Summary
A young man that the magistrate has never seen before is occupying his office. The man is from the Third Bureau. He’s blond and blue eyed and the magistrate describes him as beautiful. The man has cleaned and reorganized the office. There are fresh flowers on the desk. The man’s insignia says that he’s a warrant officer. He asks the magistrate where he’s been. The magistrate asks to see Joll. The warrant officer accuses the magistrate of “treasonously consorting with the enemy” (77). The magistrate argues that there is no enemy. He is sent to jail.
As the magistrate goes to jail he feels giddy. He feels like he’s finally on the right side, no longer a part of the Empire. He’s put in the same room where the interrogations happened. He still hasn’t washed or eaten since arriving back. He insists that the guards let him get his bedroll and that they feed him. He slurps some gruel. He goes into the cell and sleeps for hours, through the next day. Cockroaches come out.
Sitting alone in the cell he begins to think of the others who’ve been there. He conjures them—the girl and her father—their torture. Images of what happened to them arise in his imagination. He imagines the entire thing: the girl being raped and maimed in front of her father, the father going berserk and being beaten to death in front of his daughter. The thought of this upsets him, and he begins to obsess over the girl. Images of her move through his mind. He imagines her in different ways and he tries to draw meaning from the different images.
He’s in isolation and the guards aren’t allowed to talk to him but he overhears things. He learns that Joll and the army have set fire to the riverbanks to clear the hiding places for the barbarians. He thinks of the damage this will cause to the land.
He’s brought back in to the office—his office. The warrant officer wants to read him the depositions that he’s received against the magistrate. He reads: people in the town accused the magistrate of consorting with the nomad girl, being obsessed with her, neglecting his duties because of her. Then the men from his expedition accused him of going to warn the barbarians of the coming campaign (though these men state that they only understood this after returning to the outpost and talking to the warrant officer). The men also said that he was in love with the nomad girl and that she wasn’t interested in him. Upon hearing the depositions the magistrate announces that he’ll defend himself in a court of law. He also says that no one would dare say these things to his face.
He returns to solitary confinement. He enters a routine of meager meals and brief exercise in the yard. He’s not given clean clothes. He meditates extensively on the tortures of the routine and the power of his captors to diminish his life. Every day a little boy brings his food. He speaks to the boy as much he can and asks questions to find out what’s happening with the campaign. He’s forgetting the face of the girl. Then one night he dreams of her tortured body. He tries to comfort her.
One day he hears confusion outside. No one comes to feed him. He thinks the army must be back. He misses two meals. In the afternoon he beats on his door until the guard opens up angrily. The magistrate demands food and says that the Colonel will be angry to find him so filthy. The guard lets him out into the kitchen and gets the maid to fetch him hot water. He hurries to wash his clothes. As he’s alone in the kitchen, he opens the cellar door and takes the key from the hook where it hangs and slips it into his cloak.
That night, with the key, he slips out of his cell. Only he knows that the key for the cellar is the same one for the barracks and the kitchen and his cell. He goes out into the town at night. Everyone is asleep. He roams around and sleeps behind a chicken house. In the morning he makes his way up into the inn, into the room of the girl whose room he used to go into. He hides under her bed. She eventually comes in with a man—an actual lover and not one of her clients. While the magistrate hides, the girl makes love to this man. The magistrate hears her actually loving someone. It’s a kind of torture for him. Late in the afternoon he goes wandering out. He goes up a watchtower and sees all of the field have been completely flooded. All the grains wiped out. A watchman comes up and finds him, but it’s not someone he knows. The watchman tells him he can’t be there. He says he was getting out of the sun. He asks what happened to the fields. The watchman tells him that the barbarians cut the embankments of the rivers in the night and flooded them. All the food is lost. This was the commotion that the magistrate heard. It turns out the army hasn’t actually returned.
