Waiting For The Barbarians

5

THE BARBARIANS come out at night. Before darkness falls the last goat must be brought in, the gates barred, a watch set in every lookout to call the hours. All night, it is said, the barbarians prowl about bent on murder and rapine. Children in their dreams see the shutters part and fierce barbarian faces leer through. "The barbarians are here!" the children scream, and cannot be comforted. Clothing disappears from washing-lines, food from larders, however tightly locked. The barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls, people say; they come and go as they please, take what they like; no one is safe any longer. The farmers still till the fields, but they go out in bands, never singly. They work without heart: the barbarians are only waiting for the crops to be established, they say, before they flood the fields again.

Why doesn't the army stop the barbarians? people complain. Life on the frontier has become too hard. They talk of returning to the Old Country, but then remember that the roads are no longer safe because of the barbarians. Tea and sugar can no longer be bought over the counter as the shopkeepers hoard their stocks. Those who eat well eat behind closed doors, fearful of awaking their neighbour's envy.

Three weeks ago a little girl was raped. Her friends, playing in the irrigation ditches, did not miss her till she came back to them bleeding, speechless. For days she lay in her parents' home staring at the ceiling. Nothing would induce her to tell her story. When the lamp was put out she would begin to whimper. Her friends claim a barbarian did it. They saw him running away into the reeds. They recognized him as a barbarian by his ugliness. Now all children are forbidden to play outside the gates, and the farmers carry clubs and spears when they go to the fields.

The higher feeling runs against the barbarians, the tighter I huddle in my corner, hoping I will not be remembered.

It is a long time since the second expeditionary force rode out so bravely with its flags and trumpets and shining armour and prancing steeds to sweep the barbarians from the valley and teach them a lesson they and their children and grandchildren would never forget. Since then there have been no dispatches, no communiqués. The exhilaration of the times when there used to be daily military parades on the square, displays of horsemanship, exhibitions of musketry, has long since dissipated. Instead the air is full of anxious rumours. Some say that the entire thousand-mile frontier has erupted into conflict, that the northern barbarians have joined forces with the western barbarians, that the army of the Empire is too thinly stretched, that one of these days it will be forced to give up the defence of remote outposts like this one to concentrate its resources on the protection of the heartland. Others say that we receive no news of the war only because our soldiers have thrust deep into the enemy's territory and are too busy dealing out heavy blows to send dispatches. Soon, they say, when we least expect it, our men will come marching back weary but victorious, and we shall have peace in our time.

Among the small garrison that has been left behind there is more drunkenness than I have ever known before, more arrogance towards the townspeople. There have been incidents in which soldiers have gone into shops, taken what they wanted, and left without paying. Of what use is it for the shopkeeper to raise the alarm when the criminals and the civil guard are the same people? The shopkeepers complain to Mandel, who is in charge under the emergency powers while Joll is away with the army. Mandel makes promises but does not act. Why should he? All that matters to him is that he should remain popular with his men. Despite the parade of vigilance on the ramparts and the weekly sweep along the lakeshore (for lurking barbarians, though none has ever been caught), discipline is lax.

Meanwhile I, the old clown who lost his last vestige of authority the day he spent hanging from a tree in a woman's underclothes shouting for help, the filthy creature who for a week licked his food off the flagstones like a dog because he had lost the use of his hands, am no longer locked up. I sleep in a corner of the barracks yard; I creep around in my filthy smock; when a fist is raised against me I cower. I live like a starved beast at the back door, kept alive perhaps only as evidence of the animal that skulks within every barbarian-lover. I know I am not safe. Sometimes I can feel the weight of a resentful gaze resting upon me; I do not look up; I know that for some the attraction must be strong to clear the yard by putting a bullet through my skull from an upstairs window.

There has been a drift of refugees to the town, fisherfolk from the tiny settlements dotted along the river and the northern lakeshore, speaking a language no one understands, carrying their households on their backs, with their gaunt dogs and rickety children trailing behind them. People crowded around them when they first came. "Was it the barbarians who chased you out?" they asked, making fierce faces, stretching imaginary bows. No one asked about the imperial soldiery or the brush-fires they set.

There was sympathy for these savages at first, and people brought them food and old clothing, until they began to put up their thatched shelters against the wall on the side of the square near the walnut trees, and their children grew bold enough to sneak into kitchens and steal, and one night a pack of their dogs broke into the sheepfold and tore out the throats of a dozen ewes. Feelings then turned against them. The soldiers took action, shooting their dogs on sight and, one morning when the men were still down at the lake, tearing down the entire row of shelters. For days the fisherfolk hid out in the reeds. Then one by one their little thatched huts began to reappear, this time outside the town under the north wall. Their huts were allowed to stand, but the sentries at the gate received orders to deny them entry. Now that rule has been relaxed, and they can be seen hawking strings of fish from door to door in the mornings. They have no experience of money, they are cheated outrageously, they will part with anything for a thimbleful of rum.

