Waiting for the Barbarians: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

The fourth chapter begins as the magistrate describes a man (Officer Mandel) sitting at his desk in the office behind the courtroom—a man donning one of the Third Bureau’s uniforms. The man is searching through his various records, and ignores the magistrate when he asks him if there’s something in particular he’s looking for, or if he could speak to Colonel Joll. Eventually, the man accuses the magistrate of “treasonously consorting with the enemy,” and the magistrate is arrested. Oddly, however, this is a source of elation for the magistrate, who is overjoyed at the thought of having his allegiance with the Empire severed. Then, as he is escorted to his cell, the magistrate runs into the three men who helped him on his expedition, and tells them not to be anxious about being hurt or arrested, since they were only following his orders.

The magistrate describes his living conditions in captivity: he’s fed the same rations as the soldiers, and every second day he’s allowed to wash and exercise for an hour, when a crowd of people always gather to see the “spectacle of the fall of the once mighty.” At night, his cell is assaulted by cockroaches—one night he’s “awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing [his] throat.” It only takes two days of living in solitude for the magistrate to proclaim that “man was not made to live alone”—his own speech begins to feel strange to him, he says, and this newly “bestial life” is making him into a “beast.” Still, he says, it’s when his mind is turned in on himself that he turns his attention to others—to those who were imprisoned and tortured by Joll, like the barbarian girl and her murdered father. No wonder her father grew detached and hopeless and wanted to die after his interrogation, the magistrate thinks, since he’d been utterly humiliated in front of his daughter.

The magistrate then says that, by offering the barbarian girl protection, he was, in a way, taking over the role of her father. He says that, while he considers this to be a noble action of his, he regrets having ever allowed Joll’s men to enter his settlement. He further remarks about the girl, saying that—upon witnessing the brutalized, naked form of her father at the hands of Joll and company—she “was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her.”

The magistrate then remarks that, even though the guards have been ordered not to discuss anything with him, it’s nonetheless easy to put together a coherent narrative based on the bits of chatter he overhears during his exercise and washing hours. He’s also observed that the army has started a fire on the riverbanks to the northwest in order to clear any brush that could potentially aid the barbarians in concealing themselves from the watchtowers of the settlement. The magistrate is repulsed at the army’s lack of sensibility for the fertile soil which will be destroyed in the fire’s path.

The magistrate’s narrative then shifts—he’s back in his office, which has been cleared of all his things. Mandel enters, and reads him the charges imputed to him by two of the men who served him on his expedition to the barbarians. He’s accused of forming a bond with a streetwoman (the barbarian girl) to the “detriment of his official duties,” and who had a “demoralizing effect on the prestige of imperial administration” since she had worked as a prostitute among the soldiers. Further, he’s accused of hastily preparing for the journey and putting his travel companions’ lives at risks, and, most importantly, of having “long consultations” with the barbarians and exchanging gifts with them. The magistrate, however, asserts that he will defend himself in a court of law. Mandel just waves his hand in disregard, and says that the magistrate will have a chance to reply.

Escorted back to his cell, the magistrate’s narration then revolves around the humiliations he faces as a prisoner—he’s denied requests for clean clothes, and the “monotonous regimen of soup and porridge and pie” makes defecating an agony. Further, he wonders what freedom has been left to him, and concludes “the freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence or gabble to myself or beat the door or scream.” He also describes a little boy—the cook’s grandson—who brings him his meal every day, very animatedly. Their brief interactions comprise the majority of his newly vacant social life. The magistrate asks the boy if the soldiers have come back, and he says no.

The magistrate continues to contemplate the barbarian girl—he can no longer remember exactly what she looks like. When he tries to recall her image, the only memory that springs to the surface is of his oily hands sliding over her body. He then has his recurring dream once more. This time, the girl is alone and unaccompanied by any children, and she’s not occupied with building a snow castle. The magistrate approaches her and asks her “where does it hurt?” She then “awkwardly” touches her ankles, and the magistrate kneels and unwraps the bandages around her feet, revealing two “disembodied, monstrous . . . stranded fish, two huge potatoes.” The magistrate then enters the barracks yard, which is “as endless as the desert,” with “no hope of reaching the other side”—the girl being “the only key” he has to the “labyrinth.” The magistrate also says that there are versions of the dream where the girl changes form—changes shape, size, and sex.

The magistrate says that “the texture of the days” are “as dull as porridge.” The intricate flow of events in the external world have lost all interest in comparison to the visceral pangs of hunger and physical functions which define his solitary existence. The magistrate describes one morning when he asks the warder if he could wash his clothes in order to make himself decent for the Colonel—apparently he’s going to appear before Joll soon. The warder reluctantly leads the magistrate into the kitchen in order to let him fetch a bucket of hot water, and as the magistrate is acquiring the water, some soap and a rag, he stealthily grabs a cellar key laying out that he secretly knows also unlocks the door to his cell.

