Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  I think with yearning of the familiar routine of my duties, of the approaching summer, the long dreamy siestas, conversations with friends at dusk under the walnut trees, with boys bringing tea and lemonade and the eligible girls in twos and threes promenading before us on the square in their finery. Only days since I parted from that other one, and I find her face hardening over in my memory, becoming opaque, impermeable, as though secreting a shell over itself. Plodding across the salt I catch myself in a moment of astonishment that I could have loved someone from so remote a kingdom. All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.

  * *

  From as far away as ten miles we can make out the jutting watchtowers against the sky; while we are still on the track south of the lake the ochre of the walls begins to separate out from the grey of the desert background. I glance at the men behind me. Their step too has quickened, they can barely hide their excitement. We have not bathed or changed our clothes in three weeks, we stink, our skin is dry and seamed in black from the beating of wind and sun, we are exhausted, but we walk like men, even the boy who stumps along now on his bandaged foot with his chest thrown out. It could have been worse: it could have been better, perhaps, but it could have been worse. Even the horses, their bellies bloated with marsh-grass, seem restored to life.

  In the fields the first spring shoots are beginning to show. The thin tones of a trumpet reach our ears; the horsemen of the welcoming party issue from the gates, the sun flashing on their helmets. We look like scarecrows: it would have been better if I had told the men to put on their armour for these last few miles. I watch the horsemen trot towards us, expecting them at any moment to break into a gallop, to fire off their guns in the air and shout. But their demeanour remains businesslike, they are not a welcoming party at all, I begin to realize, there are no children running after them: they divide in two and surround us, there is not one face among them that I recognize, their eyes are stony, they do not answer my questions but march us back like prisoners through the open gates. It is only when we emerge on to the square and see the tents and hear the hubbub that we understand: the army is here, the promised campaign against the barbarians is under way.

  IV

  Aman sits at my desk in the office behind the courtroom. I have never seen him before but the insignia on his lilac-blue tunic tell me that he belongs to the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard. A pile of brown folders tied with pink tapes lies at his elbow; one is open before him. I recognize the folders: they contain records of taxes and levies dating back fifty years. Can he really be examining them? What is he looking for? I speak: “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  He ignores me, and the two stiff soldiers who guard me might as well be made of wood. I am far from complaining. After my weeks in the desert it is no hardship to stand idle. Besides, I sense a faraway tinge of exultation at the prospect that the false friendship between myself and the Bureau may be coming to an end.

  “May I speak to Colonel Joll?” I say. A shot in the dark: who is to say that Joll has returned?

  He does not answer, continuing his pretence of reading the documents. He is a good-looking man, with regular white teeth and lovely blue eyes. But vain, I think. I picture him sitting up in bed beside a girl, flexing his muscles for her, feeding on her admiration. The kind of man who drives his body like a machine, I imagine, ignorant that it has its own rhythms. When he looks at me, as he will in a moment, he will look from behind that handsome immobile face and through those clear eyes as an actor looks from behind a mask.

  He looks up from the page. It is just as I thought. “Where have you been?” he says.

  “I have been away on a long journey. It pains me that I was not here when you arrived to offer you hospitality. But now I am back, and all that is mine is yours.”

  His insignia say that he is a warrant officer. Warrant Officer in the Third Bureau: what does that mean? At a guess, five years of kicking and beating people; contempt for the regular police and for due process of law; a detestation of smooth patrician talk like mine. But perhaps I do him an injustice—I have been away from the capital for a long time.

  “You have been treasonously consorting with the enemy,” he says.

  So it is out. “Treasonously consorting”: a phrase out of a book.

  “We are at peace here,” I say, “we have no enemies.” There is silence. “Unless I make a mistake,” I say. “Unless we are the enemy.”

  I am not sure that he understands me. “The natives are at war with us,” he says. I doubt that he has ever set eyes on a barbarian in his life. “Why have you been consorting with them? Who gave you permission to leave your post?”

  I shrug off the provocation. “It is a private matter,” I say. “You will have to take my word for that. I do not intend to discuss it. Except to say that the magistracy of a district is not a post that can be abandoned like a gatepost.”

  There is a spring in my walk as I am marched away to confinement between my two guards. “I hope you will allow me to wash,” I say, but they ignore me. Never mind.

