Age of Iron

I

There is an alley down the side of the garage, you may remember it, you and your friends would sometimes play there. Now it is a dead place, waste, without use, where windblown leaves pile up and rot. Yesterday, at the end of this alley, I came upon a house of carton boxes and plastic sheeting and a man curled up inside, a man I recognized from the streets: tall, thin, with a weathered skin and long, carious fangs, wearing a baggy grey suit and a hat with a sagging brim. He had the hat on now, sleeping; with the brim folded under his ear. A derelict, one of the derelicts who hang around the parking lots on Mill Street, cadging money from shoppers, drinking under the flyover, eating out of refuse cans. One of the homeless for whom August, month of rains, is the worst month. Asleep in his box, his legs stretched out like a marionette's, his jaw agape. An unsavoury smell about him – urine, sweet wine, mouldy clothing, and something else too. Unclean.

For a while I stood staring down on him, staring and smelling. A visitor, visiting himself on me on this of all days.

This was the day when I had the news from Dr Syfret. The news was not good, but it was mine, for me, mine only, not to be refused. It was for me to take in my arms and fold to my chest and take home, without headshaking, without tears.

'Thank you, doctor,' I said: 'thank you for being frank.' 'We will do everything we can,' he said, 'we will tackle this together.' But already, behind the comradely front, I could see he was withdrawing. Sauve qui peut. His allegiance to the living, not the dying,

The trembling began only when. I got out of the car, By the time I had closed the garage door I was shaking all over: to still it I had to clench my teeth, grip my handbag. It was then that I saw the boxes, saw him.

'What are you doing here?' I demanded, hearing the irritation in my voice, not checking it. 'You can't stay, you must go.'

He did not stir, lying in his shelter, looking up, inspecting; the winter stockings, the blue coat, the skirt with whose hang there has always been something wrong, the grey hair cut by a strip of scalp, old woman's scalp, pink, babyish.

Then he drew in his legs and leisurely got up. Without a word, he turned his back on me, shook out the black plastic, folded, it in half, in quarters, in eighths. He produced a bag (Air Canada, it said) and zipped it shut. I stood aside. Leaving behind the boxes, an empty bottle and a smell of urine, he passed me. His trousers sagged; he hitched them up. I waited to be sure he had gone, and heard him stow the plastic in the hedge from the other side.

Two things, then, in the space of an hour: the news, long dreaded, and this reconnaissance, this other annunciation. The first of the carrion-birds, prompt, unerring. How long can I fend them off? The scavengers of Cape Town, whose number never dwindles. Who go bare and feel no cold. Who sleep outdoors and do not sicken. Who starve and do not waste. Warmed from within by alcohol. The contagions and i infections in their blood consumed in liquid flame. Cleaners-up after the feast. Flies, dry-winged, glazen-eyed, pitiless. My heirs.

With what slow steps did I enter this empty house, from which every echo has faded, where the very tread of footsole on board is flat and dull! How I longed for you to be here, to hold me, comfort me! I begin to understand the true meaning of the embrace. We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That is how it was when I embraced you, always. We bear children in order to be mothered by them. Home truths, a mother's truth: from now to the end that is all you will hear from me. So: how I longed for you! How I longed to be able to go upstairs to you, to sit on your bed, run my fingers through your hair, whisper in your ear as I did on school mornings, 'Time to get up!' And then, when you turned over, your body blood-warm, your breath milky, to take you in my arms in what we called 'giving Mommy a big hug, the secret meaning of which, the meaning never spoken, was that Mommy should not be sad, for she would not die but live on in you.

To live! You are my life; I love you as I love life itself. In the mornings I come out of the house and wet my finger and hold it up to the wind. When, the chill is from the north-west, from your quarter, I stand a long time sniffing, concentrating my attention in the hope that across ten thousand miles of land and sea some breath will reach me of the milkiness you still carry with you behind your ears, in the fold of your neck.

The first task laid on me, from today: to resist the craving to share my death. Loving you, loving life, to forgive the living and take my leave without bitterness. To embrace death as my own, mine alone.

To whom this writing then? The answer: to you but not to you; to me; to you in me.

All afternoon I tried to keep myself busy, cleaning out drawers, sorting and discarding papers. At dusk I came out again. Behind the garage the shelter was set up as before with the black plastic neatly spanned over it. Inside lay the man, his legs curled up, and a dog beside him that cocked its ears and wagged its tail. A collie, young, little more than a pup, black, with white points.

'No fires,' I said. 'Do you understand? I want no fires, I want no mess.'

He sat up, rubbing his bare ankles, staring around as if not knowing where he was, A horsy, weatherbeaten face with the puffiness around the eyes of an alcoholic. Strange green eyes: unhealthy.

'Do you want something to eat?' I said.

He followed me to the kitchen, the dog at his heels, and waited while I cut him a sandwich. He took a bite but then seemed to forget to chew, standing against the door-jamb with his mouth full, the light shining into his vacant green eyes, while the dog whined softly. 'I have to clean up,' I said impatiently, and made to close the door on him. He went off without a murmur; but before he turned the corner I was sure I saw him toss the sandwich away, and the dog dive after it.

