THE
JESUIT'S
TALE
you. They were the mob. (You may define the mob as the masses pos–
sessed by the devil and moved into action.) And the mob may move
in a large force, such as the shouting crowds at the public trial; it
may move as a dozen scurrying tight-lipped guardsmen like those
who came to take me away; or it may appear as a couple of 'people's
police' who were always ready, with their big powerful hands, to
shake me awake if I should show the least sign of nodding or closing
my drowsy eyelids during the long hours of interrogation before I
was submitted to the public trial; or it may sit there in the form of
a single person, the interrogator.
Of
course there was more than one
interrogator, but they came in rotation: every two hours--<>r three
hours or four hours, I cannot remember the exact length of time–
the interrogator would retire, defeated perhaps, for I had been stub–
born, but he would smile a sinister smile when he stood up and
leave the chair and the prisoner to his successor, as if he were still
sure of success. The new man would be of the same build, in the same
drab uniform, with the same expressionless face and unruffled voice,
so that you could not even get mad at the same old silly questions, the
same fantastic charges which you believed you had already satisfac–
torily answered or denied. That man would again be foiled in his
attempts to intimidate or wheedle me into accepting the charges. He
would only succeed in boring me--oh I was terribly bored- but per–
haps the man himself was bored too.
So
another man would come,
but the same epitome of the mob, not loud or shrill like tile mob I
was to encounter later during the public trial, but a mob cool with
calculated determination, a mob compressed into a Marx-Lenin-Stalin
uniform, seated in the chair like a mandarin and armed with dialectic.
I was so confused by the identity of the interrogators sitting before
me that I soon lost my sense of discrimination. I cannot remember
whether I even noticed when one of them, the fifth one perhaps, re–
tired and another one took his place. The man, anyone of the inter–
rogators, seemed to be only a head, a voice, a series of repeated
questions, a will to persecute, a simplified image of the mob, a sym–
bol of power wielded with ruthless cunning, a mouthpiece of the new
leadership which would not allow its authority to be challenged, not
even by God and His priest. To such a head and voice, my answer
had been a firm and complete denial. I had been indignant-I be–
lieve I had stamped my feet- but my voice had become weaker and