  I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man. Who would not smile? But what a dangerous joy! It should not be so easy to attain salvation. And is there any principle behind my opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers? As for this liberty which I am in the process of throwing away, what value does it have to me? Have I truly enjoyed the unbounded freedom of this past year in which more than ever before my life has been mine to make up as I go along? For example: my freedom to make of the girl whatever I felt like, wife or concubine or daughter or slave or all at once or none, at whim, because I had no duty to her save what it occurred to me to feel from moment to moment: from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement? In my opposition there is nothing heroic—let me not for an instant forget that.

  It is the same room in the barracks that they used for their interrogations last year. I stand by while the mats and rolls of the soldiers who have been sleeping here are dragged out and piled at the door. My own three men, still filthy and ragged, emerge from the kitchen to stare. “What is that you are eating?” I shout. “Get me some before they lock me up!” One of them comes trotting over with his bowl of hot millet gruel. “Take it,” he says. The guards motion me to go in. “Just a moment,” I say: “let him fetch my bedroll, then I won’t trouble you again.” They wait while I stand in a patch of sunlight spooning in the gruel like a starving man. The boy with the sore foot stands at my elbow with a bowl of tea, smiling. “Thank you,” I say. “Don’t be anxious, they won’t harm you, you were only doing what you were told.” With my bedroll and the old bear-fur under my arm I enter my cell. The soot-marks are still on the wall where the brazier used to stand. The door closes and darkness falls.

  I sleep all day and all night, barely disturbed by the chop-chop of picks behind the wall at my head or the faraway rumble of barrows and shouts of labourers. In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips. “What is that noise?” I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells. “Ah yes,” I say: “time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.” He does not understand.

  There is no window, only a hole high on the wall. But after a day or two my eyes have adjusted to the gloom. I have to shield myself against the light when, morning and evening, the door is flung open and I am fed. The best hour is early morning, when I wake and lie listening to the first birdsong outside, watching the square of the smokehole for the instant at which darkness g
ives way to the first dove-grey light.

  I am fed the same rations as the common soldiers. Every second day the barracks gate is locked for an hour and I am let out to wash and exercise. There are always faces pressed against the bars of the gate gaping at the spectacle of the fall of the once mighty. Many I recognize; but no one greets me.

  At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore. I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry of their feet across the paved floor. They are lured by the smell of the bucket in the corner, the morsels of food on the floor; no doubt too by this mountain of flesh giving off its multifarious odours of life and decay. One night I am awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing my throat. Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes. From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned.

  I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing; though it is hard to ignore the sound of brick being laid on brick so nearby.

  I look forward with craving to exercise times, when I can feel the wind on my face and the earth under my soles, see other faces and hear human speech. After two days of solitude my lips feel slack and useless, my own speech seems strange to me. Truly, man was not made to live alone! I build my day unreasonably around the hours when I am fed. I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast.

  Nevertheless it is only on the empty days when I am cast wholly upon myself that I can turn seriously to the evocation of the ghosts trapped between these walls of men and women who after a visit here no longer felt that they wanted to eat and could not walk unaided.

  Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten. I think of one who despite her age was still a child; who was brought in here and hurt before her father’s eyes; who watched him being humiliated before her, and saw that he knew what she saw.

  Or perhaps by that time she could not see, and had to know by other means: the tone his voice took on when he pleaded with them to stop, for instance.

  Always I find in myself this moment of shrinking from the details of what went on in here.

  After that she had no father. Her father had annihilated himself, he was a dead man. It must have been at this point, when she closed herself off to him, that he threw himself upon his interrogators, if there is any truth in their story, and clawed at them like a wild animal until he was clubbed down.

  I close my eyes for hours on end, sitting in the middle of the floor in the faint light of day, and try to evoke the image of that man so ill-remembered. All I see is a figure named father that could be the figure of any father who knows a child is being beaten whom he cannot protect. To someone he loves he cannot fulfil his duty. For this he knows he is never forgiven. This knowledge of fathers, this knowledge of condemnation, is more than he can bear. No wonder he wanted to die.

  I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father. But I came too late, after she had ceased to believe in fathers. I wanted to do what was right, I wanted to make reparation: I will not deny this decent impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives: there must always be a place for penance and reparation. Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency. They exposed her father to her naked and made him gibber with pain; they hurt her and he could not stop them (on a day I spent occupied with the ledgers in my office). Thereafter she was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts not only of the father and the daughter but of the man who even by lamplight did not remove the black discs from his eyes and the subordinate whose work it was to keep the brazier fed, will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.

  So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her. She leans on her two sticks looking dimly upward. What does she see? The protecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey yet breathes?

