I stood up and stretched; then I trudged home through the balmy darkness, taking my bearings from the dim sky-glow of the household fires. Ridiculous, I thought: a greybeard sitting in the dark waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him before he goes home to his military stew and his comfortable bed. The space about us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same. But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate that no one sees me!
* *
Today, only four days after the departure of the expedition, the first of the Colonel’s prisoners arrive. From my window I watch them cross the square between their mounted guards, dusty, exhausted, cringing already from the spectators who crowd about them, the skipping children, the barking dogs. In the shade of the barracks wall the guards dismount; at once the prisoners squat down to rest, save for a little boy who stands on one leg, his arm on his mother’s shoulder, staring back curiously at the onlookers. Someone brings a bucket of water and a ladle. They drink thirstily, while the crowd grows and presses in so tight around them that I can no longer see. Impatiently I wait for the guard who now pushes his way through the crowd and crosses the barracks yard.
“How do you explain this?” I shout at him. He bows his head, fumbles at his pockets. “These are fishing people! How can you bring them back here?”
He holds out a letter. I break the seal and read: “Please hold these and succeeding detainees incommunicado for my return.” Beneath his signature the seal is repeated, the seal of the Bureau which he has carried with him into the desert and which, if he perished, I would doubtless have to send out a second expedition to recover.
“The man is ridiculous!” I shout. I storm about the room. One should never disparage officers in front of men, fathers in front of children, but towards this man I discover no loyalty in my heart. “Did no one tell him these are fishing people? It is a waste of time bringing them here! You are supposed to help him track down thieves, bandits, invaders of the Empire! Do these people look like a danger to the Empire?” I fling the letter at the window.
The crowd parts before me till I stand at the centre confronting the dozen pathetic prisoners. They flinch before my anger, the little boy sliding into his mother’s arms. I gesture to the guards: “Clear a way and bring these people into the barracks yard!” They herd the captives along; the barracks gate closes behind us. “Now explain yourselves,” I say; “did no one tell him these prisoners are useless to him? Did no one tell him the difference between fishermen with nets and wild nomad horsemen with bows? Did no one tell him they don’t even speak the same language?”
One of the soldiers explains. “When they saw us coming they tried to hide in the reeds. They saw horsemen coming so they tried to hide. So the officer, the Excellency, ordered us to take them in. Because they were hiding.”
I could curse with vexation. A policeman! The reasoning of a policeman! “Did the Excellency say why he wanted them brought back here? Did he say why he could not ask them his questions out there?”
“None of us could speak their language, sir.”
Of course not! These river people are aboriginal, older even than the nomads. They live in settlements of two or three families along the banks of the river, fishing and trapping for most of the year, paddling to the remote southern shores of the lake in the autumn to catch redworms and dry them, building flimsy reed shelters, groaning with cold through the winter, dressing in skins. Living in fear of everyone, skulking in the reeds, what can they possibly know of a great barbarian enterprise against the Empire?
I send one of the men to the kitchen for food. He comes back with a loaf of yesterday’s bread which he offers to the oldest prisoner. The old man accepts the bread reverentially in both hands, sniffs it, breaks it, passes the lumps around. They stuff their mouths with this manna, chewing fast, not raising their eyes. A woman spits masticated bread into her palm and feeds her baby. I motion for more bread. We stand watching them eat as though they are strange animals.
“Let them stay in the yard,” I tell their guards. “It will be inconvenient for us, but there is nowhere else. If it gets cold tonight I will make another arrangement. See that they are fed. Give them something to do to keep their hands busy. Keep the gate closed. They will not run away but I do not want idlers coming in to stare at them.”
So I check my anger and do as the Colonel instructs: I hold his useless prisoners “incommunicado” for him. And in a day or two these savages seem to forget they ever had another home. Seduced utterly by the free and plentiful food, above all by the bread, they relax, smile at everyone, move about the barracks yard from one patch of shade to another, doze and wake, grow excited as mealtimes approach. Their habits are frank and filthy. One corner of the yard has become a latrine where men and women squat openly and where a cloud of flies buzzes all day. (“Give them a spade!” I tell the guards; but they do not use it.) The little boy, grown quite fearless, haunts the kitchen, begging sugar from the maids. Aside from bread, sugar and tea are great novelties to them. Every morning they get a small block of pressed tea-leaves which they boil up in a four-gallon pail on a tripod over a fire. They are happy here; indeed unless we chase them away they may stay with us forever, so little does it seem to have taken to lure them out of a state of nature. I spend hours watching them from the upstairs window (other idlers have to watch through the gate). I watch the women picking lice, combing and plaiting each other’s long black hair. Some of them have fits of harsh dry coughing. It is striking that there are no children in the group but the baby and the little boy. Did some of them, the nimble, the wakeful, after all succeed in escaping from the soldiers? I hope so. I hope that when we return them to their homes along the river they will have many far-fetched stories to tell their neighbours. I hope that the history of their captivity enters their legends, passed down from grandfather to grandson. But I hope too that memories of the town, with its easy life and its exotic foods, are not strong enough to lure them back. I do not want a race of beggars on my hands.
