"Waiting For The Barbarians" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coetzee J. M.)

1

I HAVE NEVER SEEN anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. "They protect one's eyes against the glare of the sun," he says. "You would find them useful out here in the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches. Look." He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. "No wrinkles." He replaces the glasses. It is true. He has the skin of a younger man. "At home everyone wears them."

We sit in the best room of the inn with a flask between us and a bowl of nuts. We do not discuss the reason for his being here. He is here under the emergency powers, that is enough. Instead we talk about hunting. He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcases had to be left to rot ("Which was a pity"). I tell him about the great flocks of geese and ducks that descend on the lake every year in their migrations and about native ways of trapping them. I suggest that I take him out fishing by night in a native boat. "That is an experience not to be missed," I say; "the fishermen carry flaming torches and beat drums over the water to drive the fish towards the nets they have laid." He nods. He tells me about a visit he paid elsewhere on the frontier where people eat certain snakes as a delicacy, and about a huge antelope he shot.

He picks his way uncertainly among the strange furniture but does not remove the dark glasses. He retires early. He is quartered here at the inn because this is the best accommodation the town provides. I have impressed it on the staff that he is an important visitor. "Colonel Joll is from the Third Bureau," I tell them. "The Third Bureau is the most important division of the Civil Guard nowadays." That is what we hear, anyhow, in gossip that reaches us long out of date from the capital. The proprietor nods, the maids duck their heads. "We must make a good impression on him."

I carry my sleeping-mat out on to the ramparts where the night breeze gives some relief from the heat. On the flat roofs of the town I can make out by moonlight the shapes of other sleepers. From under the walnut trees on the square I still hear the murmur of conversation. In the darkness a pipe glows like a firefly, wanes, glows again. Summer is wheeling slowly towards its end. The orchards groan under their burden. I have not seen the capital since I was a young man.

I awake before dawn and tiptoe past the sleeping soldiers, who are stirring and sighing, dreaming of mothers and sweethearts, down the steps. From the sky thousands of stars look down on us. Truly we are here on the roof of the world. Waking in the night, in the open, one is dazzled.

The sentry at the gate sits cross-legged, fast asleep, cradling his musket. The porter's alcove is closed, his trolley stands outside. I pass.

"We do not have facilities for prisoners," I explain. "There is not much crime here and the penalty is usually a fine or compulsory labour. This hut is simply a storeroom attached to the granary, as you can see." Inside it is close and smelly. There are no windows. The two prisoners lie bound on the floor. The smell comes from them, a smell of old urine. I call the guard in: "Get these men to clean themselves, and please hurry."

I show my visitor into the cool gloom of the granary itself. "We hope for three thousand bushels from the communal land this year. We plant only once. The weather has been very kind to us." We talk about rats and ways of controlling their numbers. When we return to the hut it smells of wet ash and the prisoners are ready, kneeling in a corner. One is an old man, the other a boy. "They were taken a few days ago," I say. "There was a raid not twenty miles from here. That is unusual. Normally they keep well away from the fort. These two were picked up afterwards. They say they had nothing to do with the raid. I do not know. Perhaps they are telling the truth. If you want to speak to them I will of course help with the language."

The boy's face is puffy and bruised, one eye is swollen shut. I squat down before him and pat his cheek. "Listen, boy," I say in the p atois of the frontier, "we want to talk to you."

He gives no response.

"He is pretending," says the guard. "He understands."

"Who beat him?" I ask.

"It wasn't me," he says. "He was like that when he came."

"Who beat you?" I ask the boy.

He is not listening to me. He stares over my shoulder, not at the guard but at Colonel Joll beside him.

I turn to Joll. "He has probably never seen anything like it before." I gesture. "I mean the eyeglasses. He must think you are a blind man." But Joll does not smile back. Before prisoners, it appears, one maintains a certain front.

I squat in front of the old man. "Father, listen to me. We have brought you here because we caught you after a stock-raid. You know that is a serious matter. You know you can be punished for it."

His tongue comes out to moisten his lips. His face is grey and exhausted.

"Father, do you see this gentleman? This gentleman is visiting us from the capital. He visits all the forts along the frontier. His work is to find out the truth. That is all he does. He finds out the truth. If you do not speak to me you will have to speak to him. Do you understand?"

"Excellency," he says. His voice croaks; he clears his throat. "Excellency, we know nothing about thieving. The soldiers stopped us and tied us up. For nothing. We were on the road, coming here to see the doctor. This is my sister's boy. He has a sore that does not get better. We are not thieves. Show the Excellencies your sore."

Nimbly, with hand and teeth, the boy begins unwrapping the rags that bandage his forearm. The last rounds, caked with blood and matter, stick to his flesh, but he lifts their edge to show me the red angry rim of the sore.

"You see," the old man says, "nothing will heal it. I was bringing him to the doctor when the soldiers stopped us. That is all."

