Waiting for the Barbarians

by J. M. Coetzee

  All the excavation we did last year has been undone by driftsand. Only corner-posts stand out here and there in the desolation where, one must believe, people once lived. I scour a hollow for myself and sit down to rest. I doubt that anyone would come looking for me here. I could lean against this ancient post with its faded carvings of dolphins and waves and be blistered by the sun and dried by the wind and eventually frozen by the frost, and not be found until in some distant era of peace the children of the oasis come back to their playground and find the skeleton, uncovered by the wind, of an archaic desert-dweller clad in unidentifiable rags.

  I wake up chilled. The sun rests huge and red upon the western horizon. The wind is rising: already flying sand has banked up against my side. I am conscious above all of thirst. The plan I have toyed with, of spending the night here among the ghosts, shivering with cold, waiting for the familiar walls and treetops to materialize again out of the dark, is insupportable. There is nothing for me outside the walls but to starve. Scuttling from hole to hole like a mouse I forfeit even the appearance of innocence. Why should I do my enemies’ work for them? If they want to spill my blood, let them at least bear the guilt of it. The gloomy fear of the past day has lost its force. Perhaps this escapade has not been futile if I can recover, however dimly, a spirit of outrage.

  * *

  I rattle the gate of the barracks yard. “Don’t you know who is here? I’ve had my holiday, now let me back in!”

  Someone comes running up: in the dim light we peer at each other through the bars: it is the man assigned as my warder. “Be quiet!” he whispers through his teeth, and tugs at the bolts. Behind him voices murmur, people gather.

  Gripping my arm he takes me at a trot across the yard. “Who is it?” someone calls. It is on the tip of my tongue to reply, to take the key out and wave it, when it strikes me that this act might be imprudent. So I wait at my old door till my warder unlocks it, pushes me inside, and closes it on the two of us. His voice comes to me out of the darkness tight with anger: “Listen: you talk to anyone about getting out and I’ll make your life a misery! You understand? I’ll make you pay! You say nothing! If anyone asks you about this evening, say I took you out for a walk, for exercise, nothing more. Do you understand me?”

  I unpick his fingers from my arm and slide away from him. “You see how easy it would be for me to run away and seek shelter with the barbarians,” I murmur. “Why do you think I came back? You are only a common soldier, you can only obey orders. Still: think about it.” He clutches my wrist, and again I loosen his fingers. “Think about why I came back and what it would have meant if I had not. You can’t expect sympathy from the men in blue, I’m sure you know that. Think what might happen if I got out again.” Now I grip his hand. “But don’t fret, I won’t talk: make up any story you like and I will support you. I know what it is like to be frightened.” There is a long suspicious silence. “Do you know what I want most of all?” I say. “I want something to eat and something to drink. I am starved, I have had nothing all day.”

  So all is as it was before. This absurd incarceration continues. I lie on my back watching the block of light above me growing stronger and then weaker day after day. I listen to the remote sounds of the bricklayer’s trowel, the carpenter’s hammer coming through the wall. I eat and drink and, like everyone else, I wait.

  * *

  First there is the sound of muskets far away, as diminutive as popguns. Then from nearer by, from the ramparts themselves, come volleys of answering shots. There is a stampede of footsteps across the barracks yard. “The barbarians!” someone shouts; but I think he is wrong. Above all the clamour the great bell begins to peal.

  Kneeling with an ear to the crack of the door I try to make out what is going on.

  The noise from the square mounts from a hubbub to a steady roar in which no single voice can be distinguished. The whole town must be pouring out in welcome, thousands of ecstatic souls. Volleys of musket-shots keep cracking. Then the tenor of the roar changes, rises in pitch and excitement. Faintly above it come the brassy tones of bugles.

  The temptation is too great. What have I to lose? I unlock the door. In glare so blinding that I must squint and shade my eyes, I cross the yard, pass through the gate, and join the rear of the crowd. The volleys and the roar of applause continue. The old woman in black beside me takes my arm to steady herself and stands on her toes. “Can you see?” she says. “Yes, I can see men on horseback,” I reply; but she is not listening.

  I can see a long file of horsemen who, amid flying banners, pass through the gateway and make their way to the centre of the square where they dismount. There is a cloud of dust over the whole square, but I see that they are smiling and laughing: one of them rides with his hands raised high in triumph, another waves a garland of flowers. They progress slowly, for the crowd presses around them, trying to touch them, throwing flowers, clapping their hands above their heads in joy, spinning round and round in private ecstasies. Children dive past me, scrambling through the legs of the grownups to be nearer to their heroes. Fusillade after fusillade comes from the ramparts, which are lined with cheering people.

  One part of the cavalcade does not dismount. Headed by a stern-faced young corporal bearing the green and gold banner of the battalion, it passes through the press of bodies to the far end of the square and then begins a circuit of the perimeter, the crowd surging slowly in its wake. The word runs like fire from neighbour to neighbour: “Barbarians!”

