‘I tell you I felt for you man.’

‘If I had my legs and my sticks I would have killed you.

In a short time. I would have cracked your head open like a nut.’

‘Bantu-boy hey. Me. I use a knife.’

‘Now me. What have I done to you? I gave you my money. All my money from one day. I have nothing else.’

‘I don’t want the money, I kicked it.’

‘I saw.’

‘I tell you man I did feel.’

‘Then why did you choose me, tsotsi?’

‘You are ugly, beggar. You are the ugliest thing I ever did see.’

Morris Tshabalala heard this without anger. It was the truth. There had been more bitter things in his life.

‘Is that all?’

Morris Tshabalala thought about the question unhurriedly. Was it all? No, there was still something else. And in its way it was the greatest of all. It was his revelation. But how do you touch a thing like that, or pick it up in words so that you can say it and hear it? There was a simple statement of it, but he hesitated, uncertain that four common words could mean so much.

‘I want to live,’ he said at last.

Tsotsi thought he understood.

‘I want to live,’ Morris Tshabalala repeated. ‘You know that?’

‘Yes,’ Tsotsi said.

‘No. You don’t,’ the cripple said, and for the first time in their talk his voice rang with an emotion. How could he know it? How could anyone know the full meaning from only four words. There was something like a lifetime clamouring behind those words. What else were the years he had spent crawling along the unending miles of the city pavements? Hadn’t it begun with a moment as terrifying as that other birth from a woman’s belly? Hadn’t they dragged him out of an even darker womb to begin a sequence of days so different, so unlike anything he had ever known before, that it could only be likened to being born again? Time was relative. Measured by something other than days and months, his six years had made him an old man.

‘No, you don’t,’ he said to Tsotsi, his voice quick and agitated at the rejection of so much of him. ‘It is not just you and your knife. I say it to myself. Not to you. To my hard hands and my ugly face and my no legs. I say it after many years of thinking I was dead and tomorrow was nothing except maybe the day when the rest of me would be buried with the other pieces.’ Morris Tshabalala saw it very clearly now; he was seeing it passionately, the truth, after all the years of thinking nothing mattered.

‘What is it, what do you mean man?’ Tsotsi could see the other man’s excitement. The cripple was sitting forward now, holding out both his hands as if to feel rain or receive a tremendous gift. But they were trembling, and the sight of them excited Tsotsi. ‘What do you mean man. I don’t know a damned thing what you’re saying.’