Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  II

  She kneels in the shade of the barracks wall a few yards from the gate, muffled in a coat too large for her, a fur cap open before her on the ground. She has the straight black eyebrows, the glossy black hair of the barbarians. What is a barbarian woman doing in town begging? There are no more than a few pennies in the cap.

  Twice more during the day I pass her. Each time she gives me a strange regard, staring straight ahead of her until I am near, then very slowly turning her head away from me. The second time I drop a coin into the cap. “It is cold and late to be outdoors,” I say. She nods. The sun is setting behind a strip of black cloud; the wind from the north already carries a hint of snow; the square is empty; I pass on.

  The next day she is not there. I speak to the gatekeeper: “There was a woman sitting over there all of yesterday, begging. Where does she come from?” The woman is blind, he replies. She is one of the barbarians the Colonel brought in. She was left behind.

  A few days later I see her crossing the square, walking slowly and awkwardly with two sticks, the sheepskin coat trailing behind her in the dust. I give orders; she is brought to my rooms, where she stands before me propped on her sticks. “Take off your cap,” I say. The soldier who has brought her in lifts off the cap. It is the same girl, the same black hair cut in a fringe across the forehead, the same broad mouth, the black eyes that look through and past me.

  “They tell me you are blind.”

  “I can see,” she says. Her eyes move from my face and settle somewhere behind me to my right.

  “Where do you come from?” Without thinking I cast a glance over my shoulder: she is staring at nothing but empty wall. Her gaze has grown rigid. Already knowing the answer, I repeat my question. She meets it with silence.

  I dismiss the soldier. We are alone.

  “I know who you are,” I say. “Will you please sit?” I take her sticks and help to seat her on a stool. Under the coat she wears wide linen drawers tucked into heavy-soled boots. She smells of smoke, of stale clothing, of fish. Her hands are horny.

  “Do you make a living by begging?” I ask. “You know you are not supposed to be in town. We could expel you at any time and send you back to your people.”

  She sits staring eerily ahead of her.

  “Look at me,” I say.

  “I am looking. This is how I look.”

  I wave a hand in front of her eyes. She blinks. I bring my face closer and stare into her eyes. She wheels her gaze from the wall on to me. The black irises are set off by milky whites as clear as a child’s. I touch her cheek: she starts.

  “I asked how you make a living.”

  She shrugs. “I do washing.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I live.”

  “We do not permit vagrants in the town. Winter is almost here. You must have somewhere to live. Otherwise you must go back to your own people.”

  She sits obdurately. I know I am beating about the bush.

  “I can offer you work. I need someone to keep these rooms tidy, to see to my laundry. The woman who does it at present is not satisfactory.”

  She understands what I am offering. She sits very stiff, her hands in her lap.

  “Are you alone? Please answer.”

  “Yes.” Her voice comes in a whisper. She clears her throat. “Yes.”

  “I have offered that you should come and work here. You cannot beg in the streets. I cannot permit that. Also you must have a place of abode. If you work here you can share the cook’s room.”

  “You do not understand. You do not want someone like me.” She gropes for her sticks. I know that she cannot see. “I am . . .”— she holds up her forefinger, grips it, twists it. I have no idea what the gesture means. “Can I go?” She makes her own way to the head of the stairs, then has to wait for me to help her down.

  A day passes. I stare out over the square where the wind chases flurries of dust. Two little boys are playing with a hoop. They bowl it into the wind. It rolls forward, slows, teeters, rides back, falls. The boys lift their faces and run after it, the hair whipped back from their clean brows.

  I find the girl and stand before her. She sits with her back against the trunk of one of the great walnut trees: it is hard to see whether she is even awake. “Come,” I say, and touch her shoulder. She shakes her head. “Come,” I say, “everyone is indoors.” I beat the dust from her cap and hand it to her, help her to her feet, walk slowly beside her across the square, empty now save for the gatekeeper, who shades his eyes to stare at us.

  The fire is lit. I draw the curtains, light the lamp. She refuses the stool, but yields up her sticks and kneels in the centre of the carpet.

  “This is not what you think it is,” I say. The words come reluctantly. Can I really be about to excuse myself? Her lips are clenched shut, her ears too no doubt, she wants nothing of old men and their bleating consciences. I prowl around her, talking about our vagrancy ordinances, sick at myself. Her skin begins to glow in the warmth of the closed room. She tugs at her coat, opens her throat to the fire. The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible; I shudder.

  “Show me your feet,” I say in the new thick voice that seems to be mine. “Show me what they have done to your feet.”

