Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  There is no consoling grandeur in any of this. When I wake up groaning in the night it is because I am reliving in dreams the pettiest degradations. There is no way of dying allowed me, it seems, except like a dog in a corner.

  * *

  Then one day they throw open the door and I step out to face not two men but a squad standing to attention. “Here,” says Mandel, and hands me a woman’s calico smock. “Put it on.”

  “Why?”

  “Very well, if you want to go naked, go naked.”

  I slip the smock over my head. It reaches halfway down my thighs. I catch a glimpse of the two youngest maids ducking back into the kitchen, dissolving in giggles.

  My wrists are caught behind my back and tied. “The time has come, Magistrate,” Mandel whispers in my ear. “Do your best to behave like a man.” I am sure I can smell liquor on his breath.

  They march me out of the yard. Under the mulberry trees, where the earth is purple with the juice of fallen berries, there is a knot of people waiting. Children are scrambling about on the branches. As I approach everyone falls silent.

  A soldier tosses up the end of a new white hemp rope; one of the children in the tree catches it, loops it over a branch, and drops it back.

  I know this is only a trick, a new way of passing the afternoon for men bored with the old torments. Nevertheless my bowels turn to water. “Where is the Colonel?” I whisper. No one pays any heed.

  “Do you want to say something?” says Mandel. “Say whatever you wish. We give you this opportunity.”

  I look into his clear blue eyes, as clear as if there were crystal lenses slipped over his eyeballs. He looks back at me. I have no idea what he sees. Thinking of him, I have said the words torture . . . torturer to myself, but they are strange words, and the more I repeat them the more strange they grow, till they lie like stones on my tongue. Perhaps this man, and the man he brings along to help him with his work, and their Colonel, are torturers, perhaps that is their designation on three cards in a pay-office somewhere in the capital, though it is more likely that the cards call them security officers. But when I look at him I see simply the clear blue eyes, the rather rigid good looks, the teeth slightly too long where the gums are receding. He deals with my soul: every day he folds the flesh aside and exposes my soul to the light; he has probably seen many souls in the course of his working life; but the care of souls seems to have left no more mark on him than the care of hearts leaves on the surgeon.

  “I am trying very hard to understand your feelings towards me,” I say. I cannot help mumbling, my voice is unsteady, I am afraid and the sweat is dripping from me. “Much more than an opportunity to address these people, to whom I have nothing to say, would I appreciate a few words from you. So that I can come to understand why you devote yourself to this work. And can hear what you feel towards me, whom you have hurt a great deal and now seem to be proposing to kill.”

  Amazed I stare at this elaborate utterance as it winds its way out of me. Am I mad enough to intend a provocation?

  “Do you see this hand?” he says. He holds his hand an inch from my face. “When I was younger”—he flexes the fingers—“I used to be able to poke this finger”—he holds up the index finger—“through a pumpkin-shell.” He puts the tip of his finger against my forehead and presses. I take a step backwards.

  They even have a cap ready for me, a salt-bag which they slip over my head and tie around my throat with a string. Through the mesh I watch them bring up the ladder and prop it against the branch. I am guided to it, my foot is set on the lowest rung, the noose is settled under my ear. “Now climb,” says Mandel.

  I turn my head and see two dim figures holding the end of the rope. “I can’t climb with my hands tied,” I say. My heart is hammering. “Climb,” he says, steadying me by the arm. The rope tightens. “Keep it tight,” he orders.

  I climb, he climbs behind me, guiding me. I count ten rungs. Leaves brush against me. I stop. He grips my arm tighter. “Do you think we are playing?” he says. He talks through clenched teeth in a fury I do not understand. “Do you think I don’t mean what I say?”

  My eyes sting with sweat inside the bag. “No,” I say, “I do not think you are playing.” As long as the rope remains taut I know they are playing. If the rope goes slack, and I slip, I will die.

  “Then what do you want to say to me?”

  “I want to say that nothing passed between myself and the barbarians concerning military matters. It was a private affair. I went to return the girl to her family. For no other purpose.”

