Reynolds opened his eyes and looked at him. It was as if someone had covered his eyes with thick sheaths of lead, the effort was so great, but open them he finally did and peered with unfocused gaze across the gloom of the cellar. At first he could see nothing, he thought his eyes were gone, there was only a misty vapour swimming across his eyes, and then suddenly he knew it was a misty vapour, and he remembered that the stone floor was covered in six inches of water and the entire cellar festooned with steam pipes: the steaming, humid heat, worse by far than any Turkish bath he had ever known, was part of the treatment.
And now he could see Jansci: he could see him as if he were seeing through a misted, frosted glass, but he could see him, perhaps eight feet away, in a chair the duplicate of his own. He could see the head continually shaking from side to side, the jaws working constantly, the hands at the end of the pinioned arms opening and closing convulsively as Jansci sought to release some of the accumulated tension, the exquisitely agonising titillation of his over-stimulated nervous system.
‘Don’t let your head go again, Michael,’ he said urgently. Even in his distress, the use of his Christian name struck Reynolds, the first time Jansci had ever used it, pronouncing it exactly as his daughter had done. ‘And for heaven’s sake keep your eyes open. Don’t let yourself go, whatever you do, don’t let yourself go! There’s a peak, a crisis of some kind to the effects of these damned chemicals, and if you get over that — don’t let go!’ he shouted suddenly. Again Reynolds opened his eyes: this time the effort was fractionally less.
‘That’s it, that’s it!’ Jansci’s voice came more clearly now. ‘I felt just the same a moment ago, but if you let go, yield to the effects, there’s no recovery. Just hang on, boy, just hang on. I can feel it going already.’
And Reynolds, also, could feel the grip of the chemicals easing. He had still the same mad urge to tear loose, to convulse every muscle in his body, but his head was clearing, and the ache behind his eyes beginning to dwindle. Jansci was talking to him all the while, encouraging him, distracting him, and gradually all his limbs and body began to quieten, he grew cold even in the fierce tropical heat of the cellar and bouts of uncontrollable shivering shook him from head to foot. Then the shivering faded and died away, and he began to sweat and grow faint as the humidity and the heat pouring from the steam pipes increased with every moment that passed. He was again on the threshold of collapse — a clear-headed, sane collapse this time — when the door opened and gum-booted warders came splashing through the water. Within seconds the warders had them free and were urging them through the open door into the clear, icy air and Reynolds, for the first time in his life, knew exactly what the taste of water must seem like to a man who had been dying of thirst in the desert.
Ahead of him he could see Jansci shrugging off the supporting hands of the warders on either side of him, and Reynolds, though he felt like a man after a long and wasting bout of fever, did the same. He staggered, all but fell when the support of the arms was withdrawn, recovered and steeled himself to follow Jansci out into the snow and bitter cold of the courtyard with his body erect and his head held high.
The commandant was waiting for them, and his eyes narrowed in swift disbelief as he saw them come out. For a few moments he was at a loss, and the words so ready on his lips remained unsaid. But he recovered quickly, and the professorial mask slipped effortlessly into place.
‘Candidly, gentlemen, had one of my medical colleagues reported this to me, I should have called him a liar. I would not, I could not have believed it. As a matter of clinical interest, how do you feel?’
‘Cold. And my feet are freezing — maybe you hadn’t noticed it, but our feet are soaking wet — we’ve been sitting with them in water for the past two hours.’ Reynolds leaned negligently against a wall as he spoke, not because his attitude reflected his feelings, but because without the wall’s support he would have collapsed on to the snow. But not even the wall lent him the support and encouragement that the approving gleam in Jansci’s eye did.
‘All in good time. Periodic alternations of temperature is part of the — ah — treatment. I congratulate you, gentlemen. This promises to be a case of unusual interest.’ He turned to one of the guards. ‘A clock in their cellar, and where they can both see it. The next injection of Actedron will be — let me see, it’s now midday — will be at 2 pjn. precisely. We must not keep them in undue suspense.’
Ten minutes later, gasping in the sudden, stifling heat of the cellar after the zero cold of the yard outside, Reynolds looked at the ticking clock, then at Jansci.
‘He doesn’t miss out even the smallest refinement of torture, does he?’
‘He would be horrified, genuinely horrified, if he heard you mention the word “torture,”‘ Jansci said thoughtfully. ‘To himself the commandant is just a scientist carrying out an experiment, and all he wants is to achieve the maximum efficiency from the point of view of results. He is, of course, quite mad, with the blind insanity of all zealots. He would be shocked to hear you say that, too.’
‘Mad?’ Reynolds swore. ‘He’s an inhuman fiend. Tell me, Jansci, is that the sort of man you call your brother? You still believe in the oneness of humanity?’
‘An inhuman fiend?’ Jansci murmured. ‘Very well, let us admit it. But at the same time let us not forget that inhumanity knows no frontiers, no frontiers in either time or space. It’s hardly the exclusive perquisite of the Russians, you know. God only knows how many thousands of Hungarians have been executed or tortured till death came as a welcome release — by their fellow Hungarians. The Czech SSB — their secret police — were on a par with the NKVD, and the Polish UB — composed almost entirely of Poles — were responsible for worse atrocities than the Russians had ever dreamed of.’
‘Worse even than Vinnitsa?’
Jansci looked at him in long, slow speculation, then raised the back of his hand to his forehead: he could have been wiping the sweat away.
‘Vinnitsa?’ He lowered his hand and stared sightlessly into the gloom of a far corner. ‘Why do you ask about Vinnitsa, my boy?*
‘I don’t know. Julia mentioned it — perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry, Jansci, forget it.’
‘No need to be sorry — I can never forget it.’ He broke off for a long moment, then went on slowly. ‘I can never forget it. I was with the Germans in 1943 when we dug up a high-fenced orchard near the NKVD headquarters. We found 10,000 dead in a mass grave in that orchard. We found my mother, my sister, my daughter — Julia’s elder sister — and my only son. My daughter and my son had been buried alive: it is not difficult to tell these things.’
In the minutes that followed, that dark, furnace-hot dungeon deep under the frozen earth of Sarhaza did not exist for Reynolds. He forgot their ghastly predicament, he forgot the haunting thought of the international scandal his trial would bring about, he forgot the man who was bent on destroying them, he could not even hear the ticking of the clock. He could think only of the man who sat quietly opposite him, of the dreadfully stark simplicity of his story, of the shattering traumatic shock that must have followed his discovery, of the miracle that he should not only have kept his sanity but grown into the kind and wise and gentle man he was, with hatred in his heart towards none that lived. To have lost so many that he loved, to have lost the most of What he lived for, and then to call their murderers his brothers. . . . Reynolds looked at him and knew that he did not even begin to know this man, and knew that he would never know him. . . .
‘It is not difficult to read your thoughts,’ Jansci said gently. ‘I lost so many I loved and, for a time, almost my reason. The Count — I will tell you his story some day, has lost even more — I, at least have still Julia and, I believe in my heart, my wife also. He has lost everything in the world. But we both know this. We know that it was bloodshed and violence that took our loved ones away from us, but we also know that all the blood spilt between here and eternity will never bring them back again. Revenge is for the madmen of the world and for the creatures of the field. Revenge will never create a world in which bloodshed and violence can never take our loved ones away from us. There may be a better kind of world worth living for, worth striving for and devoting our lives to, but I am a simple man and I just cannot conceive of it.’ He paused, then smiled. ‘Well, we are talking of inhumanity in general. Let us not forget this specific instance.’