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  Rud cackled with Neuheufel but then thought that Eckhardt was even more unhappy than he was and, while still laughing, felt a pang of self-contempt. He stopped laughing. Neuheufel noticed it and also grew silent, watching him attentively.

  Rud used to go for walks around the barracks. Sometimes he would even venture as far as the women's camp hoping to meet the Pale Stranger again.

  "You must have been seeing things," Fiala told him. "Nobody young arrives here in one piece. Never. No exceptions."

  Rud was strolling slowly, hands behind his back, stopping now and again to wait for his friend who limped behind.

  "Remember that, mate: all the young ones go through the post-mortem," Fiala was mercilessly killing Rud's dream, "and there they slice them into bits to determine the cause of death. Then they sew them up again, any old way, and chuck them in the coffin or the family will complain. The insides are stuffed back without rhyme or reason, anyhow, a slap-dash job. Only old and cut up specimens end up here. And the Un-born of course, torn to shreds by the scooping. There are no other possibilities."

  They sat down on a bench made of rough planks by the well. The bench was shaded by a little silver birch. It was a sunny, hot day and Fiala felt the heat, all the more because of his black trousers. He always wore black trousers, for the colour helped to conceal the stinking wet patch on his crotch. He had already been given two dates for corrective operations but each time they were put off at the last moment.

  The offensive smell of urine, amplified by the heat and the crushing logic of the argument with which Fiala was destroying his illusions, made Rud want to liberate himself from such unpleasant company. He felt imprisoned. He realised that the Adaptation Centre was in fact nothing but a prison: barbed wire, sentry boxes ... And behind the wires an ordinary little wood, an ordinary meadow, ordinary hills. Perhaps there he would meet the Pale Stranger again.

  "And yet, she was all in one piece - no cuts, no stitches," he insisted. "I'm sure of that, Fiala. It must have been an exception. She was lucky." Rud hoped that his insistence would put Fiala off the conversation and force him to look for other company.

  "You can't see it on me because the skin is burnt, but look in the mirror. You'll see on your face all the scars from when they stitched you up after the post-mortem," Fiala would not give up.

  "Now I know which scars are from the post-mortem and which from the Punishment," muttered Rud. The stench of urine was growing more and more intense.

  Fiala must have noticed it too. He was increasingly embarrassed. He used some trivial pretext to excuse himself, said goodbye and hobbled off on his burnt feet. After a while Rud also got up from the bench; Fiala had left a wet patch on it.

  He was walking along the inner zone. Nobody ever said that coming near the levelled stretch of ground marked with little red flags was forbidden. The sleepy guards were dozing on their towers. Rud looked at the woods beyond the wires. He felt a great urge to get there.

  "Why couldn't it be simply Heaven?" he thought. "Why this Adaptation Centre first?" He heard a train whistle coming from the railway track- the new transport had arrived.

  Suddenly, he heard a resounding crash. Rud turned his head: one of the sentry towers had collapsed, tearing down the barbed wire as it fell. Over the years the supporting planks had completely rotted through. The guard's nest, knocked up from wooden boards, was lying in the ploughed outer zone. He could hear the screams and groans of the injured guard.

  For some reason, the accident attracted no one's attention. "I can escape," thought Rud. The tower had flattened the wires, opening the way out. The guards from the neighbouring towers probably wouldn't shoot either; they could have shot one of their own. Rud stood still, stupefied.

  Only after a minute or so, one of the guards woke up from his nap and blew his whistle. The Guardians and more guards appeared. Rud expected them to run around like maniacs but they drifted over, sleepy and lethargic. They could find nobody in the orderly-room and had to send for someone from below. Two stretcher-bearers turned up, the mandatory fiery pentagrams on their hats. It seemed to Rud they blinked, unused to the light. They quickly put the groaning guard, who had apparently broken his leg, on the stretcher and carried him away. Several Un-born huddled together in a small group observing this unusual event. They themselves were a rare sight; normally they avoided sunlight to protect their sensitive skin. Only on cloudy days, early mornings or evenings, could one see them wandering around in groups, observing everything closely. One had to be careful not to bump into one of those tiny people, though in fact there was little chance of that, since from a distance of several yards they would already be invading the mind of a passer-by, shouting in his head to be careful and not to harm them.

