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."