Shikumen street where Chen prowled

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La Condition Humane (Man's Fate)

Chen Da-er, terrorist  March 21, 1927 ‘Should he try to raise the mosquito netting?  Or should he strike through it? Chen was torn  with anguish-his eyes riveted to the mass of  white gauze that hung from the ceiling over  a body less visible than a shadow, and from  which emerged only that foot half-turned in  sleep, yet living-human flesh. The only light came from the neighborhood  building, a great rectangle of wan light cut by window bars, one which streaked the bed just  below the foot as if to stress its solidity and life. Four or five klaxons screamed at once. Was he  discovered? The wave of uproar subsided: some  traffic jam, there were still traffic jams out there  in the world of men. He repeated to himself that this man must die stupidly, for he knew that he would kill him.  Whether he was caught or not, executed or not,  did not matter. Nothing existed but this foot,  this man whom he must strike without letting  him defend himself-for if he defended himself,  he would cry out. Chen was becoming aware,  with a revulsion verging on nausea, that he stood  there not as a fighter, but as a sacrificial priest…. The sleeper, lying on his back in the European style bed, was wearing only a pair of short drawers,  but his ribs were not visible under the full flesh.  Chen had to take the nipples as gauging points.  He changed the position of the dagger: blade down.  To touch this motionless body was as difficult as to  stab a corpse, perhaps for the same reason. As if  called forth by this notion of a corpse, a grating  sound suddenly issued from the man’s throat. Chen  could no longer even draw back, for his legs and  arms had gone completely limp. But the rattle  became regular:  the  man was not dying, he was  snoring. He again became living, vulnerable; and  at the same time, Chen felt himself ridiculed. The body turned gently toward the right. Was he  going to wake up now? With a blow that would  have split a plank Chen struck through the gauze.  Sensitive to the very tip of the blade, he felt the  body rebound towards him, flung up by the springs  of the bed, He stiffened his arm furiously to hold it  down: like the severed halves drawn to each other,  the legs sprang together toward the chest; then  they jerked out, straight and stiff. Chen would have  struck again-but how was he to withdraw the dagger…. Nothing bore witness to the struggle-not even the  tear in the gauze, which seemed to have been  divided into two strips—nothing but the silence and the  over-powering intoxication into which he was sinking.

Rén de Qíngkuàng

Translator:

Notes: Man's Fate depicts the 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai and the party's later annihilation in a massacre led by its former ally Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces. Malraux's alienated revolutionary heroes - Ch'en, a young Chinse fighter, Kyo Gisors, a Eurasian organizer, Katow, a former student of medicine from Russia, and others - find a sense of human solidarity and dignity in action and death. "The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." (from Man's Fate) Ch'en is a terrorist who struggles with his orders: "He was serving the gods of his choice; but beneath his sacrifice to the Revolution lay a world of depths beside which this night of crushing anguish was bright as day. 'To assassinate is not only to kill, alas...'" The title of the book came from the 17th-century philosopher Pascal. At the end of the novel, Katow gives away his cyanide capsules, and faces his death, complete aware of its nature - he will be thrown into the boiler of a steam locomotive.

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