  More and more guards and inmates gathered around. The Guardians began to pick volunteers for work. The tower and the wires needed to be mended and someone had to carry new planks. Of course, they did not bother the old and the Un-born. At first, Rud wanted to leave quietly but then thought he had nothing better to do. Back in the barracks there was only another of Neuheufel's essays waiting for his corrections. The very thought that he would have to go through the misery of praising loudly the Interrogator's feeble ideas made him head for the crowd.

  "Keep out of it, boy," said the toothless old woman, "or they'll blame it on you ... They'll be looking for a scapegoat. First they build rubbish and then blame innocent people ..." She was livening up. She even started waving her walking stick, but soon gave up; it was too heavy for her.

  Rud was in no mind to get back. He stood out from the crowd of stooped, withered bodies and was quickly picked out. One of the Interrogators motioned him to come closer. Rud walked up to him.

  "We need people to work," said the Interrogator, looking closely at the number on his overalls.

  "I wonder if he's already memorised my number," the thought passed through Rud's mind.

  "We'll carry the wood. Go and wait there, at the fence."

  "Will we go outside the zone?" Rud played dumb.

  "No. We'll be dancing on the roofs," snorted the Interrogator. "Do as you're told, Milankiewicz," he added.

  Rud froze. How could he know his name? Probably the Interrogators communicated among themselves in the same way as the Un-born, and this one must have already got his data from the central register. It made sense. Without a word, though pleased, he stepped over the string with the little red rags, crossed the stretch of beaten down ground and joined the selected group. They waited a few more minutes until the required number of people had been found. The Interrogators brought axes and saws.

  Rud was overwhelmed with joy when he realised that they were going to the woods for which he longed so much. The prospect of hard physical work was in no way offputting. He was given an axe set on a long handle. Thus equipped - some with axes, some with saws - they marched in pairs. Deeply moved, Rud walked across the ploughed outer zone, his feet sinking in the soft earth. Everybody marched cheerfully, some even started to whistle.

  They were escorted only by one unarmed Interrogator. He introduced himself as Schulz. "Come to think of it, there would be no problem in overpowering him," thought Rud. "One blow with the axe and it's done. We'll have to wait till we get into the wood so they can't see us from the Centre," he was analysing the situation. "Before they register the escape we'll be far away. I'm sure the others are thinking the same thing."

  The wood was not far and after fifteen minutes they entered among the first trees. Schulz was marking the trees to be felled. He behaved as if he was not afraid of them.

  Then it started: Rud felt an itching inside his nose. He sneezed; once, a second time, a tenth. His nose was dripping like a tap. Rud felt awful. His body became an unbearable place to be in. His head seemed to swell. He could not think. He had never had hay fever before and its symptoms were something new to him. They all suffered the same. Some of them really began to swell up. Schulz hurried them without mercy. They sawed the trunks and then chopped the branc
hes off.

  "Come on, get on with it. You'll stay here till we get all the timber we need. Nobody will do it for us," he kept shouting. He was the only one who did not suffer from the allergy. "What do you think?" he sneered, "that those towers and wires are put up to keep you in? You're wrong! They are to protect you against the outside environment."

  After several hours of unendurable work - unendurable because of the raging hay fever - Rud's nose was red and painful. It even bled a couple of times. Schulz gave each of them an anti-histamine pill. He had no more. The pill worked for fifteen minutes and then it started all over again.

  After they finished, each pair lifted a prepared log and placed it on their shoulders. Despite the weight they marched briskly, sneezing and swearing, just to make it to the zone. Rud was relieved to find himself back behind the wires. The hay fever disappeared the moment they entered the Centre.

  Neuheufel waited till Rud had finished a chapter. The semestral essay was nearly complete. Rud found calculating the correlation between the regions and types and number of people coming to the Centre hard going. The nearincomprehensible equations noted by Neuheufel during his lessons were very dubious: the same data calculated several times always gave different results. Neuheufel didn't seem to notice, greeting each result with the same gloomy face. Rud took it all very seriously and in his mind he already pictured the inevitable row.

