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.