  The standard-bearer’s horse is led by a man who brandishes a heavy stick to clear his way. Behind him comes another trooper trailing a rope; and at the end of the rope, tied neck to neck, comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache. For a moment I am puzzled by the posture, by the tiptoeing eagerness with which they follow their leader, till I catch a glint of metal and at once comprehend. A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man’s hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks. “It makes them meek as lambs,” I remember being told by a soldier who had once seen the trick: “they think of nothing but how to keep very still.” My heart grows sick. I know now that I should not have left my cell.

  I have to turn my back smartly to avoid being seen by the two who, with their mounted escort, bring up the rear of the procession: the bareheaded young captain whose first triumph this is, and at his shoulder, leaner and darker after his months of campaigning, Colonel of Police Joll.

  The circuit is made, everyone has a chance to see the twelve miserable captives, to prove to his children that the barbarians are real. Now the crowd, myself reluctantly in its wake, flows towards the great gate, where a half-moon of soldiers blocks its way until, compressed at front and rear, it cannot budge.

  “What is going on?” I ask my neighbour.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “but help me to lift him.” I help him to lift the child he carries on his arm on to his shoulders. “Can you see?” he asks the child.

  “Yes.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They are making those barbarians kneel. What are they going to do to them?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.”

  Slowly, titanically, with all my might, I turn and begin to squeeze my body out. “Excuse me . . . excuse me . . .” I say: “the heat—I’m going to be sick.” For the first time I see heads turn, fingers point.

  I ought to go back to my cell. As a gesture it will have no effect, it will not even be noticed. Nevertheless, for my own sake, as a gesture to myself alone, I ought to return to the cool dark and lock the door and bend the key and stop my ears to the noise of patriotic bloodlust and close my lips and never speak again. Who knows, perhaps I do my fellow-townsmen an injustice, perhaps at this very minute the shoemaker is at home tapping on his last, humming to himself to drown the shouting, perhaps there are h
ousewives shelling peas in their kitchens, telling stories to occupy their restless children, perhaps there are farmers still going calmly about the repair of the ditches. If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them! For me, at this moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important above all is that I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of its perpetrators. I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

  I pass through the barracks gate into my prison yard. At the trough in the middle of the yard I pick up an empty bucket and fill it. With the bucket held up before me, slopping water over its sides, I approach the rear of the crowd again. “Excuse me,” I say, and push. People curse me, give way, the bucket tilts and splashes, I forge forward till in a minute I am suddenly clear in the frontmost rank of the crowd behind the backs of the soldiers who, holding staves between them, keep an arena clear for the exemplary spectacle.

  Four of the prisoners kneel on the ground. The other eight, still roped together, squat in the shade of the wall watching, their hands to their cheeks.

  The kneeling prisoners bend side by side over a long heavy pole. A cord runs from the loop of wire through the first man’s mouth, under the pole, up to the second man’s loop, back under the pole, up to the third loop, under the pole, through the fourth loop. As I watch a soldier slowly pulls the cord tighter and the prisoners bend further till finally they are kneeling with their faces touching the pole. One of them writhes his shoulders in pain and moans. The others are silent, their thoughts wholly concentrated on moving smoothly with the cord, not giving the wire a chance to tear their flesh.

  Directing the soldier with little gestures of the hand is Colonel Joll. Though I am only one in a crowd of thousands, though his eyes are shaded as ever, I stare at him so hard with a face so luminous with query that I know at once he sees me.

  Behind me I distinctly hear the word magistrate. Do I imagine it or are my neighbours inching away from me?

  The Colonel steps forward. Stooping over each prisoner in turn he rubs a handful of dust into his naked back and writes a word with a stick of charcoal. I read the words upside down: ENEMY . . . ENEMY . . . ENEMY . . . ENEMY. He steps back and folds his hands. At a distance of no more than twenty paces he and I contemplate each other.

  Then the beating begins. The soldiers use the stout green cane staves, bringing them down with the heavy slapping sounds of washing-paddles, raising red welts on the prisoners’ backs and buttocks. With slow care the prisoners extend their legs until they lie flat on their bellies, all except the one who had been moaning and who now gasps with each blow.

  The black charcoal and ochre dust begin to run with sweat and blood. The game, I see, is to beat them till their backs are washed clean.

  I watch the face of a little girl who stands in the front rank of the crowd gripping her mother’s clothes. Her eyes are round, her thumb is in her mouth: silent, terrified, curious, she drinks in the sight of these big naked men being beaten. On every face around me, even those that are smiling, I see the same expression: not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite.

  The soldiers doing the beating grow tired. One stands with his hands on his hips panting, smiling, gesturing to the crowd. There is a word from the Colonel: all four of them cease their labour and come forward offering their canes to the spectators.

  A girl, giggling and hiding her face, is pushed forward by her friends. “Go on, don’t be afraid!” they urge her. A soldier puts a cane in her hand and leads her to the place. She stands confused, embarrassed, one hand still over her face. Shouts, jokes, obscene advice are hurled at her. She lifts the cane, brings it down smartly on the prisoner’s buttocks, drops it, and scuttles to safety to a roar of applause.