  “Is that all you want to say to me?”

  “I want to say that no one deserves to die.” In my absurd frock and bag, with the nausea of cowardice in my mouth, I say: “I want to live. As every man wants to live. To live and live and live. No matter what.”

  “That isn’t enough.” He lets my arm go. I teeter on my tenth rung, the rope saving my balance. “Do you see?” he says. He retreats down the ladder, leaving me alone.

  Not sweat but tears.

  There is a rustling in the leaves near me. A child’s voice: “Can you see, uncle?”

  “No.”

  “Hey, monkeys, come down!” calls someone from below. Through the taut rope I can feel the vibration of their movements in the branches.

  So I stand for a long while, balancing carefully on the rung, feeling the comfort of the wood in the curve of my sole, trying not to waver, keeping the tension of the rope as constant as possible.

  How long will a crowd of idlers be content to watch a man stand on a ladder? I would stand here till the flesh dropped from my bones, through storm and hail and flood, to live.

  But now the rope tightens, I can even hear it rasp as it passes over the bark, till I must stretch to keep it from throttling me.

  This is not a contest of patience, then: if the crowd is not satisfied the rules are changed. But of what use is it to blame the crowd? A scapegoat is named, a festival is declared, the laws are suspended: who would not flock to see the entertainment? What is it I object to in these spectacles of abasement and suffering and death that our new regime puts on but their lack of decorum? What will my own administration be remembered for besides moving the shambles from the marketplace to the outskirts of the town twenty years ago in the interests of decency? I try to call out something, a word of blind fear, a shriek, but the rope is now so tight that I am strangled, speechless. The blood hammers in my ears. I feel my toes lose their hold. I am swinging gently in the air, bumping against the ladder, flailing with my feet. The drumbeat in my ears becomes slower and louder till it is all I can hear.

  I am standing in front of the old man, screwing up my eyes against the wind, waiting for him to speak. The ancient gun still rests between his horse’s ears, but it is not aimed at me. I am aware of the vastness of the sky all around us, and of the desert.

  I watch his lips. At any moment now he will speak: I must listen carefully to capture every syllable, so that later, repeating them to myself, poring over them, I can discover the answer to a question which for the moment has flown like a bird from my recollection.

  I can see every hair of the horse’s mane, every wrinkle of the old man’s face, every rock and furrow of the hillside.

  The girl, with her black hair braided and hanging over her shoulder in barbarian fashion, sits her horse behind him. Her head is bowed, she too is waiting for him to speak.

  I sigh. “What a pity,” I think. “It is too late now.”

  I am swinging loose. The breeze lifts my smock and plays with my naked body. I am relaxed, floating. In a woman’s clothes.

  What must be my feet touch the ground, though they are numb to all feeling. I stretch myself out carefully, at full length, light as a leaf. Whatever it is that has held my head so tightly slackens its grip. From inside me comes a ponderous grating. I breathe. All is well.

  Th
en the hood comes off, the sun dazzles my eyes, I am hauled to my feet, everything swims before me, I go blank.

  The word flying whispers itself somewhere at the edge of my consciousness. Yes, it is true, I have been flying.

  I am looking into the blue eyes of Mandel. His lips move but I hear no words. I shake my head, and having once started find that I cannot stop.

  “I was saying,” he says, “now we will show you another form of flying.”

  “He can’t hear you,” someone says. “He can hear,” says Mandel. He slips the noose from my neck and knots it around the cord that binds my wrists. “Pull him up.”