Later that night, the magistrate escapes from his cell. He goes to an upper room in the barracks, one next to his old apartment, which is now locked. Three men are asleep in the room. Looking out through a window onto the town square, he expects to see “campfires, lines of tethered horses and stacked arms, rows of tents,” but is surprised that there’s nothing to see except a single person and perhaps two tents—and he wonders whether the expeditionary force is simply not yet back or whether he’s viewing what remains of it, though he dismisses the latter as a possibility. One of the men sleeping in the room grips the magistrate’s hand and says that he’s thirsty. The magistrate, unrecognized by him, agrees to fetch him water if he’ll promise to keep quiet. After helping to support the man while he drinks his water—he’s ill—the magistrate slips out through the window.

After dropping less than gracefully from the window onto the ground and landing behind a row of bushes, the magistrate lies there for at least an hour, he says, when he could be trying to escape. Finally, he begins to crawl along the wall and makes his way to the back of the inn. There, beneath a wooden stairway, there’s an inlet where wood is stored and where cats loiter when there’s rain. He crawls into an old bag underneath the stairs, which “smells of urine” and “is certainly full of fleas,” but all he cares about at the moment is the pain in his back caused by his fall from the window.

Awaking later to the sound of footsteps on the stairway, the magistrate, undiscovered, makes his way to the room of the girl at the inn. There, he smells the comforting fragrance of her clothes, and decides to hide under her bed. He fantasizes about joining the rest of the town later in the evening—of dressing and crossing the square to his office, nodding to his friends and neighbors, and carrying on as if nothing had happened. However, the magistrate quickly checks his fantasizing with a bout of realistic thinking—as he lies under the bed, he’s a hunted man. But “Why me?,” he wonders, and he imagines himself being given a hasty, unfair trial, and being dragged from the courtroom to the executioner. Though the magistrate says that he’s not afraid of death, he says that he shrinks from “the shame of dying . . . stupid and befuddled.”

The girl at the inn enters the room, and the magistrate contemplates revealing himself and asking her to hide him until nightfall, when he’d plan to escape the town and head down to the lakeside—but he decides against this. He goes undiscovered, worried mostly about his stench giving him away. Lying there, he reminisces about the first time he was escorted to his cell, and how he felt like a “sane man sure of the rightness” of his cause, but now—after two months living with cockroaches and no one to talk to except a ghost in his dreams—he’s not as confident in himself.

The magistrate also longs for sexual contact with a woman’s body, and wonders how he could ever be perceived as doing right when the whole town is against his escapade with the barbarian girl and would be infuriated with him if, seen as a result of his communication with the barbarians, any soldiers were killed. He also knows that his interrogators would not cease in their application of pain regardless of his truth-telling, because of their philosophy that “the last truth is told only in the last extremity.” Lastly, he realizes that his escape plan is futile—he’d starve within a week outside the settlement.

The girl at the inn and a young man enter the room—he tells her that she shouldn’t put up with the way the soldiers are treating her, since she’s not a slave, but she tells him that he doesn’t understand. Suddenly, they begin to make love—on the bed under which the magistrate is hiding. The magistrate, repulsed, plugs his ears. He actually groans to himself, though they do not hear him. After they fall asleep, he slips out from underneath the bed, and tiptoes out of the room and down to the kitchen. There, an old woman cook spots him, but the magistrate simply raises a hand and smiles, and the startled woman seems to ignore him.

The magistrate exits the kitchen and tries to leave the settlement through the north gate, but it’s closed and barred. He therefore climbs the stairway of the watchtower. Looking out over the landscape, he wonders to himself if he’s been locked away for two months or ten years—the landscape has totally changed. The magistrate is then noticed by a nearby sentry—a watchtower guard—who doesn’t recognize him and tells him to get down, since the watchtower is off limits to civilians. The magistrate proceeds to ask him several questions, like where everyone he used to know is, and what happened out in the fields. He apologizes for asking such questions, but explains that he’s had a fever, having been totally confined to bed. The sentry explains that the barbarians cut away part of an embankment one night, and consequently flooded the fields—he adds that the crop is entirely ruined, and is too late to replant. The magistrate asks him when he expects the main expeditionary force to be back, and the guard says “soon, it must be soon.”

