Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.

Something momentous. I think so.

It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.

We sat in silence.

I hated life.