While he watched the cripple and waited, Tsotsi kept saying to himself: I don’t know you, fucker, not from nowhere, so what do I care. Just you make a move. I don’t care a damn thing for you. It had never been necessary to say this to himself before. He had to now, and it was because of the feeling. Tsotsi had a growing presentiment of its nature, but it was not yet fully revealed. At that moment he still knew it only by its hidden working in his body. It was there as a lethargy in his legs that should have been stiff and ready to run when the moment came, as a tiredness in his fingers that would have to be even quicker if he was forced to use his knife. Above all else it was there as a desire—and even that in its way was dull and only half-formed—that it would be better if the cripple didn’t move, if neither of them moved at all, and all of the time to come rushed past like the motor cars, leaving him against the wall and the cripple on his corner.

The full truth of what had happened to him came when the old car stalled and was pushed to the corner and he saw his man escape in its wake. He did care. Regardless of what he had been saying to himself a few minutes ago, he did care. There was no possibility of doubt or of arguing it away. When Morris Tshabalala crawled off behind the car, Tsotsi experienced a spasm of relief. He couldn’t believe it of himself. He shook his head the way donkeys do to dislodge a troublesome swarm of flies. He cleared his throat and spat onto the pavement as if there were a galling taste in his mouth. He even closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the wall as if he had decided to sleep and forget the episode. The truth persisted. His man had escaped into a few more hours of troubled living and he was desperately glad. It was obvious now what had been happening to him as he followed Morris Tshabalala down the main street. He was also right in thinking it had never happened before. He had felt for his victim.

Tsotsi kept well back after that, and from the darkness of a doorway he watched the cripple enter the Bantu Eating House. There was an Indian shop opposite it, and beside the shop a soap-smelling alleyway with three dustbins at the entrance. They were so crammed with garbage the lids didn’t fit. Tsotsi bought a few slices of polony from the shop, then sat down on one of the dustbins to wait some more, but above all to examine the strange experience of feeling for a man.

He refined the thought. The truth of the matter was not his feelings, but the other man’s. It was Morris Tshabalala’s fear, his desperation, the agony of his futile effort to escape, his gladness when the inevitable had been deferred for a little while longer.