Life and Times of Michael K Page 13

  Parasite was the word the police captain had used: the camp at Jakkalsdrif, a nest of parasites hanging from the neat sunlit town, eating its substance, giving no nourishment back. Yet to K lying idle in his bed, thinking without passion (What is it to me, after all? he thought), it was no longer obvious which was host and which parasite, camp or town. If the worm devoured the sheep, why did the sheep swallow the worm? What if there were millions, more millions than anyone knew, living in camps, living on alms, living off the land, living by guile, creeping away in corners to escape the times, too canny to put out flags and draw attention to themselves and be counted? What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Could the parasites then still be called parasites? Parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed upon. Perhaps in truth whether the camp was declared a parasite on the town or the town a parasite on the camp depended on no more than on who made his voice heard loudest.

  He thought of his mother. She had asked him to bring her back to her birthplace and he had done so, though perhaps only by a trick of words. But what if this farm was not her true birthplace? Where were the stone walls of the wagonhouse she had spoken of? He made himself pay a daylight visit to the farmyard and to the cottages on the hillside and the rectangle of bare earth beside them. If my mother ever lived here I will surely know, he told himself. He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.

  He tried to imagine a figure standing alone at the head of the line, a woman in a shapeless grey dress who came from no mother; but when he had to think of the silence in which she lived, the silence of time before the beginning, his mind baulked.

  Now that he slept so much, animals came back to prey on his field, hares and little grey steenbok. He would not have minded if they had merely nibbled the tips of the vines; but he lapsed into fits of gloomy anger when they bit through a vine and left the fruit to wither. He did not know what he would do if he lost his two beloved melons. He spent hours trying to construct a gametrap out of wire but could not get it to work. One night he made his bed in the middle of the field. The glare of the moon kept him awake, he started at every rustle, the cold numbed his feet. How much easier it would all be, he thought, if there were a fence around the dam, a fence of stout wire mesh with its bottom edge staked a foot underground to stop the burrowers.

  There was a continual taste of blood in his mouth. His bowels ran and there were moments of giddiness when he stood up. Sometimes his stomach felt like a fist clenched in the centre of his body. He forced himself to eat more of the pumpkin than he had appetite for; it relieved the tightness in his stomach but did not make him better. He tried to shoot birds but had lost his skill with the catapult as well as his old patience. He killed and ate a lizard.

  The pumpkins were ripening all together, the vines turning yellow and withering. K had not thought of how he could store them. He tried cutting the flesh in strips and drying it in the sun, but it rotted and attracted ants. He piled the thirty pumpkins in a pyramid near his burrow; it looked like a beacon. They could not be buried, they needed warmth and dryness, they were creatures of the sun. Eventually he deposited them fifty paces apart up and down the river-bed in the undergrowth; to disguise them he made a paste of mud and painted each shell in a mottled pattern.

  Then the melons ripened. He ate these two children on successive days, praying that they would make him well. He thought he felt better afterwards, though he was still weak. Their flesh was the colour of orange river-silt, but deeper. He had never tasted fruit so sweet. How much of that sweetness came from the seed, how much from the earth? He scraped their seeds together and spread them to dry. From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.

  The first day passed when K did not come out of his burrow at all. He awoke in the afternoon feeling no hunger. There was a cold wind blowing; there was nothing that needed his attention; his work for the year was done. He turned over and went to sleep again. When next he knew, it was dawn and birds were singing.

  He lost track of time. Sometimes, waking stifled under the black coat with his legs swaddled in the bag, he knew that it was day. There were long periods when he lay in a grey stupor too tired to kick himself free of sleep. He could feel the processes of his body slowing down. You are forgetting to breathe, he would say to himself, and yet lie without breathing. He raised a hand heavy as lead and put it over his heart: far away, as if in another country, he felt a languid stretching and closing.

  Through whole cycles of the heavens he slept. Once he dreamed that he was being shaken by an old man. The old man wore filthy tattered clothing and smelled of tobacco. He bent over K, gripping his shoulder. ‘You must get off the land!’ he said. K tried to shrug him off but the claw gripped tighter. ‘You will get into trouble!’ the old man hissed.

  He also dreamed of his mother. He was walking with her in the mountains. Though her legs were heavy, she was young and beautiful. With great sweeps he was gesturing from horizon to horizon: he was happy and excited. The green lines of river-courses stood out against the fawn of the earth; there were no roads or houses anywhere; the air was still. In his wild gesturings, in the great windmill sweeps of his arms, he realized he was in danger of losing his footing and being carried over the edge of the rock-face into the vast airiness of space between the heavens and the earth; but he had no fear, he knew he would float.

  Sometimes he would emerge into wakefulness unsure whether he had slept a day or a week or a month. It occurred to him that he might not be fully in possession of himself. You must eat, he would say, and struggle to get up and look for a pumpkin. But then he would relax again, and stretch his legs and yawn in sensual pleasure so sweet that he wished for nothing but to lie and let it ripple through him. He had no appetite; eating, picking up things and forcing them down his gullet into his body, seemed a strange activity.

