The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories

AN OLD JOURNAL

IT SOMETIMES SEEMS as if the defence of our country has been quite badly neglected. Until recently, we never thought about it, and just got on with our business; but the events of the past few days have got us worried.

I run a shoemaker’s on the square in front of the royal palace. I’d just opened my shop for the morning when I saw that that every street was guarded by armed men. They’re not our soldiers: it turns out they’re nomads from the north. In some way I can’t get my head around, they’ve pushed forward into the capital, even though it’s so far from the border. In any case, they’re here, and every morning it looks like there are more of them.

Since they’re nomads, they camp under the open sky and look down on living in houses. They’re always busy sharpening their swords, filing their arrows and practising on horseback. They’ve turned this peaceful, painstakingly clean public square into a stable. We do sometimes try to go out of our shops to clear away at least the worst of the mess, but it’s a pointless effort and it puts us in danger of being trampled by the wild horses or injured by their riders’ whips.

There’s no talking to the nomads. They don’t speak our language and barely have one of their own. The noises they use as speech make them sound like crows. All you hear these days is that crow-like croaking. Our way of life, our laws, are incomprehensible to them, and irrelevant. That must be why they’re also hostile to any attempt to communicate with sign language. You can talk till you sprain your jaw and gesture till you dislocate your wrists, they won’t have understood you and they will never understand you. They often just grimace; then you can see the whites of their eyes rolling and foam spilling out of their mouths, but they’re not trying to express anything, nor even to frighten you; they do it just because that’s how they are. What they need, they take. You can’t really say that they use force. When they appear, you step aside and let them have everything.

They’ve taken many a good piece from my stores as well. But I can’t complain when I see, for example, how bad it is for the butcher across from me. As soon as he brings in any supplies, it’s all torn away from him and guzzled by the nomads. Even their horses eat meat; you’ll often see a rider lying next to his horse with both of them tucking into the same piece of meat, one from each end. The butcher is too afraid to stop bringing in the deliveries. We understand why, so we’ve scraped together some money to support him. If the nomads stopped getting their meat, who knows what they’d think of doing; that said, who knows how they’ll act even if they do get their meat every day.

The other morning, the butcher thought he could at least save himself the work of chopping up the meat and just had a live ox brought in. He can never do that again. I had to go and lie on the floor at the very back of the workshop for more than an hour, with all my clothes, sheets and pillows piled on top of myself, just so as not to hear the ox’s screaming; the nomads jumped on it from all sides and tore out chunks of warm meat with their teeth. It was quiet for a long time before I dared go outside again; they were sprawled around the ox’s carcass like drinkers around a barrel of wine.

It was then that I think I saw the king himself at one of the palace windows; he never usually comes to these outer buildings, he lives in the innermost of the palace gardens; but this time—at least this is what I thought I saw—he was standing at one of the windows and looking down, his head bowed, at the commotion in front of his palace.

“How’s this going to turn out?” we all ask each other. “How long will we need to endure these burdens and ordeals? The royal palace is what attracted the nomads, but it doesn’t know how to drive them away again. The gate stays locked; the guards, who used to have a ceremony of marching in and out, now stay behind barred windows. The job of saving the country has been left to us artisans and business people, but we aren’t up to it; we’ve never claimed to be capable of something like that. It’s a misunderstanding, and we’re all going to go under because of it.”