Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  For the rest of the night the gates stand open and little family groups, most of them on foot and weighed down under heavy packs, hurry after the soldiers. And before dawn the fisherfolk slink back in, meeting with no resistance, bringing their sickly children and their pitiful possessions and their bundles of poles and reeds with which to begin all over again the task of home-building.

  * *

  My old apartment stands open. Inside the air is musty. Nothing has been dusted for a long time. The display cases—the stones and eggs and artifacts from the desert ruins—are gone. The furniture in the front room has been pushed against the walls and the carpet removed. The little parlour seems not to have been touched, but all the drapery carries a sour stuffy smell.

  In the bedroom the bedclothes have been tossed aside with the same motion I use, as if I myself had been sleeping here. The odour from the unwashed linen is alien.

  The chamber pot under the bed is half full. In the cupboard there is a crumpled shirt with a ring of brown inside the collar and yellow stains under the armpits. All my clothes are gone.

  I strip the bed and lie down on the bare mattress, expecting some sense of unease to creep over me, the ghost of another man lingering still among his odours and disorders. The feeling does not come; the room is as familiar as ever. With my arm over my face I find myself drifting toward sleep. It may be true that the world as it stands is no illusion, no evil dream of a night. It may be that we wake up to it ineluctably, that we can neither forget it nor dispense with it. But I find it as hard as ever to believe that the end is near. If the barbarians were to burst in now, I know, I would die in my bed as stupid and ignorant as a baby. And even more apposite would it be if I were caught in the pantry downstairs with a spoon in my hand and my mouth full of fig preserve filched from the last bottle on the shelf: then my head could be hacked off and tossed on to the pile of heads on the square outside still wearing a look of hurt and guilty surprise at this irruption of history into the static time of the oasis. To each his own most fitting end. Some will be caught in dugouts beneath their cellars clutching their valuables to their breasts, pinching their eyes shut. Some will die on the road overwhelmed by the first snows of winter. Some few may even die fighting with pitchforks. After which the barbarians will wipe their backsides on the town archives. To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? I lie on the bare mattress and concentrate on bringing into life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper.

  VI

  Sometimes in the mornings there are fresh hoofprints in the fields. Among the straggling bushes that mark the far limit of the ploughed land the watchman sees a shape which he swears was not there the day before and which has vanished a day later. The fisherfolk will not venture out before sunrise. Their catch has dropped so low that they barely subsist.

  In two days of co-operative effort in which we laboured with our weapons at our sides, we have harvested the far fields, all that was left after the flooding. The yield is less than four cups a day for each family, but better than nothing.

  Although the blind horse continues to turn the wheel that fills the tank by the lakeshore that irrigates the gardens of the town, we know that the pipe can be cut at any time and have already begun with the digging of new wells within the walls.

  I have urged my fellow-citizens to cultivate their kitchen gardens, to plant root vegetables that will withstand the winter frosts. “Above all we must find ways of surviving the winter,” I tell them. “In the spring they will send relief, there is no doubt of that. After the first thaw we can plant sixty-day millet.”

  The school has been closed and the children are employed in trawling the salty southern fingers of the lake for the tiny red crustaceans that abound in the shallows. These we smoke and pack in one-pound slabs. They have a vile oily taste; normally only the fisherfolk eat them; but before the winter is out I suspect we will all be happy to have rats and insects to devour.

  Along the north rampart we have propped a row of helmets with spears upright beside them. Every half-hour a child passes along the row moving each helmet slightly. Thus do we hope to deceive the keen eyes of the barbarians.

  The garrison that Mandel bequeathed us consists of three men. They take turns in standing guard at the locked courthouse door, ignored by the rest of the town, keeping to themselves.

  In all measures for our preservation I have taken the lead. No one has challenged me. My beard is trimmed, I wear clean clothes, I have in effect resumed the legal administration that was interrupted a year ago by the arrival of the Civil Guard.

  We ought to be cutting and storing firewood; but no one can be found who will venture into the charred woods along the river, where the fisherfolk swear they have seen fresh signs of barbarian encampments.

  * *

  I am woken by a pounding on the door of my apartment. It is a man with a lantern, windburnt, gaunt, out of breath, in a soldier’s greatcoat too large for him. He stares at me in bewilderment.

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “Where is the Warrant Officer?” he replies, panting, trying to look over my shoulder.

  It is two o’clock in the morning. The gates have been opened to let in Colonel Joll’s carriage, which stands with its shaft resting on the ground in the middle of the square. Several men shelter in its lee against the bitter wind. From the wall the men of the watch peer down.