  If I can hold my arms stiff, if I am acrobat enough to swing a foot up and hook it around the rope, I will be able to hang upside down and not be hurt: that is my last thought before they begin to hoist me. But I am as weak as a baby, my arms come up behind my back, and as my feet leave the ground I feel a terrible tearing in my shoulders as though whole sheets of muscle are giving way. From my throat comes the first mournful dry bellow, like the pouring of gravel. Two little boys drop out of the tree and, hand in hand, not looking back, trot off. I bellow again and again, there is nothing I can do to stop it, the noise comes out of a body that knows itself damaged perhaps beyond repair and roars its fright. Even if all the children of the town should hear me I cannot stop myself: let us only pray that they do not imitate their elders’ games, or tomorrow there will be a plague of little bodies dangling from the trees. Someone gives me a push and I begin to float back and forth in an arc a foot above the ground like a great old moth with its wings pinched together, roaring, shouting. “He is calling his barbarian friends,” someone observes. “That is barbarian language you hear.” There is laughter.

  V

  The barbarians come out at night. Before darkness falls the last goat must be brought in, the gates barred, a watch set in every lookout to call the hours. All night, it is said, the barbarians prowl about bent on murder and rapine. Children in their dreams see the shutters part and fierce barbarian faces leer through. “The barbarians are here!” the children scream, and cannot be comforted. Clothing disappears from washing-lines, food from larders, however tightly locked. The barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls, people say; they come and go as they please, take what they like; no one is safe any longer. The farmers still till the fields, but they go out in bands, never singly. They work without heart: the barbarians are only waiting for the crops to be established, they say, before they flood the fields again.

  Why doesn’t the army stop the barbarians? people complain. Life on the frontier has become too hard. They talk of returning to the Old Country, but then remember that the roads are no longer safe because of the barbarians. Tea and sugar can no longer be bought over the counter as the shopkeepers hoard their stocks. Those who eat well eat behind closed doors, fearful of awaking their neighbour’s envy.

  Three weeks ago a little girl was raped. Her friends, playing in the irrigation ditches, did not miss her till she came back to them bleeding, speechless. For days she lay in her parents’ home staring at the ceiling. Nothing would induce her to tell her story. When the lamp was put out she would begin to whimper. Her friends claim a barbarian did it. They saw him running away into the reeds. They recognized him as a barbarian by his ugliness. Now all children are forbidden to play outside the gates, and the farmers carry clubs and spears when they go to the fields.

  The higher feeling runs against the barbarians, the tighter I huddle in my corner, hoping I will not be remembered.

  It is a long time since the second expeditionary force rode out so bravely with its flags and trumpets and shining armour and prancing steeds to sweep the barbarians from the valley and teach them a lesson they and their children and grandchildren would never forget. Since then there have been no dispatches, no communiqués. The exhilaration of the times when there used to be daily military parades on the square, displays of horsemanship, exhibitions of musketry, has long since dissipated. Instead the air is full of anxious rumours. Some say that the entire thousand-mile frontier has erupted into conflict, that the northern barbarians have joined forces with the western barbarians, that the army of the Empire is too thinly stretched, that one of these days it will be forced to give up the defence of remote outposts like this one to concentrate its resources on the protection of the heartland. Others say that we receive no news of the war only because our soldiers have thrust deep into the enemy’s territory and are too busy dealing out heavy blows to send dispatches. Soon, they say, when we least expect it, our men will come marching back weary but victorious, and we shall have peace in our time.

  Among the small garrison that has been left behind there is more drunkenness than I have ever known before, more arrogance towards the townspeople. There have been incidents in which soldiers have gone into shops, taken what they wanted, and left without paying. Of what use is it for the shopkeeper to raise the alarm when the criminals and the civil guard are the same people? The shopkeepers complain to Mandel, who is in charge under the emergency powers while Joll is away with the army. Mandel makes promises but does not act. Why should he? All that matters to him is that he should remain popular with his men. Despite the parade of vigilance on the ramparts and the weekly sweep along the lakeshore (for lurking barbarians, though none has ever been caught), discipline is lax.

