Life and Times of Michael K Page 17

  ‘Michaels is not lying outside the wall,’ I reported. ‘Nor is he wearing clothes that will incriminate us. He is wearing royal blue overalls with the legend TREEFELLERS emblazoned on back and front that have been hanging on a nail in the grandstand toilets since God knows when. Therefore we can safely disclaim him.’

  Noël looked tired: an old and tired man.

  ‘Also,’ I said, ‘can you remind me why we are fighting this war? I was told once, but that was long ago and I seem to have forgotten.’

  ‘We are fighting this war,’ Noël said, ‘so that minorities will have a say in their destinies.’

  We exchanged empty looks. Whatever my mood was, I could not get him to share it.

  ‘Let me have that certificate you promised,’ he said. ‘Don’t fill in the date, leave it blank.’

  Then as I sat at the nurse’s table in the evening, with nothing to do and the ward in darkness and the south-easter beginning to stir outside and the concussion case breathing away quietly, it came to me with great force that I was wasting my life, that I was wasting it by living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war. I went outside and stood on the empty racetrack staring up into a sky swept clean by the wind, hoping that the spirit of restlessness would pass and the old calm return. War-time is a time of waiting, Noël once said. What was there to do in camp but wait, going through the motions of living, fulfilling one’s obligations, keeping an ear tuned all the time to the hum of the war beyond the walls, listening for its pitch to change? Still, it occurred to me to wonder whether Felicity, to name only Felicity, thought of herself as living in suspension, alive but not alive, while history hesitated over what course it would take. Felicity, if I am to judge by what has passed between Felicity and me, has never conceived of history as anything but a childhood catechism. (‘When was South Africa discovered?’ ‘1652.’ ‘Where is the biggest man-made hole in the world?’ ‘Kimberley.’) I doubt that Felicity pictures to herself currents of time swirling and eddying all about us, on the battlefields and in the military headquarters, in the factories and on the streets, in boardrooms and cabinet chambers, murkily at first, yet tending ever towards a moment of transfiguration in which pattern is born from chaos and history manifests itself in all its triumphant meaning. Unless I mistake her, Felicity does not think of herself as a castaway marooned in a pocket of time, the time of waiting, camp time, war-time. To her, time is as full as it has ever been, even the time of washing sheets, even the time of sweeping the floor; whereas to me, listening with one ear to the banal exchanges of camp life and with the other to the suprasensual spinning of the gyroscopes of the Grand Design, time has grown empty. (Or do I underestimate Felicity?) Even the concussion case, turned wholly inward, wrapped up in the processes of his own slow extinction, lives in dying more intensely than I in living.

  Despite the embarrassment it would cause us, I find myself wishing that a policeman would arrive at the gate holding Michaels by the scruff of the neck like a rag doll, saying, ‘You should watch the bastards more carefully,’ and deposit him there, and march off. Michaels with his fantasy of making the desert bloom with pumpkin flowers is another of those too busy, too stupid, too absorbed to listen to the wheels of history.

  This morning, without notice, a convoy of trucks arrived bringing four hundred new prisoners, the batch held up first at Reddersburg for a week and then on the line north of Beaufort West. All the time we were playing games here, and spending time with girlfriends, and philosophizing about life and death and history, these men waited in cattle trucks parked in sidings under the November sun, sleeping packed against each other in the cold of the highland nights, let out twice a day to relieve themselves, eating nothing but porridge cooked over thornbush fires beside the tracks, watching cargoes more urgent than themselves rumble past while the spider spun his web between the wheels of their home. Noël says he was going to refuse delivery point-blank, as he might be entitled to do, given the facilities here, until he smelled the prisoners, saw their lassitude and helplessness, and knew that if he created difficulties they would simply be driven back to the railway yards and herded into the same trucks they came in to wait till someone somewhere in the unimaginable bureaucracy above bestirred himself or else till they died. So we have been working all day, all of us, without a break, to process them: to delouse them and burn their old clothes, to fit them out in camp uniform and feed them and dose them, to separate the sick from the merely starved. The ward and its annexe are bursting at their seams again; some of the new patients are no less fragile than Michaels, who approached, I thought, as near to a state of life in death or death in life, whatever it was, as is humanly possible. All in all, then, we are back in business, and before long there will once again be flag-raising exercises and educative chanting to spoil the peace of the summer afternoons.

  There were at least twenty deaths en route, the prisoners told us. The dead were buried in unmarked graves out in the veld. Noël checked the papers. They turn out to be a fresh set drawn up in Cape Town this morning, reflecting nothing but the number of arrivals. ‘Why don’t you demand the embarkation documents?’ I asked him. ‘It would be a waste of time,’ he replied. ‘They would say the papers haven’t come through yet. Only the papers will never come through. No one wants an inquiry. Besides, who is to say that twenty in four hundred is an unacceptable rate? People die, people are dying all the time, it’s human nature, you can’t stop them.’

