There were three men within the antiseptic whitewashed walls – the Man, the Judge, the Doctor.
The Man was dead – but not quite – as he lay unconscious on the operation table, with a bullet in his heart.
The Judge said: ‘Doctor, I want this man to be saved at all costs.’
The Doctor said: ‘I am not God, Judge, but we’ll do everything possible to save him.’
The Judge said: ‘I want you to do more than that. I want you to attempt the impossible.’
‘There is only one possibility,’ said the Doctor, ‘but you know how dangerous that is.’
‘I know – but I want you to try it.’
‘Of course, if we do succeed,’ said the Doctor, ‘it will be a triumph of surgery, of science.’
‘And a triumph of law. That’s why I am interested in this unfortunate man.’
As they started giving him the anaesthesia, the Man floated in the amorphous realm between life and death. He was alive, yet not alive, dead, but not quite dead. The perforated, bleeding heart could not hold long – it was already beyond repair.
The Man on the operating table was given anaesthesia, oxygen, blood transfusion, intravenous glucose as the surgeons tore through the cage of ribs to reach the lacerated heart. In the twilight half-world of pain and anaesthesia, the Man’s subconscious was aware of the sounds – the barking of dogs, the echoes of a stentorian voice pronouncing the sentence of doom:
‘… To be hanged by the neck till he is dead … dead…’
The Judge pronounced the sentence without the slightest trace of tremor in his voice. ‘… To be hanged by the neck till he is dead!’
The Man felt a constriction of his throat as if the noose were already there. Involuntarily, he loosened his collar as, through close-set eyes, he searched the Judge’s face for some sign of remorse or, at least, compassion for the human life that he was snuffing out with a stroke of his pen. No, there was none. If anything, there was a sense of relief after the long hours and many days of legal hair-splitting, of the seemingly interminable arguments of the prosecution and the defence. ‘Thank God, it’s all over,’ the Judge’s sigh seemed to say. He was taking elaborate precautions to avoid looking in the direction of the prisoner.
The Man suddenly felt that he was on the verge of tears, but with an effort of will, he held them back. No, he would not let them see him weakening. If only the Judge had given him just one look of pity, of human sympathy for the desperate compulsion that had motivated the murders, he would have known the Judge was regretfully doing his duty, that he was also a prisoner of his own set of compulsions. Then, thought the Man, I wouldn’t mind letting them see my tears of regret, of remorse, of the fear of death. Then he would have been content to let them lead him to the death cell and, in course of time, to the gallows. He would have been reconciled to his fate.
In that fateful moment the Man was obsessed with only one compulsive thought: why couldn’t the Judge bid him goodbye with one little human gesture? After all, he was sending him on a long journey from which he would never return.
He too had sent his wife and his best friend on a long, long journey from which they would never return. In court jargon, he had committed a double murder. But he had genuine tears in his eyes when he had stolen up from behind and stabbed his friend. The vital spot he had chosen between the shoulder blades had ensured speedy and, he hoped, painless death. In the army, they had taught him where exactly to plunge the bayonet. He had a medal to show for the ten enemy soldiers he had killed. His friend was his eleventh victim. There was scarcely a sound as the stabbed one fell to the ground. He was instantly killed. He had carefully withdrawn the bayonet, wiped it clean with a handkerchief (which was duly produced in court as Exhibit A), and put it back in its leather scabbard. Then he had gently lifted his friend and laid him on his bed, closed the eyes that were open with an expression of surprise in them, as if he had felt a sudden stab of pain in his back and died before he could find out what had caused it.
His eyes were filled with tears when he entered the room where his wife was asleep. In the moonlight pouring through the windows she looked so small, so soft and defenceless, that he could not bear to unsheathe the bayonet. He had planned to cut her throat but now shuddered at the idea. He would have to do it with his bare hands. That too he had learnt in the army. The karate instructor in the commando school had taught him which nerve to press in the neck to silence the enemy forever. He had learned his lesson well, and his wife died in her sleep, with a smile on her lips – cold they seemed – he kissed her little feet which were like dead marble. Then he sat down at the foot of her bed and shed all the tears that he had held back for so long. He was crying not only for his wife and his friend, but for those other ten men – husbands, brothers, sons – for killing whom they had given him a medal. He was still sobbing in the morning when the police, investigating the death of his friend, found him there at the foot of his own bed where his dead wife lay in gentle sleep.