There were not so many of these homeless people in your time. But now they are part of life here. Do they frighten me? On the whole, no. A little begging, a little thieving; dirt, noise, drunkenness; no worse. It is the roaming gangs I fear, the sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison-house is already beginning to close. Children scorning childhood, the time of wonder, the growing-time of the soul. Their souls, their organs of wonder, stunted, petrified. And on the other side of the great divide their white cousins soul-stunted too, spinning themselves tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons. Swimming lessons, riding lessons, ballet lessons; cricket on the lawn; lives passed within walled gardens guarded by bulldogs; children of paradise, blond, innocent, shining with angelic light, soft as putti. Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee-grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted.

Why do I give this man food? For the same reason I would feed his dog (stolen, I am sure) if it came begging. For the same reason I gave you my breast. To be full enough to give and to give from one's fullness: what deeper urge is there? Out of their withered bodies even the old try to squeeze one last drop. A stubborn will to give, to nourish. Shrewd was death's aim when he chose my breast for his first shaft.

This morning, bringing him coffee, I found him urinating into the drain, which he did without any appearance of shame.

'Do you want a job of work?' I said. 'There are plenty of jobs I can give you.'

He said nothing, but drank the coffee, holding the mug in both hands.

'You are wasting your life,' I said. 'You are not a child any more. How can you live like this? How can you lie around and do nothing all day? I don't understand it. '

It is true: I do not understand it. Something in me revolts at the lassitude, the letting go, the welcoming of dissolution. He did something that shocked me. With a straight look, the first direct look he has given me, he spat a gob of spit, thick, yellow, streaked with brown from the coffee, on to the concrete beside my foot. Then he thrust the mug at me and sauntered off.

The thing itself, I thought, shaken: the thing itself brought out between us. Spat not upon me but before me where I could see it, inspect it, think about it. His word, his kind of word, from his own mouth, warm at the instant when it left him. A word, undeniable, from a language before language. First the look and then the spitting. What kind of look? A look without respect, from a man to a woman old enough to be his mother. Here: take your coffee.

He did not sleep in the alley last night. The boxes are gone too. But, poking around, I came upon the Air Canada bag in the woodshed, and a place that he must have scratched for himself amid the jumble of lumber and faggots. So I know he means to come back.

Six pages already, and all about a man you have never met and never will. Why do I write about him? Because he is and is not. Because in the look he gives me I see myself in a way that can be written. Otherwise what would this writing be but a kind of moaning, now high, now low? When I write about him I write about myself. When 1 write about his dog I write about myself; when I write about the house I write about myself. Man, house, dog: no matter what the word, through it I stretch out a hand to you. In another world I would not need words. I would appear on your doorstep. 'I have come for a visit,' I would say, and that would be the end of words: I would embrace you and be embraced. But in this world, in this time, I must reach out to you in words. So day by day I render myself into words and pack the words into the page like sweets: like sweets for my daughter, for her birthday, for the day of her birth. Words out of my body, drops of myself, for her to unpack in her own time, to take in, to suck, to absorb. As they say on the bottle: old-fashioned drops, drops fashioned by the old, fashioned and packed with love, the love we have no alternative but to feel toward those to whom we give ourselves to devour or discard.

Though it rained steadily all afternoon, it was not till dark that I heard the creak of the gate and, a minute later, the click of the dog's claws on the veranda.

I was watching television. One of the tribe of Ministers and Onderministers was making an announcement to the nation. 1 was standing, as I always do when they speak, as a way of keeping what I can of my self-respect (who would choose to face a firing-squad sitting down?). Ons buig nie voor dreigemente nie, he was saying:' we do not bow to threats: one of those speeches.

The curtains behind me were open. At a certain moment I became aware of him, the man whose name I do not know, watching over my shoulder through the glass. So I turned up the sound, enough for, if not the words, then the cadences, to reach him, the slow, truculent Afrikaans rhythms with their deadening closes, like a hammer beating a post into the ground. Together, blow after blow, we listened. The disgrace of the life one lives under them: to open a newspaper, to switch on the television, like kneeling and being urinated on. Under them: under their meaty bellies, their full bladders. 'Your days are numbered,' I used to whisper once upon a time, to them who will now outlast me.

I was on my way out to the shops, in the act of opening the garage door, when I had a sudden attack. An attack: it was just that: the pain hurling itself upon me like a dog, sinking its teeth into my back. I cried out, unable to stir. Then he, this man, appeared from somewhere and helped me into the house.

I lay down on the sofa, on my left side, In the only comfortable posture left to me. He waited. 'Sit down,' I said. He sat. The pain began to subside. 'I have cancer,' I said, it has made its way into the bone. That is what hurts.'

I was not at all sure he understood.

A long silence. Then: 'This is a big house,' he said. 'You could turn it into a boarding-house.'

I made a tired gesture.

'You could let rooms to students,' he went on relentlessly.

I yawned, and, feeling my teeth sag, covered my mouth. Once upon a time I would have blushed. But no longer.

