Age of Iron

III

In the small hours of last night there was a telephone call. A woman, breathless, with the breathlessness of fat people. 'I want to speak to Florence. '

'She is sleeping. Everyone is sleeping.'

'Yes, you can call her.'

It was raining, though not hard. I knocked at Florence 's door. At once it opened, as if she had been standing there wailing for the summons. From behind her came the sleepy groan of a child. 'Telephone,' I said.

Five minutes later she came up to my room. Without her glasses, bareheaded, in a long white nightdress, she seemed much younger.

'There is trouble,' she said.

'Is it Bheki?'

'Yes, I must go.'

'Where is he?'

'First I must go to Guguletu, then after that, I think, to Site C.'

'I have no idea where Site C is.'

She gave me a puzzled look.

'I mean, if you can show me the way I will take you by car,' I said.

'Yes,' she said, but still hesitated. 'But I cannot leave the children alone.'

'Then they must come along.'

'Yes,' she said. I could not remember ever seeing her so indecisive.

'And Mr Vercueil,' I said: 'he must come to help with the car.'

She shook her head.

'Yes,' I insisted: 'he must come.'

The dog lay at Vercueil's side. It tapped its tail on the floor when I came in but did not get up.

'Mr Vercueil!' I said loudly. He opened his eyes; I held the light away. He broke wind, 'I have to take Florence to Guguletu. It is urgent, we have to leave at once. Will you come along?'

He made no reply, but curled up on his side. The dog rearranged itself.

'Mr Vercueil!' I said, pointing the light at him.

'Fuck off,' he mumbled.

'I can't wake him,' I reported to Florence. 'I have to have someone along to push the car.'

'I will push,' she said.

With the two children on the back seat warmly covered, Florence pushed. We set off. Peering through glass misted over with our breathing, I crawled over De Waal Drive, got lost for a while in the streets of Claremont, then found Lansdowne Road. The first buses of the day were abroad, brightly lit and empty. It was not yet five o'clock.

We passed the last houses, the last streetlights. Into a steady rain from the north-west we drove, following the faint yellow glow of our headlights.

'If people wave to you to stop, or if you see things in the road, you must not stop, you must drive on,' said Florence.

'I will certainly not,' I said. 'You should have warned me earlier. Let me make myself clear, Florence: at the first sign of trouble I am turning back.'

'I do not say it will happen, I am just telling you.'

Full of misgiving I drove on into the darkness. But no one barred the way, no one waved, there was nothing across the road. Trouble, it seemed, was still in bed; trouble was recuperating for the next engagement.: The roadside, along which, at this hour, thousands of men would ordinarily have been plodding to work, was empty. Swirls of mist floated toward us, embraced the car, floated away. Wraiths, spirits. Aornos this place: birdless. I shivered, met Florence 's gaze. 'How much further?' I asked.

'Not far.'

'What did they say on the telephone?'

'They were shooting again yesterday. They were giving guns to the witdoeke and the witdoeke were shooting.'

'Are they shooting in Guguletu?'

'No, they are shooting out in the bush.'

'At the first hint of trouble, Florence, I am turning back. We are fetching Bheki, that is all we are going to do, then: we are going home. You should never have let him leave.'

'Yes, but you must: turn here, you must turn left.'

I turned. A hundred metres further there was a barrier across the road with flashing lights, cars parked along the verges, police with guns. I stopped; a policeman came up.

'What is your business here?' he asked.

'I am taking my domestic home,' I said, surprised at how calmly I lied.

He peered at the children sleeping on the back seat. 'Where does she live?'

'Fifty-seven,' said Florence.

'You can drop her here, she can walk, it is not far.'

'It is raining, she has small children, I am not letting her walk alone,' I said firmly.

He hesitated, then, with his flashlight waved me through.

On the roof of one of the cars stood a young man in battle-dress, his gun at the ready, staring out into the darkness.

Now there was a smell of burning in the air, of wet ash, burning rubber. Slowly we drove down a broad unpaved street lined with matchbox-houses. A police van armoured in wire mesh cruised past us. 'Turn right here,' said Florence. 'Turn right again. Stop here. '

With the baby on her arm and the little girl, only half awake, stumbling behind, she splashed up the path to No. 219, knocked, was admitted. Hope and Beauty. It was like living in an allegory. Keeping the engine running, I waited.

The police van that had passed us drew up alongside. A light shone in my face. I held up a hand to shield my eyes. The van pulled away.

Florence re-emerged holding a plastic raincoat over herself and the baby, and got into the back seat. Dashing through, the rain behind her came not Bheki but a man in his thirties or forties, slight, dapper, with a moustache. He got in beside me. 'This Is Mr Thabane my cousin,' said Florence. 'He will show us the way. '

'Where is Hope?' I asked.

'I have left her with my sister.'

'And where is Bheki?'

There was silence.

'I am not sure,' said the man. His voice was surprisingly soft. 'He came in yesterday morning and put his things down and went out. After that we did not see him at all. He did not come home to sleep. But I know where his friends live. We can start looking there.'

'Is this what you want, Florence?' I asked.

'We must look for him,' said Florence: 'there is nothing else we can do.'

'If you would prefer me to drive I can drive,' said the man. 'It is anyhow better, you know. '

I got out and sat beside Florence In the back. The rain was coming down more heavily now; the car splashed through pools on the uneven' road. Left and right we turned under the sick orange of the streetlights, then stopped. 'Careful, don't switch off,' I said to Mr Thabane the cousin. He got out and knocked at a window. A long conversation followed, with someone I could not see. By the time he came back he was soaked and cold. With clumsy fingers he took out a pack of cigarettes and tried to light one. 'Please, not in the car,' I said. A look of exasperation passed between him and Florence.

We sat in silence. 'What are we waiting for?' I asked. 'They are sending someone to show us the way.' A little boy wearing a balaclava cap too large for him came trotting out of the house. With entire self-assurance, greeting us all with a smile, he got into the car and began to give directions. Ten years old at: most. A child of the times, at home in this landscape of violence. When I think back to my own childhood. I remember only long sun-struck afternoons, the smell, of dust under avenues of eucalyptus, the quiet rustle of water in roadside furrows, the lulling of doves. A childhood of sleep, prelude, to what: was meant to be a life without trouble and a smooth passage to Nirvana. Will we at least be allowed our Nirvana, we children, of that bygone age? I doubt it. If justice reigns at all, we will find ourselves barred at the first threshold of the underworld. White as grubs in our swaddling bands, we will be dispatched to join those infant souls whose eternal whining Aeneas mistook for weeping. White our colour, the colour of limbo: white sands, white rocks, a white light pouring down from all sides. Like an eternity of lying on the beach, an endless Sunday among thousands of our own kind, sluggish, half asleep, In earshot of the comfortable lap of the waves. In limine primo: on the threshold of death, the threshold of life. Creatures thrown up by the sea, stalled on the sands, undecided, indecisive, neither hot nor cold, neither fish nor fowl.

We had passed the last of the houses and were driving in grey early-morning light through a landscape of scorched 'earth, blackened trees. A pickup truck passed us with three men in the back sheltering under a tarpaulin. At the next road-block we caught up with them again. They gazed expressionlessly at us, eye to eye, as we waited to be inspected. A policeman waved them through, waved us through too.

We turned north, away from the mountain, then off the highway on to a dirt road that soon became sand. Mr Thabane stopped. 'We can't drive further, it is too dangerous,' he said. 'There is something wrong with your alternator,' he added, pointing to the red light glowing on the dashboard.

'I am letting things run down,' I said. I did not feel like explaining.

He switched off the engine. For a while we sat listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Then Florence got out, and the boy. Tied on her back, the baby slept peacefully.

'It is best if you keep the doors locked,' said Mr Thabane to me.

'How long will you be?'

'I cannot say, but we will hurry.'

I shook my head. 'I am not staying here,' I said.

I had no hat, no umbrella. The rain beat against my face, pasted my hair to my scalp, ran down my neck. From this sort of outing, I thought, one catches one's death of cold. The boy, our guide, had already dashed ahead.

'Put this over your head,' said Mr Thabane, offering the plastic raincoat.

'Nonsense,' I said, 'I don't mind a little rain.'

'Still, hold it over you,' he insisted. I understood. 'Come,' he said. I followed.

Around us was a wilderness of grey dune-sand and Port Jackson willow, and a stench of garbage and ash. Shreds of plastic, old iron, glass, animal bones littered both sides of the path. I was already shivering with cold, but when I tried to walk faster my heart pounded unpleasantly. I was falling behind. Would Florence pause? No: amor matris, a force that stopped for nothing.

At a fork in the path Mr Thabane was waiting. 'Thank you,' I gasped, 'you are kind. I am sorry to be holding you up. I have a bad hip.'

'Take my arm,' he said.

Men passed us, dark, bearded, stern, armed with sticks, walking swiftly in single file. Mr Thabane stepped off the path. I held tighter to him.

The path widened, then came to an end in a wide, flat pond. On the far side of the pond the shanties started, the lowest-lying cluster surrounded by water, flooded. Some built sturdily of wood and iron, others no more than skins of plastic sheeting over frames of branches, they straggled north over the dunes as far as I could see.

At the brink of the pond I hesitated. 'Come,' said Mr Thabane. Holding on to him I stepped in, and we waded across, in water up to our ankles. One of my shoes was sucked off. 'Watch out for broken glass,' he warned. I retrieved the shoe.

Save for an old woman with a sagging mouth standing in a doorway, there was no one in sight. But as we walked further the noise we had heard, which at first might have been taken for wind and rain, began to break up into shouts, cries, calls, over a ground-bass which I can only call a sigh: a deep sigh, repeated over and over, as if the wide world itself were sighing.

Then the little boy, our guide, was with us again, tugging Mr Thabane's sleeve, talking excitedly. The two of them broke away; I struggled behind them up the duneside.

We were at the rear of a crowd hundreds strong looking down upon a scene of devastation: shanties burnt and smouldering, shanties still, burning, pouring forth black smoke. Jumbles of furniture, bedding, household objects stood, in the pouring rain. Gangs of men were at work trying to rescue the contents of the burning shacks, going from one to another, putting out the fires; or so I thought till with a shock it came to me that these were no rescuers but incendiaries, that the battle I saw them waging was not with the flames but with the rain.

It was from the people gathered on the rim of this amphitheatre in the dunes that the sighing came. Like mourners at a funeral they stood in the downpour, men, women and children, sodden, hardly bothering to protect themselves, watching the destruction.

A man in a black overcoat swung an axe. With a crash a window burst. He attacked the door, which caved in at the third blow. As if released from a cage, a woman with a baby in her arms flew out of the house, followed by three barefoot children. He let them pass. Then he began to hack at the door-frame. The whole structure creaked.

One of his fellows stepped inside carrying a jerry-can. The woman dashed in after him, emerged with her arms full of bedclothes. But when she tried to make a second foray she was hurled, out bodily.

A new sigh rose from the crowd. Wisps of smoke began to blow from inside the shack. The woman got to her feet, dashed indoors, was again hurled out.

A stone came sailing out of the crowd and fell with a clatter on the roof of the burning shack. Another hit the wall, another landed at the feet of the man with the axe. He gave a menacing shout. He and half a dozen of his fellows stopped what they were doing and, brandishing sticks and bars, advanced on the crowd. Screaming, people turned to flee, I among them, But in the clinging sand, I could barely lift my feet. My heart pounded, pains shot through, my chest. I stopped, bent over, gasping. Can this really be happening to me? I thought. What am I doing here? I had a vision of the little green car waiting quietly at the roadside. There was nothing I longed for more than to get into my car, slam the door behind me, close out this looming world of rage and violence.

A girl, an enormously fat teenager, shouldered me out of her way. 'Damn you!' I gasped as I fell. 'Damn you!' she gasped back, glaring with naked animosity: 'Get out! Get out!' And she toiled up the duneside, her huge backside quaking.

One more such blow, I thought, face down in the sand, and I am gone. These people can take many blows, but I, I am fragile as a butterfly.

Feet crunched past me. I caught a glimpse of a brown boot, the tongue flapping, the sole tied on with string. The blow I shrank from did not fall.

I got up. There was a fight 'of some kind going on to my left; all the people who a minute ago had been fleeing into the bush were just as suddenly pouring back. A woman screamed, high and loud. How could I get away from this terrible place? Where was the pond I had waded across, where was the path to the car? There were ponds everywhere, pools, lakes, sheets of water; there were paths everywhere, but where did they lead?

Distinctly I heard the pop of gunfire, one, two, three shots, not nearby, but not far away either.

'Come,' said a voice, and Mr Thabane strode past. 'Yes!' I gasped, and gratefully struggled after him. But I could not catch up. 'Slower, please,' I called. He waited; together he and I recrossed the pool and reached the path.

A young man came up beside us, his eyes bloodshot. 'Where are you going?' he demanded. A hard question, a hard voice.

'I am going away, I am getting away, I am out of place here,' I answered.

'We are going to fetch the car, ' said Mr Thabane.

'We want to use that car,' said the young man.

'I am not letting anyone have my car,' I said.

'This is a friend of Bheki,' said Mr Thabane. 'I don't care, I am not letting him have my car.'

The young man – not a man at all, in fact, but a boy dressed like a man, bearing himself like a man – made a strange gesture: holding one hand at head-height, he struck it with the other, palm against palm, a glancing blow. What did it mean? Did it mean, anything?

My back was in agony from the walking. I slowed down and stopped. 'I must get home soon,' I said. It was an appeal; 1 could hear the unsteadiness in my voice.

'You have seen enough?' said Mr Thabane, sounding more distant than before.

'Yes, I have seen enough. I didn't come here to see sights. I came to fetch Bheki.'

'And you want to go home?'

'Yes, I want to go home. I am in pain, I am exhausted.'

He turned and walked on. I hobbled behind. Then he stopped again. 'You want to go home,' he said. 'But what of the people who live here? When they want to go home, this is where they must go. What do you think of that?'

We stood in the rain, in the middle of the path, face to face. Passers-by stopped too, regarding me curiously, my business their business, everyone's business.

'I have no answer,' I said. 'It is terrible.'

'It is not just terrible,' he said, 'it is a crime. When you see a crime being committed in front of your eyes, what do you say? Do you say, "I have seen enough, I didn't come to see sights, I want to go home"?'

I shook my head in distress.

'No, you don't,' he said. 'Correct. Then, what do you say? What sort of crime is it that you see? What is its name?'