  Then step by step his sleep grew to be lighter and the periods of wakefulness more frequent. He began to be visited by trains of images so rapid and unconnected that he could not follow them. He tossed and turned, unsatisfied by sleep but too drained of strength to rise. He began to have headaches; he gritted his teeth, wincing with every pulse of blood in his skull.

  There was a thunderstorm. As long as the thunder rolled far away K barely noticed it. But then a clap burst directly over him and it began to pour. Water seeped down the sides of the burrow; streaming down the gully, it washed away the mud plaster and flooded through his sleeping-place. He sat up, head and shoulders bowed under the roof-plates. There was nowhere better to go. Propped in a corner in the rushing water with the sodden coat pulled tight around him, he slept and woke.

  He emerged into daylight shivering with cold. The sky was overcast, he had no way of making a fire. One cannot live like this, he thought. He wandered about the field and past the pump. Everything was familiar, yet he felt like a stranger or a ghost. There were pools of water on the ground and water in the river for the first time, a swift brown stream yards wide. On the far side something pale stood out against the gun-blue gravel. What is it, he marvelled, a great white mushroom brought out by the rain? With a start he recognized it as a pumpkin.

  The shivering
would not stop. He had no strength in his limbs; when he set one foot in front of the other it was tentatively, like an old man. Needing to sit all of a sudden, he sat down on the wet earth. The tasks that awaited him seemed too many and too great. I have woken too early, he thought, I have not finished my sleeping. He suspected that he ought to eat to stop the swimming in front of his eyes, but his stomach was not ready. He forced himself to imagine tea, a cup of hot tea thick with sugar; on hands and knees he drank from a puddle.

  He was still sitting when they discovered him. He heard the drone of the vehicles when they were far off but thought it was distant thunder. Only when they had reached the gate below the farmhouse did he see them and realize what they were. He stood up, grew dizzy, sat down again. One of the vehicles stopped before the house; the other, a jeep, bumped across the veld towards him. It held four men; he watched them come; hopelessness settled over him.

  At first they were ready to believe he was simply a vagrant, a lost soul the police would have picked up in the course of time and found a home for in Jakkalsdrif. ‘I live in the veld,’ he said, replying to their question; ‘I live nowhere.’ Then he had to rest his head on his knees: there was a hammering inside his skull and a taste of bile in his mouth. One of the soldiers picked up an arm between two fingers and dangled it. K did not pull away. The arm felt like something alien, a stick protruding from his body. ‘What do you think he lives on?’ the soldier asked—‘Flies? Ants? Locusts?’ K could see nothing but their boots. He closed his eyes; for a while he was absent. Then someone gave his shoulder a slap and pushed something at him: a sandwich, two thick slices of white bread with polony between them. He pulled back and shook his head. ‘Eat, man!’ his benefactor said. ‘Get some strength into yourself!’ He took the sandwich and bit into it. Before he could chew, his stomach began to retch drily. With his head between his knees he spat out the mouthful of bread and meat and handed the sandwich back. ‘He’s sick,’ said one voice. ‘He’s been drinking,’ said another.

  But then they found his house, the stonework of the front wall nakedly visible after the rain. First they took turns on hands and knees to peer inside. Then they lifted off the roof and uncovered the neat interior, the spade and axe, the knife and spoon and plate and mug on a shelf cut into the gravel, the magnifying glass, the bed of wet grass. They brought K over to confront his handiwork, holding him upright, no longer disposed to be kindly. Tears ran down his face. ‘Did you make this?’ they asked. He nodded. ‘Are you alone here?’ He nodded. The soldier holding him brought his arm up sharply behind his back. K hissed with pain. ‘The truth!’ said the soldier. ‘It is the truth,’ said K.

  The truck arrived too; the air was loud with voices and the squawks and rasps of the two-way radio; soldiers were crowding around to see K and the house he had built. ‘Spread out!’ one of them shouted: ‘I want the whole area searched! We are looking for footpaths, we are looking for holes and tunnels, we are looking for any kind of storage site!’ He dropped his voice. He was dressed in camouflage uniform like everyone else; there was no badge K could see to tell he was in charge. ‘You see what kind of people they are,’ he said: his eyes moved around restlessly, he did not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. ‘You think there is nothing and all the time the ground beneath your feet is rotten with tunnels. Look around a place like this and you would swear there wasn’t a living soul in miles. Then turn your back and they come crawling out of the ground. Ask him how long he’s been here.’ He turned on K and raised his voice. ‘You! How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since last year,’ K said, not knowing whether it was a good lie or a bad lie.

  ‘So when are your friends coming? When are your friends coming again?’

  K shrugged.

