Life and Times of Michael K Read online

  As a child K had been hungry, like all the children of Huis Norenius. Hunger had turned them into animals who stole from one another’s plates and climbed the kitchen enclosure to rifle the garbage cans for bones and peelings. Then he had grown older and stopped wanting. Whatever the nature of the beast that had howled inside him, it was starved into stillness. His last years at Huis Norenius were the best, when there were no big boys to torment him, when he could slip off to his place behind the shed and be left alone. One of the teachers used to make his class sit with their hands on their heads, their lips pressed tightly together and their eyes closed, while he patrolled the rows with his long ruler. In time, to K, the posture grew to lose its meaning as punishment and became an avenue of reverie; he remembered sitting, hands on head, through hot afternoons with doves cooing in the gum trees and the chant of the tables coming from other classrooms, struggling with a delicious drowsiness. Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing.

  There were other times when his mind would return to the Visagie boy in his hiding-place, wherever that was, in darkness under the floor among the mouse-droppings, or shut up in a cupboard in the attic, or out in his grandfather’s veld behind a bush. He thought of the nice pair of boots: they seemed wasted on someone who lived in a hole.

  It became an effort not to shut his eyes against the glare of the sun. There was a throbbing that would not leave him; lances of light pierced his head. Then he could keep nothing down; even water made him retch. There was a day when he was too tired to get up from his bed in the cave; the black coat lost its warmth and he shivered continually. It came home to him that he might die, he or his body, it was the same thing, that he might lie here till the moss on the roof grew dark before his eyes, that his story might end with his bones growing white in this faroff place.

  It took him all of a day to creep down the mountainside. His legs were weak, his head hammered, every time he looked downward he grew dizzy and had to grip the earth till the whirling stopped. When he reached the level of the road the valley was in deep shadow; the last light was fading by the time he entered the town. The smell of peach-blossom enveloped him. There was a voice too, coming from all sides, the calm even voice he had heard the first day he saw Prince Albert. He stood at the head of the High Street among the verdant gardens, unable to make out a word, though he listened hard, of the distant monotone that after a while blended with the twitter of the birds in the trees and then gave way to music.

  There was no one on the streets. K made his bed in the doorway of the Volkskas office with a rubber doormat under his head. When his body had cooled he began to shiver. He slept in fits, clenching his jaws against the pain in his head. A flashlight woke him but he could not separate it from the dream in which he was involved. To the questions of the police he gave unclear answers, shouts and gasps. ‘Don’t! … Don’t! … Don’t! …’ he said, the word coming out like a cough from his lungs. Understanding nothing, repelled by his smell, they pushed him into their van, took him back to the station, and locked him in a cell with five other men, where he resumed his shivering and his delirious sleep.

  In the morning, when they led the prisoners out for ablutions and breakfast, K was rational but unable to stand. He apologized to the constable at the door, ‘It is cramp in my legs, it will go away,’ he said. The constable called the duty officer. For a while they watched the skeletal figure that sat with its back to the wall rubbing its exposed calves; then together they bore K bodily into the yard, where he cringed from the brilliant sunlight, and motioned to another of the prisoners to give him food. K accepted a thick slab of mealie-porridge but, even before the first spoonful had reached his mouth, had begun his retching.

  No one knew where he was from. He had no papers on him, not even a green card. On the charge sheet he was listed ‘Michael Visagie—CM—40—NFA—Unemployed,’ and charged with leaving his magisterial district without authorization, not being in possession of an identification document, infringing the curfew, and being drunk and disorderly. Attributing his debilitation and incoherence to alcohol poisoning, they permitted him to stay in the yard while the other prisoners were returned to the cells, then at noon took him in the back of the van to the hospital. There he was stripped of his clothes and lay naked on a rubber sheet while a young nurse washed and shaved him and dressed him in a white smock. He felt no shame. ‘Tell me, I have always wanted to know, who is Prince Albert?’ he asked the nurse. She paid no attention. ‘And who is Prince Alfred? Isn’t there a Prince Alfred too?’ He waited for the soft warm rag to touch his face, closing his eyes, willing it to come.

