Howard, hands limp at his side, Josias silent, as though struck, and Emily lifting, lifting the bedsheets, the blanket, to see if something, something of Joseph remained.

The painting, the painting had been knocked off its ledge and lay on its face on the floor. Its brown paper back, its backboard, had been gashed and pulled out, torn out, revealing only the canvas below. It was not worthy of taking, of examining further.

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED there were the frantic questions. From Jack Benator: who had betrayed Joseph, who knew where he was? Howard counting, again and again, the people who knew about the garden room: the six of us. Me. Howard. Stephen and Helena. Emily. Josias.

Tiny? Ah, Tiny never cared what Joseph was doing there, not Tiny.

One of the children, did one of the children say something? Never, I knew that would not be.

And another mystery: why had the police not come for us, as well? Because we had found, that terrible morning, that the door to my studio had been battered, splintered open, too. Some of my frames tossed aside, things tossed aside in a search, but a cursory search. It seemed the police had quickly seen there was nothing that interested them, there.

And as the days wore on there was a slow dawning: the police had deliberately left us. They had come for Joseph, and decided not to come for Howard, or for me. Jack Benator too: untouched.

And then, one morning a few black days later, as I was saying goodbye to the children going to school, I remembered something. How had I not thought of it before?

Eric.

I WENT OVER the words in my last letter to Eric, in my mind. I went over them, again and again. And again. All I could hear in my head were my own words: A man working for the ANC is staying with us. He stays in the garden room right near my studio, at the end of my garden.

That’s what I’d written. I had written it.

I said nothing to anyone, I said nothing to Howard. I told no one.

I, I alone, was responsible for what had happened.

I thought about dying. I felt like dying.

I BECAME, then, truly ill. No one could talk to me. Howard stayed home from work, and sat at my bedside. Emily came back and forth with tea, meals for Howard. I ate and drank nothing. I don’t know what the children did, how they managed, I think they went to school.

I imagined the interception of my letter, as I lay. My aerogram being opened by the security police, in a grey, grey room, in Johannesburg’s central post office, I knew that building, an old, grey place. I pictured my black-inked words, read, again, and again, by cold eyes, as they swam in front of me, endlessly across my mind: my own black words.

And I imagined the quiet order given by a man in uniform, by telephone, the information passed.