V.

When Weissmann came back into the mirror he was carrying another oscillograph roll. Mondaugen lay among dust babies, feeling too impotent to yell stop, thief. The transvestite lieutenant had parted his hair in the middle and larded his eyelashes with mascara; these, batting against his lenses, left dark parallel streaks so that each eye looked out from its own prison window. As he passed the imprint on the coverlet of the scurvified body which had lately occupied it, Weissmann gave it (so Mondaugen fancied) a coy, sidewise smile. Then he vanished. Not too long after that, Mondaugen's retinae withdrew for a time from light. Or it is presumed they did; either that, or Under-the-Bed is even stranger country than neurasthenic children have dreamt it to be.

One could as well have been a stonemason. It dawned on you slowly, but the conclusion was irresistible: you were in no sense killing. The voluptuous feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you went into the extermination with, was sooner or later replaced by a very curious - not emotion, because part of it was obviously a lack of what we commonly call "feeling" - "functional agreement" would come closer to it; operational sympathy.

The first clear instance of it he could remember came one day, during a trek from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop. His outfit were moving consignments of Hottentot prisoners, for some reason which doubtless made sense to the upper echelons. It was 140 miles and took generally a week or ten days to do, and none of them liked the detail much. A lot of prisoners died on route, and that meant stopping the whole trek, finding the sergeant with the keys, who it seemed was always miles back under a kameeldoorn tree, dead drunk or well on the way, then riding back, unlocking the neck-ring of the fellow who'd died; sometimes rearranging the line so the weight of the extra chain would be more evenly distributed. Not to make it easier on them, exactly, but so one wouldn't wear out any more blacks than one had to.

It was a glorious day, December and hot, a bird somewhere gone mad with the season. Firelily, under him, seemed sexually aroused, she curveted and frolicked so about the line of march, covering five miles to the prisoners' one. From the side it always looked medieval, the way the chain hung down in bights between their neck-rings, the way the weight pulled them constantly toward earth, the force only just overcome, as long as they managed to keep their legs moving. Behind them came army oxcarts, driven by loyal Rehoboth Bastards. How many can understand the resemblance he saw? In his village church in the Palatinate was a mural of the Dance of Death, led by a rather sinuous, effeminate Death in his black cloak, carrying his scythe and followed by all ranks of society from prince to peasant. Their own African progress was hardly so elegant: they could only boast a homogeneous string of suffering Negroes and a drunken sergeant in a wideawake hat who carried a Mauser. Yet that association, which most of them shared, was enough to give the unpopular chore an atmosphere of ceremony.

The trek hadn't been under way more than an hour before one of the blacks began to complain about his feet. They were bleeding, he said. His overseer brought Firelily close in and looked: so they were. Hardly would the blood soak into the sand than the prisoner behind would kick it invisible. Not long after that the same prisoner complained that the sand was working its way into the cuts on his feet and the pain was making it difficult for him to walk. No doubt this was also true. He was told either to be quiet or forfeit his share of water when they outspanned for the noon rest. The soldiers had learned on previous treks that if one native was allowed to complain, the others soon enough took it up, and this for some reason slowed everyone. They wouldn't sing or chant; that perhaps could have been borne. But the wailing, self-indulgent babel that would go up - God, it was awful. Silence, for practical reasons, was the rule and was enforced.