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

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

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

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

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

"They tell me you are blind."

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

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

I dismiss the soldier. We are alone.

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

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

She sits staring eerily ahead of her.

"Look at me," I say.

"I am looking. This is how I look."

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

"I asked how you make a living."

She shrugs. "I do washing."

"Where do you live?"

"I live."

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

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

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

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

"Are you alone? Please answer."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let me see," I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe you can see," I say.

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

"A blur," I say.

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

"Did they do it to you?"

"Yes."

"What did they do?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is where they touched me," she says, and pushes my hand away

"Does it hurt?"

She shakes her head.

"Let me look."

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

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

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

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

I have relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid. "From the kitchen to the Magistrate's bed in sixteen easy steps"-that is how the soldiers talk of the kitchenmaids. Another of their sayings: "What is the last thing the Magistrate does when he leaves in the morning?-He shuts his latest girl in the oven." The smaller a town the more richly it hums with gossip. There are no private affairs here. Gossip is the air we breathe. For part of the day she washes dishes, peels vegetables, helps to bake bread and prepare the humdrum round of porridge, soup and stew that the soldiers are fed. There are, besides her, the old lady who has ruled over the kitchen almost as long as I have been magistrate, and two girls, the younger of whom ascended the sixteen stairs once or twice last year. At first I am afraid these two will band together against her; but no, they seem quickly to make friends. Passing the kitchen door on my way out I hear, muffled by the steamy warmth, voices, soft chatter, giggles. I am amused to detect in myself the faintest stab of jealousy.

"Do you mind the work?" I ask her.

"I like the other girls. They are nice."

"At least it's better than begging, isn't it?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

"Are there things you miss?"

"I miss my sister."

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

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

She herself is oblivious of my swings of mood. Her days have begun to settle into a routine with which she seems content. In the morning after I have left she comes to sweep and dust the apartment.

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a very pretty little creature," I say.

She shrugs. "Animals belong outdoors."

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

"You can't do that, it is too young, it would starve to death or dogs would catch it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The police officer?"

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

"One at a time?"

"Not always. Sometimes two."

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

"We heard he went berserk and attacked them."

"Yes?"

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

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

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

"What happened to his daughter?"

"She was also questioned, but not so long."

"Go on."

But he has nothing more to tell me.

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

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

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

"Yes, I think so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a long while there is silence between us.

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

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

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

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

"Because there is nowhere else to go."

"And why do I want you here?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is nothing. That is where the iron touched me. It made a little burn. It is not sore." She pushes my hands away. "What do you feel towards the men who did this?" She lies thinking a long time. Then she says, "I am tired of talking."

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

In this moody state I pay a visit one evening to the rooms on the second floor of the inn. As I climb the rickety outside stairway a man I do not recognize hurries down past me, ducking his head. I knock at the second door along the corridor and enter. The room is just as I remember it: the bed neatly made, the shelf above it packed with trinkets and toys, two candles burning, a glow of warmth coming from the great flue that runs along the wall, an odour of orange-blossom in the air. The girl herself is occupied in front of the mirror. She gives a start at my entry, but rises smiling to welcome me and bolts the door. Nothing seems more natural than to seat her on the bed and begin to undress her. With little shrugs she helps me bare her trim body. "How I have missed you!" she sighs. "What a pleasure to be back!" I whisper. And what a pleasure to be lied to so flatteringly! I embrace her, bury myself in her, lose myself in her soft bird-like flurries. The body of the other one, closed, ponderous, sleeping in my bed in a faraway room, seems beyond comprehension. Occupied in these suave pleasures, I cannot imagine what ever drew me to that alien body. The girl in my arms flutters, pants, cries as she comes to a climax. Smiling with joy, sliding into a languorous half-sleep, it occurs to me that I cannot even recall the other one's face. "She is incomplete!" I say to myself. Though the thought begins to float away at once, I cling to it. I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry. I shudder with revulsion in the arms of my little bird-woman, hug her to me.