'I have a woman who helps with the housework,' I said. 'She is away till the end of the month, visiting her people. Do you have people?'

A curious expression: to have people. Do I have people? Are you my people? I think not. Perhaps only Florence qualifies to have people.

He made no reply. There is an air of childlessness about him. Of having no children in the world but also of having no childhood in his past. His face all bone and weathered-skin. As one cannot imagine a snake's head that does not look old, so one cannot see behind his face the face of a child. Green eyes, animal eyes: can one picture an infant with eyes like that?

'My husband and I parted a long time ago, ' I said. 'He is dead now. I have a daughter in America. She left in 1976 and hasn't come back. She is married to an American. They have two children of their own.'

A daughter. Flesh of my flesh. You.

He took out a packet of cigarettes. 'Don't smoke in the house, please,' I said.

'What is your disability?' I said. 'You say you get a disability pension.'

He held out his right hand. Thumb and forefinger stood out; the other three fingers curled into the palm. 'I can't move them,' he said.

We gazed at his hand, at the three crooked fingers with their dirty nails. Not what I would call a work-calloused hand.

'Was it an accident?'

He nodded; the kind of nod that committed him to nothing.

'I'll pay you to cut the lawn,' I said.

For an hour, using the hedge clippers, he hacked listlessly at the grass, knee-high by now in places. In the end he had cleared a patch a few yards square. Then he quit. 'It's not my kind of work,' he said. I paid him for the hour. As he left he bumped against the cat-tray, spilling litter all over the veranda.

All in all, more trouble than he is worth. But I did not choose him. He chose me. Or perhaps he merely chose the one house without: a dog. A house of cats.

The cats are unsettled by these newcomers. When they show their noses outside the dog makes playful dashes at them, so they skulk indoors, peevish. Today they would not eat. Thinking they spurned the food because it had been in the refrigerator, I stirred a little hot water into the smelly mess (what is it? seal-flesh? whale-flesh?). Still, they disdained it, circling the dish, flicking the tips of their tails. 'Eat!' I said, pushing the dish at them. The big one lifted a finicky paw to avoid being touched, At which I lost control. 'Go to hell, then!' I screamed, and flung the fork wildly in their direction – 'I am sick to death of feeding you!' In my voice there was a new, mad edge; and, hearing it, I exulted. Enough of being nice to people, enough of being nice to cats! 'Go to hell!' I screamed again, at the top of my voice. Their claws scrabbled on the linoleum as they fled.

Who cares? When I am in a mood like this I am capable of putting a hand on the bread-board and chopping it off without a second thought. What do I care for this body that has betrayed me? I look at my hand and see only a tool, a hook, a thing for gripping other things. And these legs, these clumsy, ugly stilts: why should I have to carry them with me everywhere? Why should I take them to bed with me night after night and pack them in under the sheets, and pack the arms in too, higher up near the face, and lie there sleepless amid the clutter? The abdomen too, with its dead gurglings, and the heart beating, beating: why? What have they to do with me?

We sicken before we die so that we will be weaned from our body. The milk that nourished us grows thin and sour; turning away from the breast, we begin to be restless for a separate life. Yet this first life, this life on earth, on the body of earth – will there, can there ever be a better? Despite all the glooms and despairs and rages, I have not let go of my love of it.

In pain, I took two of Dr Syfret's pills and lay down on the sofa. Hours later I woke befuddled and cold, fumbled my way upstairs, got into bed without undressing.

In the middle of the night I became aware of a presence in the room that could only have been his. A presence or a smell. It was there, then it went away.

From the landing came a creak. Now he is entering the study, I thought; now he is switching on the light. I tried to recall whether, among the papers on the desk, any were private, but there was too much confusion in my head. Now he sees the books, shelf upon shelf, I thought, trying to bring back order, and the piles of old journals. Now he looks at the pictures on the wall: Sophie Schliemann decked out in Agamemnon's treasure hoard; the robed Demeter from the British Museum. Now, quietly, he slides out the drawers of the desk. The top drawer, full of letters, accounts, torn-off stamps, photographs, does not interest him. But in the bottom drawer there is a cigar-box full of coins: pennies, drachmas, centimes, schillings. The hand with the curled fingers dips into it, takes out two five-peseta pieces big enough to pass for rands, pockets them. Not an angel, certainly. An insect, rather, emerging from behind the skirting-boards when the house is in darkness to forage for crumbs.

I heard him at the far end of the landing, trying the two locked doors. Only rubbish, I wanted to whisper to him – rubbish and dead memories; but the fog in my head closed in again.

Spent the day in bed. No energy, no appetite. Read Tolstoy – not the famous cancer story, which I know all too well, but the story of the angel who takes up residence with the shoemaker. What chance is there, if I take a walk down to Mill Street, of finding my own angel to bring home and succour? None, I think. Perhaps in the countryside there are still one or two sitting against milestones in the heat of the sun, dozing, waiting for what chance will bring. Perhaps in the squatter camps. But not in Mill Street, not in the suburbs. The suburbs, deserted by the angels. When a ragged stranger comes knocking at the door he is never anything but a derelict, an alcoholic, a lost soul. Yet how, in our hearts, we long for these sedate homes of ours to tremble, as in the story, with angelic chanting!

