The town of Middelplaas — for that is not its name, but it will do — possessed, among its modest civic achievements, one truly remarkable institution: Jannie.

Not remarkable in the way that explorers are remarkable, or poets, or criminals of any ingenuity. Jannie was remarkable in the way that a grandfather clock is remarkable — utterly dependable, completely silent, and only truly noticed when it stops.

For twenty years, Jannie had occupied the third stool from the left at Kobus's Bar and Lounge with the serene territorial confidence of a minor colonial power. He arrived at seven o'clock on weekdays and two o'clock on weekends with a precision that made the Swiss seem approximate. No greeting passed his lips. No valediction disturbed the air upon his departure. He existed in the pub the way oxygen exists — silently, essentially, and without apparent opinion on the matter.

Pieter the barman had long since ceased to find this unusual. He had, in fact, evolved a magnificent symbiosis with his most faithful customer, a relationship of such refined mutual silence that it would have moved a Trappist monk to quiet tears of professional admiration. The drink appeared. The money disappeared under the placemat. The glass was replenished. No word was spoken. Twenty years of this, and neither man had felt the arrangement lacked anything whatsoever.

Pieter relied on one further courtesy that Jannie extended to the establishment: at eleven o'clock — closing time, to the minute — Jannie would rise from his stool with the unhurried dignity of a man who has somewhere better to be, and this small act served as Pieter's signal to begin the closing procedures. It was, when one examined it, a rather elegant system. Jannie functioned as both customer and human alarm clock, which, at the price of a few beers per evening, represented exceptional value.

It was therefore on a Thursday in November that Pieter first noticed something amiss.

Eleven o'clock arrived. Jannie did not.

Pieter glanced across. Jannie was still there, perched on his stool with characteristic squareness, his eyes directed at some fixed point in the middle distance that had occupied his attention for the better part of two decades. This was not unusual. What was unusual — what struck Pieter with the slow, creeping wrongness of a sum that refuses to balance — was that Jannie's glass was half full.

In twenty years, Jannie had never left a half-full glass. A half-full glass was, in the theology of Jannie, a heresy.

Pieter began his closing procedures with the uneasy feeling of a man who suspects he may be the last to receive important news.

The remaining patrons filed out. Several of the locals who had drunk alongside Jannie for years — meaning, who had drunk in his general vicinity while he maintained his devoted silence — called out their farewells. Jannie offered his customary response, which was to say, none whatsoever. This, too, was normal. But the half-full glass was not.

When Pieter finally crossed the room and invited Jannie, in the traditional manner of publicans everywhere, to conclude his beverage and vacate the premises, it became apparent that Jannie had, at some point during the evening, departed this world with the same quiet efficiency with which he had inhabited it.

He had not made a fuss. He had not clutched his chest theatrically or knocked over his glass or done anything that might have troubled the other customers. He had simply stopped, as a clock stops — mid-tick, mid-thought, mid-beer — and sat there in his accustomed posture, looking, if anything, marginally more relaxed than usual.

The community of Middelplaas rallied with commendable if slightly bewildered warmth.

The difficulty, as I was to discover when Barry the undertaker arrived at my door requesting ministerial services, was that nobody knew anything about Jannie whatsoever.

"What was his surname?" I asked the first local.

"Jannie," he said, with the confidence of a man answering correctly.

"His first name, yes. His family name."