Summary
After Joll and all of the prisoners leave, the magistrate sees a woman, one of the “nomads,” begging the streets. It seems that she’s been left behind. There’s something wrong with her feet. They’ve been damaged, broken. He sees her again and learns that she’s blind. He tells her that she can’t be in the streets, but she clearly has nowhere to go. She doesn’t want to talk. She’s traumatized. It’s freezing. He takes her into his rooms, though she’s very reluctant to follow. He realizes that she considers him one of Joll’s men. “The distance between myself and her torturers,” he says, “is negligible” (27). The thought of this horrifies him. He tries to comfort her by the fire.
He wants to see what happens to her feet. He removes her boots and she shows him her ankles, stating that they were broken at the ankles. She walks on broken ankles that have never set. He washes her feet and ankles. He falls asleep doing this. When he wakes she’s gone.
He finds her and brings her back into his rooms. He feeds her and watches her eat. He asks what happened to her eyes. She says that they also did it to her, but she claims that she’s not actually blind. She can see in her peripheries. Again the magistrate washes her feet. He massages them. He enters a dream state and slowly falls asleep. This time when he wakes the girl is huddled asleep on the floor. He covers her in blankets.
A ritual of washing begins. He starts with the feet but moves over her whole body. Though he washes her naked breasts and belly, it’s not erotic. It causes him to fall asleep. But every night the ritual continues. He’s fascinated by her scars. He finds one on her eyeball, like a small caterpillar. He says that “it’s been growing more and more clear…that until the marks on this girl’s body are understood, [he] cannot let go of her…” (31).
He gets her a job as a scullery maid in the kitchen. She works with other kitchen girls who also see other men. Every night she comes to his room and he performs his washing ritual. Then they sleep in the same bed. He touches her but never has sex with her. He begins to obsess about what she looked like before she was tortured. He goes back in his memory and tries to recall.
The magistrate interviews the different men who were on duty when the girl was tortured. He tries to get their memories of her. They recall that she was there with her father. Her father was killed. It turns out that her father saw her being tortured and he fought back and they murdered him. She saw it happen.
The magistrate has a recurring dream of children playing in the snow. One of them is a hooded figure who keeps their back to him.
Winter arrives. The magistrate notes that no barbarians come to visit that year. Normally different groups come to trade. But not this year. The magistrate goes hunting alone. He comes across a buck. He aims at it but can’t bring himself to shoot. Or perhaps he waits too long; he can’t tell. The buck sees him and moves away. The magistrate doesn’t understand his actions. He speaks about it to the girl but their language is limited. They grow closer. He oils her body and lies with her. He pleads with her to tell him what she remembers of her torture. She gives in and tells him about a two-pronged fork with knobs on the ends that they used, plunging it into her flesh and twisting it. They held it in the fire and then held the burning knobs in front of her eyes. They forced her to tell them the truth but she had nothing to tell them. They burned her eyeballs.
The magistrate stares into her eyeballs, fascinated. He asks what she feels for her torturers. She doesn’t want to talk.
In the next passage he refers to his ritual of washing and oiling her as a “bondage.” After this he goes to the inn and spends the night with the young “birdlike” girl who he has seen in the past. When he creeps back into his room, he feels as though he’s been adulterous. The nomad girl is awake, though she pretends to sleep. During the following nights he visits the other girl. He starts to see the nomad girl as hideous. He doesn’t understand why she’s in his bed. One night she puts his hands on her and asks him why he doesn’t want to be with her. She says that she knows that he’s with other women. He feels disgusted by her and he does nothing to comfort her. He becomes horrified and fascinated by his own sexuality. He doesn’t understand how it is that he can be so repulsed by a woman. He does nothing to comfort the girl. Instead he visits the “birdlike” girl at the inn all the time.
The girl becomes ugly to the magistrate. He says the word to himself. Ugly. As he thinks this, he fixates on his own fascination with her. He tries to understand his previous attraction. The thought of it repulses him. He obsesses over his memory of her before she was tortured. He wants to recall an image of her down in the yard. He attempts to reconstruct it.
A changing of the guard happens. New conscripts arrive, and old ones return to their homes. The new ones come accompanied by a young officer who’s enthusiastic about the Empire’s projects. The officer speaks of plans to launch a broad offensive against the barbarians. The magistrate makes the mistake of speaking on behalf of the barbarians. At least he feels that this is a mistake. He rants at the officer, criticizing the attitudes of the empire toward barbarians, exposing his tolerant, open, liberal view.
The officer explains that two conscripts deserted en route to their post. This seems slightly suspicious to the magistrate. News eventually comes of the bodies of the two. They are found together. The officer wants to leave them where they are but the magistrate demands that they be given their rites. The nomad girl asks if he doesn’t want to sleep with her. He can’t explain why he doesn’t. He upsets her with his rejection. Instead of comforting her, he puts her out of his room. She begins to sleep in a cot down below. Their ritual ends.