He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practised in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one's own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens.

I glanced around the ring of spectators. Were they hostile? There was no hostility I could detect. They were merely waiting for me to say my part.

'There are many things I am sure I could say, Mr Thabane,' I said. 'But then they must truly come from me. When one speaks under duress – you should know this – one rarely speaks thr truth.'

He was going to respond, but I stopped him.

'Wait. Give me a minute. I am not evading your question. There are terrible things going on here. But what I think of them I must say in my own way. '

'Then let us hear what you have to say! We are listening! We are waiting!' He raised his hands for silence. The crowd murmured approval.

'These are terrible sights,' I repeated, faltering. 'They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other people's words. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the rruth. That is all I can say now.'

'This woman talks shit,' said a man in the crowd. He looked around. 'Shit,' he said. No one contradicted Mm. Already some were drifting away.

'Yes,' I said, speaking directly to him- 'you are right, what you say is true.'

He gave me a look as if I were mad.

'But what do you expect?' I went on. 'To speak of this' -I waved a hand over the bush, the smoke, the filth littering the path – 'you would need the tongue of a god.'

'Shit,' he said again, challenging me.

Mr Thabane turned and walked off. I trailed behind him. The crowd parted. In a minute the boy passed me, hurrying. Then the car came in sight.

'It is a Hillman, your car, isn't it,' said Mr Thabane. 'There can't be many left on the roads.'

I was surprised. After what had passed I thought there was a line drawn between us. But he seemed to bear no grudge.

'From the time when British was Best,' I replied. 'I am sorry if I do not make sense. '

He ignored the apology, if that is what it was. 'Was British ever best?' he asked.

'No, of course not. It was just a slogan for a while after the War. You won't remember, you were too young.'

'I was born in 1943,' he said. 'I'm forty-three. Don't you believe me?' He turned, offering me his neat good looks. Vain; but an appealing vanity.

I pulled the starter. The battery was dead. Mr Thabane and the boy got out and pushed, struggling for a footing in the sand. At last the engine caught. 'Go straight,' said the boy. I obeyed.

'Are you a teacher?' I asked Mr Thabane.

'I was a teacher. But I have left the profession temporarily. Till better times arrive. At present I sell shoes.'

'And you?' I asked the boy.

He mumbled something I did not hear.

'He is an unemployed youth,' said Mr Thabane. 'Are you not?'

The boy smiled selfconsciously. 'Turn here, just after the shops,' he said.

Alone in the wilderness stood a row of three little shops, gutted, scorched.' BHAWOODIEN CASH STORE, said the one sign still legible.

'From long ago,' said Mr Thabane. 'From last year.'

We had come out on a broad dirt road. To our left stood a cluster of houses, proper houses, with brick walls and asbestos roofs and chimneys. Among them, around them, stretching into the distance across the flats, were squatter shacks.

'That building,' said the boy, pointing ahead.

It was a long, low building, a hall or school perhaps, surrounded by a mesh fence. But great lengths of the fence had been trampled down, and of the building itself only the smoke-blackened walls were still standing. In front of it a crowd had gathered. Faces turned to watch the Hillman's approach.

'Shall I switch off?' I said.

'You can switch off, there is nothing to be afraid of,' said Mr Thabane.

'I am not afraid, ' I said. Was it true? In a sense, yes; or at least, after the episode in the bush, I cared less what happened to me.

'There is no need to be afraid anyway,' he continued smoothly: 'your boys are here to protect you.' And he pointed.

I saw them then, further down the road: three khaki-brown troop-carriers almost merging into the trees, and, outlined against the sky, helmeted heads.

'In case you were thinking,' he concluded, 'that this was just a quarrel among blacks, a spot of faction-fighting. Look: there is my sister.'

My sister he called her, not: Florence . Perhaps I alone in all the world called her Florence. Called her by an alias. Now I was on ground where, people were revealed in their true names.

'She stood with her back to the wall, sheltering from the rain: a sober, respectable woman in a burgundy coat and white knitted cap. We threaded our way toward her. Though she gave no sign, I was sure she saw me. ' Florence!' I called. She looked up dully. 'Have you found him?'

She nodded toward the gutted interior, then turned away, not greeting me. Mr Thabane began to push past the throng in the entranceway. Embarrassed, I waited. People milled past, skirting me as though I were bad luck.

A girl in an apple-green school tunic advanced on me, her hand raised as if to give me a slap. I flinched, but it was only in play. Or perhaps I should say: she forbore from actually striking.

'I think you should look too,' said Mr Thabane, re-emerging, breathing fast. He went over to Florence and took her in his arms. Lifting her glasses aside, she put her head on his shoulder and burst into tears.

The inside of the hall was a mess of rubble and charred beams. Against the far wall, shielded from the worst: of the rain, were five bodies neatly laid out. The body in the middle was that of Florence 's Bheki. He still wore the grey flannel trousers, white shirt and maroon pullover of his school, but his feet were bare. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth open too. The rain had been beating on him for hours, on him and his comrades, not only here but wherever they had been when they met their deaths; their clothes, their very hair, had a flattened, dead look. In the corners of his eyes there were grains of sand. There was sand in his mouth.

Someone was tugging my arm. Dazed, I looked down at a little girl with wide, solemn eyes. 'Sister,' she said, 'sister,' but then did not know how to go on.

'She is asking, are you one of the sisters?' explained a woman, smiling benignly.

I did not want to be drawn away, not now. I shook my head.

'She means, are you one of the sisters from the Catholic Church,' said the woman. 'No,' she went on, speaking to the child in English, 'she is not one of the sisters.' Gently she unlocked the child's fingers from my sleeve.

Florence was surrounded by a press of people.

'Must they lie there in the rain?' I asked Mr Thabane.

'Yes, they must lie there. So that everyone can see. '

'But who did it?'

I was shaking: shivers ran up and down my body, my hands trembled. I thought of the boy's open eyes. I thought:

What did he see as his last sight on earth? I thought: This is the worst thing I have witnessed in my life. And I thought: Now my eyes are open and I can never close them again.

'Who did it?' said Mr Thabane. 'If you want to dig the bullets out of their bodies, you are welcome. But I will tell you in advance what you will find. 'Made in South Africa. SABS Approved.' That is what you will find.'

'Please listen to me,' I said. 'I am not indifferent to this… this war. How can I be? No bars are thick enough, to keep it out.' I felt like crying; but here, beside Florence, what right had I? 'It lives inside me and I live inside it,' I whispered.

Mr Thabane shrugged impatiently. His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?

I tell you the story of this morning mindful that the storyteller, from her office, claims the place of right. It is through my eyes that you see; the voice that speaks in your head is mine. Through me alone do you find yourself here on these desolate flats, smell the smoke in the air, see the bodies of the dead, hear the weeping, shiver in the rain. It is my thoughts that you think, my despair that you feel, and also the first stirrings of welcome for whatever will put an end to thought: sleep, death. To me your sympathies flow; your heart beats with mine.

Now, my child, flesh of my flesh, my best self, I ask you to draw back. I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are. It would be easier for you, I know, if the story came from someone else, if it were a stranger's voice sounding; in your ear. But the fact is, there is no one else. I am the only one. I am the one writing: I, I. So I ask you: attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words, listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily.

Read all, even this adjuration, with a cold eye.

Someone had thrown a rock through the windscreen. Big as a child's head, mute, it lay on the seat amid a scattering of glass as if it now owned the car. My first thought was: Where will I get a windscreen for a Hillman? And then: How fortunate that everything is coming to an end at the same time!

I tumbled the rock, from the seat and began to pick out the loose shards from the windscreen. Now that I had something to do I felt calmer. But I was calmer too because I no longer cared if I lived. What might happen to me no longer mattered. I thought: My life may as well be waste. We shoot these people as if they are waste, but in the end it is we whose lives are not worth living.

I thought of the five bodies, of their massive, solid presence in the burned-down hall. Their ghosts have not departed, I thought, and will not depart. Their ghosts are sitting tight, in possession.

If someone had dug a grave for me there and then in the sand, and pointed, I would without a word have climbed in and lain down and folded my hands on my breast. And when the sand fell in my mouth and in the corners of my eyes I would not have lifted a finger to brush it away.

Do not read in sympathy with me. Let your heart not: beat with mine.

I held out a coin through the window. There was a rush of takers. The children pushed, the engine started. Into thrust-out hands I emptied my purse.

Drawn up among the bushes where the road dwindled to a track stood the military vehicles I had seen, not three, as I had thought, but five. Under the eye of a boy in an olive rain-cape I got out: of the car, so cold in my wet clothes that I might as well have been naked.

I had hoped the words I needed would just come, but: they did not. I held out my hands, palms 'upward. I am bereft, my hands said, bereft of speech. I come to speak but have nothing to say.

' Wag in die motor, ek sal die polisie skakel,' he called down to me. A boy with pimples playing this self-important, murderous game. Wait in the car, I will call the police, I shook my head, went on shaking my head. He was talking to someone beside him, someone I could not see. He was smiling. No doubt they had been watching from the beginning, had their own opinion of me. A mad old do-gooder caught in the rain, bedraggled as a hen. Were they right? Am I a do-gooder? No, I have done no good that I can think of. Am I mad? Yes, I am mad. But they are mad too. All of us running mad, possessed by devils. When madness climbs the throne, who in the landscapes contagion?

'Don't call the police, I can take care of myself,' I called. But the murmuring, the sideways looks continued. Perhaps they were already on the radio.

'What do you think you are doing?' I called up to the boy. The smile stiffened on his lips. 'What do you think you are doing?' I shouted, my voice beginning to crack. Shocked, he stared down. Shocked to be screamed at by a white woman, and one old enough to be his grandmother.

A man in battledress came over from the next vehicle in the line. Levelly he regarded me. ' Wat is die moeilikheid?' he asked the boy in the troop-carrier. 'Nee, niks moeilikheid nie.' No problem. 'Net hierdie dame wai wil weet wot aangaan.'

'This is a dangerous place to be, lady,' he said, turning to me. An officer, evidently. 'Anything can happen here. I am going to send for an escort to take you back to the road.'

I shook my head. I was in command of myself, I was not even tearful, though I did not put it past myself to break down at any moment.

What did I want? What did the old lady want? What she wanted was to bare something to them, whatever there was that might be bared at this time, in this place. What she wanted, before they got rid of her, was to bring out a scar, a hurt, to force it upon them, to make them see it with their own eyes: a scar, any scar, the scar of all this suffering, but in the end my scar, since our own scars are the only scars we can carry, with us. I even brought a hand up to the buttons of my dress. But my fingers were blue, frozen,

'Have you seen inside that hall?' I asked in my cracked voice. Now the tears were beginning to come.

The officer dropped his cigarette, ground it into the wet sand.

'This unit hasn't fixed a shot in twenty-four hours,' he said softly. 'Let me suggest to you: don't get upset before you know what you are talking about. Those people in there are not the only ones who have died. The killings are going on all the time. Those are just the bodies they picked up from yesterday. The fighting has subsided for the time being, but as soon as the rain stops it will flare up again, I don't know how you got here – they should have closed the road – but this is a bad place, you shouldn't be here. We'll radio the police, they can escort you out. '

'Ek het reeds geskakel,' said the boy in the troop-carrier.

'Why don't you just put down your guns and go home, all of you?' I said. 'Because surely nothing can be worse than what you are doing here. Worse for your souls, I mean.'

'No,' he said. I had expected incomprehension, but no, he understood exactly what I meant. 'We will see it through now. '

I was shivering from head to foot. My fingers, curled into the palms of my hands, would not straighten. The wind drove the sodden clothing against my skin.

'I knew one of those dead boys,' I said. 'I have known him since he was five. His mother works for me. You are all too young for this. It sickens me. That is all.'

I drove back, to the hall and, sitting in the car, waited. They were bringing the bodies out now. From the gathering crowd I felt a wave of something come out at me: resentment, animosity. Worse than that: hatred. Would it have been different if I had not been seen speaking to the soldiers? No.

Mr Thabane came over to see what I wanted. 'I am sorry, but I am not sure of the way back,' I said.

'Get on to the tar road, turn right, follow the signs,' he said curtly.

'Yes, but which signs?'

'The signs to civilization.' And he turned on his heel.

I drove slowly, in part because of the wind beating into my face, in part because I was numb in body and soul. I strayed into a suburb I had never heard of and spent twenty minutes driving around indistinguishable streets looking for a way out. At last I found myself in Voortrekker Road. Here, fox the first time, people began to stare at the car with the shattered windscreen. Stares followed me all the way home.

The house felt cold and alien. I told myself: Have a hot bath, rest. But an icy lethargy possessed me. It took an effort to drag myself upstairs, peel off the wet clothes, wrap myself in a robe, get into bed. Sand, the grey sand of the Cape Flats, had crusted between my toes. I will never be warm again, I thought. Vercueil has a dog to lie against, Vercueil knows how to live in this climate. But as for me, and for that cold boy soon to be put into the earth, no dog will help us any more. Sand already in his mouth, creeping in, claiming him.

Sixteen years since I shared a bed with man or boy. Sixteen years alone. Does that surprise you?

I wrote. I write. I follow the pen, going where it takes me. What else have I now?

I woke up haggard. It was night again. Where had the day gone? The light in the toilet was on. Sitting on the seat, his trousers around his knees, his hat on his head, fast asleep, was Vercueil. I stared in astonishment.

He did not wake; on the contrary, though his head lolled and his jaw hung open, he slept as sweetly as a babe. His long lean thigh was quite hairless.

The kitchen door stood open and garbage from the overturned bucket was strewn over the floor. Worrying at an old wrapping-paper was the dog. When it saw me it hung its ears guiltily and thumped its tail. 'Too much!' I murmured: 'Too much!' The dog slunk out.

I sat down at the table and gave myself up to tears. I cried not for the confusion in my head, not for the mess in the house, but for the boy, for Bheki. Wherever I turned he was before me, his eyes open in the look of childish puzzlement with which he had met his death. Head on arms I sobbed, grieving for him, for what had been taken from him, for what had been taken from me. Such a good thing, life! Such a wonderful idea for God to have had! The best idea there had ever been. A gift, the most generous of all gifts, renewing itself endlessly through the generations. And now Bheki, robbed of it, gone, torn away!