I walk back with my visitor across the square. Three women pass us, coming back from the irrigation dam with washbaskets on their heads. They eye us curiously, keeping their necks stiff. The sun beats down.

"These are the only prisoners we have taken for a long time," I say. "A coincidence: normally we would not have any barbarians at all to show you. This so-called banditry does not amount to much. They steal a few sheep or cut out a pack-animal from a train. Sometimes we raid them in return. They are mainly destitute tribespeople with tiny flocks of their own living along the river. It becomes a way of life. The old man says they were coming to see the doctor. Perhaps that is the truth. No one would have brought an old man and a sick boy along on a raiding party."

I grow conscious that I am pleading for them.

"Of course one cannot be sure. But even if they are lying, how can they be of use to you, simple people like that?"

I try to subdue my irritation at his cryptic silences, at the paltry theatrical mystery of dark shields hiding healthy eyes. He walks with his hands clasped before him like a woman.

"Nevertheless," he says, "I ought to question them. This evening, if it is convenient. I will take my assistant along. Also I will need someone to help me with the language. The guard, perhaps. Does he speak it?"

"We can all make ourselves understood. You would prefer me not to be there?"

"You would find it tedious. We have set procedures we go through."

Of the screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary, I hear nothing. At every moment that evening as I go about my business I am aware of what might be happening, and my ear is even tuned to the pitch of human pain. But the granary is a massive building with heavy doors and tiny windows; it lies beyond the abattoir and the mill in the south quarter. Also what was once an outpost and then a fort on the frontier has grown into an agricultural settlement, a town of three thousand souls in which the noise of life, the noise that all these souls make on a warm summer evening, does not cease because somewhere someone is crying. (At a certain point I begin to plead my own cause.)

When I see Colonel Joll again, when he has the leisure, I bring the conversation around to torture. "What if your prisoner is telling the truth," I ask, "yet finds he is not believed? Is that not a terrible position? Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more! And what a responsibility for the interrogator! How do you ever know when a man has told you the truth?"

"There is a certain tone," Joll says. "A certain tone enters the voice of a man who is telling the truth. Training and experience teach us to recognize that tone."

"The tone of truth! Can you pick up this tone in everyday speech? Can you hear whether I am telling the truth?"

This is the most intimate moment we have yet had, which he brushes off with a little wave of the hand. "No, you misunderstand me. I am speaking only of a special situation now, I am speaking of a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see-this is what happens- first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth."

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt. That is what I bear away from my conversation with Colonel Joll, whom with his tapering fingernails, his mauve handkerchiefs, his slender feet in soft shoes I keep imagining back in the capital he is so obviously impatient for, murmuring to his friends in theatre corridors between the acts.

(On the other hand, who am I to assert my distance from him? I drink with him, I eat with him, I show him the sights, I afford him every assistance as his letter of commission requests, and more. The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.)

The report he makes to me in my capacity as magistrate is brief.

"During the course of the interrogation contradictions became apparent in the prisoner's testimony. Confronted with these contradictions, the prisoner became enraged and attacked the investigating officer. A scuffle ensued during which the prisoner fell heavily against the wall. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful."

For the sake of completeness, as required by the letter of the law, I summon the guard and ask him to make a statement. He recites, and I take down his words: "The prisoner became uncontrollable and attacked the visiting officer. I was called in to help subdue him. By the time I came in the struggle had ended. The prisoner was unconscious and bleeding from the nose." I point to the place where he should make his mark. He takes the pen from me reverently.

"Did the officer tell you what to say to me?" I ask him softly.

"Yes, sir," he says.

"Were the prisoner's hands tied?"

"Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir."

I dismiss him and fill out the burial warrant.

But before I go to bed I take a lantern, cross the square, and circle through the back streets to the granary. There is a new guard at the door of the hut, another peasant boy wrapped in his blanket asleep. A cricket stops its singing at my approach. The pulling of the bolt does not waken the guard. I enter the hut holding the lantern high, trespassing, I realize, on what has become holy or unholy ground, if there is any difference, preserve of the mysteries of the State.

The boy lies on a bed of straw in a corner, alive, well. He seems to be sleeping, but the tension of his posture betrays him. His hands are tied in front of him. In the other corner is a long white bundle.

I wake the guard. "Who told you to leave the body there? Who sewed it up?"

He hears the anger in my voice. "It was the man who came with the other Excellency, sir. He was here when I came on duty. He said to the boy, I heard him, 'Sleep with your grandfather, keep him warm.'

He pretended he was going to sew the boy into the shroud too, the same shroud, but he did not."

While the boy still lies rigidly asleep, his eyes pinched shut, we carry the corpse out. In the yard, with the guard holding the lantern, I find the stitching with the point of my knife, tear the shroud open, and fold it back from the head of the old man.

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole. "Close it up," I say. The guard bunches the opening together. It falls open. "They say that he hit his head on the wall. What do you think?" He looks at me warily. "Fetch some twine and tie it shut."

