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Old man Grossman was worse than a nuisance. He was a source of constant anxiety and irritation; he was a menace to himself and to the passing motorists into whose path he would step, to the children in the streets whose games he would break up, sending them flying, to the householders who at night would approach him with clubs in their hands, fearing him a burglar; he was a butt and a jest to the African servants, who would tease him on street corners.

It was impossible to keep him in the house. He would take any opportunity to slip out — a door left open meant that he was on the streets, a window unlatched was a challenge to his agility, a walk in the park was as much a game of hide-and-seek as a walk. The old man’s health was good, physically; he was quite spry, and he could walk far, and he could jump and duck if he had to. And all his physical activity was put to only one purpose: to running away. It was a passion for freedom that the old man might have been said to have, could anyone have seen what joy there could have been for him in wandering aimlessly about the streets, in sitting footsore on pavements, in entering other people’s homes, in stumbling behind advertisement hoardings across undeveloped building plots, in toiling up the stairs of fifteen-story blocks of flats in which he had no business, in being brought home by large young policemen who winked at. Harry Crossman, the old man’s son, as they gently hauled his father out of their flying-squad cars.

“He’s always been like this,” Harry would say, when people asked him about his father. And when they smiled and said, “Always?” Harry would say, “Always. I know what I’m talking about. He’s my father, and I know what he’s like. He gave my mother enough gray hairs before her time. All he knew was to run away.”

Harry’s reward would come when the visitors would say, “Well, at least you’re being as dutiful to him as anyone can be.”

It was a reward that Harry always refused. “Dutiful? What can you do? There’s nothing else you can do.” Harry Grossman knew that there was nothing else he could do. Dutifulness had been his habit of life; it had had to be, having the sort of father he had, and the strain of duty had made him abrupt and begrudging. He even carried his thick, powerful shoulders curved inwards, to keep what he had to himself. He was a thick-set, bunch-faced man, with large bones, and short, jabbing gestures; he was in the prime of life, and he would point at the father from whom he had inherited his strength, and on whom the largeness of bone showed now only as so much extra leanness that the clothing had to cover, and say, “You see him? Do you know what he once did? My poor mother saved enough money to send him from the old country to South Africa; she bought clothes for him, and a ticket, and she sent him to her brother, who was already here. He was going to make enough money to bring me out, and my mother and my brother, all of us. But on the boat from Bremen to London he met some other Jews who were going to South America, and they said to him, ‘Why are you going to South Africa? It’s a wild country, the savages will eat you. Come to South America and you’ll make a fortune.’ So in London he exchanges his ticket. And we don’t hear from him for six months. Six months later he gets a friend to write to my mother asking her please to send him enough money to pay for his ticket back to the old country — he’s dying in the Argentine, the Spaniards are killing him, he says, and he must come home. So my mother borrows from her brother to bring him back again. Instead of a fortune he brought her a new debt, and that was all.”

But Harry was dutiful, how dutiful his friends had reason to see again when they would urge him to try sending the old man to a home for the aged. “No,” Harry would reply, his features moving heavily and reluctantly to a frown, a pout, as he showed how little the suggestion appealed to him. “I don’t like the idea. Maybe one day when he needs medical attention all the time I’ll feel differently about it, but not now, not now. He wouldn’t like it, he’d be unhappy. We’ll look after him as long as we can. It’s a job. It’s something you’ve got to do.”

More eagerly Harry would go back to a recital of the old man’s past. “He couldn’t even pay for his own passage out. I had to pay the loan back. We came out together – my mother wouldn’t let him go by himself again, and I had to pay off her brother who advanced the money for us. I was a boy — what was I? — sixteen, seventeen, but I paid for his passage, and my own, and my mother’s and then my brother’s. It took me a long time, let me tell you. And then my troubles with him weren’t over.” Harry even reproached his father for his myopia; he could clearly enough remember his chagrin when shortly after their arrival in South Africa, after it had become clear that Harry would be able to make his way in the world and be a support to the whole family, the old man — who at that time had not really been so old — had suddenly, almost dramatically, grown so short-sighted that he had been almost blind without the glasses that Harry had had to buy for him. And Harry could remember too how he had then made a practice of losing the glasses or breaking them with the greatest frequency, until it had been made clear to him that he was no longer expected to do any work. “He doesn’t do that any more. When he wants to run away now he sees to it that he’s wearing his glasses. That’s how he’s always been. Sometimes he recognizes me, at other times, when he doesn’t want to, he just doesn’t know who I am.”

