Every moment is a death. We may go back and haunt them, but we may never possess them again. Who designed such a cruel mechanism as memory? Imagine yourself on a train. You see a boy walking the veld. He begins to raise his arm, his mouth widens. He’s about to shout to you—and then nothing. The boy’s gone before you even started to see him. I was on a train only once, the most dawdling train anybody ever bothered to build—the Windhoek-Swakop line. Pushing a team of wheelbarrows across the Namib would be faster. But even the slowest train in creation is still a train. Even a wooden seat in a third-class carriage rocks you like a mother. See him out there beside the tracks? Trousers too short for him, shirtless, carrying a staff tied off with a red kerchief? And still I can’t hold him, his rising arm, his almost shout. I float by. Something he needed to tell me? Something I needed to know? So I died then. That was twenty-five years ago, the occasion of my exile. Are that boy’s words still on the wind? A warning? At the temple courts, Jesus wrote with his finger, in the dust. What words? Nobody knows. Do you see what I’m trying to say?