'I want to go home!' So 1 had whinged, to my shame, to Mr Thabane the shoe salesman. From an old person's throat a child's voice. Home to my safe house, to my bed of childhood slumber. Have I ever been fully awake? I might as well ask: Do the dead know they are dead? No: to the dead it is not given to know anything. But in our dead sleep we may at least be visited by intimations. I have intimations older than any memory, unshakeable, that once upon a time I was alive. Was alive and then was stolen from life. From the cradle a theft took place: a child was taken and a doll left in its place to be nursed, and reared, and that doll is what I call I.

A doll? A doll's life? Is that what I have lived? Is It given to a doll to conceive such a thought? Or does the thought come and so as another intimation, a, flash of lightning, a piercing of the fog by the lance of an angel's intelligence? Can a doll recognize a doll? Can a doll know death? No: dolls grow, they acquire speech and gait, they perambulate the world; they age, they wither, they perish; they are wheeled into the fire or buried in the earth; but they do not 'die. They exist forever in that moment of petrified surprise prior to all recollection when a life was taken away, a life not theirs but in whose place they are left behind as a token. Their knowing a knowledge without substance, without worldly weight, like a doll's head, itself, empty, airy. As they themselves are not babies but the ideas of babies; more round, more pink, more blank, and blue-eyed than a baby could, ever be, living not life but an idea of life, immortal, undying, like all ideas.

Hades, Hell: the domain of ideas. Why has it ever been necessary that hell be a place on its own in the ice of Antarctica or down the pit of a volcano? Why can hell not be at the foot of Africa, and why can the creatures of hell not walk among the living?

'Father, can't you see I'm burning?' implored the child, standing at his father's bedside. But his father, sleeping on, dreaming, did not see.

That is the reason – I bring it forward now for you to see – why I cling so tightly to the memory of my mother. For if she did not give me life, no one did. I cling not just to the memory of her but to her herself, to her body, to my birth from her body into the world. In blood and milk I drank her body and came to life. And then was stolen, and have been lost ever since.

There is a photograph of me you have seen but will probably not remember. It was taken in 1918, when I was not yet two. I am on my feet; I appear to be reaching towards the camera; my mother, kneeling behind me, restrains me by some kind of rein that passes over my shoulders. Standing to one side, ignoring me, is my brother Paul, his cap at a jaunty angle.

My brow is furrowed, my eyes are fixed intensely on the camera. Am I merely squinting into the sun or, like the savages of Borneo, do I have a shadowy sense that the camera will rob me of my soul? Worse: does my mother hold me back from striking the camera to the ground because I, in my doll's way, know that it will see what the eye cannot: that I am not there? And does my mother know this because she too is not there?

Paul, dead, to whom the pen has led me. I held his hand when he was going. I whispered to him, 'You will see Mama, you will both be so happy.' He was pale, even his eyes had the blanched hue of far-off sky. He gave me a tired, empty look as if to say: How little you understand! Did Paul ever really live? My sister life, he called me once in a letter, in borrowed words. Did it come to him at the end that he had made a mistake? Did those translucent eyes see through me?

We were photographed, that day, in a garden. There are flowers behind us that look like hollyhocks; to our left is a bed of melons. I recognize the place. It is Uniondale, the house in Church Street bought by my grandfather when ostrich-feathers were booming. Year after year fruit and flowers and vegetables burgeoned in that garden, pouring forth their seed, dying, resurrecting themselves, blessing us with their profuse presence. But by whose love tended? Who clipped the hollyhocks? Who laid the melon-seeds in their warm, moist bed? Was it my grandfather who got up at four in the icy morning to open the sluice and lead water into the garden? If not he, then whose was the garden rightfully? Who are the ghosts and who the presences? Who, outside the' picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bending it, bursting it in?

Dies irae, dies illa when the absent shall be present and the present absent. No longer does the picture show who were in the garden frame that day, but: who were not there. Lying all these years in places of safekeeping across the country, in albums, in desk drawers, this picture and thousands like it have subtly matured, metamorphosed. The fixing did not hold or the developing went further than one would ever have dreamed – who can know how it happened? – but they have become negatives again, a new kind of negative in which we begin to see what used to Me outside the frame, occulted. Is that why my brow is furrowed, Is that why I struggle to reach the camera: do I obscurely know that the camera is the enemy, that the camera will not lie about us but uncover what we truly are: doll-folk? Am I struggling against the reins in order to strike the camera out of the hands of whoever holds it before it is too late? And who holds the camera? Whose formless shadow leans toward my mother 'and her two offspring across the tilled bed?

Grief past weeping. I am hollow, I am a shell. To each of us fate sends the right disease. Mine a disease that eats me out from inside. Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips, dazed by the flood of light.

Was it the crab I saw so presciently when I was two, peeping out of the black box? Was I trying to save us all from the crab? But they held me back, they pressed the button, and the crab sprang out and entered me.

Gnawing at my bones now that there is no flesh left. Gnawing the socket of my hip, gnawing my backbone, beginning to gnaw at my knees. The cats, if the truth be told, have never really loved me. Only this creature is faithful to the end. My pet, my pain.

I went upstairs and opened the toilet door. Vercueil was still there, slumped in his deep sleep. I shook him. 'Mr Vercueil!' I said. One eye opened. 'Come and lie down.'

But he did not. First I heard him on the stairs, taking one step at a time like an old man. Then I heard the back door close.

A beautiful day, one of those still winter days when light seems to stream, evenly from all quarters of the sky. Vercueil drove me down Breda Street and into Orange Street. Across from Government Avenue I told him to park.

'I thought of driving the car all the way down the Avenue,' I said. 'Once I am past the chain, I don't see how anyone can stop me. But do you think there is room to get past?'

(You may remember, there are two cast-iron bollards at the head of the avenue with a chain, stretched between them.)

'Yes, you can get past at the side, ' he said.

'After that it would just be a matter of keeping the car straight. '

'Are you really going to do this?' he asked. His chicken-eyes glinted cruelly.

'If I can find the courage.'

'But why? What for?'

Hard to make grand responses in the teeth of that look. I closed my eyes and tried, to hold on to my vision of the car, moving fast enough for the flames to fan out backwards, rolling down the paved avenue past the tourists and tramps and lovers, past the museum, the art gallery, the botanical gardens, till it slowed down and came to rest before the house of shame, burning and melting.

'We can go back now,' I said. 'I just wanted to make sure it could be done.'

He came indoors and I gave him tea. The dog sat at his feet, cocking its ears at us in turn, as we spoke. A nice dog: a bright presence, star-born, as some people are.

'To answer your question What for?' I said: 'it has to do with my life. To do with a life that isn't worth, much any more. I am trying to work out what I can get for it. '

His hand moved restfully over the dog's fur, back and forth. The dog blinked, closed its eyes. Love, I thought: however unlikely, it is love I witness here.

I tried again. 'There is a famous novel in which a woman is convicted of adultery – adultery was a crime in the old days – and condemned to go in public with the letter A stitched on her dress, She wears the A for so many years that people forget what it stands for. They forget that it stands for anything. It simply becomes something she wears, like a ring or a brooch. It may even be that she was the one to start the fashion of wearing writing on one's clothing. But that isn't in the book.

'These public shows, these manifestations – this is the point of the story – how can one ever be sure what they stand for? An old woman sets herself on fire, for instance. Why? Because she has been driven, mad? Because she is in despair? Because she has cancer? I thought of painting a letter on the car to explain. But what? A? B? C? What is the right letter for my case? And why explain anyway? Whose business is it but my own?'

I might have said more, but at that moment the gate-latch clicked and the dog began to growl. Two women, one of whom I recognized as Florence 's sister, came up the path carrying suitcases.

'Good afternoon,' said the sister. She held up a key. 'We have come to fetch my sister's things. Florence.'

'Yes,' I said.

They let themselves into Florence 's room. After a while I followed. 'Is Florence all right?' I asked.

The sister, who had been unpacking a drawer, stood, up straight, breathing heavily. Clearly she relished this foolish question.

'No, I cannot say she is all right,' she said, 'Not all right. How can she be all right?'

The other woman, pretending not to hear, continued to fold baby-clothes. There was far more in the room than they could carry in two suitcases.

'I didn't mean that,' I said; 'but never mind. Can I ask you to take something to Florence from me?'

'Yes, I can take it if it is not big.' I wrote out a cheque.

'Tell Florence I am sorry. Tell her I am more sorry than I can say. 1 think of Bheki all the time.' 'You are sorry.' 'Yes.'

Another day of clear skies. Vercueil in a strangely excited state. 'So today is the day?' he asked. 'Yes,' I replied, stiffening against his indecent eagerness, on the point of adding: 'But what business is it of yours?'

Yes, I said: today is the day. Yet today has passed and I have not gone through with what I promised. For as long as the trail of words continues, you know with certainty that I have not gone through with it: a rule, another rule. Death may indeed be the last great foe of writing, but writing is also the foe of death. Therefore, writing, holding death at arm's length, let me cell you that I meant to go through with it began to go through with it, did not go through with it. Let me tell you more. Let me tell you that I bathed. Let me tell you that I dressed. Let me tell you that, as I prepared my body, some faint glow of pride began to return to it. Between waiting in bed for the breathing to stop and going out to make one's own end, what a difference!

I meant to go through with it: is that the truth? Yes. No. Yes-no. There is such a word, but it has never been allowed into the dictionaries. Yes-no: every woman knows what it means as it defeats every man. 'Are you going to do it?' asked Vercueil, his man-eyes gleaming. 'Yes-no,' I should have answered.

I wore white and blue: a light blue suit, a white House with a bow at the throat. I did my face carefully, and my hair. All the while I sat in front of the mirror I was trembling lightly. I felt no pain at all. The crab had stopped gnawing.

Luminous with curiosity, Vercueil followed me into the kitchen and prowled about while I was having breakfast. At last, irritated, unsettled, I burst out: 'Would you please leave me alone!' At which he turned away with a look of such childish hurt that I gave his sleeve a tug. 'I didn't mean that,' I said. 'But please sit down: you make me nervous when I need calm. I veer back and forth so much! At one moment I think: Let me hurry to put an end to it, to this worthless life. At the next I think: But why should I bear the blame? Why should 1 be expected to rise above my times? Is it my doing that my times have been so shameful? Why should it be left to me, old and sick and full of pain, to lift myself unaided out of this pit of disgrace?

'I want to rage against the men who have created these times. I want to accuse them of spoiling my life in the way that a rat or a cockroach spoils food without even eating it, simply by walking over it and sniffing it and performing its bodily functions on it. It is childish, I know, to point fingers and blame others. But why should I accept that my life would have been worthless no matter who held power in this land? Power is power, after all. It invades. That is its nature. It invades one's life.

'You want to know what is going; on with me and I am trying to tell you. I want to sell myself, redeem myself, but am full of confusion, about how to do it. That, if you like, is the craziness that has got into me. You need not be surprised. You know this country. There is madness in the air here.'

Throughout this speech Vercueil had worn the same tight, secretive little look. Now he said a strange thing: 'Would you like to go for a drive?'

'We can't go for a drive, Mr Vercueil. There are a thousand reasons why we can't.'

'We can see some sights, be back by twelve o'clock.'

'We can't go sightseeing in a car with a hole in the windscreen. It is ridiculous.'

'I'll take out the windscreen. It's just glass, you don't need it.'

Why did I give in? Perhaps what won me in the end was the new attention he was paying me. He was like a boy in a state of excitement, sexual excitement, and I was his object. I was flattered; in a distant way, despite all, I was even amused. Obscurely I may have felt something unsavoury in it, as in the excitement of a dog digging for carrion not buried deep enough. But I was in no condition to draw lines. What did I want, after all? I wanted a suspension. To be suspended without thought, without pain, without doubt, without apprehension, till noon came. Till the noonday gun boomed on Signal Hill and, with a bottle of petrol on the seat beside me, I either drove or did not drive past the chain and down the Avenue. But to be thoughtless till then; to hear birds sing, to feel the air on my skin, to see the sky. To live.

So I yielded, Vercueil wrapped a towel around his hand and broke out more of the glass till the hole was big enough for a child to climb through. I gave him the key. A push, and we were away.

Like lovers revisiting the scenes of their first declarations, we took the mountainside drive above Muizenberg. (Lovers!

What had I ever declared to Vercueil? That he should stop drinking. What had he declared to me? Nothing: perhaps not even his true name.) We parked at the same spot as before.

Now: feast a last time on these sights, I told myself, digging my nails into my palms, staring out over False Bay, bay of false hope, and southward over the bleak winter-waters of the most neglected of oceans.

'If we had a boat you could take me out to sea,' I murmured.

Southward: Vercueil and I alone, sailing till we reached the latitudes where albatrosses fly. Where he could lash me to a barrel or a plank, it did not matter which, and leave me bobbing on the waves under the great white wings.

Vercueil reversed on to the road. Was I wrong, or did the engine throb more sweetly in his hands than in mine?

'I am sorry if I am not making sense,' I said. 'I am trying my best not to lose direction. I am trying to keep up a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is what keeps deserting me. Sitting here among all this beauty, or even sitting at home among my own things, it seems hardly possible to believe there is a zone of killing and degradation all around me. It seems like a bad dream. Something presses, nudges inside me. I try to take no notice, but it insists. I yield an inch; it presses harder. With relief I give in, and life is suddenly ordinary again. With relief I give myself back to the ordinary. I wallow in it. I lose my sense of shame, become shameless as a child. The shamefulness of that shamelessness: that is what I cannot forget, that is what I cannot bear afterwards. That is why I must take hold, of myself, point myself down the path. Otherwise I am lost. Do you understand?'

Vercueil crouched over the wheel like someone with poor eyesight. He of the hawk's-eye. Did it matter if he did not understand?

'It is like trying to give up alcohol,' I persisted. 'Trying and trying, always trying, but knowing in your bones from the beginning that you are going to slide back. There is a, shame to that private knowledge, a shame so warm, so intimate, so comforting that it brings more shame flooding with it. There seems to be no limit to the shame a human being can feel.

'But how hard it is to kill oneself! One clings so tight to life! It seems to me that something other than the will must come into play at the last instant, something foreign, something thoughtless, to sweep you over the brink. You have to become someone other than yourself. But who? Who is it that waits for me to step into his shadow? Where do I find him?'

My watch said 10.20. 'We have to go back,' I said.

Vercueil slowed down. 'If that Is what you want, I'll take you back,' he said. 'Or, if you like, we can go on driving. We can drive all the way round the Peninsula. It's a nice day.'