What Harry said about his father sometimes failing to recognize him was true. Sometimes the old man would call out to his son, when he would see him at the end of a passage, “Who are you?” Or he would come upon Harry in a room and demand of him, “What do you want in my house?”

“Your house?” Harry would say, when he felt like teasing the old man. “Your house?”

“Out of my house!” the old man would shout back.

“Your house? Do you call this your house?” Harry would reply, smiling at the old man’s fury.

Harry was the only one in the house who talked to the old man, and then he did not so much talk to him, as talk of him to others. Harry’s wife was a dim and silent woman, crowded out by her husband and the large-boned sons like himself that she had borne him, and she would gladly have seen the old man in an old-age home. But her husband had said no, so she put up with the old man, though for herself she could see no possible better end for him than a period of residence in a home for aged Jews which she had once visited, and which had impressed her most favorably with its glass and yellow brick, and noiseless rubber tiles in its corridors, its secluded grassed grounds, and the uniforms worn by the attendants to the establishment. But she put up with the old man; she did not talk to him. The grandchildren had nothing to do with their grandfather — they were busy at school, playing rugby and cricket, they could hardly speak Yiddish, and they were embarrassed by him in front of their friends; and when the grandfather did take any notice of them it was only to call them Boers and goyim and shkotzim in sudden quavering rages which did not disturb them at all.

The house itself was a big single-storied place of brick, with a corrugated iron roof above and a wide stoep all round, Harry Crossman had bought years before, and in the continual re-building the suburb was undergoing it was beginning to look old-fashioned. But it was solid and prosperous, and within doors curiously masculine in appearance, like the house of a widower. The furniture was of the heaviest African woods, dark, and built to last, the passages were lined with bare linoleum, and the few pictures on the walls, big brown and gray mezzotints in heavy frames, had not been looked at for years. The servants were both men, large ignored Zulus who did their work and kept up the brown gleam of the furniture.

It was from this house that old man Grossman tried to escape. He fled through the doors and the windows and out into the wide sunlit streets of the town in Africa, where the blocks of flats were encroaching upon the single-storied houses behind their gardens. And in these streets he wandered.

*  *  *  *  *

It was Johannes, one of the Zulu servants, who suggested a way of dealing with old man Crossman. He brought to the house one afternoon Paulus, whom he described as his “brother.” Harry Grossman knew enough to know that “brother” in this context could mean anything from the son of one’s mother to a friend from a neighboring kraal, but by the speech that Johannes made on Paulus’s behalf he might indeed have been the latter’s brother. Johannes had to speak for Paulus, for Paulus knew no English. Paulus was a “raw boy,” as raw as a boy could possibly come. He was a muscular, mustached and bearded African, with pendulous earlobes showing the slits in which the tribal plugs had once hung; and on his feet he wore sandals the soles of which were cut from old motorcar tires, the thongs from red inner tubing. He wore neither hat nor socks, but he did have a pair of khaki shorts which were too small for him, and a shirt without any buttons. Buttons would in any case have been of no use, for the shirt could never have closed over his chest. He swelled magnificently out of his clothing, and above, there was a head carried well back, so that his beard, which had been trained to grow in two sharp points from his chin, bristled ferociously forward under his melancholy and almost mandarin-like mustache. When he smiled, as he did once or twice during Johannes’s speech, he showed his white, even teeth, but for the most part he stood looking rather shyly to the side of Harry Grossman’s head, with his hands behind his back and his bare knees bent a little forward, as if to show how little he was asserting himself, no matter what his “brother” might have been saying about him.