‘Prisoner at the bar!’ The Judge was addressing him but looking away from him at the defence counsel. ‘Have you got something to say?’
At the moment, the Man decided what he would say and what he would do, ‘Yes, sir,’ he muttered and dragged himself to his feet. Then he stood in the dock and looked directly at the Judge who still chose to look the other way.
‘This man is a coward, afraid to look me in the eye,’ thought the Man, and a twisted smile appeared on his face.
Sensing the silence, the Judge asked, ‘Yes, what is it?’ He was looking past the prisoner at the policeman who stood near the dock.
‘Your Honour,’ said the Man, ‘before I die I would like to pay a visit to my house – the place where my wife … er …died!’
‘Granted,’ the Judge nodded to the court clerk. ‘If the jail rules permit! Anything else?’
‘No, Your Honour. Thank you, Your Honour.’
The Judge did not see – but the others in the court did – a distinct leer on the prisoner’s face as he was led away. Which confirmed, in their opinion, that he was a thoroughly bad egg and deserved the death penalty, which he got.
His last wish was granted sooner than he expected. Once the noble and kind-hearted Judge had said, ‘granted’, the jail manual was duly consulted, and it was discovered that if the prisoner was to be taken to his house, it would be now or never. For, once he was lodged in the death cell, he would come out only once – for the last time.
‘You have ten minutes,’ said the senior of the two policemen who had accompanied him to the little two-room flat which was on the third floor.
‘I want to be alone in the room with the memories of my wife,’ the Man made his request with a proper show of respect for the guardians of law. ‘You can stay at the door.’
The senior policeman looked in the room, found no other door but only one window with a ledge fifty feet high above the road.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘but no hanky-panky. Or else …’ He pointed to the revolver in his belt.
The Man closed the door from inside but did not bolt it.
‘Funny man,’ the junior of the two constables remarked, ‘first he kills his wife – now he wants to be alone with his memories of her. I’ll bet her ghost will be catching him by the throat right now.’
‘You can’t tell about murderers and what they will do,’ said his senior colleague. ‘They are mad people. This one was in the army. A good record. They even gave him a medal. Was in the commandos…’
He had hardly uttered the word ‘commandos’ when he suddenly stopped. The thought flashed across his mind: ‘A commando is trained to jump from high places.’
They burst into the room and, just as they feared, it was empty. The shutters of the window were flapping in the wind. When they looked out, he was down below, just about to disappear. The senior policeman drew his revolver but the other one warned him that he couldn’t shoot into a busy street.
‘We are in luck,’ said the younger policeman, pointing to the shoes that the man had discarded before jumping. ‘They will be useful for the dogs.’
The Man, weary and exhausted after his cross-country sprint, was sleeping in a clump of trees when the distant barking of dogs penetrated his sleepy consciousness. At first he did not feel it had anything to do with him. It might be just one of the night sounds – like the buzz of the mosquitoes in the grass, or the chirping of crickets in the trees, or the croaking of the frogs in the nearby swamp. Then he sensed the barking approach, as if the dogs were headed in his direction. With a sudden start, he realized what they were – police bloodhounds! They had picked up his scent, and now their barking was growing louder, coming nearer every second, dangerously near. He cursed the harvest moon in the sky. The whole landscape was clearly visible. If he came out of the trees and made a run for the meadow, they would spot him from miles. If he did not come out, the dogs would soon discover his lair and he would be trapped like a fox in its hole. His only chance was to make a run for it.
All his senses, his energy, his willpower became concentrated in his running legs – it seemed to him this was the moment for which he had received his commando training. When he looked back, he could distinctly see the silhouettes of the dogs – they had left their policemen’s escort far behind. He could see that there were two of them as they came springing after him – two against one – but he was man and they were but dogs. He led them through a crazy dance, zigzagging round the trees, over rocks, cornfields and rice paddies, through farmhouses. They were not pursuing a man, they were following a trail of his scent; they were obliged to run through all the places he had set his fleeting feet on. They could not take a short cut to catch up with the Man. In commando school they had anticipated pursuit by bloodhounds too, and as he ran he remembered the instructions. Not daring to stop for a second lest the dogs should overtake him, he divested himself of shirt, rolled it into a ball and threw it away from him to one side, while his sweat-soaked undervest he discarded among the rocks on the other side. For a few moments the dogs were confused as they sniffed, then tore through the garments, wondering where their quarry was. He had a clear lead of a few hundred yards now, not far from the lake which was sparkling in the moonlight, his one chance of escape. The dogs cannot follow a trail through the wide expanse of water and if he could once plunge into the lake and swim across, he would be rid of his sure-footed partners.
Putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he sprinted barefoot over the pebbly ground, cutting his feet on the sharp-edged stones, feeling the slow, thick trickle of blood oozing out, but not daring to stop, for the dogs were once again on his trail. He did not have to imagine how the fox felt when the hounds and mounted riders were after it.
Now the lake was only yards away. He could feel the touch of the soft turf under his feet. It was getting softer. Soon it was slippery, slithery mud. He must mind his step, he told himself, or he would slip and fall. The next moment he was stuck knee-deep in the swamp, and that he knew was the end. Soon the dogs would be upon him. If only he had his bayonet with him he could settle with the dogs. Now he had only his two bare hands.
Yelping and barking, the dogs fell upon him with all the fury of frustrated hunters. He felt them in a tangle of tooth and claw. They had stopped barking now, concerned with the more serious business of tearing through their quarry. The commando school had anticipated even such a situation. He tried to remember the instructions. ‘Kick the bastards in their vital parts,’ his instructor had said. ‘If you have nothing else, your boots are your weapon.’ But how could he kick them when he had no boots and no legs either, stuck as they were in the swamp, which was slowly sucking him down? He could only fight back with his bare hands. Using the karate technique, he concentrated on them and, as one leaped up at him, he caught it by the throat and squeezed hard, even though the other was biting and clawing at his waist. He could feel the teeth sink into his flesh, but he tried to think he had no waist, no body, only his two bare hands squeezing the life out of the enemy.
And then there was one. The other dog lay dead in the swamp. The survivor proved the more ferocious of the two. Seeing the carcass of his companion, he attacked the Man with malice mixed with fury. It was a fight between two beasts. The Man too was now a dog. He fought back with tooth and claw, biting into the skin of the dog, trying to choke him, strangle him, tear up the canine jaw with his bare hands. He matched the dog’s yelping and barking with weird noises of his own, shrieking, shouting, cursing, showering unspeakable profanities. His own hands bloodied, his body lacerated, blood and saliva dripping from his mouth, he fought the hound with all the animal strength and human will and ingenuity that was in him. At last he could feel the dog springing at him with diminished vigour, and the next time the animal made an attempt to gouge out his eyes, the Man ducked his head, caught the dog by the throat and squeezed till he could feel the body go limp and heavy as it keeled over. He had killed them both.
It was then that he realized that the swamp had sucked him in up to his waist and he no longer had the strength to pull himself out of it. With wild despairing eyes, he looked around the moonlit landscape, beyond the bodies of the two dogs which were also being slowly sucked into the morass. With a shudder of horror, the Man realized that he might have to share the swampy grave with his two tormentors.
It was then that he became aware of a new presence. It was that of the older of the two policemen who had accompanied him to his flat. He was fat and he was panting from the exertion of the pursuit. If he came near him, he would try karate on him too. But he would not need to come near. For he had a gun in his hand.
‘So you thought you could give us the slip, eh?’ Then, eyeing the two carcasses that were beginning to be sucked into the swamp, he brandished the revolver. ‘You killed my Blackie and Brownie, they were like my sons, you brute!’
‘I am sorry,’ said the Man, trying to strike a humorous note, ‘I did not know they were your sons, or I would have allowed them to tear me to pieces.’
‘Trying to be funny, eh? Put up your hands!’ He barked out the order, and the Man raised both his hands above his head.
A vicious smile appeared on the policeman’s face. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘This is better and simple. Straight into the heart.’ And he fired at point-blank range.
