The Magus - John Fowles [188]
yet. Wimmel had started first on the ones most likely to break. "I have seen several films--like Rossellini's films--of the good human's reactions to such scenes. How he turns on the Fascist monsters and delivers himself of some terse yet magnificent condemnation. How he speaks for history and humanity and forever puts them in their place. My own feelings were of immediate and intense personal fear. You see, Nicholas, I thought, and Wimmel left a long silence to let me think, that I was now going to be tortured as well. I did not know why. But there was no reason left in the world. When human beings could do such things to one another... "I turned round and looked at Wimmel. The extraordinary thing was that he seemed the most human other person in the room. He looked tired and angry. Even a little disgusted. Ashamed at the mess his men had created. "He said in English, These men do this for pleasure. I do not. I wish, before they start on that murderer there, that you will speak to him." Conchis spoke with quite a good imitation of a German accent. Pauses, to mark the dialogue. "I said, What must I say? "I want the names of his friends. I want the names of the people who help him. I want the positions of hiding places and arms places. If he gives me these I give to him my word he will be executed in a correct military manner. "I said, Did _they_ not tell you enough? Wimmel said, All they knew. But he knows more. He is a man I have long wished to meet. His friends could not make him speak. I do not think we shall make him speak. Perhaps you can. You will say this. The truth. You do not like us Germans. You are an educated man. You wish only to stop this... procedures. You will advise him to speak what he knows. It is no guilt now that he is caught to speak. You understand? Come with me. "We went into another bare room next door. A few moments later the wounded man was dragged in, still tied to his chair, and set in the centre of the room. I was given a chair facing him. The colonel sat in the background and waved the torturers outside. I began to talk. "I did exactly as the colonel had ordered. That is, I begged the man to give all the information he could. You will say it was dishonourable of me, because you are thinking of the families and men he could have betrayed. But that night I lived in those two rooms. They were the only reality. The outside world did not exist. I felt passionately that it was my duty to stop any more of this atrocious degradation of human intelligence. And that Cretan's obsessive obstinacy seemed to contribute so directly to the degradation that it in part constituted it. "I told him I was not a collaborationist, that I was a doctor, that my enemy was human suffering. That I spoke for Greece when I said that God would forgive him if he spoke now--his friends had suffered enough. There was a point beyond which no man could be expected to suffer... and so on. Every argument I could think of. "But his expression was one of unchanging hostility to me. Hatred of me. I doubt if he even listened to what I was saying. He must have assumed that I was a collaborationist, that all the things I told him were lies. "In the end I fell silent and looked back at the colonel. I could not hide the fact that I thought I had failed. He must have signalled to the guards outside, because one of them came in, went behind the Cretan and unfastened the bandage. At once the man roared, all the chords in his throat standing out, that same word, that one word: _eleutheria_. There was nothing noble in it. It was pure savagery, as if he was throwing a can of lighted petrol over us. The guard brutally twisted the gag back over his mouth and retied it. "Of course the word was not for him a concept or an ideal. It was simply his last weapon, and he used it as a weapon. "The colonel said, Take him back and await my orders. The man was dragged away again into that sinister room. The colonel walked to the shuttered window, opened it onto darkness and stood there for a minute, then turned to me. He said, Now you see why I must speak