Looking into her face, you wouldn’t know that. You had to see her doing it, because I don’t think you can imagine that. She did it with a look. She didn’t look—her eyes saw everything from the inside ... when she was at it. That was like cold fervor, but no that wasn’t. That was (she shook her head just a little) two things at once, you can’t imagine. Enthusiasm, or mania, maybe, and dreaminess at the same time. None of it was not real to her, though. I knew that not one single thing about it was unreal. Or vague—or anything but sharp and distinct. It’s ridiculous to say sharp but that’s the word. When she was at it, her eyes were like black wells, with glistens all over them. (She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment actually saw it.) All pupil, that seemed, staring, and seeing backwards.

And I saw her, or I watched her, you couldn’t have observed her more closely than I did. I had my perches there to watch her from, that gave me a commanding view, unauthorized though. Never paid much attention to them, only to her. I saw them, naturally, but as she saw them. Or would have seen them, if she saw them from the outside, and she didn’t, didn’t seem to. No, she saw them inside, and I saw them outside, but I saw into her. She knew exactly how that was done, and she lived that through each of them, or that was her fantasy.

The door bursts open, taking the man completely by surprise, and almost at once the hooder claps the hood on him—they are superb at that, getting them right away. No amount of preparation on the man’s part, unless he kills himself. And how can he? There’s that explosive struggling. The sudden pinioning and muffling. The smell of the hood, and the brush of frayed eye holes. Pulled out in that hall, that moves forward like a ratchet one man’s spot at a time. That stops. Starts. Stops. Starts. That hall has a long gap in the wall at the top, and they can see the top of gallows in the yard. They can see the chopper rise there. See it drop. See it drip. See it streaked and dripping. That smell from the door, the hall’s full of it. The men struggle between their pairs of—helpers, as we called them. Cries, all of that tumult. Scraping feet. Now there’s that unrelievedly plain metal door in front of him. He looks down and smells that puddle spreading out from under the door into the hall and he recoils from it. He wants that his legs would shrivel and curl up to his body in the air rather than touch his feet to it. And the smell is right up in his hood.