He is still trembling as if at a painful and renewed memory.

I have heard this before. When was it?

He is listening to the tramping that went past his door, and then died away as they retreated into the distance. Did they die? he thinks helplessly. He has a notion that they did, without knowing where he has got it from.

And then the flour sifts down slowly and imperceptibly and he is unable to keep a grip on the event any longer. Soon I shall be nowhere. It is all being pulverized into flour. Sifting and sifting.

Help me, he only just manages to think. But the flour immediately settles on that too.

Something occurs to him.

They’ve forgotten you.

That’s why you’re here, meeting no one, never getting sent for to join the others.

You’ve been dropped off the list somehow. Nobody knows you’re here. The swine brings you food, but that happens automatically. They’ve forgotten you.

The idea paralyses him. As soon as the swine comes in he shouts, ‘Have I been forgotten?’

The swine does not answer, but attends to his business.

‘Have I been forgotten?’

The swine shakes his head. ‘Don’t know.’

‘But why does nothing ever happen to me?’

No answer.

‘I must know why, or I’ll…’

‘All right. Don’t kick up a fuss,’ says the swine. ‘There’s more than enough of that here, without you starting.’

He says it in such a way that the forgotten man cringes at once, merely muttering, ‘Something will have to be done before it’s too late. I can’t stand it much longer. I’m forgetting it all. I’m….’

The swine has gone.

A young boy’s voice cries out in the corridor in wild terror, ‘No, no, no! I won’t!’

But the footsteps merely tramp along through it. He hears a brutal ‘Silence!’

The man on the bench inside sits up as if struck by lightning. He is suddenly certain of something: That was my son!

Horrified, he listens to the footsteps dying away in the distance. Where did this certainty come from? He knew at once that it was his son crying out. He’s here too! He has grown up, and now he’s here! And now they’re going to do something to him, so that he cried out no, no!, young and uncertain as he is.

He cannot move, merely sits on the bench, listening. They have gone now, but the footsteps and the cry are still echoing in him, and the questions come thick and fast.

That piercing cry: No, I won’t! Who else could it be but my son? he thinks.

A boy’s voice, crying out what could not be kept in any longer, when you were his age.

They had stopped him quickly but it had been enough. I’d know that voice among thousands.

The fearful shock has jerked him wide awake. Flour no longer sifts down in the hidden part of his brain. The cry tore him out of his numbed existence. He holds tight to his thoughts, and repeats with horror that that was his son. He seemed to know I was here. He cried out right outside so that I should hear his voice. I can recognize him among thousands. He has just been dragged past to be stood up against the wall, I’m sure, since he cried out like that.