His expression did not change when Harry said that it seemed hopeless, that Paulus was too raw, and Johannes explained what the baas had just said. He nodded agreement when Johannes explained to him that the baas said that it was a pity that he knew no English. But whenever Harry looked at him, he smiled, not ingratiatingly, but simply smiling above his beard, as though saying, “Try me.” Then he looked grave again as Johannes expatiated on his virtues. Johannes pleaded for his “brother.” He said that the baas knew that he, Johannes, was a good boy. Would he, then, recommend to the baas a boy who was not a good boy too? The baas could see for himself, Johannes said, that Paulus was not one of these town boys, these street loafers; he was a good boy, come straight from the land. He was not a thief or a drinker. He was strong, he was a hard worker, he was clean, and he could be as gentle as a woman. If he, Johannes, were not telling the truth about all these things, then he deserved to be chased away. If Paulus failed in any single respect, then he, Johannes, would voluntarily leave the service of the baas, because he had said untrue things to the bass. But if the baas believed him, and gave Paulus his chance, then he, Johannes, would teach Paulus all the things of the house and the garden, so that Paulus would be useful to the baas in ways other than the particular task for which he was asking the baas to hire him. And, rather daringly, Johannes said that it did not matter so much if Paulus knew no English, because the old baas, the oubaas, knew no English either.

It was as something in the nature of a joke — almost a joke against his father — that Harry Grossman gave Paulus his chance. For Paulus was given his chance. He was given a room in the servants’ quarters in the back yard, into which he brought a tin trunk painted red and black, a roll of blankets, and a guitar with a picture of a cowboy on the back. He was given a houseboy’s outfit of blue denim blouse and shorts, with red piping round the edges, into which he fitted, with his beard and his physique, like a king in exile in some pantomime. He was given his food three times a day, after the white people had eaten, a bar of soap every week, cast-off clothing at odd intervals, and the sum of one pound five shillings per week, five shillings of which he took, the rest being left at his request, with the baas, as savings. He had a free afternoon once a week, and he was allowed to entertain not more than two friends at any one time in his room. And in all the particulars that Johannes had enumerated, Johannes was proved reliable. Paulus was not one of these town boys, those street loafers. He did not steal or drink, he was clean and he was honest and hard-working. And he could be as gentle as a woman.

It took Paulus some time to settle down to his job; he had to conquer not only his own shyness and strangeness in the new house filled with strange people — let alone the city, which, since taking occupation of his room, he had hardly dared to enter — but also the hostility of old man Grossman, who took immediate fright at Paulus and redoubled his efforts to get away from the house upon Paulus’s entry into it. As it happened, the first result of this persistence on the part of the old man was that Paulus was able to get the measure of the job, for he came to it with a willingness of spirit that the old man could not vanquish, but could only teach. Paulus had been given no instructions, he had merely been told to see that the old man did not get himself into trouble, and after a few days of bewilderment Paulus found his way. He simply went along with the old man.

At first he did so cautiously, following the old man at a distance, for he knew the other had no trust in him. But later he was able to follow the old man openly; still later he was able to walk side by side with him, and the old man did not try to escape from him. When old man Grossman went out, Paulus went too, and there was no longer any need for the doors and windows to be watched, or the police to be telephoned. The young bearded Zulu and the old bearded jew from Lithuania walked together in the streets of the town that was strange to them both; together they looked over the fences of the large gardens and into the shining layers of the blocks of flats; together they stood on the pavements of the main arterial roads and watched the cars and trucks rush between the tall buildings; together they walked in the small, sandy parks, and when the old man was tired Paulus saw to it that he sat on a bench and rested. They could not sit on the bench together, for only whites were allowed to sit on the benches, but Paulus would squat on the ground at the old man’s feet and wait until he judged the old man had rested long enough, before moving on again. Together they stared into the windows of the suburban shops, and though neither of them could read the signs outside the shops, the advertisements on billboards, the traffic signs at the side of the road, Paulus learned to wait for the traffic lights to change from red to green before crossing a street, and together they stared at the Coca-Cola girls and the advertisements for beer and the cinema posters. On a piece of cardboard which Paulus carried in the pocket of his blouse Harry had had one of his sons print the old man’s name and address, and whenever Paulus was uncertain of the way home, he would approach an African or a friendly-looking white man and show him the card, and try his best to follow the instructions, or at least the gesticulations which were all of the answers of the white men that meant anything to him. But there were enough Africans to be found, usually, who were more sophisticated than himself, and though they teased him for his “rawness” and for holding the sort of job he had, they helped him too. And neither Paulus nor old man Crossman was aware that when they crossed a street hand-in-hand, as they sometimes did when the traffic was particularly heavy, there were white men who averted their eyes from the sight of this degradation, which could come upon a white man when he was old and senile and dependent.

