and to the right, two Americans, Midwestern senator busts: square-shouldered, square-headed, square-faced, square-minded, craftiness in philistine droning, bull-like aggression in the pettifoggery of Civil Law, world potentates in cast-iron self-righteousness . . .

finally, farther to the right, two Russians in bombastic generals’ uniforms belonging to the people (albeit without the full pomp of medals): over blood-red epaulets the size of meat platters, their stubble heads are as immovable as rocks on which the frail fuss and claptrap of the Capitalist Imperialists shatter . . .

one of them sheds an occasional Mongolian grin over a piece of paper, on which he doodles motionlessly. He is drawing caricatures of the people called to the witness stand, and whenever he pulls off an especially good one, he feels a childlike joy . . .

and there, on the witness stand, a man, become emotional in reliving the memory, tells about a mass shooting somewhere in Volhynia. His nerves can’t take it, he weeps, although without tears: the sobbing shakes him dry, his shoulders heave, he can barely get the words out. He goes into agonizing detail about another man who was to be shot in a group. The mass grave was already dug, twenty yards by ten, several rows of corpses were already lying in it. And this man had a child at his side, his son, eight years old, a bright little boy—dry sobs, quaking shoulders . . . OUR LORD JUSTICE soothingly taps a sucked pencil. Would the witness kindly pull himself together and speak more succinctly, the Court’s time is limited, this carrion-smelling nightmare is only supposed to take nine months, long enough to give birth to a legal changeling . . . So the witness pulls himself together and tells about how this child didn’t quite understand what was going on, he spoke confidently to his father, but noticed, by the father’s—how shall I put it?—absent, abstracted expression that something unusual, something ominous was afoot . . . the child suddenly became frightened and began to ask what was happening, why were there so many corpses lying in the ditch. And the father caressed his head and spoke calming words to the boy: It’s not half so bad, my child, there is almost something good about dying young—And then the rattle of the machine guns or the automatic pistols or whatever they used—The witness can’t speak, and OUR LORD JUSTICE clears his throat. This is a private digression, as it were; the witness should confine his testimony to the fact of the shooting alone (if possible with precise data on the number of shooters and victims)—harrumph, yes. The issue here is something more general, that is to say, human rights in the legal sense, i.e., we must accurately establish crimes of such magnitudinous planning and perpetration as to impinge upon international law . . .