I begin with a codicil - I forbid you to read this story. Turn the page, or accept the consequences.

 

My accuser was making every effort to find me, it seemed. But I had to abide by the rules of the game. Were a letter of his to be delivered to my door, I knew that the law would not exonerate me simply because I failed to open it. I would have to open it, legally, even if actually I didn’t. And even if I didn’t actually read it – opened or not – there would be little “reasonable doubt” surrounding the possibility that I had read it. On this point, I am not me; I am someone else, presumed by a populace to be a certain kind of thing. It doesn’t matter to them that this distinction seems so minor – after all, how many would not be that certain kind of thing? Surely we all read letters, unless we have something to hide? And so the logical codicil: if we claim not to have read them, then we must have something to hide! And yet, in my particular case, how very much depends upon it. Were he to telephone me, the fact I failed to take his call would incriminate me as surely as if I had done; and, again, were he to challenge me in the street, the fact I chose to ignore his accusations, saying nothing, would not be sufficient to preserve my freedom.

I say that he seemed to be making every effort to find me. I cannot be sure, because the only possible escape for me was to place myself in such situations that he could never make contact with me; furthermore, if subsequently I learned that he had even attempted such contact for sure, then this in itself would serve in the case against me. I had to move rapidly from place to place, but though he had a mind much like my own, I as yet had the advantage, namely that because he had not yet succeeded in accusing me, he had no claim to restrict my freedom of movement - even if, in so many different ways, he had already restricted it. For it was fair to assume certain things - for example, that he would be familiar with my habits and many of my friends, and there was nothing to stop him from trying to reach me through either of them. So I was forced to break all contact with the life that had gone before, thus making it impossible for these indirect agents to challenge me either on his behalf.

This continued for some time, and the loneliness of my existence became harder and harder to bear. I wished that I could have been able to make a decisive escape - to change my name, for example, or to emigrate to some foreign country. But since he was the one making the accusation and I was studiedly refusing to allow him to present that accusation to me, the law gave him the right, as the accuser, to try to find the man he wanted to accuse. Thus he would have had every dispensation to consult the register of name changes, records of my movements lodged in the immigration office, and even police records, simply because of his inability otherwise to realise a fundamental right that the law upheld - his right to accuse a man who - he would maintain - had wronged him. Furthermore, even before my guilt had been established, he also had the right to requisition the time and knowledge of many public servants to ensure that his deposition would finally be delivered. So that maybe he didn't even need to guess that I might change my name or try to leave the country; others, on his behalf, would postulate all this and more, even while he was asleep or attending to other matters. And so I was up against not just one mind - which I might have hoped to outfox - but a machine with seemingly infinite resources and insight, that it seemed highly improbable any single mind could outwit entirely.

I realised now that perhaps my flight was only making things worse, since my reluctance to confront his accusation could easily be construed as a tacit affirmation of guilt, in the same way that those who refuse to show up for trial can be condemned in absentia. So long as I failed to present myself, I was guilty in potentia of every crime that anyone might choose to lay at my door, and maybe yet more crimes had accumulated in the interim, as more and more people perceived my inability to defend myself, and maliciously lodged accusations on their own account.

Then again, maybe I had never been accused at all. Maybe I had done nothing wrong. But something had changed in the world, and my flight - whether from a real or imagined accusation - had itself achieved a sinister purpose, namely that it had stripped my freedom from me as completely as if I had actually stood my ground, faced judgment, and been condemned. I knew now that the accusation itself was immaterial, that it had already served its purpose, and, at its heart, I saw a different accusation I would never be able to refute. Some day they would push a note scrawled in charcoal on the back of a flattened piece of tin under the thatch-door of my mud-hut at the end of the earth, and I would not even need to read the words to know what they would be: "My accusation is simply this - I accuse you of running away. Defend yourself, if you can."

 

*

 

Now it is my turn to accuse you - my reader - of reading a story I forbade you to read. You have no defence, and when you are judged, you shall therefore deserve the shame of the punishment that shall fall upon you. There is no place you can hide, for you have read my accusation, and even if you hurl the book away, someone somewhere knows that you have bought or borrowed it, or guesses that you have taken it up by chance; someone knows you have read it, and even now the mechanism of the law is preparing the case against you.