I should have answered: No, take me back at once. But I hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation the words died within me.

'Stop here,' I said.

Vercueil drew off the road and parked.

'I have a favour to ask of you,' I said. 'Please don't make fun of me.'

'Is that the favour?'

'Yes. Now or In the future.'

He shrugged.

On the far side of the road a man in tattered clothes sat beside a pyramid of firewood for sale. He looked us over, looked away.

'Time passed.

'I told you a story once about my mother,' I said at last, trying to speak more softly. 'About how when she was a little girl she lay in the dark not knowing what was rolling over her, the wagon-wheels or the stars.

'I have held on to that story all my life. If each of us has a story we tell to ourself about who we are and where we come from, then that Is my story. That is the story I choose, or the story that has chosen me. It Is there that I come from, it is there that I begin.

'You ask whether I want to go on driving. If it were practically possible, I would suggest that we drive to the Eastern Cape, to the Outeniqua Mountains, to that stopping-place at the top of Prince Alfred's Pass. I would even say, Leave maps behind, drive north and east by the sun, I will recognize It when we come to it: the stopping-place, the starting-place, the place of the navel, the place where I join the world. Drop me off there, at the top of the pass, and drive away, leaving me to wait for the night and the stars and the ghostly wagon to come rolling over.

'But the truth is, with or without maps, I can no longer find the place. Why? Because a certain desire has gone from me. A year ago or a month ago it would have been different. A desire, perhaps the deepest desire I am capable of, would have flowed from me toward that one spot of earth, guiding me. This is my mother, I would have said, kneeling there: this is what gives life to me. Holy ground, not as a grave but as a place of resurrection is holy: resurrection eternal out of the earth.

'Now that desire, which one may as well call love, is gone from me. I do not love this land any more. It Is as simple as that. I am like a man who has been castrated. Castrated in maturity, I try to imagine how life is for a man to whom that has been done. I imagine him seeing things he has loved before, knowing from memory that he ought still to love them, but able no longer to summon up the love itself. Love: what was that? he would say to himself, groping in memory for the old feeling. But about everything there would now be a flatness, a stillness, a calmness. Something I once had has been betrayed, he would think, and concentrate, trying to feel that betrayal in all its keenness. But there would be no keenness. Keenness would be what would be gone from everything. Instead he would feel a tug, light but continual, toward stupor, detachment. Detached, he would say to himself, pronouncing the sharp word, and he would reach out to test its sharpness. But there too a blurring, a blunting would have intervened. All is receding, he would think; in a week, In a month I will have forgotten everything, I will be among the lotus-eaters, separated, drifting. For a last time he would try to feel the pain of that separation, but all that would come to him would be a fleeting sadness.

'I don't know whether I am being plain enough, Mr Vercueil. I am talking about resolve, about trying to hold on to my resolve and failing. I confess, I am drowning, I am sitting here next to you and drowning.'

Vercueil slouched against the door. The dog whined softly. Standing with its paws on the front seat, it peered ahead, eager to get moving again. A minute passed.

Then from his jacket pocket he drew a box of matches and held it out to me. 'Do it now, ' he said. 'Do what?'

'It.'

'Is that what you want?'

'Do it now. I'll get out of the car. Do it, here, now.'

At the corner of his mouth a ball of spittle danced up and down. Let hirn be mad, I thought. Let it be possible to say that about him: that he is cruel, mad, a mad dog.

He shook the box of matches at me. 'Are you worried about him?' He gestured at the man with the firewood. 'He won't interfere.'

'Not here, ' I said.

'We can go to Chapman's Peak. You can drive over the edge if that's what you want.'

It was like being trapped in a car with a man trying to seduce you and getting cross when you did not give in. It was like being transported back to the worst days of girlhood.

'Can we go home?' I said.

'I thought you wanted to do it.'

'You don't understand.'

'I thought you wanted a push down the path. I'm giving you a push.'

Outside the hotel in Hout Bay he stopped the car again. 'Have you got some money for me?' he said.

I gave him a ten-rand note.

He went into the off-licence, returned with a bottle in a brown paper packet. 'Have a drink,' he said, and twisted off the cap.

'No, thank you. I don't like brandy.'

'It's not brandy, it's medicine.'

I took a sip, tried to swallow, choked and coughed; my teeth came loose.

'Hold it in your mouth,' he said.

I took another sip and held it in my mouth. My gums and palate burned, then grew dead. I swallowed and closed my eyes. Something began to lift inside me: a curtain, a cloud. Is this it, then, I thought? Is this all? Is this how Vercueil points the way?

He turned the car, drove back up the hill, and parked in a picnic area high above the bay. He' drank and offered, me the bottle. Cautiously I drank. The veil of greyness that had covered everything grew visibly lighter. Dubious, marvelling, I thought: Is it really so simple – not a matter of life and death at all?

'Let me tell you finally,' I said: 'What set me off was not my own condition, my sickness, but something quite different.'

The dog complained softly. Vercueil reached out a languid hand; it licked his fingers.

' Florence 's boy was shot on Tuesday.'

He nodded.

'I saw the body,' I went on, taking another sip, thinking: Shall I now grow loquacious? Lord preserve me! And as I grow loquacious will Vercueil grow loquacious too? He and I, under the influence, loquacious together in the little car?

'I was shaken,' I said. 'I won't say grieved because I have no right to the word, it belongs to his own people. But I am still – what? – disturbed. It has something to do with his deadness, his dead weight. It is as though in death he became very heavy, like lead or like that thick, airless mud you get at the bottoms of dams. As though in the act of dying he gave a last sigh and all the lightness went out of him. Now he is lying on top of me with all that weight. Not pressing, just lying.

'It was the same when that friend of his was bleeding in the street. There was the same heaviness, Heavy blood. I was trying to stop it from flowing down the gutters. So much blood! If I had caught it all I would not have been able to lift the bucket. Like trying to lift a bucket of lead.

'I have not seen black people in their death before, Mr Vercueil. They are dying all the time, I know, but always somewhere else. The people I have seen die have been white and have died in bed, growing rather dry and light there, rather papery, rather airy. They burned well, I am sure, leaving a minimum of ash to sweep up afterwards. Do you want to know why I set my mind on burning myself? Because I thought I would burn well.

'Whereas these people will not burn, Bheki and the other dead. It would be like trying to burn figures of pig-iron or lead. They might lose their sharpness of contour, but when the flames subsided they would still be there, heavy as ever. Leave them long enough and they may sink, millimetre by millimetre, till the earth closes over them. But then they would sink no further. They would stay there, bobbing just under the surface. If you so much as scuffled with your shoe you would uncover them: the faces, the dead eyes, open, full of sand.'

'Drink,' said Vercueil, holding out the bottle. His face was changing, the lips filling out, gorged, wet, the eyes growing vague. Like the woman he had brought home. I took the bottle and wiped it on my sleeve.

'You must understand, it is not just a personal thing, this disturbance I am telling you about,' I pursued. 'In fact it is not personal at all. I was fond of Bheki, certainly, when he was still a child, but: 1 was not happy with the way he turned out. I had hoped for something else. He and his comrades say they have put childhood behind them. Well, they may have ceased being children, but what have they become? Dour little puritans, despising laughter, despising play.

'So why should I grieve for him? The answer is, I saw his face. When he died he was a child again. The mask must have dropped in sheer childish surprise when it broke upon him in that last instant that the stone-throwing and shooting was not a game after all; that the giant who came shambling towards him with a paw full of sand to stop into his mouth would not be turned away by chants or slogans; that at the end of the long passageway where he choked and gagged and could not breathe there was no light.

'Now that child is buried and we walk upon him. Let me tell you, when I walk upon this land, this South Africa, I have a gathering feeling of walking upon black faces. They are dead but their spirit has not left them. They lie there heavy and obdurate, waiting for my feet to pass, waiting for me to go, waiting to be raised up again. Millions of figures of pig-iron floating under the skin of the earth. The age of iron waiting to return.

'You think I am upset but will get over it. Cheap tears, you think, tears of sentiment, here today, gone tomorrow. Well, it is true, I have been upset in the past, I have imagined there could be no worse, and then the worse has arrived, as it does without fail, and I have got over it, or seemed to. But that is the trouble! In order not to be paralyzed with shame I have had to live a life of getting over the worse. What I cannot get over any more is that getting over. If I get over it this time I will never have another chance not to get over it. For the sake of my own resurrection I cannot get over it this time.'

Vercueil held out the bottle. A full four inches were gone. I pushed his hand away. 'I don't want to drink any more,' I said.

'Go on,' he said: 'get drunk for a change.'

'No!' I exclaimed. A tipsy anger flared up in me against his crudity, his indifference. What was I doing here? In the exhausted car the two of us must have looked like nothing so much as belated refugees from the platteland of the Great Depression. All we lacked was a coir mattress and a chicken-coop tied on the roof. I snatched the bottle from his hand; but while I was still rolling down the window to throw it out, he wrested it back.

'Get out of my car!' I snapped.

Taking the key from the ignition lock, he got out. The dog bounded after him. In full sight of me he tossed the key into the bushes, turned, and, bottle in hand, stalked down the hill towards Hout Bay.

Burning with rage I waited, but he did not turn.

Minutes passed. A car pulled off the road and drew up beside me. Music blared from it, loud and metallic. In that welter of noise a couple sat gazing over the sea. South Africa at its recreations. I got out and tapped at their window. The man turned a vacant look on me, chewing, 'Can you turn down the music?' I said. He fiddled or pretended to fiddle with something, but the volume did not change. I tapped again. Through the glass he mouthed words at me, then in a flurry of dust reversed the car and parked on the other side of the area.

I searched in the bushes where Vercueil had thrown the key, with no success.

As the other car drove off at last, the woman turned to glare at me. Her face not unattractive yet ugly: closed, bunched, as if afraid that light, air, life itself were going to gather and strike her. Not a face but an expression, yet an expression worn so long as to be hers, her. A thickening of the membrane between the world and the self inside, a thickening become thickness. Evolution, but evolution backwards. Fish from the primitive depths (I am sure you know chis) grew patches of skin sensitive to the fingerings of light, patches that in time became eyes. Now, in South Africa. I see eyes clouding over again, scales thickening on them, as the land-explorers, the colonists, prepare to return to the deep.

Should I have come when you invited me? In my weaker moments I have often longed to cast myself on your mercy. How lucky, for both our sakes, that I have held out! You do not need an albatross from the old world around your neck; and as for me, would I truly escape South Africa by running to you? How do I know the scales are not already thickening over my own eyes? That woman in the car: perhaps, as they drove off, she was saying to her companion: 'What a sour old creature! What a closed-off face!'

And then, what honour is there in slipping off in these times when the worm-riddled ship is so clearly sinking, in the company of tennis players and crooked brokers and generals with pocketfuls of diamonds departing to set up retreats in the quieter backwaters of the world? General G, Minister M on their holdings in Paraguay, grilling beefsteaks over coals under southern skies, drinking beer with their cronies, singing songs of the old country, looking to pass away in their sleep at a great old age with grandchildren and peons hat in hand at the foot of the bed: the Afrikaners of Paraguay joining the Afrikaners of Patagonia in their sullen diaspora: ruddy men with paunches and fat wives and gun collections on their living-room walls and safety-deposit boxes in Rosario, exchanging Sunday-afternoon visits with the sons and daughters of Barbie, Eichmann: bullies, thugs, torturers, killers – what company!

Besides, I am too tired. Tired beyond cause, tired as an armour against the times, yearning to close my eyes, to sleep. 'What is death, after all, but an ascent into the final reaches of tiredness?

I remember your last telephone call. 'How are you feeling?' you asked. 'Tired but otherwise well,' I replied. 'I am taking things slowly. Florence is a pillar of strength, as ever, and I have a new man to help in the garden.' 'I'm so glad,' you said in your brisk American voice – 'You must rest a lot and concentrate on getting your strength back. '

Mother and daughter on the telephone. Midday there, evening here. Summer there, winter here. Yet the line as clear as if you were next door. Our words taken apart, hurled through the skies, put together again whole, flawless. No longer the old undersea cable linking you to me but an efficient, abstract, skybourne connection: the idea of you connected to the idea of me; not words, not living breath passing between us, but the ideas of words, the idea of breath, coded, transmitted, decoded. At the end you said, 'Good night', mother;' and I, 'Goodbye, my dear, thank you for phoning,' on the word dear allowing my voice to rest (what self-indulgence!) with the full weight of my love, praying that the ghost of that love would survive the cold trails of space and come home to you.

On the telephone, love but not truth. In this letter from elsewhere (so long a letter!) truth and love together at last. In every you that I pen love flickers and trembles like St Elmo's fire; you are with me not as you are today in America, not as you were when you left, but as you are in some deeper and unchanging form: as the beloved, as that which does not die. It is the soul of you that I address, as it is the soul of me that will be left with you when this letter is over. Like a moth from its case emerging, fanning its wings: that is what, reading, I hope you will glimpse: my soul readying itself for further flight. A white moth, a ghost emerging from the mouth of the figure on the deathbed. This struggling with sickness, the gloom and self-loathing of these days, the vacillation, the rambling too (there is little more to tell about the Hout Bay episode – Vercueil returned drunk and bad-tempered, found the key, and drove me home, and that was that; perhaps, if the truth be known, his dog led him back) -all part of the metamorphosis, part of shaking myself loose from the dying 'envelope.

And after that, after the dying? Never fear, I will not haunt you. There will be no need to close the windows and seal the chimney to keep the white moth from flapping in during the night and settling on your brow or on the brow of one of the children. The moth is simply what will brush your cheek ever so lightly as you put down the last page of this letter, before it flutters off on its next journey. It is not my soul that will remain with you but the spirit of my soul, the breath, the stirring of the air about these words, the faintest of turbulence traced in the air by the ghostly passage of my pen over the paper your fingers now hold.

Letting go of myself, letting go of you, letting go of a house still alive with memories: a hard task, but I am learning. The music too. But the music I will take with me, that at least, for it is wound into my soul. The ariosos from the Matthew Passion, wound in and knotted a thousand times, so that no one, nothing can undo them.

If Vercueil does not send these writings on, you will never read them. You will, never even know they existed. A certain, body of truth will never take on flesh: my truth: how I lived in these times, in this place.

What is the wager, then, that I am making with Vercueil, on Vercueil?

