Life and Times of Michael K Read online

  We took Michaels in his pyjamas, with a blanket over his shoulders, to the store-room at the far end of the stand. Paint cans and cardboard boxes piled against the wall, cobwebs in every corner, dust thick on the floor, and nowhere to sit. Michaels confronted us crossly, holding the blanket tight, resolute on his two stick-feet.

  ‘You’re in the shit, Michaels,’ said Noël. ‘Your friends from Prince Albert have been misbehaving. They are making a nuisance of themselves. We need to catch them, have a talk to them. We don’t think you are giving us all the help you can. So you are getting a second chance. We want you to tell us about your friends: where they hide out, how we can get to meet them.’ He lit a cigarette. Michaels did not stir or take his eyes off us.

  ‘Michaels,’ I said, ‘Michael—some of us are not even sure you had anything to do with the insurgents. If you can persuade us you were not working for them, you can save us a lot of trouble and save yourself a lot of unhappiness. So tell me, tell the Major: what were you actually doing on that farm when they caught you? Because all we know is what we read in these papers from the police at Prince Albert, and, frankly, what they say doesn’t make sense. Tell us the truth, tell us the whole truth, and you can go back to bed, we won’t bother you any more.’

  Now he crouched perceptibly, clutching the blanket about his throat, glaring at the two of us.

  ‘Come on, my friend!’ I said. ‘No one is going to hurt you, just tell us what we want to know!’

  The silence lengthened. Noël did not speak, passing the whole burden to me. ‘Come on, Michaels,’ I said, ‘we haven’t got all day, there is a war on!’

  At last he spoke: ‘I am not in the war.’

  Irritation overflowed in me. ‘You are not in the war? Of course you are in the war, man, whether you like it or not! This is a camp, not a holiday resort, not a convalescent home: it is a camp where we rehabilitate people like you and make you work! You are going to learn to fill sandbags and dig holes, my friend, till your back breaks! And if you don’t co-operate you will go to a place that is a lot worse than this! You will go to a place where you stand baking in the sun all day and eat potato-peels and mealie-cobs, and if you don’t survive, tough luck, they cross your number off the list and that is the end of you! So come on, talk, time is running out, tell us what you were doing so that we can write it down and send it to Prince Albert! The Major here is a busy man, he isn’t used to wasting time, he came out of retirement to run this nice camp and help people like you. You must co-operate.’

  Still crouching, ready to evade me if I should spring, he made his reply. ‘I am not clever with words,’ he said, nothing more. He moistened his lips with his lizard-tongue.

  ‘We don’t want you to be clever with words or stupid with words, man, we just want you to tell the truth!’

  He smiled back craftily.

  ‘This garden you had,’ said Noël: ‘what did you grow there?’

  ‘It was a vegetable garden.’

  ‘Who were these vegetables for? Who did you give them to?’

  ‘They weren’t mine. They came from the earth.’

  ‘I asked, who did you give them to?’

  ‘The soldiers took them.’

  ‘Did you mind it that the soldiers took your vegetables?’

  He shrugged. ‘What grows is for all of us. We are all the children of the earth.’

  Now I intervened. ‘Your own mother is buried on that farm, isn’t she? Didn’t you tell me your mother is buried there?’

  His face closed like a stone, and I pressed on, scenting the advantage. ‘You told me the story of your mother, but the Major has not heard it. Tell the Major the story of your mother.’

  Again I noted how distressed he becomes when he has to talk about his mother. His toes curled on the floor, he licked at the lip-cleft.

  ‘Tell us about your friends who come in the middle of the night and burn down farms and kill women and children,’ said Noël. ‘That’s what I want to hear.’

  ‘Tell us about your father,’ I said. ‘You talk a lot about your mother but you never mention your father. What became of your father?’

  He closed his mouth obstinately, the mouth that would never wholly shut, and glowered back.

