Evans Experientialism
 Evans Experientialism
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WITHOUT APPEAL |
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WITHOUT APPEAL Karim tumbled to the floor. His eyes opened to the legs surrounding him. Had he been sleeping? . . . And before that? Back on his seat, he looked round, hoping to remember where he was. Men and women were seated in four impassive rows against the walls of a large grey room; he recognised none of those distant enough to examine at leisure. And yet there was nothing but a door to his left, another to his right, and one above a flight of steps straight ahead of him - though over the first there was an inscription he couldn't quite make out. ‘Karim.’ He looked round. Danny was sitting beside him, a troubled smile on his dissolute face, his hand reaching out for Karim's. ‘No 'ard feelin's, eh, Karim, ol' son of a gun?’ Karim knew he shouldn't shake this hand (there was some reason he could not quite recollect), but he allowed his own to be taken in its firm grasp. ‘Where are we, Danny? - And what - ‘ A man in charcoal grey stood on the top step ahead of them, looking unhurriedly round the faces till his eyes rested on Karim. ‘Karim Ibn al- Walid. This way.’ Karim rose. All eyes followed him towards the steps with resolute, genuine indifference. Half-way across the floor he looked back at Danny, who shrugged apologetically. ‘No 'ard feelin's, eh?’ The man in the grey suit breathed in to let him pass. Ahead was a large shiny head bent over a desk, almost hidden by a heap of files. Karim picked his way round records stacked on the floor, some reaching to the ceiling; marooned among the piles was a chair while to its left, behind a tape recorder on another island, slumped a man in earphones who looked blind. The head canted up from the folder it was studying; a hand indicated the chair. ‘What is all this? I mean. . .’ Karim gestured numbly at the desk, the recording equipment, the window on one side running with yellowish rain, the one on the other with the quaint realism of its photographed landscape, the files. . . ‘Sit down, Karim. I ask the questions here.’ With a yawn he did not bother to conceal, he turned to the man in grey still standing by the door. Karim sat down, feeling sheepish. ‘Bailiff, call Mr and Mrs. . . Call Mr and Mrs al-Walid.’ Karim smiled awkwardly. ‘You doing a This Is Your Life on me?’ The Assessor smiled back distantly. Mum and Dad were in the door, were being coaxed across the encumbered floor by the Bailiff. Mum checked herself. ‘My son? What you doing here?’ ‘Like to know that myself, Mum.’ The Assessor took up a paper knife, then with a smile of self-deprecation exchanged it for a pen. ‘What kind of a son, Mrs al-Walid? Good? Bad? So- so?’ Her breast visibly swelled. ‘Good. But very good. He respected us.’ ‘Honoured us,’ put in her husband. ‘Never smart-alecked you? Never came in late? Never fornicated on your three-piece suite?’ ‘Never, never,’ effused Mrs al-Walid. Finally Karim's parents faded uncertainly to the door. He was able to WITHOUT APPEAL 3=== breathe again. What a pair! ‘And now,’ read the Assessor hesitantly, ‘Mrs Pauline Molyneux.’ Who's she? A grey face appeared in the doorway. Who the hell is she? ‘Relax, Mrs Molyneux.’ The Assessor spoke kindly. ‘You were a juror at the trial of Hassan Ibn al-Walid?’ ‘Karim,’ she said. The eyes returned to the record, smiled. ‘No pulling the wool over your eyes, Mrs Molyneux! Karim Ibn al-Walid's trial?’ She nodded, looking unwaveringly at Karim. ‘Will you identify the plaintiff - Start again: will you identify the defendant for the purpose of the record?’ She nodded at Karim without lifting her eyes. ‘In words please.’ ‘Words? Okay - Karim.’ ‘Were you foreman at the trial?’ ‘Foreperson.’ ‘What crime was he convicted of?’ ‘Murder.’ ‘Tell the Court about it. Take your time.’ He turned angrily on the Bailiff, who was standing with a portly man at the door. ‘I'll tell you when I'm ready, for God's sake!’ Shrugging away his irritation, he looked back at the witness. ‘As I say, take your time.’ She did, lingering over every detail: Karim had fallen for his friend Danny Evans; he offered his young wife Marie to Danny and stood behind a curtain watching Danny make love to her; Uncle Ahmad blundered in and began screaming; in an attempt to avoid scandal, Karim murdered his uncle. Several times Karim had tried to interrupt. Certainly this is what he'd been convicted of, but - Each time he tried, the Assessor held up a peremptory palm. A pack of lies chasing foxy half-truths. Why does this Assessor accept the findings of that perjured court? Never heard of a mistake in criminal justice? He was still stammering his innocence when Mrs Molyneux stumbled out of the room. ‘What's this whole nightmarish procedure anyway? You've some nerve dragging people in off the streets.’ ‘Off the streets?’ The Assessor put down his pen, barely concealing his amusement. ‘This is the Judgement, Karim. When the whole of your batch has come before me, officials will divide you into two groups. Some - you will be among them - will be going there.’ He pointed at the window streaming with sulfurous water. Karim, fascinated, edged towards it. Not brimstone! I mean, this is no laughing matter. Flames of star-heat appeared to be pulsing before him, kept from the wall, he assumed, by some magnetic field; within each flame, in climactic pain, writhed a body calcinated, its own fat burning, obstinately alive. ‘Do you do this with lasers?’ he laughed. The Assessor did not laugh. ‘So, Mr al-Walid. . . The rest of your group will be going there.’ What had appeared to be a photograph behind the pane - being too beautiful for real life -, shimmered before him with cinematic radiance. ‘This is nonsense. I'm a Muslim. What - ‘ The eyes had silenced him. ‘Right, Mr al-Walid, you may wait for the Sorting-Out with the others.’ Danny was next in the courtroom so that Karim was not able to speak till his friend returned. Then it all came out - the recriminations, the terror, the indignation of the innocent punished for the crimes of the guilty. Danny looked genuinely concerned, stood brusquely and tried forcing his way past the Bailiff into the courtroom but was shoved stumbling down the steps. One by one the rest of the men and women were called to face trial, some returning grey, shrunken and trembling, others radiant. Now the outer door to Hell opened, and a dozen men in white asbestos appeared in the waiting room. As the Bailiff read from a list, they approached the trembling men and women named, took them by wrists, shirts and hair and dragged individuals too horrified to scream through the door with the superscription. It was Karim's turn. ‘You can't let this happen, Danny. You know I'm innocent. By God! I'm as innocent as you're guilty.’ The white gauntlet had him by the jacket; he was trying to dig his heels into the polished floor, trying to avoid the unthinkable miscarriage of eternal justice. Before they shut the door, Danny heard Karim's last ‘I'm innocent! Tell them I'm innocent!’ The door closed with an oiled click, and Karim stood in the antechamber of Hell, the long funnel of wedge-shaped corridor with the far gate gleaming ahead, pressed by bodies smelling of excrement, shivering with fear. One of the Furnacemen was turning a chromed wheel; almost at once the heat hit, singeing eyebrows, lashes, hair. By degrees the crack of fire at the far end of the passage widened to a narrow screaming rectangle, to a distant square of blinding light and heat. The condemned tried to push back against the white-clad workmen, but these were poking at the outer ring of bodies with cattle prods; Karim felt the electric waves through the men and women round him as, slowly, agonisingly, they hobbled, some forwards, some backwards or sideways, towards the fire. And now it was as if the pain was pulling them into its roaring vortex. Before he fell into the flame, he opened his eyes and looked into a terror mirroring his own. At the very moment Karim slipped into Hell, Danny recovered his senses, numbed till then by the enormity of what had happened. ‘Stop!’ he screamed. ‘Stop them! stop them!’ Succouring hands took him in gentle embrace, ineffable smiles burnt into his soul. He wrenched himself free, suddenly endowed with strength he knew was not his. The Bailiff was barring his way. ‘Stand back!’ commanded Danny. The Bailiff stood back. Danny strode to the desk, scattering files. He leaned for the Assessor's lapels. ‘Quickly, damn it! Karim's innocent! He's innocent, I say!’ When the Assessor had shaken himself free, he listened wearily to Danny's account: Danny had long wanted to go to bed with Marie. Small, feather-light and smelling alternately of musk and autumn bonfires, she had the jewelled angularity and ambiguous smile of a Florentine angel. He had decided to have her; maybe his body had decided, his mind being simply borne upwards on the rising escalator of his lust. The fact that she was married - specially that she was married to his best friend - only whetted his desire. He'd stolen one of Karim's keys, raped Marie in the lounge; when the uncle came home, Danny killed him with his bare hands and in the ensuing investigation and trial had managed to subvert justice, with the consequences of which the Assessor was aware. ‘Why did you call that juror?’ screamed Danny. ‘Why not Marie? Why not Uncle Ahmad?’ While assistants held back the demented Danny, Marie was sent for; at once, pointing an accusing finger at Danny, she shouted inarticulately. Eventually they were able to calm her so that she could speak. Yes, Danny, her husband's best friend, had raped her and murdered Karim's uncle. Why hadn't she testified at the trial? the Assessor wanted to know. For a while she was incoherent again. ‘Haven't you got it in your precious files? I died on the way to hospital. I died!’ The Assessor looked past Danny at the Bailiff, who simply shook his head. ‘Try anyway.’ The Bailiff left them in a silence so complete you could hear the sobs Marie was holding back. In a minute he returned, shaking his head once more. The Assessor held out his hands in a tired gesture of contrition. ‘The gates of Hell are shut.’ ‘Then open them,’ blustered Danny. ‘I'll take his place - my own, I mean.’ ‘Commendable - and out of the question. It's been written: “Leave behind all hope”.’ ‘That was Dante. What about God?’ The word exploded like a bomb. Danny continued inexorably: ‘And what about Peter's rock? We were told the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. What about that?’ ‘Look.’ The Assessor rose and, taking him gently by the shoulders, advanced over collapsed stacks of files towards the one-way window onto Hell. ‘There,’ he said. ‘The friend you wronged is there. The man whose wife you coveted, whose key you stole to rape her, whose uncle you killed and against whom you obstinately bore false witness - there he is.’ Indeed he was there. In these first minutes of eternal punishment, the body was already black and the face beyond recognition; but somehow the eyes, preserved perhaps to perceive the glare that consumed the self-replacing flesh, had not been boiled away; they glistened with damning reproach, appearing to look straight into Danny's. ‘What can I do?’ cried Danny. The Assessor shook his head with infinite sadness. ‘Nothing, Danny, nothing. Nothing but suffer eternally among the Blest.’ They led Danny away with the weeping Marie, and he knew in that instant that he would never be free from the tearing sobs, that the bright photographic sunlight of heaven would be darkened forever by her pain.
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The Short Stories of Nicholas Hancock