They bring me my evening meal as usual but I cannot eat. I cannot keep still, I have to walk back and forth or rock on my haunches to keep myself from screaming, tearing my clothes, clawing my flesh, doing whatever people do when the limit of their endurance is reached. I weep, and feel the tears stinging the open flesh. I hum the old song about the rider and the juniper bush over and over again, clinging to the remembered words even after they have ceased to make any sense. One, two, three, four . . . I count. It will be a famous victory, I tell myself, if you can last the night.
In the early hours of the morning, when I am so giddy with exhaustion that I reel on my feet, I finally give way and sob from the heart like a child: I sit in a corner against the wall and weep, the tears running from my eyes without stop. I weep and weep while the throbbing comes and goes according to its own cycles. In this position sleep bursts upon me like a thunderbolt. I am amazed to come to myself in the thin grey light of day, slumped in a corner, with not the faintest sense that time has passed. Though the throbbing is still there I find I can endure it if I remain still. Indeed, it has lost its strangeness. Soon, perhaps, it will be as much part of me as breathing.
So I lie quietly against the wall, folding my sore hand under my armpit for comfort, and fall into a second sleep, into a confusion of images among which I search out one in particular, brushing aside the others that fly at me like leaves. It is of the girl. She is kneeling with her back to me before the snowcastle or sandcastle she has built. She wears a dark blue robe. As I approach I see that she is digging away in the bowels of the castle.
She becomes aware of me and turns. I am mistaken, it is not a castle she has built but a clay oven. Smoke curls up from the vent at the back. She holds out her hands to me offering me something, a shapeless lump which I peer at unwillingly through a mist. Though I shake my head my vision will not clear.
She is wearing a round cap embroidered in gold. Her hair is braided in a heavy plait which lies over her shoulder: there is gold thread worked into the braid. “Why are you dressed in your best?” I want to say: “I have never seen you looking so lovely.” She smiles at me: what beautiful teeth she has, what clear jet-black eyes! Also now I can see that what she is holding out to me is a loaf of bread, still hot, with a coarse steaming broken crust. A surge of gratitude sweeps through me. “Where did a child like you learn to bake so well in the desert?” I want to say. I open my arms to embrace her, and come to myself with tears stinging the wound on my cheek. Though I scrabble back at once into the burrow of sleep I cannot re-enter the dream or taste the bread that has made my saliva run.
* *
Colonel Joll sits behind the desk in my office. There are no books or files; the room is starkly empty save for a vase of fresh flowers.
The handsome warrant officer whose name I do not know lifts the cedarwood chest on to the desk and steps back.
Looking down to refer to his papers, the Colonel speaks. “Among the items found in your apartment was this wooden chest. I would like you to consider it. Its contents are unusual. It contains approximately three hundred slips of white poplar-wood, each about eight inches by two inches, many of them wound about with lengths of string. The wood is dry and brittle. Some of the string is new, some so old that it has perished.
“If one loosens the string one finds that the slip splits open revealing two flat inner surfaces. These surfaces are written on in an unfamiliar script.
“I think you will concur with this description.”
I stare into the black lenses. He goes on.
“A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties, we do not know when. It remains for you to explain what the messages say and who the other parties were.”
He takes a slip from the chest and flicks it across the polished surface of the desk towards me.
I look at the lines of characters written by a stranger long since dead. I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right. In the long evenings I spent poring over my collection I isolated over four hundred different characters in the script, perhaps as many as four hundred and fifty. I have no idea what they stand for. Does each stand for a single thing, a circle for the sun, a triangle for a woman, a wave for a lake; or does a circle merely stand for “circle”, a triangle for “triangle”, a wave for “wave”? Does each sign represent a different state of the tongue, the lips, the throat, the lungs, as they combine in the uttering of some multifarious unimaginable extinct barbarian language? Or are my four hundred characters nothing but scribal embellishments of an underlying repertory of twenty or thirty whose primitive forms I am too stupid to see?
“He sends greetings to his daughter,” I say. I hear with surprise the thick nasal voice that is now mine. My finger runs along the line of characters from right to left. “Whom he says he has not seen for a long time. He hopes she is happy and thriving. He hopes the lambing season has been good. He has a gift for her, he says, which he will keep till he sees her again. He sends his love. It is not easy to read his signature. It could be simply ‘Your father’ or it could be something else, a name.”
I reach over into the chest and pick out a second slip. The warrant officer, who sits behind Joll with a little notebook open on his knee, stares hard at me, his pencil poised above the paper.
