Sermon for the Merciless

THE TORMENTORS (250 pp.)--Richard Cargoe--Sloane ($3).

The prisoners were bound by a long rope. As they marched past the handsome NKVD lieutenant, they thought him "a rescuer who had providentially arrived to remove their chains." This feeling was an illusion, of course, for the lieutenant was taking them to Siberia to work as slaves in the gold mines. But he seemed so kind, so eager to treat them as unfortunate men rather than political outcasts, that for a while they could not help loving him.

As they drew closer to the mines, and as they suffered together through a freezing storm, the relationship between the lieutenant and his prisoners became more intense and tangled, almost human. The history of this relationship, with its bloody climax, is the story of The Tormentors, an erratic novel which alternates uncertainly between dramatic power and distracting preachments.

Siberian Gratitude. Though he never swerved from his duty as their jailer, Lieut. Kudriavtsev felt increasing pity for his emaciated prisoners--Sherrez, the selfless composer who believed "that God comes to me out of the darkness in waves of music"; Kuzma, the priest who feigned madness to help the other prisoners; Korn-felder, the doctor who took care of the sick as if he were still visiting patients in a provincial town. These prisoners were good people, talented people, and in a moment of anguish Kudriavtsev silently asked: "My God, why do I have to lead these damned souls to Hell?" But it never occurred to him that the order he personified was evil.

For a while, the prisoners, too, were at moral odds amongst themselves. They argued endlessly about the proper way to meet their fate. The doctor was satisfied "to make our peace with these things and die quietly, like men." Anatol, a shaven-headed ex-Communist, snorted at dying "gracefully ... It stinks of priests and last minute confessions."

In the prison camp Lieut. Kudriavtsev fell in love with Sherrez' wife, Elena, who responded to his strength and buoyancy. In gratitude he gave her some music paper for her husband. He was ready to give the prisoners almost anything except freedom.

Then Kudriavtsev was called away.

When he came back, his old impulses to kindness had been drilled out of him. He ignored Elena, drove the prisoners to exhaustion, and tolerated the brutality of his lonely and guilty guards. Sherrez' was horribly beaten for protesting the kicking of a woman prisoner; other prisoners were hammered to death with crowbars. In a grotesque ceremony the prisoners formally tried Kudriavtsev and all the guards as murderers and "condemned" them to death. Next morning the prisoners were machine-gunned by a guard.

Mid-Century Finger. The Tormentors is motored by two main ideas: 1) that the unjust ultimately suffer more than their victims, and 2) that in a society where brutality is normal, one man's kindness cannot undo the evil to which the society has bound him.

In British Author Cargoe's book these ideas come to only intermittent life. Too often there are weary, philosophizing digressions, and sometimes the writing becomes as hysterical as the characters. The Tormentors never does more than point a journalistic finger at the mid-century horrors he has to tell.

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