  There is a scramble for the canes, the soldiers can barely keep order, I lose sight of the prisoners on the ground as people press forward to take a turn or simply watch the beating from nearer. I stand forgotten with my bucket between my feet.

  Then the flogging is over, the soldiers reassert themselves, the crowd scrambles back, the arena is reconstituted, though narrower than before.

  Over his head, exhibiting it to the crowd, Colonel Joll holds a hammer, an ordinary four-pound hammer used for knocking in tent-pegs. Again his gaze meets mine. The babble subsides.

  “No!” I hear the first word from my throat, rusty, not loud enough. Then again: “No!” This time the word rings like a bell from my chest. The soldier who blocks my way stumbles aside. I am in the arena holding up my hands to still the crowd: “No! No! No!”

  When I turn to Colonel Joll he is standing not five paces from me, his arms folded. I point a finger at him. “You!” I shout. Let it all be said. Let him be the one on whom the anger breaks. “You are depraving these people!”

  He does not flinch, he does not reply.

  “You!” My arm points at him like a gun. My voice fills the square. There is utter silence; or perhaps I am too intoxicated to hear.

  Something crashes into me from behind. I sprawl in the dust, gasp, feel the sear of old pain in my back. A stick thuds down on me. Reaching out to ward it off, I take a withering blow on my hand.

  It becomes important to stand up, however difficult the pain makes it. I come to my feet and see who it is that is hitting me. It is the stocky man with the sergeant’s stripes who helped with the beatings. Crouched at the knees, his nostrils flaring, he stands with his stick raised for the next blow. “Wait!” I gasp, holding out my limp hand. “I think you have broken it!” He strikes, and I take the blow on the forearm. I hide my arm, lower my head, and try to grope towards him and grapple. Blows fall on my head and shoulders. Never mind: all I want is a few moments to finish what I am saying now that I have begun. I grip his tunic and hug him to me. Though he wrestles, he cannot use his stick; over his shoulder I shout again.

  “Not with that!” I shout. The hammer lies cradled in the Colonel’s folded arms. “You would not use a hammer on a beast, not on a beast!” In a terrible surge of rage I turn on the sergeant and hurl him from me. Godlike strength is mine. In a minute it will pass: let me use it well while it lasts! “Look!” I shout. I point to the four prisoners who lie docilely on the earth, their lips to the pole, their hands clasped to their faces like monkeys’ paws, oblivious of the hammer, ignorant of what is going on behind them, relieved that the offending mark has been beaten from their backs, hoping that the punishment is at an end. I raise my broken hand to the sky. “Look!” I shout. “We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How—!” Words fail me. “Look at these men!” I recommence. “Men!” Those in the crowd who can crane to look at the prisoners, even at the flies that begin to settle on their bleeding welts.

  I hear the blow coming and turn to meet it. It catches me full across the face. “I am blind!” I think, staggering back into the blackness that instantly falls. I swallow blood; something blooms across my face, starting as a rosy warmth, turning to fiery agony. I hide my face in my hands and stamp around in a circle trying not to shout, trying not to fall.

  What I wanted to say next I cannot remember. A miracle of creation—I pursue the thought but it eludes me like a wisp of smoke. It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways.

  I take my fingers from my eyes and a grey world re-emerges swimming in tears. I am so profoundly grateful that I cease to feel pain. As I am hustled, a man at each elbow, back through the murmuring crowd to my cell, I even find m
yself smiling.

  That smile, that flush of joy, leave behind a disturbing residue. I know that they commit an error in treating me so summarily. For I am no orator. What would I have said if they had let me go on? That it is worse to beat a man’s feet to pulp than to kill him in combat? That it brings shame on everyone when a girl is permitted to flog a man? That spectacles of cruelty corrupt the hearts of the innocent? The words they stopped me from uttering may have been very paltry indeed, hardly words to rouse the rabble. What, after all, do I stand for besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behaviour towards captured foes, and what do I stand against except the new science of degradation that kills people on their knees, confused and disgraced in their own eyes? Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners with their backsides in the air? Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No! Easier to be beaten and made a martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped? The old magistrate, defender of the rule of law, enemy in his own way of the State, assaulted and imprisoned, impregnably virtuous, is not without his own twinges of doubt.

  My nose is broken, I know, and perhaps also the cheekbone where the flesh was laid open by the blow of the stick. My left eye is swelling shut.

  As the numbness wears off the pain begins to come in spasms a minute or two apart so intense that I can no longer lie still. At the height of the spasm I trot around the room holding my face, whining like a dog; in the blessed valleys between the peaks I breathe deeply, trying to keep control of myself, trying not to make too disgraceful an outcry. I seem to hear surges and lulls in the noise from the mob on the square but cannot be sure that the roar is not simply in my eardrums.