  “We need food, fresh horses, fodder,” my visitor is saying. He trots ahead of me, opens the door of the carriage, speaks: “The Warrant Officer is not here, sir, he has left.” At the window, in the moonlight, I catch a glimpse of Joll himself. He sees me too: the door is slammed shut, I hear the click of the bolt inside. Peering through the glass I can make him out sitting in the dim far corner, rigidly averting his face. I rap on the glass but he pays no attention. Then his underlings shoulder me away.

  Thrown out of the darkness, a stone lands on the roof of the carriage.

  Another of Joll’s escort comes running up. “There is nothing,” he pants. “The stables are empty, they have taken every single one.” The man who has unharnessed the sweating horses begins to curse. A second stone misses the carriage and nearly hits me. They are being thrown from the walls.

  “Listen to me,” I say. “You are cold and tired. Stable the horses, come inside, have something to eat, tell us your story. We have had no news since you left. If that madman wants to sit in his carriage all night, let him sit.”

  They barely listen to me: famished, exhausted men who have done more than their duty in hauling this policeman to safety out of the clutches of the barbarians, they whisper together, already re-harnessing a pair of their weary horses.

  I stare through the window at the faint blur against the blackness that is Colonel Joll. My cloak flaps, I shiver from the cold, but also from the tension of suppressed anger. An urge runs through me to smash the glass, to reach in and drag the man out through the jagged hole, to feel his flesh catch and tear on the edges, to hurl him to the ground and kick his body to pulp.

  As though touched by this murderous current he reluctantly turns his face towards me. Then he sidles across the seat until he is looking at me through the glass. Hi
s face is naked, washed clean, perhaps by the blue moonlight, perhaps by physical exhaustion. I stare at his pale high temples. Memories of his mother’s soft breast, of the tug in his hand of the first kite he ever flew, as well as of those intimate cruelties for which I abhor him, shelter in that beehive.

  He looks out at me, his eyes searching my face. The dark lenses are gone. Must he too suppress an urge to reach out, claw me, blind me with splinters?

  I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: “The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves,” I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. “Not on others,” I say: I repeat the words, pointing at my chest, pointing at his. He watches my lips, his thin lips move in imitation, or perhaps in derision, I do not know. Another stone, heavier, perhaps a brick, hits the carriage with a thunderous clatter. He starts, the horses jerk in their traces.

  Someone comes running up. “Go!” he shouts. He pushes past me, beats at the door of the carriage. His arms are full of loaves. “We must go!” he shouts. Colonel Joll slips the bolt and he tumbles the loaves in. The door slams shut. “Hurry!” he shouts. The carriage heaves into motion, its springs groaning.

  I grip the man’s arm. “Wait!” I cry. “I will not let you go until I know what has happened!”

  “Can’t you see?” he shouts, beating at my grasp. My hands are still weak; to hold him I have to clasp him in a hug. “Tell me and you can go!” I pant.

  The carriage is nearing the gates. The two mounted men have already passed through; the other men run behind. Stones clatter against the carriage out of the darkness, shouts and curses rain down.

  “What do you want to know?” he says, struggling vainly.

  “Where is everyone else?”

  “Gone. Scattered. All over the place. I don’t know where they are. We had to find our own way. It was impossible to keep together.” As his comrades disappear into the night he wrestles harder. “Let me go!” he sobs. He is no stronger than a child.

  “In a minute. How could it be that the barbarians did this to you?”

  “We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert! Why did no one tell us it would be like that? We were not beaten—they led us out into the desert and then they vanished!”

  “Who led you?”

  “They—the barbarians! They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!”

  “So you gave up and came home?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  He glares desperately back at me. “Why should I lie?” he shouts. “I don’t want to be left behind, that is all!” He tears himself loose. Shielding his head with his hands, he races through the gate and into the darkness.

  * *

  Digging has ceased at the third well-site. Some of the diggers have already gone home, others stand around waiting for orders.

  “What is the trouble?” I say.

  They point to the bones lying on a heap of fresh earth: a child’s bones.

  “There must have been a grave here,” I say. “A strange place for a grave.” We are on the vacant plot behind the barracks, between the barracks and the south wall. The bones are old, they have absorbed the colour of the red clay. “What do you want to do? We can start digging again nearer the wall if you like.”

  They help me to climb into the pit. Standing chest-deep I scratch away the earth around the side of a jawbone embedded in the wall. “Here is the skull,” I say. But no, the skull has already been dug up, they show it to me.

  “Look under your feet,” says the foreman.

  It is too dark to see, but when I chop lightly with the mattock I strike something hard; my fingers tell me it is bone.

  “They aren’t buried properly,” he says. He squats at the lip of the pit. “They are lying just any old how, on top of each other.”

  “Yes,” I say. “We can’t dig here, can we?”

  “No,” he says.

  “We must fill it in and start again nearer the wall.”

  He is silent. He reaches out a hand and helps me clamber out. The bystanders say nothing either. I have to toss the bones back in and shovel the first earth before they will pick up their spades.