  So he lay again between clean sheets, not in the main ward but in a long wood-and-iron extension at the rear of the hospital, housing, as far as he could see, only children and old men. A row of light bulbs hung on long cords from the bare rafters, swaying out of time with one another. A tube ran out of his arm to a bottle on a rack; out of the corner of his eye he could watch the level fall hour by hour, if he wanted to.

  Once when he awoke there were a nurse and a policeman in the doorway looking in his direction, murmuring together. The policeman carried his cap under his arm.

  The afternoon sun glared through the window. A fly settled on his mouth. He waved it away. It circled and settled again. He yielded; his lip underwent the tiny cold searching of its proboscis.

  An orderly came in with a trolley. Everyone got a tray except K. Smelling the food, be felt the saliva seep in his mouth. It was the first hunger he had known for a long time. He was not sure that he wanted to become a servant to hunger again; but a hospital, it seemed, was a place for bodies, where bodies asserted their rights.

  Dusk fell, and then darkness. Someone switched on the lights, in two banks of three. K closed his eyes and slept. When he opened them again the lights were still on. Then as he watched they faded and went off. Moonlight fell in four silver slabs through the four windows. Somewhere nearby a diesel motor sputtered. The lights came on dimly. He fell asleep.

  In the morning he ate and kept down a breakfast of baby cereal and milk. He felt strong enough to get up, but was too shy to do so till he saw an old man wrap a dressing-gown over his pyjamas and leave the room. After that he walked up and down beside his bed for a while, feeling odd in the long smock.

  In the next bed was a young boy with a bandaged stump of an arm. ‘What happened?’ said K. The boy turned away and did not reply.

  If I could find my clothes, K thought, I would leave. But the cupboard beside his bed was empty.

  He ate again at midday. ‘Eat while you can,’ said the orderly who brought his food, ‘the great hunger is still to come.’ Then he moved on, pushing the trolley of food before him. It seemed a strange thing to say. K kept an eye on him as he went his round. From the far end of the ward the orderly felt K’s gaze, and gave him a mysterious smile; but when he returned to fetch the tray he would say nothing more.

  The sun beating down on the iron roof turned the ward into an oven. K lay with his legs spread, dozing. From one of his spells he awoke to see the same policeman and nurse standing over him. He shut his eyes; when he opened them they were gone. Night fell.

  In the morning a nurse fetched him and led him to a bench in the main building, where he waited an hour till it was his turn. ‘How are you feeling today?’ asked the doctor. K hesitated, not knowing what to say, and the doctor stopped listening. He told K to breathe and listened to his chest. He examined him for venereal infection. In two minutes it was over. He wrote something in the brown folder on his desk. ‘Have you ever seen a doctor about your mouth?’ he asked while he wrote. ‘No,’ said K. ‘You could get it corrected, you know,’ said the doctor, but did not offer to correct it.

  K returned to his bed and waited with his hands under his head till the nurse brought him clothes: underpants and a khaki shirt and shorts, neatly ironed. ‘Put these on,’ she said, and busie
d herself elsewhere. Sitting up in bed, K put them on. The shorts were too big. When he stood up he had to hold the waist-band to stop them from slipping down. Then he saw the policeman at the door. ‘These are too big,’ he said to the nurse. ‘Can’t I have my own clothes?’ ‘You will get your own clothes back at the desk,’ she told him. The policeman led him down the corridor to the reception desk and there took charge of a brown paper parcel. No words passed. There was a blue van in the parking lot. K waited for the back to be unlocked; the tarmac was so hot under his bare soles that he had to dance where he stood.