I hold the lantern over the boy. He has not stirred; but when I bend to touch his cheek he flinches and begins to tremble in long ripples that run up and down his body. "Listen to me, boy," I say, "I am not going to harm you." He rolls on his back and brings his bound hands up before his face. They are puffy and purple. I fumble at the bonds. All my gestures in relation to this boy are awkward. "Listen: you must tell the officer the truth. That is all he wants to hear from you-the truth. Once he is sure you are telling the truth he will not hurt you. But you must tell him everything you know. You must answer every question he asks you truthfully. If there is pain, do not lose heart." Picking at the knot I have at last loosened the rope. "Rub your hands together till the blood begins to flow." I chafe his hands between mine. He flexes his fingers painfully. I cannot pretend to be any better than a mother comforting a child between his father's spells of wrath. It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive.

"Has he had anything to eat this evening?" I ask the guard.

"I do not know."

"Have you had anything to eat?" I ask the boy. He shakes his head. I feel my heart grow heavy. I never wished to be drawn into this. Where it will end I do not know. I turn to the guard. "I am leaving now, but there are three things I want you to do. First, when the boy's hands are better I want you to tie them again, but not so tightly that they swell. Second, I want you to leave the body where it is in the yard. Do not bring it back in. Early in the morning I will send a burial party to fetch it, and you will hand it over to them. If there are any questions, say I gave the orders. Third, I want you to lock the hut now and come with me. I will get you something from the kitchen for the boy to eat, which you will bring back. Come."

I did not mean to get embroiled in this. I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the law-court twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content. When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.

But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians. Traders travelling safe routes had been attacked and plundered. Stock thefts had increased in scale and audacity. A party of census officials had disappeared and been found buried in shallow graves. Shots had been fired at a provincial governor during a tour of inspection. There had been clashes with border patrols. The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war.

Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe.

In the capital the concern was that the barbarian tribes of the north and west might at last be uniting. Officers of the general staff were sent on tours of the frontier. Some of the garrisons were strengthened. Traders who requested them were given military escorts. And officials of the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard were seen for the first time on the frontier, guardians of the State, specialists in the obscurer motions of sedition, devotees of truth, doctors of interrogation. So now it seems my easy years are coming to an end, when I could sleep with a tranquil heart knowing that with a nudge here and a touch there the world would stay steady on its course. If I had only handed over these two absurd prisoners to the Colonel, I reflect- "Here, Colonel, you are the specialist, see what you can make of them!"-if I had gone on a hunting trip for a few days, as I should have done, a visit up-river perhaps, and come back, and without reading it, or after skimming over it with an incurious eye, put my seal on his report, with no question about what the word investigations meant, what lay beneath it like a banshee beneath a stone-if I had done the wise thing, then perhaps I might now be able to return to my hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence while waiting for the provocations to cease and the tremors along the frontier to subside. But alas, I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.

From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.

As I glide across the square, dark figures separate out from the whiteness, children at play building a snowcastle on top of which they have planted a little red flag. They are mittened, booted, muffled against the cold. Handful after handful of snow they bring, plastering the walls of their castle, filling it out. Their breath departs from them in white puffs. The rampart around the castle is half built. I strain to pierce the queer floating gabble of their voices but can make out nothing.

I am aware of my bulk, my shadowiness, therefore I am not surprised that the children melt away on either side as I approach. All but one. Older than the others, perhaps not even a child, she sits in the snow with her hooded back to me working at the door of the castle, her legs splayed, burrowing, patting, moulding. I stand behind her and watch. She does not turn. I try to imagine the face between the petals of her peaked hood but cannot.

The boy lies on his back, naked, asleep, breathing fast and shallow. His skin glistens with sweat. For the first time the bandage is off his arm and I see the angry open sore it hid. I bring the lantern closer. His belly and both groins are pocked with little scabs and bruises and cuts, some marked by trickles of blood.

"What did they do to him?" I whisper to the guard, the same young man as last night.

"A knife," he whispers back. "Just a little knife, like this." He spreads thumb and forefinger. Gripping his little knife of air he makes a curt thrust into the sleeping boy's body and turns the knife delicately, like a key, first left, then right. Then he withdraws it, his hand returns to his side, he stands waiting.

I kneel over the boy, bringing the light close to his face, and shake him. His eyes open languidly and close again. He sighs, his rapid breathing slows. "Listen!" I say to him. "You have been having a bad dream. You must wake up." He opens his eyes and squints past the light at me.

The guard offers a pan of water. "Can he sit?" I ask. The guard shakes his head. He raises the boy and helps him to sip.

