Life and Times of Michael K Read online

  When he went back to his alley he found that the cardboard boxes had been cleared away. He spent the night in a doorway recessed from the street. A brass plate above his head read: LE ROUX & HATTINGH—PROKUREURS. He woke when the police cruised past but soon fell asleep again. It was not as cold as on the previous night.

  His mother’s bed was occupied by a strange woman whose head was wrapped in bandages. K stood at the foot of the bed and stared. Perhaps I am in the wrong ward, he thought. He stopped a nurse. ‘My mother—she was here yesterday …’ ‘Ask at the desk,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Your mother passed away during the night,’ the woman doctor told him. ‘We did what we could to keep her, but she was very weak. We wanted to contact you but you didn’t leave a number.’

  He sat down on a chair in the corner.

  ‘Do you want to make a phone call?’ said the doctor.

  This was evidently a code for something, he did not know what. He shook his head.

  Someone brought him a cup of tea, which he drank. People hovering over him made him nervous. He clasped his hands and stared hard at his feet. Was he expected to say something? He separated his hands and clasped them, over and over.

  They took him downstairs to see his mother. She lay with her arms at her sides, still wearing the smock with the legend KPACPA on the breast. The tube was gone. For a while he looked at her; then he no longer knew where to look.

  ‘Are there other relatives?’ asked the nurse at the desk. ‘Do you want to phone them? Do you want us to phone them?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said K, and went and sat again on his chair in the corner. After that he was left alone, till at midday a tray of hospital food appeared, which he ate.

  He was still sitting in the corner when a man in a suit and tie came to speak to him. What had been his mother’s name, age, place of abode, religious denomination? What had her business been in Stellenbosch? Did K have her travel documents? ‘I was taking her home,’ replied K. ‘It was cold where she lived in Cape Town, it was raining all the time, it was bad for her health. I was taking her to a place where she could get better. We did not plan to stop in Stellenbosch.’ Then he began to fear he was giving away too much, and would answer no more questions. The man gave up and went away. After a while he came back, squatted in front of K, and asked: ‘Have you yourself ever spent time in an asylum or institution for the handicapped or place of shelter? Have you ever held paid employment?’ K would not answer. ‘Sign your name here,’ said the man, and held out a paper, pointing to the space. When K shook his head the man signed the paper himself.

  The shifts changed, and K wandered out into the parking lot. He walked about and looked up into the clear night sky. Then he returned to his chair against the wall. He was not told to leave. Later, when there was no one about, he went downstairs to look for his mother. He could not find her, or else the door that led to her was locked. He climbed into a great wire cage containing soiled linen and slept there, curled up like a cat.

  The second day after his mother’s death a nurse he had never seen appeared before him. ‘Come, it is time to go now, Michael,’ she said. He followed her to the desk in the hall. The suitcase was waiting for him, and two brown paper parcels. ‘We have packed your late mother’s clothes and personal possessions in her suitcase,’ the strange nurse said: ‘you may take it now.’ She wore glasses; she sounded as if she were reading the words from a card. K noticed that the girl at the desk was watching them out of the corner of her eye. ‘This parcel,’ the nurse went on, ‘contains your mother’s ashes. Your mother was cremated this morning, Michael. If you choose, we can dispose of the ashes fittingly, or else you can take them with you.’ With a fingernail she touched the parcel in question. Both parcels were neatly sealed with brown paper tape; this was the smaller. ‘Would you like us to take charge of it?’ she said. Her finger stroked it lightly. K shook his head. ‘And in this parcel,’ she went on, pushing the second one firmly across to him, ‘we have put a few small things for you that you may find useful, clothes and toiletries.’ She looked him candidly in the eye and gave him a smile. The girl at the desk turned back to her typewriter.

  So there is a place for burning, K thought. He imagined the old women from the ward fed one after another, eyes pinched against the heat, lips pinched, hands at their sides, into the fiery furnace. First the hair, in a halo of flame, then after a while everything else, to the last things, burning and crumbling. And it was happening all the time. ‘How do I know?’ he said. ‘How do you know what?’ the nurse said. Impatiently he indicated the box. ‘How do I know?’ he challenged. She refused to answer, or did not understand.