“This one reads as follows,” I say: “ ‘I am sorry I must send bad news. The soldiers came and took your brother away. I have been to the fort every day to plead for his return. I sit in the dust with my head bare. Yesterday for the first time they sent a man to speak to me. He says your brother is no longer here. He says he has been sent away. “Where?” I asked, but he would not say. Do not tell your mother, but join me in praying for his safety.’
“And now let us see what this next one says.” The pencil is still poised, he has not written anything, he has not stirred. “ ‘We went to fetch your brother yesterday. They showed us into a room where he lay on a table sewn up in a sheet.’” Slowly Joll leans back in his chair. The warrant officer closes his notebook and half-rises; but with a gesture Joll restrains him. “‘They wanted me to take him away like that, but I insisted on looking first. “What if it is the wrong body you are giving me?” I said—“You have so many bodies here, bodies of brave young men.” So I opened the sheet and saw that it was indeed he. Through each eyelid, I saw, there was a stitch. “Why have you done that?” I said. “It is our custom,” he said. I tore the sheet wide open and saw bruises all over his body, and saw that his feet were swollen and broken. “What happened to him?” I said. “I do not know,” said the man, “it is not on the paper; if you have questions you must go to the sergeant, but he is very busy.” We have had to bury your brother here, outside their fort, because he was beginning to stink. Please tell your mother and try to console her.’
“Now let us see what the next one says. See, there is only a single character. It is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended. That is part of barbarian cunning.
“It is the same with the rest of these slips.” I plunge my good hand into the chest and stir. “They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire—the old Empire, I mean. There is no agreement among scholars about how to interpret these relics of the ancient barbarians. Allegorical sets like this one can be found buried all over the desert. I found this one not three miles from here in the ruins of a public building. Graveyards are another good place to look in, though it is not always easy to tell where barbarian burial sites lie. It is recommended that you simply dig at random: perhaps at the very spot where you stan
d you will come upon scraps, shards, reminders of the dead. Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere. The night is best: sometimes when you have difficulty in falling asleep it is because your ears have been reached by the cries of the dead which, like their writings, are open to many interpretations.
“Thank you. I have finished translating.”
I have not failed to keep an eye on Joll through all this. He has not stirred again, save to lay a hand on his subordinate’s sleeve at the moment when I referred to the Empire and he rose, ready to strike me.
If he comes near me I will hit him with all the strength in my body. I will not disappear into the earth without leaving my mark on them.
The Colonel speaks. “You have no idea how tiresome your behaviour is. You are the one and only official we have had to work with on the frontier who has not given us his fullest co-operation. Candidly, I must tell you I am not interested in these sticks.” He waves a hand at the slips scattered on the desk. “They are very likely gambling-sticks. I know that other tribes on the border gamble with sticks.
“I ask you to consider soberly: what kind of future do you have here? You cannot be allowed to remain in your post. You have utterly disgraced yourself. Even if you are not eventually prosecuted—”
“I am waiting for you to prosecute me!” I shout. “When are you going to do it? When are you going to bring me to trial? When am I going to have a chance to defend myself?” I am in a fury. None of the speechlessness I felt in front of the crowd afflicts me. If I were to confront these men now, in public, in a fair trial, I would find the words to shame them. It is a matter of health and strength: I feel my hot words swell in my breast. But they will never bring a man to trial while he is healthy and strong enough to confound them. They will shut me away in the dark till I am a muttering idiot, a ghost of myself; then they will haul me before a closed court and in five minutes dispose of the legalities they find so tiresome.
“For the duration of the emergency, as you know,” says the Colonel, “the administration of justice is out of the hands of civilians and in the hands of the Bureau.” He sighs. “Magistrate, you seem to believe that we do not dare to bring you to trial because we fear you are too popular a figure in this town. I do not think you are aware of how much you forfeited by neglecting your duties, shunning your friends, keeping company with low people. There is no one I have spoken to who has not at some time felt insulted by your behaviour.”
“My private life is none of their business!”
“Nevertheless, I may tell you that our decision to relieve you of your duties has been welcomed in most quarters. Personally I have nothing against you. When I arrived back a few days ago, I had decided that all I wanted from you was a clear answer to a simple question, after which you could have returned to your concubines a free man.”
It strikes me suddenly that the insult may not be gratuitous, that perhaps for different reasons these two men might welcome it if I lost my temper. Burning with outrage, tense in every muscle, I guard my silence.
“However, you seem to have a new ambition,” he goes on. “You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his principles.
“But let me ask you: do you believe that that is how your fellow-citizens see you after the ridiculous spectacle you created on the square the other day? Believe me, to people in this town you are not the One Just Man, you are simply a clown, a madman. You are dirty, you stink, they can smell you a mile away. You look like an old beggar-man, a refuse-scavenger. They do not want you back in any capacity. You have no future here.