Paulus knew only Zulu, the old man knew only Yiddish, so there was no language in which they could talk to one another. But they talked all the same. They both explained, commented and complained to each other of the things they saw around them, and often they agreed with one another, smiling and nodding their heads and explaining again with their hands what each happened to be talking about. They both seemed to believe that they were talking about the same things, and often they undoubtedly were, when they lifted their heads sharply to see an aeroplane cross the blue sky between two buildings, or when they reached the top of a steep road and turned to look back the way they had come, and saw below them the clean impervious towers of the city thrust nakedly against the sky in brand new piles of concrete and glass and brick facing. Then down they would go again, among the houses and the gardens where the beneficent climate encouraged both palms and oak trees to grow indiscriminately among each other — as they did in the garden of the house to which, in the evenings, Paulus and old man Crossman would eventually return.

In and about the house Paulus soon became as indispensable to the old man as he was on their expeditions out of it. Paulus dressed him and bathed him and trimmed his beard, and when he old man woke distressed in the middle of the night it would be for Paulus that he would call — “Der schwarzer,” he would shout (for he never learned Paulus’s name), “vo’s der schwarzer” — and Paulus would change his sheets and pajamas and put him back to bed again. “Baas Zeide,” Paulus called the old man, picking the Yiddish word for grandfather from the children of the house.

And that was something that Harry Crossman told everyone of. For Harry persisted in regarding the arrangement as a kind of joke, and the more the arrangement succeeded the more determinedly did he try to spread the joke, so that it should be a joke not only against his father but a joke against Paulus too. It had been a joke that his father should be looked after by a raw Zulu; it was going to be a joke that the Zulu was successful at it. “Baas Zeide! That’s what der schwarzer calls him — have you ever heard the like of it? And you should see the two of them, walking about in the streets hand-in-hand like two schoolgirls. Two clever ones, der schwarzer and my father going for a promenade, and between them, I tell you, you wouldn’t be able to find out what day of the week or what time of day it is.”

And when people said, “Still that Paulus seems a very good boy,” Harry would reply:

“Why shouldn’t he be? With all his knowledge, are there so many better jobs that he’d be able to find? He keeps the old man happy — very good, very nice, but don’t forget that that’s what he’s paid to do. What does he know any better to do, a simple Kaffir from the kraal? He knows he’s got a good job, and he’d be a fool if he threw it away. Do you think,” Harry would say, and this too would insistently be part of the joke, “if I had nothing else to do with my time I wouldn’t be able to make the old man happy?” Harry would look about his sitting room, where the floorboards bore the weight of his furniture, or when they sat on the stoep he would measure with his glance the spacious garden aloof from the street beyond the hedge. “I’ve got other things to do. And I had other things to do, plenty of them, all my life, and not only for myself.” What those things were that he had had to do all his life would send him back to his joke. “No, I think the old man has just found his level in der schwarzer — and I don’t think der schwarzer could cope with anything else.”

Harry teased the old man to his face too, about his “black friend,” and he would ask his father what he would do if Paulus went away; once he jokingly threatened to send the Zulu away. But the old man didn’t believe the threat, for Paulus was in the house when the threat was made, and the old man simply left his son and went straight to Paulus’s room, and sat there with Paulus for security. Harry did not follow him; he would never have gone into any of his servants’ rooms, least of all that of Paulus. For though he made a joke of him to others, to Paulus himself Harry always spoke gruffly, unjokingly, with no patience. On that day he had merely shouted after the old man, “Another time he won’t be there.”

