Life and Times of Michael K (12 page)

‘So I hear you ask who is in favour of the camp? I’ll tell you. First, the Railways. The Railways would like to have a Jakkalsdrif every ten miles along the line. Second, the farmers. Because from a gang from Jakkalsdrif a farmer gets a day’s work blood cheap, and at the end of the day the truck fetches them and they are gone and he doesn’t have to worry about them or their families, they can starve, they can be cold, he knows nothing, it’s none of his business.’

A short distance away, out of earshot, sat the gang foreman on a little folding stool. K watched him pour coffee out of his vacuum flask. His long flat fingers could not all find a place on the ear of the mug. With two fingers in the air he raised it and drank. Over the rim his eyes met K’s. What does he see? thought K. What am I to him? The foreman set down the mug, raised his whistle to his lips, and, still sitting, blew a long blast.

Later that afternoon, while he was chopping at the roots of a thornbush, the same foreman came and stood behind him. Glancing under his arm, he saw the two black shoes and the rattan stick tapping idly in the dust, and felt himself trembling with the old nervousness. He went on chopping, but there was no strength in his arms. Only when the foreman moved off could he begin to collect himself.

In the evening he was too tired to eat. He took his mattress outside and lay watching the stars appear one by one out of the violet sky. Then someone on the way to the latrines stumbled over him. There was a commotion, from which he retreated.
Moving the mattress back to the hut, he lay on his bunk in the dark under the roof-plates.

On Saturday they were paid and the commissary lorry came. On Sunday a pastor visited the camp to conduct a prayer service, after which the gates were thrown open till curfew time. K went to the service. Standing among the women and children, he joined in the singing. Then the pastor bent his head and prayed. ‘Let peace enter our hearts again, O Lord, and grant it to us to return to our homes cherishing bitterness against no man, resolved to live together in fellowship in Thy name, obeying Thy commandments.’ Afterwards he spoke to some of the old people, then climbed into the blue van that had waited for him at the gate and was driven off.

Now they were free to go to Prince Albert, or visit friends, or simply take a walk in the veld. K saw a family of eight, the man and wife in their best sober black, the girls in pink and white dresses with white hats, the boys in grey suits and ties with their feet stuffed into shiny black shoes, set off down the long road to the town. Others followed: a band of girls, laughing, arm in arm; the man with the guitar together with his sister and his girlfriend. ‘Why don’t we go?’ suggested K to Robert. ‘Let the youngsters go if they want to,’ replied Robert. ‘What’s so special about Prince Albert on a Sunday? I’ve seen it before, it’s nothing to me. Go with them if you want to. Buy yourself a cool drink and sit outside the café and scratch your fleabites. There is nothing else to do. I say, if we are going to be in jail, let’s be in jail, let’s not pretend.’

Nevertheless K left the camp. He strolled down the Jakkalsrivier till the wire and the huts and the pump were out of sight. Then he lay down in the warm grey sand with his beret over his face and fell asleep. He awoke sweating. He lifted the beret and squinted into the sun. Striking all the colours of the rainbow from his eyelashes, it filled the sky. I am like an ant that does not know where its hole is, he thought. He dug his hands into the sand and let it pour through his fingers over and over again.

The moustache they had shaved off at the hospital was beginning to cover his lip again. Still, he found it hard to relax with Robert and his family around the fire where the eyes of the children were continually upon him. There was one little boy in particular who pursued him wherever he sat, clutching at his face. The child’s mother, embarrassed, would fetch him away, whereupon he would wriggle and whine to be let loose till K did not know what to do or where to look. He suspected that the older girls laughed at him behind his back. He had never known how to behave with women. The Vrouevereniging ladies, perhaps because he was so thin, perhaps because they had decided he was simple, regularly allowed him to clean the soup-bucket: three time a week this made up his meal. He gave half his wages to Robert and carried the other half about in his pocket. There was nothing he wanted to buy; he never went to town. Robert still looked after him in various ways but spared him his speeches about the camp. ‘I have never seen anyone as asleep as you,’ Robert said. ‘Yes,’ replied K, struck that Robert too had seen it.

