Waiting for the Barbarians Page 5

  I cast my mind back, trying to recover an image of her as she was before. I must believe that I saw her on the day she was brought in by the soldiers roped neck to neck with the other barbarian prisoners. I know that my gaze must have passed over her when, together with the others, she sat in the barracks yard waiting for whatever was to happen next. My eye passed over her; but I have no memory of that passage. On that day she was still unmarked; but I must believe she was unmarked as I must believe she was once a child, a little girl in pigtails running after her pet lamb in a universe where somewhere far away I strode in the pride of my life. Strain as I will, my first image remains of the kneeling beggar-girl.

  I have not entered her. From the beginning my desire has not taken on that direction, that directedness. Lodging my dry old man’s member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread. When I look at her naked body and my own, I find it impossible to believe that once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower radiating out from a kernel in the loins. These bodies of hers and mine are diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere; but often also flat, blank. I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another.

  I watch her as she undresses, hoping to capture in her movements a hint of an old free state. But even the motion with which she pulls the smock up over her head and throws it aside is crabbed, defensive, trammelled, as though she were afraid of striking unseen obstacles. Her face has the look of something that knows itself watched.

  From a trapper I have bought a little silver-fox cub. It is no more than a few months old, barely weaned, with teeth like a fine saw-edge. The first day she took it with her to the kitchen, but it was terrified by the fire and the noise, so now I keep it upstairs, where it cowers all day under the furniture. During the night I sometimes hear the click-click of its claws on the wooden floors as it roams about. It laps from a saucer of milk and eats scraps of cooked meat. It cannot be housetrained; the rooms have begun to smell of its droppings; but it is still too early to let it run loose in the yard. Every few days I call in the cook’s grandson to crawl behind the cabinet and under the chairs to clean up the mess.

  “It’s a very pretty little creature,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Animals belong outdoors.”

  “Do you want me to take it to the lake and let it go?”

  “You can’t do that, it is too young, it would starve to death or dogs would catch it.”

  So the fox cub stays. Sometimes I see its sharp snout peeking out from a dark corner. Otherwise it is only a noise in the night and a pervasive tang of urine as I wait for it to grow big enough to be disposed of.

  “People will say I keep two wild animals in my rooms, a fox and a girl.”

  She does not see the joke, or does not like it. Her lips close, her gaze settles rigidly on the wall, I know she is doing her best to glare at me. My heart goes out to her, but what can I do? Whether I appear to her decked in my robes of office or whether I stand naked before her or whether I tear open my breast for her, I am the same man. “I am sorry,” I say, the words falling inertly from my mouth. I reach out five dough-fingers and stroke her hair. “Of course it is not the same.”

  * *

  One after another I interview those men who were on duty while the prisoners were being questioned. From each I get the same account: they hardly spoke to the prisoners, they were not permitted to enter the room where the interrogations took place, they cannot tell me what went on in there. But from the sweeping-woman I get a description of the room itself: “Just a little table, and stools, three stools, and a mat in the corner, otherwise quite bare . . . No, no fire, only a brazier. I used to empty out the ashes.”

  Now that life has returned to normal the room is in use again. At my request the four soldiers who are quartered there drag their chests out on to the gallery, pile their sleeping-mats, plates and mugs on top of them, take down their strings of laundry. I close the door and stand in the empty room. The air is still and cold. Already the lake is beginning to freeze over. The first snows have fallen. Far away I hear the bells of a pony-cart. I close my eyes and make an effort to imagine the room as it must have been two months ago during the Colonel’s visit; but it is difficult to lose myself in reverie with the four young men dawdling outside, chafing their hands together, stamping their feet, murmuring, impatient for me to go, their warm breath forming puffs in the air.

  I kneel down to examine the floor. It is clean, it is swept daily, it is like the floor of any room. Above the fireplace on the wall and ceiling there is soot. There is also a mark the size of my hand where soot has been rubbed into the wall. Otherwise the walls are blank. What signs can I be looking for? I open the door and motion to the men to bring their belongings back.

  A second time I interview the two guards who were on duty in the yard. “Tell me exactly what happened when prisoners were questioned. Tell me what you yourselves saw.”

  The taller one replies, a boy with a long jaw and an eager air whom I have always liked. “The officer . . .”

  “The police officer?”

  “Yes . . . The police officer would come to the hall where the prisoners were kept and he would point. We would fetch the prisoners he wanted and take them out to be questioned. Afterwards we would take them back.”

  “One at a time?”

