It is a hot afternoon. The square is packed with visitors. Few spare a glance for the white-haired woman who, suitcase in hand, descends from a bus. She wears a blue cotton frock; her neck, in the sun, is burned red and beaded with sweat.

Past the pavement tables, past the young folk, the wheels of the suitcase rattling over the cobbles, she makes her way to the gate where a uniformed man stands drowsily on guard, propped on the rifle he holds butt down before him.

"Is this the gate?" she asks.

Beneath the peaked cap he blinks once in confusion.

"Can I pass through?"

With a movement of the eyes he indicates the lodge to one side.

The lodge, put together of prefabricated wooden panels, is stiflingly hot. Inside, behind a small trestle table, sits a man in shirt-sleeves, writing. A tiny electric fan blows a stream of air into his face.

"Excuse me," she says. He pays no attention. "Excuse me. Can someone open the gate for me?"

He is filling in some kind of form. Without ceasing to write, he speaks, "First you must make a statement."

"Make a statement? To whom? To you?"

With his left hand he pushes a sheet of paper across to her. She lets go of the suitcase and picks up the paper. It is blank.

"Before I can pass through I must make a statement," she repeats. "A statement of what?"

"Belief. What you believe."

"Belief? . . . What if I do not believe? What if I am not a believer?"

The man shrugs. For the first time he looks directly at her. "We all believe. We are not cattle. For each of us there is something we believe. Write it down, what you believe. Put it in the statement."

There is no more doubt in her mind about where she is, who she is. She is a petitioner before the gate. The journey that brought her here, to this country, to this town, that seemed to reach its end when the bus halted and its door opened onto the crowded square, was not the end of it all. Now commences a trial of a different kind. Some act is required of her, some prescribed yet undefined affirmation, before she will be found good and can pass through. But is this the one who will judge her, this ruddy, heavy-set man on whose rather sketchy uniform (military? civil? guard?) she can detect no mark of rank but on whom the fan, swinging neither left nor right, pours a coolness that she wishes were being poured on her?

"I am a writer," she says. "You have probably not heard of me here, but I write, or have written, under the name Elizabeth Costello. It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said."

She pauses, then brings out the next sentence, the sentence that will determine whether this is her judge, the right one to judge her, or, on the contrary, merely the first in a long line leading to who knows what featureless functionary in what chancellery in what castle. "I can do an imitation of belief, if you like. Will that be enough for your purposes?"

His response has an air of impatience about it, as though this is an offer he has had many times before. "Write the statement as required," he says. "Bring it back when it is completed."

"Very well, I will do so. Is there a time when you go off duty?"

"I am always here," he replies. From which she understands that this town where she finds herself, where the guardian of the gate never sleeps and the people in the cafes seem to have nowhere to go, no obligation other than to fill the air with their chatter, is no more real than she: no more but perhaps no less.

Seated at one end of the pavement tables she briskly composes what is to be her statement. I am a writer, a trader in fictions, it says. I maintain certain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I change my habitation or my clothes, according to my needs. On these grounds--professional, vocational--I request exemption from a rule of which I now hear for the first time, namely that every petitioner at the gate should hold to one or more beliefs.

She takes her statement back to the guardhouse. As she half expected, it is rejected. The man at the desk does not refer it to a higher authority, apparently it does not deserve that, merely shakes his head and lets the page fall to the floor and pushes a fresh sheet of paper towards her. "What you believe," he says.

She returns to her chair on the pavement. Am I going to become an institution, she wonders: the old woman who says she is a writer exempt from the law? The woman who, with her black suitcase always beside her (containing what?--she can no longer remember), writes pleas, one after the other, that she puts before the man in the guardhouse and that the man in the guardhouse pushes aside as not good enough, not what is required before one can pass on?

"Can I just glance through?" she says on her second attempt. "Take a glance at what lies on the other side? Just to see if it is worth all this trouble."

Ponderously the man rises from his desk. He is not as old as she, but he is not young either. He is wearing riding boots; his blue serge trousers have a red stripe up the sides. How hot he must be, she thinks! And in winter, how cold! Not a cushy job, being guardian of the gate.

Past the soldier leaning on his rifle he takes her, till they stand before the gate itself, massive enough to hold back an army. From a pouch at his belt he takes a key nearly as long as his forearm. Will this be the point where he tells her the gate is meant for her alone, and moreover that she is destined never to pass through? Should she remind him, let him know she knows the score?

The key turns twice in the lock. "There, satisfy yourself," says the man.

She puts her eye to the crack. A millimeter, two millimeters he draws open the door, then closes it again.

"You have seen," he says. "The record will show that."

What has she seen? Despite her unbelief, she had expected that what lay beyond this door fashioned of teak and brass but also no doubt of the tissue of allegory would be unimaginable: a light so blinding that earthly senses would be stunned by it. But the light is not unimaginable at all. It is merely brilliant, more brilliant perhaps than the varieties of light she has known hitherto, but not of another order, not more brilliant than, say a magnesium flash sustained endlessly.

The man pats her on the arm. It is a surprising gesture, coming from him, surprisingly personal. Like one of those torturers, she reflects, who claim to wish you no harm, merely to be doing their sad duty. "Now you have seen," he says. "Now you will try harder."

--J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, pp. 193-196