It is a wager on trust. So little to ask, to take a package to the post office and pass it over the counter. So little that it is almost nothing. Between taking the package and not taking it the difference is as light as a feather. If there is the slightest breath of trust, obligation, piety left behind when I am gone, he will surely take it.

And if not?

If not, there is no trust and we deserve no better, all of us, than to fall into a hole and vanish.

Because I cannot trust Vercueil I must trust him.

I am trying to keep a soul alive in times not hospitable to the soul.

Easy to give alms to the orphaned, the destitute, the hungry. Harder to give alms to the bitter-hearted (I think of Florence). But the alms I give Vercueil are hardest of all.

What I give he does not forgive me for giving. No charity in him, no forgiveness. (Charity? says Vercueil. Forgiveness?) Without his forgiveness I give without charity, serve without love. Rain falling on barren soil.

When I was younger I might have given myself to him bodily. That is the sort of thing one does, one did, however mistakenly. Now I put my life in his hands instead. This is my life, these words, these tracings of the movements of crabbed digits over the page. These words, as you read them, if you read them, enter you and draw breath again. They are, if you like, my way of living on. Once upon a time you lived in me as once upon a time I lived in my mother; as she still lives in me, as I grow towards her, may I live in you.

I give my life to Vercueil to carry over. I trust Vercueil because I do not trust Vercueil. I love him because I do not love him. Because he is the weak reed I lean upon him.

I may seem to understand what I say, but, believe me, I do not. From the beginning, when I found him behind the garage in his cardboard house, sleeping, waiting, I have understood nothing. I am feeling my way along a, passage that grows darker all the time. I am feeling my way toward you; with each word I feel my way.

Days ago I caught a cold, which has now settled on my chest and turned, into a dry, hammering cough that goes on for minutes at a stretch and leaves me panting, exhausted.

As long as the burden is a burden of pain alone I bear it by holding it at a distance. It is not I who am in pain, I say to myself: the one in pain is someone else, some body else who shares this bed with, me. So, by a trick, I hold it off, keep it elsewhere. And when the trick will not work, when the pain insists on owning me, I bear it anyhow.

(As the waves rise I have no doubt my tricks will be swept away like the dikes of Zeeland.)

But now, during these spasms of coughing, I cannot keep any distance from myself. There is no mind, there is no body, there is just I, a creature thrashing about, struggling for air, drowning. Terror, and the ignominy of terror! Another vale to be passed through on the way to death. How can this be happening to me? I think at the height of the coughing: Is it fair? The ignominy of naivete. Even a dog with a broken back breathing its last at the roadside would not think, But is this fair?

Living, said Marcus Aurelius, calls for the art of the wrestler, not the dancer. 'Staying on your feet is all; there is no need for pretty steps.

Yesterday, with, the pantry bare, I had to go shopping. Trudging home with my bags, I had a bad spell. Three passing schoolboys stopped to stare at the old woman leaning against a lamp-post with her groceries spilled around her feet. In between the coughing I tried to wave them away. What I looked like I cannot imagine. A woman in a car slowed down. 'Are you all right?' she called. 'I have been shopping,' I panted. 'What?' she said, frowning, straining to hear. 'Nothing!' I gasped. She drove off.

How ugly we are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves! Even the beauty queens look irritable. Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?

Then last night the worst happened. Into the confusion of my drugged, unsavoury slumber penetrated the sound of barking. On and on it went, steady, relentless, mechanical. Why did Vercueil not put a stop to it?

I did not trust myself on the stairs. In bathrobe and slippers I went out on to the balcony. It was cold, a light rain was falling. 'Mr Vercueil!' I croaked – 'What is the dog barking about? Mr Vercueil!'

The barking stopped, then started again. Vercueil did not appear.

I went back to bed and lay there unable to sleep, the barking like hammering in my ears.

This is how old women fall and break their hips, I warned myself: this is how the trap is laid, and this is how they are caught.

Holding to the banister with both hands I crept downstairs.

There was someone in the kitchen and it was not: Vercueil. Whoever it was did not try to hide. My God, I thought: Bheki! A chill ran through me.

In the eerie light cast by the open refrigerator he confronted me, his forehead with the bullet wound covered by a white bandage.

'What do you want?' I whispered. 'Do you want food?'

He spoke: 'Where is Bheki?'

The voice was lower, thicker than Bheki's. Who could it be then? Befuddled, I searched for a name.

He closed the refrigerator door. Now we were in darkness. 'Mr Vercueil!' I croaked. The dog barked without let-up. 'The neighbours will come,' I whispered.

As he passed me his shoulder brushed mine. Flinching, I smelled him and knew who he was.

He reached the door. The barking grew frantic.

' Florence isn't here any more,' I said. I turned on the light.

He was not wearing his own clothes. Or perhaps it is a fashion. The jacket seemed to belong to a full-grown man and the trousers were too long. One arm of the jacket was empty.

'How is your arm?' I asked.

'I must not move the arm,' he said.

'Come away from the door,' I said.

I opened the door a crack. The dog leapt excitedly. I tapped it on the nose. 'Stop it at once!.' I commanded. It whined softly. 'Where is your master?' It cocked, its ears. I closed the door.

'What do you want here?' I asked the boy.

'Where is Bheki?'

'Bheki is dead. He was killed last week while you were in hospital. He was shot. He died at once. The day after that affair with the bicycle.'

He licked, his lips. There was a cornered, uncertain look about him.

'Do you want something to eat?'

He shook his head. 'Money. I have no money,' he said. 'For the bus.'

'I will give you money. But where do you intend to go?'

'I must go home.'

'Don't do that, I urge you. I know what I am talking about, I have seen what is happening on the Flats. Stay away till things have gone back to normal.'

'Things will never be normal -'

'Please! I know the argument, I haven't the time or interest to go through it again. Stay here till things are quieter. Stay till you are better. Why did you leave the hospital? Are you discharged?'

'Yes. I am discharged.'

'Whose clothes are you wearing?' 'They are mine.'

'They are not your clothes. Where did you get them?'

'They are mine. A friend brought them to me.'

He was lying. He lied no better than any other fifteen-year-old.

'Sit down. I will give you something to eat, then, you can get some sleep. Wait till morning before you make up your mind what to do next.'

I made tea. He sat down, paying me no attention at all. It did not embarrass him that I did not believe his story. What I believed was of no account. What did he think of me? Did he give me any thought? Was he a thinking person? No: compared with. Bheki he was unthinking, inarticulate, unimaginative. But he was alive and Bheki was dead. The lively about everything, I am written out, bled dry, and still I go on. This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost.

I dream, but I doubt that it is God I dream of. When. I fall asleep there commences a restless movement of shapes behind my eyelids, shapes without body or form, covered in a haze, grey or brown, sulphurous. Borodino is the word that comes to me in my sleep: a hot summer afternoon on the Russian plain, smoke everywhere, the grass dry and burning, two hosts that have lost all cohesion plodding about, parched, in terror of their lives. Hundreds of thousands of men, faceless, voiceless, dry as bones, trapped on a field of slaughter, repeating night after 'night their back-and-forth march across that scorched plain in the stench of sulphur and blood: a hell into which I plummet when I close my eyes.

I am more than half convinced it is the red pills, Diconal, that call up these armies inside me. But without the red pills I can no longer sleep.

Borodino, Diconal: I stare at the words. Are they anagrams? They look like anagrams. But for what, and in what language?

When I wake out of the Borodino sleep I am calling or crying or coughing with sounds that come from deep in my chest. Then I quieten down, and lie staring about me. My room, my house, my life: too close a rendering to be an imitation: the real thing: I am back: again and again I am back, from the belly of the whale disgorged. A miracle each time, unacknowledged, uncelebrated, unwelcome. Morning after morning I am disgorged, cast up on the shore, given another chance. And what do I do with it? Lie without motion on the sands waiting for the night tide to return, to encircle me, to bear me back into the belly of darkness. Not properly born: a liminal creature, unable to breathe in water, that lacks the courage to leave the sea behind and become a dweller on land.

At the airport, the day you left, you gripped me and stared into my eyes. 'Do not: call me back, Mother,' you said, 'because I will not come.' Then you shook the dust of this country from your feet. You, were right. Nevertheless, there is part of me that is always on the alert, always turned to the north-west, longing to welcome you, embrace you, should you relent and, in whatever form, come visiting. There is something as terrible as it is admirable in that will of yours, in the letters you write in which – let me be candid – there is not enough love, or at least not enough of the loving-yielding that brings love to life. Affectionate, kind, confiding even, full of concern for me, they are nonetheless the letters of someone grown strange, estranged.

Is this an accusation? No, but it is a reproach, a heartfelt reproach. And this long letter – I say it now – is a call into the night, into the north-west, for you to come back to me. Come and bury your head in my lap as a child does, as you used to, your nose burrowing like a mole's for the place you came from. Come, says this letter: do not cut yourself off' from me. My third word.

If you would say you came from me, I would not have to say I came from the belly of the whale.

I cannot live without a child. I cannot die without a child.

What I bear, in your absence, is pain. I produce pain. You are my pain.

Is this an accusation? Yes. J'accuse. I accuse you of abandoning me. I fling this accusation at you, into the north-west, into the teeth of the wind. I fling my pain at you.

Borodino: an anagram for Come back in some language or other. Diconal: I call.

Words vomited up from the belly of the whale, misshapen, mysterious. Daughter.

In the middle of the night I telephoned Lifeline. 'Home deliveries?' said the woman – 'I don't know of anyone who does home deliveries any more except Stuttafords. Would you like to try Meals on Wheels?'

'It is not a question of cooking,' I said. 'I can do my own cooking. I just want the groceries delivered. I am having difficulty carrying things.'

'Give me your number and I'll get a social worker to phone you in the morning,' she said.

I put down the receiver.

The end comes galloping. I had not reckoned that as one goes downhill one goes faster and faster. I thought the whole road could be taken at an amble. Wrong, quite wrong.

There is something degrading about the way it all ends – degrading not only to us but to the idea we have of ourselves, of humankind. People lying in dark bedrooms, in their own mess, helpless. People lying in hedges in the rain. You will not understand this, yet. Vercueil will.

Vercueil has disappeared again, leaving the dog behind. A pity about Vercueil. No Odysseus, no Hermes, perhaps not even a messenger. A circler-around. A ditherer, despite the weatherworn front.

And I? If Vercueil has failed his test, what was mine? Was my test whether I had the courage to incinerate myself in front of the House of Lies? I have gone over that moment a thousand times in my mind, the moment of striking the match when my ears are softly buffeted and I sit astonished and even pleased in the midst of the flames, untouched, my clothes burning without singeing, the flames a cool blue. How

easy to give meaning to one's life, I think with surprise, thinking very fast in the last instant before the eyelashes catch, and the eyebrows, and one no longer sees. Then after that no thought any more, only pain (for nothing comes without its price).

Would the pain be worse than toothache? Than childbirth? Than this hip? Than, childbirth multiplied by two? How many Diconal to mute it? Would it be playing the game to swallow all the Diconal before turning the car down Government Avenue, edging past the chain? Must one die in full knowledge, fully oneself? Must one give birth to one's death without anaesthetic?

The truth is, there was always something false about that impulse, deeply false, no matter to what rage or despair it answered. If dying in bed over weeks and months, in a purgatory of pain and shame, will not save my soul, why should I be saved by dying in two minutes in a pillar of flames? Will the lies stop because a sick old woman kills herself? Whose life will be changed, and how? I go back to Florence, as so often. If Florence were passing by, with Hope at her side and Beauty on her back, would she be impressed by the spectacle? Would she even spare it a glance? A juggler, a clown, an entertainer, Florence would think: not a serious person. And stride on.

What would count in Florence 's eyes as a serious death? What would win her approval? Answer: a death that crowns a life of honourable labour; or else that comes of itself, irresistible, unannounced, like a clap of thunder, like a bullet between the eyes.

Florence is the judge. Behind the glasses her eyes are still, measuring all. A stillness she has already passed on to her daughters. The court belongs to Florence; it is I who pass under review. If the life I live is an examined life, it is because for ten years I have been under examination in the court of Florence.

'Have you got Dettol?'

His voice startled me as I sat in the kitchen writing. His, the boy's.

'Go upstairs. Look in the bathroom, the door on the right. Look in the cupboard under the basin.'

There were splashing noises, then he came down again. The bandage was off; with surprise I noticed that the stitches were still in.

'Didn't they take out the stitches?'

He shook his head.

'But when did you leave the hospital?'

'Yesterday. The day before yesterday.'

Why the need to lie?

'Why didn't you stay and let them take care of you?'

No response.

'You must keep that cut covered, otherwise it will get infected and leave you with a scar.' With a mark Eke a whiplash across his forehead for the rest of his life. A memento.

Who is he to me that I should nag him? Yet I held closed his open flesh, staunched the flow of his blood. How persistent the impulse to mother! As a hen that loses its chicks will take in a duckling, oblivious of the yellow fur, the flat beak, and teach it to take sand-baths, peck at worms.

I shook out the red tablecloth and began to cut it. 'I don't have any bandage in the house,' I said, 'but this is quite clean, if you don't mind red.' Around his head I wound a strip twice and knotted it behind. 'You must go to a doctor soon, or a clinic, to have the stitches taken out. You can't leave them in.'

His neck stiff as a poker. A smell coming from him, the smell that must have set the dog off: nervousness, fear.

'My head is not sore,' he said, clearing his throat, 'but my arm' – he moved, his shoulder gingerly – 'I must rest my arm.'

'Tell me, are you running away from someone?'

He was silent.

'I want to speak to you seriously,' I said. 'You are too young for this kind of thing. I told Bheki so and I tell you again. You must listen to me. I am an old person, I know what I am talking about. You are still children. You are throwing away your lives before you know what life can be. What are you – fifteen years old? Fifteen is too young to die. Eighteen is too young. Twenty-one is too young. '

He got up, brushing the red band with his fingertips. A favour. In the age of chivalry men hacked other men to death with women's favours fluttering on their helmets. A waste of breath to preach prudence to this boy. The instinct for battle too strong in him, driving him on. Battle: nature's way ' of liquidating the weak and providing mates for the strong. Return covered in glory and you shall have your desire. Gore and glory, death and sex. And I, an old woman, crone of death, tying a favour around his head!

'Where is Bheki?' he said.

I searched his face. Had he not understood what I told him? Had he forgotten? 'Sit down,' I said.

He sat.

