Asylum Piece

AT NIGHT

How slowly the minutes pass in the winter night: and yet the hours themselves do not seem so long. Already the church clock is calling the hour again in its dull country voice that sounds half stupefied with the cold. I lie in bed, and like a well-drilled prisoner, an old-timer, I resign myself to the familiar pattern of sleeplessness. It is a routine I know only too well.

My jailer is in the room with me, but he cannot accuse me of being rebellious or troublesome. I lie as still as if the bed were my coffin, not wishing to attract his attention. Perhaps if I don’t move for a whole hour he will let me sleep.

Naturally, I cannot put on the light. The room is as dark as a box lined with black velvet that someone has dropped into a frozen well. Everything is quiet except when the house-bones creak in the frost or a lump of snow slides from the roof with a sound like a stealthy sigh. I open my eyes in the darkness. The eyelids feel stiff as if tears had congealed upon them in rime. If only I could see my jailer it would not be so bad. It would be a relief to know just where he is keeping watch. At first I fancy that he is standing like a dark curtain beside the door. The ceiling is lifted off the room as if it were the lid of a box and he is towering up, taller than an elm tree, up towards the icy mountains of the moon. But then it seems to me that I have made a mistake and that he is crouching on the floor quite close to me.

An iron band has been clamped round my head, and just at this moment the jailer strikes the cold metal a ringing blow which sends needles of pain into my eye sockets. He is showing his disapproval of my inquiring thoughts; or perhaps he merely wishes to assert his authority over me. At any rate, I hastily shut my eyes again, and lie motionless, hardly daring to breathe, under the bed clothes.

To occupy my mind I begin to run through the formulae which the foreign doctor taught me when I first came under suspicion. I repeat to myself that there is no such person as a victim of sleeplessness, that I stay awake simply because I prefer to continue my thoughts. I try to imagine myself in the skin of a newborn infant, without future or past. If the jailer looks into my mind now, I think, he cannot raise any objection to what is going on there. The face of the Dutch doctor, thin and sharp and hard like the face of a sea captain, passes before me. Suddenly a cock crows near by with a sound fantastic, unearthly, in this world still locked in darkness and frost. The cock’s crow flowers sharply in three flaming points, a fiery fleur-de-lis blossoming momentaneously in the black field of night.

Now I am almost on the point of falling asleep. My body feels limp, my thoughts start to run together. My thoughts have become strands of weed, of no special colour, slowly undulating in colourless water.

My left hand twitches and again I am wide awake. It is the striking of the church clock that has called me back to my jailer’s presence. Did I count five strokes or four? I am too tired to be certain. In any case, the night will be over soon. The iron band on my head has tightened and slipped down so that it presses against my eyeballs. And yet the pain does not seem so much to come from this cruel pressure as to emanate from somewhere inside my skull, from the brain cortex: it is the brain itself which is aching.

All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment, with an unseen jailer, when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice.

But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one’s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.