They are a bony, pigeon-chested people. Their women seem always to be pregnant; their children are stunted; in a few of the young girls there are traces of a fragile, liquid-eyed beauty; for the rest I see only ignorance, cunning, slovenliness. Yet what do they see in me, if they ever see me? A beast that stares out from behind a gate: the filthy underside of this beautiful oasis where they have found a precarious safety.

One day a shadow falls across me where I doze in the yard, a foot prods me, and I look up into Mandel's blue eyes.

"Are we feeding you well?" he says. "Are you growing fat again?"

I nod, sitting at his feet.

"Because we can't go on feeding you forever."

There is a long pause while we examine each other.

"When are you going to begin working for your keep?"

"I am a prisoner awaiting trial. Prisoners awaiting trial are not required to work for their keep. That is the law. They are maintained out of the public coffer."

"But you are not a prisoner. You are free to go as you please." He waits for me to take the ponderously offered bait. I say nothing. He goes on: "How can you be a prisoner when we have no record of you? Do you think we don't keep records? We have no record of you. So you must be a free man."

I rise and follow him across the yard to the gate. The guard hands him the key and he unlocks it. "You see? The gate is open."

I hesitate before I pass through. There is something I would like to know. I look into Mandel's face, at the clear eyes, windows of his soul, at the mouth from which his spirit utters itself. "Have you a minute to spare?" I say. We stand in the gateway, with the guard in the background pretending not to hear. I say: "I am not a young man any more, and whatever future I had in this place is in ruins." I gesture around the square, at the dust that scuds before the hot late summer wind, bringer of blights and plagues. "Also I have already died one death, on that tree, only you decided to save me. So there is something I would like to know before I go. If it is not too late, with the barbarian at the gate." I feel the tiniest smile of mockery brush my lips, I cannot help it. I glance up at the empty sky. "Forgive me if the question seems impudent, but I would like to ask: How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been… working with people? That is a question I have always asked myself about executioners and other such people. Wait! Listen to me a moment longer, I am sincere, it has cost me a great deal to come out with this, since I am terrified of you, I need not tell you that, I am sure you are aware of it. Do you find it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that one would want to wash one's hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don't you think? Some kind of purging of one's soul too-that is how I have imagined it. Otherwise how would it be possible to return to everyday life-to sit down at table, for instance, and break bread with one's family or one's comrades?"

He turns away, but with a slow claw-like hand I manage to catch his arm. "No, listen!" I say. "Do not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that. Remember, I too have devoted a life to the law, I know its processes, I know that the workings of justice are often obscure. I am only trying to understand. I am trying to understand the zone in which you live. I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day. But I cannot! That is what troubles me! If I were he, I say to myself, my hands would feel so dirty that it would choke me-"

He wrenches himself free and hits me so hard in the chest that I gasp and stumble backwards. "You bastard!" he shouts. "You fucking old lunatic! Get out! Go and die somewhere!"

"When are you going to put me on trial?" I shout at his retreating back. He pays no heed.

There is nowhere to hide. And why should I? From dawn to dusk I am on view on the square, roaming around the stalls or sitting in the shade of the trees. And gradually, as word gets around that the old Magistrate has taken his knocks and come through, people cease to fall silent or turn their backs when I come near. I discover that I am not without friends, particularly among women, who can barely conceal their eagerness to hear my side of the story. Roaming the streets, I pass the quartermaster's plump wife hanging out the washing. We greet. "And how are you, sir?" she says. "We heard that you had such a hard time." Her eyes glitter, avid though cautious. "Won't you come in and have a cup of tea?" So we sit together at the kitchen table, and she sends the children to play outside, and while I drink tea and munch steadily at a plate of the delicious oatmeal biscuits she bakes, she plays out the first moves in this roundabout game of question and answer: "You were gone so long, we wondered if you would ever be coming back… And then all the trouble you had! How things have changed! There was none of this commotion when you were in charge. All these strangers from the capital, upsetting things!" I take my cue, sigh: "Yes, they don't understand how we go about things in the provinces, do they. All this trouble over a girl…" I gobble another biscuit. A fool in love is laughed at but in the end always forgiven. "To me it was simply a matter of common sense to take her back to her family, but how could one make them understand that?" I ramble on; she listens to these half-truths, nodding, watching me like a hawk; we pretend that the voice she hears is not the voice of the man who swung from the tree shouting for mercy loud enough to waken the dead. "… Anyhow, let us hope it is all over. I still have pains"-I touch my shoulder- "one's body heals so slowly as one gets older…"

So I sing for my keep. And if I am still hungry in the evening, if I wait at the barracks gate for the whistle that calls the dogs and slip in quietly enough, I can usually wheedle out of the maids the leftovers from the soldiers' supper, a bowl of cold beans or the rich scrapings of the soup-pot or half a loaf of bread.

