The next thought took a long time in coming—and when it did it frightened him. He was curious. This in its way was even stranger than the memory—because that had had predecessors in a half-brothered way, like the man who called himself Petah, and his fear of spiders and the nostalgia in the smell of wet newspapers. None had ever been as vivid, as terrifying as the memory of the bitch, but they did have to do with his past. But he had never been curious. Now he was. He knew his curiosity as a froth of futile questions that came to his lips. He wanted the answers, he wanted the answers very bad, but he did not have them. That was when he decided to take the baby. That was his talisman, his touchstone. It had worked once, working with devastating efficacy. It might work again. He would make it work again. He would wait until it worked again. His determination moved in the shadow of fear. Something urged him to kill the baby and leave it, warning him that he was playing a game he had never dared before. But Tsotsi was obsessed now, a longshot fool who had rolled the dice and had his first win, and then dared the lot because he wanted more. Tsotsi wanted to know everything.

So he carried the baby back through the wide streets and the dawn, passing under the first birds and their chatter in the trees, reaching the township at the same time as the sun. The baby would have to be alive to work its alchemy again. For that reason he fed it, and cleaned it and had now hidden it safely where he could return to it in his time and leisure, to lure the yellow bitch out of his past. When he left the ruins he had decided to return the next day to feed it again.

5

In the time that Tsotsi sat thinking in the ruins, two unimportant and unnoticed events took place in the township. Gumboot Dhlamini was buried and Boston awoke.

The cemetery was an acreage of crowded, sandy soil. There was a fence around the perimeter but termites had got into the poles and eaten them away at the base. Most of them now hung free of the ground, and a few had fallen over, dragging the wires down with them. The cemetery was really an accident. The people had had to bury their dead, and when the authorities came around to discussing the matter the cemetery already existed. It was then hurriedly made official, because with that strange reverence that authority has for dead bodies they sent in a team of workmen to erect the fence and to plant trees at regular intervals along its length.

The trees were a failure. They were meant to be cypresses but someone had made a mistake at the nursery. At least three-quarters had died, and the survivors had grown up deformed and twisted out of all resemblance to what was intended. They were a type of pipe with a deep, almost black-green foliage. If you took your sorrow to their shade you got covered all over by the sticky, resinous secretion on the trunks and branches.