Gods and Soldiers Read Online Free PDF

with a thick roll of papers. He looked triumphant as he handed it to the superintendent. Their informer had been exact. The other hound reached unerringly into a tiny hole in the sagging, rain-patterned ceiling and brought out another tube of papers.
    â€œSearch. More!” the superintendent barked. He unrolled the tubes. He appeared surprised at the number of sheets in his hands. I was. I didn’t know I had written so much. When they were through with the holes and crevices, the dogs turned their noses to my personal effects. They picked up my mattress and shook and sniffed and poked. They ripped off the tattered cloth on its back. There were no papers there. They took the pillow-cum-rucksack (a jeans trouser-leg cut off at mid-thigh and knotted at the ankle) and poured out the contents on to the floor. Two threadbare shirts, one pair of trousers, one plastic comb, one toothbrush, one half-used bar of soap, and a pencil. They swooped on the pencil before it had finished rolling on the floor, almost knocking heads in their haste.
    â€œA pencil!” the superintendent said, shaking his head, exaggerating his amazement. The prisoners were standing in a tight, silent arc. He walked the length of the arc, displaying the papers and pencil, clucking his tongue. “Papers. And pencil. In prison. Can you believe that? In my prison!”
    I was sandwiched between the two hounds, watching the drama in silence. I felt removed from it all. Now the superintendent finally turned to me. He bent a little at the waist, pushing his face into mine. I smelt his grating smell; I picked out the white roots beneath his carefully dyed moustache.
    â€œI will ask. Once. Who gave you. Papers?” He spoke like that, in jerky, truncated sentences.
    I shook my head. I did my best to meet his red-hot glare. “I don’t know.”
    Some of the inmates gasped, shocked; they mistook my answer for reckless intrepidity. They thought I was foolishly trying to protect my source. But in a few other eyes I saw sympathy. They understood that I had really forgotten where the papers came from.
    â€œHmm,” the superintendent growled. His eyes were on the papers in his hands; he kept folding and unfolding them. I was surprised he had not pounced on me yet. Maybe he was giving me a spell to reconsider my hopeless decision to protect whoever it was I was protecting. The papers. They might have blown in through the door bars on the sentinel wind that sometimes patrolled the prison yard in the evenings. Maybe a sympathetic warder, seeing my yearning for self-expression emblazoned neon-like on my face, had secretly thrust the roll of papers into my hands as he passed me in the yard. Maybe—and this seems more probable—I bought them from another inmate (anything can be bought here in prison, from marijuana to a gun). But I had forgotten. In prison, memory short-circuit is an ally to be cultivated at all costs.
    â€œI repeat. My question. Who gave you the papers?” he thundered into my face, spraying me with spit.
    I shook my head. “I have forgotten.”
    I did not see it, but he must have nodded to one of the hounds. All I felt was the crushing blow on the back of my neck. I pitched forward, stunned by pain and the unexpectedness of it. My face struck the door bars and I fell before the superintendent’s boots. I saw blood where my face had touched the floor. I waited. I stared, mesmerized, at the reflection of my eyes in the high gloss of the boots’ toecaps. One boot rose and landed on my neck, grinding my face into the floor.
    â€œSo. You won’t. Talk. You think you are. Tough,” he shouted. “You are. Wrong. Twenty years! That is how long I have been dealing with miserable bastards like you. Let this be an example to all of you. Don’t. Think you can deceive me. We have our sources of information. You can’t. This insect will be taken to solitary and he will be properly dealt with.