Waiting for the Barbarians: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The fifth chapter begins with the magistrate describing the hysterical gossip about the barbarians which has overtaken the fort. The barbarians, people say, have dug a tunnel under the walls of the fort, and the townsfolk are convinced that they’re always prowling about waiting to murder, rape, steal, and pillage. Further, a little girl in the town was apparently raped by a barbarian—recognized as a barbarian because of his ugliness. The magistrate adds that it’s been a long time since the second expeditionary force rode out against the barbarians. He says that, among the small group of soldiers left behind, there is a level of alcohol consumption and disrespect towards the townspeople which he’s never witnessed before. The soldiers will go into shops and take what they want without paying. And, while Mandel promises to take charge of and enforce order among his soldiers (since he’s in charge while Joll’s away) he fails to ultimately act.

The magistrate says that he lives in a corner of the barracks yard, more disgraced than ever, having “lost his last vestige of authority the day he spent hanging from a tree in a woman’s underclothes,” and who had to lick up his food for a week, having lost the use of his hands. He says that there’s also been an influx of refugees to the town—fisherfolk from outlying settlements along the river. While at first the townsfolk were sympathetic to them, after several occurrences (their building of thatched shelters along the wall of the town square, their thieving children and sheep-killing dogs) feelings towards them have changed.

One day, the magistrate says, Mandel approaches him in the yard and says that the expenditures to keep him as a prisoner cannot go on forever. When asked when he’s going to start working for his keep, the magistrate responds by saying that, as a prisoner awaiting trial, he’s not required to work. Mandel, however, says that the magistrate is not a prisoner, and that he’s free to go as he pleases. As the magistrate goes to leave, he asks Mandel, “how do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been [torturing] people?” Mandel tries to evade the question, but the magistrate persists, trying to insist that he doesn’t mean it to be sarcastic, but that, as a fellow civil devotee to the law, he wants to try and understand how someone like Mandel could bear to perform his duty and stand to live. Mandel is incredibly angered, and calls the magistrate a bastard, telling him to “go and die somewhere.”

The magistrate says that, with his new freedom, he cannot hide from anyone—he’s constantly on view in the town square. Gradually, he adds, the townsfolk start to soften up to him, and realize that “the old magistrate has taken his knocks and come through.” As he’s walking the streets one day, the magistrate encounters Mai, “the quartermaster’s plump wife,” and she invites him in for tea and biscuits. She sympathizes with all the hardships he’s gone through, and mentions that there was never such commotion when he was in charge as there is now. As the magistrate rambles about how he became a fool in love over the barbarian girl—that it was simply common sense to return her to her family—she “listens to these half-truths, nodding, watching me like a hawk.”

The magistrate says that he now sings (begs) for his keep, and can usually get the maids from the barracks to feed him leftovers from the soldier’s dinners. In the mornings, he’ll visit Mai at the inn as she cooks, just to “breathe in all the good smells.” She tells him that many people have left the town, afraid of the barbarian threat, and that it’s becoming a rougher road to travel each day—if you want to leave—with the approach of winter. The magistrate tells Mai that, he realizes, “I disappeared and then reappeared, and in between was not part of the world.”

The magistrate is rather forthright about his sexuality with Mai, saying how in prison he only thought about food—not women. He even mentions the girl at the inn, wondering why he is confessing all this, but then he realizes that when he first encountered his tormentors, his philosophy was “let everything be said,” and that this is having an influence on the way he speaks now. Further, the magistrate’s narration goes on about how food is the thing he craves the most, and how he can use his powers of flattery to get special meals. He says that he wants to be fat again—“fatter than ever before.”

The magistrate says that it’s been almost three months since the second expeditionary force departed—and there’s been no news about its progress. Instead, he says horrible rumors abound about its possible failures. Every week, a “convoy of the prudent” leave the town to head east towards the capital, supposedly to “visit relatives till things settle down again.” Soon after the families leave their houses, the fort’s soldiers loot and vandalize them. Also, those who are perceived to be preparing to leave the town are subject to public insult and robbery. The magistrate says that the soldiers “tyrannize” the town, having held a torch-lit meeting at the center of the settlement condemning those who wish to leave, and the slogan “WE STAY” has become popular among those who consider themselves to be faithful. He also mentions that he was present during the night of the meeting, and says that it turned into a march that ended up setting a house on fire. He concludes that Mandel has utterly lost control of the garrison—he was nowhere in sight during the march.

The magistrate, continuing to discuss the soldiers’ new sense of power, mentions that they are fawned-upon by the citizens, who host a weekly levy in order to fund a feast for them. The more the soldiers are pampered, he says, the less reliable they become. The magistrate then discusses walking from town to the lakeside. He says that he’s deeply familiar with this road—he’s walked it by night ever since he was a child—and has no desire to leave the settlement, like the many families who have. “How,” he says, “can I believe that the night is full of the flitting shadows of the barbarians?”

