I gradually felt my nerves begin to give way under the pressure of the void, and aware of the danger I stretched them to breaking point to find or invent something to divert my mind. To keep myself occupied I tried remembering and reciting anything I had ever learnt by heart, the national anthem and the playground rhymes of my childhood, the Homer I had studied at school paragraphs of the Civil Code. Then I tried arithmetic, adding and dividing numbers at random, but my memory was unable to hold the numbers steady in the void. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. The same thought kept flickering through my mind: what do they know? What did I say yesterday? What must I say next time?

‘This truly unspeakable state of affairs lasted four months. Four months – it’s easy to write down: just under a dozen characters! It’s easy to say: four months – two syllables. Your lips can articulate such a sound in a quarter of a second: four months! But no one can describe, assess, demonstrate to himself or anyone else how long a given period lasts in a timeless, spaceless void, and you can’t explain to anyone how it gnaws away at you and destroys you, nothing, nothing, nothing around you, only the same table and bed and washbasin and wallpaper, and always that silence, always the same jailer handing in food without looking at you, always the same thoughts circling around the same object in the void until you go mad. With alarm, I realized that my brain was becoming confused. At first I had been inwardly clear during the interrogations, I had answered calmly and carefully; my ability to think what to say and what not to say at the same time was still in working order. Now I stammered in articulating even the simplest sentences, for as I spoke I was staring, hypnotized, at the pen recording my statements on paper, as if I were trying to follow my own words. I felt my strength failing me, I felt the moment coming closer and closer when I would tell them everything to save myself, tell them what I knew and perhaps even more, when I would give away a dozen human beings and their secrets to escape that choking void, without gaining any more than a brief respite for myself. One evening I really did reach that point; when the jailer happened to bring my food at that moment of suffocation, I suddenly shouted, “Take me to be questioned! I want to tell them everything! I want to make a statement! I’ll tell them where the securities are, where the money is! I’ll tell them everything, everything!” Fortunately he didn’t hear me. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear me.

‘In my hour of greatest need, something quite unexpected happened, offering me a way of escape, at least for a time. It was the end of July, a dark, overcast, rainy day. I remember that last detail clearly because the rain was drumming against the windowpanes in the corridor down which I was led to be questioned. I had to wait in the chief interrogator’s anteroom. You always had to wait before every interrogation; leaving you to wait was part of the technique too. First they made you nervous with the summons, with being suddenly fetched from your cell in the middle of the night, and then, once you had adjusted to the idea of interrogation, once you had prepared your mind and will to resist, they kept you waiting, a deliberately pointless wait of an hour, two hours, three hours before the interrogation itself, to tire your body and wear your mind down. And I was kept waiting for a particularly long time that Wednesday, the 27th of July; I waited standing in the anteroom for two full hours. I remember the date so precisely for a particular reason, because in the anteroom where I had to wait – of course I wasn’t allowed to sit down – in the anteroom where I had to wait on my feet for two hours there was a calendar, and I can’t tell you how, in my hunger for the printed word, for something written, I stared and stared at that one number, those few words on the wall: July 27th. My brain devoured them, so to speak. And then I went on waiting, waiting, staring at the door, wondering when it would finally open, trying to think what my inquisitors might ask this time, and knowing it would be nothing like what I was preparing for. In spite of all this, however, the torment of waiting and standing was a pleasure too, and did me good, because at least this room wasn’t the same as mine. It was a little larger, had two windows instead of one, and it was without the bed and without the washbasin and without the crack on the window sill that I had studied a million times. The door was painted a different colour, there was a different armchair by the wall, and on the left a filing cabinet with files and a coat-stand with hangers on which were draped three or four wet army overcoats, the coats of my torturers. So I had something new and different to look at, something different at last for my starved eyes, which clutched greedily at every detail. I observed every fold of those coats, I noticed, for instance, a drop of water dangling from one of the wet collars, and absurd as it may sound, I waited with ridiculous excitement to see if that drop would finally run down the fold of the fabric, or if it would continue to defy gravity and stay there longer – in fact I stared and stared at that drop for minutes on end as if my life depended on it. Then, when at last it had rolled down, I counted the buttons on the coats, eight on one coat, eight on another, ten on the third; then I compared their lapels; my hungry eyes touched, played with, seized upon all those silly little details with an avidity I can hardly describe. And suddenly my gaze fixed on something. I had seen that the side pocket of one of the coats was bulging slightly.