I watched from the kitchen window as the next-door neighbour stood in front of the house opposite, wearing striped green pyjamas and slippers that slid ever so slightly on the ground, slick with dew. After a moment he began to move slowly to the edge of one of the neighbours’ gardens. I saw that he carried a spade in his left hand and, in his right, a cigarette whose smoke looped upwards in the morning air. He stood still, and stood still, and all at once began to dig feverishly in our neighbour’s low shrubbery. With one hand he dug, with the other, pulled and pulled on the shrub. I could hear the deep rending noise of the roots in the ground, of earthworms being pulled apart, finally a creaking sound of the plant giving way. Now he held the shrub in his right hand, the spade in his left, and slowly he began to walk down the narrow street to the main road. As I watched him go by, someone else’s shrub in one hand, shedding someone else’s soil in a straight line as he went, I thought: Yes. I know what it is to want to act without first seeking permission. When the odds were so clearly not in one’s favour, what was left to do but thieve? To take something for one’s own. Something that was not shabby, worn out, run down, something trimmed and treated, like one’s neighbour’s shrub. What in the end did they add up to, these moments of revelation? The neighbour and I had never spoken, would never now speak to each other. And Clara – that intensity between us that I could not articulate seemed to have run its course, too. What, now, was I supposed to do with its residues? Still I was held fast. What would I do? I would strip the world bare. I would start over.