Yet it was strange to see how Harry Crossman would always be drawn to the room in which he knew his father and Paulus to be. Night after night he came into the old man’s bedroom when Paulus was dressing or undressing the old man; almost as often Harry stood in the steamy, untidy bathroom when the old man was being bathed. At these times he hardly spoke, he offered no explanation of his presence. He stood dourly and silently in the room, in his customary powerful and begrudging stance, with one hand clasping the wrist of the other and both supporting his waist, and he watched Paulus at work. The backs of Paulus’s hands were smooth and black and hairless, they were paler on the palms and at the fingernails, and they worked deftly about the body of the old man, who was submissive under the ministrations of the other. At first Paulus had sometimes smiled at Harry while he worked, with his straight-forward, even smile in which there was no invitation to a complicity in patronage, but rather an encouragement to Harry to draw forward. But after the first few evenings of this work that Harry had watched, Paulus no longer smiled at his master. And while he worked Paulus could not restrain himself, even under Harry’s stare, from talking in a soft, continuous flow of Zulu, to encourage the old man and to exhort him to be helpful and to express his pleasure in how well the work was going. When Paulus would at last wipe the gleaming soap flakes from his dark hands he would sometimes, when the old man was tired, stoop low and with a laugh pick up the old man and carry him easily down the passage to his bedroom. Harry would follow; he would stand in the passage and watch the burdened, bare-footed Zulu until the door of his father’s room closed behind them both.

Only once did Harry wait on such an evening for Paulus to reappear from his father’s room. Paulus had already come out, had passed him in the narrow passage, and had already subduedly said, “Good night, baas,” before Harry called suddenly:

“Hey! Wait!”

“Baas,” Paulus said, turning his head. Then he came quickly to Harry. “Baas,” he said again, puzzled and anxious to know why his baas, who so rarely spoke to him, should suddenly have called him like this, at the end of the day, when his work was over.

Harry waited again before speaking, waited long enough for Paulus to say, “Baas?” once more, and to move a little closer, and to lift his head for a moment before letting it drop respectfully down.

“The oubaas was tired tonight,” Harry said. “Where did you take him? What did you do with him?”

“Baas?” Paulus said quickly. Harry’s tone was so brusque that the smile Paulus gave asked for no more than a moment’s remission of the other’s anger.

But Harry went on loudly, “You heard what I said. What did you do with him that he looked so tired?”

“Baas — I —” Paulus was flustered, and his hands beat in the air for a moment, but with care, so that he would not touch his baas. “Please, baas.” He brought both hands to his mouth, closing it forcibly. He flung his hands away. “Johannes,” he said with relief, and he had already taken the first step down the passage to call his interpreter.

“No!” Harry called. “You mean you don’t understand what I say? I know you don’t,” Harry shouted, though in fact he had forgotten until Paulus had reminded him. The sight of Paulus’s startled, puzzled, and guilty face before him filled him with a lust to see this man, this nurse with the face and the figure of a warrior, look more startled, puzzled, and guilty yet; and Harry knew that it could so easily be done, it could be done simply by talking to him in the language he could not understand. “You’re a fool,” Harry said. “You’re like a child. You understand nothing, and it’s just as well for you that you need nothing. You’ll always be where you are, running to do what the white baas tells you to do. Look how you stand! Do you think I understood English when I came here?” Harry said, and then with contempt, using one of the few Zulu words he knew, “Hamba! Go! Do you think I want to see you?”

“Au, baas!” Paulus exclaimed in distress. He could not remonstrate; he could only open his hands in a gesture to show that he knew neither the words Harry used, nor in what he had been remiss that Harry should have spoken in such angry tones to him. But Harry gestured him away, and had the satisfaction of seeing Paulus shuttle off like a schoolboy.

*  *  *  *  *

Harry was the only person who knew that he and his father had quarreled shortly before the accident that ended the old man’s life took place; this was something that Harry was to keep secret for the rest of his life.

Late in the afternoon they quarreled, after Harry had come back from the shop out of which he made his living. Harry came back to find his father wandering about the house, shouting for der schwarzer, and his wife complaining that she had already told the old man at least five times that der schwarzer was not in the house. It was Paulus’s afternoon off.

Harry went to his father, and when his father came eagerly to him, he too told the old man, “Der schwarzer’s not here.” So the old man, with Harry following, turned away and continued going from room to room, peering in through the doors. “Der schwarzer’s not here,” Harry said. “What do you want him for?”

Still the old man ignored him. He went down the passage towards the bedrooms. “What do you want him for?” Harry called after him.

The old man went into every bedroom, still shouting for der schwarzer. Only when he was in his own bare bedroom did he look at Harry. “Where’s der schwarzer?” he asked.

“I’ve told you ten times I don’t know where he is. What do you want him for?”

“I want der schwarzer.”

“I know you want him. But he isn’t here.”

“I want der schwarzer.”

“Do you think I haven’t heard you? He isn’t here.”

“Bring him to me,” the old man said.

“I can’t bring him to you. I don’t know where he is.” Then Harry steadied himself against his own anger. He said quietly, “Tell me what you want. I’ll do it for you. I’m here, I can do what der schwarzer can do for you.”

“Where’s der schwarzer?”

“I’ve told you he isn’t here,” Harry shouted, the angrier for his previous moment’s patience. “Why don’t you tell me what you want? What’s the matter with me — can’t you tell me what you want?”

“I want der schwarzer.”

“Please,” Harry said. He threw out his arms towards his father, but the gesture was abrupt, almost as though he were thrusting his father away from him. “Why can’t you ask it of me? You can ask me — haven’t I done enough for you already? Do you want to go for a walk? — I’ll take you for a walk. What do you want? Do you want — do you want — ?” Harry could not think what his father might want. “I’ll do it,” he said. “You don’t need der schwarzer.”

Then Harry saw that his father was weeping. The old man was standing up and weeping, with his eyes hidden behind the thick glasses that he had to wear; his glasses and his beard made his face a mask of age, as though time had left him nothing but the frame of his body on which the clothing could hang, and this mask of his face above. But Harry knew when the old man was weeping — he had seen him crying too often before, when they had found him at the end of a street after he had wandered away, or even, years earlier, when he had lost another of the miserable jobs that seemed to be the only one he could find in a country in which his son had, later, been able to run a good business, drive a large car, own a big house.

“Father,” Harry asked, “what have I done? Do you think I’ve sent der schwarzer away?” Harry saw his father turn away, between the narrow bed and the narrow wardrobe. “He’s coming — ” Harry said, but he could not look at his father’s back, he could not look at his father’s hollowed neck, on which the hairs that Paulus had clipped glistened above the pale brown discolorations of old age — Harry could not look at the neck turned stiffly away from him while he had to try to promise the return of the Zulu. Harry dropped his hands and walked out of the room.

No one knew how the old man managed to get out of the house and through the front gate without having been seen. But he did manage it, and in the road he was struck down. Only a man on a bicycle struck him down, but it was enough, and he died a few days later in the hospital.

Harry’s wife wept, even the grandsons wept; Paulus wept. Harry himself was stony, and his hunched, protuberant features were immovable; they seemed locked upon the bones of his face. A few days after the funeral he called Paulus and Johannes into the kitchen and said to Johannes, “Tell him he must go. His work is finished.”

Johannes translated for Paulus, and then, after Paulus had spoken, he turned to Harry. “He says, yes baas.” Paulus kept his eyes on the ground; he did not look up even when Harry looked directly at him, and Harry knew that this was not out of fear or shyness, but out of courtesy for his master’s grief — which was what they could not but be talking of, when they talked of his work.

“Here’s his pay.” Harry thrust a few notes towards Paulus, who took them in his cupped hands, and retreated.

Harry waited for them to go, but Paulus stayed in the room, and consulted with Johannes in a low voice. Johannes turned to his master. “He says, baas, that the baas still has his savings.”

Harry had forgotten about Paulus’s savings. He told Johannes that he had forgotten, and that he did not have enough money at the moment, but would bring the money the next day. Johannes translated and Paulus nodded gratefully. Both he and Johannes were subdued by the death there had been in the house.

And Harry’s dealings with Paulus were over. He took what was to have been his last look at Paulus, but this look stirred him again against the Zulu. As harshly as he told Paulus that he had to go, so now, implacably, seeing Paulus in the mockery and simplicity of his houseboy’s clothing, to feed his anger to the very end, Harry said, “Ask him what he’s been saving for. What’s he going to do with the fortune he’s made?”

Johannes spoke to Paulus and came back with a reply. “He says, baas, that he is saving to bring his wife and children from Zululand to Johannesburg. He is saving, baas,” Johannes said, for Harry had not seemed to understand, “to bring his family to this town also.”

The two Zulus were bewildered to know why it should have been at that moment that Harry Crossman’s clenched, fist-like features should suddenly seem to have fallen from one another, nor why he should have starred with such guilt and despair at Paulus, while he cried, “What else could I have done? I did my best,” before the first tears came.