I'm Not Stiller Read Free Page A

At the same time I felt that perhaps they had a torture chamber after all, perhaps the stolen potato was enough to make them come with red-hot irons. Suddenly my Jew put up his hand, to the accompaniment of general laughter. Even the head warder realized that this admission could only be an act of derision (he had never seen a Jew who played football) which was worse than the theft of an uncooked potato. The Jew, white with agitation, had to step out of the ranks. The rest of us were told to go round at the double for five minutes. Of course the poor fat fellow in front of me, wobbling like a hot-water bottle, was left behind on the first time round and ran in a spiral to shorten the distance, until a warder told him to fall out. They were not inhuman. But order must be maintained and also a certain gravity. After all, we were in a remand prison...
    There are times, alone in my cell, when I have the feeling that I have only dreamed all this; that at any moment I could stand up, take my hands away from my face and look round in freedom, as though the prison were only within me.
    ***
    'I've done my best,' said my defending counsel, 'to make your stay in the remand prison, which I hope will be short, as comfortable as possible—whisky is not allowed. You have the best room in the building, believe me, not the biggest, but the only one with morning sunshine; you have this view into the old chestnut tree. As to the bells of the Cathedral, they're very loud, I admit; but what do you expect me to do? I can't put the Cathedral somewhere else.'
    That was quite right, just as everything my counsel says is right in a way that never convinces me and yet always puts me in the wrong. The ringing of the cathedral bells, a metallic hum which breaks out at least twice a day and more often when there are weddings or funerals, makes it impossible to hear oneself think; it is like a trembling of the air, a soundless quaking, a noise like a man diving into the water from an excessively high diving board; it makes me deaf, dizzy, and idiotic. But my counsel is right; he can't put the cathedral somewhere else. And as I then remain silent out of sheer hopelessness, he picks up his folder and says:
    'Right, let's get down to business.'
    My counsel is a thoroughly decent, or at least inoffensive fellow, from a well-to-do family, virtuous through and through, rather inhibited, but even his inhibitions are turned into good manners; and above all, he is just, no doubt of that, just in even the most trivial matter, desperately just, just out of an almost inborn conviction that justice exists, at least in a constitutional State, at least in Switzerland.
    At the same time, he's not stupid. He knows a great deal, he's as reliable as an encyclopedia, especially where Switzerland is concerned, so that there is really no point in discussing Switzerland with my counsel; every idea that casts doubt on Switzerland is smothered under a mass of indisputable historical facts, and in the end, if you don't actually praise his Switzerland, you are always in the wrong, just as I was wrong over the bells of their cathedral. Perhaps it's only his lack of temperament, his virtuousness, his moderation, which so immoderately irritate me; he is superior to me in intelligence, yet he employs all his intelligence simply to avoid making mistakes. I find such people unbearable. I can reproach him with nothing; he considers me a thoroughly decent, or at least inoffensive, fundamentally sensible fellow, a man' of good will, a Swiss. This is the basis on which he is conducting my defence, and every time I see him I nearly explode. Then I turn on my heels, leave him sitting on the bed and turn my back to him; I maintain an almost insulting silence arid stare out of the window at the old chestnut trees with my hands in my pockets, simply because in the long run I can't stand people of his sort—people who can't imagine committing murder themselves, and therefore can't imagine