This house is tired of waiting for the day, tired of holding itself together. The floorboards have lost their spring. The insulation of the wiring is dry, friable, the pipes clogged with grit. The gutters sag where screws have rusted away or pulled loose from the rotten wood. The rooftiles are heavy with moss. A house built solidly but without love, cold, inert now, ready to die. Whose walls the sun, even the African sun, has never succeeded in warming, as though the very bricks, made by the hands of convicts, radiate an intractable sullenness.

Last summer, when the workmen were re-laying the drains, I watched, them dig out the old pipes. Two metres down into the earth they went, bringing up mouldering brick, rusty iron, even a solitary horseshoe. But no bones. A site without a human past; to spirits, as to angels, of no interest.

This letter is not a baring of my heart. It is a baring of something, but not of my heart.

Since the car would not start this morning, I had to ask him, this man, this lodger to push. He pushed me down the driveway. 'Now!' he shouted, slapping the roof. The engine caught. I swung into the road, drove a few yards, then, on an impulse, stopped. 'I have to go to Fish Hoek,' I called from a cloud of smoke: 'Do you want to come along?'

So we set off, the dog on the back seat, In the green Hillman of your childhood. For a long while no word passed between us. Past the hospital, past the University, past Bishopscourt we drove, the dog leaning over my shoulder to feel the wind on its face. Up Wynberg Hill we toiled. On the long downhill swoop on the other side I switched off the engine and coasted. Faster and faster we went, till the wheel shuddered in my hands and the dog whined with excitement. I was smiling, I believe; my eyes may even, have been shut.

At the foot of the hill, as we began to slow down, I cast him a glance. He sat relaxed, imperturbable. Good man! I thought.

'When I was a child,' I said, 'I used to do downhills on a bicycle with no brakes to speak of. It belonged to my elder brother. He would dare me. I was completely without fear. Children cannot conceive of what if is to die. It never crosses their minds that they may not be immortal.'

'I would ride my brother's bicycle down hills even steeper than this one. The faster I went, the more alive I would feel. I would quiver with life as if I were about to burst through my skin. As a butterfly must feel when it is being born, or bearing itself.

'In an old car like this you still have the freedom to coast. With a modern car, when you switch off the engine the steering wheel locks. I am sure you know that. But people sometimes make a mistake or forget, and then can't keep the car on the road. Sometimes they go over the side and into the sea.'

Into the sea. Tussling with a locked wheel while you soar in a bubble of glass over the sun-glinting sea. Does it really happen? Do many do it? If I stood on Chapman's Peak on a Saturday afternoon, would I see them, men and women, thick in the air as midges taking off on their last flight?

'There Is a story I want to tell you,' I said. 'When my mother was still a child, in the early years of the century, the family used to go to the seaside for Christmas. This was still in the age of ox-wagons. They would travel by ox-wagon all the way from Uniondale in the Eastern Cape to Plettenberg Bay at the mouth of the Piesangs River, a journey of a hundred miles taking I don't know how many days. Along the way they would camp at the roadside.

'One of their stopping-places was at the top of a mountain pass. My grandparents would spend the nights In the wagon itself while my mother and the other children had their bed underneath it. So – here the story begins – nay mother lay at the top of the pass in the stillness of the night, snug in her blankets with her brothers and sisters sleeping beside her, watching the stars through the spokes of the wheels. As she watched it began to seem that the stars were moving: the stars were moving or else the wheels were moving, slowly, very slowly. She thought: What shall I do? What if the wagon is beginning to roll? Shall I call out a warning? What if I lie silent and the wagon gathers speed and rolls all the way down the mountainside with my parents inside? But what if I am imagining it all?

'Choking with fear, her heart pounding, she lay there watching the stars, watching them move, thinking, 'Shall I? Shall I?,' listening for the creak, the first creak. At last she fell asleep, and her sleep was full of dreams of death. But in the morning, when she re-emerged, it was into light and peace. And the wagon re-emerged with her, and her parents re-emerged, and all was well, as it had been before.'

It was time for him to say something now, about hills or cars or bicycles or about himself or his childhood. But he was stubbornly silent.

'She told no one what went on in the night,' I resumed. 'Perhaps she was waiting for me to come. I heard the story many times from her, in many forms. Always they were on their way to the Piesangs River. Such a lovely golden name! I was sure it must be the most beautiful place on earth. Years after my mother's death I visited Plettenberg Bay and saw the Piesangs River for the first time. Not a river at all, just a trickle of water choked with reeds, and mosquitoes in the evenings, and a caravan park full of screaming children and fat barefoot men in shorts braaiing sausages over gas cookers. Not Paradise at all. Not a place one would mount a journey to year after year through valleys and over mountains.'

Up Boyes Drive the car was labouring now, willing but old, like Rocinante. I gripped the wheel tighter, urging her on.

Above Muizenberg, overlooking the sweep of False Bay, I parked and switched off the engine. The dog began to whine. We let it out. It sniffed the curbstones, sniffed the bushes, relieved itself, while we watched in awkward silence.