"Listen," I say. "They tell me you have made a confession. They say you have admitted that you and the old man and other men from your clan have stolen sheep and horses. You have said that the men of your clan are arming themselves, that in the spring you are all going to join in a great war on the Empire. Are you telling the truth? Do you understand what this confession of yours will mean? Do you understand?" I pause; he looks back vacantly at all this vehemence, like someone tired after running a great distance. "It means that the soldiers are going to ride out against your people. There is going to be killing. Kinsmen of yours are going to die, perhaps even your parents, your brothers and sisters. Do you really want that?" He makes no response. I shake his shoulder, slap his cheek. He does not flinch: it is like slapping dead flesh. "I think he is very sick," whispers the guard behind me, "very sore and very sick." The boy closes his eyes on me.

I call in the only doctor we have, an old man who earns his livelihood pulling teeth and making up aphrodisiacs out of bonemeal and lizards' blood. He puts a clay poultice on the sore and smears ointment on the hundred little stabs. Within a week, he promises, the boy will be able to walk. He recommends nourishing food and leaves in a hurry. He does not ask how the boy sustained his injuries.

But the Colonel is impatient. His plan is to launch a swift raid on the nomads and take more prisoners. He wants the boy along as a guide. He asks me to release thirty of the garrison of forty to him and to provide mounts.

I try to dissuade him. "With no disrespect, Colonel," I say, "you are not a professional soldier, you have never had to campaign in these inhospitable parts. You will have no guide except a child who is terrified of you, who will say whatever comes into his head to please you, who is anyhow unfit to travel. You cannot rely on the soldiers to help you, they are only peasant conscripts, most of them have not been more than five miles from the settlement. The barbarians you are chasing will smell you coming and vanish into the desert while you are still a day's march away. They have lived here all their lives, they know the land. You and I are strangers-you even more than I. I earnestly advise you not to go."

He hears me out, even (I have the feeling) leads me on a little. I am sure this conversation is noted down afterwards, with the comment that I am "unsound". When he has heard enough he dismisses my objections: "I have a commission to fulfil, Magistrate. Only I can judge when my work is completed." And he goes ahead with his preparations.

He travels in his black two-wheeled carriage, with camp-bed and folding writing-table strapped on the roof. I supply horses, carts, fodder and provisions for three weeks. A junior lieutenant of the garrison accompanies him. I speak to the lieutenant in private: "Do not depend on your guide. He is weak and terrified. Keep an eye on the weather.

Note landmarks. Your first duty is to bring our visitor back safely." He bows.

I approach Joll again, trying to get an outline of his intentions.

"Yes," he says. "Of course I should not want to commit myself to a course beforehand. But, broadly speaking, we will locate the encampment of these nomads of yours and then proceed further as the situation dictates."

"I ask," I continue, "only because if you get lost it becomes our task here to find you and bring you back to civilization." We pause, savouring from our different positions the ironies of the word.

"Yes, of course," he says. "But that is unlikely. We are fortunate to have the excellent maps of the region provided by yourself."

"Those maps are based on little but hearsay, Colonel. I have patched them together from travellers' accounts over a period of ten or twenty years. I have never set foot myself where you plan to go. I am simply warning you."

Since his second day here I have been too disturbed by his presence to be more than correct in my bearing towards him. I suppose that, like the roving headsman, he is used to being shunned. (Or is it only in the provinces that headsmen and torturers are still thought of as unclean?) Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men. Does he wash his hands very carefully, perhaps, or change all his clothes; or has the Bureau created new men who can pass without disquiet between the unclean and the clean?

Late into the night I hear the scraping and drumming of the orchestra under the old walnut trees across the square. There is a rosy glow in the air from the great bed of coals over which the soldiers are roasting whole sheep, a gift from the "Excellency". They will drink into the early hours, then set off at daybreak.

I find my way to the granary by the back alleys. The guard is not at his post, the door to the hut stands open. I am about to enter when I hear voices inside whispering and giggling.

I stare into pitch dark. "Who is here?" I say.

There is a scrabbling sound and the young sentry stumbles against me. "Sorry, sir," he says. I smell his rum-sodden breath. "The prisoner called me and I was trying to help him." From the darkness comes a snort of laughter.

I sleep, wake to another round of dance-music from the square, fall asleep again, and dream of a body lying spread on its back, a wealth of pubic hair glistening liquid black and gold across the belly, up the loins, and down like an arrow into the furrow of the legs. When I stretch out a hand to brush the hair it begins to writhe. It is not hair but bees clustered densely atop one another: honey-drenched, sticky, they crawl out of the furrow and fan their wings.

My last act of courtesy is to ride out with the Colonel as far as where the road turns north-west along the coast of the lake. The sun is up and glares so savagely from the surface that I have to shield my eyes. The men, tired and queasy after their night of revels, straggle behind us. In the middle of the column, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him, comes the prisoner. His face is ghastly, he sits his horse uncomfortably, his wounds plainly still cause him pain. In the rear come the pack-horses and carts with water-casks, provisions, and the heavier equipment: lances, fusils, ammunition, tents. All in all not a stirring sight: the column rides raggedly, some of the men bareheaded, some wearing the heavy plumed cavalry helmet, others the simple leather cap. They avert their eyes from the glare, all save one, who looks sternly ahead through a strip of smoked glass glued to a stick which he holds up before his eyes in imitation of his leader. How far will this absurd affectation spread?

