Limbani Phiri was twenty-nine years old and had an unfinished chair, propped against the wall of the shack with the three legs already planed and the fourth still a rough parallelepiped that recalled the beams of the stilt houses on Lake Malawi where his father, in another life before the drought of two thousand seventeen, had cut the first piece of mlombwa for his workshop in Mzimba. The chair was for Mrs Dlamini, the South African woman at the egg stall in the Edendale market, who paid in cash and didn't ask for the passport of whoever fixed her things. It was July when he was finishing it. It was the twenty-ninth of June, actually, but in Slangspruit you say July when it starts to get really cold, when the tin shacks turn into a drumhead and all the neighbors wake up together at four because someone is coughing as if a bone were about to come out of him.

Mphatso had come the evening before to tell him to get on the bus, the one the mayor of Pietermaritzburg had laid on to carry to the border anyone who wanted to leave by the thirtieth, and Limbani had looked at the chair with the air of a man calculating how many nails he has left in his pocket. Mphatso had said: the border is the border, a chair is a chair, a chair can be made in Lilongwe too. Limbani had pointed out to him that in Lilongwe there is no Mrs Dlamini, and Mrs Dlamini had given him an advance of four hundred rand in his hand two weeks ago, which meant the chair was no longer entirely his, it belonged for about a third to a woman who sold eggs and who, in return, had never asked him where he came from. Mphatso had answered that chairs are only chairs and that dead men don't finish chairs, and Limbani had looked at the fourth leg and thought that in Lilongwe there would still be wood, of course, but the wood of Lilongwe is another wood, and a chair made with the mlombwa of Mzimba is not the same chair you make with the bluegum of Pietermaritzburg, the bluegum is lighter, it holds the nails better but it doesn't sing under the plane the way the mlombwa sings, his father had learned it from the Portuguese painter of Salima who made furniture for the nuns and used to say that every wood has a voice, you only had to listen to it.

On the morning of the thirtieth he had gone out at six. He had taken the chair to carry it into the yard to finish it in good light, because the shack's bulb had gone two weeks ago and the bulb shops had been closed since Operation Dudula had set fire to the warehouse of Mr Govender, the Indian who sold everything to everyone without minding the skin, and now for a bulb you had to go all the way to Edendale Mall but at Edendale Mall the Somalis no longer went back, nor the Mozambicans, the Malawians like Limbani passed through keeping their eyes on the ground. He had set the chair upside down on the little table of screws. He had taken the plane. He had planed the fourth leg for two, three, ten minutes, enough to bring down to the ground a handful of shavings that looked like the black curls of a young woman's hair, and this had reminded him that we had to phone his sister in Malawi for his niece's birthday, he would have it done tomorrow, today he was finishing the chair.

They had come, five of them, from the side of the water pump. Limbani had not seen them at once because he was bent over the wood, but he had heard the sound of the boots on the beaten earth, a precise, dry sound, like when his father struck the hammer in the cellar and you already knew which nail he was looking for just from the way he moved it. He had lifted his head and had seen the one in front, a boy of maybe seventeen with a cricket bat, who had asked him in Zulu if he was Malawian, and Limbani had thought that the word Malawian in Zulu sounds almost like the word in Chichewa, two Bantu languages that meet in the same stressed syllable, and this for a moment had seemed to him consoling, like when you find a joint that works on its own and you don't need nails.

He had said yes.

He had said nothing else because there were the plane in one hand and the fourth leg of the chair in the other, and because Mphatso had explained to him that saying anything else is no use. The boy had raised the bat. The other four had come closer. Mrs Dlamini, at the Edendale market, at nine in the morning, would open the egg stall as she had every Tuesday for eighteen years, would clean the till with a wet rag, would count her four hundred rand of advance the way a person counts the months of a wait that is about to end, and for a few days she would still believe that the chair was coming, that the Malawian carpenter was only late, that wood is wood and Mzimba is Mzimba and a chair, once begun, a chair gets finished.