He spoke. 'You are pointing the wrong way,' he said. 'You should be pointing downhill.'

I hid my chagrin, I have always wished to be thought a capable person. Now more than ever, with incapability looming,

'Are you from the Cape?' I said.

'Yes.'

'And have you lived here all your life?'

He shifted restlessly. Two questions: one too many.

A breaker, perfectly straight, hundreds of yards long, foiled inshore, a single crouched figure on a surfboard gliding ahead of it. Across the bay the mountains of Hottentots Holland stood out clear and blue. Hunger, I thought: it is a hunger of the eyes that I feel, such hunger that I am loth even to blink. These seas, these mountains: I want to burn them upon my sight so deeply that, no matter where I go, they will always be before me. I am hungry with love of this world.

A flock of sparrows settled on the bushes around us, preened themselves, took off again. The surfer reached shore and began to trudge up the beach. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes. From not blinking, I told myself. But the truth was, I was crying. Hunched over the wheel, I abandoned myself, first to a quiet, decent sobbing, then to long wails without articulation, emptyings of the lungs, emptyings of the heart. 'I am so sorry,' I gasped; and then, when I was calmer: 'I am sorry, I don't know what has come over me.'

I should not have bothered to apologize. He gave no sign of having noticed anything.

I dried my eyes, blew my nose. 'Shall we go?' I said.

He opened the door, gave a long whistle. The dog bounded in. An obedient dog, no doubt stolen from a good family.

The car was indeed pointing the wrong way.

'Start in reverse,' he said.

I released the handbrake, rolled back down the hill a little way, let out the clutch. The car shuddered and stopped. 'It has never started in reverse,' I said.

'Swing over to the other side of the road,' he directed, like a husband giving a driving lesson.

I let the car roll further downhill, then swung across the road. With blaring horn a great white Mercedes shot past on the inside. 'I didn't see it!' I gasped.

'Go!' he shouted.

I stared in astonishment at this stranger shouting at me. 'Go!' he shouted again, straight into my face.

The engine caught. I drove back in stiff silence. At the corner of Mill Street he asked to be let off.

The worst of the smell comes from, his shoes and feet. He needs socks. He needs new shoes. He needs a bath. He needs a bath every day; he needs clean underwear; he needs a bed, he needs a roof over his head, he needs three meals a day, he needs money in the bank. Too much to give: too much for someone who longs, if the truth be told, to creep into her own mother's lap and be comforted.

Late in the afternoon he returned. Making an effort to forget what had passed, I took him around the garden, pointing out tasks that need to be done. 'Pruning, for instance, ' I said. 'Do you know how to prune?'

He shook his head. No, he didn't know how to prune. Or didn't want to.

In the bottom corner, the most heavily overgrown, thick creepers covered the old oak bench and the rabbit-hutch. 'This should all be cleared,' I said.

He lifted one edge of the mat of creepers. On the floor of the hutch was a jumble of parched bones, including the perfect skeleton of a young rabbit, its neck arched back in a last contortion.

'Rabbits,' I said. 'They used to belong to my domestic's son. I let him keep them here as pets. Then there was some commotion or other in his life. He forgot about them and they starved to death. I was in hospital and didn't know about it. I was terribly upset when I came back and found out what agony had been going on unheeded at the bottom of the garden. Creatures that can't talk, that can't even cry.'

Guavas were dropping, worm-riddled, making a malodorous pulpy carpet under the tree. 'I wish the trees would stop bearing,' I said. 'But they never do. '

The dog, following behind, sniffed perfunctorily at the hutch. The dead long dead, their smells all gone.

'Anyhow, do what you can to bring it back under control, I said. 'So that it doesn't become a complete wilderness.'

'Why?' he said.

'Because that is how I am,' I said. 'Because I don't mean to leave a mess behind.'

He shrugged, smiling to himself.

'If you want to be paid you will have to earn it,' I said. 'I am not giving you money for nothing.'

For the rest of the afternoon he worked, hacking away at the creepers and grass, pausing now and again, to stare into the distance, pretending not to be aware that I was keeping an eye on him from upstairs. At five o'clock I paid him. 'I know you are not a gardener,' I said, 'and I don't want to turn you into what you are not. But we can't proceed on a basis of charity.'

Taking the notes, folding them, putting them in his pocket, looking off to one side so as not to look at me, he said softly, 'Why?'

'Because you don't deserve it. '

And he, smiling, keeping his smile to himself: 'Deserve… Who deserves anything?'

Who deserves anything? In a quick fury I thrust the purse at him. 'What do you believe in, then? Taking? Taking what you want? Go on: take!'

Calmly he took the purse, emptied it of thirty rand and some coins, and handed it back. Then off he went, the dog jauntily at his heels. In half an hour he was back; I heard the clink of bottles.

Somewhere he has found himself a mattress, one of those folding mattresses people take to the beach. In his little nest amid the dust and mess of the woodshed, with a candle at his head and the dog at his feet, he lay smoking.

'I want that money back,' I said.