  In the parking lot he tore open the bigger parcel. It contained a safety razor, a bar of soap, a hand towel, a white jacket with maroon flashes on the shoulders, a pair of black trousers, and a black beret with a shiny metal badge reading ST JOHN AMBULANCE.

  He held out the clothes to the girl at the desk. The nurse with glasses had disappeared. ‘Why do you give me this?’ he asked. ‘Don’t ask me,’ said the girl. ‘Maybe someone left them behind.’ She would not look him in the face.

  He threw the soap and razor away and thought of throwing the clothes away too, but did not. His own clothes had begun to smell.

  Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital. By day he pushed the cart around the streets in the vicinity; by night he slept under culverts, behind hedges, in alleys. It seemed strange to him that children should be riding their bicycles home from school in the afternoons, ringing their bells, racing one another; it seemed strange that people should be eating and drinking as usual. For a while he went around asking for garden jobs, but grew to shrink from the distaste that householders, owing him no charity, showed as they opened their doors on him. When it rained he crawled under the cart. There were long periods when he sat staring at his hands, his mind blank.

  He fell into the company of men and women who slept under the railway bridge and haunted the vacant lot behind the liquor shop on Andringa Street. Sometimes he lent them his cart. In a fit of largesse he gave away the stove. Then one night someone tried to pull the suitcase from under his head while he was sleeping. There was a fight, and he moved on.

  Once a police van stopped beside him in the street and two policemen got out to inspect the cart. They opened the suitcase and rummaged through its contents. They stripped the wrapping paper from the second parcel. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside that a plastic bag of dark grey ash. It was the first time K had seen it. He looked away. ‘What’s this?’ asked the policeman. ‘It’s my mother’s ashes,’ said K. The policeman tossed the packet speculatively from hand to hand and made a comment to his friend that K did not hear.

  For hours at a time he stood across the street from the hospital. It was smaller than it had once seemed, merely a long low building with a red tiled roof.

  He ceased to observe the curfew. He did not believe that any harm would come to him; and if it should come, it would not matter. Dressed in his new clothes, the white jacket and black pants and beret, he pushed his cart where and when he wished. Sometimes spells of airiness came over him. He felt weaker than before, but not sick. He ate once a day, buying doughnuts or pies with money from his mother’s purse. There was pleasure in spending without earning: he took no heed of how fast the money went.

  He tore a black strip from the lining of his mother’s coat and pinned it around his arm. But he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life.

  With nothing to do, he slept more and more. He discovered that he could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position: on the sidewalk at noon, with people stepping over his body; standing against a wall, with the suitcase between his legs. Sleep settled inside his head like a benign fog; he had no will to resist it. He did not dream of anyone or anything.

  One day the barrow disappeared. He shrugged off the loss.

  It appeared that he had to stay in Stellenbosch for a
certain length of time. There was no way of shortening the time. He stumbled through the days, losing his way often.

  He was walking along the Banhoek road one day, as he sometimes did, with the suitcase. It was a subdued, misty morning. He heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs behind him; first there was a smell of fresh manure, then he was slowly overtaken by a cart, an old green municipal refuse cart without hatches, drawn by a Clydesdale and driven by an old man in black oilskins. For a while they were moving side by side. The old man gave a little nod; and K, hesitating a moment, peering down the long straight avenue of mist, found that there was after all nothing any more to keep him. So he hoisted himself up and took his place beside the old man. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘If you need help I can help.’

  But the old man did not need help, nor was he in the mood for talk. He dropped K a mile past the top of the pass and turned off down a dirt track. K walked all day and slept the night in a eucalyptus grove with the wind roaring in the branches high overhead. By midday the next day he had skirted Paarl and was heading northward along the national road. He halted only within sight of the first checkpoint, and waited in a skulking-place till he was sure that no one on foot was being stopped.

  Several times he was passed by long convoys of vehicles with armed escorts. Each time he left the road and stood well clear, not trying to hide, keeping his hands visible, as he saw other people do.

