(no subject)

“Is it madness, then, to be strong and not weak?” he said bitterly.

“You’re not weak, you loony - you’re anything but. But, see - as I understand it, when someone is, is tortured” - she hated to say the word, it burned in her mouth - “it’s fear as much as pain, the fearful anticipation of more pain, which - ”

“Yes. Until there’s nothing left but pain and, and, and this sickening, absolute terror - until there’s nothing left of your mind, of your self, except that overwhelming dread.”

“Yes. Well, there are some people who just can’t do terror, but they have to be a bit nuts to be that way, because fear of pain is a basic vertebrate defence-mechanism. There was this guy, this Polish Jewish doctor called Garri Urban, who wrote this book called Tovarisch, I am Not Dead which - well, which caused a certain amount of mixed feeling in the Jewish community at the time, as I recall, because books about Jews fleeing from the Nazis etc. etc. are supposed to be about terrible suffering nobly borne etc. etc., and this one should have been subtitled ‘How I fought and fornicated my way across the wartime Soviet Union, fortified only by liberal draughts of surgical spirit.’” Severus gave a little snort at that, which she considered to be a Good Sign.

“Anyway, Urban was interrogated by the NKVD - the forerunners of the KGB? - never mind, by Russian security services, and they tried to torture him - but it didn’t really work out that way, because he kept hitting them. They tried to sit him on a chair so they could loom over him and he hit them over the head with it. They tied him and left him on a block of ice for hours but when they came for him he still managed to stagger up and dump a bucket of pish over them. He still got beaten up, you understand - but psychologically he was just the loser in a brawl, not a, a helpless victim.”

“I’m afraid that the - opportunities for fighting back are strictly limited when your opponents have all got bloody wands and you haven’t.”

“I know that pet, and I’m not suggesting… The point is that Urban was so aggressive, so - manic as a ferret on amphetamines, basically - that he just saw the situation as a golden opportunity to hit somebody, so he didn’t get scared - he hadn’t got room to be scared, because he was too busy spoiling for a fight. And he was cast-iron arrogant - he really loved himself - so he was just - insulted, but not humiliated. And when people insulted him, he thumped them - with a complete disregard for the odds against him which was, even by my standards, slightly nuts. And even Urban gave in in the end and signed their false confession that they wanted him to sign, rather than go on being beaten.”

“How - disappointing. After all that.”

“Oh - he was using a whole different script from the NKVD, so they couldn’t tell what it was he was writing, and had to take his signature on trust. He didn’t sign it with his name - he signed it with an obscene doodle.”

- Sons of Prophecy, Ch10