He did not feel the cold, the terror or the shame. He did not
hear the swish of the knout in the air or the savage howl of pain and
despair. He only saw the bare back of a man's body swelling up and
covered over evenly with white and purple stripes. Gradually the bare
back lost the semblance of human flesh. The blood oozed and squirted,
forming patches, drops and rivulets, which ran down on the white,
thawing snow.
Terror gripped the soul of Gabriel Andersen as he thought of the
moment when the man would rise and face all the people who had seen
his body bared out in the open and reduced to a bloody pulp. He closed
his eyes. When he opened them, he saw four soldiers in uniform and red
hats forcing another man down on the snow, his back bared just as
shamefully, terribly and absurdly--a ludicrously tragic sight.
Then came the third, the fourth, and so on, to the end.
And Gabriel Andersen stood on the wet, thawing snow, craning his neck,
trembling and stuttering, though he did not say a word. Dank sweat
poured from his body. A sense of shame permeated his whole being. It
was a humiliating feeling, having to escape being noticed so that they
should not catch him and lay him there on the snow and strip him
bare--him, Gabriel Andersen.
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