The baby cried again. Tsotsi went back and brought it out from under the bed. For the first time since the night in the grove of bluegum trees, when fate forced it into his hands, he was glad he had it. He rejoiced in the very things that had disgusted and angered him in the past, like its smell, its wizened ugliness, its crying the raucous yell of noise that came unendingly out of its black hole of a mouth. Everything about it that touched, or could be touched by one of his senses gave him satisfaction. This was reality, to be heard, to be felt, to be smelt. This was no phantom from his past that came like a dream remembered after many years and yet…and yet seemed real. He could hold this baby in his hands. It was real now, and it was the beginning of three strange days and it was still with him and crying and wanting milk and things. Its function that moment went beyond giving him a hold on an actual moment of the living, urgent present. He had become the repository of Tsotsi’s past. The baby and David, himself that is, at first confused, had now merged into one and the same person. The police raid, the river, and Petah, the spider spinning his web, the grey day and the smell of damp newspapers were a future awaiting the baby. It was outside itself. He could sympathize with it in its defencelessness against the terrible events awaiting it.

Not irrelevantly—because despite the woman’s visit the baby looked worse than ever—he thought of death. What if it died? Then he, Tsotsi, would have to take the past back and what could he do with it? What could he, in his life, in that room, do with a day a long, long time ago and a woman humming and a little boy happy with cotton reels on the floor?

‘Stay alive,’ he said aloud. ‘Stay alive—David. I’ll get you mother’s milk.’

When some time later Miriam Ngidi took her place in the water queue, Tsotsi was waiting at his window, standing so that he could watch her without being seen. He noticed that she looked back at his room many times and he wondered if it meant that it was going to be easier to get her. He decided that it did, because there wasn’t much fear in the way she moved or in her face when she looked back. It was a furtive, quick turn of the head when she bent to pick up her bucket and move a few steps forward. After each look she lapsed into an absent mood and seemed to think deep and not to notice anything around her. Then it was her turn at the tap, and when her bucket was full she started on the way back.

Tsotsi had also had time to notice many other things that he had missed the previous day, like the strong slant to her eyes, and the ochre tint of her skin, which was not black like most of the others’. She stood straight and, although not very tall, she looked it because of the way she carried her body, walking well, with a full roll of her hips. One baby had not marked her, or if anything only turned a girl into a woman; the moment of ripening, they said in the township. You only speak of a tree after picking the first fruit.