I found Vercueil In the woodshed doing something to a shoe by candlelight. 'I am going back to the hospital,' I said: 'Will you come with me?'
The ward Florence had described was at the far end of the old building, reached by going down to the basement, past the kitchens, then up again.
It was true. A man with a shaven skull, thin as a rake, was sitting up in bed, beating his palms on his thighs and chanting In a loud voice. A broad black strap passed around his middle and under the bed. What was he singing? The words belonged to no tongue I knew of. I stood in the doorway unable to enter, fearing that at any moment he would fix me with his gaze, stop singing, raise one of those skeletal black arms and point.
'DTs,' said Vercueil. 'He's got the DTs.'
'No, It's worse than that,' I whispered.
Vercueil took my elbow. I let him lead me in.
There was a long table down the middle of the ward with a jumble of trays on it. Someone was coughing soggily as though his lungs were full of milk. 'In the corner,' said Vercueil.
He did not know who we were, nor did I easily recognize the boy whose blood had stuck my fingers together. His head was bandaged, his face puffy, his left arm strapped against his chest. He wore pale blue hospital pyjamas.
'Don't talk,' I said. 'We have just come to make sure you are all right.'
He opened the swollen lips and closed them again.
'Do you remember me? I am the woman Bheki's mother works for. I was watching this morning: I saw everything that happened. You must get well quickly. I have brought you some fruit.' On the cabinet I placed the fruit: an apple, a pear.
His expression did not change.
I did not like him. I do not like him. I look into my heart and nowhere do I find any trace of feeling for him. As there are people to whom one spontaneously warms, so there are people to whom one Is, from, the first, cold. That is all. This boy is not like Bheki. He has no charm. There is something stupid about him, something deliberately stupid, obstructive, intractable. He is one of those boys whose voices deepen too early, who by the age of twelve have left childhood behind and turned brutal, knowing. A simplified person, simplified in every way: swifter, nimbler, more tireless than real people without doubts or scruples, without humour, ruthless, innocent. While he lay in the street, while I thought he was dying, I did what I could for him. But, to be candid, I would rather I had spent myself on someone else.
I remember a cat I once nursed, an old ginger torn whose jaw was locked shut by an abscess. I took him in when he was too weak to resist, fed him milk through a tube, dosed him with antibiotics. When he got back his strength I set him free, but continued to put out food for him. For a year, on and off, I saw him in the neighbourhood; for a year the food was taken. Then he vanished, for good. In all this time he treated me without compromise as one of the enemy. Even when he was at his weakest his body was hard, tense, resistant under my hand. Around this boy I now felt the same wall of resistance. Though his eyes were open, he did not see; what I said he did not hear.
I turned to Vercueil. 'Shall we go?' I said. And on an impulse – no, more than that, with a conscious effort not to block the stirring of the impulse – I touched the boy's free hand.
It was not a clasp, not a long touch; it was the merest brush, the merest lingering of my fingertips on the back of his hand. But I felt him stiffen, felt an angry electric recoil.
For your mother, who is not here, I said within myself. Aloud I said: 'Be slow to judge.'
Be slow to judge: what did I mean? If I did not know, who else could be expected to? Certainly not: he. Yet in his case, 1 was sure, the incomprehension ran deeper. My words fell off him like dead leaves the moment they were uttered. The words of a woman, therefore negligible; of an old woman, therefore doubly negligible; but above all of a white.
I, a white. When I think of the whites, what do I see? I see a herd of sheep (not a flock: a herd) milling around on a dusty plain under the baking sun. I hear a drumming of hooves, a confusion of sound which resolves itself, when the ear grows attuned, into the same bleating call in a thousand different inflections: 'I!' 'I!' 'I!' And, cruising among them, bumping them aside with their bristling flanks, lumbering, saw-toothed, red-eyed, the savage, unreconstructed old boars grunting 'Death!.' 'Death!' Though it does me no good, I flinch from the white touch as much as he does; would even flinch from the old white woman who pats his hand if she were not I.
I tried again.
'Before I retired,' I said, 'I was a teacher. I taught at the university. '
Vercueil eyed me keenly from the other side of the bed. But I was not talking to him.
'If you had been in my Thucydides class,' I went on, 'you might have learned something about what can happen to our humanity in time of war. Our humanity, that we are 'Born' with, that we are born into.'
There was something smoky about the boy's eyes: the whites without lustre, the pupils flat, dark, like printer's ink. Though he may have been sedated, he knew I was there, knew who I was, knew I was talking to him. He knew and he did not listen, as he had never listened to any of his teachers, but had sat like a stone in the classroom, impervious to words, waiting for the bell to ring, biding his time.
'Thucydides wrote of people who made rules and followed them. Going by rule they killed entire classes of enemies without exception. Most of those who died felt, I am sure, that a terrible mistake was being made, that, whatever the rule was, it could not be meant for them. 'I! -': that was their last word as their throats were cut. A word of protest: I, the exception.
'Were they exceptions? The truth is given time to speak, we would all claim to be exceptions. For each of us there is a case to be made. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt.
'But there are times when there is no time for all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy. There is no time, so we fall back on the rule. And that is a great pity, the greatest pity. That is what you could have learned from Thucydides. It is a great pity when we find ourselves entering upon times like those. We should enter upon them with a sinking heart. They are by no means to be welcomed.'
Quite deliberately he put his good hand under the sheet, in case I should touch it again.
'Good night,' I said. 'I hope you sleep well and feel better in the morning.'
The old man had stopped chanting. His hands flapped loosely on his thighs like dying fish. His eyes were rolled back, there were streaks of spittle on his chin.
The car would not start, and Vercueil had to push.
'That boy is different from Bheki, quite different,' I said, talking too much now, a little out of control. 'I try not to show it, but he makes me nervous. I am sorry Bheki has fallen under his influence. But there are hundreds of thousands like him, I suppose. More than there are like Bheki. The rising generation.'
We got home. Uninvited, he followed me in.
'I have to sleep, I am exhausted,' I said; and then, when he made no move to leave: 'Do you want something to eat?'
I put food in front of him, took my pills, waited.
Holding the loaf of bread, with his bad hand, he cut a slice, buttered, it thickly, cut cheese. His fingernails filthy. Who knows what else he had been touching. And this is the one to whom I speak my heart, whom I trust with last things. Why this crooked path to you?
My mind like a pool, which his finger enters and stirs. Without that finger stillness, stagnation.
'A way of indirection. By indirection I find direction out. A crab's-walk. His dirty fingernail entering me.
'You look grey,' he said.