The End

I felt ready to start again; the great gash of anger had cleaned me of hope, hope of the unraveled rope and appeal of any sentence handed down.I was ready now, staring at the sky with its stars and patterns and brilliant light.I felt my heart open to the great silence. To feel myself as part of its huge indifferent flow; its washing of history and time like lightening amongst the trees of the village where the Dada was my brother, my blood,my line. I understood that I had once been happy.That I was happy still. All that was needed now was for the crowds to show.Festooned crowds in flowered shirts that would come to the prison walls on the day of my death and call for my anhilation and cheer to the echo at its coming and none more so than the Kalimantan’s. And there would be crowds. They shoot the guilty on the opposite side of the island. The police have to clear the roads, the way thousands turn up all bright in their Saturday best to raise an almighty cheer when the rifles go off and the smell of wood smoke rises in the air over Indonesia. No army is slow to murder. Chance plays no part there. When I’m dropped through the trap I’ll take the whoosh and my spirits in strange commotion pressing upward will dance in my head like ice. I’ll embrace the great blaze of light. When news of my death shall reach them all I can hope for is that they will raise the same cheers for me. I know someone who will certainly do so. Rama Abdullah the pirate, great grandson of the white Rajah; the child of his father to the man ; my Dada. I shall need no hood. I want them to see my eyes bulge and my neck snap and to accompany my fall into universal darkness with song. I hope the news will spread like wild fire and dancing to all the districts, diocese and Kampongs of this scented, unholy archipeligo.

Dada 175

I felt ready to start again; the great gash of anger had cleaned me of hope, hope of the unraveled rope and appeal of any sentence handed down.I was ready now, staring at the sky with its stars and patterns and brilliant light.I felt my heart open to the great silence. To feel myself as part of its huge indifferent flow; its washing of history and time like lightening amongst the trees of the village where the Dada was my brother, my blood,my line. I understood that I had once been happy.That I was happy still. All that was needed now was for the crowds to show.Festooned crowds in flowered shirts that would come to the prison walls on the day of my death and call for my anhilation and cheer to the echo at its coming and none more so than the Kalimantan’s. And there would be crowds. They shoot the guilty on the opposite side of the island. The police have to clear the roads, the way thousands turn up all bright in their Saturday best to raise an almighty cheer when the rifles go off and the smell of wood smoke rises in the air over Indonesia. No army is slow to murder. Chance plays no part there. When I’m dropped through the trap I’ll take the whoosh and my spirits in strange commotion pressing upward will dance in my head like ice. I’ll embrace the great blaze of light. When news of my death shall reach them all I can hope for is that they will raise the same cheers for me. I know someone who will certainly do so. Rama Abdullah the pirate, great grandson of the white Rajah; the child of his father to the man ; my Dada. I shall need no hood. I want them to see my eyes bulge and my neck snap and to accompany my fall into universal darkness with song. I hope the news will spread like wild fire and dancing to all the districts, diocese and Kampongs of this scented, unholy archipeligo.

Dada 174

It was when the door closed after the holy man that I released my breath and shouted and shouted and screamed at the walls. The guards came running but they knew better than to come near me, the chair and metal basin was hurled, the bed broken. I knew nothing of my strength in such a vortex and then I looked up and saw a moon and a night I could imagine scented with flowers and I rebelled again in screams and anger. All the commotion had unsettled me but this time it had reached its final ebb. I lay down upon my mattress on the floor and slept well. A long sleep for me but the stars were still out in the sky and I could imagine the sound of the city and the river and beyond it the country. The marvelous peace of a summer’s night flooded through me. Just on daybreak I heard the deep sound of a ship coming close to the dock and thought of the women below deck, carried in bundles to the wharf along with their baskets. People were starting on a voyage that no longer concerned me. Dada was close to me now. I understood what his life had been like with his ships and friends and where he had come from. Going to that home was just an extension to the life he had lived for years here in the city with his stories, his laughter and songs of Liverpool and the Blue Funnel line. In the home there was no escape from them with Kim Song. I suppose he must have been happy there where lives were flickering and tapering all around him like candles. It was important to remember as many stories as possible and just as important to forget the other stuff. My parents hated him telling me when I was young but what you don’t talk about can possess many layers. Blasphemous they called him but they needed his money then. With death so near, Dada must have felt on the brink of freedom. He had lived under so many rulers, the English, the Chinese, the Japanese and Malays and was despised by them all. He could see through them like through a window and still laugh. He could see through the gauze and dazzle design of the ships who sought to avoid the pirates the way they avoided the truth. No one had any right to weep for him. No matter what he had done.

