"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 Jolli, 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.
2
She KNEELS IN THE shade of the barracks wall a few yards from the gate, muffled in a coat too large for her, a fur cap open before her on the ground. She has the straight black eyebrows, the glossy black hair of the barbarians. What is a barbarian woman doing in town begging? There are no more than a few pennies in the cap.
Twice more during the day I pass her. Each time she gives me a strange regard, staring straight ahead of her until I am near, then very slowly turning her head away from me. The second time I drop a coin into the cap. "It is cold and late to be outdoors," I say. She nods. The sun is setting behind a strip of black cloud; the wind from the north already carries a hint of snow; the square is empty; I pass on.
The next day she is not there. I speak to the gatekeeper: "There was a woman sitting over there all of yesterday, begging. Where does she come from?" The woman is blind, he replies. She is one of the barbarians the Colonel brought in. She was left behind.
A few days later I see her crossing the square, walking slowly and awkwardly with two sticks, the sheepskin coat trailing behind her in the dust. I give orders; she is brought to my rooms, where she stands before me propped on her sticks. "Take off your cap," I say. The soldier who has brought her in lifts off the cap. It is the same girl, the same black hair cut in a fringe across the forehead, the same broad mouth, the black eyes that look through and past me.
"They tell me you are blind."
"I can see," she says. Her eyes move from my face and settle somewhere behind me to my right.
"Where do you come from?" Without thinking I cast a glance over my shoulder: she is staring at nothing but empty wall. Her gaze has grown rigid. Already knowing the answer, I repeat my question. She meets it with silence.
I dismiss the soldier. We are alone.
"I know who you are," I say. "Will you please sit?" I take her sticks and help to seat her on a stool. Under the coat she wears wide linen drawers tucked into heavy-soled boots. She smells of smoke, of stale clothing, of fish. Her hands are horny.
"Do you make a living by begging?" I ask. "You know you are not supposed to be in town. We could expel you at any time and send you back to your people."
She sits staring eerily ahead of her.
"Look at me," I say.
"I am looking. This is how I look."
I wave a hand in front of her eyes. She blinks. I bring my face closer and stare into her eyes. She wheels her gaze from the wall on to me. The black irises are set off by milky whites as clear as a child's. I touch her cheek: she starts.