Summary
The magistrate finds himself in a leadership role again in the town, though there’s little left now to defend, and the place is under threat—not only from the encroaching winter, but from humans, that is, the “barbarians.” There are hoof prints in the field. The fisher folk are afraid of going out before dawn, and their catch is meager. The people harvest all they can from the edges of the flooded fields, but there isn’t much. The magistrate encourages everyone to use their garden plots inside the town walls to grow root vegetables. They begin to dig wells within the walls. They’re too afraid to seek out firewood in the forests where the fisher folk say they’ve seen signs of barbarian encampments. The children go out and search for crustaceans along the edges of the lake. They smoke these bitter shellfish and pack them in stacks. There are only three soldiers left in the town. Along the walls of the town they place helmets and spears. Children move these dummies every hour to give the impression that they are actual guards. The magistrate wears clean clothes. His beard is trimmed.
Late in the night someone pounds on his door. A soldier stands carrying a lantern. He’s panicked, gaunt and weathered, returned from the desert. He demands to know where Mandel is. Outside in the yard is Joll’s black carriage. The magistrate goes out to it. He sees Joll through the window. For the first time Joll is without his sunglasses. They look at each other. The magistrate mouths to him that his time has come. Stones and bricks begin to rain down on Joll’s carriage from the villagers. Realizing that Mandel is gone, Joll’s men rush to leave in a panic. They take loaves of bread and dump them into the carriage. The magistrate demands to know what happened to the rest of the army. A soldier tells him that they froze in the mountains and starved in the desert. The barbarians lured them deeper, but they never let them catch them. They stole their horses and picked men off one by one. The soldier is panicked. He flees with Joll.
While digging a well near the barracks, the people of the village find skulls and bones: skeletons, deep below the surface, of people who were never buried properly—a mass grave. There’s no explanation of where or when it was from. They stop digging the well in that spot. The magistrate has a recurring erection that wakes him. He wants it go away. He goes to a herbalist who remains in the town. The herbalist gives him a potion to use, but asks why he wants to kill his desires. The magistrate says it has nothing to do with desire. It’s an irritation, he says.
He begins to sleep with Mai, the cook from the inn, who is still in the village. She is older and not entirely attractive to the magistrate. She has a young baby. They talk about the nomad girl together. The magistrate tells Mai that he liked her very much. Mai tells the magistrate that the girl told her how she didn’t understand the magistrate. She didn’t know what he wanted from her. As she says this, the magistrate is filled with “utter desolation” (152). The magistrate is surprised to hear that they were close. Mai confesses her fears of the barbarians to him. He reassures her that they wont be harmed. Mai sleeps down in the kitchen near the stove. She doesn’t want her mother to know who she’s sleeping with. He agrees that it’s better. They stop sleeping together. He misses her for a couple of nights but the feeling begins to fade.
He contemplates the history of his old oasis town. He begins to write it down in a romanticized tone. He comments that perhaps when the threat of winter has begun to bite, or when the barbarian is truly at the gate he will begin to tell the truth. He says, “I wanted to live outside the history that the 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?” (154). He mediates on the year that has passed and on the meaning of the relationship between the Empire and nomads.
The first snowflakes begin to fall. The snow builds. The magistrate stands looking down at the square. Some children build a snowman. He observes their progress. He goes down and watches closely. Then he leaves it feeling like an old man who has long since lost his way, but presses on nonetheless.
Analysis
Joll and the Empire have succeeded in manifesting their true desires by creating the barbarian—or at least turning the nomad into a true enemy. The threat of that enemy is finally felt in a real way in the last chapter that leaves off with the magistrate in his outpost, literally waiting for the barbarians. Finally, there seem to be actual signs of an actual human threat outside the gates.
Yet it’s hard to know if the threat is truly real. Perhaps the thing that the Empire has succeeded in is instilling the paranoia in the magistrate’s narrative. For if the barbarians were out there, what would they be waiting for? Perhaps the threat of the barbarian is, through and through, the threat from within the mind.
The soldiers who return affirm that there was never a direct battle. The soldier says they were lured deeper and deeper into the mountains. But who lured them? Whose will was it that drew them deeper? Why did they not turn around and give up the chase? Indeed, the concept of the barbarian is always relational. While actual humans may be out there, and while they may well defend themselves, the idea of them as an enemy may always start in the mind of the one who perceives the threat.
A theme of cycles works through the narrative and dominates the final chapters. At the opening of the book the magistrate describes a cycle of barbarian-fear returning to the Empire with each generation. Here that cycle appears to be exhausting itself. It’s not the barbarians that burn it out of the town; it’s the people themselves. The seasonal cycle makes itself felt as the winter encroaches. A civilizational cycle seems to be at work as the outpost stands unguarded, waiting soon to meet the same fate as the old archeological ruins. The mass grave that is found, suggests that this outpost might itself be sitting on the site of a similar story to the one it’s going through now. Perhaps the magistrate doesn’t even know his own peoples’ history.
The magistrate has avoided truth and he admits to this in the final chapter as begins to write a romanticized history of his times. But what exactly is it that he means when he says that he “wanted to live outside the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects” (154)? He says, “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?” (154). Is this the truth that he also suggest he might write, once the barbarian is “truly at the gate?” (154). Is the truth that he wished for the violent world to be different than it is? Is the truth that he lived and wants to continue to live in denial of truth? The last line of the book suggests as much, as we see an old man who has long since lost his way, “but presses on along a road that may lead to nowhere” (155). The final word of Waiting for the Barbarians seems one of profound existentialism. “The road to nowhere” is a powerful image of meaninglessness at the heart of the project of civilization.
