implied have not yet begun. Though the steps of approach are as real as the steps of a town hall, yet still you need not climb them. Even if they had spilt poison there in the centre I need not lick it up. They want information not corpses. Cannot be acid because fingertips are still smooth and cold, not burning and blistered. Cannot be lye because as with acid, no pain. Only cold, cold as the air, as the concrete where I can hear the stridulation of fabric under my hip. Nothing has happened to you yet. Don’t be tricked into selling cheap.”

  Selling what? What was the information that I was so uncertain I really had? What could I have said? What was it, my last bargaining token, last scrap of value, only chock between me and a sliding descent of infinite length and cleverness, torment after torment? He said it was for my own good, for all our goods—so the last of human faces had said, that delicately adjusted face, so delicate over the delicate, fragile bones.

  But now there began to build up in me the conviction that even if I wanted to I could not remember, would never remember. I could see a layer of concrete build up in my mind over the forgotten thing, the thing down there that I had meant to say. But when that concrete forms in the mind, no internal road drill can break it up.

  “Wait a minute. Let me remember——”

  For, of course, you can only remember such a thing by forgetting to remember and then glancing back at it quickly before the concrete has a chance to form; but Halde would use a road drill, he would know of one. Yet no pain will break that concrete; hammer and you leave no mark——

  “I tell you I’ve forgotten—I’d remember if I could! You must give me a moment——”

  But there would be no moment of mercy. I knew now that I had forgotten and that I should never remember. The ladder of pain would stretch away from this stone pillow to an unknown height, I forced to climb. Let the road drill dance on the nerves savagely, on the flesh, spill the blood. What is your name? Muriel Millicent Mollie? Mary Mabel Margaret? Minnie Marcia Moron?

  Oil, acid, lye. None of them.

  No.

  I could feel my cheekbone against wood; and a voice was talking loudly and hysterically through the cotton-wool.

  “I tell you I can’t remember! I would if I could—why don’t you let me alone? If you only gave me a time not to think but a time to lie down under the sky without steps or pain then the concrete would slip away and the information come blurting out if there is any information and then we could start fair——”

  There was that harvest picture yearned for, a harvest under one star and the moon. The light lay heavy on the heads of corn and he was going down through the light, leaning on his stick, a man soon to be harvested, too, creeping towards peace. There was the blue girl leaning back, a quiet river under her shoulder, the meal having crept on towards the shared siesta time.

  But I was standing up again, shuffling through my trousers round the wall, facing it with hands feeling. But the wall was still there, right round. I reached up again as high as I could and still there was no ceiling—only darkness weighing heavy, smothering like a feather bed.

  Oil. Acid. Lye.

  No.

  My body slid down and its right hand crept out, touched smoothness. Its fingers slipped on with tiny steps in smoothness that nibbled away the unknown space.

  He knew they would nibble, he is the master.

  Something, not touched yet or not with the sensitive tips, something touched, lying against the nail of the third finger, the weak one. Something touched my nail about a third of the way from the pared edge, cold as the smoothness. Mercilessly the fingers lifted in the darkness and explored, sending back their messages from the sensitive tips.

  The thing was cold. The thing was soft. The thing was slimy. The thing was like an enormous dead slug—dead because where the softness gave way under the searching tips it did not come back again.

  I could see everything now except the slug-thing because there was almost no darkness left. There was light falling away in a torrent, there were shouts and screams visible as shapes, long curves that shone and vibrated. But the shape of the thing on the floor was communicated to me through one enslaved finger that would not let go, that rendered the outline phosphorescent in my head, a strange, wandering haphazard shape with here a tail drawn out in slimy thinness and there the cold, wet bulk of a body. But this was no complete body of any animal or man. I knew now why this was the shape of no animal, knew what the wetness was. I knew too much. I should have touched his sharp nose and been armoured. Their cleverness was to shatter all the taboos of humanity, to crash through with an exhibition so brutal, a warning so unequivocal that the third step was like standing on a step of sheer horror above the others. They had laid there this fragment of human flesh, collapsed in its own cold blood. So the lights fell and spun and blood that was pumped out of the heart was visible too, like a sun’s corona, was part noise, part feeling, part light.

  A darkness ate everything away.

  When I came together again, moaning, sick, huddled there was no intermission of knowledge. As soon as I remembered who I was I knew where I was and what thing lay there in the darkness, flung down from what misused body? And how long, my mind thought busily to itself, how long had that fragment been lying there? But they were not infallible then, for this morgue-like coldness gave me some protection. Yet even so, my nose now noticed in the air, noticed and tried to reject, certain elements other than the fetor of confinement. Or perhaps they were infallible indeed, when dealing ex cathedra with a matter of faith and morals such as this one and even the rate of decomposition was nicely calculated to increase. I recognized and miserably applauded the virtuosity of their torture for torture it was. This third step, they said, is unbearable, becomes unbearable, yet he must continue to bear it because the fourth step is worse. Do you think the cliff of loathing on which you are now huddled is our highest point? It is nothing but a preparatory ledge on our Everest. Base camp. Climb now. Try.

