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.
I am woken by a pounding on the door of my apartment. It is a man with a lantern, windburnt, gaunt, out of breath, in a soldier's greatcoat too large for him. He stares at me in bewilderment.
"Who are you?" I say.
"Where is the Warrant Officer?" he replies, panting, trying to look over my shoulder.
It is two o'clock in the morning. The gates have been opened to let in Colonel Joll's carriage, which stands with its shaft resting on the ground in the middle of the square. Several men shelter in its lee against the bitter wind. From the wall the men of the watch peer down.
"We need food, fresh horses, fodder," my visitor is saying. He trots ahead of me, opens the door of the carriage, speaks: "The Warrant Officer is not here, sir, he has left." At the window, in the moonlight, I catch a glimpse of Joll himself. He sees me too: the door is slammed shut, I hear the click of the bolt inside. Peering through the glass I can make him out sitting in the dim far corner, rigidly averting his face. I rap on the glass but he pays no attention. Then his underlings shoulder me away.
Thrown out of the darkness, a stone lands on the roof of the carriage.
Another of Joll's escort comes running up. "There is nothing," he pants. "The stables are empty, they have taken every single one." The man who has unharnessed the sweating horses begins to curse. A second stone misses the carriage and nearly hits me. They are being thrown from the walls.
"Listen to me," I say. "You are cold and tired. Stable the horses, come inside, have something to eat, tell us your story. We have had no news since you left. If that madman wants to sit in his carriage all night, let him sit."
They barely listen to me: famished, exhausted men who have done more than their duty in hauling this policeman to safety out of the clutches of the barbarians, they whisper together, already re-harnessing a pair of their weary horses.
I stare through the window at the faint blur against the blackness that is Colonel Joll. My cloak flaps, I shiver from the cold, but also from the tension of suppressed anger. An urge runs through me to smash the glass, to reach in and drag the man out through the jagged hole, to feel his flesh catch and tear on the edges, to hurl him to the ground and kick his body to pulp.
As though touched by this murderous current he reluctantly turns his face towards me. Then he sidles across the seat until he is looking at me through the glass. His face is naked, washed clean, perhaps by the blue moonlight, perhaps by physical exhaustion. I stare at his pale high temples. Memories of his mother's soft breast, of the tug in his hand of the first kite he ever flew, as well as of those intimate cruelties for which I abhor him, shelter in that beehive.
He looks out at me, his eyes searching my face. The dark lenses are gone. Must he too suppress an urge to reach out, claw me, blind me with splinters?
I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say: I repeat the words, pointing at my chest, pointing at his. He watches my lips, his thin lips move in imitation, or perhaps in derision, I do not know. Another stone, heavier, perhaps a brick, hits the carriage with a thunderous clatter. He starts, the horses jerk in their traces.
Someone comes running up. "Go!" he shouts. He pushes past me, beats at the door of the carriage. His arms are full of loaves. "We must go!" he shouts. Colonel Joll slips the bolt and he tumbles the loaves in. The door slams shut. "Hurry!" he shouts. The carriage heaves into motion, its springs groaning.
I grip the man's arm. "Wait!" I cry. "I will not let you go until I know what has happened!"
"Can't you see?" he shouts, beating at my grasp. My hands are still weak; to hold him I have to clasp him in a hug. "Tell me and you can go!" I pant.
The carriage is nearing the gates. The two mounted men have already passed through; the other men run behind. Stones clatter against the carriage out of the darkness, shouts and curses rain down.
"What do you want to know?" he says, struggling vainly.
"Where is everyone else?"
"Gone. Scattered. All over the place. I don't know where they are. We had to find our own way. It was impossible to keep together." As his comrades disappear into the night he wrestles harder. "Let me go!" he sobs. He is no stronger than a child.
"In a minute. How could it be that the barbarians did this to you?"
"We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert! Why did no one tell us it would be like that? We were not beaten-they led us out into the desert and then they vanished!"
"Who led you?"
"They-the barbarians! They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!"
"So you gave up and came home?"
"Yes!"
"Do you expect me to believe that?"
He glares desperately back at me. "Why should I lie?" he shouts. "I don't want to be left behind, that is all!" He tears himself loose. Shielding his head with his hands, he races through the gate and into the darkness.
