Temat: Inspirujące cytaty...
Średnio inspirujący cytat, ale zapada w pamięć:
Holding his knife, the bearlike Mongolian officer looked at Yamamoto and grinned. To
this day, I remember that smile. I see it in my dreams. I have never been able to forget it.
No sooner had he flashed this smile than he set to work. His men held Yamamoto down
with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost care. It
truly was like skinning a peach. I couldn’t bear to watch. I closed my eyes. When I did this,
one of the soldiers hit me with his rifle butt. He went on hitting me until I opened my eyes.
But it hardly mattered: eyes open or closed, I could still hear Yamamoto’s voice. He bore
the pain without a whimper-at first. But soon he began to scream. I had never heard such
screams before: they did not seem part of this world. The man started by slitting open
Yamamoto’s shoulder and proceeded to peel off the skin of his right arm from the top
down-slowly, carefully, almost lovingly. As the Russian officer had said, it was something
like a work of art. One would never have imagined there was any pain involved, if it
weren’t for the screams. But the screams told the horrendousness of the pain that ac-
companied the work.
Before long, the entire skin of Yamamoto’s right arm had come off in a single thin
sheet. The skinner handed it to the man beside him, who held it open in his fingertips,
circulating among the others to give them a good look. All the while, blood kept dripping
from the skin. Then the officer turned to Yamamoto’s left arm, repeating the procedure.
After that he skinned both legs, cut off the penis and testicles, and removed the ears. Then
he skinned the head and the face and everything else. Yamamoto lost consciousness,
regained it, and lost it again. The screams would stop whenever he passed out and continue
when he came to again. But his voice gradually weakened and finally gave out altogether.
All this time, the Russian officer drew meaningless patterns on the ground with the heel of
his boot. The Mongolian soldiers watched the procedure in silence. Their faces remained
expressionless, showing neither disgust nor excitement nor shock. They watched
Yamamoto’s skin being removed a piece at a time with the same kind effaces we might
have if we were out for a stroll and stopped to have a look at a construction site.
Meanwhile, I did nothing but vomit. Over and over again. Long after it seemed there
was nothing more for me to bring up, I continued to vomit. At last, the bearlike Mongolian
officer held up the skin of Yamamoto’s torso, which he had so cleanly peeled off. Even the
nipples were intact. Never to this day have I seen anything so horrible. Someone took the
skin from him and spread it out to dry the way we might dry a sheet. All that remained
lying on the ground was Yamamoto’s corpse, a bloody red lump of meat from which every
trace of skin had been removed. The most painful sight was the face. Two large white
eyeballs stared out from the red mass of flesh. Teeth bared, the mouth stretched wide open
as if in a shout. Two little holes were all that remained where the nose had been removed.
The ground was a sea of blood.
"Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
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