  I felt upwards for the ceiling and in that moment the fourth step revealed itself. There was a whirlpool which had once been my mind but which now was slipping round, faster and faster; and a story leapt into the centre of it, a story completely remembered, vividly visualized—story of the small cell and the ceiling that came down slowly with all the weight of the world. I was scrabbling at the high wall, but
the ceiling was still out of reach and I could not tell. But I knew that there were crushed things hanging from it that stank as the cold scrap in the centre was stinking; and presently I should hear the sound of its descent as it made unbearably small what was too small already, and came mercilessly down. So I was crouched in my fetid corner, gasping, sweating, talking.

  “Why do you torment yourself? Why do you do their work for them? Nothing has touched you physically yet——”

  For of course he knew. That fine, intellectual head was dedicated. What had I with my feelings, my gross sensuality, my skipping brain to put against a man who taught in a German university? Reason and common sense told me there was no body hanging crushed from which other pieces might fall and yet I believed in the body because Halde wanted me to.

  I started to cry out.

  “Help me! Help me!”

  Let me be accurate now if ever. These pages I have written have taught me much; not least that no man can tell the whole truth, language is clumsier in my hands than paint. And yet my life has remained centred round the fact of the next few minutes I spent alone and panic-stricken in the dark. My cry for help was the cry of the rat when the terrier shakes it, a hopeless sound, the raw signature of one savage act. My cry meant no more, was instinctive, said here is flesh of which the nature is to suffer and do thus. I cried out not with hope of an ear but as accepting a shut door, darkness and a shut sky.

  But the very act of crying out changed the thing that cried. Does the rat expect help? When a man cries out instinctively he begins to search for a place where help may be found; and so the thing that cried out, struggling in the fetor, the sea of nightmare, with burning breath and racing heart, that thing as it was drowning looked with starting and not physical eyes on every place, against every wall, in every corner of the interior world.

  “Help me!”

  But there was no help in the concrete of the cell or the slime, no help in the delicate, the refined and compassionate face of Halde, no help in those uniformed shapes. There was no file for prison bars, no rope ladder, no dummy to be left in the pallet bed. Here the thing that cried came up against an absolute of helplessness. It struck with the frantic writhing and viciousness of a captive snake against glass and bars. But in the physical world there was neither help nor hope of weakness that might be attacked and overcome. The bars were steel, were reinforcements of this surrounding concrete. There was no escape from the place, and the snake, the rat struck again from the place away from now into time. It struck with full force backwards into time past, saw with the urgency of present need that time past held only balm for a quieter moment; turned therefore and lunged, uncoiled, struck at the future. The future was the flight of steps from terror to terror, a mounting experiment that ignorance of what might be a bribe, made inevitable. The thing that cried fled forward over those steps because there was no other way to go, was shot forward screaming as into a furnace, as over unimaginable steps that were all that might be borne, were more, were too searing for the refuge of madness, were destructive of the centre. The thing that screamed left all living behind and came to the entry where death is close as darkness against eyeballs.

  And burst that door.

  10

  Therefore when the commandant let me out of the darkness he came late and as a second string, giving me the liberty of the camp when perhaps I no longer needed it. I walked between the huts, a man resurrected but not by him. I saw the huts as one who had little to do with them, was indifferent to them and the temporal succession of days that they implied. So they shone with the innocent light of their own created nature. I understood them perfectly, boxes of thin wood as they were, and now transparent, letting be seen inside their quotas of sceptred kings. I lifted my arms, saw them too, and was overwhelmed by their unendurable richness as possessions, either arm ten thousand fortunes poured out for me. Huge tears were dropping from my face into dust; and this dust was a universe of brilliant and fantastic crystals, that miracles instantly supported in their being. I looked up beyond the huts and the wire, I raised my dead eyes, desiring nothing, accepting all things and giving all created things away. The paper wrappings of use and language dropped from me. Those crowded shapes extending up into the air and down into the rich earth, those deeds of far space and deep earth were aflame at the surface and daunting by right of their own natures though a day before I should have disguised them as trees. Beyond them the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang and were conjubilant. They were not all that sang. Everything is related to everything else and all relationship is either discord or harmony. The power of gravity, dimension and space, the movement of the earth and sun and unseen stars, these made what might be called music and I heard it.