Analysis
The magistrate’s unabashed desire to understand the tortured nomad girl is a complex illustration of his inner sense of guilt. His curiosity is the probing mentality of someone accustomed to having power and privilege. He takes what he wants, without regard for her traumatic experience. When he states that “nothing is worse than we can imagine” in his effort to get him to tell her what Joll did, he is participating in an interrogation of his own (31). It seems almost a reverse torture, as he attempts to unravel her torture in his own mind, to learn it and possess it. Yet it is arguably nothing more than another stage of her torture. His interrogation comes with soft hands, but that doesn’t make it non-violent. The girl doesn’t want to speak about what happened—to relive it—yet he reveals no regard for this at all. He seemingly has no sensitivity. He seems to believe his own words that things that happen in the mind cannot be worse than actual experience. This is the fantasy of someone who has never experienced hardship or torture of any kind. The idea that “nothing is worse than we can imagine” is the idea of someone who cannot actually imagine the realities of torture—a man in denial, who has shut his eyes and ears and tried to proceed with life as normal while an Empire goes about the violent work of maintaining its myth of glory. As he pries and prods the girl with words, trying to possesses, to know, to occupy her body, he enacts a condition of entitlement.
Yet what exactly is motivating him to know? Why is it that he wants to trace this girl’s suffering? Does the magistrate feel that by knowing what happened he might understand his own Empire? Or is it a kind of self-knowledge that he’s after? While he wants to dissociate himself from Joll and the torturers, he might in fact be coming to a knowledge that he doesn’t want: namely, that he is closer to them than he knows, that the torture they inflict is related to his own power.
His relationship with the girl is multifaceted. His fascination with her has many possible causes. The game of washing her and attempting to learn her may also be a game of ameliorating his own guilt. By trying to wash her pain away, it appears as though he’s trying to make up for his association with her torturers, to reverse the suffering they’ve inflicted. Trying to know her pain is similarly a way of trying to rationalize his guilt.
In all of its many interpretations, the act of possessing her—keeping her in his room—remains an act of power that also allows him to control her place in his existence. If she’s out on the street as a vagrant, then she becomes an intrusion, an uncontrolled reminder of the damage done by his Empire. By keeping her he gets to define her existence and to narrate his relation to her. When he says that he has “relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the kitchen as a scullery maid” we see that he sees himself as a savior (32). In this way, he’s also getting something out of his relationship with her. He gets to feel that he is giving something to her, even though she has had everything taken from her by his people. The important question here however is whether or not the magistrate’s blindness to the cause of her suffering is the result of active or passive denial. When he seeks out the reason for her being stripped, does he already know it, or does he in fact have to figure it out?
He reads her scars with his fingers, like a blind man reading braille. He interprets her suffering with his hands. After a certain point in this nightly ritual, he falls asleep, as though he can only take in so much information. Finally he gets the truth out of her in the form of language and after she tells him her story; at this point, he leaves her for the other, intact, pretty, “birdlike” girl at the inn. He speaks of his obligation to washing and oiling the nomad girl as a form of “bondage” (33). His rejection of the nomad girl at this point is a rejection of knowledge. He can only handle so much “truth” at once.
It’s also possible that he has conquered her by learning her mystery, and now he’s no longer interested or attracted. This conquest may define a broader, more familiar experience of sexual desire: once the mystery is solved, boredom sets in. He grows repulsed by her. When the details of her experience had still been a mystery, she had appealed to him erotically. His desire for empirical fact is mixed with sexual desire, as though learning “truth” is an erotic process. This brings to mind Joll’s lust for “truth.” Is the magistrate’s desire much different? What is it that he actually wants from the nomad? Was the idea of her being tortured titillating when it remained abstract, but ruined when the facts arrived? The facts are ugly.
His growing repulsion with the girl parallels his repulsion with himself. After learning about what happened to her, he comes to the revelation—or possibly decision—that she’s ugly. He states it out loud as though it’s a fact. Then as he thinks back on his previous attraction to her we see that his disgust for her is a projection of his disgust with himself. His previous attraction to her seems to him perverse—and maybe it was related to the attraction of a torturer for their victim’s “truth.” His torture of her at this stage is amplified by his revulsion. But an important part of what disgusts him is his own previous fascination. Nonetheless, by deciding that she’s “ugly” he categorizes her and continues to flex his power over her. His subsequent obsession with recalling what she used to look like prior to being tortured doesn’t free him from his trap of seeing her as ugly. The magistrate is unable to see the woman as she is now. He is blinded by her blindness.
The magistrate’s inner conflict is ratcheted tighter when the young officer arrives and the magistrate speaks on behalf of the barbarians. Despite his seeming regression with girl, he seems to be developing some sense of backbone in the face of agents of the Empire. His sense that he should hold his tongue adds to the tension of the plot.
