The Impostor Read Online Free PDF Page A

light he could see the front line of the weeds, massed like a besieging army in the yard. There was still that enemy to overcome.
    But he knew how much hard work was involved in a project like that. It wasn’t easy to subdue the natural world. His neighbour, the man in the blue overalls, spent hours and hours outside each day, hacking and digging and pruning. Over the next week or two, Adam observed him as he toiled in solitary fervour. There was never a repeat of that strange incident from the first morning, when the man had gone rushing inside. But there was a mutually suspicious awareness between Adam and his neighbour, which grew more complex as the days went by.
    They were always watching each other, in a sneaky sort of way. And one evening, as he sat out on his stoep , Adam noticed the man standing outside his back door, smoking a cigarette. There was a spill of light from inside the house and it caught the brooding presence of him, so silent and intense there on the grass, the red glow of the cigarette going agitatedly back and forth. It was twilight, the end of the day: a natural moment for reverie. But Adam felt uneasy–as if the man was waiting for something; wanting something from him–and this time it was he who jumped up and hurried off inside.
    After that, they avoided each other. When the man was outside in his garden, Adam stayed indoors, spying on him from behind the curtains. But there wasn’t much to see. The blue man–which was how Adam thought of him–was always working, always anxious and frenetic. On the rare occasions when he was standing still, he would be puffing on a cigarette. Nobody ever came to visit him; he appeared to be as lonely and singular as Adam himself.
    Although he slaved away furiously in his garden, he had another job too–or perhaps it was a hobby. He did metal-work. There was a small shed behind the house and for hours every day a horrible noise of screeching and welding came out of it. When he worked at night, Adam could see a spray of fire inside, like the glow of some infernal industry. The blue man was making burglar bars and security gates. They were often propped up outside for the paint to dry. Later he would load them up on a bakkie and drive off to deliver them.

    The poems didn’t come. Or not yet. There was a big window in the lounge with the view that he’d imagined: rolling fields and hills, the dark bar of mountains in the distance. But in the foreground was the windmill, towering over his psyche, making thumping, threatening noises as the blades turned in the wind. It was broken, he could see; the water it fetched up blurted out in jets from a missing section of pipe. When he’d set up a desk in front of the window, with his notebook and pen on top of it, all he could see and hear was the windmill, churning uselessly against the sky. It stood between him and the poems, which stirred invisibly beyond it, out of reach.
    He told himself he needed time. He’d had a major upheaval, a big shift in the foundations. He had to take it easy, allow himself to adjust. In a couple of weeks the windmill would recede into the background and the poems would take its place.
    Meanwhile he tried to settle into this new life of his. He took himself off on walks to explore the town. But the heart of it was really that one main street. And whenever he walked down its length, popping into the shops, trying to make friendly conversation with the locals, the same feeling from that first day rose up in him again: that he was trapped somewhere that was nowhere, in which the light was too blindingly stark, and in which it was always Sunday afternoon.
    What he felt–it came to him after a week or two–was the absence of history. There was the sense of a white deadness before the lightning strikes. In this electric lull, the hands of the clock didn’t move. There was only the land, rolling and vast and elemental, in which time was measured out in the shadows of clouds passing over, or