J. Coetzee - Waiting For The Barbarians

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.

SOMETIMES IN THE MORNINGS there are fresh hoofprints in the fields. Among the straggling bushes that mark the far limit of the ploughed land the watchman sees a shape which he swears was not there the day before and which has vanished a day later. The fisherfolk will not venture out before sunrise. Their catch has dropped so low that they barely subsist.

In two days of co-operative effort in which we laboured with our weapons at our sides, we have harvested the far fields, all that was left after the flooding. The yield is less than four cups a day for each family, but better than nothing.

Although the blind horse continues to turn the wheel that fills the tank by the lakeshore that irrigates the gardens of the town, we know that the pipe can be cut at any time and have already begun with the digging of new wells within the walls.

I have urged my fellow-citizens to cultivate their kitchen gardens, to plant root vegetables that will withstand the winter frosts. "Above all we must find ways of surviving the winter," I tell them. "In the spring they will send relief, there is no doubt of that. After the first thaw we can plant sixty-day millet."

The school has been closed and the children are employed in trawling the salty southern fingers of the lake for the tiny red crustaceans that abound in the shallows. These we smoke and pack in one-pound slabs. They have a vile oily taste; normally only the fisherfolk eat them; but before the winter is out I suspect we will all be happy to have rats and insects to devour.

Along the north rampart we have propped a row of helmets with spears upright beside them. Every half-hour a child passes along the row moving each helmet slightly. Thus do we hope to deceive the keen eyes of the barbarians.

The garrison that Mandel bequeathed us consists of three men. They take turns in standing guard at the locked courthouse door, ignored by the rest of the town, keeping to themselves.

In all measures for our preservation I have taken the lead. No one has challenged me. My beard is trimmed, I wear clean clothes, I have in effect resumed the legal administration that was interrupted a year ago by the arrival of the Civil Guard.

We ought to be cutting and storing firewood; but no one can be found who will venture into the charred woods along the river, where the fisherfolk swear they have seen fresh signs of barbarian encampments.