Continuing down the road, the magistrate eventually begins to wade into an expanse of marshland, and fantasizes about joining the fisherfolk as a member of their village, having a romantic conception of their lifestyle. As he wades further into the water, the magistrate realizes that his daydreaming about becoming a fisherman represents the very mode of thinking engrained in the minds of adult citizens of the Empire: “dreams of ends . . . not of how to live but of how to die.” Children, he says, never doubt that the trees they play under are everlasting, or the prospect of one day growing to be as strong and/or fertile as their parents—they never doubt that there is a continuity to life, or that their hopes for the future are guaranteed, and almost ordained by nature itself. They live in a kind of time that the Empire bars its adult citizens from living out. The Empire has “made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children,” the magistrate says.

The Empire, the magistrate continues, lives its existence out in the “jagged time of rise and fall.” Concerned with starting and ending things, with success and catastrophe, and not in the “smooth recurrent spinning time” of the seasons, the Empire ruthlessly plots to maintain and reproduce itself—and not to give itself up to the flux of the moment. The magistrate says that he is infected by this virus of thought, propagated by the Empire, no less than Colonel Joll is. Even though their priorities in life are drastically different, they are nonetheless equally subject to thinking about time in terms of beginning and end.

The magistrate, finding his way back to dry land, falls asleep. Later he wakes up and makes his way down the road to the fisherman’s camp, when a dog starts barking. Suddenly, the “night bursts out in a clamour of barking, shouts of alarm, screams.” Fearful that he has startled the entire town, he tries to shout out “It is nothing!” but isn’t heard. Someone runs past him, and a woman whom the magistrate says he “knows at once” pummels into him, but she gets away from his grasp and runs past him. Then the sound of trumpets comes, and the magistrate slowly makes his way into the camp, and enters a hut.

In the hut, the magistrate says that he would like to fall asleep, but his impact with the girl has unsettled him. He is wary that he will follow, in the morning, his sexual urges to investigate who, in fact, the girl—a woman or child, he says—ran into him, in order to “build upon her . . . an even more ridiculous erotic adventure.” Thus the magistrate says that, even for men of his age, there’s no cap on one’s foolishness. He says that the only excuse men of his age and erotic nature have is that “we leave no mark of our own on the girls who pass through our hands”—that those they engage sexually can “shrug off” whatever they offer. He continues with this theme, wondering if, when he would engage in his massaging rituals with the barbarian girl, all he really wanted to do was “engrave” himself on her in a very deep manner, and if, indeed, his inability to do so was what caused him the anxiety he felt.

Continuing on his tangent about the barbarian girl, the magistrate says that she will be forever marked “for life as the property of a stranger,” and that no one will ever engage her with the same sexual pity with which he did. He thinks that if she had only spoken up and told the magistrate that, if he wanted to learn how to torture her, he should simply ask his “friend with the black eyes,” Joll—and if he “had been in a position to understand her,” he “might have saved [him]self from a year of confused and futile gestures of expiation.”

Presumably falling asleep in the hut, the magistrate experiences yet again his recurring dream. He dreams that he’s heading towards the barbarian girl in the same snow-laden town square. While he walks towards her at first, he starts to fly as the wind picks up. Yet as he swoops down towards her, he’s afraid that she won’t turn around to see him in time, and so he tries to yell out to her and warn her. Unable to pierce the wind with his sound, he comes upon her bracing himself for impact—but, at just the last moment, she turns and sees him. “For an instant,” he says, “I have a vision of her face . . . glowing, healthy, smiling on me,” just before the two make impact. The girl’s head hits the magistrate right in the stomach, propelling him beyond her, but he says that the bump is “as faint as the stroke of a moth.” He realizes that because the impact was so light, he needn’t have been so anxious in the first place. When he tries to look back, all he can see is a wall of snow.

The magistrate awakes and his mouth is wet with kisses—a dog has been licking his face. He exits the hut and walks up to the northwest watchtower of the settlement, and then back down the road towards the lakeside again. He encounters a boy urinating in the middle of the path, who looks up at him, startled, and runs away to hide in the reeds. But the magistrate tells him that he can come out—there being nothing to be afraid of. Yet turning back to the fishing town, he notes that the gates are open, and sees heavily armed soldiers peeking into the huts of the fisherfolk. Apparently suspicious of the commotion that occurred the night before, the soldiers start to deface and wreck parts of the village. Trying to plead with them, the magistrate informs a man trying to destroy a thatched hut that he was the cause of the commotion—that he inadvertently scared the villagers while out on a walk, and that they don’t deserve to be punished for fleeing down the river worried that the barbarians might be upon them.