Or in the mornings I can saunter over to the inn and, leaning over the flap of the kitchen door, breathe in all the good smells, marjoram and yeast and crisp chopped onions and smoky mutton-fat. Mai the cook greases the baking-pans: I watch her deft fingers dip into the pot of lard and coat the pan in three swift circles. I think of her pastries, the renowned ham and spinach and cheese pie she makes, and feel the saliva spurt in my mouth.

"So many people have left," she says, turning to the great ball of dough, "I can't even begin to tell you. A sizable party left only a few days ago. One of the girls from here-the little one with the long straight hair, you may remember her-she was one of them, she left with her fellow." Her voice is flat as she imparts the information to me, and I am grateful for her considerateness. "Of course it makes sense," she continues, "if you want to leave you must leave now, it's a long road, dangerous too, and the nights are getting colder." She talks about the weather, about the past summer and signs of approaching winter, as though where I had been, in my cell not three hundred paces from where we stand, I had been sealed off from hot and cold, dry and wet. To her, I realize, I disappeared and then reappeared, and in between was not part of the world.

I have been listening and nodding and dreaming while she talks. Now I speak. "You know," I say, "when I was in prison-in the barracks, not in the new prison, in a little room they locked me into-I was so hungry that I did not give a thought to women, only to food. I lived from one mealtime to the next. There was never enough for me. I bolted my food like a dog and wanted more. Also there was a great deal of pain, at different times: my hand, my arms, as well as this"-I touch the thickened nose, the ugly scar under my eye by which, I am beginning to learn, people are surreptitiously fascinated. "When I dreamed of a woman I dreamed of someone who would come in the night and take the pain away. A child's dream. What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out. What you said a moment ago, for instance-the girl you mentioned-I was very fond of her, I think you know that, though delicacy prevented you… When you said she was gone, I confess, it was as if something had struck me here, in the breast. A blow."

Her hands move deftly, pressing circles out of the sheet of dough with the rim of a bowl, catching up the scraps, rolling them together. She avoids my eyes.

"I went upstairs to her room last night, but the door was locked. I shrugged it off. She has a lot of friends, I never thought I was the only one… But what did I want? Somewhere to sleep, certainly; but more too. Why pretend? We all know, what old men seek is to recover their youth in the arms of young women." She pounds the dough, kneads it, rolls it out: a young woman herself with children of her own, living with an exacting mother: what appeal am I making to her as I ramble on about pain, loneliness? Bemused I listen to the discourse that emerges from me. "Let everything be said!" I told myself when I first faced up to my tormentors. "Why clamp your lips stupidly together? You have no secrets. Let them know they are working on flesh and blood! Declare your terror, scream when the pain comes! They thrive on stubborn silence: it confirms to them that every soul is a lock they must patiently pick. Bare yourself! Open your heart!" So I shouted and screamed and said whatever came into my head. Insidious rationale! For now what I hear when I loosen my tongue and let it sail free is the subtle whining of a beggar. "Do you know where I slept last night?" I hear myself saying. "Do you know that little lean-to at the back of the granary?…"

But above all it is food that I crave, and more intensely with every passing week. I want to be fat again. There is a hunger upon me day and night. I wake up with my stomach yawning, I cannot wait to be on my rounds, loitering at the barracks gate to sniff the bland watery aroma of oatmeal and wait for the burnt scrapings; cajoling children to throw me down mulberries from the trees; stretching over a garden fence to steal a peach or two; passing from door to door, a man down on his luck, the victim of an infatuation, but cured now, ready with a smile to take what is offered, a slice of bread and jam, a cup of tea, in the middle of the day perhaps a bowl of stew or a plate of onions and beans, and always fruit, apricots, peaches, pomegranates, the wealth of a bounteous summer. I eat like a beggar, gobbling down my food with such appetite, wiping my plate so clean that it does the heart good to see it. No wonder I am day by day creeping back into the good books of my countrymen.

And how I can flatter, how I can woo! More than once have I had a tasty snack prepared especially for me: a mutton chop fried with peppers and chives, or a slice of ham and tomato on bread with a wedge of goats' milk cheese. If I can carry water or firewood in return, I do so gladly, as a token, though I am not as strong as I used to be. And if for the time being I have exhausted my sources in the town-for I must be careful not to become a burden on my benefactors-I can always stroll down to the fisherfolk's camp and help them clean fish. I have learned a few words of their language, I am received without suspicion, they understand what it is to be a beggar, they share their food with me.