Dada 173

What difference could they make to me ? The ‘Malayaness’ of my parents and their obedient child, and on the way how my half Dayak, half White, Chinese Dada had become ignored and butchered by their thoughts. Thoughts that hardened into habits and institutions of blood and matter instead of scattered in freedom across the sea. Who were Dada’s real killers ? Was it himself ? What difference could it make now ?,The Dada’s love, the holy one’s words or the love of a man and a serial crime. Whatever way you look at it, the way you choose to live has nothing to do with justice. He used to shout from the balcony, ‘You who are so far away from us have been brought close . We are the peace between you, between Chinese, Malayan, Melenau or Iban. The union makes us peacemakers and breaks barriers they use to keep us apart; broken by hostility, caused by rulers, decreed by shipping laws from across the sea. They bind us no more, those islands of repression where the queen sits with her brigands and pirateers, colonies and rajahs. The union unites us in peace. Peace to you who were so far away and peace to those who come near us; its spirit guides us all.’ He could close his book now. It seems to me that you do not choose fate, it chooses you; like the way time runs through us, we do not run through time, it is not ours, we merely take from what is around us, the thoughts of millions who call themselves my ‘brothers’ even if I am not theirs. The holy man could see that every man or women is privileged, not just the castes or the races, the ‘ons’, ‘’ans’ ‘asians’ or ‘ese’ of these nations. There is only one class of human, the privileged class, those lucky to be alive, the party people and the quiet, the drug users and the eaters of good food. All with the gift of life, all condemned to die; the preacher was quite right about this. But what difference would it make if he was executed because he did not weep the same tears or in the same name as me? It was all the same in the end. What did it matter if at this very moment Mo was kissing his new boyfriend and eating lamb’s kidney’s ?. Was he to be executed for that in accordance with the laws of this land? As a condemned man himself could he not see, nor feel that dark wind blowing up from the south or rather remember the smell of his lover’s perfume?

Dada 172

My father reached to his waist. A bead of sweat dripped from his moustache. His white shirt was lightly stained from the food we had eaten that evening. Rain started to hammer against the blinds. At first you could hear the tack tack tack against the windows and then the rivers streaming down the panes and then the lightning crackle in the trees. ‘Your Dada could have ruined the very foundation of this island and all the kampongs of the peninsula with his communism’’ My father’s belt was out now and raised. I picked up a knife from the kitchen work top and held it, the steel jutting from my fingers the way our pirates held the Kris. ‘Come near me and I will put this ‘I raised the blade ‘just below your ribs.’ My mother screamed. I told her to fucking shut up. Maybe the holy man had helped to connect my history with my present. Nothing, nothing, could shift that importance. This sight of the river and a small ship and the population of many nations of tribes and identities pouring off it to seek what they could find along all its trading routes along these islands echoed through me like a cymbal. Its children sang to be with me this dawn and tomorrows dawn and so it blew, a slow persistent sound from my past and from the people they call the sea Dayaks.. The wind ran with the rain and the sun to the fish dock and it ran from there to be here at this very moment, a wind that blew my whole life long, to people who I’d known and loved. The Holy Man could leave now. He knew my silence. On its way, that wind had levelled out all the ideas that people had tried to foist on me on all the years of my own journey beneath my mother’s and father’s fear. Who were the ‘white rajahs’ themselves if not pirates dressed in their tropical silks and linens and what difference had the woman in blue made with her infantile stories.

