Waiting For The Barbarians

"The rumour going about brigade headquarters," he says, "is that there will be a general offensive against the barbarians in the spring to push them back from the frontier into the mountains."

I am sorry to break off the train of reminiscing. I do not want to end the evening with a wrangle. Nevertheless I respond. "I am sure it is only a rumour: they ca

He looks at me oddly. For the first time this evening I feel a barrier descend, the barrier between the military and the civilian. "But surely," he says, "if we are to be frank, that is what war is about: compelling a choice on someone who would not otherwise make it." He surveys me with the arrogant candour of a young graduate of the War College. I am sure that he is remembering the story, which must by now have gone the rounds, of how I withheld my co-operation from an officer of the Bureau. I think I know what he sees before him: a minor civilian administrator sunk, after years in this backwater, in slothful native ways, outmoded in his thinking, ready to gamble the security of the Empire for a makeshift, insecure peace.

He leans forward, wearing an air of deferential boyish puzzlement: I am more and more convinced he is playing with me. "Tell me, sir, in confidence," he says, "what are these barbarians dissatisfied about? What do they want from us?"

I ought to be cautious but I am not. I ought to yawn, evade his question, end the evening; but I find myself rising to the bait. (When will I learn to keep a cu

"They want an end to the spread of settlements across their land. They want their land back, finally. They want to be free to move about with their flocks from pasture to pasture as they used to." It is not too late to put a stop to the lecture. Instead I hear my voice rise in tone and abandon myself regretfully to the intoxication of anger. "I will say nothing of the recent raids carried out on them, quite without justification, and followed by acts of wanton cruelty, since the security of the Empire was at stake, or so I am told. It will take years to patch up the damage done in those few days. But let that pass, let me rather tell you what I find disheartening as an administrator, even in times of peace, even when border relations are good. There is a time in the year, you know, when the nomads visit us to trade. Well: go to any stall in the market during that time and see who gets short-weighted and cheated and shouted at and bullied. See who is forced to leave his womenfolk behind in the camp for fear they will be insulted by the soldiers. See who lies drunk in the gutter, and see who kicks him where he lies. It is this contempt for the barbarians, contempt which is shown by the meanest ostler or peasant farmer, that I as magistrate have had to contend with for twenty years. How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table ma

"But we are not going," the young man says quietly. "Are you sure?"

"We are not going, therefore they make a mistake. Even if it became necessary to supply the settlement by convoy, we would not go. Because these border settlements are the first line of defence of the Empire. The sooner the barbarians understand that the better."

Despite his engaging air there is a rigidity to his thought that must derive from his military education. I sigh. I have achieved nothing by letting myself go. His worst suspicion is no doubt confirmed: that I am unsound as well as old-fashioned. And do I really after all believe what I have been saying? Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way: intellectual torpor, slovenliness, tolerance of disease and death? If we were to disappear would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating our ruins? Would they preserve our census rolls and our grain-merchants' ledgers in glass cases, or devote themselves to deciphering the script of our love-letters? Is my indignation at the course that Empire takes anything more than the peevishness of an old man who does not want the ease of his last years on the frontier to be disturbed? I try to turn the conversation to more suitable subjects, to horses, hunting, the weather; but it is late, my young friend wants to leave, and I must settle the reckoning for the evening's entertainment.

The children are playing in the snow again. In their midst, with her back to me, is the hooded figure of the girl. At moments, as I struggle towards her, she is obliterated from sight behind the curtain of falling snow. My feet sink so deep that I can barely lift them. Each step takes an age. This is the worst it has snowed in all the dreams.

As I labour towards them the children leave off their play to look at me. They turn their grave shining faces on me, their white breath drifting from them in puffs. I try to smile and touch them as I pass on my way to the girl, but my features are frozen, the smile will not come, there seems to be a sheet of ice covering my mouth. I raise a hand to tear it off: the hand, I find, is thickly gloved, the fingers are frozen inside the glove, when I touch the glove to my face I feel nothing. With ponderous movements I push my way past the children.

Now I begin to see what the girl is doing. She is building a fort of snow, a walled town which I recognize in every detail: the battlements with the four watchtowers, the gate with the porter's hut beside it, the streets and houses, the great square with the barracks compound in one corner. And here is the very spot where I stand! But the square is empty, the whole town is white and mute and empty. I point to the middle of the square. "You must put people there!" I want to say. No sound comes from my mouth, in which my tongue lies frozen like a fish. Yet she responds. She sits up on her knees and turns her hooded face towards me. I fear, at this last instant, that she will be a disappointment, that the face she will present to me will be obtuse, slick, like an internal organ not meant to live in the light. But no, she is herself, herself as I have never seen her, a smiling child, the light sparkling on her teeth and glancing from her jet-black eyes. "So this is what it is to see!" I say to myself. I want to speak to her through my clumsy frozen muzzle. "How do you do all that fine work with your hands in mittens?" I want to say. She smiles kindly on my mumbling. Then she turns back to her fort in the snow.