  Meanwhile I, the old clown who lost his last vestige of authority the day he spent hanging from a tree in a woman’s underclothes shouting for help, the filthy creature who for a week licked his food off the flagstones like a dog because he had lost the use of his hands, am no longer locked up. I sleep in a corner of the barracks yard; I creep around in my filthy smock; when a fist is raised against me I cower. I live like a starved beast at the back door, kept alive perhaps only as evidence of the animal that skulks within every barbarian-lover. I know I am not safe. Sometimes I can feel the weight of a resentful gaze resting upon me; I do not look up; I know that for some the attraction must be strong to clear the yard by putting a bullet through my skull from an upstairs window.

  There has been a drift of refugees to the town, fisherfolk from the tiny settlements dotted along the river and the northern lakeshore, speaking a language no one understands, carrying their households on their backs, with their gaunt dogs and rickety children trailing behind them. People crowded around them when they first came. “Was it the barbarians who chased you out?” they asked, making fierce faces, stretching imaginary bows. No one asked about the imperial soldiery or the brush-fires they set.

  There was sympathy for these savages at first, and people brought them food and old clothing, until they began to put up their thatched shelters against the wall on the side of the square near the walnut trees, and their children grew bold enough to sneak into kitchens and steal, and one night a pack of their dogs broke into the sheepfold and tore out the throats of a dozen ewes. Feelings then turned against them. The soldiers took action, shooting their dogs on sight and, one morning when the men were still down at the lake, tearing down the entire row of shelters. For days the fisherfolk hid out in the reeds. Then one by one their little thatched huts began to reappear, this time outside the town under the north wall. Their huts were allowed to stand, but the sentries at the gate received orders to deny them entry. Now that rule has been relaxed, and they can be seen hawking strings of fish from door to door in the mornings. They have no experience of money, they are cheated outrageously, they will part with anything for a thimbleful of rum.

  They are a bony, pigeon-chested people. Their women seem always to be pregnant; their children are stunted; in a few of the young girls there are traces of a fragile, liquid-eyed beauty; for the rest I see only ignorance, cunning, slovenliness. Yet what do they see in me, if they ever see me? A beast that stares out from behind a gate: the filthy underside of this beautiful oasis where they have found a precarious safety.

  One day a shadow falls across me where I doze in the ya
rd, a foot prods me, and I look up into Mandel’s blue eyes.

  “Are we feeding you well?” he says. “Are you growing fat again?”

  I nod, sitting at his feet.

  “Because we can’t go on feeding you forever.”

  There is a long pause while we examine each other.

  “When are you going to begin working for your keep?”

  “I am a prisoner awaiting trial. Prisoners awaiting trial are not required to work for their keep. That is the law. They are maintained out of the public coffer.”

  “But you are not a prisoner. You are free to go as you please.” He waits for me to take the ponderously offered bait. I say nothing. He goes on: “How can you be a prisoner when we have no record of you? Do you think we don’t keep records? We have no record of you. So you must be a free man.”

  I rise and follow him across the yard to the gate. The guard hands him the key and he unlocks it. “You see? The gate is open.”

  I hesitate before I pass through. There is something I would like to know. I look into Mandel’s face, at the clear eyes, windows of his soul, at the mouth from which his spirit utters itself. “Have you a minute to spare?” I say. We stand in the gateway, with the guard in the background pretending not to hear. I say: “I am not a young man any more, and whatever future I had in this place is in ruins.” I gesture around the square, at the dust that scuds before the hot late summer wind, bringer of blights and plagues. “Also I have already died one death, on that tree, only you decided to save me. So there is something I would like to know before I go. If it is not too late, with the barbarian at the gate.” I feel the tiniest smile of mockery brush my lips, I cannot help it. I glance up at the empty sky. “Forgive me if the question seems impudent, but I would like to ask: How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been . . . working with people? That is a question I have always asked myself about executioners and other such people. Wait! Listen to me a moment longer, I am sincere, it has cost me a great deal to come out with this, since I am terrified of you, I need not tell you that, I am sure you are aware of it. Do you find it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that one would want to wash one’s hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don’t you think? Some kind of purging of one’s soul too—that is how I have imagined it. Otherwise how would it be possible to return to everyday life—to sit down at table, for instance, and break bread with one’s family or one’s comrades?”