Winston more than yourself that motivated you. If you had changed that report, all hope for Winston would then be gone. In effect, you would have consigned Winston to death. I donât think you were able to do that, Major Kaufman.â
âAdams,â Kaufman said slowly, âaside from my medical duties, there was no reason for me to lift a finger to help Winston. Iâm a Jew.â
âYou say that as if it should carry some special and hidden meaning for me, Kaufman. It doesnât. I am a Protestant, but that doesnât make me insensitive or indifferent to what Nazism and Fascism have done to this world. The only Jew I suppose I knew in my childhood was a Colonel Cramer. He was a friend of my fatherâs and a dinner guest on many occasions that I remember. I never knew that he was a Jew, until one evening at dinner he brought up a quotation we had need for. It stayed with meââYe are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?â After dinner my father expressed some surprise that Colonel Cramer had come up with the quotation so readily. âWhy?â I asked. âBecause he knows his Testament?â âBecause he is Jewish and because the lines are from Matthew,â my father told me. He left it at that. You see, Major, I donât believe in these different worlds that we inhabit, and if I had any such beliefs, they were beaten out of me in Africa and in Italy. Iâve been in this land only three days, as you mentioned, but I donât feel its strangeness any longer.â
âYou havenât convinced me that I want to save Winston,â Kaufman said.
âI donât have to convince you, because as you made plain to me, Winston cannot be saved. I think you want to save something else even more important than Winston, and I think you know what I mean, Major Kaufman.â
âI know what you mean,â Kaufman said dully and hopelessly. âIâm no hero. I canât be a hero.â
âUnless,â Adams pointed out with deliberate cruelty, âthe world you value is well aware that you are a hero. But if your wife and your friends and all the people whose opinion you value here and at home donât see you as a hero at all, but just consider you a damned foolâwell, then yes; why be a hero?â
âThatâs a lousy thing to say.â
âYes.â
âWhat skin off your back is it if I live with myself?â
âNobody lives with himself alone, Major. Whatever it was back there in Rivington Street that made you the man you are today, it wasnât the dirt and poverty. There were other things that you have to remember and live with.â
âDo you really think you can win this case?â Kaufman demanded. âDonât you know that Winston must die? Donât you realize that nothing you can do will alter the verdict? How can you sit there and talk as if any action of mine would make a difference?â
âBecause it would make a difference.â
âAdamsâtell me, isnât unity and harmony in this theater of action more important than the life of a pathological murderer?â
âYou donât buy unity with a manâs life or with injustice or with a fixed verdict.â
âHow can you be so damned sure of yourself?â
âBecause Iâm unsure of myself. Itâs not what I believe, Major, itâs the fact that I am trying to believe.â
âAnd you really think you can win?â
âI can fightâand if I have weaponsâwellâyes, damn it, I could win!â
Major Kaufman got up and strode to the door. Opening it, he called out, âOrderly!â When the orderly came, Kaufman barked at him, âDidnât it ever occur to you to pick up the dishes?â
âBut, Major, youâre still drinking your tea.â
âDonât give me that! Take that tray and get out of
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