One afternoon, when I was not doing anything in particular, my father came to my room and knocked on the door. Perhaps he guessed I was thinking about him, and wanted himself to take ownership of that thought. Perhaps, on the contrary, it was the lack he sensed, as he thrust his body forward in recompense. Either way, now that he stood before me, it was as if his presence had driven something more authentic away, and it was only a shadow that balanced this man upon its heels.

The room was suddenly silent, and I looked out at the bright, grey day beyond the window - a day which, for no clear reason, was destined to be forgotten. Involuntarily, I found myself trying, within its easy facility, to detect the fundamental deficiency that both gifted it with and limited it to the identity that it had.

In a moment, he will open his mouth and say something; he will find words to say - I reflected, - and, whatever those words are, they will mean exactly the same as all the other words he has ever spoken to me. As we waited together for whatever would begin, I wondered if he too knew this, and, if so, from what source he would summon the courage to speak at all. After all, the two of us had said nothing of importance for thirty years; what could there be to say now? And, even if it were possible to say anything new, how could we coordinate our minds to share both that novelty and its importance?

Yet now, as always, it was impossible for us not to speak - a son to a father, and a father to a son - if only to acknowledge the impasse to which we had come together. Like the draught of elsewhere, like the very form of foreignness, in that solitary figure I found myself summing the simultaneous mystery and boredom of all the things I had dismissed in life. On impulse, I stared again at my father, striving to understand what it was the two of us were trying to reach through one another. Just now, close enough to breathe upon each other, it was not his heart I saw into; it was the diffuse reflection of the top of his bald head, and it put me in mind more of an implement - perhaps a workman's tool of some kind - than the repository or source of anything, mental or otherwise. Beyond it, something was moving in the bright, grey day, in the day outside of ourselves on the other side of the lintel. Like the crown of his head, its greyness suggested a kind of unspecified potential, albeit one from which nothing useful could be learned, since all grey days are essentially the same, and no one will ever ask which grey day in particular. Then I saw that, far away at the end of the field, someone was running very fast or very slow between a pair of goal posts and the first line of trees.

“Your sister's name is Dzandze,” he said at last. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I countered, with restrained mirth. “I did not.”

“Then you never knew your sister,” he concluded.

“You are mistaken. I know my sister very well.”

“Then you would also know that she has been pregnant since birth.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Did you never think she walked in a funny way?” He looked up, drew his head close to mine, and declared with satisfaction: “You were almost an uncle all that time, and you never even knew it.”

“When is the baby due?” I asked with feigned indulgence. In fact I wanted him to see that I did not believe a word of it, and therefore this could be little more than empty patronage. But I could not muster the anger to cut my contempt free; clinging to me as it did, it became instead something pitiable which would only pull me down. Instinctively I wondered: What do I really want, believe or know, not just concerning this, but anything?

“When is the baby due?” I asked more softly. But the question seemed to irk him.

“Who can say?” he said abruptly. “Some years you think it’s going to come out, that she might just pull it off. Then it takes one look, and back it goes again …” He shook his head, as though the jeopardy of this birth, and his powerlessness in the face of it, had taken their toll: “This has been going on for some time now, I might add.”

“Since birth, in fact,” I quipped.

“You are correct,” he retorted mildly, as if faintly astonished by the suggestion.

I felt anxious; I felt oppressed by the heaviness of things - the heaviness of the day, the heaviness of this labour, the lack of knowledge, of which it seemed a physical distillate. My father had bowed his head, and with neither his lips nor eyes for qualification, everything he said - everything that happened in what he said - was somehow exorbitant and unconvincing. Language was all we shared, I reflected; without an accompanying set of shared experiences, the litany of facts – “I did this;” “this happened;” “they said that” - was without significance, and therefore without sense. It did not have to be my sister; it was not really what he said that made her strange; it was that he himself was a stranger, and I did not trust him with the life we shared. I did not trust him with the authority to be my father, and he did not trust me with the authority to be his son. Perhaps, after all, it was I who had spoken out of turn.

My father made a gesture. “Your sister was crying by the quayside,” he said. Then, with a different gesture, he raised his head and held the phrase out to me.

I met his gaze. Nothing had changed in the room. Now he was standing up; he was standing by the window: "Does that mean nothing to you? Or not very much?”

"What am I supposed to do with her unhappiness?" I contested.

"You are supposed to wear it," he answered shortly.

Then I realised that, all the along the seam of the sentence, there were little hooks upon which my own life had caught itself, and threatened to unwind. For an instant, with a glittering hiss, the insides of my feelings flash by; who knows with what unique destiny they were created? Who knows when their rightful time might come? Who knows how we can ever reach the desire that drives us onward - the yearning to be here, though it's impossible, though everything's impossible, and both because and in despite of this?

"Perhaps it should have been better to know that you were childless," he mused. "But to be capable of having children, and yet not to have that child ... To carry a child, when that child is little more than prevention - something that fills the space, in you, that another child might otherwise have been ... To carry that thing patiently before you, each day, to have to live with the empty feelings of that - that glut …" he persisted, half horrified, half fascinated. "Yet you would have to come back, in despite of yourself; you would have to keep on checking; you'd always think tomorrow it might be different; it might be born at last. And then tomorrow would go, and there would be the day after tomorrow, and, thinking about these things now, it isn’t easy to believe, is it? Although you have to go on believing, all the same. Don’t you?”

But I had already made my peace with expectation; I knew exactly how far it would lead me; all that remained was all that would ever be, and the waiting that would precede it. Years before, once, like this, I had gone to visit my father in the cracked little room, at the end of the passageway at the bottom of the stairs, and, washing my hands at the sink, I had been surprised at the dirt that had collected there. When I was a child he would never have tolerated such things, I reflected, and suddenly I felt lonely - not for either of us, but for the idea of loneliness itself, the resignation with which it defines its bereft, unshareable space. The guilt of pitying him combined with the excitement of doing so; both in turn combined again with the abrupt awareness that this understanding could only lead to the grave. It was as if, even then, I were looking down the broken steps into some universal darkness, and in the grey room today no time has passed or passes, as in our separate ways, my father and I still await our own birth within a family it remains to discover.