I told Emily to wash his windows, take a bucket down there and wipe them down. I can’t ask Josias to do it, I said. Emily looked at me. Josias knows about everything, she said, but okay, ma’am.

The next afternoon I watched her from my bedroom, her figure, her familiar figure, making its way down the grass, carrying a bucket, some rags under her arm. The bucket must have been full of water because she walked carefully, as though she might stumble and fall. That wasn’t a job for her, I thought.

My mornings in the studio continued in the stasis, my studio started to feel unused, an abandoned shed, with me its caretaker, merely.

JOSEPH HAD TOLD ME his work was proceeding, how I remembered that word, it stuck in my mind and kept returning to me. His work was proceeding, while my work wasn’t. I started reading the newspapers with more attention.

At breakfast, with the newspaper, I would scan and scan, until I found something, something I was looking for: a small explosion on the main road to Sasolburg, one day. Sabotage. I’d carry an image of that road, I’d been on it, it was the main road to the Free State, a long straight road, power lines, some shanties you could see in the distance, glinting, a lone Black man, walking.

And another day: a problem, again a small explosion, outside a police station in Ermelo, I’d been there too. A dusty town, with nothing, its police station a small squat building on the main road, manned with an officer, brutal in his language, I imagined it. I knew that language, I knew it. Opstaan jou moer, opstaan.

My mornings at breakfast now lost their peace. As I sat with my tea, I came to feel that the newspapers were, how can I say, my friends. They held what was true. It seemed to me if I read closely enough, I would find the truth of where we were, what was happening. I began to eat less. I told Emily I only wanted dry toast now, and sometimes I’d only have a few bites of that. Howard said I looked thin.

One morning I read, in a corner buried on page seven, of an explosion on the South Rand, near the foreman’s building, not far from the mine itself. I worried, then, about the miners, the Black miners. What if they were inadvertently killed? I started to worry about many small things like that, that filled my days, my days that I floated through, in all other ways, as before.

Did Joseph read the newspapers? He didn’t have newspapers. But Joseph didn’t need newspapers. Joseph and his comrades were the ones creating the news, the stories, that I was reading.

And then the mines started to fill my dreams. Their black tunnels, their raging heat, a black face, gleaming with sweat; the miner’s lamplight. The clanging of iron buckets, the rails. The elevator that moved up and down, ceaselessly. A roar of dynamite, above. I’d wake, with a start.