When later in the middle of the night I ease myself out of her arms, she whimpers but does not awaken. I dress in the dark, close the door behind me, grope my way down the stairs, hurry back home with snow crunching underfoot and an icy wind boring into my back.

I light a candle and bend over the form to which, it seems, I am in a measure enslaved. Lightly I trace the lines of her face with my fingertip: the clear jaw, the high cheekbones, the wide mouth. Lightly I touch her eyelids. I am sure she is awake, though she gives no sign.

I shut my eyes, breathe deeply to still my agitation, and concentrate wholly on seeing her through my blind fingertips. Is she pretty? The girl I have just left, the girl she may perhaps (I suddenly realize) smell on me, is very pretty, there is no question about that: the acute-ness of my pleasure in her is sharpened by the elegance of her tiny body, its manners, its movements. But of this one there is nothing I can say with certainty. There is no link I can define between her womanhood and my desire. I cannot even say for sure that I desire her. All this erotic behaviour of mine is indirect: I prowl about her, touching her face, caressing her body, without entering her or finding the urge to do so. I have just come from the bed of a woman for whom, in the year I have known her, I have not for a moment had to interrogate my desire: to desire her has meant to enfold her and enter her, to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for desire to reconstitute itself. But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her-but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

It is not that something is in the course of happening to me that happens to some men of a certain age, a downward progress from lib-

ertinage to vengeful actions of impotent yearning. If a change in my moral being were occurring I would feel it; nor would I have undertaken this evening's reassuring experiment. I am the same man I always was; but time has broken, something has fallen in upon me from the sky, at random, from nowhere: this body in my bed, for which I am responsible, or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it? For the time being, perhaps forever, I am simply bewildered. It seems all one whether I lie down beside her and fall asleep or fold her in a sheet and bury her in the snow. Nevertheless, bending over her, touching my fingertips to her forehead, I am careful not to spill the wax.

Whether she guesses where I have been I cannot decide; but the next night, when I am lulled almost to sleep by the rhythm of the oiling and rubbing, I feel my hand stopped, held, guided down between her legs. For a while it rests against her sex; then I shake more of the warm oil on to my fingers and begin to caress her. Quickly the tension gathers in her body; she arches and shudders and pushes my hand away. I continue to rub her body till I too relax and am overtaken with sleep.

I experience no excitement during this the most collaborative act we have yet undertaken. It brings me no closer to her and seems to affect her as little. I search her face the next morning: it is blank. She dresses and stumbles down to her day in the kitchen.

I am disquieted. "What do I have to do to move you?": these are the words I hear in my head in the subterranean murmur that has begun to take the place of conversation. "Does no one move you?"; and with a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me.

I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself. It is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences. What depravity is it that is creeping upon me? I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves. There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars. How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!

I begin to visit the girl at the inn regularly. There are moments during the day, in my office behind the courtroom, when my attention wanders and I drift into erotic reverie, grow hot and swollen with excitement, linger over her body like a moony lustful youth; then reluctantly I have to recall myself to the tedium of paperwork or walk over to the window and stare into the street. I remember how in the first years of my appointment here I used to roam the obscurer quarters of the town toward dusk, shadowing my face in my cloak; how sometimes a restless wife, leaning over the half-door with the hearthfire gleaming behind her, would answer my gaze without flinching; how I would fall into conversation with young girls promenading in twos and threes, buy them sherbet, then perhaps lead one away into the darkness to the old granary and a bed of sacks. If there was anything to be envied in a posting to the frontier, my friends told me, it was the easy morals of the oases, the long scented summer evenings, the complaisant sloe-eyed women. For years I wore the well-fed look of a prize boar. Later that promiscuity modulated into more discreet relations with housekeepers and girls lodged sometimes upstairs in my rooms but more often downstairs with the kitchen help, and into liaisons with girls at the inn. I found that I needed women less frequently; I spent more time on my work, my hobbies, my antiquarianism, my cartography.