He reached into his pocket and held out some notes. I took them. Not all the money, but that did not matter.

'If you are in need, you can ask,' I said. 'I am not a stingy person. And be careful with that candle. I don't want a fire.'

I turned, and went. But in a minute was back.

'You told me,' I said, 'that I should turn this house into a boarding-house for students. Well, there are better things I could do with it. I could turn it into a haven for beggars. I could run a soup-kitchen and a dormitory. But I don't. Why not? Because the spirit of charity has perished in this country. Because those who accept charity despise it, while those who give give with a despairing heart. What is the point of charity when it does not go from heart to heart? What do you think charity is? Soup? Money? Charity: from the Latin word for the heart. It is as hard to receive as to give. It takes as much effort. I wish you would learn that. I wish you would learn something instead of just lying around.'

A lie: charity, caritas, has nothing to do with the heart. But what does it matter if my sermons rest on false etymologies?

He barely listens when I speak to him. Perhaps, despite those keen bird-eyes, he is more befuddled with drink than I know.

Or perhaps, finally, he does not care. Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care.

Since life in this country is so much like life aboard a sinking ship, one of those old-time liners with a lugubrious, drunken captain and a surly crew and leaky lifeboats, I keep the shortwave radio at my bedside. Most of the time there is only talk to be heard; but if one persists into the unlikely hours of the night there are stations that relent and play music. Fading in, fading out, I heard last night – from where? Helsinki? the Cook Islands? – anthems of all the nations, celestial music, music that left us years ago and now comes back from the stars transfigured, gentle, as evidence that all that is given forth will at length return. A closed universe, curved like an egg, enclosing us.

There I lay in the dark, listening to the music of the stars and the crackling and humming that accompanied it like the dust of meteors, smiling, my heart filed with gratitude for this good news from afar. The one border they cannot close, I thought: the border upwards, between the Republic of South Africa and the empire of the sky. Where I am due to travel. Where no passport is called for.

Still under the spell of the music (it was, I think, Stoeksome of the old pieces: preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin preludes, Brahms waltzes, from Novello and Augener editions tattered, mottled, dry as dust. I played as badly as ever, misreading the same chords as half a century ago, repeating fingering mistakes grown by now into the bone, never to be corrected. (The bones prized above all by archaeologists, I remember, are those gnarled with disease or splintered by an arrowhead: bones marked with a history from a time before history.)

After I had tired of the sweetness of Brahms I closed my eyes and played chords, searching with my fingers for the one chord I would recognize, when I came upon it, as my chord, as what in the old days we used to call the lost chord, the heart's-chord. (I speak of a time before your time, when, passing down the street on a hot Saturday afternoon, you might hear, faint but dogged from a front parlour, the maiden of the household groping among the keys for that yearned-for, elusive resonance. Days of charm and sorrow and mystery too! Days of innocence!)

' Jerusalem!' I sang softly, playing chords I last heard at my grandmother's knee: 'And was Jerusalem y-builded here?'

Then at last I went back to Bach, and played clumsily, over and over again, the first fugue from Book One. The sound was muddy, the lines blurred, but every now and again, for a few bars, the real thing emerged, the real music, the music that does not die, confident, serene.

I was playing for myself. But at some point a board creaked or a shadow passed across the curtain and I knew he was outside listening.

So I played Bach for him, as well as I could. When the last bar was played I closed the music and sat with my hands in my lap contemplating the oval portrait on the cover with its heavy jowls, its sleek smile, its puffy eyes. Pure spirit, I thought, yet in how unlikely a temple! Where does that spirit find, itself now? In the echoes of my fumbling performance receding through the ether? In my heart, where the music still dances? Has it made its way into the heart too of the man in the sagging trousers eavesdropping at the window? Have our two hearts, our organs of love, been tied for this brief while by a cord of sound?

The telephone rang: a woman from the flats across the road warning me of a vagrant she had spied on my property. 'He is not a vagrant,' I said. 'He is a man who works for me.'

I am going to stop answering the telephone. There is no one I am ready to speak to except you and the fat man in the picture, the fat man in heaven; and neither of you will, I think, call.

Heaven. I imagine heaven, as a hotel lobby with a high ceiling and the Art of Fugue coming softly over the public address system. Where one can sit in a deep leather armchair and be without pain. A hotel lobby full of old people dozing, listening to the music, while souls pass and re-pass before them like vapours, the souls of all. A place dense with souls. Clothed? Yes, clothed, I suppose; but with empty hands. A place to which you bring nothing but an abstract kind of clothing and the memories inside you, the memories that make you. A place without incident. A railway station after the abolition of trains. Listening to the heavenly unending music, waiting for nothing, paging idly through the store of memories.

Will it be possible to sit in that armchair listening to the music without fretting about the house closed up and dark, the cats prowling in the garden, unfed, cross? It must be possible, or what is heaven for? Yet dying without succession is – forgive me for saying this – so unnatural. For peace of mind, for peace of soul, we need to know who comes after us, whose presence fills the rooms we were once at home in.