  He slept at the roadside and woke wet with dew. Before him the road wound upward into the mist. Birds flitted from bush to bush, their chirping muffled. He carried the suitcase on a stick over his shoulder. He had not eaten for two days; however, there seemed no limit to his endurance.

  A mile up the pass a fire winked through the mist and he heard voices. As he came closer the smell of frying bacon made his stomach churn. There were men standing around a fire keeping warm. At his approach they stopped talking and stared at him. He touched his beret but no one responded. He passed them, passed a second roadside fire, passed a column of vehicles parked head to tail with their lights on, and then came upon the reason for the stoppage. Lying on its side blocking the road, its rearmost wheels hanging over the lip of the gorge, was an articulated truck painted a blank eggshell blue. The cab was burnt out, the van blackened with smoke. A lorry loaded with sacks had collided with the wreck, and bursts of white flour marked the road. Backed up around the bend as far as K could see was the rest of the convoy. Two radios played loudly on competing stations; from up ahead came the forlorn bleating of sheep. K thought for a moment of stopping to scoop up pocketfuls of the spilled flour, but was not sure what he would do with it. He plodded past truck after truck; he passed the truckload of sheep, packed so tight that some stood on their hind legs; he passed a group of soldiers around a fire who paid no attention to him. At the rear of the convoy two beacons stood flashing, and further on a tarbucket burned in the middle of the road, tended by no one.

  Once the convoy was behind him K relaxed, thinking he was free; but at the next bend in the road a soldier in camouflage uniform stepped from behind the bushes pointing an automatic rifle at his heart. K stopped in his tracks. The soldier lowered his rifle, lit a cigarette, took a puff, and raised the rifle again. Now, K judged, it pointed at his face, or at his throat.

  ‘So who are you?’ said the soldier. ‘Where do you think you are going?’

  About to reply, K was cut short. ‘Show me,’ said the soldier. ‘Come. Show me what’s in there.’

  They were out of sight of the convoy, though faint music still came on the air. K lifted the suitcase off his shoulder and opened it. The soldier waved him back, pinched out his cigarette, and in a single movement overturned the case. Everything lay there in the road: the blue felt slippers, the white bloomers, the pink plastic bottle of calamine lotion, the brown bottle of pills, the fawn plastic handbag, the floral scarf, the scallop-rim scarf, the black woollen coat, the jewelry box, the brown skirt, the green blouse, the shoes, the other underwear, the brown paper packets, the white plastic packet, the coffee tin that rattled, the talcum powder, handkerchiefs, letters, photographs, the box of ashes. K did not stir.

  ‘Where did you steal all this?’ said the soldier. ‘You’re a thief, aren’t you? A thief running away over the mountains.’ He prodded the handbag with his boot. ‘Show me,’ he said. He touched the jewelry box. He touched the coffee tin. He touched the other box. ‘Show me,’ he said, and stepped back.

  K opened the coffee tin. It contained curtain rings. He held them out in the palm of his hand, then poured them back into the tin and closed it. He opened the jewelry box and held it out. His heart thundered in his chest. The soldier stirred the contents around, picked out a brooch, and stood back. He was smiling. K closed the box. He opened the handbag and held it out. The soldier gestured. K emptied it on the road. There was a handkerchief, a comb and mirror, a powder compact, and the two purses. The soldier pointed and K handed him the purses. He slipped them into his tunic pocket.

  K licked his lips. ‘That’s not my money,’ he said thickly. ‘That’s my mother’s money, that she worked for.’ It was not true: his mother was dead, she had no need of money. Nevertheless. There was a silence. ‘What do you think the war is for?’ K said. ‘For taking other people’s money?’

  ‘What do you think the war is for,’ said the soldier, parodying the movements of K’s mouth. ‘Thief. Watch it. You could be lying in the bushes with flies all over you. Don’t you tell me about war.’ He pointed his gun at the box of ashes. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  K took off the lid and held out the box. The soldier peered at the plastic bag. ‘What’s that stuff?’ he said.

  ‘Ash,’ said K. His voice was steadier now.

  ‘Open it,’ said the soldier. K opened the bag. The soldier took a pinch and smelled it cautiously. ‘Jesus,’ he said. His eyes met K’s.