  “Not always. Sometimes two.”

  “You know that one of the prisoners afterwards died. Do you remember that prisoner? Do you know what they did to him?”

  “We heard he went berserk and attacked them.”

  “Yes?”

  “That is what we heard. I helped to carry him back to the hall. Where they all slept. He was breathing strangely, very deep and fast. That was the last I saw of him. He was dead the next day.”

  “Go on. I am listening. I want you to tell me everything you can remember.”

  The boy’s face is strained. I am sure he has been advised not to talk. “That man was questioned longer than anyone else. I saw him sitting by himself in a corner, after he had been in the first time, holding his head.” His eyes flicker towards his companion. “He would not eat anything. He was not hungry. His daughter was with him: she tried to make him take food but he would not.”

  “What happened to his daughter?”

  “She was also questioned, but not so long.”

  “Go on.”

  But he has nothing more to tell me.

  “Listen,” I say: “we both know who the daughter is. She is the girl who stays with me. It is not a secret. Now go on: tell me what happened.”

  “I do not know, sir! Most of the time I was not there.” He appeals to his friend, but his friend is mute. “Sometimes there was screaming, I think they beat her, but I was not there. When I came off duty I would go away.”

  “You know that today she cannot walk. They broke her feet. Did they do these things to her in front of the other man, her father?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And you know that she cannot see properly any more. When did they do that?”

  “Sir, there were many prisoners to take care of, some of them sick! I knew that her feet were broken but I knew nothing about her being blind till long afterwards. There was nothing I could do, I did not want to become involved in a matter I did not understand!”

  His friend has nothing to add. I dismiss them. “Do not be afraid because you have spoken to me,” I say.

  In the night the dream comes back. I am trudging across the snow of an endless plain towards a group of tiny figures playing around a snowcastle. As I approach the children sidle away or melt into the air. Only one figure remains, a hooded child sitting with its back to me. I circle around the child, who continues to pat snow on the sides of the castle, till I can peer under the hood. The fa
ce I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself. Between numb fingers I hold out a coin.

  * *

  Winter has settled in. The wind blows from the north, and will blow incessantly for the next four months. Standing at the window with my forehead against the cold glass I hear it whistle in the eaves, lifting and dropping a loose roof-tile. Flurries of dust chase across the square, dust patters against the pane. The sky is full of fine dust, the sun swims up into an orange sky and sets copper-red. Now and again there are squalls of snow which briefly fleck the earth with white. The siege of winter is on. The fields are empty, no one has reason to go outside the town walls except those few who make a livelihood by hunting. The twice-weekly parade of the garrison has been suspended, the soldiers have permission to quit the barracks if they wish and live in the town, for there is little for them to do but drink and sleep. When I walk the ramparts in the early morning half the watchposts are empty and the numbed sentries on duty, swathed in furs, struggle to raise a hand in salute. They might as well be in their beds. For the duration of the winter the Empire is safe: beyond the eye’s reach the barbarians too, huddled about their stoves, are gritting their teeth against the cold.

  There have been no barbarian visitors this year. It used to be that groups of nomads would visit the settlement in winter to pitch their tents outside the walls and engage in barter, exchanging wool, skins, felts and leatherwork for cotton goods, tea, sugar, beans, flour. We prize barbarian leatherwork, particularly the sturdy boots they sew. In the past I have encouraged commerce but forbidden payment in money. I have also tried to keep the taverns closed to them. Above all I do not want to see a parasite settlement grow up on the fringes of the town populated with beggars and vagrants enslaved to strong drink. It always pained me in the old days to see these people fall victim to the guile of shopkeepers, exchanging their goods for trinkets, lying drunk in the gutter, and confirming thereby the settlers’ litany of prejudice: that barbarians are lazy, immoral, filthy, stupid. Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization; and upon this resolution I based the conduct of my administration. (I say this who now keep a barbarian girl for my bed!)

  But this year a curtain has fallen all along the frontier. From our ramparts we stare out over the wastes. For all we know, keener eyes than ours stare back. Commerce is at an end. Since the news arrived from the capital that whatever might be necessary to safeguard the Empire would be done, regardless of cost, we have returned to an age of raids and armed vigilance. There is nothing to do but keep our swords bright, watch and wait.

  I spend my time in my old recreations. I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have of the southern desert region; on days when the wind does not bite so keenly I take out a party of diggers to clear drift-sand from the excavations; and once or twice a week I set off by myself in the early morning to hunt antelope along the lakeshore.