We ride in silence. The reapers, busy in the fields since before dawn, stop their work to wave as we pass. At the bend in the road I rein in and bid farewell. "I wish you a safe return, Colonel," I say. Framed in the window of his carriage he inclines his head inscrutably.

So I ride back, relieved of my burden and happy to be alone again in a world I know and understand. I climb the walls to watch the little column wind away along the north-west road towards the far green smudge where the river debouches into the lake and the line of vegetation vanishes into the haze of the desert. The sun still hangs bronze and heavy over the water. South of the lake stretch marshlands and salt flats, and beyond them a blue-grey line of barren hills. In the fields the farmers are loading the two huge old hay-wagons. A flight of mallard wheels overhead and glides down towards the water. Late summer, a time of peace and plenty. I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.

Two miles due south of the town a cluster of dunes stands out from the flat sandy landscape. Catching frogs in the marshes and coasting down the slopes of the dunes on polished wooden sleds are the staple summer sports of the children, the one for the mornings, the other for the evenings when the sun goes down and the sand begins to cool. Though the wind blows at all seasons, the dunes are stable, being held together by a cap of thin grass and also, as I found by accident a few years ago, by timber skeletons. For the dunes cover the ruins of houses that date back to times long before the western provinces were annexed and the fort was built.

One of my hobbies has been to excavate these ruins. If there are no repairs to be done to the irrigation works, I sentence petty offenders to a few days of digging in the dunes; soldiers are sent here on punishment details; and at the height of my enthusiasm I even used to pay for casual labour out of my own pocket. The work is unpopular, for the diggers must toil under a hot sun or in a biting wind with no shelter and with sand flying everywhere. They work half-heartedly, not sharing my interest (which they see as whimsical), discouraged by the speed at which the sand drifts back. But in the course of a few years I have succeeded in uncovering several of the largest structures to floor level. The most recently excavated stands out like a shipwreck in the desert, visible even from the town walls. From this structure, perhaps a public building or a temple, I have recovered the heavy poplar lintel, carved with a design of interlaced leaping fish, that now hangs over my fireplace. Buried below floor level in a bag that crumbled to nothing as soon as it was touched I also found a cache of wooden slips on which are painted characters in a script I have not seen the like of. We have found slips like these before, scattered like clothespegs in the ruins, but most so bleached by the action of sand that the writing has been illegible. The characters on the new slips are as clear as the day they were written. Now, in the hope of deciphering the script, I have set about collecting all the slips I can, and have let the children who play here know that if they find one it is always worth a penny.

The timbers we uncover are dry and powdery. Many have been held together only by the surrounding sand and, once exposed, crumble. Others snap off at the lightest pressure. How old the wood is I do not know. The barbarians, who are pastoralists, nomads, tent-dwellers, make no reference in their legends to a permanent settlement near the lake. There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. The houses contain no furniture. In a heap of ashes I have found fragments of sun-dried clay pottery and something brown which may once have been a leather shoe or cap but which fell to pieces before my eyes. I do not know where the wood came from to build these houses. Perhaps in bygone days criminals, slaves, soldiers trekked the twelve miles to the river, and cut down poplar trees, and sawed and planed them, and transported the timbers back to this barren place in carts, and built houses, and a fort too, for all I know, and in the course of time died, so that their masters, their prefects and magistrates and captains, could climb the roofs and towers morning and evening to scan the world from horizon to horizon for signs of the barbarians. Perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls. Perhaps when I stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, another grey-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face at last with the barbarian. How will I ever know? By burrowing like a rabbit? Will the characters on the slips one day tell me? There were two hundred and fifty-six slips in the bag. Is it by chance that the number is perfect? After I had first counted them and made this discovery I cleared the floor of my office and laid them out, first in one great square, then in sixteen smaller squares, then in other combinations, thinking that what I had hitherto taken to be characters in a syllabary might in fact be elements of a picture whose outline would leap at me if I struck on the right arrangement: a map of the land of the barbarians in olden times, or a representation of a lost pantheon. I have even found myself reading the slips in a mirror, or tracing one on top of another, or conflating half of one with half of another.

One evening I lingered among the ruins after the children had run home to their suppers, into the violet of dusk and the first stars, the hour when, according to lore, ghosts awaken. I put my ear to the ground as the children had instructed me, to hear what they hear: thumps and groans under the earth, the deep irregular beating of drums. Against my cheek I felt the patter of sand driving from nowhere to nowhere across the wastes. The last light faded, the ramparts grew dim against the sky and dissolved into the darkness. For an hour I waited, wrapped in my cloak, with my back against the corner-post of a house in which people must once have talked and eaten and played music. I sat watching the moon rise, opening my senses to the night, waiting for a sign that what lay around me, what lay beneath my feet, was not only sand, the dust of bones, flakes of rust, shards, ash. The sign did not come. I felt no tremor of ghostly fear. My nest in the sand was warm. Before long I caught myself nodding.

