He sat and stared at the doctor’s assistant, big and black, and wondered how that big man could move so lightly. Of course he is married – very much so – and has a lot of children. He sleeps well at night and sleeps again in the afternoon. He eats a great deal and never complains of liver trouble. He lives in one room with his wife and their offspring, and his earnings exceed his needs . . . Absorbed, barely living himself, it was delightful to live, just for one moment, the life of that huge assistant. Delectable oblivion, heavenly dullness. Then suddenly he pressed his right side, a mixture of pain and gladness.

He was glad because the excruciating pain had come back at the right time. His right side had given him no pain at all for the last two days. He had become afraid that his ailing body, which had tortured him for months, was now playing tricks on him, feigning complete health, to deceive the doctor. Then the two pounds’ fee, paid in advance to the black man, would be thrown away. The pain in his side was a small matter, compared to the certainty that the two pounds were not wasted.

The three light bulbs gyrated frantically, meeting and then separating, soaring and shooting like meteors, and then standing still and gazing at him sardonically. The chairs started stamping their feet on the linoleum and danced to their own frenetic music. The walls soon caught the gay tune and swung their breasts and their buttocks, then linked their hands in an uproarious roundel.

The room grew tired of dancing, and his intestines took a rest. Things settled down before his eyes.

There was a big white spittoon in one corner of the room, and around it roamed a small dark creature, a cockroach.

It began to climb up the smooth white slope of the spittoon till it reached the brim, and then stood still twitching its whiskers. The young man was astonished at there being a cockroach in the surgery of a famous physician; he even wanted to draw the attention of the assistant to the fact, but soon dismissed the idea: why should he? He was not a regular patient; he had no right to interfere, to rebuke the assistant, this assistant.

He reached for a motley collection of medical journals and trade papers and old issues of Time and Newsweek. These appealed to him because of their crumpled pages and torn covers. He loved scraps. He was always fascinated by the reading-matter shopkeepers wrapped his cheap food in: he spread them before him calmly and absorbed their contents before he became aware of the food, and was never put off by the grease which made the paper transparent, one side becoming, as it were, a background for the other. It was much more pleasant reading than a brand-new magazine or a handsomely bound volume: it took in all the cultures and all the languages he knew and gave wonderful glimpses into the most varied mentalities. There were art reviews and books by literary pundits and essays, notebooks, ledgers and legal documents and a thousand other things.

That was why he picked the oldest number amongst those magazines to browse in. It was wonderful how little the political scene had changed. Only a few names. It carried the account of the lynching of a boy. Raped a sixty-year-old woman, it was alleged, in a public thoroughfare. Mob set upon him. Woman crushed to death in crowd. A prison, a break-in, a tree and a fire and no trial at all. He threw the magazine back. Then he remembered the cockroach.

He looked at the spittoon and had to wait for a moment till the creature poised itself at the summit of the concave crater. The poor thing, he thought to himself, was simply going to its death: there was poison lying in wait where it expected food. Most probably it was a cockroach with a low I.Q.; it should have smelt the noxious chemicals and inferred with perfect cockroach logic that this was no place for it, and that it ought to withdraw with all caution. But then, who knows, it might be an adventurous cockroach?

A door opened and three villagers came out, two of them holding the arms of a woman whose deadly pale face looked still paler against her black clothing: her whole body was covered except for her hands which looked like an X-ray picture of hands. Her eyes were rolling in dumb expectation and the young man had to lower his gaze so as not to meet hers.

The cockroach was still struggling, still determined. This time it was looking down into the very heart of the spittoon, into the mouth of the volcano. Nothing seemed to scare it away.

A voice awakened the young man; it was the black man. "Your turn," and the young man stood up apprehensively, and went in by a different door from the one the woman had emerged from.

A bulky man of about fifty blocked the kneehole of the desk at the farthest end of the room. His thin hair was neatly brushed flat upon the crown of his head and his whole appearance was stockily brisk. He motioned the new patient to sit down and asked what the trouble was. The young man started to describe the pain in his side, but soon realized that he was exaggerating. Would the doctor think him a weakling, a coward? Would he think that he was soliciting the greatest possible attention for his two pounds? At last the doctor said, "Let’s see," and proceeded to another room. The patient followed him.

The young man was seized by a childish fear when he saw the small, white, metal bed. He lay down, bared the part that was giving him pain, and gave himself up to what was to follow. The doctor’s pudgy index finger was cold when it touched his skin, but it gave him burning pain inside. The finger was on the spot where it hurt most, circling around it. Then something gave a sound like a sigh, and whole thing seemed an elaborate conjuring trick. The stethoscope came into play. It was a relief when the doctor told him to dress, although the pain had now spread all over his stomach.

Back at the desk, the doctor asked him further questions. He answered without thinking. At last the doctor said, "You’ve got appendicitis. You should have the operation as soon as possible."

The matter-of-fact, everyday tone of this statement made him all the more conscious of its significance. He asked, "Soon? . . . How soon do you mean?"

"It had better be done within a week."

He felt as if his heart was slipping from its place. The pain in his side became so hard and stone heavy that he could not stand up straight. He felt sorry for himself. Would the doctor feel sorry for him? Should he ask the doctor about the "conditions" with regard to the operation? Could he tell him he did not possess a single pound? The doctor was impassive.

"In the meantime I’m prescribing a painkiller and an ointment."

The young man walked out with his head down. The electric lights seemed to him very weak. He rolled his eyes but the big empty chairs in the waiting room stayed still.

He looked at the spittoon, to see what had become of the cockroach. He saw not one, but many black cockroaches.