He never knocks.

A dish with some kind of food has been put on his bench. He did not look up when it came. Spare me the sight of that swine. He goes across and gulps down the contents of the bowl. Then he counts the buttons on his jacket again, and adds up the number of times he has counted. When he has counted for a week, or what he thinks must be a week, he goes and draws a line somewhere beside countless other lines. Then he goes to bed. Then he sleeps. Then he is awake again. He does not call it daytime any more than anyone else does in this bewitched house. And that’s all. Outside in the corridor prisoners are led past. It is a sound unlike any other.

In the crannies dust covers the layers of desperate wishes he made at the beginning:

Give me a book!

No answer.

Give me paper. A pencil. Give me something!

No answer. Only the stone wall and the lock. But at that time he went on insisting: Give me some kind of tool! I don’t care how poor it is, but something to grasp in my fingers.

There was no answer. Thick layers of wishes lie collecting dust. One might believe that all the strength which lay behind them could be collected and make the wall fly apart, but things like that don’t happen. They lie there, once so intense, now abandoned and useless.

Now he is less interested in wishing.

Outside in the corridor prisoners are led past and back again. Recently there was a report somewhere. But he was trying to sleep. And there was a furious knocking on the walls somewhere far away. Someone was dead. He knows what it means. It happens now and then.

High up in the wall there is a small window. But if he were to climb up and look out he would see nothing but darkness and a dark wall outside the window. What’s the point of it then? Inside, a light hanging from the ceiling is kept burning. It is turned off when he is supposed to sleep.

He never goes outside. For a time he went out long enough to get some fresh air. But he never saw anyone else there. Then he did something trifling so that it came to an end. Now he never goes outside.

Feet are tramping along the corridor. It sounds like more than one person, not only the swine, as he calls him. Probably a new arrival. This makes him listen, for occasionally they have dragged someone in here to stay in his cell, if it’s full up elsewhere.

Perhaps it happened only once. It did happen though, and he remembers what he did very clearly. He went across to the corner and touched a single secret line he had drawn on the wall, in gratitude, and then he spoke in words of friendship to the newcomer. And the other man answered him, and told him all about the dark quivering house round about them. It turned out that they knew the same people, and the reasons for their being in this place were somewhat similar. It was a marvellous time. No more counting of buttons. Their tongues never stopped.