I want to be fat again, fatter than ever before. I want a belly that gurgles with contentment when I fold my palms over it, I want to feel my chin sink into the cushion of my throat and my breasts wobble as I walk. I want a life of simple satisfactions. I want (vain hope!) never to know hunger again.

Nearly three months since it departed, and still there is no news of the expeditionary force. Instead, terrible rumours everywhere: that the force has been lured into the desert and wiped out; that unknown to us it has been recalled to defend the homeland, leaving the frontier towns for the barbarians to pick like fruit whenever they choose to. Every week there is a convoy of the prudent leaving town, going east, ten or twelve families travelling together "to visit relatives", as the euphemism has it, "till things settle down again". They leave, leading pack-trains, pushing handcarts, carrying packs on their backs, their very children laden like beasts. I have even seen a long low four-wheeled cart drawn by sheep. Pack-animals can no longer be bought. Those who depart are the sensible ones, the husbands and wives who lie awake in bed whispering, making plans, cutting losses. They leave their comfortable homes behind, locking them "till we return", taking the keys as a memento. By the next day gangs of soldiers have broken in, looted the houses, smashed the furniture, fouled the floors. Resentment builds up against those who are seen to be making preparations to go. They are insulted in public, assaulted or robbed with impunity. Now there are families that simply disappear in the dead of night, bribing the guards to open the gates for them, taking the east road and waiting at the first or second stopping-place till the party that accumulates is large enough to travel safely.

The soldiery tyrannizes the town. They have held a torch-light meeting on the square to denounce "cowards and traitors" and to affirm collective allegiance to the Empire. WE STAY has become the slogan of the faithful: the words are to be seen daubed on walls everywhere. I stood in the dark on the edge of the huge crowd that night (no one was brave enough to stay at home) listening to these words chanted ponderously, menacingly from thousands of throats. A shiver ran down my back. After the meeting the soldiers led a procession through the streets. Doors were kicked in, windows broken, a house set on fire. Till late at night there was drinking and carousing on the square. I looked out for Mandel but did not see him. It may be that he has lost control of the garrison, if indeed the soldiers were ever prepared to take orders from a policeman.

When they were first quartered on the town these soldiers, strangers to our ways, conscripts from all over the Empire, were welcomed coolly. "We don't need them here," people said, "the sooner they go out and fight the barbarians the better." They were denied credit in the shops, mothers locked their daughters away from them. But after the barbarians made their appearance on our doorstep that attitude changed. Now that they seem to be all that stands between us and destruction, these foreign soldiers are anxiously courted. A committee of citizens makes a weekly levy to hold a feast for them, roasting whole sheep on spits, laying out gallons of ram. The girls of the town are theirs for the taking. They are welcome to whatever they want as long as they will stay and guard our lives. And the more they are fawned on, the more their arrogance grows. We know we cannot rely on them. With the granary nearly empty and the main force vanished like smoke, what is there to hold them once the feasting stops? All we can hope for is that they will be deterred from deserting us by the rigours of winter travel.

For premonitions of winter are everywhere. In the early hours of the morning a chilly breeze rises in the north: the shutters creak, sleepers huddle closer, the sentries wrap their cloaks tight, turn their backs. Some nights I wake up shivering on my bed of sacks and cannot get to sleep again. When the sun comes up it seems farther away each day; the earth grows cold even before sunset. I think of the little convoys of travellers strung out along hundreds of miles of road, heading for a motherland most have never seen, pushing their handcarts, goading their horses, carrying their children, nursing their provisions, day by day abandoning at the roadside tools, kitchenware, portraits, clocks, toys, everything they believed they might rescue from the ruin of their estates before they realized that at most they might hope to escape with their lives. In a week or two the weather will be too treacherous for any but the hardiest to set out. The bleak north wind will be howling all day, withering life on the stalk, carrying a sea of dust across the wide plateau, bringing sudden flurries of hail and snow. I cannot imagine myself, with my tattered clothes and cast-off sandals, stick in hand, pack on back, surviving that long march. My heart would not be in it. What life can I hope for away from this oasis? The life of an indigent bookkeeper in the capital, coming back every evening after dusk to a rented room in a back street, with my teeth slowly falling out and the landlady sniffing at the door? If I were to join the exodus it would be as one of those unobtrusive old folk who one day slip away from the line of march, settle down in the lee of a rock, and wait for the last great cold to begin creeping up their legs.