  He expected to be taken back to the police station, but instead they drove all the way through the town and then five kilometres down a dirt road to a camp in the bare veld. K had seen the ochre rectangle of Jakkalsdrif from his perch in the mountains but had thought it was a construction site. Not for a moment had he guessed that it might be one of the resettlement camps, that the tents and unpainted wood-and-iron buildings might house people, that its perimeter might be a three-metre fence surmounted with a strand of barbed wire. When he climbed out of the van holding up his pants, he did so under the eyes of a hundred curious inmates, adults and children, lining the fence on either side of the gate.

  By the gate stood a little hut with a covered porch on which identical grey-green succulents grew out of two tubs of earth. On the porch waited a stout man in military uniform. K recognized the blue beret of the Free Corps. The policeman greeted him and they retired together into the hut. With his parcel under his arm K was left to endure the inspection of the crowd. He stared first into the distance, then at his feet; he did not know what expression to wear. ‘Where did you steal those pants?’ called out someone. ‘Off Sarge’s line!’ came another voice, and there was a ripple of laughter.

  Then a second Free Corps man emerged from the hut. He unlocked the camp gate and conducted K through the crowd, crossing the bare earth of the assembly square to one of the wood-and-iron buildings. It was dark inside, there were no windows. He indicated an empty bunk. ‘That’s your home from now on,’ he said. ‘It’s the only home you’ve got, keep it clean.’ K clambered up and stretched out on the bare foam rubber no more than an armslength from the iron roof. In the dim light, in the stifling heat he waited for the guard to leave.

  All afternoon he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds of camp life outside. Once a troop of children rushed in and chased one another noisily over and under the bunks; when they left they slammed the door shut. He tried to sleep but could not. His throat was parched. He thought of the cool of his cave up in the mountains, of the streams that never stopped running. This is like Huis Norenius, he thought: I am back in Huis Norenius a second time, only now I am too old to bear it. He took off the khaki shirt and shorts and opened the package; but the clothes whose smell used to be simply his own smell had in the space of a few days grown stale and frowzy and alien. Spreadeagled on the hot mattress in his undershorts, he waited for the afternoon to pass.

  Someone opened the door and tiptoed across the floor. K pretended to be asleep. Fingers touched his bare arm. He flinched at the touch. ‘Are you all right?’ said a man’s voice. Against the dazzle of light from the doorway he could not make out the face, ‘I’m fine,’ he said: the words seemed to come from far away. The stranger tiptoed off again. K thought: I needed more warning, I should have been told I was going to be sent back amongst people.

  Later he put on the khaki clothes and went outside. The sun baked down, there was no breath of wind. Two women lay together on a blanket in the shade of a tent. One was asleep, the other had a sleeping child at her breast. She gave K a smile; he nodded and passed. He found the cistern and drank copiously. On his return he addressed her. ‘Is there anywhere I can wash some clothes?’ he asked. She pointed out the washhouse. ‘Have you got soap?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  In the washhouse were two basins and two showers. He wanted to have a shower, but when he tried the shower tap there was no water. He washed the white St John’s jacket, the black trousers, the yellow shirt and underpants with the sagging elastic; he found pleasure in soaking and wringing, in standing with his eyes shut and his arms plunged to the elbows in cold water. He put on his own shoes. Afterwards, when he went to drape his clothes over the washline, he saw the painted sign against the wall: JAKKALSDRIF RELOCATION CAMP / BATH TIMES / MALES 6–7 AM / FEMALES 7.30–8.30 AM / BY ORDER / SAVE WATER / BE SPARING. Following the line of the waterpipe from the cistern, he saw it run under the camp fence and then on to a pump on high ground some distance away.

  The woman with the baby stopped him as he passed. ‘You leave your clothes there,’ she warned, ‘they’ll be gone in the morning.’ So he fetched the damp clothing back and spread it over his bunk.

  The sun was setting; there were more people about now, and children everywhere. Three old men were playing cards outside the next hut. For a while he stood and watched.

