One day, I noticed that he’d spent ages just standing on the balcony, a blank expression on his face. Several times I asked if he’d like to go for a walk, and each time he rudely refused. I asked him what he was thinking – if there was something making him unhappy, or if he needed us to do something for him. He uttered not a sound; he just stood there looking sad – pathetic, really – not moving a muscle, like a wooden puppet without a puppet master. The winter sun slowly worked its way over his body, illuminating his head of grey hair, giving it a shining brilliance. I walked up to the balcony window and looked out. You can easily imagine the look on his face in that moment – it was an expression absolutely familiar to me: his face was taut, deep lines were etched across his forehead, his eyes had a vacant quality about them – unmoving, they seemed to be embedded within sagging eye sockets from which they could, at any moment, come loose and fall silently to the ground. But if you looked attentively at that empty mask, if you looked beyond the spectre of death hanging about it, you could see under the surface the confusion he felt, the restlessness, the sense of expectation for something that would never come, the utter despondency.

Father’s moods made him seem a stranger, and yet he remained familiar. This often made me very unhappy. In the beginning, we thought that the reason he did not wish to go to the old people’s recreation centre was that he didn’t like the atmosphere there, so we asked some of his old comrades-in-arms to come and pay him a visit. But even after these friends arrived, Father remained cold and indifferent; no friendship was rekindled. After a few commonplace remarks and some unwelcoming looks, he managed to get rid of them pretty quickly. It soon became obvious to us that Father was friendless, and that this was mostly his own doing. When he was dying I noticed that the only people who came to pay their final respects were a few senior officials from that red-walled compound and our relatives; no one else. The only person he wanted to see was you; you were perhaps his only friend, if you could call your relationship with him friendship. My father must have got along poorly with the people in his work unit. I wondered how this happened. What was it that made him keep people at a distance? Was it honour? Or character? Was it the work? What made him so solitary, so bad at normal relationships? What was it that left him friendless, can you tell me? Ah, forget it. Perhaps it’s better if you don’t tell me. But let me tell you why he was unable to enjoy his golden years, unable to live out his days happily as other old people do.