  * *

  In the dream I stand again in the pit. The earth is damp, dark water seeps up, my feet squelch, it costs me a slow effort to lift them.

  I feel under the surface, searching for the bones. My hand comes up with the corner of a jute sack, black, rotten, which crumbles away between my fingers. I dip back into the ooze. A fork, bent and tarnished. A dead bird, a parrot: I hold it by the tail, its bedraggled feathers hang down, its soggy wings droop, its eye sockets are empty. When I release it, it falls through the surface without a splash. “Poisoned water,” I think. “I must be careful not to drink here. I must not touch my right hand to my mouth.”

  * *

  I have not slept with a woman since I returned from the desert. Now at this most inappropriate of times my sex begins to reassert itself. I sleep badly and wake up in the mornings with a sullen erection growing like a branch out of my groin. It has nothing to do with desire. Lying in my rumpled bed I wait in vain for it to go away. I try to invoke images of the girl who night after night slept here with me. I see her standing barelegged in her shift, one foot in the basin, waiting for me to wash her, her hand pressing down on my shoulder. I lather the stocky calf. She slips the shift up over her head. I lather her thighs; then I put the soap aside, embrace her hips, rub my face in her belly. I can smell the soap, feel the warmth of the water, the pressure of her hands. From the depths of that memory I reach out to touch myself. There is no leap of response. It is like touching my own wrist: part of myself, but hard, dull, a limb with no life of its own. I try to bring it off: futile, for there is no feeling. “I am tired,” I tell myself.

  For an hour I sit in an armchair waiting for this rod of blood to dwindle. In its own good time it does. Then I dress and go out.

  In the night it comes back: an arrow growing out of me, pointing nowhere. Again I try to feed it on images, but detect no answering life.

  “Try bread mould and milkroot,” the herbalist says. “It may work. If it does not, come back to me. Here is some milkroot. You grind it and mix it to a paste with the mould and a little warm water. Take two spoonfuls after each meal. It is very unpleasant, very bitter, but be assured it will not do you any harm.”

  I pay him in silver. No one but children will take copper coins any more.

  “But tell me,” he says: “why should a fine healthy man like yourself want to kill off his desires?”

  “It has nothing to do with desire, father. It is simply an irritation. A stiffening. Like rheumatism.”

  He smiles. I smile back.

  “This must be the only shop in town they did not loot,” I say. It is not a shop, just a recess and a front under an awning, with racks of dusty jars and, hanging from hooks on the wall, roots and bunches of dried leaves, the medicines with which he has dosed the town for fifty years.

  “Yes, they did not trouble me. They suggested that I leave for my own good. ‘The barbarians will fry your balls and eat them’—that was what they said, those were their words. I said, ‘I was born here, I’ll die here, I’m not leaving.’ Now they are gone, and it’s better without them, I say.”

  “Yes.”

  “Try the milkroot. If it doesn’t work, come back.”

  I drink the bitter concoction and eat as much lettuce as I can, since people say that lettuce takes away one’s potency. But I do all this half-heartedly, aware that I am misinterpreting the signs.

  I also call on Mai. The inn had closed down, there being too little custom; now she comes in to help her mother in the barracks. I find he
r in the kitchen putting her baby to sleep in its cot near the stove. “I love the big old stove you have here,” she says. “It keeps its warmth for hours. Such a gentle warmth.” She brews tea; we sit at the table watching the glowing coals through the grate. “I wish I had something nice to offer you,” she says, “but the soldiers cleaned out the storeroom, there is hardly anything left.”

  “I want you to come upstairs with me,” I say. “Can you leave the child here?”

  We are old friends. Years ago, before she married the second time, she used to visit me in my apartment in the afternoons.

  “I’d rather not leave him,” she says, “in case he wakes up alone.” So I wait while she wraps the child, and then follow her up the stairs: a young woman still, with a heavy body and shapeless spreading thighs. I try to recall what it was like with her, but cannot. In those days all women pleased me.

  She settles the child on cushions in a corner, murmuring to it till it falls asleep again.

  “It is just for a night or two,” I say. “Everything is coming to an end. We must live as we can.” She drops her drawers, trampling on them like a horse, and comes to me in her smock. I blow out the lamp. My words have left me dispirited.

  As I enter her she sighs. I rub my cheek against hers. My hand finds her breast; her own hand closes over it, caresses it, pushes it aside. “I am a bit sore,” she whispers. “From the baby.”

  I am still searching for something I want to say when I feel the climax come, far-off, slight, like an earth-tremor in another part of the world.

  “This is your fourth child, isn’t it?” We lie side by side under the covers.

  “Yes, the fourth. One died.”

  “And the father? Does he help?”

  “He left some money behind. He was with the army.”

  “I am sure he will come back.”