  She neither helps nor hinders me. I work at the thongs and eyelets of the coat, throw it open, pull the boots off. They are a man’s boots, far too large for her. Inside them her feet are swaddled, shapeless.

  “Let me see,” I say.

  She begins to unwrap the dirty bandages. I leave the room, go downstairs to the kitchen, come back with a basin and a pitcher of warm water. She sits waiting on the carpet, her feet bare. They are broad, the toes stubby, the nails crusted with dirt.

  She runs a finger across the outside of her ankle. “That is where it was broken. The other one too.” She leans back on her hands and stretches her legs.

  “Does it hurt?” I say. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing.

  “Not any more. It has healed. But perhaps when the cold comes.”

  “You should sit,” I say. I help her off with the coat, seat her on the stool, pour the water into the basin, and begin to wash her feet. For a while her legs remain tense; then they relax.

  I wash slowly, working up a lather, gripping her firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons of her feet, running my fingers between her toes. I change my position to kneel not in front of her but beside her, so that, holding a leg between elbow and side, I can caress the foot with both hands.

  I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present. When I come to, my fingers have slackened, the foot rests in the basin, my head droops.

  I dry the right foot, shuffle to the other side, lift the leg of the wide drawers above her knee, and, fighting against drowsiness, begin to wash the left foot. “Sometimes this room gets very hot,” I say. The pressure of her leg against my side does not lessen. I go on. “I will find clean bandages for your feet,” I say, “but not now.” I push the basin aside and dry the foot. I am aware of the girl struggling to stand up; but now, I think, she must take care of herself. My eyes close. It becomes an intense pleasure to keep them closed, to savour the blissful giddiness. I stretch out on the carpet. In an instant I am asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up cold and stiff. The fire is out, the girl is gone.

  * *

  I watch her eat. She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch. She has a good appetite, the appetite of a robust young countrywoman.

  “I don’t believe you can see,” I say.

  “Yes, I can see. When I look straight there is nothing, there is—” (she rubs the air in front of her like someone cleaning a window).

  “A blur,” I say.


  “There is a blur. But I can see out of the sides of my eyes. The left eye is better than the right. How could I find my way if I didn’t see?”

  “Did they do it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they do?”

  She shrugs and is silent. Her plate is empty. I dish up more of the bean stew she seems to like so much. She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles. “Beans make you fart,” she says. The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock and drawers. When she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably on the periphery of her vision. When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy that one day falls asleep washing her feet and the next day feeds her bean stew and the next day—she does not know.

  I seat her, fill the basin, roll the drawers above her knees. Now that the two feet are together in the water I can see that the left is turned further inward than the right, that when she stands she must stand on the outer edges of her feet. Her ankles are large, puffy, shapeless, the skin scarred purple.

  I begin to wash her. She raises her feet for me in turn. I knead and massage the lax toes through the soft milky soap. Soon my eyes close, my head droops. It is rapture, of a kind.

  When I have washed her feet I begin to wash her legs. For this she has to stand in the basin and lean on my shoulder. My hands run up and down her legs from ankle to knee, back and forth, squeezing, stroking, moulding. Her legs are short and sturdy, her calves strong. Sometimes my fingers run behind her knees, tracing the tendons, pressing into the hollows between them. Light as feathers they stray up the backs of her thighs.

  I help her to the bed and dry her with a warm towel. I begin to pare and clean her toenails; but already waves of sleepiness are running over me. I catch my head drooping, my body falling forward in a stupor. Carefully I put the scissors aside. Then, fully clothed, I lay myself down head to foot beside her. I fold her legs together in my arms, cradle my head on them, and in an instant am asleep.

  I wake up in the dark. The lamp is out, there is a smell of burnt wick. I get up and open the curtains. The girl lies huddled asleep, her knees drawn up to her chest. When I touch her she groans and huddles tighter. “You are getting cold,” I say, but she hears nothing. I spread a blanket over her, and a second blanket.

  * *

  First comes the ritual of the washing, for which she is now naked. I wash her feet, as before, her legs, her buttocks. My soapy hand travels between her thighs, incuriously, I find. She raises her arms while I wash her armpits. I wash her belly, her breasts. I push her hair aside and wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her.

  She lies on the bed and I rub her body with almond oil. I close my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the rubbing, while the fire, piled high, roars in the grate.

  I feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us. I feed her, shelter her, use her body, if that is what I am doing, in this foreign way. There used to be moments when she stiffened at certain intimacies; but now her body yields when I nuzzle my face into her belly or clasp her feet between my thighs. She yields to everything. Sometimes she slips off into sleep before I am finished. She sleeps as intensely as a child.