  K knelt and packed his mother’s things back into the suitcase. The soldier stood aside. ‘So can I go now?’ said K.

  ‘Papers in order—you can go,’ said the soldier. K hoisted the stick with the suitcase on to his shoulder.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said the soldier. ‘You work for the ambulance or something?’

  K shook his head.

  ‘Just a minute, just a minute,’ said the soldier. He took one of the purses from his pocket, peeled a brown ten-rand note from the roll, and flicked it in K’s direction. ‘Tip,’ he said. ‘Buy yourself an ice-cream.’

  K came back and picked up the note. Then he set off again. In a minute or two the soldier had receded into the mist.

  It did not seem to him that he had been a coward. Nevertheless, a little further on it struck him that there was no point in keeping the suitcase now. He clambered up a slope and left it in the bushes, retaining only the black coat, for the cold, and the box of ashes, leaving the lid open so that the rain could fall and the sun scorch and the insects gnaw, if they wanted to, without hindrance.

  The convoys from up-country were evidently halted, for he had the road to himself. By late afternoon he was in sight of the tunnel through the mountain and the guard post at its south entrance. Quitting the road, he took to the slopes and pushed his way through dense, soggy bush till by nightfall he was high on the saddle overlooking the Elandsrivier and the road to the north. He heard baboons barking in the distance. He slept under an overhang wrapped in his mother’s coat with a stick beside him. At dawn he was moving again, making a wide arc down into the valley to avoid the road bridge. The first convoy of the new day passed.

  All day he walked, keeping off the road where that was possible. He spent the night in a bungalow in the corner of an overgrown field with rugby poles, separated from the road by a line of eucalyptus trees. The windows of the bungalow were shattered, the door broken off its hinges. The floor was covered in broken glass, old newspapers and drifting leaves; pale yellow grass grew in through cracks in the walls; snails clustered under the waterpipes; but the roof was intact. He swept a pile of leaves and paper into a corner to
make a bed. He slept intermittently, woken by high winds and heavy rain.

  It was still raining when he got up. Dizzy with hunger, he stood in the doorway staring out on the sodden grassland, the drenched trees, and the grey-misted hills beyond. For an hour he waited for the rain to abate; then he turned up his collar and ran into the downpour. At the far end of the field he clambered over a barbed-wire fence and entered an apple orchard overgrown with grass and weeds. Worm-eaten fruit lay everywhere underfoot; the fruit on the branches was undersized and infested. With the beret beaten flat over his ears by the rain and the black coat clinging to his body like a pelt, he stood and ate, taking bites of good flesh here and there, chewing as quickly as a rabbit, his eyes vacant.

  He moved deeper into the orchard. Everywhere was evidence of neglect. Indeed, he had begun to believe he was on abandoned land when the apple-trees gave way to a stretch of cleared ground beyond which he saw brick outhouses and the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of a farmhouse. In the cleared ground were neatly tended patches of vegetables: cauliflower, carrots, potatoes. He emerged from the shelter of the trees into the downpour and on hands and knees began to pull yellow half-grown carrots out of the soft earth. It is God’s earth, he thought, I am not a thief. Nevertheless he imagined a shot cracking out from the back window of the farmhouse, he imagined a huge Alsatian streaking out to attack him. When his pockets were full he stood nervously erect. Instead of taking the carrot-tops with him to scatter under the trees as he had intended, he left them where they lay.

  During the night the rain stopped. In the morning he was back on the road in his damp clothes, his belly bloated with raw food. When he heard the rumble of an approaching convoy he would creep away into the bushes, though he wondered whether by now, with his filthy clothes and his air of gaunt exhaustion, he would not be passed over as a mere footloose vagrant from the depths of the country, too benighted to know that one needed papers to be on the road, too sunk in apathy to be of harm. One of the convoys, with an escort of motorcycle outriders, armoured cars and trucks full of helmeted boy soldiers, took a full five minutes to pass. He peered steadily out from his hiding-place; the machine-gunner in the last car, muffled in scarf, goggles and woollen cap, seemed to look for an instant straight into his eyes before being borne away backwards into the Boland.