  * *

  Though the guards have orders not to discuss anything with me, it is not difficult to stitch together into a coherent story the snatches of talk I hear on my outings into the yard. All the latest talk is about the fire along the river. Five days ago it was just a darker smudge against the haze in the north-west. Since then it has eaten its way slowly down the river-course, sometimes dying down but always reviving, and clearly visible now from the town as a brown shroud over the delta where the river enters the lake.

  I can guess what has happened. Someone has decided that the river-banks provide too much cover for the barbarians, that the river would form a more defensible line if the banks were cleared. So they have fired the brush. With the wind blowing from the north, the fire has spread across the whole shallow valley. I have seen wildfires before. The fire races through the reeds, the poplars flare up like torches. Animals that are quick enough—antelope, hare, cat—escape; swarms of birds fly out in terror; everything else is consumed. But there are so many barren stretches along the river that fires rarely spread. So it is clear that in this case a party must be following the fire downriver to see to its progress. They do not care that once the ground is cleared the wind begins to eat at the soil and the desert advances. Thus the expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign, ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony.

  * *

  The shelves have been cleared, dusted and polished. The surface of the desk glows with a deep lustre, bare save for a saucer of little glass balls of different colours. The room is spotlessly clean. A vase of hibiscus flowers stands on a table in the corner filling the air with scent. There is a new carpet on the floor. My office has never looked more attractive.

  I stand beside my guard in the same clothes I travelled in, my underwear washed once or twice but my coat still smelling of woodsmoke, waiting. I watch the play of sunlight through the almond-blossoms outside the window, and am content.

  After a long while he enters, tosses a sheaf of papers on the desk, and sits down. He stares at me without speaking. He is trying, though somewhat too theatrically, to make a certain impression on me. The careful reorganization of my office from clutter and dustiness to this vacuous neatness, the slow swagger which he uses to cross the room, the measured insolence with which he examines me, are all meant to say something: not only that he is now in charge (how could I contest that?) but that he knows how to comport himself in an office, knows even how to introduce a note of functional elegance. Why does he think me worth the trouble of this display? Because despite my smelly clothes and my wild beard I am still from an old family, however contemptibly decayed out here in the back of beyond? Does he fear I will sneer unless he armours himself in a décor picked up, I have no doubt, from careful observation of the offices of his superiors in the Bureau? He will not believe me if I tell him it does not matter. I must be careful not to smile.

  He clears his throat. “I am going to read to you from the depositions we have gathered, Magistrate,” he says, “so that you will have an idea of the gravity of the charges against you.” He motions and the guard leaves the room.

  “From one: ‘His conduct in office left much to be desired. His decisions were characterized by arbitrariness, petitioners had on occasion to wait months for a hearing, and he maintained no regular system of accounting for moneys.’” He la
ys down the paper. “I may mention that an inspection of your accounts has confirmed that there have been irregularities. ‘Despite being principal adminstrative officer for the district, he contracted a liaison with a streetwoman which occupied most of his energies, to the detriment of his official duties. The liaison had a demoralizing effect on the prestige of imperial administration because the woman in question had been patronized by the common soldiers and figured in numerous obscene stories.’ I will not repeat the stories.

  “Let me read to you from another. ‘On the first of March, two weeks before the arrival of the expeditionary force, he gave orders for myself and two other men (named) to prepare at once for a long journey. He did not at that time say where we were going. We were surprised when we found that the barbarian girl would be travelling with us, but we did not ask questions. We were also surprised by the hastiness of the preparations. We did not see why we could not wait for the spring thaw. It was only after our return that we understood that his purpose had been to warn the barbarians of the coming campaign. . . . We made contact with the barbarians on approximately the eighteenth of March. He had long consultations with them from which we were excluded. An exchange of gifts also took place. At this time we discussed among ourselves what we would do if he ordered us to go over to the barbarians. We decided that we would refuse and find our own way home. . . . The girl returned to her people. He was besotted with her, but she did not care for him.’

  “So.” He lays the papers down carefully and squares the corners. I keep my silence. “I read only extracts. So that you could see the shape of things. It looks bad when we have to come in and clean up local administration. It isn’t even our job.”

  “I will defend myself in a court of law.”

  “Will you?”

  I am not surprised by what they are doing. I know very well the weight that insinuations and nuances can be made to bear or how a question can be asked in such a way as to dictate its answer. They will use the law against me as far as it serves them, then they will turn to other methods. That is the Bureau’s way. To people who do not operate under statute, legal process is simply one instrument among many.