Waiting for the Barbarians

The Magistrate notices a young woman, of indeterminate age, begging around the settlement and realizes that she was likely one of the prisoners that Joll had brought weeks prior. The Magistrate feels sympathy for her and offers her lodging in his apartment, under the pretense that begging and vagrancy within the town is against the law. The Magistrate also offers her a job as a maid and an assistant in the kitchen at the inn. Eventually, the Magistrate becomes extremely curious about the girl’s story. She has noticeable wounds on her ankles from imprisonment, walks with the help of rudimentary crutches, and appears to have damaged eyesight. The Magistrate orders the girl to show her feet to him, which she does, and the Magistrate begins rubbing them. There is the hint of a sexual fetish here that the Magistrate implicitly recognizes.

As the girl spends more time in her new position at the inn and with the Magistrate, there is an increasing sense that he is infatuated with her story, if not with her as a person. He has an intense curiosity to know how her eyesight came to be damaged, which she finally reveals was the result of torture at the hands of Joll’s men.