Let me sleep. It’s been such a long time.

Something says, What have you to sleep on?

I don’t know, he replies. But I need sleep so badly. It’s all the same to me, whatever’s happening in the other rooms.

Sleep does not come. He listens to everything he hears and for everything he dreads hearing. He gets up again and switches on the light. Perhaps the outer door is not locked after all and someone might come in? He goes over and tests it.

It is locked as much as it can be locked. As far as human ability can stretch, he says to himself, using those very words. He can feel quite safe. All his wants are supplied in the walls around him; he need never go out through the door.

He listens, standing in his nightshirt in the middle of the floor, listens to the rooms he cannot see, where they are suffering. He knows about them, but what can he do about it? He is here and must work.

We are many souls here, he thinks, using the old-fashioned expression. Perhaps someone is dying at this moment, he thinks reluctantly, as if he will be blamed for that too. He knows very well that there are many who die. Suddenly he links them with the softly shining stars in the storm, the stars that no one can see. Idiotic, but the picture forms itself. Then he is suddenly frightened by an icy thought: Perhaps this night thy soul shall be required of thee.

He had been about to go back to bed, but this terrifying notion leads him to test the well-oiled, efficient locks yet again, while it continues to plague him.

What’s happening in the other rooms now? he wonders. It will never let him rest. I have said it’s none of my business! What in the world has it got to do with me? I can’t stand people who meddle in the affairs of others!

He feels the urge to kick a chair and does so, and the chair overturns. It hurts his toes, but it gives him sufficient strength to go to bed and turn off the light. To lie with the lights burning reminds him of illness.

At the moment when the light clicks off he thinks he hears a cry. Far away, and weak. There must be several walls between him and the sound. No, it was here.

He sits up.

‘Anyone here?’ he asks, and listens, beads of sweat forming. No, there’s nobody here, nobody can get in. He listens but no more sounds come.

Deep down he realizes that it was only word from the centre, from the black weight in the middle of the house, from someone under torture because he joined the struggle. Now he has been caught and taken to the centre, and will be tried.

Martin wipes it away as if he had a damp cloth in his hand and it was chalked up on a blackboard. I know nothing about this. It’s just a lot of rumours. We don’t know for certain what’s happening.