  Dysentery and hepatitis are rife, and of course worms. Felicity and I will plainly not be able to cope. Noël has agreed that I should impress two prisoners as orderlies.

  Meanwhile plans go ahead for the upgrading of Kenilworth to high-security status. March 1 is set as the changeover date. There will be major modifications, including the flattening of the grandstand, and huts to house five hundred more prisoners. Noël telephoned the Castle to protest the shortness of the notice and was told: Calm yourself. Everything is taken care of. Help us by setting your men to clearing the ground. If there is grass, burn it. If there are stones, remove them. Every stone casts a shadow. Good luck. Remember, ’n boer maak ’n plan.

  I suspect that Noël is drinking more than usual. Perhaps now would be a good time, for him as for me, to quit the fortress—for that is what the Peninsula is clearly to become—leaving behind the prisoners to guard the prisoners, the sick to cure the sick. Perhaps the two of us should take a leaf out of Michaels’ book and go on a trip to one of the quieter parts of the country, the obscurer reaches of the Karoo for example, and set up house there, two gentleman deserters of modest means and sober habits. How to get as far as Michaels did without being picked up is the main difficulty. Perhaps we could make a start by discarding our uniforms and getting dirt under our fingernails and walking a little closer to the earth; though I doubt we will ever look as nondescript as Michaels, or as Michaels must have looked in the days before he turned into a skeleton. With Michaels it always seemed to me that someone had scuffled together a handful of dust, spat on it, and patted it into the shape of a rudimentary man, making one or two mistakes (the mouth, and without a doubt the contents of the head), omitting one or two details (the sex), but coming up nevertheless in the end with a genuine little man of earth, the kind of little man one sees in peasant art emerging into the world from between the squat thighs of its mother-host with fingers ready hooked and back ready bent for a life of burrowing, a creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comes digs its own grave and slips quietly in and draws the heavy earth over its head like a blanket and cracks a last smile and turns over and descends into sleep, home at last, while unnoticed as ever somewhere far away the grinding of the wheels of history continues. What organ of state would play with the idea of recruiting creatures like that as its agents, and what use would they serve except to carry things and die in large numbers?

  Whereas I—if one dark night I were to slip into overalls a
nd tennis shoes and clamber over the wall (cutting the wire, since I am not made of air)—I am the kind who would be snapped up by the first patrol to pass while I yet stood dithering over which way lay salvation. The truth is that the only chance I had is gone, and gone before I knew. The night that Michaels made his break, I should have followed. It is vain to plead that I was not ready. If I had taken Michaels seriously I would always have been ready. I would have had a bundle at hand at all times, with a change of clothing and a purse full of money and a box of matches and a packet of biscuits and a can of sardines. I would never have let him out of my sight. When he slept I would have slept across the door-sill; when he woke I would have watched. And when he stole off I would have stolen off behind him. I would have dodged from shadow to shadow in his tracks, and climbed the wall in the darkest corner, and followed him down the avenue of oaks under the stars, keeping my distance, stopping when he stopped, so that he should never be forced to say to himself, ‘Who is this behind me? What does he want?,’ or perhaps even start running, taking me for a policeman, a plain-clothes policeman in overalls and tennis shoes carrying a bundle with a gun in it. I would have dogged him all night through the side streets till at daybreak we would have found ourselves on the fringes of the wastes of the Cape Flats, plodding fifty paces apart through sand and bush, avoiding the clusters of shanties where here and there a curl of smoke would be climbing into the sky. And here, in the light of day, you would at last have turned and looked at me, the pharmacist turned makeshift medical officer turned foot-follower who before seeing the light had dictated to you when you might sleep and when you might wake, who had pushed tubes up your nose and pills down your throat, who had stood in your hearing and made jokes about you, who above all had unrelentingly pressed food on you that you could not eat. Suspiciously, angrily even, you would have waited in the middle of the track for me to approach and explain myself.

  And I would have come before you and spoken. I would have said: ‘Michaels, forgive me for the way I treated you, I did not appreciate who you were till the last days. Forgive me too for following you like this. I promise not to be a burden.’ (‘Not to be a burden like your mother was’? That would perhaps be imprudent.) ‘I am not asking you to take care of me, for example by feeding me. My need is a very simple one. Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned of life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp, not even to the catchment areas of the camps—certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way.’