  He handed Neuheufel a few written pages littered with crossed out and corrected lines and sat behind the table; his tired eyes were watering. The Interrogator read each sentence slowly, as if with difficulty. He moved to the window to see the text better. Rud waited in silence for the usual comments: unimaginative, often meaningless and always laboured out with immense effort; it was the time of loud praises for every feeble idea and discreet corrections of monumental inanities. The silence dragged on. It was the usual ritual. Reading was a hard task for Neuheufel, or at least that was the impression he gave.

  This time it was different, however. Neuheufel neatly folded the pages and put them into his map-case.

  "He'll be rewriting these five pages for the rest of the evening with his tongue hanging out, and tomorrow he'll bring them to me as his own ideas and I'll have to correct the spelling mistakes he's made rewriting my text ..." thought Rud, rubbing his sweating hands.

  "Well, all right," said Neuheufel. "It's a bit weak, I'll try to improve it ... A lot of mistakes."

  This was the normal conclusion, but it usually took place after convoluted discussions over each essay, which went on for hours until Neuheufel finally grasped the ideas proposed by Rud. This time it meant there would be no discussion, or that it was postponed. So Rud remained silent.

  "I looked through your file," said Neuheufel.

  Rud froze.

  "It's a big file," Neuheufel carried on. "You've picked up quite a lot on your way."

  Rud was listening attentively.

  Neuheufel stopped for a moment as if trying to think, but his boorish, as if bloated face assumed an expression of forcefully restrained laughter.

  "This Dianna of yours was quite a morsel, wasn't she," started Neuheufel again, still serious. "Such a delightful love dish. Or rather a starter. She's so small," now he was giggling, he could no longer restrain the laughter. "I watched all the cassettes with you and her. Had lots of fire, that woman .. . Where did she learn all that ... ? Or at her place ... When she was doing that ... you remember ..." he chuckled. "Or when she burnt herself pink in the sun and all that skin was peeling off ... I still liked her, don't know what you were complaining about," Neuheufel shamelessly ventured to give his own opinion.

  Rud grew pale and blushed in turn.

  "You were a pretty good rooster too," Neuheufel was slapping his thighs. "But now it's all over, Milankiewicz," he added calming down.

  Rud wished he could sink into the ground.

  "Great evening," he carried on. "A crate of beer and the video with the two of you. Holzbucher also thinks you were good."

  Rud grew angry. What right did this sonofabitch have to drag out the most intimate details of his life? He was only supposed to find out something about the sentence.

  Unexpectedly Neuheufel told him to leave. He said he had almost divulged an official secret.

  Furious, Rud ran out of the barrack. Outside, he saw Jose sitting on the bench surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke.

  "Wanna fag, Milankiewicz?" he asked calmly. His voice calmed Rud too.

  "No," he said, "but I can passively smoke some of yours."

  He sat down next to Jose.

  "You ran out as if Neuheufel stuck a propeller up your arse," said Jose and put out a half-finished roll-up. He didn't want to poison his mate.

  "Almost. He started telling me the most intimate details of my life. What I did with Dianna. He had it all on video, the bastard."

  "That's right. They have everything on video, with all the details. Every situation shot from different angles. From the front, the sides, from behind. Have you seen that sort of thing?"

  "No."

  "It's as if they stuck a camera up your arse. They showed me my cassettes too, from the service ..." he stopped abruptly.

  "Where do they get it from?"

  "They just do. During your life everything is recorded. Having a beer? Three shots. Cuddling a girl? Goes on video straight away. They have everything on video as evidence for Greater Punishment. Not other things, only things that led to the conviction."

  "But how did they do it?" Rud wondered. "Once we spent a weekend in Dianna's parents' home, they'd gone away somewhere. We were alone. Even the television was switched off, you know what I mean?"

  Jose nodded showing he understood, took out a small packet and began to roll, slowly and carefully, another roll-up. The habit was stronger than friendship.