Dada 171

No ‘I told him, ‘No’. He slowly drew his hand along the wall so as his fingers left traces along the block as if he might trace the light that might reside there like mine had once sketched across all the islands of this archipelago they call the greater Sunda. ‘Do you really love these earthly things so much’ he asked. I did not answer him. All of sudden he exploded in a way much stronger than the detective for he was a quieter and more contained man.It made the paroxysm all the greater. His face puffed up and the eyes grew bright in their dark sockets. ‘No, No, No I refuse to believe it. Do you not see there is a life that comes after us and is there before us for those who prepare. The sloughing away of the human body is nothing but preparation for the spirit to come‘. ‘Of course I had’, I told him. ‘Everyone has that wish at times but that was just the same as wanting to be rich or to swim very fast or to catch the best looking dancer at a dance’ Maybe the way he looked then, sad, contrite, even upset, I felt sorry a bit for him. What was about to break inside me also became suddenly quiet. The insults I was about to hurl, the wasted holy prayers I kept from shouting, to burn rather than to disappear, all this I kept within me, all the ecstasy and joy and rage I felt bursting inside, I kept quiet. I made no sound as if all of his pieties could be worth than more than one afternoon on the beach. I would not have cared who came to the room then, even the executioner himself, I would have taken him. He held to his own life but to me it was death. If my hands were empty now and my fate assured, his hopes and wishes had not done me down. I had seized life. I had seized upon what was around and was not intended but what had happened anyway. I had acted one way and it had not been otherwise. And what did it mean? Maybe since Dada’s funeral and the extinguishing of his own holy flame I had been waiting for this, waiting for the moment to rise before me like a pirate within a storm, his ship beyond any harbour wall. ‘Let’s talk about the Dada ‘I said when my father returned to the room from his sojourn upstairs with the Kalimantan. My mother started to get up from her chair to go to the walk through to the kitchen. She always did that. I lay my hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Not this time ma’ I said.

Dada 170

I didn’t bother to trouble much about what he said. I was thinking more of the executioners knot. He was questioning me again. I had not showed enough repentance. His voiced was raised slightly and he seemed distressed. He said he even if my appeal had succeeded I was still saddled with a huge guilt. Riddled with it, I think was his expression; guilt enough to cause any cancer of the soul he said. ‘Man’s justice is a vain thing, only god’s justice matters, he said. I pointed out that I had been condemned by man’s justice. He agreed but he said that alone would not clear the stain of my sin before God. I told him I wasn’t conscious of any sin I had committed. All I knew was that I had been found guilty of a criminal offence, and whether pre meditated or not, I was to die for that crime; no matter how much chance had played in the course of events. ‘In the matter of stain’ I said, ‘I am quite an expert’ ‘You are mistaken ‘he said. His voice was grave.’ More is required of you than you are prepared to give or may be asked to see….’ He broke off. ‘What chance did you give those poor boys?’ he looked away ‘These walls are steeped in human suffering. It always makes me shudder at what has been contained within them.The deepest nature of a man’s heart lies here.’ He said ‘And yet within the depths of this profanity, there sometimes comes a single light with the worst darkness like a lamp cast upon the sea’. ‘A fisherman’s life is never easy even with the sinking of the nets. ‘I told him. ‘I have been standing at these walls for months ‘ I continued. ‘You are right, there does come pictures and images and memories and arousals but never a single light. Once upon a time I used to search for light within them and perhaps a face, but it was always a face from the sunshine or eyes that glowed with desire for me such as Mo’s for me when we were on the beach. I had never seen any light or form that guided me amidst the grey anonymous bitumen of the prison bulwarks.’ He asked if he might touch my hand in a final farewell.

Dada 169

I said that wasn’t the same thing. That’s the same as saying we can say nothing because we do not have all the facts of every situation. It provides no consolation. What about that gangster Iskra, he’s got another forty years of dancing out each morning to greet the outcomes of his own dirty work. He said, ‘We will all die and if yours comes sooner you still have to face the same question. How will you face that terrible hour?’ He turned to me quickly and gazed into my eyes. I was supposed to look away, discomforted. He’d obviously done this many times before. It didn’t wash with me. You played this game every morning at the fish dock or when the old lady’s came with their shawls and baskets or crowds on Sunday to banter with you for bargains. You also knew who had died on the boats that night. It was the quiet way they brought the women ashore, around the back of the dock, the only time they showed respect. That was a real barter with death. All the rest was make believe. The old thought they were the best at it and very few can change the young in the matter of when they think they are getting a bargain. But again it is only chance. That was what the holy man wanted off me, a bargain, something for free. I had played this game with Mo and old Srino and they would always look away, even Iskra. I heard the beads rattle and knew what was coming. The holy one’s voice was quite steady, ‘Have you no hope at all’ he asked.Do you really think that when you die nothing remains? ‘Yes’ I said. He dropped his eyes and sat down. He was truly sorry for me he said. Life must be unbearable for a man to think in such a manner, for the end to be the end. I shrugged and looked away. It was no different than the time in that hot little room with the detective ; the clerk typing behind my shoulder with his sad onion breath or the prosecutor when he sat down on his folded robes, his eyes a glimmer towards me. I was beginning to get bored and tried to pull my usual trick; to nod and go silent in the event of him leaving me alone. I even caught the smell of the walls from that time in the detective’s office. The holy man told me why he knew my appeal had not succeeded.