The Man felt nothing. He fell down unconscious … Instantly he drifted into a dream in which he was young once again, in love with a beautiful little girl who was always laughing, always teasing him; and he was running after her, holding his own heart in his hands, offering it to her. The cruel beauty picked it up and dashed it to the ground and the fragile heart broke into a million splinters. One of the splinters pierced him where his heart should have been, and it was excruciatingly painful … but it was only pain in a dream … And then, an eternity of time passed during which he was tossed in a sea of pain, struggling against gravity, which was pulling him down to the bottom of the sea – or was it the swamp? And then he was young once again and the little girl, who was his wife, was there offering him a brand new heart and saying, ‘I am sorry I broke your heart but, look, I’ll give you another heart – it belonged to your best friend, the one whom you killed.’ And he took it and placed it in the vacuum in his chest, but this one was too big for him, and so he had to squeeze it to get it in, and the process was so painful that he thought he would die.
And then, he heard the Judge’s voice. ‘Thank you, Doctor, you have performed a miracle.’ But this was no dream…
The Man felt a prick in his arm and drifted again into timeless sleep.
After eternities of time and pain, he opened his eyes. He saw an all-pervading white cloud which, when it came into focus, proved to be a hospital ward – white walls, white-painted doors and windows, white-clad nurses, like angels, and the tall white-clad figure of the Doctor, who was like God.
They were talking in some incomprehensible technical-surgical jargon which made no sense to him in his drugged state.
When the Man had regained consciousness, the Doctor walked up to him.
‘Thank you, my friend, for cooperating with us and living through the operation. You have an amazing will to survive.’
The Man mumbled: ‘You took bullets out of my heart?’
The Doctor smiled. ‘No, my friend, we gave you a brand new heart. You are the first successful heart transplant case in our country.’
After a week, the Man could sit up in bed, propped up by pillows, and talk to journalists seated beyond a transparent plastic curtain as a precaution against infection. A sterilized microphone had been placed before the Man to magnify his weak voice.
‘How do you feel, sir?’ asked one of the journalists.
‘Fine,’ said the Man. ‘Though still a little weak.’
‘Yours is the first successful heart transplant in our country. Isn’t the thought of it exciting and exhilarating?’
‘Yes, it is – even to think of it makes me giddy.’
‘Do you know that the state has spent thousands on this operation?’
‘Yes, I know. I am grateful. They have given me a new life.’
The Doctor signalled to the journalists, cutting the interview short as the strain on the patient might be too much.
‘One last question, sir. What are your plans after you leave the hospital?’
‘To live – to live!’
The interview was over. After a few hours, the Man was shown papers with his photographs on the front page and a feature article on the basis of the three-minute interview, under a six-column heading: ‘Transplant Hero’s Plans – to Live! To Live!’
After three months of careful nursing and expensive aftercare, the Man was discharged from the hospital.
‘You can go home now,’ said the Doctor. ‘Goodbye and good luck.’
A comfortable limousine brought him to a strange new place. Here too, there was a Doctor to examine him.
The Doctor probed the chest of the Man with his stethoscope, checked his blood pressure, asked him to inhale and exhale, pricked his finger for a blood test, declared him fit, and signed a document to that effect.
‘The prisoner is perfectly sound in body and mind,’ he declared, handing over the certificate to one of the warders.
The prisoner! The Man realized with shock that he was still a prisoner. His transplanted heart missed a beat.
The Man felt his hands pinned behind him. A priest appeared from nowhere, and led the procession, intoning, ‘For dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return…’
The Warders.
The Man.
The two constables, the younger one sad, the senior one triumphant.
The Jailor.
The Doctor.
The Judge.
They brought the Man to the gallows where the hangman was waiting.
They covered the Man’s head with a black veil. He could feel the noose being placed round his neck. He felt an ominous constriction as the rope was adjusted.
On a signal from the Jailor, the hangman pressed the lever and released the trapdoor. In a moment, it was all over.
The Doctor applied the stethoscope to the dead man’s chest. He declared that the heart – the transplanted heart – was duly stilled.
The senior constable could not suppress a grin of sadistic glee. His bloodhounds were avenged.
On the Judge’s face was a deep and profound satisfaction. The law was vindicated. Justice had been done. The guilty had been duly punished.
And overhead flew a flock of white seagulls, filling the sky with a vast question mark which cast a fleeting shadow over the earth.