Not only that; there were unsettling occasions when in the middle of the sexual act I felt myself losing my way like a storyteller losing the thread of his story. I thought with a shiver of those figures of fun, fat old men whose overburdened hearts stop beating, who pass away in the arms of their loves with an apology on their lips and have to be carried out and dumped in a dark alley to save the reputation of the house. The climax to the act itself became remote, puny, an oddity. Sometimes I drifted to a halt, sometimes went mechanically through to the end. For weeks and months I would retire into celibacy. The old delight in the warmth and shapeliness of women's bodies did not desert me, but there was a new puzzlement. Did I really want to enter and claim possession of these beautiful creatures? Desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation which it was futile to deny. Nor could I always see why one part of my body, with its unreasonable cravings and false promises, should be heeded over any other as a channel of desire. Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference to you if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of in me?

Yet at other times, and particularly in the last year, with the girl whose nickname at the inn is The Star but whom I have always thought of as a bird, I felt again the power of the old sensual enchantment, swam out into her body and was transported to the old limits of pleasure. So I thought: "It is nothing but a matter of age, of cycles of desire and apathy in a body that is slowly cooling and dying. When I was young the mere smell of a woman would arouse me; now it is evidently only the sweetest, the youngest, the newest who have that power. One of these days it will be little boys." With some distaste I looked forward to my last years in this bountiful oasis.

Three nights in succession, now, I visit her in her little room, bringing presents of cananga oil, sweets, and a jar of the smoked fish-roe I know she loves to wolf down in private. When I embrace her she closes her eyes; tremors of what seem to be delight run through her. The friend who first recommended her to me spoke of her talents: "It is all playacting of course," he said, "but in her case the difference is that she believes in the role she plays." For myself, I find I do not care. Captivated by her performance, I open my eyes in the midst of all the fluttering and shivering and moaning, then sink back into the dark river of my own pleasure.

I spend three days of sensual languor, heavy-lidded, sleekly aroused, daydreaming. I return to my rooms after midnight and slip into bed, paying no attention to the obdurate form beside me. If I am woken in the morning by the sound of her preparations, I feign sleep till she is gone.

Once, happening to pass the open kitchen door, I glance in. Through wraiths of steam I see a stocky girl seated at a table preparing food. "I know who that is," I think to myself with surprise; nevertheless, the image that persists in my memory as I cross the yard is of the pile of green marrows on the table in front of her. Deliberately I try to shift my mind's gaze from the marrows back to the hands that slice them, and from the hands to the face. I detect in myself a reluctance, a resistance. My regard remains dazedly fixed on the marrows, on the gleam of light on their wet skins. As if with a will of its own, it does not move. So I begin to face the truth of what I am trying to do: to obliterate the girl. I realize that if I took a pencil to sketch her face I would not know where to start. Is she truly so featureless? With an effort I concentrate my mind on her. I see a figure in a cap and heavy shapeless coat standing unsteadily, bent forward, straddle-legged, supporting itself on sticks. How ugly, I say to myself. My mouth forms the ugly word. I am surprised by it but I do not resist: she is ugly, ugly.

I come back on the fourth night in a bad temper, thrashing about my rooms noisily, not caring who is woken. The evening has been a failure, the current of renewed desire is broken. I throw my boots on the floor and climb into bed spoiling for a quarrel, longing for someone to blame, ashamed too of my childishness. What this woman beside me is doing in my life I cannot comprehend. The thought of the strange ecstasies I have approached through the medium of her incomplete body fills me with a dry revulsion, as if I had spent nights copulating with a dummy of straw and leather. What could I ever have seen in her? I try to recall her as she was before the doctors of pain began their ministrations. It is impossible that my gaze did not pass over her as she sat with the other barbarian prisoners in the yard the day they were brought in. Somewhere in the honeycomb of my brain, I am convinced, the memory is lodged; but I am unable to bring it back. I can remember the woman with the baby, even the baby itself. I can remember every detail: the frayed edge of the woollen shawl, the patina of sweat under the wisps of fine baby-hair. I can remember the bony hands of the man who died; I believe I can even, with an effort, recompose his face. But beside him, where the girl should be, there is a space, a blankness.