I leaned across the table. 'Bheki is in the ground,' 1 said. 'He is in a box in a hole with earth heaped on top of him. He is never going to leave that hole. Never, never, never. Understand: this is not a game like football, where after you fall down you get up and go on playing. The men you are playing against don't say to each other, 'That one is just a child, let us shoot a child's bullet at him, a play bullet.' They don't think of you as a child at all. They think of you as the enemy and they hate you quite as much as you hate them. They will have no qualms about shooting you: on the contrary, they will smile with pleasure when you fall and make another notch on their gunstocks.'

He stared back at me as if I were striking him in the face, blow after blow. But, jaw set, lips clenched, he refused to wince. Over his eyes that smoky film.

'You think their discipline is poor,' I said. 'You are wrong. Their discipline is very good. What holds them back from exterminating every male child, every last one of you, is not compassion or fellow-feeling. It is discipline, nothing else: orders from above, that can change any day. Compassion is flown out of the window. This is war. Listen to what I am saying! I know what I am talking about. You think I am trying to lure you out of the struggle. Well, that is true. That is what I am doing. I say: Wait, you are too young.'

He shifted restlessly. Talk, talk! Talk had weighed down the generation of his grandparents and the generation of his parents. Lies, promises, blandishments, threats: they had walked stooped under the weight of all the talk. Not he. He threw off talk. Death to talk!

'You say it is time to fight,' I said. 'You say it is time to win or lose. Let me tell you something about that win or lose. Let me tell you something about that or. Listen to me.

'You know I am sick. Do you know what is wrong with me? I have cancer. I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life. That is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself.

'You say, 'What is the point of consuming yourself in shame and loathing? I don't want to listen to the story of how you feel, it is just another story, why don't you do something?' And when you say that, I say, 'Yes.' I say, 'Yes.' I say, 'Yes.'

'There is nothing I can reply but 'Yes' when you put that question, to me. But let me tell you what it is like to utter that 'Yes.' It is like being on trial for your life and being allowed only two words, Yes and No. Whenever you take a breath to speak out, you are warned by the judges: 'Yes or No: no speeches.' 'Yes,' you say. Yet all the time you feel other words stirring inside you like life in the womb. Not like 'a 'child kicking, not yet, but like the very beginnings, like the deep-down stirring of knowledge a woman has when she is pregnant.

'There is not only death inside me. There is life too. The death is strong, the life is weak. But my duty is to the life. I must keep it alive. I must.

'You do not believe in words. You think only blows are real, blows and bullets. But listen to me: can't you hear that the words I speak are real? Listen! They may only be air but they come from my heart, from my womb. They are not Yes, they are not No. What is living inside me is something else, another word. And I am fighting for it, in my manner, fighting for it not to be stifled. I am like one of those Chinese mothers who know that their child will be taken away from them, if it is a daughter, and done away with, because the need, the family's need, the village's need, is for sons with strong arms. They know that after the birth someone will come into the room, someone whose face will be hidden, who will take the child, from the midwife's arms and, if the sex is wrong, turn his back on them, out of delicacy, and stifle it just like that, pinching the little nose to, holding the jaw shut. A minute and all is done.

'Grieve if you like, the mother is told afterwards: grief is only natural. But do not ask: What is this thing called a son? What is this thing called a daughter, that it must die?

'Do not misunderstand me. You are a son, somebody's son. I am not against sons. But have you ever seen a newborn baby? Let me tell you, you would find it hard to tell the difference between boy and girl. Every baby has the same puffy-looking fold between the legs. The spout, the tendril that is said to mark out the boy is no great thing, really. Very little to make the difference between life and death. Yet everything else, everything indefinite, everything that gives when you press it, is condemned unheard, I am arguing for that unheard.

'You are tired of listening to old people, I can see. You are itching to be a man and do a man's things. You are tired of getting ready for life. It is time for life itself, you think. What an error you are making! Life is not following a stick, a pole, a flagstaff, a gun, and seeing where it will take you. Life is not around the corner. You are already in the midst of life.'

The telephone rang.

'It's all right, I am not going to answer it,' I said.

In silence we waited for the ringing to stop.

'I don't know your name,' I said.

'John.'

John: a nom de guerre if ever I heard one.

'What are your plans?'

He looked uncomprehending.

'What do you plan, to do? Do you want to stay here?'

'I must go home.'

'Where is home?'

He stared back at me doggedly, too tired to think up another lie. 'Poor child,' I whispered.

I did not mean to spy. But I was wearing slippers, the door to Florence 's room was open, his back was to me. He was sitting on the bed, intent on some object he had in his hand. When he heard me he gave a start and thrust it beneath the bedclothes.

'What is it you have there?' I asked.

'It is nothing,' he said, giving me one of his forced stares.

I would not have pressed him had I not noticed that a length of skirting-board had been prised from the wall and lay on the floor, revealing unplastered brickwork.

'What are you up to?' I said. 'Why are you pulling the room to pieces?'

He was silent.

'Show me what you are hiding.'

He shook his head.

I peered at the wall. There was a gap in the brickwork where a ventilator had been let in; through the gap one could reach under the floorboards.

'Are you putting things under the floor?'

'I am not doing anything. '

I dialled the number Florence had left. A child answered. 'Can I speak to Mrs Mkubukeli,' I said. Silence. 'Mrs Mkubukeli. Florence.'

Murmurs, then, a woman's voice: 'Who do you want to speak to?'

'Mrs Mkubukeli. Florence.'

'She is not here.'

'This is Mrs Curren,' I said, 'Mrs Mkubukeli used to work for me. I am phoning about her son's friend, the boy who calls himself John, I don't know his real name. It is important. If Florence is not there, can I speak to Mr Thabane?'

Again a long silence. Then a man's voice: 'Yes, this is Thabane.'

'This is Mrs Curren. You remember, we met. I am phoning about Bheki's friend, from his school. Perhaps you don't know, but he has been in hospital.'

'I know.'

'Now he has left the hospital, or run away, and come here. I have reason to believe he has a weapon of some kind, I don't know what exactly, which he and Bheki must have hidden in Florence 's room. I think that is why he has come back.'

'Yes,' he said flatly.

'Mr Thabane, I am not asking you to assert authority over the boy. But he is not well. He was quite badly injured. And I think he is in an emotionally disturbed state. I don't know how to get in touch with his family, I don't even know whether he has family in Cape Town. He won't tell me. All I am asking is that someone should come and talk to him, someone he trusts, and take him away before something happens to him.'

'He is in an emotionally disturbed state. What do you mean?'

'I mean he needs help. I mean he may not be responsible for his actions. I mean he has had a blow to the head. I mean I cannot take care of him, it is beyond me. Someone must come.'

'I will see.'

'No, that is not good enough. I want an undertaking.'

'I will ask someone to fetch him. But I cannot tell you when.'

'Today?'

'I cannot say today. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. I will see.'

'Mr Thabane, let me make one thing clear to you. I am not trying to prescribe to this boy or to anyone else what he should do with his life. He is old enough and self-willed enough to do what he will do. But as for this killing, this bloodletting in the name of comradeship, I detest it with all my heart and soul. I think it is barbarous. That is what I want to say.'

'This is not a good line, Mrs Curren. Your voice is very tiny, very tiny and very far away. I hope you can hear me.'

'I can hear you. '

'Good. Then let me say, Mrs Curren, I don't think you understand very much about comradeship.'

'I understand enough, thank, you.'

'No, you don't,' he said, quite certain of himself. 'When you are body and soul in the struggle as these young people are, when you are prepared to lay down your lives for each other without question, then a bond grows up that is stronger than any bond you will know again. That is comradeship. I see it every day with my own eyes. My generation has nothing that can compare. That is why we must stand back for them, for the youth. We stand back but we stand behind them. That is what you cannot understand, because you are too far away.'

'I am far away, certainly,' I said, 'far away and tiny. Nevertheless, I fear I know comradeship all too well. The Germans had comradeship, and the Japanese, and the Spartans. Shaka's impis too, I am sure. Comradeship is nothing but a mystique of death, of killing and dying, masquerading as what you call a bond (a bond of what? Love? I doubt it.). I have no sympathy with this comradeship. You are wrong, you and Florence and everyone else, to be taken in by it and, worse, to encourage it in children. It is just another of those icy, exclusive, death-driven male constructions. That is my opinion.'

More passed between us, but I won't repeat it. We exchanged opinions. We agreed to differ.

The afternoon dragged on. No one came to fetch the boy. I lay in bed, groggy with drugs, a cushion under my back, trying with one small adjustment after another to ease the pain, longing for sleep, dreading the dream of Borodino.

The air thickened, it began to rain, From the blocked gutter came a steady drip. The smell of cat urine wafted in from the carpet on the landing. A tomb, I thought: a late bourgeois tomb. My head turned this way and that. Grey hair on the pillow, unwashed, lank. And in Florence 's room, in the growing dark, the boy, lying on his back with the bomb or whatever it is in 'his hand, his eyes wide open, not veiled now but clear: thinking, more than, thinking, envisioning. Envisioning the moment of glory when he will arise, fully himself at last, erect, powerful, transfigured. When the fiery flower will unfold, when the pillar of smoke will rise. The bomb on his chest like a talisman: as Christopher Columbus lay in the dark of his cabin, holding the compass to his chest, the mystic instrument that would guide him to the Indies, the Isles of the Blest. Troops of maidens with bared breasts singing to him, opening their arms, as he wades to them through the shallows holding before him the needle that never wavers, that points forever in one direction, to the future.

Poor' child! Poor child! From somewhere tears sprang and blurred my sight. Poor John, who in the old days would have been destined to be a garden boy and eat bread and jam for lunch at the back door and drink out of a tin, battling now for all the insulted and injured, the trampled, the ridiculed, for all the garden boys of South Africa!

In the cold early morning I heard the gate to the courtyard being tried. Vercueil, I thought: Vercueil is back. Then the doorbell rang, once, twice, long rings, peremptory, impatient, and I knew it was not Vercueil.

It takes me minutes nowadays to get downstairs, particularly if I am befuddled by the pills. While I crept down in the half-dark they went on ringing the bell, rapping at the door. 'I am coming!' I called as loudly as I could. But I was too slow. I heard the courtyard gate swing open. There was a burst of knocking at the kitchen door, and voices speaking Afrikaans. Then, as flat and unremarkable as one stone striking another, came the sound of a shot.

A silence fell in which I clearly heard the tinkle of breaking glass. 'Wait!' I called, and ran, truly ran – I did not know I had it in me – to the kitchen door. 'Wait!' I called, slapping at the pane, fumbling with the bolts and chains – 'Don't do anything!'

There was someone in a blue overcoat standing on the veranda with his back to me. Though he must have heard me, he did not turn.

I drew the last bolt, flung the door open, appeared among them. I had forgotten my gown, my feet were bare, I stood there in my white nightdress like, for all I know, a body risen from the dead. 'Wait!' I said. 'Don't do anything yet, he is just a child!'

There were three of them. Two were in uniform. The third, wearing a pullover with reindeer running in a band across his chest, held a pistol pointing downward. 'Give me a chance to talk to him,' I said, splashing through the night's puddles. They stared in astonishment but did not try to stop me.

The window of Florence 's room was shattered. The room itself was in darkness; but, peering through the hole, I could make out a figure crouched beside the bed at the far end.

'Open the door, my boy,' I said. 'I won't let them hurt you, I promise.'

It was a lie. He was lost, I had no power to save him. Yet something went out from me to 'him. I ached to embrace him, to protect him.

One of the policemen appeared beside me, pressed against the wall. 'Tell him to come out,' he said. I turned on him in a fury. 'Go away!' I screamed, and fell into a fit of coughing.

The sun was coming up, rosy, in a sky full of drifting cloud.

'John!' I called through the coughing. 'Come out! I will not let them do anything to you.'

Now the man in the pullover was at my side. 'Tell him to pass out his weapons,' he said in a low voice.

'What weapons?'

'He has a pistol, I don't know what else. Tell him to pass everything out.'

'First promise you will not hurt him.'

His fingers closed on my arm. I resisted, but he was too strong. 'You are going to catch pneumonia out here,' he said. Something descended on me from behind: a coat, an overcoat, one of the policemen's overcoats. 'Neem haar binne,' he murmured. They guided me back to the kitchen and closed the door on me.

I sat down, stood up again. The coat stank of cigarette smoke. I dropped it on the floor and opened the door. My feet were blue with cold. 'John!' I called. The three men were huddled over a radio. The one who had given me his coat turned with an exasperated air. 'Lady, it is dangerous out here,' he said. He bundled, me indoors again, then could not find the key to lock the door,

'He is just a child,' I said.

'Let us do our work, lady,' he replied.

'I am watching you,' I said: 'I am watching everything you do. I tell you, he is just a child!'

He drew a breath as though about to respond, then let it out in a sigh and waited for me to talk myself out. A young man, solid, raw-boned. Son to someone, cousin to many. Many cousins, many aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, standing about him, behind him, above him like a chorus, guiding, admonishing.

What could I say? What did we have in common to make intercourse possible, except that he was here to defend me, to defend my interests, in the wider sense?

'Ek staan nie aan jou kant nie,' I said. 'Ek staan aan die temkant.' I stand on the other side. But on the other bank too, the other bank of the river. On the far bank, looking back.

He turned, inspecting the stove, the sink, the racks, occupying die ou dame while his friends did their business outside. All in a day's work.

'That's all,' I said. 'I'm finished. I wasn't talking to you anyway.'

To whom then? To you: always to you. How I live, how I lived: my story.

The doorbell rang. More men, men in boots and caps and camouflage uniforms, tramping through the house. They clustered at the kitchen window. 'Hy sit daar in die buitekamer,' explained the policeman, pointing to Florence 's room, 'Daar's net die een deur en die een venster.'

'Nee, dan het ons horn,' said one of the newcomers.

'I warn you, I'm watching everything you do,' I said.

He turned to me. 'Do you know this boy?' he said.

'Yes, I know him.'

'Did you know he had arms?'

I shrugged. 'God save the unarmed in these days.'

Someone else came in, a young woman in uniform with a crisp, clean air about her. 'Is dit die dame die?' she said; and then, to me: 'We are going to clear the house for a little while, till this business is over. Is there anywhere you, would like to go, friends or relatives?'

'I am not leaving. This is my house.'

Her friendliness, her concern did not waver. 'I know,' she said, 'but it's too dangerous to stay, For just a little while we must ask you to leave.'

