‘One more day.’

‘I will wait it Mama.’

‘After so many years.’

‘He will come. It will be at an end.’

‘All the years.’

‘David!’ It is his mother and he waits in silence. ‘David!’

‘Yes Mother,’ he answers.

‘The salt, my baby. Bring me the salt.’

The salt is in a tin on a shelf behind the bed. If he stands on his toes he can touch the bottom of the shelf with his fingertips, so he knows he is getting bigger because there was a time when he couldn’t touch the shelf, not even if he jumped. But the tin is still beyond him, and he must stand on the bed before he can reach it. While he is climbing up he hears the voices again.

‘Does he know?’ It is the old voice.

‘Yes Mama.’

‘What does he say.’

‘He is a child, Mama, he was too young to remember.’

‘So many years.’

Now he has the salt, and is down from the bed with a jump, and with another jump he is at the door and there he sees his mother on her knees before the porridge pot, beside the fire, and because she is beautiful and young and gentle he rushes to her and she catches him up in her arms, laughing as she hugs him, smothering him happily in her smell and her warmth.

Then he turns and looks at the old woman, watching her in silence because she is the oldest thing in his world and he has great respect for her and also fear. She is small and crooked and what is left of her is held in voluminous clothes. Her face is like the tortoise he once found in the veld and brought home. He respects her because of the example of the big people of his world, like his mother, who speak softly to her. He fears her because once when she found him doing something that was wrong, she caught him with that thin, bony hand of hers which looks like a fowl’s foot, and with the other one pinched his bum until the snot and tears came into his mouth. But there is more than just the respect he had learnt from others and his self-taught fear in his attitude to her. He knows that she watches him carefully and sometimes sees him more clearly than the big people—even his mother—who have a way of looking but not seeing. What is more important, she has never laughed at him. Not once. That then is how they face each other now, himself silent, wondering if she saw him do anything today, and the old one eyeing him with her bright, black beads.

‘Does he look like him?’ she asks his mother, who looks up from the porridge pot to smile at her son.

‘Yes Mama. He is our child.’

The old woman spits out a gobbet of the snuff she puts in her lower lip and calls him. He looks down at his feet, and fidgets on them until his mother says, ‘Go to her David’, so he goes.