I wake up in the night with the girl shaking me and the echo of a thin moan still hanging in the air. "You were shouting in your sleep," she says. "You woke me up."

"What was I shouting?"

She mumbles something, turns her back on me.

Later in the night she wakes me again: "You were shouting."

Thick-headed and confused, angry too, I try to look into myself but see only a vortex and at the heart of the vortex oblivion.

"Is it a dream?" she says.

"I cannot remember any dream."

Can it be that the dream of the hooded child building the snow-castle has been coming back? If it has, surely the taste or the smell or the afterglow of the dream would linger with me.

"There is something I must ask you," I say. "Do you remember when you were brought here, into the barracks yard, for the first time? The guards made you all sit down. Where did you sit? Which way did you face?"

Through the window I can see streaks of cloud racing across the face of the moon. Out of the darkness beside me she speaks: "They made us sit together in the shade. I was next to my father."

I summon up the image of her father. In silence I try to re-create the heat, the dust, the smell of all those tired bodies. In the shade of the barracks wall I seat the prisoners one by one, all that I can remember. I put together the woman with the baby, her woollen shawl, her bare breast. The baby wails, I hear the wail, it is too tired to drink. The mother, bedraggled, thirsty, looks at me, wondering if I can be appealed to. Next come two hazy forms. Hazy but present: I know that with an effort half of memory, half of imagination, I can fill them out. Then comes the girl's father, his bony hands folded before him. His cap is tipped over his eyes, he does not look up. Now I turn to the space beside him.

"On which side of your father were you sitting?"

"I sat to his right."

The space to the right of the man remains blank. Concentrating painfully I see even the individual pebbles on the earth beside him and the texture of the wall behind.

"Tell me what you were doing."

"Nothing. We were all very tired. We had walked since before dawn. We stopped to rest only once. We were tired and thirsty."

"Did you see me?"

"Yes, we all saw you."

I clasp my arms around my knees and concentrate. The space beside the man remains empty, but a faint sense of the presence of the girl, an aura, begins to emerge. Now! I urge myself: now I will open my eyes and she will be there! I open my eyes. In the dim light I make out her shape beside me. With a rush of feeling I stretch out to touch her hair, her face. There is no answering life. It is like caressing an urn or a ball, something which is all surface.

"I have been trying to remember you as you were before all this happened," I say. "I find it difficult. It is a pity you can't tell me." I do not expect a denial, and it does not come.

A detachment of new conscripts has arrived to take the places of men who have completed their three-year spell on the frontier and are ready to leave for their homes. The detachment is led by a young officer who is to join the staff here.

I invite him, with two of his colleagues, to dine with me at the inn. The evening goes well: the food is good, the drink plentiful, my guest has stories to tell about his journey, undertaken in a hard season in a region wholly foreign to him. He lost three men on the way, he says: one left his tent in the night to answer a call of nature and never returned; two more deserted almost within sight of the oasis, slipping away to hide in the reeds. Troublemakers, he calls them, whom he was not sorry to be rid of. Still, do I not think their desertion was foolish? Very foolish, I reply; has he any idea why they deserted? No, he says: they were fairly treated, everyone was fairly treated; but then of course conscripts… He shrugs. They would have done better to desert earlier, I suggest. The country around here is inhospitable. They are dead men if they have not found shelter by now.

We speak of the barbarians. He is convinced, he says, that for part of the way he was trailed at a distance by barbarians. Are you sure they were barbarians? I ask. Who else could they have been? he replies. His colleagues concur.

I like this young man's energy, his interest in the new sights of the frontier region. His achievement in bringing his men through in this dead season is commendable. When our companions plead the lateness of the hour and depart, I press him to stay. Past midnight we sit talking and drinking. I hear the latest news from the capital, which I have not seen for so long. I tell him of some of the places I look back on with nostalgia: the pavilion gardens where musicians perform for the strolling crowds and one's feet rustle through fallen autumn chestnut leaves; a bridge I remember from which one sees the reflection of the moon on the water that ripples around the pediments in the shape of a flower of paradise.