I stood up and stretched; then I trudged home through the balmy darkness, taking my bearings from the dim sky-glow of the household fires. Ridiculous, I thought: a greybeard sitting in the dark waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him before he goes home to his military stew and his comfortable bed. The space about us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same. But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate that no one sees me!

Today, only four days after the departure of the expedition, the first of the Colonel's prisoners arrive. From my window I watch them cross the square between their mounted guards, dusty, exhausted, cringing already from the spectators who crowd about them, the skipping children, the barking dogs. In the shade of the barracks wall the guards dismount; at once the prisoners squat down to rest, save for a little boy who stands on one leg, his arm on his mother's shoulder, staring back curiously at the onlookers. Someone brings a bucket of water and a ladle. They drink thirstily, while the crowd grows and presses in so tight around them that I can no longer see. Impatiently I wait for the guard who now pushes his way through the crowd and crosses the barracks yard.

"How do you explain this?" I shout at him. He bows his head, fumbles at his pockets. "These are fishing people! How can you bring them back here?"

He holds out a letter. I break the seal and read: "Please hold these and succeeding detainees incommunicado for my return." Beneath his signature the seal is repeated, the seal of the Bureau which he has carried with him into the desert and which, if he perished, I would doubtless have to send out a second expedition to recover.

"The man is ridiculous!" I shout. I storm about the room. One should never disparage officers in front of men, fathers in front of children, but towards this man I discover no loyalty in my heart. "Did no one tell him these are fishing people? It is a waste of time bringing them here! You are supposed to help him track down thieves, bandits, invaders of the Empire! Do these people look like a danger to the Empire?" I fling the letter at the window.

The crowd parts before me till I stand at the centre confronting the dozen pathetic prisoners. They flinch before my anger, the little boy sliding into his mother's arms. I gesture to the guards: "Clear a way and bring these people into the barracks yard!" They herd the captives along; the barracks gate closes behind us. "Now explain yourselves," I say; "did no one tell him these prisoners are useless to him? Did no one tell him the difference between fishermen with nets and wild nomad horsemen with bows? Did no one tell him they don't even speak the same language?"

One of the soldiers explains. "When they saw us coming they tried to hide in the reeds. They saw horsemen coming so they tried to hide. So the officer, the Excellency, ordered us to take them in. Because they were hiding."

I could curse with vexation. A policeman! The reasoning of a policeman! "Did the Excellency say why he wanted them brought back here? Did he say why he could not ask them his questions out there?"

"None of us could speak their language, sir."

Of course not! These river people are aboriginal, older even than the nomads. They live in settlements of two or three families along the banks of the river, fishing and trapping for most of the year, paddling to the remote southern shores of the lake in the autumn to catch redworms and dry them, building flimsy reed shelters, groaning with cold through the winter, dressing in skins. Living in fear of everyone, skulking in the reeds, what can they possibly know of a great barbarian enterprise against the Empire?

I send one of the men to the kitchen for food. He comes back with a loaf of yesterday's bread which he offers to the oldest prisoner. The old man accepts the bread reverentially in both hands, sniffs it, breaks it, passes the lumps around. They stuff their mouths with this manna, chewing fast, not raising their eyes. A woman spits masticated bread into her palm and feeds her baby. I motion for more bread. We stand watching them eat as though they are strange animals.

"Let them stay in the yard," I tell their guards. "It will be inconvenient for us, but there is nowhere else. If it gets cold tonight I will make another arrangement. See that they are fed. Give them something to do to keep their hands busy. Keep the gate closed. They will not run away but I do not want idlers coming in to stare at them."

So I check my anger and do as the Colonel instructs: I hold his useless prisoners "incommunicado" for him. And in a day or two these savages seem to forget they ever had another home. Seduced utterly by the free and plentiful food, above all by the bread, they relax, smile at everyone, move about the barracks yard from one patch of shade to another, doze and wake, grow excited as mealtimes approach. Their habits are frank and filthy. One corner of the yard has become a latrine where men and women squat openly and where a cloud of flies buzzes all day. ("Give them a spade!" I tell the guards; but they do not use it.) The little boy, grown quite fearless, haunts the kitchen, begging sugar from the maids. Aside from bread, sugar and tea are great novelties to them. Every morning they get a small block of pressed tea-leaves which they boil up in a four-gallon pail on a tripod over a fire. They are happy here; indeed unless we chase them away they may stay with us forever, so little does it seem to have taken to lure them out of a state of nature. I spend hours watching them from the upstairs window (other idlers have to watch through the gate). I watch the women picking lice, combing and plaiting each other's long black hair. Some of them have fits of harsh dry coughing. It is striking that there are no children in the group but the baby and the little boy. Did some of them, the nimble, the wakeful, after all succeed in escaping from the soldiers? I hope so. I hope that when we return them to their homes along the river they will have many far-fetched stories to tell their neighbours. I hope that the history of their captivity enters their legends, passed down from grandfather to grandson. But I hope too that memories of the town, with its easy life and its exotic foods, are not strong enough to lure them back. I do not want a race of beggars on my hands.

