Waiting for the Barbarians
John Maxwell Coetzee
 The story is set in a small frontier town under the jurisdiction of a political entity known only as "the Empire". The town's magistrate is the story's protagonist and first-person narrator. His rather peaceful existence in the town comes to an end with the declaration of a state of emergency and arrival of the Third Bureau, special forces of the Empire, led by a sinister Colonel Joll. There are rumours that the natives of the land, called "barbarians", are preparing an attack on the Empire, and so Colonel Joll and his men conduct an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. They capture a number of barbarians, bring them back to town, torture them, kill some of them, and leave for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign against the barbarians. In the meantime, the Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of imperialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau's torturers. The magistrate has an intimate yet ambiguous relationship with the girl. Eventually, he decides to take her back to her people. After a life-threatening trip through the barren land, during which they have sex, he succeeds in returning her&mdash;finally asking, to no avail, if she will stay with him&mdash;and returns to his own town. The Third Bureau soldiers have reappeared there and now arrest the Magistrate for having deserted his post and consorting with "the enemy". Without much possibility of a trial in wartime, the Magistrate remains in a locked cellar for an indefinite period, experiencing for the first time a near-complete lack of basic freedoms. He finally acquires a key that allows him to leave the makeshift jail, but finds that he has no place to escape to and only spends his time outside the jail scavenging for scraps of food. Later, Colonel Joll triumphantly returns from the wilderness with several barbarian captives and makes a public spectacle of their torture. Although the crowd is encouraged to participate in their beatings, the Magistrate bursts onto the scene to stop it, but is subdued. Taking the Magistrate, a group of soldiers hangs him up by his arms, culminating his understanding of imperialistic violence in a personal experience of torture. With the Magistrate's spirit clearly crushed, the soldiers mockingly let him roam freely through the town, knowing he has nowhere to go and no longer poses a threat to their mission. The soldiers, however, begin to abandon the town as winter approaches and their campaign against the barbarians starts to fall apart. The Magistrate tries to confront Joll on his final return from the wild, but the colonel refuses to speak to him, hastily fleeing the area with the last of the soldiers. With a widespread belief that the barbarians intend to invade the town soon, all the soldiers and many civilians have now departed, though the Magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter. There is no sign of the barbarians by the time the season's first snow falls on the town.