It’s icy out, Helena said. She’s taken to reading the weather forecast for Manhattan every day, because of me. Be careful, she said.

THE PAINTING WAS on display again last year, Helena saw it. More recent commentary was on the wall, she photographed it with her phone and showed me.

Critics suggest that the painting is a depiction of white power or supremacy, an interpretation especially relevant in the present moment.

A white painting by a white artist. Sometimes I think that such a work should be retired from the world, to make room for . . . other works. For historically erased artists and works, that’s how they describe it.

I don’t think I’d mind.

But it’s only on some days that I think that.

SINCE MY VISIT to Joseph I read the morning newspaper on my patio with renewed attention. Or obsession. Some days I wouldn’t find any report, any report I was seeking. No explosion. Nothing. Is it strange to say I felt disappointment?

But then the next day there’d be something: a weapons cache found, in a shanty on some small street, off the main Reef road or the main road to Cape Town, or to the Free State, something.

Joseph’s work was proceeding. Their work was proceeding.

And then I’d think of his dark head bent over his table, and the quiet there under the trees.

I went nowhere near my studio.

I missed Eric. Eric was my friend, but my weekly visits with him had ended. I got a letter from him in London, on a blue aerogram, in black-ink pen and his back-sloping script. I remember when it arrived, one quiet day, I with nothing, no painting, but reading the newspaper reports, my morning search through the paper for clues, my routine conversations with Emily about the grocery list, Josias sweeping, sweeping the pool under the trees.

I wouldn’t visit Joseph, I’d decided that, but I felt the invisible thread that must connect us. I on the patio reading the paper, the reports, as I sat in the dappled sun; he not visible, but there, beyond the trees.

Joseph was working. He would be writing, his dark head bent over his pages; his small, stone room.

ERIC’S BLUE AEROGRAM ARRIVED. A new colour, a new kind of letter. I’d seldom received letters from overseas.

Eric wrote about his course; about his new friends; about London. He wasn’t enjoying the winter, he wasn’t used to it. I had to buy a coat, he said. He made small observations that made me laugh, with his sense of humour I knew so well.

I saw someone who looked like you on Camden High Street yesterday, he wrote. You followed me, right? And: d’you take milk in your tea yet??

And then he wrote: I love being in a free country. I went to a shop in Islington run by the ANC, there were books and books and pamphlets about Mandela we’ve never seen. I stood there and wept, he wrote. And then: Maybe I won’t come back.