For a few days the fisherfolk are a diversion, with their strange gabbling, their vast appetites, their animal shamelessness, their volatile tempers. The soldiers lounge in the doorways watching them, making obscene comments about them which they do not understand, laughing; there are always children with their faces pressed to the bars of the gate; and from my window I stare down, invisible behind the glass.
Then, all together, we lose sympathy with them. The filth, the smell, the noise of their quarrelling and coughing become too much. There is an ugly incident when a soldier tries to drag one of their women indoors, perhaps only in play, who knows, and is pelted with stones. A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town. Though I make them dig a pit in the corner of the yard and have the nightsoil removed, the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals. The soldiers lock the door to the barracks hall, the children no longer come to the gate. Someone flings a dead cat over the wall during the night and causes an uproar. Through the long hot days they moon about the empty yard. The baby cries and coughs, cries and coughs till I flee for refuge to the farthest corner of my apartment. I write an angry letter to the Third Bureau, unsleeping guardian of the Empire, denouncing the incompetence of one of its agents. “Why do you not send people with experience of the frontier to investigate frontier unrest?” I write. Wisely I tear up the letter. If I unlock the gate in the dead of night, I wonder, will the fisherfolk sneak away? But I do nothing. Then one day I notice that the baby has stopped crying. When I look from the window it is nowhere to be seen. I send a guard
to search and he finds the little corpse under its mother’s clothes. She will not yield it up, we have to tear it away from her. After this she squats alone all day with her face covered, refusing to eat. Her people seem to shun her. Have we violated some custom of theirs, I wonder, by taking the child and burying it? I curse Colonel Joll for all the trouble he has brought me, and for the shame too.
Then in the middle of the night he is back. Bugle-calls from the ramparts break into my sleep, the barracks hall erupts in uproar as the soldiers go scrambling for their weapons. My head is confused, I am slow in dressing, by the time I emerge on to the square the column is already passing through the gates, some of the men riding, some leading their mounts. I stand back while the onlookers crowd around, touching and embracing the soldiers, laughing with excitement (“All safe!” someone shouts), until coming up in the middle of the column I see what I have been dreading: the black carriage, then the shuffling group of prisoners roped together neck to neck, shapeless figures in their sheepskin coats under the silver moonlight, then behind them the last of the soldiers leading the carts and pack-horses. As more and more people come running up, some with flaming torches, and the babble mounts, I turn my back on the Colonel’s triumph and make my way back to my rooms. This is the point at which I begin to see the disadvantages of living, as I have chosen to do, in the rambling apartment over the storerooms and kitchen intended for the military commandant we have not had for years, rather than in the attractive villa with geraniums in the windows which falls to the lot of the civil magistrate. I would like to be able to stop my ears to the noises coming from the yard below, which has now, it appears, become permanently a prison yard. I feel old and tired, I want to sleep. I sleep whenever I can nowadays and, when I wake up, wake reluctantly. Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. Living in the apartment has become bad for me, I think; but not only that. If I lived in the magistrate’s villa on the quietest street in town, holding sittings of the court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activities of this upstart policeman, if I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of the undertow, gives up the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death. But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.
All the next day the Colonel spends sleeping in his room at the inn, and the staff have to tiptoe about their duties. I try to pay no attention to the new batch of prisoners in the yard. It is a pity that all the doors of the barracks block as well as the stairway leading up to my apartment open on to the yard. I hurry out in the early-morning light, occupy myself all day with municipal rents, dine in the evening with friends. On the way home I meet the young lieutenant who accompanied Colonel Joll into the desert and congratulate him on his safe return. “But why did you not explain to the Colonel that the fishing people could not possibly help him in his inquiries?” He looks embarrassed. “I spoke to him,” he tells me, “but all he said was, ‘Prisoners are prisoners’. I decided it was not my place to argue with him.”
The next day the Colonel begins his interrogations. Once I thought him lazy, little more than a bureaucrat with vicious tastes. Now I see how mistaken I was. In his quest for the truth he is tireless. The questioning starts in the early morning and is still going on when I return after dark. He has enlisted the aid of a hunter who has shot pigs up and down the river all his life and knows a hundred words of the fisherfolk’s language. One by one the fisherfolk are taken into the room where the Colonel has established himself, to be asked whether they have seen movements of strange horsemen. Even the child is questioned: “Have strangers visited your father during the night?” (I guess, of course, at what passes in that room, at the fear, the bewilderment, the abasement.) The prisoners are returned not to the yard but to the main barracks hall: the soldiers have been turned out, quartered on the town. I sit in my rooms with the windows shut, in the stifling warmth of a windless evening, trying to read, straining my ears to hear or not to hear sounds of violence. Finally at midnight the interrogations cease, there is no more banging of doors or tramping of feet, the yard is silent in the moonlight, and I am at liberty to sleep.