  ‘Don’t you have children, Michaels?’ I said. ‘A man of your age—don’t you have a woman and children tucked away somewhere? Why is it just you by yourself? Where is your stake in the future? Do you want the story to end with you? That would make it a sad story, don’t you think?’

  There was a silence so dense that I heard it as a ringing in my ears, a silence of the kind one experiences in mine shafts, cellars, bomb shelters, airless places.

  ‘We brought you here to talk, Michaels,’ I said. ‘We give you a nice bed and lots of food, you can lie in comfort all day and watch the birds fly past in the sky, but we expect something in return. It is time to deliver, my friend. You’ve got a story to tell and we want to hear it. Start anywhere. Tell us about your mother. Tell us about your father. Tell us your views on life. Or if you don’t want to tell us about your mother and your father and your views on life, tell us about your recent agricultural enterprise and the friends from the mountains who drop in for a visit and a meal every now and again. Tell us what we want to know, then we will leave you alone.’

  I paused; he stared stonily back. ‘Talk, Michaels,’ I resumed. ‘You see how easy it is to talk, now talk. Listen to me, listen how easily I fill this room with words. I know people who can talk all day without getting tired, who can fill up whole worlds talking.’ Noël caught my eye but I pressed on. ‘Give yourself some substance, man, otherwise you are going to slide through life absolutely unnoticed. You will be a digit in the units column at the end of the war when they do the big subtraction sum to calculate the difference, nothing more. You don’t want to be simply one of the perished, do you? You want to live, don’t you? Well then, talk, make your voice heard, tell your story! We are listening! Where else in the world are you going to find two polite civilized gentlemen ready to listen to your story all day and all night, if need be, and take notes too?’

  Without warning, Noël left the room. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back,’ I ordered Michaels, and followed in haste.

  In the murky passageway I stopped Noël and pleaded with him. ‘You are never going to get sense out of him,’ I said, ‘surely you see that. He is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton. He is a poor helpless soul who has been permitted to wander out on to the battlefield, if I may use that word, the battlefield of life, when he should have been shut away in an institution with high walls, stuffing cushions or watering the flower-beds. Listen to me, Noël, I have a serious request to make. Let him go. Don’t try beating a story out of him …’

  ‘Who spoke about beating?’

  ‘… Don’t try twisting a story out of him, because truly there is no story to be had. In the profoundest sense he does not know what he is doing: I have watched him for days and I am sure of it. Make up something for the report. How big is this Swartberg insurgent gang, do you think? Twenty men? Thirty men? Say that he told you there were twenty men, always the same twenty. They came to the farm every four, five, six weeks, they never told him when they would be coming next. He knew their names, but only their first names. Make up a list of their first names. Make up a list of the arms they carried. Say they had a camp in the mountains somewhere, they never told him exactly where, except that it was high up, that it took two days to get there from the farm on foot. Say that they slept in caves and had women with them. Children too. That’s enough. Put it in a report and send it off. It’s enough to keep them off our backs, so that we can get on with our jobs.’

  We stood outside in the sunlight under the blue spring sky.

  ‘So you want me to make up a lie and sign my name to it.’

  ‘It’s not a lie, Noël. There is probably more truth in the story I told you than you would ever get out of Michaels if you used thumbscrews on him.’

  ‘An
d what if this gang doesn’t live in the mountains at all? What if they live around Prince Albert, quietly doing their jobs by day like they are told, and then when the children are asleep take out guns from under the floorboards and roam around in the dark blowing up things, setting fires, terrorizing people? Have you thought of that possibility? Why are you so keen to protect Michaels?’

  ‘I am not protecting him, Noël! Do you want to spend the rest of today in that filthy hole twisting a story out of a poor idiot who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, who quakes in his pants when he thinks of a mother with flaming hair who visits him in his dreams, who believes that babies are found under cabbage bushes? Noël, we have got better things to do! There is nothing there, I’m telling you, and if you handed him over to the police they would come to the same conclusion: there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people. I have watched him, I know! He is not of our world. He lives in a world all his own.’