"The rumour going about brigade headquarters," he says, "is that there will be a general offensive against the barbarians in the spring to push them back from the frontier into the mountains."

I am sorry to break off the train of reminiscing. I do not want to end the evening with a wrangle. Nevertheless I respond. "I am sure it is only a rumour: they cannot seriously intend to do that. The people we call barbarians are nomads, they migrate between the lowlands and the uplands every year, that is their way of life. They will never permit themselves to be bottled up in the mountains."

He looks at me oddly. For the first time this evening I feel a barrier descend, the barrier between the military and the civilian. "But surely," he says, "if we are to be frank, that is what war is about: compelling a choice on someone who would not otherwise make it." He surveys me with the arrogant candour of a young graduate of the War College. I am sure that he is remembering the story, which must by now have gone the rounds, of how I withheld my co-operation from an officer of the Bureau. I think I know what he sees before him: a minor civilian administrator sunk, after years in this backwater, in slothful native ways, outmoded in his thinking, ready to gamble the security of the Empire for a makeshift, insecure peace.

He leans forward, wearing an air of deferential boyish puzzlement: I am more and more convinced he is playing with me. "Tell me, sir, in confidence," he says, "what are these barbarians dissatisfied about? What do they want from us?"

I ought to be cautious but I am not. I ought to yawn, evade his question, end the evening; but I find myself rising to the bait. (When will I learn to keep a cunning tongue?)

"They want an end to the spread of settlements across their land. They want their land back, finally. They want to be free to move about with their flocks from pasture to pasture as they used to." It is not too late to put a stop to the lecture. Instead I hear my voice rise in tone and abandon myself regretfully to the intoxication of anger. "I will say nothing of the recent raids carried out on them, quite without justification, and followed by acts of wanton cruelty, since the security of the Empire was at stake, or so I am told. It will take years to patch up the damage done in those few days. But let that pass, let me rather tell you what I find disheartening as an administrator, even in times of peace, even when border relations are good. There is a time in the year, you know, when the nomads visit us to trade. Well: go to any stall in the market during that time and see who gets short-weighted and cheated and shouted at and bullied. See who is forced to leave his womenfolk behind in the camp for fear they will be insulted by the soldiers. See who lies drunk in the gutter, and see who kicks him where he lies. It is this contempt for the barbarians, contempt which is shown by the meanest ostler or peasant farmer, that I as magistrate have had to contend with for twenty years. How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them. We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire-our outpost, our setdement, our market centre. But these people, these barbarians don't think of it like that at all. We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients. There are old folk alive among them who remember their parents telling them about this oasis as it once was: a well-shaded place by the side of the lake with plenty of grazing even in winter. That is how they still talk about it, perhaps how they still see it, as though not one spadeful of earth had been turned or one brick laid on top of another. They do not doubt that one of these days we will pack our carts and depart to wherever it was we came from, that our buildings will become homes for mice and lizards, that their beasts will graze on these rich fields we have planted. You smile? Shall I tell you something? Every year the lake-water grows a little more salty. There is a simple explanation-never mind what it is. The barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, 'Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go.' That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us."

"But we are not going," the young man says quietly. "Are you sure?"

"We are not going, therefore they make a mistake. Even if it became necessary to supply the settlement by convoy, we would not go. Because these border settlements are the first line of defence of the Empire. The sooner the barbarians understand that the better."

Despite his engaging air there is a rigidity to his thought that must derive from his military education. I sigh. I have achieved nothing by letting myself go. His worst suspicion is no doubt confirmed: that I am unsound as well as old-fashioned. And do I really after all believe what I have been saying? Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way: intellectual torpor, slovenliness, tolerance of disease and death? If we were to disappear would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating our ruins? Would they preserve our census rolls and our grain-merchants' ledgers in glass cases, or devote themselves to deciphering the script of our love-letters? Is my indignation at the course that Empire takes anything more than the peevishness of an old man who does not want the ease of his last years on the frontier to be disturbed? I try to turn the conversation to more suitable subjects, to horses, hunting, the weather; but it is late, my young friend wants to leave, and I must settle the reckoning for the evening's entertainment.