  Then I would have stepped closer till I was within touching distance and you could not fail to see into my eyes. ‘From the moment you arrived, Michaels,’ I would have said, had I been awake and followed you, ‘I could see that you did not belong inside any camp. At first I thought of you, I will confess, as a figure of fun. I did indeed urge Major van Rensburg to exempt you from the camp regime, but only because I thought that putting you through the motions of rehabilitation would have been like trying to teach a rat or a mouse or (dare I say it?) a lizard to bark and beg and catch a ball. As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered. You were not a hero and did not pretend to be, not even a hero of fasting. In fact you did not resist at all. When we told you to jump, you jumped. When we told you to jump again, you jumped again. When we told you to jump a third time, however, you did not respond but collapsed in a heap; and we could all see, even the most unwilling of us, that you had failed because you had exhausted your resources in obeying us. So we picked you up, finding that you weighed no more than a sack of feathers, and set you down before food, and said: Eat, build up your strength so that you can exhaust it again obeying us. And you did not refuse. You tried sincerely, I believe, to do as you were told. You acquiesced in your will (excuse me for making these distinctions, they are the only means I possess to explain myself), your will acquiesced but your body baulked. That was how I saw it. Your body rejected the food we fed you and you grew even thinner. Why? I asked myself: why will this man not eat when he is plainly starving? Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply. Your will remained pliant but your body was crying to be fed its own food, and only that. Now I had been taught that the body contains no ambivalence. The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature. I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. It was not a principle, an idea that lay behind your decline. You did not want to die, but you were dying. You were like a bunny-rabbit sewn up in the carcase of an ox, suffocating no doubt, but starving too, amid all those basketfuls of meat, for the true food.’

  Here I might have paused in my discourse on the Flats while from somewhere in the middle distance behind us came the sound of a man coughing and hawking and spitting, and the smell of woodsmoke; but my glittering eye would have held you, for the time being, rooted where you stood.

  ‘I was the only one who saw that you were more than you seemed to be,’ I would have proceeded. ‘Slowly, as your persistent No, day after day, gathered weight, I began to feel that you were more than just another patient, another casualty of the war, another brick in the pyramid of sacrifice that someone would eventually climb and stand straddle-legged on top of, roaring and beating his chest and announcing himself emperor of all he surveyed. You would lie on your bed under the window with only the nightlight shining, your eyes closed, perhaps sleeping. I would stand in the doorway breathing quietly, listening to the groans and rustlings of the other sleepers, waiting; and upon me the feeling would grow stronger and stronger that around one bed among all there was a thickening of the air, a concentration of darkness, a black whirlwind roaring in utter silence above your body, pointing to you, without so much as stirring the edge of the bedclothes. I would shake my head like a man trying to shake off a dream, but the feeling would persist. “This is not my imagination,” I would say to myself. “This sense of a gathering meaningfulness is not something like a ray that I project to bathe this or that bed, or a robe in which I wrap this or that patient according to whim. Michaels means something, and the meaning he has is not private to me. If it were, if the origin of this meaning were no more than a lack in myself, a lack, say, of something to believe in, since we all know how difficult it is to satisfy a hunger for belief with the vision of times to come that the war, to say nothing of the camps, presents us with, if it were a mere craving for meaning that sent me to Michaels and his story, if Michaels himself were no more than what he seems to be (what you seem to be), a skin-and-bones man with a crumpled lip (pardon me, I name only the obvious), then I would have every justification for retiring to the toilets behind the jockeys’ changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet through my head. Yet have I ever been more sincere than I am tonight?” And standing in the doorway I would turn my bleakest stare in upon myself, seeking by the last means I knew to detect the germ of dishonesty at the heart of the conviction—the wish, let us say, for example, to be the only one to whom the camp was not just the old Kenilworth racetrack with prefabricated huts dotted across it but a privileged site where meaning erupted into the world. But if such a germ lurked within me it would not raise its head, and if it would not what could I do to compel it? (I am dubious anyhow that one can separate the self that
scrutinizes from the self that hides, setting them at odds like hawk and mouse; but let us agree to postpone that discussion for a day when we are not running away from the police.) So I would turn my gaze out again, and, yes, it would still be true, I was not deceiving myself, I was not flattering myself, I was not comforting myself, it was as it had been before, it was the truth, there was indeed a gathering, a thickening of darkness above one bed alone, and that bed was yours.’

  At this stage I think you might already have turned your back on me and begun to walk off, having lost the thread of my discourse and anyhow being anxious to put more miles between yourself and the camp. Or perhaps by now, attracted by my voice, a crowd of children from the shanties would have gathered around us, some in their pyjamas, listening open-mouthed to the big passionate words and making you nervous. So now I would have had to hurry after you, keeping close at your heels so as not to have to shout. ‘Forgive me, Michaels,’ I would have had to say, ‘there is not much more, please be patient. I only want to tell you what you mean to me, then I will be through.’

  At this moment, I suspect, because such is your nature, you would break into a run. So I would have to run after you, ploughing as if through water through the thick grey sand, dodging the branches, calling out: ‘Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away? I noticed. Do you know what thought crossed my mind when I saw you had got away without cutting the wire? “He must be a polevaulter”—that is what I thought. Well, you may not be a polevaulter, Michaels, but you are a great escape artist, one of the great escapees: I take off my hat to you!’