The confession was a
formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten,
how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there
were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it
was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods,
sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as
shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless,
hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more
kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his
groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were
times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing
seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could
not force hirnself into losing consciousness. There were times when his
nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the
beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was
enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes.
There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing
nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain,
and there were times when he feebly tried t