The children are playing in the snow again. In their midst, with her back to me, is the hooded figure of the girl. At moments, as I struggle towards her, she is obliterated from sight behind the curtain of falling snow. My feet sink so deep that I can barely lift them. Each step takes an age. This is the worst it has snowed in all the dreams.

As I labour towards them the children leave off their play to look at me. They turn their grave shining faces on me, their white breath drifting from them in puffs. I try to smile and touch them as I pass on my way to the girl, but my features are frozen, the smile will not come, there seems to be a sheet of ice covering my mouth. I raise a hand to tear it off: the hand, I find, is thickly gloved, the fingers are frozen inside the glove, when I touch the glove to my face I feel nothing. With ponderous movements I push my way past the children.

Now I begin to see what the girl is doing. She is building a fort of snow, a walled town which I recognize in every detail: the battlements with the four watchtowers, the gate with the porter's hut beside it, the streets and houses, the great square with the barracks compound in one corner. And here is the very spot where I stand! But the square is empty, the whole town is white and mute and empty. I point to the middle of the square. "You must put people there!" I want to say. No sound comes from my mouth, in which my tongue lies frozen like a fish. Yet she responds. She sits up on her knees and turns her hooded face towards me. I fear, at this last instant, that she will be a disappointment, that the face she will present to me will be obtuse, slick, like an internal organ not meant to live in the light. But no, she is herself, herself as I have never seen her, a smiling child, the light sparkling on her teeth and glancing from her jet-black eyes. "So this is what it is to see!" I say to myself. I want to speak to her through my clumsy frozen muzzle. "How do you do all that fine work with your hands in mittens?" I want to say. She smiles kindly on my mumbling. Then she turns back to her fort in the snow.

I emerge from the dream cold and stiff. It is an hour yet to first light, the fire is dead, my scalp feels numb with cold. The girl beside me sleeps huddled in a ball. I get out of bed and with my greatcloak wrapped about me start rebuilding the fire.

The dream has taken root. Night after night I return to the waste of the snowswept square, trudging towards the figure at its centre, reconfirming each time that the town she is building is empty of life.

I ask the girl about her sisters. She has two sisters, the younger, according to her, "very pretty, but scatterbrained". "Would you not like to see your sisters again?" I ask. The blunder hangs grotesquely in the air between us. We both smile. "Of course," she says.

I also ask about the period after her imprisonment, when unknown to me she lived in this town under my jurisdiction. "People were kind to me when they saw I had been left behind. I used to sleep at the inn for a time while my feet were getting better. There was a man who took care of me. He has gone now. He kept horses." She also mentions the man who gave her the boots she was wearing when I first met her. I ask about other men. "Yes, there were other men. I did not have a choice. That was how it had to be."

After this conversation relations with the common soldiers become more strained. Leaving my apartment for the courthouse in the morning, I pass one of the rare inspection parades. I am sure that among these men standing to attention with their equipment in bundles at their feet are some who have slept with the girl. It is not that I imagine them sniggering behind their hands. On the contrary, never have I seen them stand more stoically in the frosty wind that whips across the yard. Never has their bearing been more respectful. They would tell me if they could, I know, that we are all men, that any man can lose his head over a woman. Nevertheless, I try to come home later in the evenings to avoid the line of men at the kitchen door.

There is news of the lieutenant's two deserters. A trapper has come upon them frozen to death in a rough shelter not far from the road thirty miles east of here. Though the lieutenant is inclined to leave them there ("Thirty miles there and thirty miles back in this weather: a great deal for men who are no longer men, don't you think?"), I persuade him to send out a party. "They must have the rites," I say. "Besides, it is good for the morale of their comrades. They should not think that they too might die in the desert and lie forgotten. What we can do to ease their dread of having to leave this beautiful earth must be done. After all, it is we who lead them into these dangers." So the party leaves, and two days later returns with the crooked ice-hard corpses in a cart. I continue to find it strange that men should desert hundreds of miles from home and within a day's march of food and warmth, but I pursue the matter no further. Standing by the graveside in the icebound cemetery while the last rites are performed and the deceased's luckier comrades watch bareheaded, I repeat to myself that by insisting on correct treatment of the bones I am trying to show these young men that death is no annihilation, that we survive as filiations in the memory of those we knew. Yet is it truly for their benefit alone that I mount the ceremony? Am I not also comforting myself? I offer to take over the chore of writing to the parents to inform them of their respective misfortunes. "It comes more easily to an older man," I say.