  "The bastard told me everything in such minute detail, as if he were sitting next to us," carried on Rud. "But I shouldn't be saying things like that, he is my benefactor," he tried to mitigate his remarks.

  "You're right. These films have such a fine grain you can see a single hair, even the shadow that hair throws on the skin or across other hairs. They see better than you could see yourself at the time. By the way, why did you deny it? They're always right, they're never wrong. If you got Greater Punishment it means you deserved it."

  "I wasn't denying anything. Anyway, does it matter?"

  "Only that they can check out your documentation. They have no right to look through the videos, unless it's at your request."

  "I only asked him to find out why I got Greater Punishment."

  "You idiot. They'll never tell you that and thanks to you they had a video session."

  Rud stopped listening. Further away stood a kiosk surrounded by wooden tables and benches selling cigarettes and semi-sweet orangeade. Rud didn't like that orangeade: it didn't taste of oranges, it had no fizz -just water with sugar - and often had spiders' webs floating near the bottom of the bottle. Now he was surveying the benches.

  "Have you met your Dianna here?" asked Jose from behind a new cloud of smoke.

  Rud did not answer. It had not even crossed his mind to look for her. He excused himself and walked, almost ran towards the kiosk. It seemed to him that from a distance he saw a familiar, light patch.

  The Pale Stranger was sitting on a bench together with some toothless old women who were sipping the orangeade. She wore the normal uniform: brown shirt, trousers of the same colour and clogs. The way she wore her shirt, the way she crossed her legs and slipped a clog off her shapely foot, lent her coarse camp-issue garb a touch of refinement. She looked at him as if she had been waiting for him, though perhaps with a hint of fear. She might have taken him for one of the Interrogators, since by now he had acquired a pair of the well-cut green trousers worn by the guards, and an official peaked cap from which he had had to tear off the pentagram. As an inmate he had no right to wear it there, only on his back together with the registration number.

  "Hi. I'm gl
ad I've managed to find you again," he said sitting himself, uninvited, on the bench next to her. The toothless old women carried on with their quarrel, lisping so badly he could not tell what it was about.

  She made room so he could sit more comfortably.

  "What's your name?"

  "Maria."

  Rud suddenly ran out of chat-up lines. He had some tobacco with him and he could exchange it for something at the kiosk.

  "Fancy an orangeade?" he asked.

  "Do all Leaders make acquaintance through an orangeade?" she answered with a question. She had a very pale complexion, shadows around her eyes, even premature wrinkles indicating exhaustion. But nowhere - on her face, her neck or her hands - could he see any scars.

  "I'm not a Leader."

  A shadow fell on both of them. Rud turned his head; Leader Eckhardt had just returned from the kiosk with a bottle of orangeade and two mustard glasses. He stood, eyes blood-shot, with a fury which only served to bring out the manliness of his face. He looked like a wolf.

  "You here, Dandy?" he hissed putting the bottle and the glasses on the table. "Beat it."

  Undaunted, Rud defiantly opened Eckhardt's bottle, which gave out a faint hiss, and poured the stale water into the glasses. He offered one glass to Maria and ostentatiously took a sip from the other.

  "Thanks, Eckhardt," he said. The other was a Leader only during work; now they were equal. "I'll pay you back in tobacco. I know you smoke like a chimney."

  "Do you smoke?" he turned to Maria.

  "No."

  "I'll give you a pound of tobacco for the orangeade," he carried on, "it's a good price ... Now Eckhardt, leave us alone. You smell of perspiration. If you want to use the toilet, remember the Ladies is just behind the kiosk on the right, not on the left - that's the Gents."

  Rud made a couple of mistakes. He underrated his opponent. Eckhardt was maybe slower but he was also taller, heavier and stronger, and sitting, Rud had limited freedom of movement. He hoped that Eckhardt, publicly humiliated, would withdraw of his own accord. He was wrong. He had hardly managed to lift the glass to his mouth when Eckhardt, foaming with rage, pulled out his official truncheon and struck Rud over the head. The spilt orangeade splashed over the surprised women. Maria screamed, terrified. The next whack of Eckhardt's truncheon rendered him unconscious.