“You want to go down in history as a martyr, I suspect. But who is going to put you in the history books? These border troubles are of no significance. In a while they will pass and the frontier will go to sleep for another twenty years. People are not interested in the history of the back of beyond.”
“There were no border troubles before you came,” I say.
“That is nonsense,” he says. “You are simply ignorant of the facts. You are living in a world of the past. You think we are dealing with small groups of peaceful nomads. In fact we are dealing with a well organized enemy. If you had travelled with the expeditionary force you would have seen that for yourself.”
“Those pitiable prisoners you brought in—are they the enemy I must fear? Is that what you say? You are the enemy, Colonel!” I can restrain myself no longer. I pound the desk with my fist. “You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need—starting not now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy barbarities here! History will bear me out!”
“Nonsense. There will be no history, the affair is too trivial.” He seems impassive, but I am sure I have shaken him.
“You are an obscene torturer! You deserve to hang!”
“Thus speaks the judge, the One Just Man,” he murmurs.
We stare into each other’s eyes.
“Now,” he says, squaring the papers before him: “I would like a statement on everything that passed between you and the barbarians on your recent and unauthorized visit to them.”
“I refuse.”
“Very well. Our interview is over.” He turns to his subordinate. “He is your responsibility.” He stands up, walks out. I face the warrant officer.
* *
The wound on my cheek, never washed or dressed, is swollen and inflamed. A crust like a fat caterpillar has formed on it. My left eye is a mere slit, my nose a shapeless throbbing lump. I must breathe through my mouth.
I lie in the reek of old vomit obsessed with the thought of water. I have had nothing to drink for two days.
In my suffering there is nothing ennobling. Little of what I call suffering is even pain. What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore. When Warrant Officer Mandel and his man first brought me back here and lit the lamp and closed the door, I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.
* *
Nor is it a question of who endures longest. I used to think to myself, “They are sitting in another room discussing me. They are saying to each other, ‘How much longer before he grovels? In an hour we will go back and see.’ ”
But it is not like that. They have no elaborated system of pain and deprivation to which they subject me. For two days I go without food and water. On the third day I am fed. “I am sorry,” says the man who brings my food, “we forgot.” It is not malice that makes them forget. My torturers have their own lives to lead. I am not the centre of their universe. Mandel’s underling probably spends his days counting bags in the commissary or patrolling the earthworks, grumbling to himself about the heat. Mandel himself, I am sure, spends more time polishing his straps and buckles than he spends on me. When the mood takes him he comes and gives me a lesson in humanity. How long can I withstand the randomness of their attacks? And what will happen if I succumb, weep, grovel, while yet the attacks go on?<
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* *
They call me into the yard. I stand before them hiding my nakedness, nursing my sore hand, a tired old bear made tame by too much baiting. “Run,” Mandel says. I run around the yard under the blazing sun. When I slacken he slaps me on the buttocks with his cane and I trot faster. The soldiers leave their siesta and watch from the shade, the scullery maids hang over the kitchen door, children stare through the bars of the gate. “I cannot!” I gasp. “My heart!” I stop, hang my head, clutch my chest. Everyone waits patiently while I recover myself. Then the cane prods me and I shamble on, moving no faster than a man walks.
Or else I do tricks for them. They stretch a rope at knee-height and I jump back and forth over it. They call the cook’s little grandson over and give him one end to hold. “Keep it steady,” they say, “we don’t want him to trip.” The child grips his end of the rope with both hands, concentrating on this important task, waiting for me to jump. I baulk. The point of the cane finds its way between my buttocks and prods. “Jump,” Mandel murmurs. I run, make a little skip, blunder into the rope, and stand there. I smell of shit. I am not permitted to wash. The flies follow me everywhere, circling around the appetizing sore on my cheek, alighting if I stand still for a moment. The looping movement of my hand before my face to chase them away has become as automatic as the flick of a cow’s tail. “Tell him he must do better next time,” Mandel says to the boy. The boy smiles and looks away. I sit down in the dust to wait for the next trick. “Do you know how to skip?” he says to the boy. “Give the rope to the man and ask him to show you how to skip.” I skip.
It cost me agonies of shame the first time I had to come out of my den and stand naked before these idlers or jerk my body about for their amusement. Now I am past shame. My mind is turned wholly to the menace of the moment when my knees turn to water or my heart grips me like a crab and I have to stand still; and each time I discover with surprise that after a little rest, after the application of a little pain, I can be made to move, to jump or skip or crawl or run a little further. Is there a point at which I will lie down and say, “Kill me—I would rather die than go on”? Sometimes I think I am approaching that point, but I am always mistaken.
Waiting for the Barbarians Page 14