The work around the bridge was finished. For two days the men were laid off, then the Council truck came to fetch them to do road grading. K lined up at the gate with the other men, but at the last moment declined to board the truck. ‘I’m sick, I can’t work,’ he told the guard. ‘Suit yourself, but you won’t be paid,’ said the guard.

So K brought his mattress out and lay next to the hut in the shade with an arm over his face while the camp lived its life around him. He lay so still that the smaller children, having first kept their distance, next tried to rouse him, and, when he would not be roused, incorporated his body into their game. They clambered over him and fell upon him as if he were part of the earth. Still hiding his face, he rolled over and found that he could doze even with little bodies riding on his back. He found unexpected pleasure in these games. It felt to him that he was drawing health from the children’s touch; he was sorry when men from the
Council arrived to spread lime in the latrine pits and they rushed off to watch.

Through the fence K spoke to the guard: ‘Can I go out?’

‘I thought you were sick. This morning you told me you were sick.’

‘I don’t want to work. Why do I have to work? This isn’t a jail.’

‘You don’t want to work but you want other people to feed you.’

‘I don’t need to eat all the time. When I need to eat, I’ll work.’

The guard sat in his deckchair on the porch of the tiny guardhouse with his rifle leaning at his side against the wall. He smiled into the distance.

‘So can you open the gate?’ said K.

‘The only way to leave is with the work party,’ said the guard.

‘And if I climb the fence? What will you do if I climb the fence?’

‘You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you, I swear to God I won’t think twice, so don’t try.’

K caressed the wire as if weighing the risk.

‘Let me tell you something, my friend,’ said the guard, ‘for your own good, because you’re new here. If I let you out now, in three days you’ll be back pleading to be let in. I know. In three days. You’ll be standing at the gate here with tears in your eyes pleading with me to let you back. Why do you want to run away? You’ve got a home here, you’ve got food, you’ve got a bed. You’ve got a job. People are having a hard time out there in the world, you’ve seen it, I don’t need to tell you. For what do you want to join them?’

‘I don’t want to be in a camp, that’s all,’ said K. ‘Let me climb the fence and go. Turn your back. Nobody will notice I’m gone. You don’t even know how many people you’ve got here.’

‘You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you dead, mister. No hard feelings. I’m just telling you.’

The next morning K lay in bed while the other men went to
work. Later he walked over to the gate again. The same guard was on duty. He and K talked about football. ‘I’ve got diabetes,’ said the guard. ‘That’s the reason they never sent me north. Three years now I’ve been on paperwork, stores, guard duties. You think it’s bad in the camp, you try sitting out here twelve hours a day with nothing to do but look at the thornbushes. Still, I’ll tell you one thing, my friend, and this is the truth: the day I get orders to go north I walk out. They’ll never see me again. It’s not my war. Let them fight it, it’s their war.’

He wanted to know about K’s mouth (‘Just curious,’ he said), and K told him. He nodded. ‘I thought so. But then I thought maybe someone cut you.’

In the guardhouse he had a small paraffin-fuelled refrigerator. He brought out a lunch of cold chicken and bread and shared it with K, passing the food through the mesh. ‘We live pretty well, I suppose,’ he said, ‘considering there’s a war on.’ He gave a sly smile.

He spoke about the women in the camp, about the visits he and his colleague received at night. ‘They’re starved for sex,’ he said. Then he yawned and returned to his deckchair.

The next morning K was shaken awake by Robert. ‘Get dressed, you’ve got to work,’ Robert said. K pushed his arm away. ‘Come on,’ said Robert, ‘they want everyone today, no excuses, no arguments, you’ve got to come.’ Ten minutes later K was standing outside the gate in the chilly early-morning wind, being counted, waiting for the truck. They were driven through the streets of Prince Albert and then out in the direction of Klaarstroom; they took a farm road past a sprawling shaded homestead and halted beside a lush field of lucerne where two police reservists with armbands and rifles stood waiting. As they climbed down they were handed sickles by a farm-worker who did not speak or meet their eyes. A tall man in freshly-pressed khaki slacks appeared. He held up a sickle. ‘You all know how to use a sickle,’ he called out. ‘You’ve got two morgen to cut. So get down to it!’