Having been completely unrecognized by the guard, the magistrate leaves him and climbs down the watchtower steps, and exits the settlement. Looking at the fields, he notes how nothing is left standing—the farmers have already started stacking the dead crops for burning. The magistrate then comes upon one of his old excavation sites—it’s been largely undone by the wind. He says that he could probably stay there, and no one would bother looking for him. After falling asleep, the magistrate emerges to a red evening sun, and decides to return to the settlement, since he’ll die out in the desert, and asks, “why should I do my enemy’s work for them?” For, “if they want to spill my blood,” he says, “let them at least bear the guilt of it.”

Returning to the gate of the barracks yard, the magistrate yells to be let back in. His warder comes up to him, and commands that he be quiet; upon depositing the magistrate in his cell, he tells him to say nothing about escaping, or else he’ll make the magistrate’s life an absolute misery. Trying to build something of a rapport with the desperate warder, the magistrate responds that he has nothing to worry about—his lips are sealed, for he knows “what it is like to be frightened.”

Later that night, Joll’s expedition force returns, and the magistrate decides to give into temptation and leave his cell to check out all the hubbub and commotion he hears in the town square. The whole town—“thousands of ecstatic souls”—he says, are gathered in celebratory welcome. After a succession of soldiers enter through the main gateway, he says that there’s a line of barbarians, tied neck to neck, being led into the fort by a trooper. The town is in awe. The magistrate notes that the barbarians all seem to be holding an odd posture—they all hold their hands up to their cheeks as if suffering from a toothache, but he realizes that each of them have a metal wire running through their hands and cheeks. He recalls being told by a soldier that this forces the prisoner to “think of nothing but how to keep very still.” The magistrate’s heart grows sick, and he wishes he never left his cell.

The magistrate then catches sight of Colonel Joll. Feeling like he’s going to be sick, the magistrate fetches a bucket of water from the prison yard, and, returning to the crowd, forges his way to the front. The barbarians are led to the town square, where four of them (out of twelve total) are forced to kneel on the ground. They are all attached to a pole by a cord running through the loops of wire in each of their mouths, such that their faces touch the pole. Then Joll, standing over each prisoner, rubs the word ENEMY on their backs with charcoal, and the soldiers commence beating them, the goal being to erase the word, which fades when mixed with sweat and blood. After the soldiers grow tired, they offer their canes to the members of the crowd, and a little girl, pushed forward by her friends, accepts a cane and hits one of the prisoner’s rear ends. The crowd gives her a “roar of applause.” The magistrate looks on at the absurdity, repulsed.

The magistrate sees Colonel Joll holding up a four-pound hammer, displaying it to the audience—and they trade glances. In a climactic moment, the magistrate—mortified by the sight of the hammer—shouts “No!” Facing Joll, who’s no more than five paces away, the magistrate points his finger at him and shouts “You! You are depraving these people!” But Joll and one of his men beat the magistrate down. Though the magistrate valiantly withstands the pain of his beating and tries to muster up a public speech accusing Joll of inhumanity, his words fail him as he’s pelted by blows, and he hysterically asks himself just what, exactly, it is that he stands for “besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behavior towards captured foes.” Ultimately, the magistrate thinks that it’s “easier to be beaten and made a martyr,” to be killed in the name of justice than to argue for the barbarians’ cause, when the Empire has already irreparably tarnished the settlement’s relationship with the nomads. With a broken nose and perhaps a cheekbone, the magistrate is eventually carried off to his cell.

In his cell, the magistrate writhes about and weeps in pain, awaking eventually in the afternoon of the next day to find that his pain “lost its strangeness,” and that “soon, perhaps, it will be as much part of me as breathing.” He then has another dream of the barbarian girl; she’s once again kneeling before the snow castle with her back to the magistrate, and when he approaches her, she turns to him. The magistrate realizes that it’s not a castle she’s been building, but a clay oven. She hands the magistrate a “shapeless lump” at which he looks “unwillingly;” and, shaking his head, he’s unable to clear his vision. The girl, he notes, is dressed beautifully, and he remarks about her beautiful eyes and teeth. Finally, he realizes that the formless lump she’d held out to him is an artfully baked loaf of fresh bread. Opening his arms to embrace her, he awakens to the stinging of tears on his wounded cheek.

The magistrate then describes a scene in his old office. Joll sits behind his desk, and Officer Mandel—though the magistrate still does not yet know his name—stands by with a notepad. Joll asks the magistrate to explain the wooden “slips” he’s collected (from the ruins the magistrate was previously excavating), which the Colonel found in a chest in his room, and which are painted with a peculiar script. Joll tells the magistrate that he needs to explain what the messages say and who the other parties were who used them for communication.

