Péter Nádas reads “The Great Christmas Killing” (in Hungarian) from Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays at the event Evolution/Revolution, part of the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival.

The Great Christmas Killing

Twice, on two recent consecutive evenings, I watched how the former president of Romania and his wife were sentenced to death and how they were executed.
 
Dispassionately I watched myself enjoying the tyrannicide. I kept observing that although I should have been ashamed for enjoying the sight, I was not ashamed at all. I found no mercy in my heart; I felt no pity for the couple.
 
I believe in just, legal procedures. Despite this belief, my conscience was conspicuously silent. I do not believe in capital punishment. Still, the brutality of the procedure I was witnessing did not offend me.
 
Base enjoyment is dangerously close to the noble kind. Perhaps this is so because we have no separate sets of nerves for the two different kinds of enjoyment.

Any kind of pleasure tends to speed up or even disrupt breathing, causing the sensation that circulation is momentarily arrested. Hyperemia blots out consciousness with the feeling of sensual breathlessness. The physiology of mammals is a closed system. The graph of great political excitement or religious ecstasy does not differ greatly from the rising graph of lovemaking.

The captors of the dreaded Ceauşescu couple, as if the two might somehow have broken out of the dreary room in which they had been tried and sentenced to death, forced them into a space between the wall and two steel-legged tables. Either is was cold in the room, or the uniformed members of the summary tribunal did not permit the tyrant and his wife to take off their coats. They were in a hurry. They wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. They had no lawful authorization. And even if they had had it, they wanted to slaughter the two tyrants exactly the way they would one winter dawn slaughter their cherished, fattened hogs they used to scratch with such pleasure. Political consideration also entered into their haste, of course. While the tyrants were alive, any attempt to restore them to power might be considered legitimate, in which case they, the judges, would end up dead. Who would kill whom first? That was the question.

Elena Ceauşescu wore a fur-lined, light-colored cape. Gathering it tightly about her, she hoped to defend herself. She was shivering, more likely in fear than from the cold. Yet no one can say she did not remain self-possessed until the very end. She knew what was going to happen, and she said so too. Nicolae Ceauşescu was not quite so self-disciplined. I am sure it was not only his obtuseness that helped delude him. The man was seventy-one years old at that time; for forty-four of his years he had been a member of the central Committee of Romania’s Communist Party. That is much too long a time for even a single, tiny patch of one’s brain to remain rational. Ceauşescu just kept looking as his wife, rolling his small, shifty eyes and grinning nervously; you could tell he couldn’t grasp what was really happening or figure out how he might gain the upper hand.

The cameraman aimed now at the two of them, now at members of the summary tribunal. In the whole room he found no angle from which he could frame all the participants. He wobbled, jerked about, the camera shaking in his hands, and kept turning in different directions, undecided. And not only because he was no professional but also because he could not suppress his own fear and thirst for revenge. He could not reconcile his personal feelings with the task at hand.

Complete, total, dilettantism lends perfection to this documentary film. None of its subjects, light effects, participants, sounds, or means of filming is anything but base, ugly, and amateurish. In this film the windows are blacked out, and no door is seen. There is no exit from this dictatorship. Even today we don’t exactly know where we are in these shots.

Freedom is not something one receives as a present. The cameraman identifies himself with the emotional outbursts of the horror-stricken summary tribunal, and we follow his unpredictable, fitful roving. This might conceivable lead to a cathartic realization - if only we could experience, together with members of the tribunal, the emergence of truth. But that is not what happens. Narrow-minded and driven by their petty thirst for revenge, they condemn the two tyrants to death.

Just before the execution, when the tyrants’ hands are tied behind their backs with some coarse clothesline, we hear the drama’s single human sentence issue from the mouth of Elena Ceauşescu. Although ready to die, she and her husband still protest the treatment they’re getting. Even now they fear not the loss of their human dignity but the loss of their fame and prestige. The terror gripping the soldiers, however, is so profound it seems doubtful whether they can properly carry out their odious mission. “What are you so afraid of?” rises the female voice from the depths of the scuffle. And to make this self-portrait of dictatorship even more complete, in the very last scene the character who should have remained silent makes himself heard too: it is the cameraman, talking to the doctor from behind the camera when they’re already out in the courtyard where the execution by firing squad has taken place. The doctor’s hands are shaking so violently he cannot guide his stethoscope to the jugular vein. If only he could look into the eyes, under the lids. All his finders, his whole body, everything is trembling; he cannot do it.

“Raise his head. Let’s see if he’s dead!”

If he steps out of his role as physician and does as he is told, he’ll be breaking the circuit of thousands of years that, with a last little puny string, still ties his person and his profession to Hippocrates. If he obeys and does as he is told, he’ll be carrying out the most terrible sentence of all dictatorships; nothing is sacred. And then he does obey. He raises and shows us Nicolae Ceauşescu’s lifeless head. He pulls down the lower lids so we can look into the dictator’s dead eyes.

With this devastating sensory experience we carry the logic of dictatorships into the next millennium.

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