I wander down the wide road down to the lakeside. The horizon ahead is already grey, merging into the grey water of the lake. Behind me the sun is setting in streaks of gold and crimson. From the ditches comes the first cricketsong. This is a world I know and love and do not want to leave. I have walked this road by night since my youth and come to no harm. How can I believe that the night is full of the flitting shadows of barbarians? If there were strangers here I would feel it in my bones. The barbarians have withdrawn with their flocks into the deepest mountain valleys, waiting for the soldiers to grow tired and go away. When that happens the barbarians will come out again. They will graze their sheep and leave us alone, we will plant our fields and leave them alone, and in a few years the frontier will be restored to peace.

I pass the ruined fields, cleared by now and ploughed afresh, cross the irrigation ditches and the shore-wall. The ground beneath my soles grows soft; soon I am walking on soggy marshgrass, pushing my way through reedbrakes, striding ankle-deep in water in the last violet light of dusk. Frogs plop into the water before me; nearby I hear a faint rustle of feathers as a marshbird crouches ready to fly.

I wade deeper, parting the reeds with my hands, feeling the cool slime between my toes; the water, holding the warmth of the sun longer than the air, resists, then gives way, before each stride. In the early hours of the morning the fishermen pole their flat-bottomed boats out across this calm surface and cast their nets. What a peaceful way to make a living! Perhaps I should leave off my beggar's trade and join them in their camp outside the wall, build myself a hut of mud and reeds, marry one of their pretty daughters, feast when the catch is plentiful, tighten my belt when it is not.

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in this wistful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. Everyone but the children! The children never doubt that the great old trees in whose shade they play will stand forever, that one day they will grow to be strong like their fathers, fertile like their mothers, that they will live and prosper and raise their own children and grow old in the place where they were born. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not he then his son's or unborn grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal dominion, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.

There is no moon. In darkness I grope my way back to dry land and on a bed of grass, wrapped in my cloak, fall asleep. I wake up stiff and cold from a flurry of confused dreams. The red star has barely moved in the sky.

As I pass along the road to the fishermen's camp a dog starts to bark; in a moment it is joined by another, and the night bursts out in a clamour of barking, shouts of alarm, screams. Dismayed, I shout out at the top of my voice, "It is nothing!" but I am not heard. I stand helpless in the middle of the road. Someone runs past me down towards the lake; then another body cannons into me, a woman, I know at once, who gasps in terror in my arms before she breaks free and is gone. There are dogs, too, snarling about me: I whirl and cry out as one snaps at my legs, tears my skin, retreats. The frenzied yapping is all round me. From behind the walls the dogs of the town bay their response. I crouch and circle, tensed for the next attack. The brassy wail of trumpets cuts through the air. The dogs bark louder than ever. Slowly I shuffle towards the camp, till one of the huts suddenly looms against the sky. I push aside the mat that hangs over the doorway and pass into the sweaty warmth where until a few minutes ago people slept.

The clamour outside dies down, but no one returns. The air is stale, drowsy. I would like to sleep, yet I am disturbed by the resonance of that soft impact on me in the road. Like a bruise my flesh retains the imprint of the body that for a few seconds rested against me. I fear what I am capable of: of coming back tomorrow in daylight still aching with the memory and asking questions until I discover who it was who ran into me in the dark, so as to build upon her, child or woman, an even more ridiculous erotic adventure. There is no limit to the foolishness of men of my age. Our only excuse is that we leave no mark of our own on the girls who pass through our hands: our convoluted desires, our ritualized lovemaking, our elephantine ecstasies are soon forgotten, they shrug off our clumsy dance as they drive straight as arrows into the arms of the men whose children they will bear, the young and vigorous and direct. Our loving leaves no mark. Whom will that other girl with the blind face remember: me with my silk robe and my dim lights and my perfumes and oils and my unhappy pleasures, or that other cold man with the mask over his eyes who gave the orders and pondered the sounds of her intimate pain? Whose was the last face she saw plainly on this earth but the face behind the glowing iron? Though I cringe with shame, even here and now, I must ask myself whether, when I lay head to foot with her, fondling and kissing those broken ankles, I was not in my heart of hearts regretting that I could not engrave myself on her as deeply. However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will approach her save in the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that she detected and rejected in me. No wonder she fell asleep so often, no wonder she was happier peeling vegetables than in my bed! From the moment my steps paused and I stood before her at the barracks gate she must have felt a miasma of deceit closing about her: envy, pity, cruelty all masquerading as desire. And in my lovemaking not impulse but the laborious denial of impulse! I remember her sober smile. From the very first she knew me for a false seducer. She listened to me, then she listened to her heart, and rightly she acted in accord with her heart. If only she had found the words to tell me! "That is not how you do it," she should have said, stopping me in the act. "If you want to learn how to do it, ask your friend with the black eyes." Then she should have continued, so as not to leave me without hope: "But if you want to love me you will have to turn your back on him and learn your lesson elsewhere." If she had told me then, if I had understood her, if I had been in a position to understand her, if I had believed her, if I had been in a position to believe her, I might have saved myself from a year of confused and futile gestures of expiation.