I think of those abandoned farmhouses I drove past in the Karoo and on the west coast, whose owners decamped to the cities years ago leaving fronts boarded up, gates locked. Now washing flaps on the line, smoke comes from the chimney, children play outside the back door, waving to passing cars.

A land in the process of being repossessed, its heirs quietly announcing themselves. A land taken by force, used, despoiled, spoiled, abandoned in its barren late years. Loved too, perhaps, by its ravishers, but loved only in the bloomtime of its youth and therefore, in the verdict of history, not loved enough.

They open your fingers after the event to make sure you are not trying to take something with you. A pebble. A feather. A mustard seed under your fingernail.

It is like a sum, a labyrinthine sum, pages long, subtraction upon subtraction, division upon division, till the head reels. Every day I attempt it anew, in my heart the flicker of a hope that in this one case, my case, there may have been a mistake. And every day I stop before the same blank wall: death, oblivion. Dr Syfret in his rooms: 'We must face the truth.' That is to say: we must face the wall. But not he: I.

I think of prisoners standing on the brink of the trench into which their bodies will tumble. They plead with the firing-squad, they weep, they joke, they offer bribes, they offer everything they possess: the rings off their fingers, the clothes off their backs. The soldiers laugh. For they will take it all anyway, and the gold from their teeth too.

There is no truth but the shock of pain that goes through me when, in an unguarded moment, a vision overtakes me of this house, empty, with sunlight pouring through the windows on to an empty bed, or of False Bay under Hue skies, pristine, deserted – when the world I have passed my life in manifests itself to me and I am not of it. My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.

I try to sleep. I empty my mind; calm, begins to steal over me. I am falling, I think, I am faffing: welcome, sweet sleep. Then at the very edge of oblivion something looms up and pulls me back, something whose name can only be dread. I shake myself free. I am awake in my room in my bed, all is well. A fly settles on my cheek. It cleans itself. It begins to explore. It walks across my eye, my open eye. I want to blink, I want to wave it away, but I cannot. Through an eye that is and is not mine I stare at it. It licks itself, if that is the word. There is nothing in those bulging organs that I can recognize as a face. But it is upon me, it is here: it struts across me, a creature from another world.

Or: It is two in the afternoon. I am lying on the sofa or in bed, trying to keep the weight off my hip, where the pain is worst. I have a vision of Esther Williams, of plump girls in flowered bathing costumes swimming in effortless backstroke formation through sky-blue, rippling waters, smiling and singing. Invisible guitars strum; the mouths of the girls, bows of vivid scarlet lipstick, form words. What are they singing? Sunset… Farewell… Tahiti. Longing sweeps through me for the old Savoy bioscope, for tickets at one and fourpence in a currency gone forever, melted down save for a few last farthings in my desk drawer, on one side George VI, the good king, the stammerer, on the other a pair of nightingales. Nightingales. I have never heard nightingale-song and never will. I embrace the longing, embrace the regret, embrace the king, the swimming girls, embrace whatever will occupy me.

Or I get up and switch on the television. On one channel football. On the other a black man clasping his hands over the Bible, preaching to me in a language I cannot even put a name to. This is the door I open to let the world flood in, and this is the world that comes to me. It is like peering down a pipe.

Three years ago I had a burglary (you may remember, I carry, but before they left they tipped out every drawer, slashed every mattress, smashed crockery, broke bottles, swept all the food in the pantry on to the floor.

'Why do they behave like this?' I asked the detective in bewilderment – 'What good does it do them?'

'It's the way they are,' he replied. 'Animals.'

After that I had bars installed on all the windows. They were fitted by a plump Indian man. After he had screwed the bars into the frames he filled in the head of each screw with glue. 'So that they can't be unscrewed,' he explained. When he left he said, 'Now you are safe, 'and patted my hand.

'Now you are safe.' The words of a zookeeper as he locks the door for the night on some wingless, ineffectual bird. A dodo: the last of the dodos, old, past egg-laying. 'Now you are safe.' Locked up while hungry predators prowl outside. A dodo quaking in her nest, sleeping with one eye open, greeting the dawn haggard. But safe, safe in her cage, the bars intact, the wires intact: the telephone wire, down which she may cry for help in a last extremity, the television wire, down which conies the light of the world, the aerial wire, which calls in music from the stars.

Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening: I have only to see the heavy, blank faces so familiar since childhood to feel gloom and nausea. The bullies in the last row of school-desks, raw-boned, lumpish boys, grown up now and promoted to rule the land. They with their fathers and mothers, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters: a locust horde, a plague of black locusts infesting the country, munching without cease, devouring lives. Why, in a spirit of horror and loathing, do I watch them? Why do I let them into the house? Because the reign of the locust family is the truth of South Africa, and the truth is what makes me sick? Legitimacy they no longer trouble to claim. Reason they have shrugged off. What absorbs them is power and the stupor of power. Eating and talking, munching lives, belching. Slow, heavy-bellied talk. Sitting in a circle, debating ponderously, issuing decrees like hammer-blows: death, death, death. Untroubled by the stench. Heavy eyelids, piggish eyes, shrewd with the shrewdness of generations of peasants. Plotting against each other too: slow peasant plots that take decades to mature. The new Africans, pot-bellied, heavy-jowled men on their stools of office: Cetshwayo, Dingane in white skins. Pressing downward: their power in their weight. Huge bull-testicles pressing down on their wives, their children, pressing the spark out of them. In their own hearts no spark of fire left. Sluggish hearts, heavy as blood-pudding.

