His second rule which operated from then on through every other moment of the day was never to disturb his inward darkness with the light of a thought about himself or the attempt at a memory. He was not only resigned to not knowing about himself, he didn’t want to know anything. This was an instinctive caution in Tsotsi to leave well alone. It was also the hardest of all his rules, because of the independent and irrational nature of life. There was only a limited area that he controlled absolutely. The vaster regions of it operated regardless of him, sometimes running against his purpose. Sometimes something simple would catch a sense, something evocative of something in his past, the smell of wet newspaper did it, and it would stir and start associations charged with pain and mystery inside him. Once, feeling secure in his bed in his room, he had seen a spider working at its web in a corner of the ceiling and seeing this he had known a moment of acute terror—and had passed a night without sleep, almost hypnotized by the spider, too frightened to kill it. And all he knew was that the insect, inexplicably, had evoked terror, and that something frightened and very small had moved within him.

Sometimes these encounters with his past were of a more definite nature. Like the time he and Die Aap and Butcher were rolling dice near the station and Butcher nudged him and all three of them looked up. A policeman was walking down the road towards them, wheeling a bicycle with one hand, the other dragging by the jacket a man who was handcuffed. One policeman, one prisoner in a deserted street. Butcher had smiled, Die Aap might have laughed, while Tsotsi waited and watched. The policeman saw them, and he slowed down a little, then tightened his hold on the man and walked on to them.

The prisoner was young, maybe Tsotsi’s age, but as thin as hunger can make a man, with those large shiny eyes that go with it. He had been beaten. There was a trickle of blood from his nose. Tsotsi watched him, vaguely uneasy at first, more so when the man saw him and his face lit up with recognition and he looked quickly at the policeman and smiled suddenly with a wild hope. Butcher nudged Tsotsi. ‘Okay?’ he asked.

But Tsotsi didn’t answer. He was remembering the face—but in his memory it seemed younger and the body under the face was that of a boy, a child with knobby knees and empty hands. There was a memory of boys scavenging the townships. Beyond that he had never gone.

When the policeman and his prisoner were abreast of them he still hadn’t moved, or given the word to the others. They looked at him perplexed. The smile on the prisoner’s face was going, he looked hard at Tsotsi, hoping very hard. Butcher nudged him, and he might have moved then, but the prisoner looked at him desperately as he paused and called him by a strange name. David, he said. Tsotsi looked away, picked up the dice and rolled them.