Short story: The Interrogator

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"Please, I am pregnant."


She wailed for mercy, her gesture hindered by a swollen abdomen.


But that did not concern him. So many pregnant women died in the Revolution. Some he has inflicted, and before that, he had witnessed too many of it - his sisters-in-arms, students, workers, the innocents, the locals, and finally his wife - since the Regime unleashed its blue-clad thugs onto the streets. For weeks it had been his nightmares, and after some time it has become his making. He probed, he watched.


Cruelty was not his nature, but one could argue that it was not in the collective psyche of his people as well, not before then. After all, it has taken them much time, much endurance to eventually raise against the externally-installed Regime, the bastard child of a bastard treaty. For decades, it had schemed to eat away their rights and local culture behind a wall of ever-swelling police force and hired gangsters. The local has been angered, but it ignored; and when the locals finally took it upon the street, it reacted in brute force. Truncheons drawn; protests crushed, and so were limbs and skulls. It was a time when the society was torn apart; when entire districts became sites of brawls; when the sideways were lined with dauntingly long rows of casualty, stretching to distance unseen; when news report showed one skirmish after another every day; when they all thought it was the worst.


But it did not take long before the first death occurred, a secondary schoolboy caught between the charging policemen and the packed crowd behind him. He was bludgeoned to death, without escape, without mercy for his pleads, in full view of his screaming brethren and reporters. The people stunned. Soon, shock became rage; crowds turned into mobs; timidity vanished, replaced by cruelty. It was no more demonstration, it was Revolution. Just as violence was the words it understood, so it was the words that the Regime received in full. The puppets panicked, they turned to their Master, who finally made the not-quite unprecedented decision to send in the military, for a war to pacify the land.


The battle was fierce. The invader was well-trained and armed, qualities matched only by their ruthlessness, but the Militia had determination and an urban terrain to their side. Somewhere deep inside his mind one might find, between the mangling, twisted scars of trauma, memories of firefights over broken street, of sleepless nights endured under the wails of air alarm, of summary executions by the roadside and tattered bodies deprived of uniforms hung on light poles, of suicidal charges against armored fighting vehicles, of retaliated massacres, of counter-retaliation ambushes, of the blockade, the starvation, the drought until the international powers finally stepped in to force a peace on the once-prosperous ruin.


They have won. It was a hard-earned victory, once considered by many to be impossible. They, at long last, have attained Independence for their homeland. So much was lost, yet so much was gained. The soldiers withdrew, back into their now revolting land; the threats were gone. It was supposed to be the time to enjoy their precious Independence.


But it soon became clear that the Independence was too precious to be lost again. It needed security, it needed unceasing vigilance against former collaborators and enemy aliens, it needed policing. The tide has turned, the time has come for the oppressed to vent their hatred - not on the enemy and its lackey Regime, for they have fled and were nowhere to be found, but on those they could no longer protected. It was the stalled immigrants and parallel traders of their origin - long regarded as locusts feasting on local resources ever before the Revolution - that was left behind for the vengeful Militia to round up on. So much was lost, yet so many lingered. It did not matter that the population has already shrunk by one fifth, that numerous labors were urgently needed to rebuild the devastated landscape, the pollution has to be cleansed; no undesired will be spared, and not least a single misbreed, conceived out of the sole purpose to get citizenship or out of affairs between depraved local women and enemy soldiers. Their crimes were inherited.


His emotions was gone forever when he saw the insides of his wife shed on the asphalt of a wrecked thoroughfare, where rows of captives were made to kneel down before the muzzles blasted. There were times when he wondered, back before the Occupation, the Revolution, the Victory, in the days of guiltless youth, that would he be one day able to see through the heart and mind of his mystifying loved one. He saw it that day; his world destroyed, and all that left within him since were calculation. How much cracks plus terror equal to one's breaking point; how much doses of agents did it take to reach that fine line of pain; how wide the margin of tolerance is; how many of them left.


"I don't mind if you don't talk right now. We have all day for that..." He circled behind her, measuring her outward signs of distress, the points to exploit. Finally he leaned close and whispered into her ear, while gesturing to an apparatus with a hose. "...or should we wash the kid out so that you can see it for yourself?"


***


He slept in peace that night.

Thank you for posting, I enjoyed your story. It reminded me, at moments, of Borges. You have a wonderful sense of rhythm and cadence.

Thanks! I have never read Borges. I think I got inspirations from Jack London and Robert Harris, but I like poetry enough to at least try to integrate some of the rhythm and cadence I came across into my text.