Digging has ceased at the third well-site. Some of the diggers have already gone home, others stand around waiting for orders. "What is the trouble?" I say.
They point to the bones lying on a heap of fresh earth: a child's bones.
"There must have been a grave here," I say. "A strange place for a grave." We are on the vacant plot behind the barracks, between the barracks and the south wall. The bones are old, they have absorbed the colour of the red clay. "What do you want to do? We can start digging again nearer the wall if you like."
They help me to climb into the pit. Standing chest-deep I scratch away the earth around the side of a jawbone embedded in the wall. "Here is the skull," I say. But no, the skull has already been dug up, they show it to me.
"Look under your feet," says the foreman.
It is too dark to see, but when I chop lightly with the mattock I strike something hard; my fingers tell me it is bone.
"They aren't buried properly," he says. He squats at the lip of the pit. "They are lying just any old how, on top of each other."
"Yes," I say. "We can't dig here, can we?"
"No," he says.
"We must fill it in and start again nearer the wall."
He is silent. He reaches out a hand and helps me clamber out. The bystanders say nothing either. I have to toss the bones back in and shovel the first earth before they will pick up their spades.
In the dream I stand again in the pit. The earth is damp, dark water seeps up, my feet squelch, it costs me a slow effort to lift them.
I feel under the surface, searching for the bones. My hand comes up with the corner of a jute sack, black, rotten, which crumbles away between my fingers. I dip back into the ooze. A fork, bent and tarnished. A dead bird, a parrot: I hold it by the tail, its bedraggled feathers hang down, its soggy wings droop, its eye sockets are empty. When I release it, it falls through the surface without a splash. "Poisoned water," I think. "I must be careful not to drink here. I must not touch my right hand to my mouth."
I have not slept with a woman since I returned from the desert. Now at this most inappropriate of times my sex begins to reassert itself.
I sleep badly and wake up in the mornings with a sullen erection growing like a branch out of my groin. It has nothing to do with desire. Lying in my rumpled bed I wait in vain for it to go away. I try to invoke images of the girl who night after night slept here with me. I see her standing barelegged in her shift, one foot in the basin, waiting for me to wash her, her hand pressing down on my shoulder. I lather the stocky calf. She slips the shift up over her head. I lather her thighs; then I put the soap aside, embrace her hips, rub my face in her belly. I can smell the soap, feel the warmth of the water, the pressure of her hands. From the depths of that memory I reach out to touch myself. There is no leap of response. It is like touching my own wrist: part of myself, but hard, dull, a limb with no life of its own. I try to bring it off: futile, for there is no feeling. "I am tired," I tell myself.
For an hour I sit in an armchair waiting for this rod of blood to dwindle. In its own good time it does. Then I dress and go out.
In the night it comes back: an arrow growing out of me, pointing nowhere. Again I try to feed it on images, but detect no answering life.
"Try bread mould and milkroot," the herbalist says. "It may work. If it does not, come back to me. Here is some milkroot. You grind it and mix it to a paste with the mould and a little warm water. Take two spoonfuls after each meal. It is very unpleasant, very bitter, but be assured it will not do you any harm."
I pay him in silver. No one but children will take copper coins any more.
"But tell me," he says: "why should a fine healthy man like yourself want to kill off his desires?"
"It has nothing to do with desire, father. It is simply an irritation. A stiffening. Like rheumatism."
He smiles. I smile back.
"This must be the only shop in town they did not loot," I say. It is not a shop, just a recess and a front under an awning, with racks of dusty jars and, hanging from hooks on the wall, roots and bunches of dried leaves, the medicines with which he has dosed the town for fifty years.
"Yes, they did not trouble me. They suggested that I leave for my own good. 'The barbarians will fry your balls and eat them'-that was what they said, those were their words. I said, 'I was born here, I'll die here, I'm not leaving.' Now they are gone, and it's better without them, I say."
"Yes."
"Try the milkroot. If it doesn't work, come back."
I drink the bitter concoction and eat as much lettuce as I can, since people say that lettuce takes away one's potency. But I do all this halfheartedly, aware that I am misinterpreting the signs.
