What have I done to be kept here? he thinks sometimes. It slides away from him. I was against them so they arrested me. But he cannot remember what it was all about. He seizes it and it escapes him. He can recall hard, piercing eyes looking at him, and a blinding light straight on his face, and questions, questions until everything spun round – but then he cannot hang on to it. Flour is sifting slowly and imperceptibly over this memory too, from a tiny hole in his brain.

I must talk to someone! But no one comes in to see him. He doesn’t count the swine.

Once he cried out when the swine was there: ‘I must talk to someone or I’ll go to pieces!’

The swine merely shook his head and took the empty dish away.

It’s getting cold again. Does that mean it’s winter now? Sometimes he feels freezing and his teeth chatter. There are long, endless periods of time. Flour sifts down. Occasionally there is a noise in the corridor outside. The sort of shouts one makes at dumb animals. But nobody comes in. He hears this often. It gets to be a frequent occurrence. Now and again he hears the knocking on the wall, sometimes at a furious tempo that makes him wonder what it can mean. He counts buttons through aeons of time. The room becomes warmer again. But the air remains just as stale and heavy. Flour is sifting down somewhere. Nothing whatsoever exists except for the tramp of feet in the corridor, and the swine.

Search as he will, he is unable to conjure up any pictures of his home. This eats into him more than anything else. I have a home, but a layer of fine flour has settled over it, over the woman there, over any children I may have. The swine sometimes turns up with better food, and announces curtly that it has come from them. He accepts it, and eats it, but as he chews it he is riven with black fear: I’ve forgotten them! They are more indistinct each time. Soon they will have disappeared. I have a son. Or perhaps I haven’t? What am I?

Nobody answers.

He cries wildly to the swine: ‘Is she outside? Let her come in! I must be allowed to talk to her.’

The swine merely shakes his head.

‘But she is outside! I know she is.’

The swine simply departs.

Then it is dark again. And far out in this darkness people are being driven past with contemptuous shouts. And there is knocking on the walls. In a little while a dull report will be heard, shut in but clear. He cringes as he sits on the bench. He hears the hysterical knocking on the wall too. He is being told something, but it’s no use. Dust settled long ago, stifling his ability to interpret it. The knocking calls for an answer, but has to give up. There are no more shots either. When the swine arrives with his breakfast he never looks up.