Lined up three paces apart, the men began to work their way across the field, bending, gathering, cutting, taking half a step forward, in a rhythm that soon had K sweating and dizzy. ‘Cut clean, cut clean!’ bellowed a voice right behind him. K turned and faced the farmer in khaki; he could smell the sweet deodorant he used. ‘Where were you brought up, monkey?’ shouted the farmer. ‘Cut low, cut clean!’ He took the sickle from K’s hand, pushed him aside, gathered the next tuft of lucerne, and cut it clean and low. ‘See?’ he shouted. K nodded. ‘Then do it, man, do it!’ he shouted. K bent and sawed the next tuft off close to the earth. ‘Where do they pick up rubbish like that?’ he heard the farmer call to one of the reservists. ‘He’s half-dead! They’ll be digging up corpses for us next!’

‘I can’t go on!’ K gasped to Robert at the first break. ‘My back is breaking, every time I stand straight the world spins.’

‘Just go slow,’ said Robert. ‘They can’t make you do what you can’t do.’

K looked at the ragged swathe he had cut.

‘You want to know who this is?’ murmured Robert. ‘This guy is the brother-in-law of the captain of police, Oosthuizen. His machine breaks down, so what happens? He picks up the phone, calls the police station, and first thing in the morning he has thirty pairs of hands to cut his lucerne for him. That’s how it works here, the system.’

They finished cutting the field in near-darkness, leaving the baling for the next day. K was reeling with exhaustion. Sitting in the truck he closed his eyes and felt as if he were hurtling through endless empty space. Back in the hut he fell into a dead sleep. Then in the middle of the night he was woken by the crying of a baby. There were discontented murmurs from around him: everyone seemed to be awake. For what seemed hours they lay and listened as the baby somewhere in the tents went through cycles of whimpering, wailing, and shrieks that left it gasping for breath. Aching to sleep, K felt anger mount inside himself. He
lay with his fists clenched against his breast, wishing the child annihilated.

In the back of the truck, with the slipstream roaring on them, K mentioned the crying in the night. ‘You want to know how they shut that child up in the end?’ said Robert. ‘Brandy. Brandy and aspirin. That’s the only medicine. No doctor in the camp, no nurse.’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you what happened when they opened the camp, when they opened the new home they had built for all the homeless people, the squatters from Boontjieskraal and the Onderdorp, the beggars off the streets, the unemployed, the vagrants who sleep on the mountain, the people chased off the farms. Not a month after they opened the gates everyone was sick. Dysentery, then measles, then ’flu, one on top of the other. From being shut up like animals in a cage. The district nurse came in, and you know what she did? Ask anyone who was here, they will tell you. She stood in the middle of the camp where everyone could see, and she cried. She looked at children with the bones sticking out of their bodies and she didn’t know what to do, she just stood and cried. A big strong woman. A district nurse.

‘Anyway,’ said Robert, ‘they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn’t give a stuff for us. They just don’t want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.’

‘I don’t know,’ said K. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t look deep enough,’ said Robert. ‘Take a good look in their hearts, then you’ll see.’

K shrugged.

‘You’re a baby,’ said Robert. ‘You’ve been asleep all your life. It’s time to wake up. Why do you think they give you charity,
you and the children? Because they think you are harmless, your eyes aren’t opened, you don’t see the truth around you.’

Two days later the baby that had cried in the night was dead. Because it was an iron rule from above that under no circumstances was a graveyard to be established within or in close proximity to any camp of any type, the child was buried in the back block of the town cemetery. The mother, a girl of eighteen, returned from the burial service and refused to eat. She did not weep, merely sat beside her tent staring out in the direction of Prince Albert. The friends who came to console her she did not hear; when they touched her she pushed their hands away. Michael K spent hours standing against the fence where she could not see him, watching her. Is this my education? he wondered. Am I at last learning about life here in a camp? It seemed to him that scene after scene of life was playing itself out before him and that the scenes all cohered. He had a presentiment of a single meaning upon which they were converging or threatening to converge, though he did not know yet what that might be.