The men at the window had stopped talking now: they were impatient for me to be gone. 'Bel die ambulans,' said one of them. 'Ag, sy kan sommer by die stasie wag,' said the woman. She turned to me. 'Come now, Mrs… ' She waited for me to supply the name. I did not. 'A nice warm cup of tea,' she offered.

'I am not going.'

They paid my words no more attention than they would a child's. 'Gaan had 'n kombers,' said the man – 'sy's amper biou pan die koue.'

The woman went upstairs and came back with the quilt from my bed. She wrapped it around me, gave me a hug, then helped me into my slippers, No sign of disgust at my legs, my feet. A good girl, reared to make someone a good wife.

'Are there are any pills or medicines or anything else you want to take along?' she asked.

'I'm not leaving,' I repeated, gripping my chair.

Murmured words passed between her and the men. Without warning I was lifted, from behind, under the arms. The woman took my legs. Like a carpet they carried me to the front door; Pain racked my back. 'Put me down!' I cried,

'In a minute,' said the woman, soothingly,

'I have cancer!' I screamed – 'Put me down!'

Cancer! What a pleasure to fling the word at them! It stopped them in their tracks like a knife. 'Sit haar neer, dalk kom haar iets oor,' said the man holding me – 'Ek het mos gese jy moet die ambulans bel.' Gingerly they laid me down on the sofa.

'Where is the pain?' asked the woman, frowning,

'In my heart,' I said, She looked puzzled. 'I have cancer of the heart.' Then she understood; she shook her head as if shaking off flies.

'Does it pain you to be carried?'

'It pains me all the time,' I said.

She caught the eye of the man behind me; something passed between them so amusing that she could not keep back a smile.

'I caught it by drinking from the cup of bitterness,' I plunged on. What did it matter if they thought me dotty? 'You will probably catch it too one day. It is hard to escape.'

There was a crash of breaking glass. Both of them rushed from the room; I got up and limped behind.

Nothing had changed except that a second windowpane was gone, The courtyard itself was empty; the policemen, half a dozen of them now, were crouching on the veranda, guns at the ready.

'Weg!' shouted one of them furiously, 'Kry haar weg!'

The woman bundled me indoors. As she closed the door there was a curt explosion, a fusillade of shots, then a long stunned silence, then, low talk and, from somewhere, the sound of Vercueil's dog yapping.

I tried to pull open the door, but the woman, held me tight,

'If you have hurt him. I will never forgive you,'1 said.

'It's all right, we'll phone again for the ambulance,' she said, trying to soothe me.

But the ambulance was already there, drawn up on the sidewalk. Scores of people were gathering excitedly from all directions, neighbours, passers-by, young and old, black and white; from the balconies of the flats people stared down. By the tame the policewoman and I emerged from the front door they were wheeling the body, covered in a blanket, down the driveway, and loading it aboard.

I made to climb into the ambulance after it; one of the attendants even took my arm to help me in; but a policeman intervened. 'Wait, we'll send another ambulance for her,' he said,

'I don't want another ambulance,' I said. He put on a kindly, nonplussed look. 'I want to go with him,' I said, and made another attempt to climb in. The quilt fell to my feet.

He shook his head, 'No,' he said. He gestured and the attendant closed the doors.

'God forgive us!' I breathed. With the quilt clasped, around me I began to walk down Schoonder Street, away from the crowd. I had almost reached the corner when the policewoman came trotting after me. 'You must come home now!' she ordered. 'It's not my home any more,' I replied in a, fury, and kept walking. She took my arm; I shook myself free. 'Sy's van haar kop af,' she remarked to no one in particular, and gave up.

In Buitenkant Street, under the flyover, I sat down to rest. A steady stream of cars flowed past heading for the city. No one spared me a glance. With my wild hair and pink quilt I might be a spectacle on Schoonder Street; here, amid the rubble and filth, I was just part of the urban shadowland.

A man and woman passed on foot on the other side of the street. Did I recognise the woman? Was it the one Vercueil had brought to the house, or did all the women who hung around the Avalon Hotel and Solly Kramer's Liquor Store have those wasted, spidery legs? The man, carrying a knotted plastic bag over his shoulder, was not Vercueil.

I wrapped myself tighter in the quilt and lay down. Through my bones I could feel the rumble of traffic on the flyover. The pills were in the house, the house in other hands. Could I survive without the pills? No. But did I want: to survive? I was beginning to feel the indifferent peace of an old animal that, sensing its time is near, creeps, cold and sluggish, into the hole in the ground where everything will contract to the slow thudding of a heart. Behind a concrete pillar, in a place where the sun had not shone for thirty years, I curled up on my good side, listening to the beat of the pain that might as well have been the beat of my pulse.

I must have slept. Time must have passed. When I opened my eyes there was a child kneeling beside me, feeling inside the folds of the quilt. His hand crept over my body. 'There is nothing for you,' I tried to say, but my teeth were loose. Ten years old at most, with a shaven skull and bare feet and a hard look. Behind him two companions, even younger. I slipped out the teeth. 'Leave me alone,' I said: 'I am sick, you will get sick from me.'

Slowly they withdrew and, like crows, stood waiting.

I had to empty my bladder. Yielding, I urinated where I lay. Thank God for the cold, I thought, thank God for the numbness: all things work together toward an easy birth.

The boys came closer again. I awaited the prying of their hands, not caring. The roar of wheels lulled me; like a grub in a hive, I was absorbed into the hum of the spinning world. The air dense with noise. Thousands of wings passing and repassing without touching. How was there space for them all? How is there space in the skies for the souls of all the departed? Because, says Marcus Aurelius, they fuse one with another: they burn and fuse and so are returned to the great cycle.

Death after death. Bee-ash.

The flap of the quilt was drawn back. I felt light on my eyelids, coldness too on my cheeks where the tears had run.

Something pressed between my lips, was forced between my gums. I gagged and pulled away. All three children were clustered over me now in the gloom; there may have been others too, behind them. What were they doing? I tried to push the hand away but it pressed all the harder. An ugly noise came from my throat, a dry rasp like wood splitting. The hand withdrew. 'Don't -' I said; but my palate was sore, it was hard to form words.

What did I want to say? Don't do that!? Don't you see I have nothing?? Don't you have any mercy?? What nonsense. Why should there be mercy in the world? I thought of beetles, those big black beetles with the humped backs, dying, waving their legs feebly, and ants pouring over them, gnawing at the soft places, the joints, the eyes, tearing away the beetle-flesh.

It was a stick, nothing more, a stick a few inches long that he had forced into my mouth. I could taste the grains of dirt it left behind.

With the tip of the stick he lifted my upper lip. I pulled back and tried to spit. Impassively he stood up. With a bare foot he kicked, and a little rain of dust and pebbles struck my face.

A car passed, outlining the children in its headlights. They began to move off down Buitenkant Street. Darkness returned.

Did these things really happen? Yes, these things happened. There is no more to be said about it. They happened a stone's throw from Breda Street and Schoonder Street and Vrede Street, where a century ago the patricians of Cape Town gave orders that there be erected spacious homes for themselves and their descendants in perpetuity, foreseeing nothing of the day when, in their shadows, the chickens would come home to roost.

There was a fog in my head, a grey confusion. I shivered; paroxysms of yawning passed over me. For a while I was nowhere.

Then something was sniffing at my face: a dog. I tried to ward it off but it found a way past my fingers. So I yielded, thinking, there are worse things than a dog's wet nose, its eager breath. I let it lick my face, lick my lips, lick up the salt of my tears. Kisses, if one wanted to look at them that way.

Someone was with the dog. Did I recognize the smell? Was it Vereueil, or did all street-wanderers smell of mouldering leaves, of underwear rotting in the ash-heap? 'Mr Vereueil?' I croaked, and the dog whined with excitement, giving a great sneeze straight into my face.

A match flared. Yes, it was Vercueil, hat and all. 'Who put you here?' he asked. 'Myself,' I said, past the raw place on my palate. The match died. Tears came again, which the dog eagerly consumed.

With his high shoulderblades and his chest narrow as a gull's, I would not have guessed that Vereueil could be so strong. But he lifted me, wet patch and all, and carried me. I thought: forty years since I was last carried by a man. The misfortune of a tall woman. Will this be how the story ends: with being carried in strong arms across the sands, through the shallows, past the breakers, into the darker depths?

We were away from the flyover, in blessed stillness. How much more bearable everything was suddenly becoming! Where was the pain? Was the pain in a better humour too? 'Don't go back to Schoonder Street,' I ordered.

We passed under a streetlight. I saw the strain in the muscles of his neck, heard his breath coming fast. 'Put me down for a minute,' I said. He put me down and rested. When would the time come when the jacket fell away and great wings sprouted from his shoulders?

Up Buitenkant Street he bore me, across Vrede Street, street of peace, and, treading more slowly, groping before each step, into a dark wooded space. Through branches I glimpsed the stars.

He set me down.

'I am so happy to see you,' I said, the words coming from my heart, heartfelt. And then: 'I was attacked by some children before you came. Attacked or violated or explored, I don't know which. That is why I talk so strangely. They pushed a stick into my mouth, I still don't understand why. What pleasure could it have given them?'

'They wanted your gold teeth,' he said. 'They get money for gold from the pawnshops.'

'Gold teeth? How strange. I haven't any gold teeth. I took my teeth out anyway. Here they are.'

From somewhere in the dark he fetched, cardboard, a carton box folded flat. He spread it and helped me to Me down. Then without haste, without ceremony, he lay down too with his back to me. The dog settled between our legs.

'Do you want some of the quilt?' I said.

'I'm OK.'

Time passed.

'I'm sorry, but I'm terribly thirsty,' I whispered. 'Is there no water here?'

He got up and came back with a bottle. I smelled it: sweet wine, the bottle half full. 'It's all I've got,' he said. I drank it down. It did nothing for my thirst, but in the sky the stars began to swim. Everything grew remote: the smell of damp earth, the cold, the man beside me, my own body. Like a crab after a long day, tired, folding its claws, even the pain went to sleep. I swooped back into darkness.

When I awoke he had turned and flung an arm across my neck. I could have freed myself, but preferred not to disturb him. So while by slow degrees the new day broke, I lay face to face with him, not stirring. His eyes opened once, alert, like an animal's. 'I am not gone,' I murmured. The eyes closed.

The thought came: Whom, of all beings on earth, do I know best at this hour? Him. Every hair of his beard, every crease of his forehead known to me. Him, not you. Because he is here, beside me, now.

Forgive me. Time is short, I must trust my heart and tell the truth. Sightless, ignorant, I follow where the truth takes me.

'Are you awake?' I murmured.

'Yes.'

'Both those boys are dead now,' I said. 'They have killed them both. Did you know?'

'I know.'

'You know what happened at the house?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mind if I talk?'

'Talk.'

'Let me tell you: I met Florence 's brother the day Bheki died – brother or cousin or whatever. An educated man. I told him how I wished Bheki had never got involved in -what shall I call it? – the struggle. 'He is just a child,' I said: 'He isn't ready. But for that friend of his, he would never have been drawn in.'

'Later I spoke to him again on the telephone. I told him frankly what I thought of the comradeship for which both those children have now died. A mystique of death, I called it. I blamed people like Florence and him for doing nothing to discourage it.

'He heard me out civilly. I was entitled to my opinions, he said. I did not change his mind.

'But now I ask myself: What right have I to opinions about comradeship or anything else? What right have I to wish Bheki and his friend had kept out of trouble? To have opinions in a vacuum, opinions that touch no one, is, it seems to me, nothing. Opinions must be heard by others, heard and weighed, not merely listened to out of politeness. And to be weighed they must have weight. Mr Thabane does not weigh what I say. It has no weight to him. Florence does not even hear me. To Florence what goes on in my head is a matter of complete indifference, I know that.'

Vercueil got up, went behind a tree, urinated. Then, to my surprise, he came and lay down again. The dog snuggled against him, its nose in his crotch. With my tongue I probed the sore place in my mouth, tasting the blood.

'I have not changed my mind,' I said. 'I still detest these calls for sacrifice that end with, young men bleeding to death in the mud. War is never what it pretends to be. Scratch the surface and you find, invariably, old men sending young men to their death in the name of some abstraction or other. Despite what Mr Thabane says (I do not blame him, the future comes disguised, if it came naked we would be petrified by what we saw), it remains a war of the old upon the young. Freedom or death! shout Bheki and his friends. Whose words? Not their own. Freedom or death!, I have no doubt, those two little girls are rehearsing in their sleep. No! I want to say: Save yourselves!

'Whose is the true voice of wisdom, Mr Vercueil? Mine, I believe. Yet who am. I, who am I to have a voice at all? How can I honourably urge them to turn their back on that call? What am I entitled to do but sit in a corner with my mouth shut? I have no voice; I lost it long ago; perhaps I have never had one. I have no voice, and that is that. The rest should be silence. But with this – whatever it is – this voice that is no voice, I go on. On and on.'

Was Vercueil smiling? His face was hidden. In a toothless whisper sticky with sibilants I went on.

'A crime was committed long ago. How long ago? I do not know. But longer ago than 1916, certainly. So long ago that I was born into it. It is part of my inheritance. It is part of me, I am part of it.

'Like every crime it had its price. That price, I used to think, would have to be paid in shame: in a life of shame and a shameful death, unlamented, in an obscure corner. I accepted that. I did not try to set myself apart. Though it was not a crime I asked to be committed, it was committed in my name.

I raged at times against the men who did the dirty work -you have seen it, a shameful raging as stupid as what it raged against – but I accepted too that, in a sense, they lived inside me. So that when in my rages I wished them dead, I wished death on myself too. In the name of honour. Of an honourable notion of honour. Honestamors.

'I have no idea what;freedom is, Mr Vercueil. I am sure Bheki and his friend had no idea either. Perhaps freedom is always and only what is unimaginable. Nevertheless, we know unfreedom when we see it – don't we? Bheki was not free, and knew it. You are not free, at least not on this earth, nor am I. I was born a slave and I will most certainly die a slave. A life in fetters, a death in fetters: that is part of the price, not to He quibbled at, not to be whined about.