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less. But I temporized, I looked around this obscure frontier, this little backwater with its dusty summers and its cartloads of apricots and its long siestas and its shiftless garrison and the waterbirds flying in and flying out year after year to and from the dazzling waveless sheet of the lake, and I said to myself, "Be patient, one of these days he will go away, one of these days quiet will return: then our siestas will grow longer and our swords rustier, the watchman will sneak down from his tower to spend the night with his wife, the mortar will crumble till lizards nest between the bricks and owls fly out of the belfry, and the line that marks the frontier on the maps of Empire will grow hazy and obscure till we are blessedly forgotten." Thus I seduced myself, taking one of the many wrong turnings I have taken on a road that looks true but has delivered me into the heart of a labyrinth.

In the dream I am advancing towards her over the snow-covered square. At first I walk. Then as the wind gathers force I begin to be driven forward in a cloud of whirling snow, with arms extended on either side and the wind catching my cloak like a boatsail. Gathering speed, my feet skimming over the ground, I swoop down upon the solitary figure at the centre of the square. "She will not turn and see me in time!" I think. I open my mouth to cry out a warning. A thin wail comes to my ears, whipped away by the wind, borne up into the sky like a scrap of paper. I am almost upon her, I am already tensing myself for the impact, when she turns and sees me. For an instant I have a vision of her face, the face of a child, glowing, healthy, smiling on me without alarm, before we collide. Her head strikes me in the belly; then I am gone, carried by the wind. The bump is as faint as the stroke of a moth. I am flooded with relief. "Then I need not have been anxious after all!" I think. I try to look back, but all is lost from sight in the whiteness of the snow.

My mouth is covered in wet kisses. I spit, shake my head, open my eyes. The dog that has been licking my face backs off wagging its tail. Light seeps through the doorway of the hut. I crawl out into the dawn. Sky and water are tinged with the same rosiness. The lake, where I have grown used to seeing every morning the blunt-prowed fishing-boats, is empty. The camp where I stand is empty too.

I wrap myself tighter in my cloak and walk up the road past the main gate, which is still closed, as far as the north-west watchtower, which does not appear to be manned; then back down the road and, cutting across the fields, over the earthwall towards the lakeside.

A hare starts at my feet and dashes away in a zigzag. I keep track of it until it has circled back and is lost behind the ripe wheat in the far fields.

A little boy stands in the middle of the path fifty yards from me, peeing. He watches the arc of his urine, watching me too out of the corner of his eye, curving his back to make the last spurt go further. Then with his golden trail still hanging in the air he is suddenly gone, snatched away by a dark arm from the reeds.

I stand on the spot where he stood. There is nothing to be seen but tossing reed-crests through which flickers the dazzling half-globe of the sun.

"You can come out," I say, barely raising my voice. "There is nothing to be afraid of." The finches, I notice, are avoiding this patch of reeds. I have no doubt that thirty pairs of ears hear me.

I turn back to the town.

The gates are open. Soldiers, heavily armed, poke around among the huts of the fisherfolk. The dog that awoke me trots with them from hut to hut, tail high, tongue lolling, ears alert.

One of the soldiers heaves at the rack where the gutted and salted fish hang to dry. It comes creaking down.

"Don't do that!" I call, hurrying my steps. Some of these men I recognize from the long days of torment in the barracks yard. "Don't do it, it wasn't their fault!"

With deliberate nonchalance the same soldier now strolls over to the largest of the huts, braces himself against two of the projecting roof-struts, and tries to lift the thatched roof off. Though he strains he cannot do it. I have watched these fragile-seeming huts being built. They are built to withstand the tugging of winds in which no bird can fly. The roof frame is lashed to the uprights with thongs that pass through wedge-shaped notches. One cannot lift it without cutting the thongs.

I plead with the man. "Let me tell you what happened last night. I was walking past in the dark and the dogs began to bark. The people here were frightened, they lost their heads, you know how they are. They probably thought the barbarians had come. They ran away down to the lake. They are hiding in the reeds-I saw them a short while ago. You can't punish them for such a ridiculous incident."

He ignores me. A comrade helps him to clamber on to the roof. Balancing on two struts, he begins to stamp holes in the roof with the heel of his boot. I hear the thuds inside as the grass and clay plastering falls.

"Stop it!" I shout. The blood pounds in my temples. "What have they done to harm you?" I grab at his ankle but he is too far away. I could tear out his throat in this mood.

Someone thrusts himself before me: the friend who helped him up. "Why don't you fuck off," he murmurs. "Why don't you just fuck off. Why don't you go and die somewhere."

