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and make recompense with beer.’ There was no laughter now, except my own. People turned inwards. They hugged their glasses, raised their voices and pretended that they had no ears. Ours had become a town which had no ears: the rich built high walls around their homes and topped their iron gates with wire; bankers and diplomats drew the blinds on their limousines or travelled, drably, indisguise. Costers in the market place wouldn’t trade in rumours any more. ‘Be deaf, be happy’ is what they said.
    I F I HAD been calm and in command I would have reminded Corporal Beyat of that day when he had taken my witless sister, as he called her, for a ride and she had returned bruised and ecstatic late at night. But I was crying from the beating they had given me, and shaking, too, from fear. ‘Why am I here?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘For nothing much,’ he said. ‘For talking with your mouth open, like all the others here. That’s what happens nowadays if you grumble with your drinks. There’s someone paid to listen hard in every bar – and we’ve lots of room down here for all the big mouths in the town. You’ll see.’ But he was only talking tough. He knew nothing. Perhaps my name and photograph had appeared one evening on a list and a squad had been sent to seek me out. For what? Perhaps I had been mistaken for another man, one wanted by the police. Perhaps I had simply been unlucky – the wrong face in the wrong place when the word went out there were dissidents at large. A car door had swung open as I was walking from the market with a newspaper and a bag of manac beans. They were expert at abduction. I was pulled onto the back seat and the car was in motion before I had a chance to cry out for help to the old men who sat inthe shade of their porches and watched the traffic pass. The beans spilled onto the floor and cushions as expert blows to the chin, hardly hurting, kept me dazed and silent as we drove out of our gaunt and pungent streets to the wide catalpa’d avenues and to my cell.
    ‘Count yourself as lucky,’ said Beyat. ‘You’ve got me to keep an eye on you. And this cell, it’s got a window, see. You can watch the soldiers marching in the yard. This is a five-star cell. Until yesterday a government minister was here. They came, they asked some questions, they let him go perhaps. Or he was transferred. No one stays for long.’ At his instruction I took off my clothes and watch and packed them in a plastic bag. My five-star cell – a mat, a bunk, a bucket – was no smaller than my room at home. And it was clean and odourless. ‘Your sister,’ he said, checking between my legs and in my mouth for money, weapons, false teeth, drugs. ‘She’s no great catch, you know, not for a soldier. We take our pick. If there are girls about, then count me in. But ’Freti, she’s got mushrooms for a brain. She got what she was after. And now she should clear off.’ He was talking as if we had just met in a bar, conspiratorial strangers, boastful with anonymity and drink. ‘Is that why you’ve brought me here,’ I asked, ‘to talk about my sister? Does she know I’m here?’ He laughed: ‘No one knows you’re here, that’s our job. You’ve gonemissing. You’ve taken off to join the insurrection. You’re dead. You couldn’t stand your witless sister any more, so you cut your throat and climbed into a hole.’ He handed me some brown overalls and a pair of plastic sandals. ‘Put them on,’ he said. ‘Stop shaking. You’re getting on my nerves.’
    I HAVE stood at the window and watched Corporal Beyat as he goes off duty through the wire gate. The women press forward and shout the names of the sons and husbands who have disappeared. They push leaflets into his pockets. They whisper subversion as he squeezes through them and out onto the open pavement of Government Drive. ’Freti tags along without a word from him. Once he turned and shouted, ‘Keep away’ perhaps, or ‘Leave me