  He counted thirty tents evenly spaced over the camp terrain, and seven huts besides the bathhouse and latrines. Foundations for a second row of huts had been laid, and rusty bolts jutted from the concrete.

  He walked over to the gate. On the guardhouse porch one of the two Free Corps sentries sat in a deckchair dozing, his shirt open to the waist. K leaned his head against the mesh, willing the guard to wake. ‘Why have I been sent here?’ he wanted to say. ‘How long do I have to stay?’ But the guard went on sleeping, and K lacked the courage to shout.

  He wandered back to the hut, and from the hut to the cistern. He did not know what to do with himself. A young girl came with a bucket to fill, but stopped when she saw him and went away. He retreated to the back fence of the camp and stared out over the empty veld.

  In one or two of the stone fireplaces amongst the tents there were now fires burning; there was a bustle of people coming and going; the camp was coming to life.

  A blue police van arrived in a cloud of dust and pulled up at the gate, followed by an open truck with men standing packed together in the back. Every child in the camp rushed to the gate. The guard let the van through, and it drove slowly to the fourth in the row of huts, the one with the stovepipe. Two women got out and unlocked the hut; behind them followed the police driver carrying a cardboard box. From the back fence K could faintly hear the crackling of the radio in the van. Soon a first puff of black smoke came from the pipe.

  Men from the truck were unloading bundles of firewood and stacking them inside the gate.

  The policeman returned to his van and sat in the cab combing his hair. One of the women, the large one in slacks, emerged from the hut and beat on a triangle. Before the last note had died away there was a crowd of children jostling at the door, carrying mugs or plates or tin cans, and mothers with infants. The woman cleared a space and began to let the children in two by two. K wandered over and joined the back of the crowd. When the children emerged, he saw, they had soup and slices of bread.

  A little boy, bumped as he came out, spilled his soup over his legs. Walking gingerly, as though he had wet himself, he rejoined the line. Some of the children sat down on the bare ground outside the hut to eat, others carried their supper back to the tents.

  K approached the woman at the door. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘can I have something to eat? I haven’t got a plate. I come from the hospital.’

  ‘It’s for the children only,’ replied the woman, and looked away.

  He went back to his hut and put on the black trousers, which were still damp. The khaki shorts he tossed under a bunk.

  He spoke to the policeman in the van. ‘Where do I get something to eat?’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask to come here. Now where must I get food?’

  ‘This isn’t jail,’ said the policeman, ‘this is a camp, you work for your food like everyone else in the camp.’

  ‘How can I work when I am locked up? Where is the work I must do?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said the policeman. ‘Ask your friends. Who do you think you are that I should give you a free living?’
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  It was better in the mountains, K thought. It was better on the farm, it was better on the road. It was better in Cape Town. He thought of the hot dark hut, of strangers lying packed about him on their bunks, of air thick with derision. It is like going back to childhood, he thought: it is like a nightmare.

  There were more fires burning now, and a smell of cooking, even of meat grilling. The woman in slacks beckoned him over to the kitchen and handed him a plastic bucket. ‘Wash this,’ she said, ‘and put it inside here. Lock the door. You know how a padlock works?’ K nodded. There was a layer of soup mush at the bottom of the bucket. The two women got into the van with the policeman; as they drove off, K noticed, they looked straight ahead of them as though there were nothing left to be curious about in the camp.

  Darkness fell. Around the fires there were groups eating and talking; later on someone began to play a guitar and there was dancing. At first K hung about in the shadows looking on; then, feeling foolish, he went and lay down on his bunk in the empty hut.

  Someone entered: he turned as the dark shape approached him. ‘Want a cigarette?’ said a voice. K accepted the cigarette and sat up hunched against the wall. By the light of the match he saw a man older than himself.

  ‘Where are you from?’ said the man.

  ‘I walked around the back fence this afternoon,’ said K. ‘Anyone can climb it. A child could climb it in a minute. Why do people stay here?’