Dada 168

How could I know anything about that? Apart from our bodies there was nothing to remind us of each other. His fear of being caught and labelled was greater than his love for me and it was me who was the most disengaged in the first place. Maybe this is all part of the illusion where nothing seems as it seems and nothing is about what it is really about. Suppose Mo was dead. His memory would move to another place. We always regard the dead with more affection than the living. I suppose that’s quite right. Their time has gone. There is nothing more to say, no more wriggling or squirming with the messy daily business of life. I could not feign an interest. This seemed to me quite normal. People would soon forget me when I was dead. I could not even say this was hard to stomach. There is no idea alive that you can’t get used to in time, not even the fact of your own oblivion. My thoughts had reached this point when suddenly the door swung open and the chief of the holy ones appeared. He opened the door with his own key and without guards or judge. He approached me directly. He awoke me from my reverie. I gave a jump. He told me not to worry, it was natural. I reminded him again that his presence was only required when they came to walk me to the gallows What was he doing here if it was not time for the grim visit. I noticed the beads in his hand and gave out a groan. ‘This is just a friendly visit’ he said. It had no bearing on any outcome of my refused appeal. He sat down on my bed and asked me to raise myself and sit behind him. I refused and he looked hurt. He had a soft kindly face and I felt bad ignoring him but then thought, fuck him. He was the one imposing on me. He remained quite still at first, his arms resting on his knees, his eyes fixed upon his hands, as keen as a little sea bird. They were slender but sinewy hands that looked like they had spent time in the garden. He gently rubbed them together and laid them on his face as if gathering them for energy in the task ahead. The beads clacked. I could picture him tending his green garden and vegetable patch much like my Dada. Maybe there was a black hut on the borders of his path like the one he kept for his assignments. He stayed so long in this position and I was so busy imaging all the parts of his allotment that I quite forgot he was there. Suddenly he sprang up and I heard the beads dance. He looked down upon me. ‘Why’ he asked’ don’t you let me refresh you?’ ‘Because I don’t need you’ I said ‘Are you really so sure of that’ he said I told him about my surge of freedom, the unquickening of the noose and the end of my appeal. ‘They are the things that concern me ‘I said. ‘Whether I believed or not wasn’t really the point’. ‘I cannot answer you’ he said He looked away and without altering his posture asked if it was because I was utterly desperate that I should act like this? I answered that it wasn’t. I was scared enough, that was true but wouldn’t anyone be in my position? ‘In that case he said, God/ Allah/The Almighty Buddha can help you. All the ones I have seen in your position have turned to them in their time of trouble.’ ‘They are at liberty to do so’ I answered him. If they wanted to be helped then let God help them but I had no time to work up any interest that did not concern me. He fluttered his hands. Then drawing himself up, he smoothed his clothes, just like the detective when he gave me the once over in that brown afternoon what seemed like years ago. It was not because I had been condemned he said that he spoke to me in such a personal way. In his opinion every person on earth was under sentence of death.

Seventeen

The thought of a criminal like Iskra with all his years in hand of grifting and whoring was galling to me. He could go sailing out each day with only the thought of improving his business; his every act premeditated against the law whereas I should dismiss any countenance of another appeal. My crime was of a different category. I gave myself the pleasure, indeed the right, to think of the alternative. Of my appeal as a stunning victory, a dismissal snatched from the jaws of defeat. The trouble then was to calm myself from the sudden onrushing joy that swept through my body and danced on every nerve. It even brought tears to my eyes. I had to bring my thoughts to heel for even contemplating this possibility. There were many hurdles to be ridden. In the final analysis the consummation of the Judge’s order would be no consolation. When I had succeeded in a curious settling down after the euphoria, I gained a good hour of peace as if I had returned from a hearty swim.. It was in these moments post exertion, that all the time you make suddenly shines clear before you. You can’t lose sight of anything that you don’t understand. I refused to see either judge or the holy man. Both made their way to my door together with a couple of squirming prison officers. They twist even more in the face of death. I was lying down and the morning rain had gone. We were in for a patch of sunlight. I could see the clouds scudding along a blue ridge and felt warm. I refused their plea. My lawyers dance was enough for me. It showed the whole crazy business for what it was. What was the use of putting it off. I was two cards down and the rope might still slip but it there might be a small trick yet, a candle lit small hope. I heard the knock on the door. I turned my face to the wall. They both murmured nonsense to me. I did not respond. One of the guards came over to shake me. I lay rigid and turned away. ‘Don’t beat him’ the judge said They departed as they had come, in murmurs. Then I did something I had not for quite a while, I thought of Mo. He had not written apart form that one cursory letter that attempted to explain his actions. ‘We were criminals before the law and before your actions that day,’ he wrote. He did not want to be associated, neither by sex nor deed with a condemned man. He might be ill now, or dead, slaughtered by my friends who found his betrayal too much to bear in the heat and nervous stench of the court room. He said he had to speak the truth.

