One day, even though it was after dark, Father had not come home for dinner. We went out to look for him, scouring the whole area. We finally found him out by those red walls. He was sitting next to the iron gates, alone, the ground around him littered with cigarette butts. According to the guard, he’d spent the afternoon sitting there. He had shown the guard his ID, but knew that he would not be permitted inside, so he had just sat there like that – and yet to look at him, he seemed at ease, peaceful. He just couldn’t let go of his former life behind those red walls! He just couldn’t let go of the work! I knew then why he had been unable to enjoy retirement. His heart had remained within those walls; it had remained with all those mysteries and secrets. Nothing else could steal it away: he was infatuated with the place, with the work. He’d been intoxicated by what went on behind the walls; his heart had become divorced from the world outside the compound. This special work, this oh-so-secretive career, had required him to sever all connections with the real world. It was as though he had been confined within a web of secrecy. Year after year the outside world and its inhabitants grew ever more remote until finally they ceased to exist for him. To make him leave this world of secrets, to suddenly force him out of that red-walled compound – well, what he saw, what he heard, what he felt could only mean nothing to him. It was all so unrelated and alien to him; snippets of a life he had long since abandoned. As a result, everything bored him. It was all so meaningless. It was an ossified form of life, unendurable. You could say this is the attitude of a ‘company man’: for such a person normal life is fragmentary, superfluous, pointless. I remember General Patton once said, ‘There’s only one proper way for a professional soldier to die: the last bullet of the last battle of the war.’ I think my father’s sorrow stemmed from this. He hadn’t been felled by some bullet fired from within those red towering walls. The last bullet never found him.