And their message stupidly unchanging, stupidly forever the same. Their feat, after years of etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; to stun with amazement. Stupor: insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind. Stupid: dulled in the faculties, indifferent, destitute of thought or feeling. From stupere to be stunned, astounded. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone. The message: that the message never changes. A message that: turns people to stone.

We watch as birds watch snakes, fascinated by what is about to devour us. Fascination: the homage we pay to our death. Between the hours of eight and nine we assemble and they show themselves to us. A ritual manifestation, like the processions of hooded bishops during Franco's war. A thanatophany: showing us our death. Viva la muerte! their cry, their threat. Death to the young. Death to life. Boars that devour their offspring. The Boar War.

I say to myself that I am watching not the lie but the space behind the lie where the truth ought to be. But is it true?

I dozed (it is still yesterday I am writing about), read, dozed again. I made tea, put on a record. Bar by bar the Goldberg Variations erected themselves in the air. I crossed to the window. It was nearly dark. Against the garage wall the man was squatting, smoking, the point of his cigarette glowing. Perhaps he saw me, perhaps not. Together we listened.

At this moment, I thought, I know how he feels as surely as if he and I were making love.

Though it came unbidden, though it filled me with distaste, I considered the thought without flinching. He and I pressed breast to breast, eyes closed, going down the old road together. Unlikely companions! Like travelling in a bus in Sicily, pressed face to face, body to body against a strange man. Perhaps that is what the afterlife will be like: not a lobby with armchairs and music but a great crowded bus on its way from nowhere to nowhere. Standing room only: on one's feet forever, crushed against strangers. The air thick, stale, full of sighs and murmurs: Sorry, sorry. Promiscuous contact. Forever under the gaze of others. An end to private life.

Across the courtyard he squatted, smoking, listening. Two souls, his and mine, twined together, ravished. Like insects mating tail to tail, facing away from each other, still except for a pulsing of the thorax that might be mistaken for mere breathing. Stillness and ecstasy.

He flicked his cigarette away. A burst of sparks as it hit the ground, then darkness.

This house, I thought. This world. This house, this music. This.

'This is my daughter,' I said. 'The one I told you about, who lives in America.' And through his eyes regarded you in the photograph: a pleasant-faced, smiling woman in her thirties, against a field of green, raising a hand to her hair, which is blowing in the wind. Confident. That is what you have now: the look of a woman who has found herself.

'These are their children.'

Two little boys in caps and coats and boots and gloves standing to attention beside a snowman, waiting for the shutter to click.

A pause. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I had set tea before him, and Marie biscuits. Marie biscuits: food for old people, for the toothless.

'There is something 1 would like you, to do for me if I die. There are some papers I want to send to my daughter. But after the event. That is the important part. That Is why I cannot send them myself. I will do everything else. I will make them up into a parcel with the right stamps on it. All you will have to do will be to hand the parcel, over the counter at the post office. Will you do that for me?'

He shifted uncomfortably.

'It is not a favour I would ask if I could help it. But there is no other way. 1 will not be here.'

'Can't you ask someone else?' he said.

'Yes, I can. But I am asking you. These are private papers, private letters. They are my daughter's inheritance. They are all I can give her, all she will accept, coming from this country. I don't want them opened and read by anyone else.'

Private papers. These papers, these words that either you read now or else will never read. Will they reach you? Have they reached you? Two ways of asking the same question, a question to which I will never know the answer, never. To me this letter will forever be words committed to the waves: a message in a bottle with the stamps of the Republic of South Africa on it, and your name.

'I don't know,' said the man, the messenger, playing with his spoon.

He will make no promise. And even if he promises, he will do, finally, what he likes. Last instructions, never enforceable. For the dead are not persons. That is the law: all contracts lapse. The dead cannot be cheated, cannot be betrayed, unless you carry them with you in your heart and do the crime there.

'Never mind,' I said. 'I had thought of asking you to come in and feed the cats as well. But I will make another arrangement.'

What other arrangement? In Egypt they bricked in cats with their dead masters. Is that what I want: yellow eyes padding back and forth, searching for a way out of the dark cave?

'I will have to have them put down,' I said. 'They are too old to take to a new home.'

Like water against a rock my words thudded against his silence.

'I have to do something about them,' I said. 'I can't do nothing. You would feel the same, in my position.'

He shook his head. Not true. Indeed, not true. One winter's night, sooner or later, when the artificial fire in his veins is no longer hot enough to preserve him, he will perish. He will die in a doorway or an alley with his arms hugged across his chest; they will find him with this dog ox some other dog by his side, whimpering, licking his face. They will cart him off and the dog will be left behind in the street and that will be the end of that. No arrangements, no bequests, no mausoleum.

'I'll post your parcel for you,' he said.