  A generation ago there were antelope and hares in such numbers that watchmen with dogs had to patrol the fields by night to protect the young wheat. But under pressure from the settlement, particularly from dogs running wild and hunting in packs, the antelope have retreated eastward and northward to the lower reaches of the river and the far shore. Now the hunter must be prepared to ride at least an hour before he can begin his stalk.

  Sometimes, on a good morning, I am enabled to live again all the strength and swiftness of my manhood. Like a wraith I glide from brake to brake. Shod in boots that have soaked in thirty years of grease, I wade through icy water. Over my coat I wear my huge old bearskin. Rime forms on my beard but my fingers are warm in their mittens. My eyes are sharp, my hearing is keen, I sniff the air like a hound, I feel a pure exhilaration.

  Today I leave my horse hobbled where the line of marshgrass ends on the bleak south-west shore and begin to push my way through the reeds. The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple. Almost at once, with absurd good fortune, I come upon a waterbuck, a ram with heavy curved horns, shaggy in his winter coat, standing sideways on to me, teetering as he stretches up for the reed-tips. From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves. Around his fetlocks I can make out circlets of ice-drops.

  I am barely attuned yet to my surroundings; still, as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs under his chest, I slide the gun up and sight behind his shoulder. The movement is smooth and steady, but perhaps the sun glints on the barrel, for in his descent he turns his head and sees me. His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.

  My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die.

  He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things. Behind my paltry cover I stand trying to shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling, till the buck wheels and with a whisk of his tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds.

  I trudge on purposelessly for an hour before I turn back.

  “Never before have I had the feeling of not living my own life on my own terms,” I tell the girl, struggling to explain what happened. She is unsettled by talk like this, by the demand I seem to be making on her to respond. “I do not see,” she says. She shakes her head. “Didn’t you want to shoot this buck?”

  For a long while there is silence between us.

  “If you want to do something, you do it,” she says very firmly. She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, “If you had wanted to do it you would have done it.” In the makeshift language we share there are no nuances. She has a fondness for facts, I note, for pragmatic dicta; she dislikes fancy, questions, speculations; we are an ill-matched couple. Perhaps that is how barbarian children are brought up: to live by rote, by the wisdom of the fathers as handed down.

  “And you,” I say. “Do you do whatever you want?” I have a sense of letting go, of being carried dangerously far by the words. “Are you here in bed with me because it is what you want?”

  She lies naked, her oiled skin glowing a vegetal gold in the firelight. There are moments—I feel the onset of one now—when the desire I feel for her, usually so obscure, flickers into a shape I can recognize. My hand stirs, strokes her, fits itself to the contour of her breast.

  She does not answer my words, but I plunge on, embracing her tightly, speaking thick and muffled into her ear: “Come, tell me why you are here.”

  “Because there is nowhere else to go.”

  “And why do I want you here?”

  She wriggles in my grasp, clenches her hand into a fist between her chest and mine. “You want to talk all the time,” she complains. The simplicity of the moment is over; we separate and lie silent side by side. What bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of thorns? “You should not go hunting if you do not enjoy it.”

  I shake my head. That is not the meaning of the story, but what is the use of arguing? I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth.

  She speaks. “You are always asking me that question, so I will now tell you. It was
a fork, a kind of fork with only two teeth. There were little knobs on the teeth to make them blunt. They put it in the coals till it was hot, then they touched you with it, to burn you. I saw the marks where they had burned people.”

  Is this the question I asked? I want to protest but instead listen on, chilled.

  “They did not burn me. They said they would burn my eyes out, but they did not. The man brought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids open. But I had nothing to tell them. That was all.

  “That was when the damage came. After that I could not see properly any more. There was a blur in the middle of everything I looked at; I could see only around the edges. It is difficult to explain.

  “But now it is getting better. The left eye is getting better. That is all.”

  I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back. “And this?” I say, touching the worm-like sear in the corner.

  “That is nothing. That is where the iron touched me. It made a little burn. It is not sore.” She pushes my hands away.

  “What do you feel towards the men who did this?”

  She lies thinking a long time. Then she says, “I am tired of talking.”

  * *

  There are other times when I suffer fits of resentment against my bondage to the ritual of the oiling and rubbing, the drowsiness, the slump into oblivion. I cease to comprehend what pleasure I can ever have found in her obstinate, phlegmatic body, and even discover in myself stirrings of outrage. I become withdrawn, irritable; the girl turns her back and goes to sleep.