The soldier and his fellows, however, do not heed the magistrate’s words, and continue on their path of destruction. They snap the roof off a hut they’ve gathered around, and tell the magistrate to “fuck off” and “go and die somewhere.” When the roof of the hut snaps up, a soldier who had climbed atop it falls through to the ground, and as his fellows look on in laughter, he complains: “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! It’s not funny. I’ve hurt my fucking thumb! It’s sore!” Belligerently, he accuses the fisherfolk of being savages, and says that the Empire should have “lined them up against a wall and shot them long ago—with their friends!” The soldier, ignoring the magistrate, storms off.

Standing back in the road, the magistrate waits for his anger to subside, and he recalls an instance from the days when he had jurisdiction over the main settlement. A boy who had been charged with stealing chickens and sentenced to three years of army service tried to desert his post after a month. Caught and brought before the magistrate, the boy said that he only wanted to be able to see his mother and sisters again, but the magistrate told him that, being “fallen creatures” who are wholly subject to the law, “we cannot do as we wish.” At that time, the magistrate believed that every person had the capacity to know what was and was not just at every moment—that “all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.”

The magistrate says that he remembers feeling ill at ease on days where he would have to make such strict decisions, entertaining the idea that, though “some men suffer unjustly, it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.” He concludes that, while he had considered resigning from his post as magistrate multiple times, he always rejected doing so, knowing that someone else would just be vested with the “shame of office,” therefore not really changing anything.

The magistrate says that two horsemen, less than a mile away, have been spotted crossing the bare fields towards the settlement. Though some of the townsfolk gather in celebration, something seems wrong. One of the horsemen, who’s been riding shoulder to shoulder with the other, suddenly cuts off towards the lakeside. The remaining horseman, however, continues to gallop towards the settlement—and as he gets closer, the magistrate sees that he’s dead (and he’s been so for several days). He’ a soldier of the Empire who’s been fixed to wooden planks to keep him upright on the horse—a taunting trick by the barbarians. With no one else willing to perform the duty, the magistrate gathers the reigns of the errant horse and brings the dead soldier back to the settlement’s gates.

The magistrate then says that this event confirms every premonition of danger among the townspeople, adding that “true panic overtakes the town.” Some families, he says, shut themselves up in their houses, and the school has closed. Further, he mentions a rumor that a substantial group of barbarians has made camp only a few miles away from the burnt river-banks, and that an attack on the garrison is therefore inevitable and imminent. The magistrate comments: “the unthinkable has occurred: the army that marched forth so gaily three months ago will never return.”

The magistrate begs the gatekeeper of the garrison to allow the fisherfolk back inside their establishment, since they’re afraid for their lives. But the guard ignores him. Then, one night, as the magistrate is on his way back to the granary shed—where he sleeps—he encounters a line of horse-drawn carriages, packed with supplies, making way to pass out of the settlement. He notes that the townspeople “emerge from their houses and stand quietly by watching this evidently long-planned manoeuvre of withdrawal,” and he asks to meet with Officer Mandel to interview him about what’s going on, but the guard on watch at the courthouse brushes him off.

Returning from the courthouse to the town square, the magistrate finds Mandel reading a statement announcing the “temporary” withdrawal of the majority of soldiers stationed at the garrison—though a “caretaker force,” he says, will be left behind. There is also going to be an overall ceasing of the Empire’s campaign efforts on the frontier for the remainder of the winter. He says that he hopes he will return in the spring, when the army can “initiate a new offensive.”

The magistrate notes that, as Mandel speaks, his men are clearly stocking their carriages with the fruits of their looting. While he says that none of the villagers dare to protest, he can nonetheless sense “currents of helpless anger” all around him. Later on, the soldiers commence their departure of the garrison, and a young man runs out towards the company with his arms waving, stirring unrest. Shots ring out—and the magistrate sees the cause of the “futile attack”: a man grabbing at a woman in the very last cart. The square, afterwards, is dark and empty, and for the rest of the night, small family groups follow after the soldiers in a hurry, carrying heavy packs.

The magistrate says that his old apartment stands open—it has been vacant for a while now, the air is musty, and all of his artifacts from the archeological sites have disappeared. Lying down on his mattress, he anticipates that some special uneasiness will befall him, but nothing comes: the room is just as recognizable and familiar as it’s ever been. The magistrate then begins to think about the possibility of being invaded by the barbarians. While he’s certainly convinced that the world is no sugarcoated illusion or dream, he still finds it hard to firmly believe in the prospect that the end is near—that the barbarians will sweep in and kill the inhabitants of the settlement. Ultimately he says that, if and however the citizens of the garrison die, the Empire will have learned nothing—for something “in all of us, deep down” is “granite and unteachable.” For no one, he believes, actually thinks that “the world of tranquil certainties we were born into” is about to be annihilated.