The magistrate goes around the back wall of the town. There’s nothing out there for him. He will starve out there. He returns to his cell. He calls to the guard to let him in. The guard is terrified of getting in trouble. He lets him back in and feeds him. The imprisonment continues as before. Finally there comes the real commotion of the army returning. The magistrate can’t help himself. He uses his key and lets himself out again. A crowd has gathered and he comes up behind them and strains to see: the crowd is cheering as the army returns. The men hold their hands in the air. They’re garlanded with flowers. They have brought prisoners. As the magistrate gets closer he sees that how the prisoners are bound. There’s a rope around their necks. Each of them has their hands attached to their faces by a wire that has been threaded through the palm of their hand and the flesh their cheeks. They’re trying very hard to keep still so as not to tear their flesh.
The magistrate pushed himself to the front of the crowd. Colonel Joll is in the center with the prisoners. There are thousands in the crowd, but the magistrate feels Joll’s eyes on him through his dark shades. The prisoners are laid on the ground. Joll covers their backs in dust and writes the word ENEMY ENEMY on each of them. Then the beating begins. With long green canes, the soldiers begin to beat the backs of the prisoners. Everyone watches. They are trying to beat them clean. Then they give a cane to a young girl. She is urged forward. She beats a prisoner. When the flogging is over, Joll comes out with a hammer. They are going to pulverize the feet of the prisoners.
The magistrate shouts for Joll to stop. He pushes himself into the center and shouts out that they are humans. He points and Joll and accuses him of depraving the prisoners. He’s hit over the head. A soldier begins to beat him. He’s down on his knees. He points at the hammer and shouts that you wouldn’t use a hammer on a beast. He calls out that the prisoners are men. He’s beaten to the ground then carried to a cell. There, delirious and confused, he meditates on the concept of justice.
He suffers in his cell for countless hours. His body is in pain. Eventually he sleeps and dreams of the girl. She’s baking in a clay oven. She turns to him. She wearing a blue robe and a round cap embroidered in gold. He’s never seen her looking so beautiful. She asks where he’s been. She offers him bread and when he looks at her face she is glowing. He wakes and tries to bring the dream back.
He’s brought into his office. Colonel Joll is sitting behind his desk and the blue-eyed warrant officer, Mandel, is beside him. There are fresh flowers on the desk. The room is starkly empty. Joll says that they’ve searched through the magistrate’s rooms and they’ve found his communications with the barbarians. He has the ancient poplar slips that the magistrate has been collecting from the old ruin. Joll looks at the markings on the slips and demands that the magistrate tell him their meaning. The magistrate looks at the slips and begins to make up their meaning, telling the story of the girl and how she was tortured. He reads others, telling other stories of torture at the hands of the Empire. Mandel, the warrant officer stands up to hit him, but Joll gestures for him to sit. Joll tells the magistrate that he’s tiring. Joll asks the magistrate what he envisions in his future. The magistrate says he wants to be given a trail. He shouts that he deserves a hearing in court.
They come to his cell and torture him. It’s not described. All the magistrate says is that they came to show him “the meaning of humanity [and] in the space of an hour they showed [him] a great deal” (115). They leave him in his cell for days. They come in and torture him at random. He’s brought out into the yard, naked and stinking. They force him to run. They force him to jump over a high rope with his hands tied. Children watch.
Then one day Mandel and another man come in and give him a woman’s dress to put on. They take him out to a tree. A crowd forms. They put a noose around his neck. His hands are bound behind his back. They put a sack on his head and make him climb a ladder. He can’t hold on. If he slips the noose will tighten. Mandel forces him up and up to the top. He slips near the top and feels himself hanging, swinging. He blacks out only to waken to Mandel’s face over him. Then Mandel loops the rope through his bound arms, behind his back. The magistrate is hoisted up and his shoulders splinter as they’re torqued behind him. He hears flesh tearing and bone cracking. He bellows involuntarily, on and on.
Analysis
This chapter feels climactic in how certain of the magistrate’s questions, desires, and fears are addressed, achieved or realized. The giddy feeling that he experiences when he’s first taken into the prison is important for what it reveals about the latent, murky or repressed desires hinted at in previous chapters. Here it’s stated that he’s getting something he wants. He’s literally excited to be dragged off to the cell, and as he says, “I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man,” (78). The irony of this newfound freedom is rich. He feels liberated by being imprisoned.
