Books: Revolutionist

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE — Arthur Koestler—Macmillan ($2).

The first day the Nazis tortured Communist Peter Slavek they began by spitting in his face. In a bleak, spacious basement room, where the dim light oozed through frosted glass windows and the bored torturers whiled away their leisure hours playing cards and reading newspapers, they next broke his nose, split his lips and knocked out two teeth.

There was a cupboard in the room whose unknown contents terrified Peter more than the blows. When he said: “I have nothing to confess,” they opened its doors (there was a typed inventory of its contents on the inside of the door) and brought out implements of leather and steel, neatly hung on hooks. Stripped, he was bent over a table, his head down, his chin pressed against the rough wooden board smelling of carbolic soap. The first three strokes seemed to split his body in two. “Each new stroke lit up an electric bulb behind his eyeballs and caused an explosion inside his skull. He heard himself burst into long, savage screams, felt his bladder empty itself, his stomach throw up its contents over the table. There was lightning and thunder, the splitting of skin, the convulsions of choking from the grimy sponge they had thrust into his mouth to silence him.” As he felt himself pass out, his thin, fading voice muttered: “I have nothing to confess.”

He tried each day to eat less so he would faint more quickly. When at last they said: “Well, my boy, today we are going to finish with you, one way or the other,” his heart leaped with relief. The other details of Peter’s torture are even more horrifying. In Arrival and Departure their full savagery is modified by the device Arthur Koestler uses, of having Peter relate them to a psychiatrist who is also a Communist and something of a psychiatric case herself. But they are strong enough even when tempered with psychoanalytic jargon. Arrival and Departure is a far less important book than Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a political melodrama of the Moscow trials. Its novel contribution is in its subtle picture of the Communist use of psychiatry.

By the time Peter Slavek escapes from the Nazis, the German-Russian Pact has been signed. He has become an ex-Communist. He lands in a foreign country where exiles are thick as thieves, all awaiting passage to the U.S. The Communists, ex-Communists, Nazis, Jewish refugees work out Europe’s problems in miniature, and sometimes in unconscious mimicry.

Most of Arrival and Departure is given over to Peter’s breakdown, his nursing back to health at the hands of the psychiatrist, Sonia, his brief, tormented love affair with a French girl, his long confessions and recollections, and his recovery. Gradually Peter comes to understand that, far from being an outcast, he has become a hero of the underground, a victim of the war as truly as the shattered aviators regaining health at the outdoor tables of the cafés. In periods of almost religious exaltation—except that in his inward dialogues he speaks to the image of the psychiatrist rather than to God—he works out the pattern of his past and his destiny: “He felt free and lucid as never before; as if a persistent pressure, a torment so dull and constant that one was no longer aware of it. had been suddenly taken from him. . . . He was alone; alone and free. … He saw his wasted youth as one long nightmare of torment and flight—he saw it as if a lamp had been lit behind a transparence. But henceforth the lamp would remain alight; and as he settled down to sleep, for the first time he did not observe his protective ritual, the touching of his burn-scars with his pointed index-finger.”

His French sweetheart vanished. Sonia disappeared. The German-Russian Pact ended in war; Communists and ex-Communists began to speak to one another again; Peter got passage to the U.S. But as he was boarding the ship he saw his old enemies boarding it with him. He raced down the gangplank before the ship left shore. A full-fledged warrior of the underground, he was dropped back into the land of the Nazis from the air. There Arthur Koestler ends his story, leaving it up to the reader to decide what Peter will become.