The Desire to Control Others’ Life and Death

The Desire to Control Others’ Life and Death emerges from a rusty railway switch that two orphanage boys manage to move. For The unnamed boy narrator, the lever first makes mass death imaginable as a private choice: one push could send a train over a cliff. Later, a crowded train does derail nearby, in circumstances that strongly implicate The Silent One but do not show him operating the switch. The gap between imagined command and uncertain action gives the episode its force. Power appears thrilling when it can be rehearsed in secret; once lives are lost, its human cost is no abstraction.

The Switch and Its Secret

The Crossing on the unfinished railway spur lies a few miles from the city. An abandoned spur, begun before the war and never completed, ends near a cliff where a bridge was meant to stand. Moss has grown over its rusty switching points. The boys inspect the mechanism repeatedly and try to shift the lever, but corrosion keeps it fixed. The place offers a stark material form for a possibility not yet realized: a track that could redirect a train, and a cliff beyond it.

The change begins with an ordinary observation. The boys have seen a locksmith free a jammed lock by soaking it in oil. The next day, The Silent One steals a bottle of kitchen oil; in the evening, the boys pour it over the switch’s bearings, wait for it to penetrate, and hang their weight on the lever. The mechanism creaks, the lever jolts, and the points screech onto the other track. Startled by their success, they immediately switch it back. Their experiment is brief, but it changes what the place means: the lever is no longer merely immovable machinery. It has become an accessible instrument of choice.

Afterward, the boys exchange knowing glances whenever they pass the fork. Their shared secret gives the narrator a private sense of command even when he is only sitting in a tree’s shade, watching a train appear on the horizon. He imagines that the people aboard are in his hands, and that one movement could send the whole train over the cliff into the stream below. The scene distinguishes capability from action: he has discovered a working mechanism, but in this moment he contemplates what he could do rather than doing it.

Historical Scale and Private Power

The narrator connects this fantasy to trains carrying people to gas chambers and crematories. He imagines the men who ordered and organized those transports exercising a comparable power over victims whose names, faces, and occupations they did not know. Their orders set troops and police in motion to round people up for ghettos and death camps; railway routes could lead toward life or death. The comparison places the boys’ secret beside the organized machinery of mass persecution without making their situations equivalent. Its focus is the unnerving structure of power: decisions made at a distance can determine the fate of people rendered anonymous to those deciding.

The narrator does not settle whether the pleasure lies in possessing such power or using it. That uncertainty matters. His reflection names an attraction, not a justified action, and leaves its source unresolved. The switch becomes the concrete center of that ambiguity: a hand can move it, but the knowledge that it can be moved is already enough to transform the boy’s view of himself and of the passengers passing below. The episode links a child’s imagined omnipotence to a history in which bureaucratic orders and railway infrastructure carried lethal consequences.

The Derailment

Several weeks later, on market day, The Silent One takes the narrator to a derelict hut near the crossing. They climb onto its roof before dawn. When a train whistles, The Silent One stiffens and points. The crowded carriages carry peasants traveling to market; baskets protrude from windows, and people cling to the steps. As the train nears the crossing, The Silent One squeezes the narrator’s arm hard enough to make him jump. The locomotive then veers aside. The account does not show either boy at the lever, but the location, their earlier experiment, and the timing make the switch’s role—and The Silent One’s possible action—pressing questions rather than a plainly witnessed fact.

Only the first two cars follow the engine. The others buckle, climb over one another, and fall from the embankment. A crash of crunching metal and screeching is followed by steam that hides the wreck and cries from below. The narrator is stunned; The Silent One sags, grips his knees, and watches the dust settle before pulling the narrator away. They return to the orphanage while people rush toward the site and ambulance bells sound nearby. The violence that had existed as a thrilling imagined possibility has become a public disaster with injured and dead passengers.

In the following days, black-bordered newspapers list casualties, police search for suspected political saboteurs, and cranes lift carriages twisted together over the track. These details widen the consequences beyond the boys’ secret: the derailment becomes a civic catastrophe and an object of official investigation. Yet the narrative does not disclose a definitive account of who moved the points. The uncertainty prevents the episode from becoming a simple demonstration of a boy exercising complete control. The switch may connect his fantasy to the wreck, but it cannot make the event fully legible or contain what follows.

The Limits of Revenge

On the next market day, The Silent One leads the narrator through a changed marketplace. Many stalls are empty; black crosses mark the deaths of their owners. The boys approach the stand of the farmer who had knocked out the narrator’s teeth and pushed him into a barrel. Seeing the familiar milk, cream, butter, and fruit, the narrator looks to The Silent One in anguish. The farmer is alive, still behind his stall. The Silent One stares at him in disbelief, then takes the narrator’s hand and leaves.

Outside the market, The Silent One falls onto the grass and cries with his words muffled against the ground. It is the only time the narrator hears him speak. The moment sharply complicates the idea that the derailment delivered purposeful vengeance: the tormentor survived, while other market people died, and The Silent One’s response is grief or pain rather than visible triumph. His earlier pleasure at the sight of empty stalls cannot settle what the disaster meant to him. The scene offers no explicit confession or explanation, only a reversal from the secretive boy who seemed to hold lives in his hands to a boy overwhelmed by the consequences.

The episode’s central contrast is therefore between imagined mastery and actual human vulnerability. A lubricated lever can redirect a train, but neither the boys’ shared secret nor the narrator’s fantasy grants them command over who dies, who survives, or what the loss will mean. By setting the narrator’s reflection on mass persecution beside a local wreck and its uneven consequences, the narrative makes the desire for power visible without treating it as fulfillment. The switch promises a clean, singular gesture; the lives gathered around it resist that simplicity.