mysteriousness and incomprehensibility was more acceptable to his
reason than this strangely and fantastically changed world. What is
more, death seemed to have been destroyed completely in this insane
world of phantoms and puppets, having lost its great and enigmatic
significance, becoming something mechanical and only for that reason
terrible. He would be seized, taken, led, hanged, pulled by the feet,
the rope would be cut, he would be taken down, carried off and buried.

And the man would have disappeared from the world.

At the trial the nearness of his comrades brought Kashirin to himself.
For an instant he imagined he saw real people; they were sitting and
trying him, speaking like human beings, listening, apparently
understanding him. But as he mentally rehearsed the meeting with his
mother he clearly felt with the terror of a man who is beginning to
lose his reason and who realizes it, that this old woman in the black
little kerchief was only an artificial, mechanical puppet, of the kind
that can say "pa-pa," "ma-ma," but somewhat better constructed. He
tried to speak to her, while thinking at the same time with a shudder:

"O Lord! That is a puppet. A mother doll. And there is a
soldier-puppet, and there, at home, is a father-puppet, and this is
the puppet of Vasily Kashirin."

It seemed to him that in another moment he would hear somewhere the
creaking of the mechanism, the screeching of unoiled wheels. When his
mother began to cry, something human again flashed for an instant, but
at the very first words it disappeared again, and it was interesting
and terrible to see that water was flowing from the eyes of the doll.