  So, Michaels, the long and the short of it is that by my eloquence I saved you. We will make up a story to satisfy the police, and instead of travelling back to Prince Albert handcuffed in the back of a van in a pool of urine you can lie in clean sheets listening to the cooing of the doves in the trees, dozing, thinking your own thoughts. I hope you will be grateful one day.

  Extraordinary, though, that you should have survived thirty years in the shadows of the city, followed by a season footloose in the war zone (if one is to believe your story), and come out intact, when keeping you alive is like keeping the weakest pet duckling alive, or the runt of the cat’s litter, or a fledgling expelled from the nest. No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

  The first warm day of the summer, a day for the beach. Instead of which a new patient has been brought in exhibiting a high fever, dizziness, vomiting, swelling of the lymph nodes. I isolated him in the old weighing room and sent off blood and urine samples to Wynberg for analysis. Half an hour ago, passing the mail room, I noticed the package still lying there with the red cross and the URGENT stamp clear for all to see. The mail van doesn’t come today, the clerk explained. Couldn’t he have sent it with a messenger on a bicycle? No messenger to send, he replied. It’s not a matter of one prisoner, I said, it’s a matter of the health of the whole camp. He shrugged. Môre is nog ’n dag. What’s the hurry? On his desk an open girlie magazine.

  Behind the west wall, behind the brick and barbed wire, the oaks along Rosmead Avenue have exploded these last few days into dense emerald green. From the avenue comes the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs, and now from the other direction, from the exercise terrain, the strains of the little choir from the church in Wynberg who come every second Sunday, with their accordionist, to sing to the prisoners. ‘Loof die Heer’ they are singing, their closing number, after which the prisoners will be marched back to Block D for their meal of pap and beans and gravy. For their souls they have a choir and a pastor (there is no shortage of pastors), for their bodies a medical officer. Thus they lack for nothing. In a few weeks they will pass out certified pure of heart and willing of hand, and there will be six hundred bright new faces coming in. ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else will,’ says Noël, ‘and that somebody will be worse than me.’ ‘At least prisoners have stopped dying of unnatural causes since I took over,’ says Noël. ‘The war can’t go on forever,’ says Noël, ‘it will have to end one day, like all things.’ The sayings of Major van Rensburg. ‘Nevertheless,’ I say, when it is my turn to speak, ‘when the shooting stops and the sentries are fled and the enemy walk through the gates unchallenged, they will expect to find the camp commandant at his desk with a revolver in his hand and a bullet through his head. That is the gesture they will expect, despite everything.’ Noël makes no response, though I presume he has thought it all out.

  Yesterday I discharged Michaels. On the discharge slip I clearly specified exemption from physical exercise for a minimum of seven days. Yet when I emerged from the grandstand this morning the first thing I saw was Michaels slogging it out around the track with the rest of them, stripped to the waist, a skeleton trailing behind forty vigorous human bodies. I remonstrated with the duty officer. His reply: ‘When he can’t take any more, he can drop out.’ I protested: ‘He will drop dead. His heart will stop.’ ‘He has been telling you stories,’ he replied. ‘You mustn’t believe all the stories these buggers tell you. There’s nothing wrong with him. Why are you so interested anyway? Look.’ He pointed. Michaels passed us, his eyes shut, breathing deeply, his face relaxed.

  Perhaps I do indeed believe too many of his stories. Perhaps the truth is simply that he needs to eat less than other people.

  I was wrong. I should not have doubted. After two days he is back. Felicity went to the door, and there he was, supported between two guards, unconscious. She asked what had happened. They pretended not to know. Ask Sergeant Albrechts, they said.

  His hands and feet were cold as ice, his pulse very weak. Felicity wrapped him in blankets with hot water bottles. I gave him an injection, and later fed him glucose and milk through a tube.

  Albrechts sees the case as one of simple insubordination. Michaels refused to participate in prescribed activities. As punishment he was made to do exercises: squats and star-jumps. After half a dozen of these he collapsed and could not be revived.

