The ruins, he would hide the baby in one of the ruins. There were already large areas of them in the township. They had been picked clean by scavenging children, but were now left alone, as ugly as ulcers on a weak body. Ja—a ruin. And the best one, because it was the biggest, began not far from his room, near the boundary of the impatient white suburb.

Tsotsi put his tin of condensed milk into his pocket, propping the holes first with bits of papers, then the spoon, and finally he turned to the baby. He replaced the lid, and picked up the box carefully so as not to disturb its sleep. He opened the door, looked around first and then stepped into the street, which was still deserted except for the dust of the men who had passed, a child without a game and a dog with a flea.

He asked no questions among the fallen walls. Neither why they were down and where had the people gone, nor was it right or what wrong had they done that it had come to this. He didn’t need to. They had been asked. On that uncertain day, unremembered now because there had been so many like it, when the squad had come with sledgehammers and crowbars in the first light, and the people had sat sleepy- eyed and bewildered on the pavement, that had been the moment of asking, voiced bitterly or inwardly, wordlessly, to be thrown away unanswered, as much the debris of that day as the rubble their homes had been reduced to after a few violent minutes of work.

Tsotsi passed through doorway to doorway, stepping lightly on walls that lay as they had fallen in their moment of submission. Those that still stood had been shocked into a dumb, gaping idiocy. Through them could be seen other ruins, and through those still others, giving a perspective of raw ends and rubble until it seemed that the space itself, the intangible something defined by four walls and a roof, had been broken up and holes knocked in it. Overhead the sky stretched as taut as a blue tarpaulin.

It was a good place to hide the baby. They were deserted, except for a few lizards grown bold in their undisturbed times. The people were gone, those who had lived there, been born there, gone away as much as those who had died there. The only ones who had returned, and then only briefly, were the children of the other families still in the township. They had come back for a short time starting when the demolition squad had left, returning to scavenge amongst the bricks, going home in the evening with wood from the broken doors and window frames, which had cooked simple meals in other backyards. They had come back another day, and maybe another after that to play there and lay the broken bricks in a child’s dream of home, with a flower in a bottle and a one-legged doll. But they too forgot one day, because there were other games, other ruins, and this one had been picked clean. So the sun bleached the walls, the dust settled and the wind swept it clear of all smells of living. They were odourless as Tsotsi walked through.