  As for me, under her blind gaze, in the close warmth of the room, I can undress without embarrassment, baring my thin shanks, my slack genitals, my paunch, my flabby old man’s breasts, the turkey-skin of my throat. I find myself moving about unthinkingly in this nakedness, sometimes staying to bask in the fire after the girl has gone to sleep, or sitting in a chair reading.

  But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if poleaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, blank, outside time.

  One evening, rubbing her scalp with oil, massaging her temples and forehead, I notice in the corner of one eye a greyish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid, grazing.

  “What is this?” I ask, tracing the caterpillar with my fingernail.

  “That is where they touched me,” she says, and pushes my hand away.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Let me look.”

  It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her. Between thumb and forefinger I part her eyelids. The caterpillar comes to an end, decapitated, at the pink inner rim of the eyelid. There is no other mark. The eye is whole.

  I look into the eye. Am I to believe that gazing back at me she sees nothing—my feet perhaps, parts of the room, a hazy circle of light, but at the centre, where I am, only a blur, a blank? I pass my hand slowly in front of her face, watching her pupils. I cannot discern any movement. She does not blink. But she smiles: “Why do you do that? Do you think I cannot see?” Brown eyes, so brown as to be black.

  I touch my lips to her forehead. “What did they do to you?” I murmur. My tongue is slow, I sway on my feet with exhaustion. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”

  She shakes her head. On the edge of oblivion it comes back to me that my fingers, running over her buttocks, have felt a phantom criss-cross of ridges under the skin. “Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,” I mumble. She gives no sign that she has even heard me. I slump on the couch, drawing her down beside me, yawning. “Tell me,” I want to say, “don’t make a mystery of it, pain is only pain”; but words elude me. My arm folds around her, my lips are at the hollow of her ear, I struggle to speak; then blackness falls.

  * *

  I have relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid. “From the kitchen to the Magistrate’s bed in sixteen easy steps”—that is how the soldiers talk of the kitchenmaids. Another of their sayings: “What is the last thing the Magistrate does when he leaves in the morning?—He shuts his latest girl in the oven.” The smaller a town the more richly it hums with gossip. There are no private affairs here. Gossip is the air we breathe.

  For part of the day she washes dishes, peels vegetables, helps to bake bread and prepare the humdrum round of porridge, soup and stew that the soldiers are fed. There are, besides her, the old lady who has ruled over the kitchen almost as long as I have been magistrate, and two girls, the younger of whom ascended the sixteen stairs once or twice last year. At first I am afraid these two will band together against her; but no, they seem quickly to make friends. Passing the kitchen door on my way out I hear, muffled by the steamy warmth, voices, soft chatter, giggles. I am amused to detect in myself the faintest stab of jealousy.

  “Do you mind the work?” I ask her.

  “I like the other girls. They are nice.”

  “At least it’s better than begging, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  The three girls sleep together in a small room a few doors from the kitchen, if they do not happen to be sleeping elsewhere. It is to this room that she finds her way in the dark if I send her away in the night or the early morning. No doubt her friends have prattled about these trysts of hers, and the details are all over the marketplace. The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal. I cannot play the part of a man of iron or a saintly widower. Sniggers, jokes, knowing looks—these are part of the price I am resigned to paying.

  “Do you like it, living in a town?” I ask her cautiously.

  “I like it most of the time. There is more to do.”

  “Are there things you miss?”

  “I miss my sister.”

  “If you really want to go back,” I say, “I will have you taken.”

  “Taken where?” she sa
ys. She lies on her back with her hands placidly over her breasts. I lie beside her, speaking softly. This is where the break always falls. This is where my hand, caressing her belly, seems as awkward as a lobster. The erotic impulse, if that is what it has been, withers; with surprise I see myself clutched to this stolid girl, unable to remember what I ever desired in her, angry with myself for wanting and not wanting her.

  She herself is oblivious of my swings of mood. Her days have begun to settle into a routine with which she seems content. In the morning after I have left she comes to sweep and dust the apartment. Then she helps in the kitchen with the midday meal. Her afternoons are mainly her own. After the evening meal, after all the pots and pans have been scoured, the floor washed, the fire damped, she leaves her fellows and picks her way up the stairs to me. She undresses and lies down, waiting for my inexplicable attentions. Perhaps I sit beside her stroking her body, waiting for a flush of blood that never truly comes. Perhaps I simply blow out the lamp and settle down with her. In the dark she soon forgets me and falls asleep. So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits itself in sleep into ever sturdier health, working in silence even at the points of irremediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again.