The boy was but eight years old, and spent his days in the company of neighbouring farmers. His family had moved to a rural abode where they might subsist for as long as foreign troops controlled their nation's soil. Food was abundant there, but children were few. The local farmers had become the boy's friends; and living in grandfather's stone house was good enough, except for the punishments. Even at his age he recognised that the grounds for condemnation were insufficient, knew that the justifications his parents gave were flimsy, were arbitrary, almost eager pouncing upon his unkind words or thoughtless slights to his younger sister, whom he came to detest. The punishments were cruel and bizarre because inexplicably suspended. Heavy sanctions were declared, assigned a latent state, and stored up for application at some specific, future date.

      'You will be shut in your room in two days time,' he was told.

      'Do it to me now,' he cried, 'why in two days?' No, only at the appointed hour would he be padlocked in for a morning, for an afternoon and an evening, sometimes longer. Once he was confined two nights and a day in the bathroom, taking his meals by the sink, and sleeping in the tub. He couldn't know that his parents were fighters in the resistance, that his grandfather's house was a way station for escaped prisoners and downed aviators, and that the local farmers had become too accustomed to accommodation, had made too much money selling to the occupying army to be allowed to hear from a small boy of visitors to his grandfather's house.

      Years later, he fought for his country in yet another war, leading fifty men of his own age, and using caution as his principal weapon. He ringed the villages he was ordered to capture, sent in ample warning, reduced the place to rubble, and had his soldiers poke in the ruins. He never lost a man.

      Afterward he returned home to his nation's capital and engaged the pursuit of a beautiful girl. His bid for marriage met stern opposition from her parents, who never assented, only conceded when informed of a conception. His union was blessed with children; but like a sentence held in abeyance ten years then abruptly enforced, terminal illness declared itself in their eldest child, sweeping the infant to death in a matter of weeks.

       His marriage sundered.  He dressed solitude at first in stillborn wanderings, later in sterile liaison, and at last, yet tossing on internal seas, returned to his wife. He bit off the minutes on tobacco's butt ends, strung together his hours in alcohol's sleek stream. Now and again his eyes appeared lucid in an ashen face. His body resisted as best it could the poison's onslaught, growing thin, writhen, and eventually succumbing. He nuzzled close to nothingness on a hospital bed, given up for lost amongst vital organs in collapse. His condition denied him even anaesthetic oblivion, making hallucination his only palliative to agony.

      Pain and delirium played through his body for ten days. His first-born was alive again, cowering in Grandfather's house. The farmers lay dead in smoking ruins picked over by soldiers. He followed his wife's progress by her voice, trailed it through a crowded salon while dictating in a foreign language to an employee lying prostrate beneath a chair. Each day at bedside, the man's second son read the news to him, recapitulated political vagaries, financial trends, and sporting results. The lad received in recompense only silence from the comatose, all but a corpse of a father in the critical ward. Whether a further rung on karma's ladder, mere spills from hazard's pouch, or the hard bargain of original sin, those ten days were a final atonement. The patient slipped from death's grip to emerge in a world of gritty, monotone grey.

      Months afterwards, there came a slow annealing of mental activity, hints of colour leaking in from the corners of his sight. Now he had the dignity, the gravity of one beyond all judgement. It is to his credit that when offered freedom's expanse, he sat in virtue's circle. Branded at last with immunity, he chose honesty's path, as best he could devise it.