I also call on Mai. The inn had closed down, there being too little custom; now she comes in to help her mother in the barracks. I find her in the kitchen putting her baby to sleep in its cot near the stove. "I love the big old stove you have here," she says. "It keeps its warmth for hours. Such a gentle warmth." She brews tea; we sit at the table watching the glowing coals through the grate. "I wish I had something nice to offer you," she says, "but the soldiers cleaned out the storeroom, there is hardly anything left."
"I want you to come upstairs with me," I say. "Can you leave the child here?"
We are old friends. Years ago, before she married the second time, she used to visit me in my apartment in the afternoons.
"I'd rather not leave him," she says, "in case he wakes up alone." So I wait while she wraps the child, and then follow her up the stairs: a young woman still, with a heavy body and shapeless spreading thighs. I try to recall what it was like with her, but cannot. In those days all women pleased me.
She settles the child on cushions in a corner, murmuring to it till it falls asleep again.
"It is just for a night or two," I say. "Everything is coming to an end. We must live as we can." She drops her drawers, trampling on them like a horse, and comes to me in her smock. I blow out the lamp. My words have left me dispirited.
As I enter her she sighs. I rub my cheek against hers. My hand finds her breast; her own hand closes over it, caresses it, pushes it aside. "I am a bit sore," she whispers. "From the baby."
I am still searching for something I want to say when I feel the climax come, far-off, slight, like an earth-tremor in another part of the world.
"This is your fourth child, isn't it?" We lie side by side under the covers.
"Yes, the fourth. One died."
"And the father? Does he help?"
"He left some money behind. He was with the army."
"I am sure he will come back."
I feel her placid weight against my side. "I have grown very fond of your eldest boy," I say. "He used to bring me my meals while I was locked up." We lie for a while in silence. Then my head begins to spin. I re-emerge from sleep in time to hear the tail-end of a rattle from my throat, an old man's snore.
She sits up. "I will have to go," she says. "I can't sleep in such bare rooms, I hear creaking all night." I watch her dim shape move as she dresses and picks up the child. "Can I light the lamp?" she says. "I'm afraid of falling on the stairs. Go to sleep. I will bring you breakfast in the morning, if you don't mind millet porridge."
"I liked her very much," she says. "We all did. She never complained, she always did what she was asked, though I know her feet gave her pain. She was friendly. There was always something to laugh about when she was around."
Again I am as dull as wood. She labours with me: her big hands stroke my back, grip my buttocks. The climax comes: like a spark struck far away over the sea and lost at once.
The baby begins to whimper. She eases herself away from me and gets up. Big and naked, she walks back and forth across the patch of moonlight with the baby over her shoulder, patting it, crooning. "He will be asleep in a minute," she whispers. I am half asleep myself when I feel her cool body settle down again beside me, her lips nuzzle my arm.
"I don't want to think about the barbarians," she says. "Life is too short to spend worrying about the future."
I have nothing to say.
"I don't make you happy," she says. "I know you don't enjoy it with me. You are always somewhere else."
I wait for her next words.
"She told me the same thing. She said you were somewhere else. She could not understand you. She did not know what you wanted from her."
"I didn't know you and she were intimate."
"I was often here, downstairs. We talked to each other about what was on our minds. Sometimes she would cry and cry and cry. You made her very unhappy. Did you know that?"
She is opening a door through which a wind of utter desolation blows on me.
"You don't understand," I say huskily. She shrugs. I go on: "There is a whole side to the story you don't know, that she could not have told you because she did not know it herself. Which I don't want to talk about now."
"It is none of my business."
We are silent, thinking our own thoughts about the girl who tonight sleeps far away under the stars.
"Perhaps when the barbarians come riding in," I say, "she will come riding with them." I imagine her trotting through the open gateway at the head of a troop of horsemen, erect in the saddle, her eyes shining, a forerunner, a guide, pointing out to her comrades the lay of this foreign town where she once lived. "Then everything will be on a new footing."
We lie in the dark thinking.
"I am terrified," she says. "I am terrified to think what is going to become of us. I try to hope for the best and live from day to day. But sometimes all of a sudden I find myself imagining what might happen and I am paralyzed with fear. I don't know what to do any more. I can only think of the children. What is going to become of the children? " She sits up in the bed. "What is going to become of the children?" she demands vehemently.
