Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [65]
Already the members of the Executive Committee had been immobilized by scores of strong arms. Laid on the table were gauze, basins with cotton wool, serrated knives. The smell of ether filled the room. The girls laid things out quickly and carefully, as if they'd all been practising their tasks for some time.
‘Now the doctor will explain everything properly. Come on, Tolja!’
Anatol Spiridionovic, a medical degree begun and never finished, stepped forward holding red rubber-gloved hands high over an already obese stomach. He was a strange character, Tolja, a man who perhaps to hide his shyness would put on a comic, infantile grin and come out with a string of witticisms.
‘The hand … Ah, the litde handy pandy… the hand is a prehensile organ … oh yes, very useful… that's why we have two of them … and of fingers, as a rule, we have ten … every finger is made up of three bone segments, or phalanges … or at least that's what they're called in our part of the world … phalanx, middle phalanx, terminal phalanx…’
‘Stop it. You're getting on our nerves! What do you want to do, give us a lecture!’ People grumbled. (In the end nobody liked this Tolja fellow.) ‘Let's get to the real thing! Come on! Let's get down to it!’
The first person they brought out was Virghilij. When he realized they were only going to amputate the first phalanx of his ring finger, he recovered his nerve and bore the pain with a pride worthy of his reputation. But some of the others screamed; it took several people to hold them down; fortunately sooner or later most of them fainted. There were different amputations for different people, but generally speaking no more than two phalanges for the more important leaders (the other phalanges would be cut off later a few at a time; one had to remember there would be many of these ceremonies over the years to come). Blood loss was greater than expected; the girls mopped up carefully.
Lined up on the tablecloth, the amputated fingers looked like small fish, throats pierced by the hook and pulled to the bank. They soon went dry and black, and, after a brief discussion as to whether they should be kept in a showcase, they were thrown in the bin.
This system of pruning the leaders bore excellent fruit. In exchange for relatively small physical impairment, a great improvement in morale was achieved. The leaders' authority grew with periodic mutilation. When a hand with missing fingers was raised above the barricades, the demonstrators rallied round and the lancers on their horses were submerged in a crowd they couldn't break up. The singing, the thuds, the neighing, the shouts - ‘Volja i Raviopravie!’, ‘Death to the Tsar!’ ‘Victorious and honoured the day after shall fall!’ - ranged in the icy air, wafted over the banks of the Neva, reached the Peter and Paul fortress, penetrated the deepest cells where imprisoned comrades beat their chains to the rhythm and stretched out their stumps through the bars.
4
Every time they reached out a hand to sign a document or make the kind of terse gesture that would stress something in a speech, the young leaders found themselves looking at their amputated fingers, and this had an immediate mnemonic effect, establishing an association of ideas between the organ of command and time getting shorter. More than anything else it was a practical system: the amputations could be carried out by simple students and nurses, in improvised operating rooms, with whatever instruments came to hand; if found