By being imprisoned by the Empire, the magistrate can feel his allegiance to the Empire’s victims—specifically to the tortured girl, and in this way he can feel exonerated of the guilt that was otherwise burdening him. It takes physical punishment and incarceration for him to begin to know his political or philosophical position in relation to the Empire-barbarian conflict—and in this way, to begin to imagine that he knows himself. The liberation that he experiences is a liberation from a self-perception as a man of the Empire and as an enemy of the barbarians. Of course, this giddy pleasure must be short lived.
His claim that his joy is “dangerous” hints at more than the danger of the torture masters who now have full power over his life and body (78). In his state of solitary confinement, as he faces all that has happened, the magistrate is bound to learn more about himself than he may be able to handle. Indeed, he immediately questions the “principle behind [his] opposition” (78). He asks himself: “have I not simply been provoked into reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers?” (78). It is quite possible that his antagonism is that of masculine threat. In this encounter with Mandel, for example, he has focused on Mandel’s sexuality and indulged ideas of Mandel’s way with women. He says: “I picture him sitting up in bed beside a girl, flexing his muscles for her, feeding on her admiration” (77). The magistrate used to be the one behind the desk, the one free to choose whichever woman he wanted in the town. Now the other men have taken his position.
One of the first things to haunt the magistrate in his cell is the image of the torture of the girl and her father. As he sits in the cell, their ghosts come to him. He imagines in detail the process of humiliation of the father as he is stripped of his power to protect his own daughter. The magistrate imagines the father helplessly watching his daughter be tortured and raped and in doing this he feels the man’s state of helplessness as he’s stripped of all purpose and meaning. The magistrate imagines that it was at this point that the father would have lost it, lashing out, knowing there’s nothing he could do. This would be the point that they would have killed him.
The connection between sexuality and power is central to the broader narrative and it remains central in this chapter as we see the magistrate transformed from a man of authority to a beaten creature in a woman’s dress. Throughout his torment, torture, and solitary confinement, his relationship to the nomad girl returns to haunt him. He also has a telling first-hand encounter with the “birdlike” girl from the inn as he hides under her bed and listens to the sound of her making love in a sincere and passionate way to a man who she actually loves. In this chapter, as the magistrate is stripped of his legal, magisterial powers, he is simultaneously stripped of his masculine powers. The two, Coetzee seems to suggest, are tightly entwined. As he becomes a naked human, he is forced to face the meaning of his own sexuality and in this way, his entire existence.
In his first interrogation, when Mandel accuses him of warning the barbarians of the coming campaign, Mandel also brings up the nomad girl. Mandel claims that the other men on the expedition claimed that the magistrate was smitten with her, while she clearly had no interest in him. This point is intended to sting the magistrate and it works well. It’s after this interrogation that the magistrate begins to be truly tormented by his own solitude and begins to feel the insignificance of his own existence. He’s no longer the giddy man he was when he first entered the prison.
Along with the concept of power, the concept of the barbarian is transformed in the chapter. A full pivot takes place, and the meaning of the word is transferred from the nomad people to the men of the Empire who prove themselves masters of barbaric behavior, sadistically torturing their captors in front of children, taking pleasure in inflicting brutal suffering on helpless bodies. The scene in the square, when the torture masters bring in the bound prisoners, is climactic. All is revealed here and a transformation takes place in the town. The witnesses are no longer passive. They are brought in and made to participate. This process of initiation not only implicates the people in the crimes of the Empire, it transforms the people from innocents to perpetrators.
For the first time the magistrate has the opportunity to be the voice of justice. Of course, it’s too late. It’s while he’s entirely stripped of power that he finds words to speak against the evils of the Empire’s power. It’s only when he has nothing left to lose that he finds his voice, and the question thus arises: would he have spoken up when he still had authority? People where being tortured and killed in the barracks while he was still magistrate and he turned a blind eye. Has actually changed inside, or is it merely that fact that he’s a stripped man that allows him to cry out against injustice? Perhaps he can only speak out against this injustice because it is the same injustice being done to him. Yet surely he knows that it can get worse, much worse. Perhaps he has in fact changed on the inside, and it’s this change that leads him to the point where the chapter ends: shoulders splintered, hanging helplessly, a broken body in a tree.
