Free The Discovery Of Slowness by Sten Nadolny Page B

which – it could not be denied – was now pointed at his chest. In his mind, one single concern began to crowd out all others. It grew and grew. It surpassed all boundaries. It exploded. The man could pull the trigger at once and kill him, sending him to death or to perish slowly from gangrene. He was faced with it now: there was no escape. It was about to happen and could not be averted. Suddenly John clearly sensed where his heart was, like anyone who knows that death is inevitable. Why couldn’t he knock the pistol out of the man’s hand or throw himself to the side? Neither required ingenuity, yet he couldn’t do it. He had the man by the throat and thought only that somebody who is being strangled can’t fire a gun. But that a man would be particularly inclined to fire if he was in the process of being strangled but hadn’t been strangled yet – well, perhaps John wanted to think of that but couldn’t because his brain acted as if it were already dead. All that remained alive was the idea that the danger could be averted only by the unremitting, relentless strangulation of that throat. The other man still didn’t fire.
    He was old for a soldier, certainly over forty. John had never knelt on top of anyone who could be his father. The throat was warm. The skin was soft. John had never touched a person for so long. Nowchaos had really set in: the battle inside his body. While he was squeezing the throat, the nerves in his fingers felt horror at its warmth and softness. He sensed how the throat – purred! It vibrated, tender and miserable, a deep, miserable purr. The hands were horrified, yet the head, which dreaded the humiliation of being killed, that traitor head which thought wrongly, acted as though it had understood nothing.
    The pistol dropped to the floor. The legs stopped thrashing. A gunshot wound in the shoulder: bright red blood.
    The pistol had not been loaded.
    Had the Dane said something? Had he surrendered? John sat and stared at the dead man’s throat. He had been afraid of the humiliation of violent death. But squeezing an organism to death with slow deliberation, because fear had not subsided fast enough, meant losing more than one’s head. It was a humiliation, a powerlessness which was even more crushing than the other degradation. Now that he had survived, and his head had to admit all his thoughts again, the battle continued inside him: hands, muscles, and nerves rebelled.
    â€˜I killed him,’ John said, trembling. The man with the high forehead looked at him with tired eyes. He remained unimpressed. ‘I couldn’t stop squeezing,’ said John. ‘I was too slow to stop myself.’
    â€˜It’s done,’ the forehead answered hoarsely. ‘The battle is over.’ John trembled more and more. His trembling turned into shaking: his muscles contracted in different places in his body, forming painful islands, as though in this way they were armouring his inner self or were expelling an alien substance straight through the skin. ‘The battle is over!’ shouted the man who had seen the sign. ‘We showed ’em!’
    Â Â Â Â 
    They put out new buoys. The Danes had removed all markings from the waterway so the British ships would run aground. Gradually, the longboat advanced to the edge of an unfathomable depth, very close to the broken, shot-up Trekroner. John sat on the boat’s thwart, apathetically, and stared at the shore. Slowness is deadly, he thought. If it is so for others, so much the worse. He wanted to be a piece of coast, a rock on the shore whose actions would always correspond exactly to his true speed. An outcry made him look down: in the clear, shallow water countless slain men lay on the bottom, many of them with blue coats, many with open eyes staring up. Terror? No. Of course, they were lying there.
    He himself was part of them: a stopped clock, that’s what he was. He belonged