For a few days the fisherfolk are a diversion, with their strange gabbling, their vast appetites, their animal shamelessness, their volatile tempers. The soldiers lounge in the doorways watching them, making obscene comments about them which they do not understand, laughing; there are always children with their faces pressed to the bars of the gate; and from my window I stare down, invisible behind the glass.

Then, all together, we lose sympathy with them. The filth, the smell, the noise of their quarrelling and coughing become too much. There is an ugly incident when a soldier tries to drag one of their women indoors, perhaps only in play, who knows, and is pelted with stones. A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town. Though I make them dig a pit in the corner of the yard and have the nightsoil removed, the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals. The soldiers lock the door to the barracks hall, the children no longer come to the gate. Someone flings a dead cat over the wall during the night and causes an uproar. Through the long hot days they moon about the empty yard. The baby cries and coughs, cries and coughs till I flee for refuge to the farthest corner of my apartment. I write an angry letter to the Third Bureau, unsleeping guardian of the Empire, denouncing the incompetence of one of its agents. "Why do you not send people with experience of the frontier to investigate frontier unrest?" I write. Wisely I tear up the letter. If I unlock the gate in the dead of night, I wonder, will the fisherfolk sneak away? But I do nothing. Then one day I notice that the baby has stopped crying. When I look from the window it is nowhere to be seen. I send a guard to search and he finds the little corpse under its mother's clothes. She will not yield it up, we have to tear it away from her. After this she squats alone all day with her face covered, refusing to eat. Her people seem to shun her. Have we violated some custom of theirs, I wonder, by taking the child and burying it? I curse Colonel Joll for all the trouble he has brought me, and for the shame too.

Then in the middle of the night he is back. Bugle-calls from the ramparts break into my sleep, the barracks hall erupts in uproar as the soldiers go scrambling for their weapons. My head is confused, I am slow in dressing, by the time I emerge on to the square the column is already passing through the gates, some of the men riding, some leading their mounts. I stand back while the onlookers crowd around, touching and embracing the soldiers, laughing with excitement ("All safe!" someone shouts), until coming up in the middle of the column I see what I have been dreading: the black carriage, then the shuffling group of prisoners roped together neck to neck, shapeless figures in their sheepskin coats under the silver moonlight, then behind them the last of the soldiers leading the carts and pack-horses. As more and more people come running up, some with flaming torches, and the babble mounts, I turn my back on the Colonel's triumph and make my way back to my rooms. This is the point at which I begin to see the disadvantages of living, as I have chosen to do, in the rambling apartment over the storerooms and kitchen intended for the military commandant we have not had for years, rather than in the attractive villa with geraniums in the windows which falls to the lot of the civil magistrate. I would like to be able to stop my ears to the noises coming from the yard below, which has now, it appears, become permanently a prison yard. I feel old and tired, I want to sleep. I sleep whenever I can nowadays and, when I wake up, wake reluctantly. Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. Living in the apartment has become bad for me, I think; but not only that. If I lived in the magistrate's villa on the quietest street in town, holding sittings of the court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activities of this upstart policeman, if I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of the undertow, gives up the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death. But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.

All the next day the Colonel spends sleeping in his room at the inn, and the staff have to tiptoe about their duties. I try to pay no attention to the new batch of prisoners in the yard. It is a pity that all the doors of the barracks block as well as the stairway leading up to my apartment open on to the yard. I hurry out in the early-morning light, occupy myself all day with municipal rents, dine in the evening with friends. On the way home I meet the young lieutenant who accompanied Colonel Joll into the desert and congratulate him on his safe return. "But why did you not explain to the Colonel that the fishing people could not possibly help him in his inquiries?" He looks embarrassed. "I spoke to him," he tells me, "but all he said was, 'Prisoners are prisoners'. I decided it was not my place to argue with him."

The next day the Colonel begins his interrogations. Once I thought him lazy, little more than a bureaucrat with vicious tastes. Now I see how mistaken I was. In his quest for the truth he is tireless. The questioning starts in the early morning and is still going on when I return after dark. He has enlisted the aid of a hunter who has shot pigs up and down the river all his life and knows a hundred words of the fisherfolk's language. One by one the fisherfolk are taken into the room where the Colonel has established himself, to be asked whether they have seen movements of strange horsemen. Even the child is questioned: "Have strangers visited your father during the night?" (I guess, of course, at what passes in that room, at the fear, the bewilderment, the abasement.) The prisoners are returned not to the yard but to the main barracks hall: the soldiers have been turned out, quartered on the town. I sit in my rooms with the windows shut, in the stifling warmth of a windless evening, trying to read, straining my ears to hear or not to hear sounds of violence. Finally at midnight the interrogations cease, there is no more banging of doors or tramping of feet, the yard is silent in the moonlight, and I am at liberty to sleep.

