People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the coun… - Nadine Gordimer

What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates.

No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village.

Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.