  ‘What was it that he was refusing to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Sing,’ he said.

  ‘Sing? He’s not right in the head, man, he can’t speak properly—how do you expect him to sing?’

  He shrugged. ‘It won’t hurt him to try,’ he said.

  ‘And how can you punish him with physical exercise? He’s as weak as a baby, you can see that.’

  ‘It’s in the book,’ he replied.

  Michaels is conscious again. His first act was to pull the tube out of his nose, Felicity coming too late to stop him. Now he lies near the door under his heap of blankets looking like a corpse, refusing to eat. With his stick-arm he pushes away the feed bottle. ‘It’s not my kind of food’ is all he will say.

  ‘What the hell is your kind of food?’ I ask him. ‘And why are you treating us like this? Don’t you see we are trying to help you?’ He gives me a serenely indifferent look that really rouses my ire. ‘There are hundreds of people dying of starvation every day and you won’t eat! Why? Are you fasting? Is this a protest fast? Is that what it is? What are you protesting against? Do you want your freedom? If we turned you loose, if we put you out on the street in your condition, you would be dead within twenty-four hours. You can’t take care of yourself, you don’t know how. Felicity and I are the only people in the world who care enough to help you. Not because you are special but because it is our job. Why can’t you co-operate?’

  This open row caused a great stir in the ward. Everyone listened. The boy I had suspected of meningitis (and whom I caught yesterday with his hand up Felicity’s skirt) knelt on his bed craning to see, a broad smile on his face. Felicity herself dropped all pretence of pushing the broom.

  ‘I never asked for special treatment,’ croaked Michaels. I turned my back and walked out.

  You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.

  Later, when things had calmed down in the ward, I returned and sat down at your bedside. For a long while I waited. Then at last you opened your eyes and spoke. ‘I am not going to die,’ you said. ‘I can’t eat the food here, that’s all. I can’t eat camp food.’

  ‘Why don’t you write out a discharge for him,’ I pressed Noël. ‘I’ll take him to the gate tonight and put a few rand in his pocket and chuck him out. Then he can start fending for himself like he wants to. You write a discharge and I’ll make out a report for you: “Cause of decease pneumonia, consequent on chronic malnutrition predating admission.” We can cross him off the list and we won’t have to think
about him any more.’

  ‘I am baffled by this interest you have in him,’ said Noël. ‘Don’t ask me to tamper with records, I am not going to do it. If he is going to die, if he is starving himself to death, let him die. It’s simple enough.’

  ‘It’s not a question of dying,’ I said. ‘It’s not that he wants to die. He just doesn’t like the food here. Profoundly does not like it. He won’t even take babyfood. Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom.’

  An awkward silence fell between us.

  ‘Maybe you and I wouldn’t like camp food either,’ I persisted.

  ‘You saw him when they brought him in,’ said Noël. ‘He was a skeleton even then. He was living by himself on that farm of his free as a bird, eating the bread of freedom, yet he arrived here looking like a skeleton. He looked like someone out of Dachau.’

  ‘Maybe he is just a very thin man,’ I said.

  The ward was in darkness, Felicity asleep in her room. I stood over Michaels’ bed with a flashlight, shaking him till he woke and shielded his eyes. I spoke in a whisper, bending so close that I could smell the odour of smoke he somehow carries with him despite his ablutions.

  ‘Michaels, there is something I want to tell you. If you don’t eat, you are truly going to die. It is as simple as that. It will take time, it will not be pleasant, but in the end you will certainly die. And I am going to do nothing to stop you. It would be easy for me to tie you down and strap your head and put a tube down your throat and feed you, but I am not going to do that. I am going to treat you like a free man, not a child or an animal. If you want to throw your life away, so be it, it is your life, not mine.’

  He took his hand away from his eyes and cleared his throat deeply. He seemed about to speak, then shook his head instead and smiled. In the torchlight his smile was repulsive, sharklike.