The joy has gone from my life. I spend the day playing with lists and numbers, stretching petty tasks to fill the hours. In the evening I eat at the inn; then, reluctant to go home, make my way upstairs to the warren of cubicles and partitioned rooms where the ostlers sleep and the girls entertain men-friends.

I sleep like a dead man. When I wake up in the thin early-morning light the girl is lying curled up on the floor. I touch her arm: "Why are you sleeping there?"

She smiles back. "It is all right. I am quite comfortable." (That is true: lying on the soft sheepskin rug she stretches and yawns, her neat little body not even filling it.) "You were tossing in your sleep, you told me to go away, so I decided I would sleep better here."

"I told you to go away?"

"Yes: in your sleep. Don't be upset." She climbs into bed beside me. I embrace her with gratitude, without desire.

"I would like to sleep here again tonight," I say. She nuzzles my chest. It occurs to me that whatever I want to say to her will be heard with sympathy, with kindness. But what can I possibly say? "Terrible things go on in the night while you and I are asleep"? The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on.

Another day and another night I spend away from the empire of pain. I fall asleep in the girl's arms. In the morning she is again lying on the floor. She laughs at my dismay: "You pushed me out with your hands and feet. Please don't get upset. We cannot help our dreams or what we do in our sleep." I groan and turn my face away. I have known her a year, visiting her sometimes twice a week in this room. I feel a quiet affection for her which is perhaps the best that can be hoped for between an aging man and a girl of twenty; better than a possessive passion certainly. I have played with the idea of asking her to live with me. I try to remember by what nightmare I am possessed when I push her away, but fail. "If I ever do it again you must promise to wake me," I tell her.

Then, in my office at the courthouse, a visitor is announced. Colonel Jolli, wearing his dark eyeshades indoors, enters and sits down opposite me. I offer him tea, surprised at how steady my hand is. He is leaving, he says. Should I try to conceal my joy? He sips his tea, sitting carefully upright, inspecting the room, the shelves upon shelves of papers bundled together and tied with ribbon, the record of decades of humdrum administration, the small bookcase of legal texts, the cluttered desk. He has completed his inquiries for the time being, he says, and is in a hurry to return to the capital and make his report. He has an air of sternly controlled triumph. I nod my understanding. "Anything that I can do to facilitate your journey…" I say. There is a pause. Then into the silence, like a pebble into a pool, I drop my question.

"And your inquiries, Colonel, among the nomad peoples and the aboriginals-have they been as successful as you wished?"

He places his fingers together tip to tip before he answers. I have the feeling that he knows how much his affectations irritate me. "Yes, Magistrate, I can say that we have had some success. Particularly when you consider that similar investigations are being carried out elsewhere along the frontier in a co-ordinated fashion."

"That is good. And can you tell us whether we have anything to fear? Can we rest securely at night?"

The corner of his mouth crinkles in a little smile. Then he stands up, bows, turns, and leaves. Early next morning he departs accompanied by his small escort, taking the long east road back to the capital. Throughout a trying period he and I have managed to behave towards each other like civilized people. All my life I have believed in civilized behaviour; on this occasion, however, I cannot deny it, the memory leaves me sick with myself.

My first action is to visit the prisoners. I unlock the barracks hall which has been their jail, my senses already revolting at the sickly smell of sweat and ordure, and throw the doors wide open. "Get them out of there!" I shout at the half-dressed soldiers who stand about watching me as they eat their porridge. From the gloom inside the prisoners stare apathetically back. "Go in there and clean up that room!" I shout. "I want everything cleaned up! Soap and water! I want everything as it was before!" The soldiers hurry to obey; but why is my anger directed at them, they must be asking. Into the daylight emerge the prisoners, blinking, shielding their eyes. One of the women has to be helped. She shakes all the time like an old person, though she is young. There are some too sick to stand up.

I last saw them five days ago (if I can claim ever to have seen them, if I ever did more than pass my gaze over their surface absently, with reluctance). What they have undergone in these five days I do not know. Now herded by their guards they stand in a hopeless little knot in the corner of the yard, nomads and fisherfolk together, sick, famished, damaged, terrified. It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain. It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble. Thus it is that, administration of law and order in these parts having today passed back to me, I order that the prisoners be fed, that the doctor be called in to do what he can, that the barracks return to being a barracks, that arrangements be made to restore the prisoners to their former lives as soon as possible, as far as possible.