  And now came what is harder to confess than cruelty. It happened as the first of my fellows left our hut and moved along the path towards me. He was a being of great glory on whom a whole body had been lavished, a lieutenant, his wonderful brain floating in its own sea, the fuel of the world working down transmuted through his belly. I saw him coming, and the marvel of him and these undisguised trees and mountains and this dust and music wrung a silent cry from me. This cry travelled away and along a fourth dimension at right-angles to the other three. The cry was directed to a place I did not know existed, but which I had forgotten merely; and once found, the place was always there, sometimes open and sometimes shut, the business of the universe proceeding there in its own mode, different, indescribable.

  The awesome and advancing creature so arranged his flesh that sounds came visibly out of his mouth.

  “Have you heard?”

  But then he noticed the water on my face and was embarrassed by the sight of a crying Englishman.

  “Sorry, Sammy. They’re a lot of bloody murderers.”

  He looked away because he would have found it very easy to cry himself. But I was surrounded by a universe like a burst casket of jewels and I was dead anyway myself, knowing how little it mattered. So he wandered off, thinking I was round the bend, not comprehending my complete and luminous sanity. I returned to my fourth dimension and found that love flows along it until the heart, the physical heart, this pump or alleged pump makes love as easy as a bee makes honey. This seemed to me at that time the only worth-while occupation; and while I was so engaged the pace became so hot that a flake of fire, a brightness, flicked out of the hidden invisible and settled on the physical heart for all the world as though the heart is what poetry thinks it to be and not just a bit of clever machinery. Standing between the understood huts, among jewels and music, I was visited by a flake of fire, miraculous and pentecostal; and fire transmuted me, once and for ever.

  How can a man listen and speak at the same time? There was so much to learn, so many adjustments to make that prison life became extremely busy and happy. For now the world was reorientated. What had been important dropped away. What had been ludicrous became common sense. What had had the ugliness of frustration and dirt, I now saw to have a curious reversed beauty—a beauty that could only be seen, out of the corner of the eye, a beauty which often only became apparent when it was remembered. All these things, of course, were explicable in two ways; the one explained them away, the other accepted them as data relevant to the nature of the cosmos. There was no argument possible between people holding either view. I knew that, because at different times of my life I had been either kind in turn. It seemed natural to me that this added perception in my dead eyes should flow over into work, into portraiture. That is why those secret, smuggled sketches of the haggard, unshaven kings of Egypt in their glory are the glory of my right hand and likely to remain so. My sketches of the transfigured camp, the prison which is no longer a prison are not so good, I think, but they have their merit. One or two of them see the place with the eye of innocence or death, see the dust and the wood and the concrete and the wire as though they had just been created. But the world of miracle I could not paint then or now.

&nb
sp; For as time went on and I became accustomed to the rhythm of silence I began to learn about the new world. To be part of it was not just an ambition, but was a necessity. Therefore the thing in here, the dead thing that looked out must adapt its nature to conform. What was the nature of the new world outside and what was the nature of the dead thing inside?

  Gradually I came to see that all this wonder formed an order of things and that the order depended on pillars. But the substance of these pillars when I understood what it was, confounded me utterly. We had thrown it away in the world, it was a joke. The brilliance of our political vision and the profundity of our scientific knowledge had enabled us to dispense with this substance. It had not been perceptible in the laboratory test-tube when we performed our simple qualitative analysis. It had caught no votes, it had not been suggested as a remedy for war, it was accounted for, if any account was needed as a byproduct of the class system, the same way as you get aniline dyes from the distillation of coal—an accident, almost. This substance was a kind of vital morality, not the relationship of a man to remote posterity nor even to a social system, but the relationship of individual man to individual man—once an irrelevance but now seen to be the forge in which all change, all value, all life is beaten out into a good or a bad shape. This live morality was, to change the metaphor, if not the gold, at least the silver of the new world.

  Now at last, the eyes of Sammy turned and looked where Halde had directed them. To die is easy enough in the forcing chamber of a cell and to see the world with dead or innocent eyes is easy enough, too, if you can find the trick. But when the eyes of Sammy were turned in on myself with that same stripped and dead objectivity, what they saw was not beautiful but fearsome. Dying, after all, then was not one tenth complete—for must not complete death be to get out of the way of that shining, singing cosmos and let it shine and sing? And here was a point, a single point which was my own interior identity, without shape or size but only position. Yet this position was miraculous as everything else since it continually defied the law of conservation of energy, rule one as it were, and created shapes that fled away outwards along the radii of a globe. These shapes could be likened to nothing but the most loathsome substances that man knows of, or perhaps the most loathsome and abject creatures, continuously created, radiating swiftly out and disappearing from my sight; and this was the human nature I found inhabiting the centre of my own awareness. The light that showed up this point and these creatures came from the newly perceived world in all its glory. Otherwise I might have been a man who lived contentedly enough with his own nature.