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The hearse passes them. His mother holds out a hand to stop it, speaks to the undertaker. ‘They will give us a lift in to town,’ she says.

So he has to climb into the hearse and sit crammed between his mother and the undertaker, cruising sedately down Voortrekker Road, hating her for it, hoping that no one from his school will see him.

‘The lady was a schoolteacher, I believe,’ says the undertaker. He speaks with a Scots accent. An immigrant: what can he know of South Africa, of people like Aunt Annie?

He has never seen a hairier man. Black hair sprouts from his nose and his ears, sticks out in tufts from his starched cuffs.

‘Yes,’ says his mother. ‘She taught for over forty years.’

‘Then she left some good behind,’ says the undertaker. ‘A noble profession, teaching.’

‘What has happened to Aunt Annie’s books?’ he asks his mother later, when they are alone again. He says books, but he means Ewige Genesing in its many copies.

His mother does not know or will not say. From the flat where she broke her hip to the hospital to the old-age home in Stikland to Woltemade no. 3, no one has given a thought to the books except perhaps Aunt Annie herself, the books that no one will ever read; and now Aunt Annie is lying in the rain waiting for someone to find the time to bury her. He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?

Youth

Wer den Dichter will verstehen

muß in Dichters Lande gehen.

– Goethe

One

He lives in a one-room flat near Mowbray railway station, for which he pays eleven guineas a month. On the last working day of each month he catches the train in to the city, to Loop Street, where A. & B. Levy, property agents, have their brass plate and tiny office. To Mr B. Levy, younger of the Levy brothers, he hands the envelope with the rent. Mr Levy pours the money out onto his cluttered desk and counts it. Grunting and sweating, he writes a receipt. ‘Voilà, young man!’ he says, and passes it over with a flourish.

He is at pains not to be late with the rent because he is in the flat under false pretences. When he signed the lease and paid A. & B. Levy the deposit, he gave his occupation not as ‘Student’ but as ‘Library Assistant’, with the university library as his work address.

It is not a lie, not entirely. From Monday to Friday it is his job to man the reading room during evening hours. It is a job that the regular librarians, women for the most part, prefer not to do because the campus, up on the mountainside, is too bleak and lonely at night. Even he feels a chill down his spine as he unlocks the back door and gropes his way down a pitch-dark corridor to the mains switch. It would be all too easy for some malefactor to hide in the stacks when the staff go home at five o’clock, then rifle the empty offices and wait in the dark to waylay him, the night assistant, for his keys.

Few students make use of the evening opening; few are even aware of it. There is little for him to do. The ten shillings per evening he earns is easy money.

Sometimes he imagines a beautiful girl in a white dress wandering into the reading room and lingering distractedly after closing time; he imagines showing her over the mysteries of the bindery and cataloguing room, then emerging with her into the starry night. It never happens.

Working in the library is not his only employment. On Wednesday afternoons he assists with first-year tutorials in the Mathematics Department (three pounds a week); on Fridays he conducts the diploma students in drama through selected comedies of Shakespeare (two pounds ten); and in the late afternoons he is employed by a cram school in Rondebosch to coach dummies for their Matriculation exams (three shillings an hour). During vacations he works for the Municipality (Division of Public Housing) extracting statistical data from household surveys. All in all, when he adds up the monies, he is