Under the thatch and clay I hear the roof-strut snap cleanly. The man on the roof throws out his hands and plunges through. One moment he is there, his eyes wide with surprise, the next moment there is only a puff of dust hanging in the air.

The mat over the doorway is pushed aside and he staggers out clutching his hands together, covered from head to toe in ochre dust. "Shit!" he says. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" His friends howl with laughter. "It's not funny!" he shouts. "I've hurt my fucking thumb!" He squeezes his hand between his knees. "It's fucking sore!" He swings a kick at the wall of the hut and again I hear plaster fall inside. "Fucking savages!" he says. "We should have lined them up against a wall and shot them long ago-with their friends!"

Looking past me, looking through me, declining in every way to see me, he swaggers off. As he passes the last hut he rips off the mat over the doorway. The strings of beads with which it is decorated, red and black berries, dried melon-seeds, break and cascade everywhere. I stand in the road waiting for the quivering of rage in me to subside. I think of a young peasant who was once brought before me in the days when I had jurisdiction over the garrison. He had been committed to the army for three years by a magistrate in a far-off town for stealing chickens. After a month here he tried to desert. He was caught and brought before me. He wanted to see his mother and his sisters again, he said. "We cannot just do as we wish," I lectured him. "We are all subject to the law, which is greater than any of us. The magistrate who sent you here, I myself, you-we are all subject to the law." He looked at me with dull eyes, waiting to hear the punishment, his two stolid escorts behind him, his hands manacled behind his back. "You feel that it is unjust, I know, that you should be punished for having the feelings of a good son. You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know." I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the mill-wheel, knew what was just: all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice. "But we live in a world of laws," I said to my poor prisoner, "a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade." After lecturing him I sentenced him. He accepted the sentence without murmur and his escort marched him away. I remember the uneasy shame I felt on days like that. I would leave the courtroom and return to my apartment and sit in the rocking-chair in the dark all evening, without appetite, until it was time to go to bed. "When some men suffer unjustly," I said to myself, "it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it." But the specious consolation of this thought could not comfort me. I toyed more than once with the idea of resigning my post, retiring from public life, buying a small market garden. But then, I thought, someone else will be appointed to bear the shame of office, and nothing will have changed. So I continued in my duties until one day events overtook me.

The two horsemen are less than a mile away and already beginning to cross the bare fields by the time they are spied. I am one of the crowd that, hearing shouts from the walls, pours out in welcome; for we all recognize the green and gold battalion standard they bear. Among scampering excited children I stride across the freshly turned clods.

The horseman on the left, who has been riding shoulder to shoulder with his companion, turns away and trots off towards the lakeside track.

The other one continues to amble towards us, sitting very erect in the saddle, holding out his arms from his sides as if intending to embrace us or to fly up into the sky.

I begin to run as fast as I can, my sandals dragging in the earth, my heart pounding.

A hundred yards from him there is a thud of hooves behind and three armoured soldiers gallop past, racing towards the reed-brakes into which the other horseman has now disappeared.

I join the circle around the man (I recognize him, despite the change) who, with the standard flapping bravely above his head, gazes blankly towards the town. He is lashed to a stout wooden framework which holds him upright in his saddle. His spine is kept erect by a pole and his arms are tied to a cross-piece. Flies buzz around his face. His jaw is bound shut, his flesh is puffy, a sickly smell comes from him, he has been several days dead.

A child tugs at my hand. "Is he a barbarian, uncle?" he whispers. "No," I whisper back. He turns to the boy next to him. "You see, I told you," he whispers.

Since no one else seems prepared to do it, I am the one to whose lot it falls to pick up the trailing reins and lead these tidings from the barbarians back through the great gates, past the silent watchers, to the barracks yard, there to cut their bearer loose and lay him out for burial.

The soldiers who set out after his lone companion are soon back. They canter across the square to the courthouse from which Mandel conducts his reign and disappear inside. When they reappear they will speak to no one.

Every premonition of disaster is confirmed, and for the first time true panic overtakes the town. The shops are swamped with customers bidding against each other for stocks of food. Some families barricade themselves in their houses, herding poultry and even pigs indoors with them. The school is closed. The rumour that a horde of barbarians is camped a few miles away on the charred river-banks, that an assault on the town is imminent, flashes from street corner to street corner. The unthinkable has occurred: the army that marched forth so gaily three months ago will never return.

The great gates are closed and barred. I plead with the sergeant of the watch to allow the fisherfolk inside. "They are in terror of their lives," I say. He turns his back on me without reply. Above our heads on the ramparts the soldiers, the forty men who stand between us and annihilation, gaze out over lake and desert.