  ‘Ask him again,’ said the officer, turning away. ‘Keep asking him. Ask him when his friends are coming. Ask him when they were last here. See if he’s got a tongue. See if he is such an idiot as he looks.’

  The soldier who was holding K gripped the nape of his neck between thumb and forefinger and guided him down till he was kneeling, till his face was touching the earth. ‘You heard what the officer said,’ he said, ‘so tell me. Tell me your story.’ He flicked the beret away and pressed K’s face hard into the earth. With nose and lips squashed flat, K tasted the damp soil. He sighed. They lifted him and held him up. He did not open his eyes. ‘So tell us about your friends,’ the soldier said. K shook his head. He was hit a terrific blow in the pit of the stomach and fainted.

  They spent the afternoon hunting for the stocks of food and arms they were convinced were hidden there. First they scoured the area around the dam, then they explored further up and down the river. There was an instrument with earphones and a black box that one of them used: K watched him move slowly along the shoulder of the river bank, where the earth was soft, prodding his rod into the earth. Many of the pumpkins, perhaps all of them, were discovered: young men kept returning bearing pumpkins, which they tossed in a heap at the edge of the field. The pumpkins only made them more certain that there were stores hidden (‘Otherwise why would they leave this monkey here?’ K overheard).

  They wanted to interrogate him again but he was plainly too weak. They gave him tea, which he drank, and tried to reason with him. ‘You’re sick, man,’ they said. ‘Look at you. Look at how your friends treat you. They don’t care what happens to you. You want to go home? We’ll take you home and give you a new start in life.’

  They sat him up against a wheel of the jeep. One of them fetched the beret and dropped it in his lap. They offered him a slice of soft white bread. He swallowed a mouthful, leaned sideways, and brought it up, together with the tea. ‘Leave him alone, he’s finished,’ someone said. K wiped his mouth on his sleeve. They stood in a circle about him; he had a feeling they did not know what to do.

  He spoke. ‘I’m not what you think,’ he said, ‘I was sleeping and you woke me, that’s all.’ They gave no sign of understanding.

  They quartered themselves in the farmhouse. In the kitchen they set up their own stove; soon K could smell tomatoes cooking. Someone had hung a radio on a hook on the stoep; the air was full of nervous electric rhythms that unsettled him.

  They put him in the bedroom at the end of the corridor, on a tarpaulin folded in four, with a blanket over him. They gave him warm milk and two pills which they said were aspirin and which he kept down. Later, after dark, a boy brought him a plate of food. ‘See if you can eat just a mouthful,’ he said. He shone a flashlight on the plate. K saw two sausages in a thick gravy, and mashed potato. He shook his head and turned to the wall. The boy left the plate at the bedside (‘In case you change your mind’). After that they did not disturb him. He drowsed uneasily for a while, troubled by the smell of the food. At last he got up and put the plate in a corner. Some of the soldiers were on the stoep, some in the living-room. There was talk and laughter but no light.

  The next morning the police arrived from Prince Albert with dogs to help in the search for tunnels and hidden supplies. Captain Oosthuizen recognized K at once. ‘How could I forget a face like that?’ he said. ‘This joker ran away from Jakkalsdrif in December. His name is Michaels. What name did he give you?’ ‘Michael,’ said the army officer. ‘It’s Michaels,’ said Captain Oosthuizen. He poked K in the ribs with his boot. ‘He’s not sick, he always looks like this. Hey, Michaels?’

  So they took K back to the dam, where he watched the dogs drag their handlers back and forth across the acre of grass and up and down the river banks, whining with eagerness, tugging at the leash, but finally able to lead them to nothing better than old porcupine burrows and hare sets. Oosthuizen gave K a cuff on the side of the head. ‘So what’s this about, monkey?’ he said. ‘You playing games with us?’ The dogs were loaded back into the van. Everyone was losing interest in the search. The young soldiers stood about in the sun talking, drinking coffee.

  K sat with his head between his knees. Though his mind was clear, he could not contro
l the dizziness. A string of spittle drooled from his mouth; he did not bother to stop it. Every grain of this earth will be washed clean by the rain, he told himself, and dried by the sun and scoured by the wind, before the seasons turn again. There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass.

  So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers’ laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother’s, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

  There was a heavy explosion, and at once a second explosion. The air shook, there was a clamour of birds, the hills rumbled and echoed. K stared around wildly. ‘Look!’ said a soldier, and pointed.

  Where the Visagie house had once stood there was now a cloud of grey and orange, not mist but dust, as if a whirlwind were carrying the house away. Then the cloud stopped growing, its substance thinned, and a skeleton began to emerge: part of the back wall with the chimney; three of the supports that had held up the verandah. A sheet of roofing swooped out of the air and hit the ground noiselessly. The reverberations went on, but K did not know any more if they were in the hills or in his head.

  Swallows flew past, so low above the ground he could have touched them had he stretched out a hand.