Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee - - Free e. Books online Reading It should not be so easy to attain salvation. And is there any principle behind my opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers? As for this liberty which I am in the process of throwing away, what value does it have to me? Have I truly enjoyed the unbounded freedom of this past year in which more than ever before my life has been mine to make up as I go along?
For example: my freedom to make of the girl whatever I felt like, wife or concubine or daughter or slave or all at once or none, at whim, because I had no duty to her save what it occurred to me to feel from moment to moment: from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement? In my opposition there is nothing heroic- -let me not for an instant forget that. It is the same room in the barracks that they used for their interrogations last year. I stand by while the mats and rolls of the soldiers who have been sleeping here are dragged out and piled at the door.
My own three men, still filthy and ragged, emerge from the kitchen to stare. What is that you are eating?" I shout.
Get me some before they lock me up!" One of them comes trotting over with his bowl of hot millet gruel. Take it," he says. The guards motion me to go in. Just a moment," I say: "let him fetch my bedroll, then I won't trouble you again." They wait while I stand in a patch of sunlight spooning in the gruel like a starving man. The boy with the sore foot stands at my elbow with a bowl of tea, smiling. Thank you," I say.
Don't be anxious, they won't harm you, you were only doing what you were told." With my bedroll and the old bear- fur under my arm I enter my cell. The soot- marks are still on the wall where the brazier used to stand. The door closes and darkness falls. I sleep all day and all night, barely disturbed by the chop- chop of picks behind the wall at my head or the faraway rumble of barrows and shouts of labourers. In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal.
Waiting For The Barbarians eBook: J M Coetzee: Amazon.ca. includes free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed.
I sigh and wet my lips. "What is that noise?" I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells. "Ah yes," I say: "time for the black flower of civilization to bloom." He does not understand. There is no window, only a hole high on the wall. But after a day or two my eyes have adjusted to the gloom. I have to shield myself against the light when, morning and evening, the door is flung open and I am fed. The best hour is early morning, when I wake and lie listening to the first birdsong outside, watching the square of the smoke- hole for the instant at which darkness gives way to the first dove- grey light. I am fed the same rations as the common soldiers.
Download Waiting for the Barbarians PDF for free. Grab the ePUB, MOBI and eBook format for your digital device! It should not be so easy to attain salvation. And is there any principle behind my opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers? As.
Description : A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians centers on the crisis of the conscience of the Magistrate a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best. PDF Ebook Waiting For The Barbarians Pdf Free Download, Save or Read Online Waiting For The Barbarians Pdf PDF file for free from our online library PDF File: Waiting For The Barbarians Pdf. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS PDF PDF. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by J.M. Coetzee. . is now available from Viking Books A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians centers on the crisis of. No eBook available. Amazon.com. It had a touch of Waiting For Godot, with a. Waiting For The Barbarians. Download Waiting For The Barbarians Book or Ebook File with PDF Epub Audio and Full format File.
Every second 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. Or perhaps by that time she could not see, and had to know by other means: the tone his voice took on when he pleaded with them to stop, for instance. Always I find in myself this moment of shrinking from the details of what went on in here. After that she had no father. Her father had annihilated himself, he was a dead man. It must have been at this point, when she closed herself off to him, that he threw himself upon his interrogators, if there is any truth in their story, and clawed at them like a wild animal until he was clubbed down. I close my eyes for hours on end, sitting in the middle of the floor in the faint light of day, and try to evoke the image of that man so ill- remembered. All I see is a figure named /father /that could be the figure of any father who knows a child is being beaten whom he cannot protect.
To someone he loves he cannot fulfil his duty. For this he knows he is never forgiven. This knowledge of fathers, this knowledge of condemnation, is more than he can bear. No wonder he wanted to die. I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father. But I came too late, after she had ceased to believe in fathers. I wanted to do what was right, I wanted to make reparation: I will not deny this decent impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives: there must always be a place for penance and reparation. Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency. They exposed her father to her naked and made him gibber with pain; they hurt her and he could not stop them (on a day I spent occupied with the ledgers in my office). Thereafter 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. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts not only of the father and the daughter but of the man who even by lamplight did not remove the black discs from his eyes and the subordinate whose work it was to keep the brazier fed, will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing. So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her. She leans on her two sticks looking dimly upward. What does she see? The pro- tecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey yet breathes? Though the guards have orders not to discuss anything with me, it is not difficult to stitch together into a coherent story the snatches of talk I hear on my outings into the yard.
All the latest talk is about the fire along the river. Five days ago it was just a darker smudge against the haze in the north- west. Since then it has eaten its way slowly down the river- course, sometimes dying down but always reviving, and clearly visible now from the town as a brown shroud over the delta where the river enters the lake. I can guess what has happened.
Someone has decided that the river- banks provide too much cover for the barbarians, that the river would form a more defensible line if the banks were cleared. So they have fired the brush. With the wind blowing from the north, the fire has spread across the whole shallow valley. I have seen wildfires before. The fire races through the reeds, the poplars flare up like torches. Animals that are quick enough- -antelope, hare, cat- escape; swarms of birds fly out in terror; everything else is consumed.
But there are so many barren stretches along the river that fires rarely spread. So it is clear that in this case a party must be following the fire downriver to see to its progress.
They do not care that once the ground is cleared the wind begins to eat at the soil and the desert advances. Thus the expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign, ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony. The shelves have been cleared, dusted and polished. The surface of the desk glows with a deep lustre, bare save for a saucer of little glass balls of different colours. The room is spotlessly clean. A vase of hibiscus flowers stands on a table in the corner filling the air with scent.
There is a new carpet on the floor. My office has never looked more attractive. I stand beside my guard in the same clothes I travelled in, my underwear washed once or twice but my coat still smelling of woodsmoke, waiting.