Then in front of my eyes I saw the letter written by this man to me and I snapped out of the nightmare as if I had walked out of a photograph. I was standing at my window, sweating with terror because of being Charlie Themba, mad and paranoiac, the man hated by the white men and disowned by his comrades. I stood there, limp with cold exhaustion and tried to summon Mr Mathlong. But while I could see him, clearly, walking rather stooped across a sunlit space of dust from one tin-roofed shanty to another, smiling courteously, with his unfailing gentle, rather amused smile, he was separated from me. I clutched on to the window curtains, to stop myself falling and felt the cold slipperiness of the curtains between my fingers like dead flesh and I shut my eyes. My eyes shut, I understood through waves of sickness that I was Anna Wulf, once Anna Freeman, standing at the window of an old ugly flat in London, and that behind me on the bed was Saul Green, wandering American. But I don’t know how long I was there. I came to myself like coming out of a dream, not knowing what room one is going to wake in. I realized that, like Saul, I no longer had a sense of time. I looked at the cold whitish sky, and the cold distorted sun, and turned carefully to look into the room. It was rather dark in the room, and the gas fire made a warm glow on the floor. Saul lay very still. I walked very carefully across the floor, which seemed to heave and bulge under me, and I bent over to look at Saul. He was asleep, and the cold seemed to come out of him. I lay down beside him, fitting myself to the curve of his back. He did not move. Then, suddenly, I was sane, and I understood what it meant when I said, I am Anna Wulf and this is Saul Green and I have a child named Janet. I tightened my hold on him, and he turned, abrupt, his arm up to ward off a blow, and saw me. His face was dead white, the bones of his face sticking out through thin skin, his eyes a sick lustreless grey. He flung his head on to my breasts and I held him. He slept again and I tried to feel time. But time had gone out of me. I lay with the cold weight of this man against me, as if ice lay against me, and I tried to make my flesh warm enough to warm his. But his cold crept into me, so I gently shoved and pushed him under the blankets and we lay under warm fibres and slowly the cold went away and his flesh warmed against mine. Now I was thinking about my experience of being Charlie Themba. I could no longer remember it, as I could no longer ‘remember’ how I had understood that war was working in us all, towards fruition. I was, in other words, sane again. But the word sane meant nothing, as the word mad meant nothing. I was oppressed by a knowledge of immensity, feeling the weight of hugeness, but not as when I play ‘the game’, only in its aspect of meaninglessness. I cowered, and I could see no reason why I should be mad or sane. And, looking past Saul’s head, everything in the room seemed sly and threatening and cheap and meaningless, and even now I could feel the slippery dead curtains between my fingers.