"They won't harm the children," I tell her. "They won't harm anyone." I stroke her hair, calm her, hold her tight, till it is time again to feed the baby.
She sleeps better downstairs in the kitchen, she says. She feels more secure when she can wake up and see the glow of coals in the grate. Also she likes to have the child with her in the bed. Also it is better if her mother does not find out where she spends the nights.
I too feel it was a mistake and do not visit her again. Sleeping alone, I miss the scent of thyme and onion on her fingertips. For an evening or two I experience a quiet, fickle sadness, before I begin to forget.
I stand out in the open watching the coming of the storm. The sky has been fading till now it is bone-white with tones of pink rippling in the north. The ochre rooftiles glisten, the air grows luminous, the town shines out shadowless, mysteriously beautiful in these last moments.
I climb the wall. Among the armed dummies stand people staring out towards the horizon where a great cloud of dust and sand already boils up. No one speaks.
The sun turns coppery. The boats have all left the lake, the birds have stopped singing. There is an interval of utter silence. Then the wind strikes.
In the shelter of our homes, with the windows bolted and bolsters pushed against the doors, with fine grey dust already sifting through roof and ceiling to settle on every uncovered surface, film the drinking water, grate on our teeth, we sit thinking of our fellow-creatures out in the open who at times like this have no recourse but to turn their backs to the wind and endure.
In the evenings, in the hour or two I can afford at the fireplace before my ration of wood gives out and I must creep into bed, I occupy myself in my old hobbies, repairing as best I can the cases of stones I found smashed and tossed away in the courthouse gardens, toying again with the decipherment of the archaic writing on the poplar slips.
It seems right that, as a gesture to the people who inhabited the ruins in the desert, we too ought to set down a record of settlement to be left for posterity buried under the walls of our town; and to write such a history no one would seem to be better fitted than our last magistrate. But when I sit down at my writing-table, wrapped against the cold in my great old bearskin, with a single candle (for tallow too is rationed) and a pile of yellowed documents at my elbow, what I find myself beginning to write is not the annals of an imperial outpost or an account of how the people of that outpost spent their last year composing their souls as they waited for the barbarians.
"No one who paid a visit to this oasis," I write, "failed to be struck by the charm of life here. We lived in the time of the seasons, of the harvests, of the migrations of the waterbirds. We lived with nothing between us and the stars. We would have made any concession, had we only known what, to go on living here. This was paradise on earth."
For a long while I stare at the plea I have written. It would be disappointing to know that the poplar slips I have spent so much time on contain a message as devious, as equivocal, as reprehensible as this.
"Perhaps by the end of the winter," I think, "when hunger truly bites us, when we are cold and starving, or when the barbarian is truly at the gate, perhaps then I will abandon the locutions of a civil servant with literary ambitions and begin to tell the truth."
I think: "I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that that is cause for shame?"
I think: "I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe."
I think: "But when the barbarians taste bread, new bread and mulberry jam, bread and gooseberry jam, they will be won over to our ways. They will find that they are unable to live without the skills of men who know how to rear the pacific grains, without the arts of women who know how to use the benign fruits."
I think: "When one day people come scratching around in the ruins, they will be more interested in the relics from the desert than in anything I may leave behind. And rightly so." (Thus I spend an evening coating the slips one by one in linseed oil and wrapping them in an oilcloth. When the wind lets up, I promise myself, I will go out and bury them where I found them.)
I think: "There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it."
The wind has dropped, and now the snowflakes come floating down, the first fall of the year, flecking the rooftiles with white. All morning I stand at my window watching the snow fall. When I cross the barracks yard it is already inches deep and my footsteps crunch with an eerie lightness.
In the middle of the square there are children at play building a snowman. Anxious not to alarm them, but inexplicably joyful, I approach them across the snow.
They are not alarmed, they are too busy to cast me a glance. They have completed the great round body, now they are rolling a ball for the head.
"Someone fetch things for the mouth and nose and eyes," says the child who is their leader.
It strikes me that the snowman will need arms too, but I do not want to interfere.
They settle the head on the shoulders and fill it out with pebbles for eyes, ears, nose and mouth. One of them crowns it with his cap.
It is not a bad snowman.
This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.