Dada 167

Then there was my appeal, I made the most of this idea, thinking of all the resounding phrases that would ring around the court room on my behalf. It would be cooler in there as well, studying the effects of each note of support so as to extract the most consolation from the judge while the conditioner clanked and groaned. ‘He’s done his punishment but expect nothing’ said the lady in blue. My appeal was dismissed. I was back with the three slipped knots. I was to die. It’s common knowledge I said to myself; life isn’t worth living anyway, it’s too much of a struggle. And on a wider view what does it matter if you die at twenty three or eighty three; there is only another sixty years to have got through. Seeing things like this did not seem so bad. Iskra could have his forty years of pimping before his skin turned to parchment and his hands begin to shake like old Srino’s. I had slept with men and women, rolled the dice and smoked the Ice. I worked at my trade and smelled the river each morning instead of letting my life go by. It was better than sitting behind a desk or tiring my brain with voluminous studies. Men and women will continue on living, families will struggle, death will come for each one of us.This business of dying just had to be got through, the same way you had to fight to come down the birth canal. Everything was a journey and then again it wasn’t. The thought of another forty years of life, of laughing and getting high, of parties and work, sunshine and sleep seemed like an never ending celebration, like a river in motion. I wanted it.I wanted the poetry of the days. I wanted it as surely as the sea or that stack of summer hours, day upon day that you could extract from the bud like a bee takes pollen from a flower, the sweetest orange flower.

Dada 166

This was the worst period when you knew they could come. I once woke just after midnight and could swear I heard voices, I listened intently, ears cocked for any sound. If they are coming and you are going with them to die and you know that they will return to have their breakfast and you will be dead, it leaves a funny feeling inside you. It is like when you lose something and try to retrace your steps, and imagine being in the same place a moment earlier. What has changed, Approaching death is the same but you could not do that here. What would your step sound to them when they took you. Could you imagine a dead man’s footsteps returning to its same source like a never ending wave, just the thought would make you nauseous? Would they remember those steps when the guards returned to have an early bowls of noodles with beef a green leaf for decoration and orange gravy. Dada used to say that no matter how bad your condition there is always something to be thankful for. Each each morning when the sky brightened and you knew we would have some clear sunshine before the rain and the lightness invaded my cell, I knew that he was right. Even though the faintest rustle would have sent me to the door of the cell and pressed my ear to the to the rough, cold wood, listening so intently that I could hear my breathing pulse through me and grateful and thankful that no one was going to come now except the cook and the boy with my breakfast. I had another twenty four hours of freedom. Twenty four months my Dada spent in prison for sedition but the corrective stain lasted a lifetime. The Patriot game was not for him. He did not see the same borders as the rulers but he got the joke. Like everything in life around here the joke is never about what it is about. The stories of muddied blood seeped around him like those seaways around my heart; his punishment a deterant to others.

Dada 165

If you study that space you learn about your place in the world, the accident of history, the importance of place, the joy of imagining other seas and continents and shores. We are lucky here in the tropics. We can imagine that other life much easier. When the sky began to turn green, I knew another day was coming to an end and my thoughts would automatically turn towards the dawn. .The electric in the night in the dry seasons echoed the electricity in my brain, the movement of blood through my heart, a vast internal seaway with its own ports and rivers and quays along its banks. The, the pumping of the manifest, the loading of the cargo, the pillaging of spices and jewels from the river boats of the islands were all part of the same thing. What we sea Dayaks do best when we are forced to look back to our history. I still could not echo the thought that my heart would no longer beat. But these pictures in my head bore their own reality instead. It was in vain. No matter how I tried, the enormous grey of the dawn was still there and no matter the green luminosity of the night, my appeal awaiting there in front of me. Sometimes also it was easier to let my thoughts settle into their natural own groove rather than trying to follow them elsewhere. We are a sea going people. We understand the waves and those who live upon the water. They always came for you at dawn, that’s what I knew; to get the thing done early so the day could move on and the sun cross its line. I don’t like surprises. When something is going to happen I want to be ready for it. It was then that I took to taking extended naps through the day when the time was quiet, in order to keep guard over the night and make out for the first few lines of the grey in the sky, the first hint of daybreak in the dark dome above, the peeling away of the stars and the disappearing light of the moon gone to the sea.

