Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

I feel old and tired, I want to sleep. I sleep whenever I can nowadays and, when I wake up, wake reluctantly. Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

The joy has gone from my life. I spend the day playing with lists and numbers, stretching petty tasks to fill the hours.

It occurs to me that whatever I want to say to her will be heard with sympathy, with kindness. But what can I possibly say? “Terrible things go on in the night while you and I are asleep”? The jackal rips out the hare’s bowels, but the world rolls on.

“Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,” I mumble.

“If you want to do something, you do it,” she says very firmly. She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, “If you had wanted to do it you would have done it.”

“I am terrified to think what is going to become of us. I try to hope for the best and live from day to day. But sometimes all of a sudden I find myself imagining what might happen and I am paralyzed with fear. I don’t know what to do any more.

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.