'What I did not know, what I did not know - listen to me now! – was that the price was even higher. I had miscalculated. Where did the mistake come in? It had something to do with honour, with the notion I clung to through thick and thin, from my education, from my reading, that in his soul the honourable man can suffer no harm. I strove always for honour, for a private honour, using shame as my guide. As long as I was ashamed I knew I had not wandered into dishonour. That was the use of shame: as a touchstone, something that would always be there, something you could come back to like a blind person, to touch, to tell you where you were. For the rest: I kept: a decent distance from my shame. I did not wallow in it. Shame never became a shameful pleasure; it never ceased to gnaw me. I was not proud of it, I was ashamed of it. My shame, my own. Ashes in my mouth day after day after day, which never ceased to taste like ashes.

'It is a confession I am making here, this morning, Mr Vercueil,' I said, 'as full a confession as I know how. I withhold no secrets. I have been a good person, I freely confess to it. I am a good person still. What times these are when to be a good person is not enough!

'What I had not calculated on was that more might be called for than to be good. For there are plenty of good people in this country. We are two a penny, we good and nearly good. What the times call for is quite different from goodness. The times call for heroism. A word that, as I speak it, sounds foreign to my lips. I doubt that I have ever used it before, even in a lecture. Why not? Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps out of shame. As one drops one's gaze before a naked man. I would have used the words heroic status instead, I think, in a lecture. The hero with his heroic status. The hero, that antique naked figure.'

A deep groan came from Vercueil's throat. I craned over, but all I could see was the stubble on his cheek and a hairy ear. 'Mr Vercueil!' I whispered. He did not stir. Asleep? Pretending to sleep? How much had passed him by unheard? Had he heard about goodness and heroism? About honour and shame? Is a true confession still true if it is not heard? Do you hear me, 'or have I put you to sleep too?

I went behind a bush. Birds were singing all around. Who would have thought there was such birdlife in the suburbs!

It was like Arcady. No wonder Vercueil and his friends lived out of doors. What is a roof good for but to keep off the rain?

Vercueil and his comrades.

I lay down beside him again, my feet cold and muddy. It was quite light now. On our flattened-out box in the vacant lot we must have been visible to every passer-by. That is how we must be in the eyes of the angels: people living in houses of glass, our every act naked. Our hearts naked too, beating in chests of glass. Birdsong poured down like rain.

'I feel so much better this morning,' I said. 'But perhaps we should go back now. Feeling better is usually a warning that I am going to feel worse.'

Vercueil sat up, took off his hat, scratched his scalp with long, dirty nails. The dog came trotting up from somewhere and fussed around us. Vercueil folded the cardboard and hid it in the bushes.

'Do you know I have had a breast removed?' I said out of the blue.

He fidgeted, looked uncomfortable.

'1 regret it now, of course. Regret that I am marked. It becomes like trying to sell, a piece of furniture with a scratch or a burn mark. It's still a perfectly good chair, you say, but people aren't interested. People don't like marked objects. I am talking about my life. It may not be perfectly good, but it is still a life, not a half-life. I thought I would sell it or spend it to save my honour. But who will accept it in its present state? It is like trying to spend a drachma. A perfectly good coin somewhere else, but not here. Suspiciously marked,

'But I haven't quite given up yet. I am still casting around for something to do with it. Do you have any suggestions?'

Vercueil put on his hat, tugging it down firmly fore and aft.

'I would love to buy you a new hat,' I said.

He smiled. I took his arm; slowly we set off along Vrede Street.

'Let me tell you the dream I had,' I said. 'The man in my dream didn't have a hat, but I think it was you. He had long oily hair brushed straight back from his forehead.' Long and oily; dirty too, hanging down at the back in ugly rat's-tails; but I did not mention that.

'We were at the seaside. He was teaching me to swim. He held me by the hands and drew me out while I lay flat and kicked. I was wearing a knitted costume, the kind we had in the old days, navy blue. I was a child. But then in dreams we are always children.

'He was drawing me out, backing into the sea, fixing me with his eyes. He had eyes like yours. There were no waves, just a ripple of water coming in, glinting with light. In fact the water was oily too. Where his body broke the surface the oil clung to him with the heavy sheen oil has. I thought to myself: sardine oil: I am the little sardine: he is taking me out into the oil. I wanted to say Turn back, but dared not open my mouth for fear the oil would flood in and fill my lungs. Drowning in oil: I had not the courage for that.'

I paused to let him speak, but he was silent. We turned the corner into Schoonder Street.

'Of course I am not telling you this dream innocently,' I said. 'Retailing a dream is always meant to achieve something. The question is, what?'

'The day I first saw you behind the garage was the day I had the bad news about myself, about my case. It was too much of a coincidence. I wondered whether you were not, if you will excuse the word, an angel come to show me the way. Of course you were not, are not, cannot be – I see that. But that is only half the story, isn't it? We half perceive but we also half create.

'So I have continued to tell myself stories in which you lead, I follow. And if you say not a word, that is, I tell myself, because the angel is wordless. The angel goes before, the woman, follows. His eyes are open, he sees; hers are shut, she is still sunk in the sleep of worldliness. That is why I keep turning to you for guidance, for help.'

The front door was locked but the gate to the courtyard swung open. The broken glass had not been, swept up, the door to Florence 's room hung askew. I cast my gaze down, treading carefully, not ready yet to look into the room, not strong enough.

The kitchen door was unlocked. They had not found the key.

'Come in,' I said to Vercueil.

The house was and was not as it had been. Things in the kitchen were out of place. My umbrella hung where it had never hung before. The sofa had been shifted, exposing an old stain on the carpet. And over all a strange smell: not only cigarette smoke and sweat but something sharp and penetrating that I could not place. They have left their mark on everything, I thought: thorough workers. Then I remembered the file on my desk, the letter, all the pages thus far. That too! I thought: they will have been through that tool Soiled fingers turning the pages, eyes without love going aver the naked words. 'Help me upstairs,' I said to Vercueil.

The file, left open when I last wrote, was closed. The lock of the filing-cabinet was broken. There were gaps in the bookshelves.

The two unused rooms had had their locks forced.

They had been through the cupboard, the chest of drawers.

Nothing left untouched. Like the last visit the burglars paid. The search a mere pretext. The true purpose the touching, the fingering. The spirit malevolent. Like rape: a way of filthying a woman.

I turned to Vercueil, wordless, sick to the stomach.

'There's someone downstairs,' he said.

From the landing we could hear someone talking on the telephone.

The voice stopped. A young man in uniform emerged into the hallway and nodded to us.

'What are you doing in my house?' I called down.

'just checking,' he replied quite cheerfully. 'We didn't want strangers coming in.' He gathered up a cap, a coat, a rifle. Was it the rifle 1 had smelled? 'The detectives will be here at eight,' he said. 'I'll wait outside.' He smiled; he seemed to think he had dome me a service; he seemed to be expecting thanks.

'I must have a bath,' I said to Vercueil.

But I did not have a bath. I closed the bedroom door, took two of the red pills and lay down trembling all over. The trembling got worse till I was shaking like a leaf in a storm. I was cold but the trembling was not from the cold.

A minute at a time, I told myself: do not fall to pieces now: think only of the next minute.

The trembling began to subside.

Man, I thought: the only creature with a part of his existence in the unknown, in the future, like a shadow cast before him. Trying continually to catch up with that moving shadow, to inhabit: the image of his hope. But I, I cannot afford to be man. Must be something smaller, blinder, closer to the ground.

There was a knock and Vercueil came in, followed by the policeman who yesterday had worn the reindeer jersey and now wore a jacket and tie. The trembling began again. He motioned for Vercueil to leave the room. I sat up. 'Don't go, Mr Vercueil,' I said; and to him: 'What right have you to come into my house?'

'We have been worried about you.' He did not seem worried at all. 'Where were you last night?' And then, when I did not reply: 'Are you sure you are all right by yourself, Mrs Curren?'

Though I clenched my fists, the trembling grew worse till it convulsed me. T am not by myself!' I screamed at him: 'You are the one who is by himself!'

He was not taken aback. On the contrary, he seemed to be encouraging me to go on.

Hold yourself together, I thought! They will commit you, they will call you mad and take you away!

'What do you want here?' I asked more quietly.

'I just want to ask a few questions. How did you come across this boy Johannes?'

Johannes: was that his true name? Surely not.

'He was a friend of my domestic's son. A school-friend.'

Out of his pocket he brought a little cassette recorder and set it on the bed beside me.

'And where is your domestic's son?'

'He is dead and buried. Surely you know these things. '

'What happened to him?'

'He was shot out on the Flats.'

'And are there any more of them that you know of?'

'More of whom?'

'More friends. '

'Thousands. Millions, More than, you can count.'

'I mean, more from that cell. Are there any others who have used your premises?'

'No.'

'And do you know how these arms came into their hands?'

'What arms?'

'A pistol. Three detonators.'

'I know nothing about detonators. I don't know what a detonator is. The pistol was mine. '

'Did they take it from you?'

'I lent it to them. Not to them. To the boy, John.'

'You lent him the pistol? Was the pistol yours?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you lend him, the pistol?'

'To defend himself.'

'To defend himself against who, Mrs Curren?'

'To defend himself against attack.'

'And what kind of pistol was it, Mrs Curren? Can you show me the licence for it?'

'I know nothing about kinds of pistol. I have had it for a long time, from before all this fuss about licences.'

'Are you sure you gave it to him.? You know this is a chargeable offence we are talking about.'

The pills were beginning to take effect. The pain in my back grew more distant, my limbs relaxed, the horizon began to expand again.

'Do you really want to go on with this nonsense?' I said. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes. My head was spinning. 'These are dead people we are talking about. There is nothing more you can do to them. They are safe. You have had the execution. Why bother with a trial? Why not just close the case?'

He picked up the recorder, fiddled with it, put it back on the pillow. 'Just checking,' he said.

With a languorous arm I brushed the recorder away. He caught It before it hit the floor.

'You have been through my private papers,' I said. 'You have taken books that belong to me. I want them back. I want everything back. All my things. They are no business of yours.'

'We are not going to eat your books, Mrs Curren. You will get everything back in the end.'

'I don't want things back In the end. I want them, back now. They are mine. They are private. '

He shook his head. 'This is not private, Mrs Curren. You know that. Nothing is private any more.'

The languor was getting to my tongue now. 'Leave me,' I said thickly.

'just a few more questions. Where were you last night?'

'With Mr Vercueil.'

'Is this Mr Vercueil?'

It took too much of an effort to open my eyes. 'Yes,' I murmured.

'Who Is Mr Vercueil?' And then. In quite a different tone: 'Wie is jy?'

'Mr Vercueil takes care of me. Mr Vercueil is my right-hand man. Come here, Mr Vercueil.'

I reached out and found Vercueil's trouser-leg, then his hand, the bad hand with the curled fingers. With the numb, clawlike grip of the old I clung to it.

'In Godsnaam,' said the detective somewhere far away. In God's name: mere fulmination, or a curse on the pair of us? My grip broke, I began to slide away.

A word appeared before me: Thabanchu, Thaba Nchu. I tried to concentrate. Nine letters, anagram for what? With a great effort I placed the b first. Then I was gone.

I awoke thirsty, groggy, full of pain. The clockface stared at me but I could make no sense of the hands. The house was silent with the silence of deserted houses.

Thabanchu: banch? bath? With stupid hands I unwrapped the sheet from around me. Must I have a bath?

But my feet did not take me to the bathroom. Holding to the rail, bent over, groaning, I went: downstairs and dialled the Guguletu number. On and on the phone rang. Then at last someone answered, a child, a girl. 'Is Mr Thabane there?' I asked. 'No.' 'Then can I speak to Mrs Mkubuleki – no, not Mrs Mkubuleki, Mrs Mkubukeli?' 'Mrs Mkubukeli does not live here.' 'But do you know Mrs Mkubukeli?' 'Yes, I know him.' 'Mrs Mkubukeli?' 'Yes,' 'Who are you?' 'I am Lily.' Lee-lee. 'Are you the only one at home?' 'There is my sister too.' 'How old is your sister?' 'She is six.' 'And you – how old are you?' 'Ten.' 'Can you take a message to Mrs Mkubukeli, Lily?' 'Yes.' 'It is about her brother Mr Thabane. She must tell Mr Thabane to be careful. Say it is very important. Mr Thabane must be careful. My name is Mrs Curren. Can you write that down? And this is my number. ' I read out the number, spelled my name. Mrs Curren: nine letters, anagram for what?

Vercueil knocked and came in. 'Do you want something to eat?' he said.

'I am not hungry. But help yourself to anything you can find.'

I wanted to be left alone. But he lingered, eyeing me curiously. I was sitting up in bed, gloves on my hands, the writing-pad on my knees. For half an hour I had sat with the page blank before me.

'I am just: waiting for my hands to warm up,' I said.

But it was not cold fingers that kept me from writing. It was the pills, which I take more of now, and more often.

They are like smoke-flares. I swallow them and they release a fog inside me, a fog of extinction. I cannot take the pills and go on with the writing. So without pain no writing: a new and terrible rule. Except that, when I have taken the pills, nothing is terrible any more, everything is indifferent, everything is the same.

Nevertheless I do write. In the dead of night, with Vercueil asleep downstairs, I take up this letter to tell you one more thing about that 'John,' that sullen boy I never took to. I want to tell you that, despite my dislike of him, he is with me more clearly, more piercingly than Bheki has ever been. He is with me or I am with him: him or the trace of him. It is the middle of the night but it is the grey of his last morning too. I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence 's room too, with its one window and one door and no other way out. Outside the door men are waiting, crouched like hunters, to present the boy with bis death. In his lap he holds the pistol that, for this interval, keeps the hunters at bay, that was his and Bheki's great secret, that was going to make men of them; and beside him I stand or hover. The barrel of the pistol is between his knees; he strokes it up and down. He is listening to the murmur of voices outside, and I listen with him. He is readying himself for the smoke that will, choke his lungs, the kick that will burst the door open, the torrent of fire that will sweep him away. He is readying himself to raise the pistol in that instant: and fire the one shot he will have time to fire into the heart of the light.

His eyes are unblinking, fixed on the door through which he is going to leave the world. His mouth is dry but he is not afraid. His heart: beats steadily like a fist in his chest clenching and unclenching.

His eyes are open and mine, though I write, are shut. My eyes are shut in order to see.

Within this interval there is no time, though his heart beats time. I am here in my room in the night but I am also with him, all the time, as I am with you across the seas, hovering. A hovering time, but not eternity. A time being, a suspension, before the return of the time in which the door bursts open and we face, first he, then I, the great white glare.