"Wouldn't you like to do something else?" she asks.

Her foot rests in my lap. I am abstracted, lost in the rhythm of rubbing and kneading the swollen ankle. Her question takes me by surprise. It is the first time she has spoken so pointedly. I shrug it off, smile, try to slip back into my trance, not far from sleep and reluctant to be diverted.

The foot stirs in my grip, comes alive, pokes gently into my groin. I open my eyes to the naked golden body on the bed. She lies with her head cradled in her arms, watching me in the indirect way I am by now used to, showing off her firm breasts and her sleek belly, brimming with young animal health. Her toes continue to probe; but in this slack old gentleman kneeling before her in his plum dressing-gown they find no response.

"Another time," I say, my tongue curling stupidly around the words. As far as I know this is a lie, but I utter it: "Another time, perhaps." Then I lift her leg aside and stretch out beside her. "Old men have no virtue to protect, so what can I say?" It is a lame joke, poorly expressed, and she does not understand it. She slips open my gown and begins to fondle me. After a while I push her hand away.

"You visit other girls," she whispers. "You think I do not know?"

I make a peremptory gesture for her to be quiet.

"Do you also treat them like this?" she whispers, and starts to sob.

Though my heart goes out to her, there is nothing I can do. Yet what humiliation for her! She cannot even leave the apartment without tottering and fumbling while she dresses. She is as much a prisoner now as ever before. I pat her hand and sink deeper into gloom.

This is the last night we sleep in the same bed. I move a cot into the parlour and sleep there. Physical intimacy between us ends. "For the time being," I say. "Until the end of winter. It is better so." She accepts this excuse without a word. When I come home in the evenings she brings me my tea and kneels by the tray to serve me. Then she returns to the kitchen. An hour later she taps her way up the stairs behind the girl with the dinner-tray. We eat together. After the meal I retire to my study or go out for the evening, resuming my neglected social round: chess in the homes of friends, cards with the officers at the inn. I also pay one or two visits upstairs at the inn, but with guilty feelings that spoil the pleasure. Always, when I return, the girl is asleep, and I must tiptoe like an erring husband.

She adapts without complaint to the new pattern. I tell myself that she submits because of her barbarian upbringing. But what do I know of barbarian upbringings? What I call submission may be nothing but indifference. What does it matter to a beggar, a fatherless child, whether I sleep by myself or not as long as she has a roof over her head and food in her belly? I have hitherto liked to think that she cannot fail to see me as a man in the grip of a passion, however perverted and obscure that passion may be, that in the bated silences which make up so much of our intercourse she cannot but feel my gaze pressing in upon her with the weight of a body. I prefer not to dwell on the possibility that what a barbarian upbringing teaches a girl may be not to accommodate a man's every whim, including the whim of neglect, but to see sexual passion, whether in horse or goat or man or woman, as a simple fact of life with the clearest of means and the clearest of ends; so that the confused actions of an aging foreigner who picks her up off the streets and instals her in his apartment so that he can now kiss her feet, now browbeat her, now anoint her with exotic oils, now ignore her, now sleep in her arms all night, now moodily sleep apart, may seem nothing but evidences of impotence, indecisiveness, alienation from his own desires. While I have not ceased to see her as a body maimed, scarred, harmed, she has perhaps by now grown into and become that new deficient body, feeling no more deformed than a cat feels deformed for having claws instead of fingers. I would do well to take these thoughts seriously. More ordinary than I like to think, she may have ways of finding me ordinary too.