The magistrate doesn’t really know what any of the characters on the slips mean, even though he’s studied the structure of the language for some time, isolating over 450 characters. Instead, he makes up some translations of various slips, saying things that vaguely reflect the gruesome effects of Joll’s torture. He translates a couple of the slips as ancient letters to a barbarian whose brother has been captured by soldiers: the barbarian writing the letter says he found the person’s brother’s corpse sewn up in a sack, with his eyes sewn shut and his ankles broken.

Unamused by the magistrate’s translations, Joll asks him what he envisions of his future at the post, since he’s disgraced himself. But the magistrate just demands to be prosecuted in a formal trial so that he can defend himself, and the Colonel implies that the magistrate is delusional—that he’d never stand a chance at trial, and his belief that the Bureau won’t bring him to trial because he’s too popular of a figure in the town is totally fantastical. Joll says that he decided that he just wanted to relieve the magistrate of his duties and release him from custody, but that his mind has changed, since the magistrate seems bent on being a martyr—the “One Just Man”—to the detriment of the Empire’s cause. Joll ends the interview and tells Mandel that the magistrate is now his responsibility.

The magistrate is back in his cell. He lies “in the reek of old vomit obsessed with the thought of water,” since he’s had nothing to drink for two days. He mentions that Officer Mandel and his assistant force-fed him pints of salt water down a pipe pushed down his esophagus—and this makes him realize that, while he anticipated them to cause him varying degrees of pain, and that he would have to come to realize just “how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure” in the name of his principles, the effects of the salt water tactic were quite different. Instead of dealing in pain, this tactic made him realize “what it meant to live in a body, as a body” which can only support higher principles of justice insofar as it is healthy and nourished, and which soon forgets its higher order when visceral, physical matters come to the forefront. He also says that, while he thought that his torturers had a grand, elaborate system of “pain and deprivation” they were applying to him, really, they weren’t that methodical about it—torturing the magistrate wasn’t the center of their universe.

The magistrate then mentions a scene in the prison yard—he’s naked, an audience is gathered, and Mandel demands that he run, hitting the magistrate’s rear end with a cane whenever he slows down. Out of shape and weak, the magistrate quickly runs out of breath, but Mandel continues to prod him. Other times, the magistrate is forced to do tricks, such as jumping back and forth over a rope. Further, the magistrate says that he “smell[s] of shit,” not being permitted to wash himself. He flicks flies away from the sore on his check as if it were an automatic reflex. The magistrate wonders if there will be a time when, during these games Mandel makes him play, he will just collapse and ask to be killed rather than persist in going on.

The magistrate says that, one day, Mandel and his assistant throw open his cell door and hand him a woman’s calico smock, telling him to put it on or otherwise go naked. He dons the smock, his wrists are tied behind his back, and the two men escort him out to the yard—Mandel tells him that his “time has come.” Mandel and his men make like they’re going to hang the magistrate—though he thinks that this is only a trick to mess with him—and a crowd forms. When asked if he has any final words, the magistrate just says that he’s trying very hard to understand how Mandel feels about him, and why; instead of addressing the people directly, he’d rather hear some words from Mandel—why does he devote himself to his work, and what does he feel towards the magistrate, whom he has so concertedly tried to hurt?

Still hoping that the men are just playing, but terrified nonetheless, the magistrate says that he wants people to know that “nothing passed between [him]self and the barbarians concerning military matters. It was a private affair.” He wanted to return the barbarian girl to her people—with no other agenda. He further says that he believes that no one deserves to die, and that he wants to live like every man does. As he tries to balance himself on the ladder he’s precariously perched upon, his mind flashes back to the leader of the barbarian horsemen who pointed a gun at him when he was returning the barbarian girl. He sees the scene with the most impeccable detail: “every hair of the horse’s man, every wrinkle of the old man’s face, every rock and furrow of the hillside.”

The magistrate then returns to consciousness of the present moment—his feet touch the ground, “though they are numb to all feeling,” and he stretches out upon the ground. But he’s abruptly pulled to his feet, and Mandel tells him that he is going to show him “another form of flying.” He takes the rope off of the magistrate’s neck and, knotting it around the cord that ties his wrists behind his back, asks his assistants to pull the magistrate up. The magistrate then thinks that, if he’s acrobatic enough to be able to swing one of his feet up and hook it around the rope suspending him, he’ll be able to hang upside down without his shoulder muscles being torn by his arms swinging up over his head—but he’s unable to do this, and he suffers a “terrible tearing in [his] shoulders as though whole sheets of muscle are giving way.” Someone gives him a push, and as he shouts in agony, someone says “he is calling to his barbarian friends,” and “that is barbarian language.” They laugh at him.