Chapter 10

THE WALLS ARE FALLING

The unidentified man, who called himself Werner, was tired of life and struggle. There was a time when he loved life very dearly, when he enjoyed the theater, literature and social intercourse. Endowed with an excellent memory and a firm will, he had mastered several European languages and could easily pass for a German, a Frenchman or an Englishman. He usually spoke German with a Bavarian accent, but when he felt like it, he could speak like a born Berliner. He was fond of dress, his manners were excellent and he alone, of all the members of the organization, dared attend the balls given in high society, without running the risk of being recognized as an outsider.

But for a long time, altogether unnoticed by his comrades, there had ripened in his soul a dark contempt for mankind; contempt mingled with despair and painful, almost deadly fatigue. By nature rather a mathematician than a poet, he had not known until now any inspiration, any ecstasy and at times he felt like a madman, looking for the squaring of a circle in pools of human blood. The enemy against whom he struggled every day could not inspire him with respect. It was a dense net of stupidity, treachery and falsehood, vile insults and base deceptions. The last incident which seemed to have destroyed in him forever the desire to live, was the murder of the provocateur which he had committed by order of the organization. He had killed him in cold blood, but when he saw that dead, deceitful, now calm, and after all pitiful, human face, he suddenly ceased to respect himself and his work. Not that he was seized with a feeling of repentance, but he simply stopped appreciating himself. He became uninteresting to himself, unimportant, a dull stranger. But being a man of strong, unbroken will-power, he did not leave the organization. He remained outwardly the same as before, only there was something cold, yet painful in his eyes. He never spoke to anyone of this.

He possessed another rare quality: just as there are people who have never known headaches, so Werner had never known fear. When other people were afraid, he looked upon them without censure but also without any particular compassion, just as upon a rather contagious illness from which, however, he himself had never suffered. He felt sorry for his comrades, especially for Vasya Kashirin; but that was a cold, almost official pity, which even some of the judges may have felt at times.

Werner understood that the execution was not merely death, that it was something different,-but he resolved to face it calmly, as something not to be considered; to live until the end as if nothing had happened and as if nothing could happen. Only in this way could he express his greatest contempt for capital punishment and preserve his last freedom of the spirit which could not be torn away from him. At the trial-and even his comrades who knew well his cold, haughty fearlessness would