Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M.Coetzee

Author:J.M.Coetzee [J.M.Coetzee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-11-28T18:30:00+00:00

* * *

day the barracks gate is locked for an hour and I am let out to wash and exercise. There are always faces pressed against the bars of the gate gaping at the spectacle of the fall of the once mighty. Many I recognize; but no one greets me.

At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore. I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry of their feet across the paved floor. They are lured by the smell of the bucket in the corner, the morsels of food on the floor; no doubt too by this mountain of flesh giving off its multifarious odours of life and decay. One night I am awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing my throat. Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes. From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned.

I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing; though it is hard to ignore the sound of brick being laid on brick so nearby.

I look forward with craving to exercise times, when I can feel the wind on my face and the earth under my soles, see other faces and hear human speech. After two days of solitude my lips feel slack and useless, my own speech seems strange to me. Truly, man was not made to live alone! I build my day unreasonably around the hours when I am fed. I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast.

Nevertheless it is only on the empty days when I am cast wholly upon myself that I can turn seriously to the evocation of the ghosts trapped between these walls of men and women who after a visit here no longer felt that they wanted to eat and could not walk unaided.

Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten. I think of one who despite her age was still a child; who was brought in here and hurt before her father's eyes; who watched him being humiliated before her, and saw that he knew what she saw.

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