At nightfall, on my way to the granary shed where I still sleep, I find my way blocked. A file of two-wheeled horse-drawn commissariat carts passes along the alley, the first loaded with what I recognize as sacks of seed grain from the granary, the others empty. They are followed by a file of horses, saddled and blanketed, from the garrison stables: every horse, I would guess, that has been stolen or commandeered in the past weeks. Roused by the noise, people emerge from their houses and stand quietly by watching this evidently long-planned manoeuvre of withdrawal.

I ask for an interview with Mandel, but the guard at the courthouse is as wooden as all his comrades.

In fact Mandel is not in the courthouse. I return to the square in time to hear the end of a statement he reads to the public "in the name of the Imperial Command". The withdrawal, he says, is a "temporary measure". A "caretaker force" will be left behind. There is expected to be "a general cessation of operations along the front for the duration of the winter". He himself hopes to be back in the spring, when the army will "initiate a new offensive". He wishes to thank everyone for the "unforgettable hospitality" he has been shown.

While he speaks, standing in one of the empty carts flanked by soldiers holding torches, his men are returning with the fruits of their foraging. Two struggle to load a handsome cast-iron stove looted from an empty house. Another comes back smiling in triumph bearing a cock and a hen, the cock a magnificent black and gold creature. Their legs are bound, he grips them by the wings, their fierce bird-eyes glare. While someone holds open the door he stuffs them into the oven. The cart is piled high with sacks and kegs from a looted shop, even a small table and two chairs. They unfold a heavy red carpet, spread it over the load, lash it down. There is no protest from the people who stand watching this methodical act of betrayal, but I feel currents of helpless anger all about me.

The last cart is loaded. The gates are unbarred, the soldiers mount. At the head of the column I can hear someone arguing with Mandel. "Just an hour or so," he is saying: "they can be ready in an hour." "No question of that," replies Mandel, the wind carrying the rest of his words away. A soldier pushes me out of his path and escorts three heavily bundled women to the last cart. They clamber aboard and seat themselves, holding up their veils to their faces. One of them carries a little girl whom she perches on top of the load. Whips crack, the column begins to move, the horses straining, the cartwheels creaking. At the rear of the column come two men with sticks driving a flock of a dozen sheep. As the sheep pass the murmur in the crowd grows. A young man dashes out waving his arms and shouting: the sheep scatter into the dark, and with a roar the crowd closes in. Almost at once the first shots crack out. Running as fast as I can in the midst of scores of other screaming running people, I retain only a single image of this futile attack: a man grappling with one of the women in the last cart, tearing at her clothes, the child watching wide-eyed with her thumb in her mouth. Then the square is empty and dark again, the last cart trundles through the gates, the garrison is gone.

For the rest of the night the gates stand open and little family groups, most of them on foot and weighed down under heavy packs, hurry after the soldiers. And before dawn the fisherfolk slink back in, meeting with no resistance, bringing their sickly children and their pitiful possessions and their bundles of poles and reeds with which to begin all over again the task of home-building.

My old apartment stands open. Inside the air is musty. Nothing has been dusted for a long time. The display cases-the stones and eggs and artifacts from the desert ruins-are gone. The furniture in the front room has been pushed against the walls and the carpet removed. The little parlour seems not to have been touched, but all the drapery carries a sour stuffy smell.

In the bedroom the bedclothes have been tossed aside with the same motion I use, as if I myself had been sleeping here. The odour from the unwashed linen is alien.

The chamber pot under the bed is half full. In the cupboard there is a crumpled shirt with a ring of brown inside the collar and yellow stains under the armpits. All my clothes are gone.

I strip the bed and lie down on the bare mattress, expecting some sense of unease to creep over me, the ghost of another man lingering still among his odours and disorders. The feeling does not come; the room is as familiar as ever. With my arm over my face I find myself drifting toward sleep. It may be true that the world as it stands is no illusion, no evil dream of a night. It may be that we wake up to it in-eluctably, that we can neither forget it nor dispense with it. But I find it as hard as ever to believe that the end is near. If the barbarians were to burst in now, I know, I would die in my bed as stupid and ignorant as a baby. And even more apposite would it be if I were caught in the pantry downstairs with a spoon in my hand and my mouth full of fig preserve filched from the last bottle on the shelf: then my head could be hacked off and tossed on to the pile of heads on the square outside still wearing a look of hurt and guilty surprise at this irruption of history into the static time of the oasis. To each his own most fitting end. Some will be caught in dugouts beneath their cellars clutching their valuables to their breasts, pinching their eyes shut. Some will die on the road overwhelmed by the first snows of winter. Some few may even die fighting with pitchforks. After which the barbarians will wipe their backsides on the town archives. To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? I lie on the bare mattress and concentrate on bringing into life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper.