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I

I MET Boaz, the Israelite, at a time when I was doing nothing. I was idle, stagnant, dead still.

This was just after my twentieth birthday, when I should have been at my most energetic, restless, and ambitious. Or so I used to tell myself. Instead, I was stuck fast, as if forever, in my hometown, Lyndhurst, in South Africa. Not long before I had excitedly made my plans to go to Europe, to go to Israel, to travel as far as I could into the waiting world. But having been compelled to cancel those plans just a few days before I had been due to leave, I remained at home, like someone in a thrall, unable to move, without sufficient energy even to want to do so.

I suppose I’m exaggerating a little when I say that I was doing nothing. There were three things which I did regularly, and which could possibly be called work. At least they were activities of a kind. I went to the hospital every day to visit my father. I took Hebrew lessons three times a week. I went once a week to the farm my father owned, to deliver rations to the “boys” and to count the sheep.

II

THE sheep-counting was something of a farce. Have you ever tried to count a flock of two hundred-odd sheep being driven in a cloud of dust from one kraal to another adjacent to it, through a narrow gate? Tried without being practiced at, I mean? I was town-born-and-bred (small town, admittedly, but town nevertheless); I had just spent three years at the university in Johannesburg; I was no farmboy, no cattleman, no shepherd.

Driven by two diminutive, barefooted herdboys, who waved large sticks over their heads and yelled fiercely in Tswana and Afrikaans, the sheep milled together, ran in every direction, bleated furiously, and came running in bunches through the gate, where I stood with Piet, the herdboys’ father, each of us to one side. We counted them as they ran, their woolly coats quivering, their eyes ablaze with terror, their foolish, triangular mouths open. The dust they raised in the air was green and acrid, made of the dung they had dropped on previous occasions.

Invariably, at the end of each counting there was a discrepancy between the figure I had arrived at and the figure given to me by Piet. Invariably, my figure was somewhat lower than his. Each of us having announced his figure, an embarrassed pause would follow.

A question hung unspoken in that silence: Was Piet stealing the sheep? It was a question I found impossible to answer. If I was right one week in finding the total to be two hundred and twenty-five, say, then surely I was wrong the next week in finding it to be two hundred and forty-five. Or was I? What was there to stop Piet, after a larger than usual depredation, from insinuating ten or twenty of his own sheep into my father’s flock when the time came for them to be counted? For he did have a small flock of his own, of which he was a most attentive keeper, about which he bargained and bickered and came to obscure arrangements with Africans on neighboring farms. I couldn’t tell his sheep from any other; they were all the same black-headed Persian type, with dusty off-white bodies; none had been branded or dyed distinctively.

Piet was gentle with me, but unyielding. He would clear his throat, breaking the silence between us; he would gesture soothingly with the hand that clutched the bowl of the small, unlit pipe he almost invariably carried. He was a slight, untalkative, middle-aged man, with a mouth pursed forward in an expression of melancholy, dogged doubt; his face might have been that of a pair of elongated parentheses. He looked reflective, skeptical, and somehow urban; his face might have been that of a lawyer, or a petty shopkeeper perhaps, a seller of stationery and stamps. But he was a shepherd, nothing more, and his clothes were almost as ragged as those of his children. His shirt was a mere accumulation of patches; his shoes were so hard, large and cracked, they might have been made of unseasoned timber. I was pretty sure he put on those shoes only in honor of my visits, and went around barefoot the rest of the time. On his head he wore a brown woolen cap with an implausible pom-pom.

“Nee, my baas,” he might say. “Twee honderd drie en dertig.”

Two hundred and thirty-three. He had counted them, and that was his total. I had counted and got two hundred and twenty-seven. So this week the discrepancy was only six. Last week it had been nineteen. The week before it had been fourteen. What was the truth? Would I never know it? What was I going to do now?

I did what I always did: I stared hard at Piet, who met my gaze with a look of dutiful, dignified submission. Pouting, head drooping, pom-pom hanging forward, he waited for me to pronounce judgment. Sometimes I said we should count the sheep all over again, which we would do amid renewed dust and confusion, with results as unsatisfactory as before. More often I said that we would count them more carefully, more slowly, next time. Then we would leave, while the sheep, still protesting, would be driven out of the kraal and down the slope to the grazing lands.

They had more than three thousand acres to graze in, those sheep. Three thousand acres of pale grass, stunted black camelthorn trees, and innumerable nipple-shaped, knee-high antheaps of dried earth; the whole area being divided by wire fences into “camps,” with an iron windmill and an iron watertank in each one. You could see every windmill and tank, you could see all three thousand acres, and who knew how many hundreds of thousands of acres beyond—belonging to Pope, to Van Aswegan, to Huyssteen, to Jaap Burger, to the Lyndhurst General Mining & Exploration Company—from the farmhouse where I always parked the car. Behind the farmhouse there was a ridge of koppies, and the slight elevation on which the house stood was enough to give a view that stretched all the way I had come. The only irregularity on the horizon was the mine-dumps of Lyndhurst, sixteen miles away. From there the white dirt road ran through one farm after another; past the ridge behind the farmhouse it was lost to sight. Out of curiosity I had once followed it beyond the farm, and had found that it arrived eventually at a miserable, shadeless huddle of iron-roofed buildings called Platkop, thirty miles farther on.

It was called, for some reason, the Samarian Road. Why Samarian? What had it to do with Samaria? None of the farms along its route was named Samaria, so far as I knew.

Anyway, that was the road, that was the view, from the sagging wire fence that separated the sand of the veld from the sand of the farmhouse “garden.” The house itself was a low iron-roofed building, whitewashed inside and out, divided into four small rooms. The only item of furniture still in it was a hatstand. A real, elaborate, varnished hatstand, with fierce antlers for hats arching out of a kind of node near the top, and two rings of wood around its lower half, to contain umbrellas. Umbrellas? In that climate? I used to go into the house to see that everything was in order. “Everything” was invariably “in order,” though I found every time I went in that more whitewash had flaked from the walls and that more and more insects appeared to be occupying the place. Black and yellow striped hornets made their nests plumb against the walls, spiders spun their webs in corners, ants boarded their food in nests between floorboards. Overhead, between the iron roof and the buckled beaverboard ceiling, I could hear faint scurryings and crepitations—birds, perhaps, or mice, were nesting there.

Everything, I repeat, was in order. The only disorder, the only visible movement in the house, was that of the motes of dust that swarmed and twinkled in columns of sunlight coming in through the windows. The walls sent off a cloud of white dust if I struck them with the palms of my hands, and I often did it, partly for the sake of seeing the dust fly, and partly for the sake of the flat, echoless sound, where no other sound was. Then I would go out. The veld always surprised me when I came out: the house was so cramped and meager, the veld so very large. Yet in point of life there didn’t seem to be all that much to choose between them.

But waiting around the car would be Piet and his family, and Kagisho and his family. Kagisho, the other “boy,” Piet’s assistant, was many years older than Piet; he was bent, frail, and Bushmanlike in appearance, with a skin that had a queer reddish or golden tint. Around them sprawled, squatted and slept their many children. I say slept because that’s what the youngest children were doing, slung in fringed shawls on their mothers’ backs. I would have thought both women to have passed the childbearing age; but they obviously had not. For that matter, I would have thought Kagisho to be beyond the child-propagating age. But perhaps he had handed his wife over to Piet with the same alacrity he showed when I once heard Piet ask him to hand over the pay I had just given him.

I paid Piet and Kagisho once a month; every week each family was given so much mealiemeal, so much sugar, so much tea, so much tobacco. In addition I sometimes off-loaded salt or sulphur or bonemeal for the sheep. Whether or not the sheep ever got these rations I do not know. And there were usually one or two other items that Piet had asked me to get the previous week—a bottle of cough mixture for one of his children, or some kaffircorn malt which he used to brew his own beer. I always brought the children packets of barley sugar, which each came up in turn to receive, in cupped hands. They thanked me formally for these. Once when one of them forgot to do so he was reminded by Piet, who sent the delinquent tumbling with a single, savage blow across the back of the head.

So my “work” on the farm would be over. I’d tell Piet to expect me at the same time the next week, and get into the car. The women would smile and bob their heads, hands clutching their long skirts; the children would wave; Piet would send groete—greetings—to the oubaas—my father; Kagisho, who was always both industrious and ineffectual in the off-loading, would give a sudden start as though he too feared a blow from Piet, and hastily send his groete, as well, to the oubaas. Somewhere along the road I’d pass the sheep on the way to the particular camp they were grazing in, and I’d wave to the solitary boy herding them. And so, home.

There were just two ways of going home: one was very fast, the other very slow. It was purely a matter of mood which way I did the journey; it never made a difference to anyone else. I had no appointments to keep. When I traveled fast, my ambition was to cover the sixteen miles between the farm and town in fifteen minutes. This was not at all easy to do, on an ill-kept, corrugated dirt road, which curved zealously around every clump of thornbushes, and which was interrupted at least half a dozen times by narrow cattle grids. Many of the curves were almost blind, where the thornbushes grew particularly thickly, and all of them were made trickier by the drifts of sand at their sides. I had some narrow escapes on that road, and so did the oncoming motorists I sometimes found myself confronting in a cloud of dust, to the sound of blaring, astonished horns and skidding tires.

When I went slowly I’d drive as slowly as I could in top gear, until the car began to stall, then I’d change down into second and do the same; then the same in first. I’d accelerate to seventy miles an hour, switch off the ignition, and see how far the car would go before coming to a halt. I would turn the car round so that it faced the farm again, put it into reverse and drive backward for a couple of miles. Many times I simply stopped the car at the side of the road, walked a little way into the veld, and lay down on the sand and tufts of grass, shielding my eyes from the sun and looking straight up into the blue sky until it swam with a multitude of tiny, squirming shapes that were dark and bright at the same time. Or I stared at a particular thornbush, trying to impress it so firmly on my mind that I would be able to visualize it in every detail an hour later, when I would be back in Lyndhurst. But I found that usually it was something nearby that I hadn’t been concentrating on, seeing only out of the corner of my eye, which I would really remember: the knobbly, hard surface of an antheap, or a particular tuft of grass, or the bland, flat face of a locust, its eyes like tiny beads pasted on, which had jumped onto my trouser leg.

I was seldom disturbed by anything other than insects. A car, or some solitary African on foot or on a bicycle, might pass on the road; I daresay they were curious about the empty car standing on the roadside, but insufficiently so ever to come and look for me. I was on my own, surrounded by a flat, blank vacancy of sky and veld, a world of pale colors and strong light. It was abysmally dull, null, motionless, limitless, meaningless.

Eventually I would drive on to meet the main tarred road, where the view opened out on the town itself: low iron roofs, which always looked black in the strong sunlight; a group of taller buildings in the town center, also black; some trees, the same; mine-dumps of green sand in a rough circle around the entire scatter of the place. I used to skirt the town, going home along a bypass road which had pairs of tram tracks running parallel to it for some distance, before they branched off into the veld, making for no visible destination at all. Poles, no longer carrying cables, arched over the tracks. God knows when they had been laid down, and with what expectations. The expectations had clearly not been fulfilled, but the tracks and poles still marched bravely and aimlessly across the bare veld, under the wide sky.

III

So much for my “work” on the farm. As for the Hebrew lessons…

All the attempts that had been made in my childhood to teach me Hebrew had ended in failure. I had been determined that they should. For obvious reasons. I had associated the Hebrew language with being alien, set apart, exposed; implicated in what I was convinced at an early age was a continuing, unendurable history of suffering and impotence; involved with a religion in whose rituals I could find no grace, no power, no meaning, and that had no connection I could discern with the dusty, modern mining town in South Africa in which I was growing up. I can still remember how intensely I hated the very pictures in the books from which we had been taught Hebrew. They were old books, who knew how old, and the pictures in them were ugly, small, cramped, full of thick black lines. The boys who appeared in the pictures were physically puny, dressed in skullcaps, long jackets and grotesque knickerbockers; they had earlocks hanging from their temples; they were imprisoned in rooms that looked both overfurnished and poverty-stricken; they sat in devout, learning postures, receiving instruction from bearded rabbis or winding their phylacteries around their arms. I cannot describe the claustrophobia, the anguish of embarrassment and distaste, they roused in me. Was I learning Hebrew to become like one of those boys? Was that the prize? I would sooner have died.

So I hadn’t learned much more than the script and a handful of words and constructions in all the years I attended, or failed to attend, the classes conducted in the synagogue hall by Mr. Saltzmann, the local community’s ritual slaughterer, ritual circumciser, and instructor to the youth. I had never learned to understand the prayers that I heard sung, muttered or sighed in the synagogue. I had never read any of the volumes in Hebrew that filled the bottom row of the big bookcase in our living room: the Bible and commentaries on the Bible, the works of Yehuda Halevi and Ibn Gabriol, the collected poems of moderns like Bialik and Tschernikowsky, a translation of Graetz’s History in four volumes. Those books, imposingly bound in imitation leather, and in a peculiarly hairy green cloth, and in multicolored marbled boards, were my parents’, never mine.

Yet—or hence—here I was, a Zionist now, learning Hebrew once again. And what was more, learning it from the same Mr. Saltzmann who had tried so hard to teach it to me in my childhood. Three times a week we sat at the big table in the dining room, surrounded by sideboards with mahogany roses worked all over them, mirrors in heavy mahogany frames, a clock in a glass and mahogany case five feet tall and complete with a pendulum, which unfortunately did not work. When we looked up from our books we stared into an elaborate marble fireplace, and a mantel that incorporated a melancholy lithograph of three sheepdogs in a hut somewhere in Scotland. One could tell that the hut was in Scotland because the largest of the dogs was standing guard over a plaid and a tam o’shanter, presumably the property of the shepherd, who was nowhere to be seen. His absence, I might say, lent a touch of drama to the picture which it otherwise sadly lacked.

Inevitably, in these surroundings, so intimately familiar to me that in recollection they seem to belong to an inner world of dream rather than to any external world of fact, I got to know Mr. Saltzmann far better than I ever had as a child. With his bitten nails, his lined brow, his shoulders of unequal height, his unexpectedly strong head of wavy, silver hair, his pallid skin, he looked exactly as he had years before. Then I had thought of him only as a threat and a bore; now I came to know him as an assiduous reader of newspapers, as a rather dissatisfied husband and family man, as a small-scale speculator in real estate, as an enthusiast for certain finer points of Hebrew grammar. We discussed, in a desultory, subdued way, such topics as the meaning of life, the prospects of an afterlife, the future of the State of Israel, and the relation between science and religion. On all these subjects I thought Mr. Saltzmann surprisingly cautious, in view of the position he held in the community. He did not seem to know just where he stood. Yet I did not feel it would have been right to accuse him of insincerity when he led the prayers in synagogue, or when he cut the throats of chickens, cattle, and sheep in the ritually prescribed manner. Far from it. In holding fast to his orthodoxy Mr. Saltzman seemed to me as sincere and singleminded about what he was doing as a man washed overboard in the middle of the ocean would be in clutching at a spar. If you were to be so heartless as to ask such a man if he “believed” in his spar, you would get the same kind of answer that Mr. Saltzman gave to me. What else was there? Why throw it away? Who can be so choosy?

But we didn’t spend all our time in conversation; we did pay some attention to our books. The book we used chiefly had been published by the Zionist Organization of America, and was as modern and secular as it possibly could have been. In simple Hebrew it described the adventures of the family Cohen, who sailed one day on a ship to Palestine, and who were so enchanted by everything they saw that they decided to settle there without further ado. On the whole these Cohens were a devoted but charmless family, easily excited into fits of enthusiasm and much given to explaining things to one another. By the end of the book I was up to everything they did and said; I understood their laborious conversations and their few, feeble jokes. In fact, by the time I’d finished the book I was beginning to fancy that already I knew more about the Hebrew language than the poor Cohens ever would; that I had already grasped something of its inner spirit, of its harshness, its archaic severity and compression, its lack of sinuosity, all of which were illustrated for me not just in its sounds and constructions but even in its epigraphy.

Privately, without telling Mr. Saltzman, I took some of the Hebrew books from their places in the bookshelf, and worked through various passages that I found I could cope with. The easiest passages for me to read, all questions of grammar aside, were in the Bible, both because the stories I chose were already familiar to me, and because I could always check my understanding of what I’d read against the English version. One of the first of the tales I went through in this way, reading the Hebrew and English in alternation, was that in which God “proved” Abraham by asking of him the sacrifice of “his son, his only son, whom he loved, even Isaac,” before accepting the sacrifice of a ram caught in a thicket instead. “And afterwards they rose up and went together to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt in Beersheba.”

It was a curious experience to read it all in the original Hebrew for the first time, knowing that in Beersheba, which I had hoped to have visited by that time, there once again dwelt a Hebrew-speaking people who, like myself, were reputed to be descended from the tribe of Abraham and Isaac. How long, and in how many places, everything had been going on: fathers, sons, death, sheep, thornbushes, the lot.

IV

“AND Abraham expired, and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years; and was gathered unto his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron…”

Well, it hadn’t been quite like that. My father hadn’t died. Modern medical science, personified by Dr. Friedenberg and his colleagues, had seen to that. Nor was he all that old. He had in fact only just retired from work. Three months previously, seeing that none of his sons showed any interest in it, he had sold the cattlefeed plant he had established in the town many years before. Which, as everyone said, was a blessing, in view of what happened to him.

What happened to him, firstly, was that he woke one morning with a stomachache. This wasn’t altogether unusual; he was both choleric and dyspeptic by temperament. He dosed himself liberally with milk of magnesia, wandered about the house in dressing gown and pajamas, complaining to anyone who would listen to him about how rotten he was feeling, and then went to bed. Before driving into town that morning I went into his bedroom and asked if there was anything I could do for him. He answered with a peremptory “No!” The curtains were drawn against the rays of the sun, but every corner of the room was irradiated with a faint yellow light that seemed more baffling to the eye than darkness itself. He had some kind of antiquated air-conditioning outfit in his room, a boxlike affair the size of a small refrigerator, which rattled and wheezed and produced no cool air at all, so far as I could judge. The noise was distracting; his irritability was embarrassing; his illness was obviously not serious. I left him and went into town. My final exams at the university were a couple of weeks behind me, and my departure for Israel was booked for a few days ahead. I was a busy man, then; or felt myself to be one.

When I came back I found our family doctor in my father’s room. There was a smell of disinfectant in the air. When I greeted my father there was no answer; he lay on his back with his head turned aside. I leaned over him and saw something glittering in the tiny hollow of bone next to his eye. His face contracted and he groaned; that bright spot shivered and disappeared. Only then did I realize it had been a tear.

The doctor had been putting his things into his case; he beckoned my mother and I to follow him out of the room. In the passage he said, “I’ve given him something to ease the pain. He should settle down.” He added in a puzzled tone, “It’s the intensity of the pain that I don’t like. If he isn’t much better by tonight he’ll have to go into the hospital. For observation.”

The pain hadn’t eased by evening; it had become far worse. His temperature had risen sharply; his groans rang through the house; he hardly knew where he was. He asked for water, for the doctor, for more blankets, for fewer blankets, for the air conditioning to be turned on, for it to be turned off. Under a gray bristle of beard his face was twisted into a new shape; his eyes shone with a light I had never seen in them before. The previous day he had been a trim, fit, firm-fleshed man just past middle age—no more—vigorous in his movements, pugnacious in his expression, quick in his glances. And even in the morning he had appeared to be, at worst, an unwell, irritable old man indulging himself in a sense of grievance against the unreliability of his own body. But now, within a matter of hours, he had become a tormented stranger, other than himself, other to himself. What one saw in his eyes was not so much pain or fear as a stark, incredulous glare of interrogation.

For what seemed minutes on end that glare would be fixed on one point or another in his room; then he would heave up in the bed, his lips uttering sounds, sighs, non-words; he would fall back into brief, uneasy snatches of sleep.

The doctor came again at sunset, and phoned immediately for an ambulance. When it came the patient was wheeled down the garden path on a stretcher, put in the back of the cumbersome vehicle and driven away. Some of our neighbors and the people across the road stood at their gates and watched the spectacle, enjoying to the utmost the solemnity and drama of it all.

Dr. Friedenberg was artless, sincere and conscientious. Born and bred in Lyndhurst, trained in Cape Town and Edinburgh, he was a stalwart, square-shouldered, flat-faced man, whose ears had suffered much damage as a result of his prowess, during his medical-student years, as a rugby lock-forward. When we stood together on the pavement his troubled face loomed many inches above mine in the dying light. He made no pretense at being omniscient. He confessed he was very puzzled. He said he was going to call in the town’s one specialist physician immediately, for a consultation. Then they might have to call in the town’s one specialist surgeon. Would I and my mother be at the hospital later that evening? I said I would be, and he walked away with his rolling rugby-player’s stride to his car. I remember finding the purposefulness of that walk of his absurdly comforting.

My father was operated on early the next morning. At about eleven that night we were called to what proved to be the first of a series of vigils in anticipation of his death. Later he was operated on a second time, and a third; each operation being the result of a crisis, and each in turn producing other crises. There were vigils at midday, at night, in the dead hours of pre-dawn. The hospital was most punctilious in summoning us each time they believed him to be on the point of dying. But there was nothing we could do, once we were there, except sit about interminably in one waiting room or another, or loiter up and down night-empty corridors, looking at the funereal vases of flowers that stood in front of every door.

When we were allowed into his room we witnessed deliriums, bouts of shuddering that looked violent enough to shake his joints apart, prolonged, sunken spells of nausea, when the expression on his unmoving, strangely averted features made one think his flesh had turned in disgust from itself. One night he choked and choked while the nurses spooned from his throat the mucus in which he appeared literally to be drowning. Apparatus of various kinds—stands, tubes, clamps, bottles of blood and saline fluid, oxygen cylinders of great weight in metal cradles—constantly stood or hung about his bed. You might have thought some sort of complicated industrial process was taking place, without which he could not die. A faint smell of suppuration came from his dressings. On his best days, when he wasn’t totally unconscious or conscious only of pain and nausea, his hands wandered over the bedclothes, his lips constantly muttered meaningless words. The gaze of his eyes was sightless, turned inward; the interrogation that had been in them was quenched. His nose seemed to grow in length, but everything else about him shrank from day to day, his arms in particular taking on an oddly slight, boyish, negligible appearance. The doctors and the nurses made no secret of their surprise that he was not dead.

He had never been seriously ill before, and what had happened to him was as shockingly unexpected to us as if he had been the victim of some savage accident. Yet we also had to contend, day after day, then week after week, with the torment of slowness, doubt and anticipation. During that time I came to think of his death as the true end of his life in a sense that had simply never occurred to me before: death was life’s goal, its only certain aim and intention, it was the destination for the sake of which the journey was taken. It was not an unfortunate, retrograde flaw in nature’s arrangements, an arbitrary, unnecessary interruption of life; it was not the last, most deplorable accident we would all have to endure. There was nothing arbitrary or accidental about it. My father’s life had been a ceaseless, unknowing, unswerving trek toward these hideous days and hours; they were the summation of his life as well as its undoing. He had moved through time as through a landscape, distracted by a thousand moods, experiences, possessions, achievements, memories, but always, unfalteringly, in one direction only, in this direction. And with him, so with everyone else who lived or had ever lived or ever would. So many deaths already! So many still to die!

Could any discoveries or revelations have been more commonplace? Indeed, no. That was precisely the thought which produced in me a kind of vertigo, associated in my mind with the long, darkly glistening, strictly regular corridors of the hospital. Afterward that was the only recollection I had of the stress within my body of shock, pity or fear.

I had of course canceled my flight to Israel; I couldn’t leave in such circumstances. My departure had been put off indefinitely. I no longer thought about it. I could remember how eager I had been to leave home, to travel, to see new places, meet new people and do new work. But I could no longer remember why I had wanted any of these things; I couldn’t find my way back to wanting them.

V

IT was then that I met Boaz, the Israelite. I found him on the farm. He came to the car as soon as I arrived one day, and asked if he could speak to me when I had finished what I had come to do.

The first thing you saw when you looked at Boaz was his blind eye. It was swollen, glaucous, without iris or pupil, always open. Its size and fixity were startling, even horrifying. What was more startling still, however, was your realization that while you had been staring at that dead, sightless orb, he had been regarding you, unobserved as it were, with his good eye. That one was small, yellow, lively, set under a wrinkled lid.

His head was shaven, his skin was drawn tight against the bones of his face, and lights shone in glints from its darkness. His body was remarkably thin, melodramatically so, as if he had willed it to be like that in order to point some obscure yet incontrovertible moral. I wouldn’t care to guess his age: he could have been anything between forty and sixty, perhaps more. His clothes were as ragged as those of any other farm African. When he walked it was with odd, stiff, elongated strides; when he stood still, he held himself with an almost soldierly uprightness.

His air of patience was indistinguishable, somehow, from confidence, as he waited near the car, not moving from it, while I went about my business. I had asked him to tell me at once what he wanted; but he had said no, he would rather wait to talk to me, it would be better. He wanted to talk to me alone—”apart” was the word he used. Puzzled, curious, a little taken aback, I asked Piet, when we were a little distance from the car, who the stranger was; but all Piet would say was that his name was Boaz, that he had arrived on the farm a few days previously, and that he was some kind of preacher. He didn’t know any more, Piet insisted, than that.

I’d arrived later than usual that afternoon, and I was more than usually conscientious about the sheep-counting. So by the time we were finished the sun was low in the west, red, growing larger; around it were gathering the clouds that invariably appeared in the western corner of the horizon at that hour, after even the most cloudless days. Those clouds, together with the dust that was always in the air, the flat openness of the country, and the strength of the sun, all combined to produce the most spectacular sunsets, day after day: immense, silent, rapid combustions that flared violently into color and darkened simultaneously. It always seemed suddenly that you became aware that the colors had been consumed and that only the darkness remained; that the day was over, it would soon be full night.

My conversation with Boaz lasted longer than I had expected it to, though the request he actually had to make of me was simple enough. All he wanted, he said, speaking to me in Afrikaans, was my permission to live for a time on the farm, in one of the huts that neither Piet nor Kagisho used. (Altogether there were half a dozen small, mud-walled, iron-roofed huts for the African laborers, in a group sheltered by a screen of thornbushes some way behind the farmhouse.) He was an Israelite, Boaz told me. He was a preacher. He traveled about the country on foot, carrying his message to all who would listen. The destination of each of his journeys, he said, became known to him only after he had arrived at it. After each departure he knew that it had been right for him to move on again. Now he was here, having come from Lyndhurst along the Samarian Road; and here, it had been decided, was where he should stay.

An Israelite! Nothing less! Would he tell me who the Israelites were? He did so, at some length. Later I was to look up old newspaper files covering some of the events of which he had spoken. The facts he gave me were accurate enough. About half a century before, under the leadership of a certain Enoch Mgijima, one of the separatist African religious sects had rejected the New Testament as a white man’s fiction and “returned” to the worship of the one God of Israel. Inspired by its prophet the sect grew enormously in numbers and influence among the Africans in the bigger cities, until Mgijima called on his followers to gather at a village called Bulhoek, in order to celebrate the Passover. Several thousand obeyed him, coming together to feast and to pray for the coming of the Messiah. Days passed. Eventually the authorities told the people to move. They refused. One morning detachments of armed police arrived and ordered them to leave immediately. Instead of dispersing the Israelites tried to attack the police, who opened fire at close range. Hundreds were shot down. Those who survived fled or were arrested. Mgijima disappeared. Thereafter the movement went out of sight, was lost to any public record. However, some of the survivors of the Bulhoek massacre continued to meet as they had always done, in tiny, secret conventicles in the larger cities. It was from one of these that Boaz had come.

While he had been telling his story, we had left the car and walked a little way into the veld. Insects whirred out of the tussocks of grass at our feet; a single bird gave a melancholy, repeated whistle; I heard the voices of children from the huts, and in the distance the bleating of the sheep as they went down to graze. A faint evening breeze had sprung up. The blaze in the west was as fierce as it was remote.

His parents, Boaz went on, had been Israelites. They had taken him to their meetings, they had read the Bible to him every morning and evening, they had forbidden him to eat pork. But he had not been interested in their religion. He had wanted to be like all the other children who ran about in the streets and whose parents did not care what they did, or what they believed in, or what they ate. He left home as soon as he could, when he had been fourteen. He had had many jobs, of all kinds, in many places. He did not go home until years and years had passed. Then he heard one day that his father had died, and he decided he should go back, in order to comfort his mother.

During his first night at home he had a dream. He did not see God in his dream, for God could not be seen, but he heard him. Everything was still and empty in the dream, and out of the stillness God spoke to him as if he were Joshua, saying, “The book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night that thou may do all that is written therein. Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee withersoever thou goest.” He woke, and knew that he had been chosen. He was a chosen man among the chosen people.

“Like I choose this stone,” Boaz said, stooping to pick up a faintly translucent pebble, and holding it out to me on the palm of his hand.

It was a kind that was common enough around Lyndhurst: irregular in shape, smooth to the touch, brown in color, darkening inward from its shining surface, so that you could see some way into it, rather as with a lump of resin. I knew such stones to be volcanic in origin, like those diamonds that were mined in Lyndhurst. It lay in his hand, its dim light sealed eternally within it.

“Like this stone,” he went on calmly, not at all like a man putting forward a paradox, “chooses me.”

He brought it closer to his good eye, bending his head over it. “You think this stone is dead?” he asked me. “You think it’s here for nothing? No, never. It can’t move, but it can wait for me, lying here, while all my life I’ve been coming nearer and nearer to it. You understand? Now I pick it up, and hold it, and look at it. See how it shines! Perhaps it speaks and sings also, only we can’t hear it. But God can. Imagine! Imagine!” he repeated fervently, putting the stone to his ear. Then he held it to mine, his clenched hand against my temple.

I could hear only the blurred, small sounds of the evening breeze, nudging at intervals against me, on its journey across the empty country. I did not speak, but Boaz dropped his arm and looked down once more at the stone. With a jerk of his arm he flung it from him. We watched it fly through the air, a fast-moving, diminishing speck that fell out of sight, somewhere beyond the double track that ran down from the farmhouse.

“So it’s gone,” I said.

“Gone from us,” he corrected me. “It’s somewhere else now, where it has to be.”

A little later I asked him if he wanted to hold “meetings”—I couldn’t think of any other word to use—while he was on the farm. He was silent. I looked up into his gaunt, disfigured face. He blinded me with his blind eye. Then he said: “I am holding a meeting now.”

I turned and began walking back to the car, parked forlornly on the rise. He followed me. What he had just said had gone home. I had been moved by his story, I had listened for the song he had said was locked in the stone, I had envied his faith in the meaningfulness of his actions, I had felt a bond with him in his absurd, wild claim that he, too, was some kind of Jew. Why shouldn’t he be? What sort of Jew was I? Wasn’t it possible that he knew more about the spirit and fervor of the Israelites than I ever would? That I might learn from him something that no one else could ever teach me? Yes, just because he was a poor, black, skeleton-thin zealot who had been “sent” to live in a tumble-down hut on a farm that was nowhere. Just because he was a nut, a religious loony, a dreamer, a bearer of voices, a man you could do nothing with.

But all he had asked of me was permission to stay on the farm. It was easy for me to tell him that he could. “But I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “Not with Piet, not with anyone. Do you understand?”

He held me in the disjunction of his stare or stares before assuring me that there would be no trouble.

VI

DURING the first few weeks that followed, Boaz was as good as his word. When I went out to the farm, Piet and Kagisho, who seemed proud to have Boaz living with them, told me that he spent a lot of time praying, and that he preached sometimes to them and to Africans from the neighboring farms. On these visits Boaz himself invariably made a point of coming to see me after I had finished with the others. He never asked me for food or money: presumably the others gave him the little he needed.

What he did ask me for, however, during our early conversations, was information. Information about the Jews: he wanted to know what I could tell him about the Jewish dietary laws, about the festivals, about the liturgy, about the dispersion of the Jews to all the countries of the world, about Zionism and the State of Israel. Information about myself: he wanted to know who I was, what I was doing with myself, what I had done before he had met me, what I planned to do with my life. Information about current events, which he interpreted in ways I could not follow, according to various texts from the Bible. I answered all his questions as frankly as I could, and he listened carefully. We talked at the car, or in the car, or in the deserted house, or walking about the veld as we had the first time. He was always eager and exalted in his manner; but he was always polite and firm as well. Sometimes when he found himself at a loss for a word his lips would tremble, as if at the strain of containing the force momentarily pent up within him; but there was nothing swooning, babbling, hysterical, or ranting about him, even when he was at his most intense. He was utterly humorless, and utterly direct. He made less of the difference in color between us—and the difference it meant in status, legal rights, opportunities, wealth, education—than any other African I had ever met. That he believed in an omnipresent God and I did not was the only difference between us that mattered at all in his eyes. Or eye, rather.

It was after we had had three or four such conversations that Boaz unexpectedly told me one day that he now knew why he had been “sent” to the farm. It was his task to convert me to a belief in God. He had been “chosen” to do so.

“Oh no!” I remember exclaiming absurdly, as if he had just broken an item of bad news to me.

“Yes, I will do it with God’s help,” he answered. “You will rejoice when it has been done.”

We were standing where we had stood several times before, on the rise near the car; the sunset was once again blazing away on our right. But in the week that had passed since I had last seen him there had been a brief, fierce, dust-laden blast of wind from the direction where the sun was setting; and it was now much cooler than it had been; winter was beginning. Boaz had buttoned his threadbare jacket and turned up the lapels. He waited for my response. I could see that he, at any rate, was already rejoicing in what he was to accomplish.

“No,” I said again. “No, Boaz. You must leave me alone.”

“How can I?” he asked. “You are not alone. You never have been.”

He was immovable, utterly dedicated to the task he believed he had been set. Looking at him, I felt an impossible mixture of emotions. I was acutely embarrassed. I was touched and flattered that the welfare of my soul should mean so much to him. I was ashamed to think that secretly, without ever admitting to myself what I was really doing, I had invited him to make such an attempt for me, or on me. I was sorry I had encouraged him by talking to him as much as I had. I was resentful that he should feel free to tamper with my beliefs, or lack of belief. I was afraid that he might succeed.

The next time I went out to the farm Piet said to me, with a curious, sideways, lingering glance, quite unlike any I had previously had from him, that Boaz was “always praying for the baas.”

When we returned from the kraal I could see Boaz waiting for me near the car, as he always did. What was I to do? To avoid him altogether? To try to talk him out of his mission? To humor him, to pretend that he had succeeded, in the hope that he would leave me alone, leave the farm, believing his duty done? Should I simply tell him to go, to get out, that the permission I’d given him to stay on the farm was withdrawn? Or should I say to him that he would never, never get me to recognize his God, no matter how passionately he prayed for me, or tried to get me to pray with him? That even if there was a God I was by nature deaf to him, blind to him, insensible to his touch on me?

In the end I tried all these ways of dealing with Boaz, as well as another that took me profoundly by surprise, and with which I persisted far longer than I had with any of the others. I tried to believe, as Boaz wanted me to, in a God of life and death, the God my ancestors had believed in through their thousands of years of history; a God who was present in Lyndhurst or on the farm; who cared whether my father recovered from his illness or did not, and who had his reasons for prolonging his life or ending it, as he had with the lives of all other men; a God who would sustain me in my own life, and in the knowledge of whom I would find the purpose and the sense of ultimate value I needed. I tried to pray, I tried to read as much of the Bible as I could in Hebrew and English, I went to the synagogue on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, I tried, faute de mieux, to pretend or imagine that I did already believe, in the hope that the genuine belief would follow.

Boaz was not the only one who helped me during this period of trial. Though I did not tell Mr. Saltzmann about Boaz, or about what he was trying to do for me, or about what I was trying to do for myself, I had consulted Mr. Saltzmann about some of the points of Jewish ritual Boaz had raised, he had noticed my attendance at the synagogue, and he must have found my mood or attitude more sympathetic to his faith than it had previously been. At any rate, our lessons were soon being neglected more shamefully than ever before; and Mr. Saltzmann revealed a kind of ironic ardor that he had previously hidden from me. He swayed in his chair, he blew his nose, he made his points in the air with an extended, startled forefinger; he tipped his hat forward with a flick from behind, so that its brim was low over his forehead, and thrust it back to run his forefingers through his hair; he spoke of Jerusalem and Babylon and the Vilna Gaon, of Auschwitz, of Isaiah and the Baal Shem Tov. If Boaz spoke most often of God’s power, seeing it figured forth as much in the decisions and acts of every day as in the pageant of nature’s cruder, simpler effects that was constantly displayed between our bald stretch of earth and the sky above, Mr. Saltzmann talked more of God’s justice and mercy. He spoke of how unthinkable it was that everything men and women had always had to endure should go unrecorded, unnoticed, unrecompensed, for age after age, empire after empire, life after life; of how inconceivable it was that his, Mr. Saltzmann’s, demand for justice had no connection with the innermost workings of history, with the intentions of the universe, with the final nature of reality.

In his way Mr. Saltzmann, too, was impressive. But I admit his words had less effect on me, when I was in his presence, than those of Boaz: partly because Mr. Saltzmann was so much more familiar to me, and so much less fanatical, but mostly because it was Boaz who, after all, had declared my conversion to be his mission. “Why me?” I asked him, more than once, in remonstrance, or anger, or amusement; and he invariably answered me, as he had before, in all passion and sincerity, “We have been chosen to choose each other. We belong to the people of Israel.” I could not get beyond that conviction, beneath it, over it. “Is he still praying for me?” I asked Piet once or twice, and he answered me with an air of unsmiling rebuke, “Always.”

So I went back and forth between Mr. Saltzmann in Lyndhurst and Boaz on the farm; often I went out to the farm when I had no business there other than to see Boaz. I made no attempt to bring the two believers together. I felt, almost superstitiously, that I could do so only if I had brought them together within myself; only if through them I had arrived at a comprehension that would make my acquaintance with them both, at that particular time in my life, self-justifying, self-explanatory, reasonable, an illustration of the necessary principles of our shared existence. I argued with them both, I challenged them both, I denounced them both. There were times when I told myself that I was doing no more than studying them as specimens, or that I was practicing some kind of hoax on them, or that I was kindly doing them a favor in pretending to be interested in their preposterous beliefs. Yet even when I said such things to myself I remained convinced that if I ever let shame, guilt, embarrassment, or my own critical mind inhibit me from what I was doing, I would always regret it, I would always believe that I had let slip an extraordinary chance which would never recur.

Invariably, every day, I still called in at the hospital. To the astonishment of the doctors my father had plainly begun to recover; Dr. Friedenberg had finally summoned up the courage to say, “I think we’ll soon be able to say that he’s out of danger.” In all, four months were to pass before he emerged from the hospital.

VII

THE farm had always been far more of a hobby or extravagance of my father’s than a source of income; he was what his Afrikaner neighbors called a tjek-bock boer, a checkbook farmer. At different times he had put a great acreage under the plough and planted mealies; he had gone in for the breeding of Karakul lambs; he had attempted to raise pedigreed Red Poll cattle. None of these enthusiasms had turned out well. The mealies died of drought; he lost his appetite for Karakul breeding when he found that the lambs had to be slaughtered at the age of three days if their pelts were to realize the highest value; the pedigreed bull he had bought lacked the progenitive urge. It was fortunate for me that nothing more complicated than speculation in sheep was the current activity on the farm; the animals were simply supposed to graze on the veld until such time as they were sent to the sales in Lyndhurst.

I was surprised, therefore, that when he began to make his first attempts to come out of the utter seclusion and isolation of his illness, my father should have asked me as often as he did about the farm. His business having been sold, I suppose he felt the farm to be the only hold he now had on the world of possessions, of activity, of competition, of buying and selling at known prices, in which he had lived for so long and from which he had been so abruptly sundered. Usually when I went to see him he still lay silent on the bed, with an expression on his face that was remote, abstracted, almost aristocratic in its detachment and insubstantiality. But if he did do more than greet me with a flicker of his eyelids or a few indifferent words, almost invariably he would later ask me if I had been out to the farm, if I had found everything there in order, if it had rained on the farm, if I thought Piet was carrying out his job properly. Because I could see it pleased him if I said I had just been out there, or was on the point of going out, I said these things even when they weren’t true.

However, one day when he asked me what was happening on the farm, I began to tell him about Boaz. Previously I hadn’t mentioned to him that Boaz was living there. But now I described how I had found him on the farm, and how he had spoken to me, and what he looked like; I repeated what I had learned from him about the Israelite sect, and about his own life. I tried also to say something about the nature of Boaz’s belief in God: how absolute it was, and how direct; how he saw God’s purposes plainly written everywhere; how he believed himself to have been chosen by God and yet at liberty to deny his chosenness, in a world in which everything was foreknown yet undetermined. The one subject about which I said nothing was the plan that Boaz had for me, and my own reactions to it. I felt I shouldn’t speak of that until I knew, in the simplest way, where I stood. Then I would either need to say everything about it or never speak of it at all.

But my voice and manner must have shown my father that Boaz had become much more to me than a freak about whom I could tell amusing anecdotes. At any rate, early in my story I noticed that the sick man was listening to me with a curious intentness; but it wasn’t until I’d almost finished that I realized just how strangely he was looking at me, and in what a disturbed, random way he was moving his hands about on the bedclothes. At once I felt that I had been inconsiderate; in my preoccupation with Boaz I had gone on for much too long and overtired him. So I brought the story to an end as quickly as I could. “I hope he’ll still be around when you get up,” I said. “Then you’ll be able to see him for yourself.”

“No! I don’t want to see him!” he exclaimed, with an inexplicable, weak urgency in his voice. “You must tell him to go. You mustn’t wait. You must chase him away.”

“Why?” I asked in surprise.

He tried to sit up, but managed to do no more than get his head a few inches from the pillows before it fell back. Then he said again, “Tell him he must go.”

“But why?” I insisted. “What’s the matter? He’s doing no harm to anyone. He isn’t making any trouble. He’s just —just—”

“Tell him he must go.”

I couldn’t argue with him about it; he was too weak. “All right,” I said.

But I had no intention of doing what he’d told me. For Boaz’s sake I couldn’t do it: for my own: even in a way for my father’s. I felt that the demand had come out of the weakness and disorder of his illness, it was nothing more than a sick man’s whim.

The next time I went to see him I thought he might well have forgotten the whole conversation. But I’d hardly come into the room before he asked me, as if he’d been thinking of nothing else since we had last spoken, “Have you been to the farm? Have you told that man to go?”

“Yes,” I said. “I told him. He’ll be going soon. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Soon isn’t good enough. He must go at once. I don’t want him there. I don’t want him on my place.”

“But why not?” I protested. “What have you got against him?”

Again I didn’t get a direct reply. After some minutes, however, he began to ramble in a disconnected yet obsessive way about Boaz—or rather, about “that man, who calls himself an Israelite.” His voice was so low that I had to strain to hear him; his words were interspersed with the louder sounds of his breathing, or with spells when he merely moved his lips without producing any sounds. The incoherent craziness of what he was saying was made more painful by the physical effort that went into it, and by the terrible earnestness with which be searched my face at every phrase and in every silence for my reaction to his words.

That man who called himself an Israelite, he said, was responsible for his illness. He was a usurper, an enemy, a demon, an evil spirit. He wanted him to die. He came to take what wasn’t his. He had to be driven away. At once. Couldn’t I have seen it? How could I have let him stay there for so long? What had I thought I was doing? Hadn’t I understood that it was a matter of life and death? Yes, life and death, nothing less. That man was a malakh hamovess, an angel of death. He was waiting to finish his work, he would stay there as long as he was allowed to. But I could drive him away if I really wanted to. Unless I was in league with him and was also waiting for him to finish what he had come to do…

So he went on, interminably. It was pathetic, tedious, unnerving. His eyes, filled with fear and reproach, would not leave me. I tried to soothe and reassure him; but when he finally fell silent it was not, I felt, because I had succeeded but simply because he was too fatigued to go on. He beckoned me to come closer, and grasped my hand; his touch was hot and dry. “You must also take care,” he said in a voice laden with anxiety and foreboding. “You mustn’t think it’ll be different for you. You understand? You won’t escape either. When he’s finished with me then it’ll be your turn. I’m worried for you also—”

“Don’t worry,” I interrupted him. “I understand. You must rest now. Everything will be all right. I’ll do what you want me to do.”

He lay on his back, his nose raised toward the ceiling, his mouth pinched beneath it. His hands were on his breast, rising and falling with every breath he took. I sat by the side of the bed until he had sunk into a doze. He did not stir when I crept out of the room.

Outside the hospital the afternoon air was tepid, still, yellow. Shadows stretched over dusty lawns and dejected beds of flowers. In the road beyond the hospital grounds was a war memorial: an incised concrete slab, surrounded by steps, chains, cast-iron rifles stacked in threes. The unreality of my father’s words infected everything I saw, everything I thought of. Yet I felt that I was seeing them again for what they were, after too long a lapse. Streets and buildings were nothing more than forms of a common inertness; my thoughts nothing more than forms of delusion. What kind of imbecile, self-indulgent credulity or conceit had been keeping me going between Boaz and Mr. Saltzmann these last few weeks? In what way were my superstitious hopes or expectations better founded than my father’s wild fears? He at least had the excuse of having been weakened almost to the point of death by his illness; whereas I had done no more than watch his struggles.

Because my car was parked facing toward town, away from home, I drove in that direction. It was a Saturday afternoon; the shops were closed and the streets were more than usually empty. No one was about in the Market Square, except for a group of youths sitting on their motor-bikes, gunning their engines and shouting at one another, going nowhere. I turned to the right: more closed shops, a bridge over some railway lines. A little further on was the fence around an abandoned mine, and then streets of low, iron-roofed houses. A few more minutes, a few more turns, and they were behind me. The town was behind me, though the mine-dumps still struggled alongside the road for some distance. I came to the crossing from which the Samarian Road ran off to one side, and I left the main road to join it. It seemed that I was going to the farm.

Why not? Once more I went along the dreary, winding, familiar route. If town had been emptier than usual, the road was busier. Several family parties had chosen to go along it for their Saturday afternoon outings. Now their cars were parked at various unremarkable spots along the road. The adults sat just outside the cars, listening on portable radios to commentaries on the big rugby matches; the children ran about in the veld, jumping on or off the ant heaps, or playing hide and seek in the scrub.

By the time I reached the farm I’d left behind the last of these groups. Once through the cattle grid the road ran straight for a mile or so, then swerved a little to begin the short ascent to the farmhouse and the koppies behind. From a distance the house looked no more substantial than a box, with the lines of the kraals and outbuildings scratched around it. The huts where Piet and the others lived were out of sight, hidden behind their shelter of thornbushes.

I pulled up the car in front of the house. No one came to greet me. I didn’t expect anyone to come. I hadn’t said that I would be paying a visit to the farm that day, so even if the car had been seen approaching along the road, it would have been taken to be someone merely passing through on his way to Platkop or the farms beyond. I sat in the car for a little while, listening to the ticking noises made by the engine as it cooled. Nothing moved about me. I could hear no other sound. Eventually I opened the door and stepped outside.

It was only when I was crossing the bare space between the house and the grove of thornbushes some distance behind it that I realized why I was there. I had come to tell Boaz that he had failed. He was welcome to stay on the farm or to leave it, as he wished. But I no longer had anything to say to him or any interest in listening to what he had to say to me.

VIII

THE ground between the thornbushes had been turned into soft sand by the coming and going of the people who lived there. So my footsteps made no sound as I approached. The first that was known of my presence was when one of the yellow, long-tailed dogs which were always hanging around the place got to its feet and ran forward, barking loudly. By then I had already come upon the congregation gathered in front of the hut which Boaz had taken for himself.

About a dozen people were there, apart from Piet and Kagisho and their families. I knew none of the other drab, raggedly dressed, undersized men and women, farm laborers and their wives, who were squatting on the ground. In front of them stood Piet, with a Bible in one hand and in the other a long stick or stave surmounted by a Star of David plaited out of twigs. Next to him, on an iron bedstead, his body covered by a confusion of dirty blankets, lay Boaz. The sight of the bed dragged out into the open air, exposed to the sunlight, was somehow in itself almost as shocking or unnatural as Boaz’s look of illness, collapse, abandonment, even decay.

He looked very ill indeed, like a dying man. His face was gray in color, small, annulled, lightless. His lips were parted, his eyes closed. He was totally unconscious; the only person there who was unaware that I had come. The others had turned to look at me resentfully, as an intruder, a spy, a white enemy; and hopelessly, too, as someone who had the power to stop what they were doing and send them packing, and would probably do so. Only the children, the oval whites of their eyes immense with expectation and pent-up excitement, seemed pleased by the distraction my arrival offered.

No one moved or spoke. The sun shone down from a great height on the sand, huddled people, huts of mud and scraps of iron, the unconscious man on the bed. Heavy shadows merged indistinguishably on the sand. The dogs sniffed cautiously at my feet and wagged their curving tails. In the silence a sheep bleated loudly, resonantly, with a kind of ferocity of protest contained in the very helplessness and tremulousness of the sound. Until then I hadn’t noticed the creature, tethered by a piece of rope around its neck to a thorntree a few yards away, on one side. It jerked its head, opened its mouth, and again the noise exploded, an astonishingly loud call or yell to come from such a small cavern of flesh and bone. High, full, vibrating, the noise went on for longer than seemed possible, maddening in its stridency and urgency, in its stupidity and comprehension alike. Even while the noise still rang in my ears, I found myself looking at Piet and he at me: in the look we exchanged I knew, among some other more surprising and important facts, that that clamorous sheep was not his.

I can’t say for how long we stared at one another. He was bareheaded; and the unfamiliar prominence of his hard, round, shaven skull made him look like a stranger. He took a deep breath, as if to meet a challenge, raised his stave in the air, and began to speak in a tone I had never heard from him before. He was no longer the businessman manqué that I had known, or the patient, slyly submissive underling, or the conscientious shepherd. Or if he was still a shepherd, it was of quite another flock, which he was leading to pastures I had never seen. His voice was loud, hectoring, defiant, his gestures were bold and emphatic. He had won back the attention of his audience immediately. One or two of them still glanced anxiously at me from time to time, but even they, like the others, were answering Piet’s cries and exhortations with cries of their own, or with murmurs that they took up in turn from one another, or with phrases that they chanted in unison until Piet silenced them with a single wave of his hand. The little congregation swayed and moaned, the people clutched at the dust with their hands or clapped them together, they sat still and tense when Piet lowered his voice to a whisper. Whenever he turned to the recumbent, motionless figure of the sick man on the bed, opening his arms wide or lifting them high into the air as he did so, his audience was utterly silent, as if waiting for the sick man himself to rise and answer the speech breaking continually above him.

I couldn’t understand a word of what Piet was saying.

Not a word. He was speaking one of the African languages: a speech that to my ears was composed entirely of clicks, trills, gutturals, deep plosives. Completely cut off from his meanings, I couldn’t even tell where one word ended and another began. Yet, as in a dream, I felt that the incomprehensible sounds he was uttering were directed more specifically to me than to anyone else in his audience. The others may have forgotten about me; but I was certain that Piet had not.

As in a dream, too, foreknowledge and knowledge after the event were commingled inextricably in my mind. Each event surprised me as it took place; but once it had happened it seemed to me that it was just what I had been waiting for ever since I had come. Yes, Piet would abruptly bring his speech to an end, at a moment when no one had apparently expected him to do so. Yes, he would point at two men in the congregation, who would get hastily to their feet and go to the tethered sheep. Yes, one of them would grab it by the ears from behind and pull it back, making it rear up momentarily, before the other man knocked its hind legs off the ground. It sat grotesquely upright on its rump, with its forelegs dangling forward, its head pulled back, its throat exposed. Yes, inevitably, Piet would cross the space between himself and the pair struggling with the sheep; he would take a clasp knife from his pocket and open it; he would bring it to the animal’s throat, and then, with a deft sweep, do no more than sever the rope.

The maddened animal plunged, screamed, kicked, collapsed, was dragged upright again. Once more it sat in an artificial manlike posture, its thin forelegs held up in front of it with a curiously finicking helplessness, a disgusting daintiness. It showed its even teeth, its tongue, its wide, flat nostrils. Its eyes were rolled back into its dark head. It looked like a shrunken, demented old man; the men kneeling or stooped around it, their faces clenched with absorption, were animalized, rapt, barely conscious.

And now?

Yes, of course, once he had done it I had known all along that he would. Piet pointed at me, with the hand in which he held the knife, and at last spoke in a language I could understand.

“You can see how sick Boaz is. This morning he fell, and since then he has not been able to get up. His heart is failing him. So we ask God to take this sacrifice, instead, and to let our teacher live.”

Then he raised his voice, his hand still outstretched. “Boaz has prayed for you, many days. Now you will pray for him.”

He held out the knife to me. The lamb plunged. I came toward it. Its eye was a yellow blaze of life, crossed by a black, expressionless, oblong iris.

IX

Boaz died the next morning, in the African section of the Lyndhurst General Hospital, to which I had brought him in the car. Piet had been right in his diagnosis. He had succumbed, Dr. Friedenberg said, to a “massive coronary occlusion.” So the sacrifice was in vain.

Yes, I did what had been asked of me. Under the blade of the knife I felt something soft and thick, then a resilience which suddenly failed, and the knife entered a hollow place behind it, a vacancy. It was a squalid, messy, pointless, godless act. Even while I was doing it I remembered as a child cutting open a tennis ball to see what was inside: the sensations under my hand were much the same. But the cutting of the sheep’s throat was followed by a heavy spout of blood, and by cries of exultation from the others that were indistinguishable from cries of grief. It was followed, too, by a sudden seizure of rage within me that made me lash out with the blade again, even though it could do no more than it had already done. I wanted to punish the sheep for dying under my hand; I wanted to revenge myself against Boaz and my father for what I felt they had taken from me.

The outburst left me feeling calmer, a little tired, anxious to help Boaz in whatever way I could. The others made no objection when I said I would take him with me to the hospital in Lyndhurst. Driving back to town, with Boaz awkwardly bundled into the back seat, I remember how consoling I found the emptiness of the countryside around me, its width, its indifference, its hard materiality. It was there, it would last. That was something to be grateful for, I felt then, not resentful of, as I had always been in the past.

I left Lyndhurst for Israel a few weeks later, carrying with me Mr. Saltzmann’s parting gift of a siddur, containing the daily prayers of the Hebrew liturgy. My father had come home just before I left, though he was still confined to his bed for a month or so. During that time he arranged for a white foreman, a Boer by the name of Klaas Eybers, to live on the farm and work it with him, on a profit-sharing basis.

My father never again mentioned Boaz to me, and I did not speak of him either. Some years afterward I learned that Piet had left the farm just after my own departure. He had gone, my father said, into “the religion business” in one of the African townships around Lyndhurst, and had made a very good thing out of it. He had established his own church. My father had no idea what kind of rites were followed in it, but he did know that the money Piet got from his followers he invested in his ever-growing flock of sheep. He paid a fixed sum per head to continue grazing them on the farm.