“His head also seems to be emerging from the primal ooze, it too squints perplexed into unknown creation. A saurian head: the weight of the upper skull has squashed the mouth into the flat lower jaw and distorted it into its breadth, hopelessly unsated. Yet this is a tame, a humble saurian. Its eyes are so gloomy with despair as they ogle out of the shadow of its Nietzsche brows, which hang bushily from the socket arches and grow together at the top of the nose as in a criminal’s face; indeed, the eyes exert an almost suction-like effect. One looks into them as into the apertures of two periscopes that are camouflaged for maneuver purposes and that are slowly screwed upward as they turn to and fro, scanning around.

•

“They turn on the pale stalk of a withered neck, which grows out of the now oversized shirt collar; with a male choir singer’s Adam’s apple whipping up and down between baggy skin and sinews, the throat emits a sullenly lamenting little voice. Extremely submissive, this little voice asks the High Court for permission to remain seated during the reading of the concluding statement.

“The black-smocked Punch-and-Judy torso of LORD JUSTICE Lawrence at the judges’ table opposite the defendants’ bar nods paternally as in a puppet theater, his iron-framed spectacles sliding down his nose; with the old-man tremolo of dignified Anglo-Saxon bombast in his voice, he proclaims that the request is granted in light of the defendant’s poor state of health.

“The defendant utters his thanks, audibly touched by such patriarchally strained humanity and, while his periscopes scan an imaginary horizon, he pulls a few sheets of paper from the folds of the blanket slung around his knees, the blanket of a Baltic Sea vacationer. The room is deathly still, the defendant’s fumbling very ponderous. Finally, he’s ready. In a droning voice, Hess begins to read off a text that was obviously prepared by his attorney.

“This too is merely cant. The protestations of a completely honest man who must deal with charges that are not quite groundless yet unjustly harsh, and who must now make a manly upright effort to kiss a few asses rhetorically, to creep into any available hole inside or outside the court, and to do so quickly, making the best possible impression before a general closing of sphincters.