He wanted always to be himself and nothing else.1
It is not so easy to please the dead.2
He used to place himself so that he screened the other while he prayed, in case someone came along, so that Sahak would not be disturbed during his prayers. It was as though he wanted to help him pray. But he himself did not pray.3
— But I don't understand, he said. Why then do you bear this “Christos Iesus” carved on your disk?
— Because I want to believe, Barabbas said, without looking up at either of them.4
When he felt death approaching, that
which he had always been so afraid of, he said out into the darkness,
as though he were speaking to it:
— To thee I deliver up my soul.5
1Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas, trans. Alan Blair, with a forward by Lucien Maury, and with a letter by André Gide (New York: Random House, 1951), 55.
2 Ibid., 91.
3 Ibid., 117.
4 Ibid., 144.
5 Ibid., 180.
