A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [61]
“I think I know who you are,” he said. “If you are who I think you are, then you’ve come, my friend, to the right place. Wasn’t that your picture in the papers this morning? Are you the poor victim of this horrible new technique? If so, then you have been sent here by Providence. Tortured in prison, then thrown out to be tortured by the police. My heart goes out to you, poor poor boy.” Brothers, I could not get a slovo in, though I had my rot wide open to answer his questions. “You are not the first to come here in distress,” he said. “The police are fond of bringing their victims to the outskirts of this village. But it is providential that you, who are also another kind of victim, should come here. Perhaps, then, you have heard of me?”
I had to be very careful, brothers. I said: “I have heard of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. I have not read it, but I have heard of it.”
“Ah,” he said, and his litso shone like the sun in its flaming morning glory. “Now tell me about yourself.”
“Little enough to tell, sir,” I said, all humble. “There was a foolish and boyish prank, my so-called friends persuading or rather forcing me to break into the house of an old ptitsa -lady, I mean. There was no real harm meant. Unfortunately the lady strained her good old heart in trying to throw me out, though I was quite ready to go of my own accord, and then she died. I was accused of being the cause of her death. So I was sent to prison,sir.”
“Yes yes yes, go on.”
“Then I was picked out by the Minister of the Inferior or Interior to have this Ludovico’s veshch tried out on me.”
“Tell me all about it,” he said, leaning forward eager, his pullover elbows with all strawberry jam on them from the plate I’d pushed to one side. So I told him all about it. I told him the lot, all, my brothers. He was very eager to hear all, his glazzies like shining and his goobers apart, while the grease on the plates grew harder harder harder. When I had finished he got up from the table, nodding a lot and going hm hm hm, picking up the plates and other veshches from the table and taking them to the sink for washing up. I said: “I will do that, sir, and gladly.”
“Rest, rest, poor lad,” he said, turning the tap on so that all steam came burping out. “You’ve sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.”
“That’s right, sir,” I said, smoking one of this kind man’s cork-tipped cancers.
“They always bite off too much,” he said, drying a plate like absent-mindedly. “But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”
“That’s what the charles said, sir,” I said. “The prison chaplain, I mean.”
“Did he, did he? Of course he did. He’d have to, wouldn’t he, being a Christian? Well, now then,” he said, still wiping the same plate he’d been wiping ten minutes ago, “we shall have a few people in to see you tomorrow. I think you can be used, poor boy. I think that you can help dislodge this overbearing Government. To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.” He was still wiping this