gnawed away at me for seven whole days without actually killing me or bringing to an end the suffering and the fury, and if you had been better shots, there would have been no need to wait for it to take effect and I would have been spared that long, wretched period of dying,' the Nazi Heydrich would say to the two Czech resisters or students who machine-gunned his car in Prague and hurled grenades, and who were trained and equipped by the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, whose director, Spooner, planned the attempt. 'Yes, you committed a grave and frivolous crime by not honing your marksmanship and ensuring that the Nazi was blown to bits at once, because every night that he lay dying, they took a hundred of us out to be shot, and he survived for one long, bloody week,' those same resisters and those in charge of the SOE would be told by the seven hundred hostages who continued to be executed until the slow-acting poison finally overcame both Heydrich's powers of endurance and his rage. 'We died on 10 June 1942 in Lidice, you didn't leave a soul alive in the whole village, you killed us all regardless of age or sex, you killed the men right there and took the women to the camp at Ravensbrueck to die more slowly, simply because it was our bad luck to live in the place where the agents who were behind the Reich Protector's slow death parachuted into our occupied lands of Bohemia and Moravia, it wasn't enough for you just to loathe us and to punish a few of us as possible collaborators, why waste time finding out or checking anything, you simply hated our entire line and you destroyed it so that no memory of it would exist or survive, and you murdered us all so that there wouldn't even be anyone to remember what no longer existed,' the Nazi occupiers would be told by the 199 men and the women of that Czech village who were victims of the reprisals for Heydrich's eventual death, down to the last old man and the almost last child, for there were three of the latter, very young and 'of Aryan appearance', who, it was judged, would be capable of being re-educated as Germans and so were saved; they could not, however, save their memory. 'You killed me so that I would write no more poetry after my twenty- ninth year, you've stolen my manhood, I thought as I fell to the wine-spattered floor that later became soaked with my blood; but I was careless, you were quicker than me, and I would have done just the same to you, your life was as valuable as mine then, even though you had written nothing, but it's quite another matter for these other selfish men to come along and hate you simply because you cut short my art and deprived them of further enjoyment; but I, your dead victim, have no complaints, nor anything to blame you for,' the dramatist and poet Marlowe would say in the inn at Deptford to his knifer Ingram Frizer, if, of course, that is his definitive name, a name that has changed or remained unknown over the centuries. 'You had two henchmen plunge me head first into a butt of your disgusting wine and drown me, poor me, poor Clarence, held by the legs, which remained outside the butt and flailed about ridiculously until my lungs' final intoxication, betrayed and humiliated and killed by the black, opaque cunning of your hideous, indefatigable tongue,' George, Duke of Clarence would say to the murderous English king who was also one of Shakespeare's kings.
Oh yes, on that last day, when all times, perhaps suspended and unmoving, are brought together, these words would ring out again and again until they made the dead retch, even those who had murdered (but none of them had ever imagined the final result of the final addition, because when things end they have a number), and even the Judge to whom no one lies, who might perhaps feel tempted to forget his promise and his plans and cancel for ever that eternal, pestilential assembly: 'I died in such a place and on such a date and in such a manner, and you killed me, you placed me in the path of the bullet, the bomb, the grenade or the torch, of the stone, the arrow, the sword or the spear, you ordered me to step out and meet the bayonet, the scimitar, the machete or the axe, the dagger, the club, the musket or the sabre, you killed me or you were the cause of my death. May it all now sit heavy on your soul and may you feel the pinprick in your breast.' And the accused would always answer: 'I had to do it, I was defending my God, my king, my country, my culture, my race; my flag, my legend, my language, my class, my space; my honour, my family, my strongbox, my purse and my socks. And in short, I was afraid.' (That last was a line from a poem too, and I repeated it to myself later out loud, when I was in bed: 'And in short, I was afraid'; several times, because that night I was applying it to myself or endorsing it: 'And in short, I was afraid.') Or else they would resort to this excuse: 'I had to do it in order to avoid a greater evil, or so I thought.' Because before that weary, nauseous Judge they would not be able to claim: 'I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, as if befuddled by the tortuous smokescreen of dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, the life that does not really count, it only half happened and without my full consent.' Any judge hearing the case would say: 'Overruled, case dismissed.' No, they would not be able to make such claims before the judge who was now going to hear their case, and yet there would be some who would: they're always unmistakable, I've known them myself in my own lifetime. There is never any shortage of them.
How comforting it must have been, that distant hope or postponed reward or deferred justice, that prospect, that vision, that idea, for those people of steadfast faith during the many centuries when they believed it to be true and imagined it and nurtured it, as if it were part of a knowledge common to everyone, the illiterate and the learned, the wealthy and the needy, and when it was more like a kind of prescience than a promise or a desideratum. What a consoling idea, especially for all those who were forever subjugated, for those who knew they were destined to suffer in life – throughout their entire meek life, with no escape and no respite – injustices and abuses and humiliations that would go unpunished, with no hope of any possible reparation for their grievances nor of any conceivable chastisement for the offending parties, who were more powerful or more cruel, or simply more determined. 'I won't see it here,' they would think, biting their lower lip or their tongue until it hurt, and then easing their bite, 'not in this stubborn, unequal world, not in its unchanging order which I cannot alter and which causes me such harm, not in the skewed harmony that governs it and that is already digging my grave in order to drive me out early; but in that other world I will, when time comes to an end and we are all gathered together, all invited, without exception, to the great dance of suffering and contentment, and I will be told that I was right and will be rewarded by that Judge to whom one cannot lie because he knows already what went on, the Judge who has been everywhere and seen and heard everything, even the most trivial and insignificant of things in the world as a whole or in a single existence; what happened to me today, the terrible insult which I myself will forget if I live a few more years and it doesn't occur again, or else occurs so often that I will get the different occasions muddled up and, for my own sake, become used to it and cease to see it as a crime, no, that will not be forgotten by the Judge who remembers everything in his all-embracing record or infinite archive of the history of time, from the first hour to the last day.' What an enormous solace to utter solitude it must have been to believe that we were seen and even spied upon at every moment of our few, miserable days, with superhuman perspicacity and attention and with every tiresome detail and vacuous thought supernaturally noted and stored away: that is how it must have been if it truly existed, no human mind could have stood it, knowing and remembering everything about each person from each age, knowing it permanently, without a single fact about anyone ever going to waste, however dispensable it was and even if it neither added nor subtracted anything: a real affliction, a curse, a torment or even heaven's version of hell itself, perhaps the Judge would come to regret his omniscience with all those goings-on, become resentful of that proliferation of boring, puerile, stupid and entirely superfluous events, or else would have turned to drink in order to grow forgetful (just a little snifter now and then), or else become an opium addict (leisurely smoking the occasional pipe, to empty himself of knowledge).
'There are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material for some detailed report,' I had said to Tupra when interpreting Dick Dearlove for him, 'they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, let's say, as if there were always spectators of or permanent witnesses to their activities and passivities, even their most futile steps and during the dullest of times. Perhaps this narcissistic daydream prevalent among so many of our contemporaries, and sometimes known as 'consciousness', is nothing more than a substitute for the old idea or vague perception of the omnipresence of God, who was always watching and saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, and a relief, despite the inconveniences, that is, the implicit element of threat and punishment and the terrifying belief that nothing could ever be concealed from everyone and for ever; in any case, three or four generations of predominant doubt and incredulity are not enough for Man to accept that his gruelling and unasked- for existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching or even taking an interest in it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it.’
Perhaps even the most atheistic of men would find that hard to accept, without doing himself rational violence. And perhaps the narrative horror or disgust I had mentioned to Tupra – maybe all of us feel it to some extent, not just the Dearloves of this world – also came from the old days of steadfast faith, when a whole life of virtue and doing good and abiding by the rules could be destroyed by a single grave sin committed at the last moment – a mortal sin they called it, the record didn't mince its words – with no room for repentance or forgiveness, any proposed mending of ways being barely credible given the brief amount of time remaining to the sinner, the old must have felt in their final years as if they were walking on hot bricks, trying not to succumb to untimely