Dada 164

But wait a moment. If all this was pre –ordained, who would let you imagine different ways of reckoning. This was their certainty. One of our teachers used to talk of literature as a mirror, what about my reflection? I got to thinking about hangings. I‘d heard of those in the past, of pirates hanging from Gallows at the movies while the crowd below gazed up at them; not just the movies but when the white rajahs came to this island and strung up the rebels. What must that second be like when the knot quickens around your neck and you are left to swing. Does that nano second under the hood last a lifetime. Does everything grow bright before the rope jumps, the trap opens and your neck snaps ? Was it all the same if they killed you privately, discreetly, behind a prison wall with a hint of shame and a great deal of efficiency or could you make it glorious ?, If only for that fraction of a second but in that time you could write a trilogy. I thought of each new dawn to come. It became as precious to me as the long drawn out process of my appeal. I did my best to not let my mind wander on this but when I lay down and looked up at the sky and forced myself to study it, it opened as much fascination for me as the memory of my bedroom in Dada’s house and the yellow sunlight where Mo walked.

Dada 163

I was unwise to even consider a possibility of release. For just one moment I had pictured myself in freedom, standing behind a double rank of policemen outside the prison walls, an onlooker who had come to attend the final show. Who could go home and be free afterwards. The thought flooded my mind with a wild exultation like the wind that blew down from the mountains in the north. But it was stupid to let my imagination run away with me like that. A moment later I was shivering myself and had to wrap myself in a sheet. Even my mouth seemed to tremble. Another fancy of mine was to frame new laws that clearly stated that when you meant to do something that was when you should be punished. If you didn’t, you could not be found guilty. Your crime had to be pre meditated. It would give the criminal more of a chance that way. It might only be a dogs chance anyway and they would soon clean that up but as rule there should be a slip in the knot one time out of a thousand. It would give anyone who was going to die that slim hope of release, like the amnesty for a president’s birthday or a Sultan’s anniversary. Materials such as the rope, the garrotte or the guillotine don’t give a chance to anyone only the justice of a death ordained. These are deaths indeed. I didn’t know about the rope but maybe they would just start again if the knot slipped. Say the knot kept on slipping. They could call this ‘an act of god’ and let you live and y the spirits flood and pour back into those areas strangled. The pain of those channels squeezed tight then filling up again with blood and air might initially torment you but at least you were alive. Any condemned man needs to have this hope in his system, otherwise, what was the point. They might as well take you out and shoot you in the yard and let your parents pay for the bullet like they do in China. If it came to this, the condemned had to collaborate mentally with the system of his accusers so that all would pass off without a hitch in this tricky business of death. It could turn nasty was the unspoken thought. In return he would be ‘given’ respect. Give me Russian roulette any day, with two gulps of freedom between each bullet and even more precious my time and the sky between court room and prison van.

Dada 162

I remember reading once of the night time cell of a murderer in southern Italy. Naples I think. It was at a time when they used to grant last requests outside the jail wall. The prisoner asked for a leg of lamb, a bottle of grappa and a young woman. He paid for it all via his family. The authorities made sure they brought his bag of gold coin to the prison. When the time came for his death his hair had turned white. It stood upright above his haggard face. This is the only way to lose a life, to lose it with desperation, despair and longing. Everything else is a lie. Those that say otherwise are those who have never experienced joy before the finality of the rope. On the Peninsula my father had once attended an execution when they were performed in public. He returned home full of righteousness. He told my mother justice had been done. She asked him to describe it to her in detail and had taken a shivering fit. She had to have a blanket brought to her. Maybe that’s the only thing that can genuinely interest anyone, the taking of a life. If I ever got out of this mess I would attend every execution in my lifetime. It would be the only way to tell if you were truly alive. My father never failed to omit that this was the punishment given to all who pretended to be what they were not. Anyone who pretended different was a traitor. He gave me an uncertain look before the beatings began again. From the moment the verdict was given the results became clear.All the rest of the machinery of the State swung into action, as tangible as the wall against which I was laying and utterly indifferent to the pale movement of the sky above my cell.