The joy has gone from my life. I spend the day playing with lists and numbers, stretching petty tasks to fill the hours. In the evening I eat at the inn; then, reluctant to go home, make my way upstairs to the warren of cubicles and partitioned rooms where the ostlers sleep and the girls entertain men-friends.
I sleep like a dead man. When I wake up in the thin early-morning light the girl is lying curled up on the floor. I touch her arm: “Why are you sleeping there?”
She smiles back. “It is all right. I am quite comfortable.” (That is true: lying on the soft sheepskin rug she stretches and yawns, her neat little body not even filling it.) “You were tossing in your sleep, you told me to go away, so I decided I would sleep better here.”
“I told you to go away?”
“Yes: in your sleep. Don’t be upset.” She climbs into bed beside me. I embrace her with gratitude, without desire.
“I would like to sleep here again tonight,” I say. She nuzzles my chest. It occurs to me that whatever I want to say to her will be heard with sympathy, with kindness. But what can I possibly say? “Terrible things go on in the night while you and I are asleep”? The jackal rips out the hare’s bowels, but the world rolls on.
Another day and another night I spend away from the empire of pain. I fall asleep in the girl’s arms. In the morning she is again lying on the floor. She laughs at my dismay: “You pushed me out with your hands and feet. Please don’t get upset. We cannot help our dreams or what we do in our sleep.” I groan and turn my face away. I have known her a year, visiting her sometimes twice a week in this room. I feel a quiet affection for her which is perhaps the best that can be hoped for between an aging man and a girl of twenty; better than a possessive passion certainly. I have played with the idea of asking her to live with me. I try to remember by what nightmare I am possessed when I push her away, but fail. “If I ever do it again you must promise to wake me,” I tell her.
Then, in my office at the courthouse, a visitor is announced. Colonel Joll, wearing his dark eyeshades indoors, enters and sits down opposite me. I offer him tea, surprised at how steady my hand is. He is leaving, he says. Should I try to conceal my joy? He sips his tea, sitting carefully upright, inspecting the room, the shelves upon shelves of papers bundled together and tied with ribbon, the record of decades of humdrum administration, the small bookcase of legal texts, the cluttered desk. He has completed his inquiries for the time being, he says, and is in a hurry to return to the capital and make his report. He has an air of sternly controlled triumph. I nod my understanding. “Anything that I can do to facilitate your journey . . .” I say. There is a pause. Then into the silence, like a pebble into a pool, I drop my question.
“And your inquiries, Colonel, among the nomad peoples and the aboriginals—have they been as successful as you wished?”
He places his fingers together tip to tip before he answers. I have the feeling that he knows how much his affectations irritate me. “Yes, Magistrate, I can say that we have had some success. Particularly when you consider that similar investigations are being carried out elsewhere along the frontier in a co-ordinated fashion.”
“That is good. And can you tell us
whether we have anything to fear? Can we rest securely at night?”
The corner of his mouth crinkles in a little smile. Then he stands up, bows, turns, and leaves. Early next morning he departs accompanied by his small escort, taking the long east road back to the capital. Throughout a trying period he and I have managed to behave towards each other like civilized people. All my life I have believed in civilized behaviour; on this occasion, however, I cannot deny it, the memory leaves me sick with myself.
My first action is to visit the prisoners. I unlock the barracks hall which has been their jail, my senses already revolting at the sickly smell of sweat and ordure, and throw the doors wide open. “Get them out of there!” I shout at the half-dressed soldiers who stand about watching me as they eat their porridge. From the gloom inside the prisoners stare apathetically back. “Go in there and clean up that room!” I shout. “I want everything cleaned up! Soap and water! I want everything as it was before!” The soldiers hurry to obey; but why is my anger directed at them, they must be asking. Into the daylight emerge the prisoners, blinking, shielding their eyes. One of the women has to be helped. She shakes all the time like an old person, though she is young. There are some too sick to stand up.
I last saw them five days ago (if I can claim ever to have seen them, if I ever did more than pass my gaze over their surface absently, with reluctance). What they have undergone in these five days I do not know. Now herded by their guards they stand in a hopeless little knot in the corner of the yard, nomads and fisherfolk together, sick, famished, damaged, terrified. It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain. It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble. Thus it is that, administration of law and order in these parts having today passed back to me, I order that the prisoners be fed, that the doctor be called in to do what he can, that the barracks return to being a barracks, that arrangements be made to restore the prisoners to their former lives as soon as possible, as far as possible.