But all this happens so quickly and so breathlessly that it seems to take place simultaneously. They have had a long time to clatter through the corridor and must have arrived. It will soon be over.

‘Then listen to me you too!’ he starts yelling, striking the heavy door. That makes a splendid noise. It sounds like thunder. He continues to hammer on it without realizing that the iron is making his knuckles bleed.

All signs of life from outside are drowned. He can hear only his own ferocious din.

But listen to me, listen to me….

It doesn’t take long for somebody to hear him, either. Footsteps in the corridor outside. The light goes on. The door is wrenched open and the swine sticks his nose through the crack.

‘What’s all this din?’ he asks furiously.

The prisoner merely gapes at him. The distance is so great between what he sees in the doorway and what he was experiencing just now that at first he does not understand what he is looking at.

‘Answer me!’ says the swine.

He does not answer. His knuckles are smarting.

The swine comes right up to him. The prisoner recoils the small distance there is to recoil in.

‘All that outside,’ he stammers. ‘What is it?’

‘Be quiet now.’

‘My son is with them.’

Nothing stirs in this face that he began calling the swine a long time ago. But a powerful arm is raised threateningly to strike.

‘Will you behave yourself and keep quiet!’

‘My son is with them.’

‘Son,’ he says scornfully. ‘I don’t think you’re very sure whether you have a son or not.’

But such an assertion merely makes the prisoner shout even more loudly, in fury: ‘Did you say I have no son?’

He thinks for a moment. ‘I had thousands of memories of him,’ he says, ‘but they are lost here.’

The threatening blow is not given. The arm is merely lifted ready.

‘Are you going to stop shouting?’

‘Yes,’ he says, cringing and cowed in front of the other man, who is powerful and threatening. The prisoner has never noticed before how powerful he is. He has never looked further than his snout.

‘But I do have a son,’ he says, attempting to put these difficult problems right as best he can. ‘He was among those people who passed just now. He called to me. Do you think I wouldn’t know that voice? He’s grown a bit older, of course, as he must have done if he’s in here. When I came here he was just a little schoolboy.’

His tongue has been loosened all at once.

‘No more nonsense now,’ says the swine, cutting him short. ‘There are no children in here. So it wasn’t your son. If he was a schoolboy when you came here, then he’s still a schoolboy. How long do you think you’ve been here? And now, lie down!’

The prisoner cowers down on to the bench, trying to think about the long period of time he seems to have been there. Isn’t it so long after all? What has he just been told?