Life and Times of Michael K (11 page)

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?’

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?’

‘This isn’t a prison,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t you hear the policeman tell you it isn’t a prison? This is Jakkalsdrif. This is a camp. Don’t you know what a camp is? A camp is for people without jobs. It is for all the people who go around from farm to farm begging for work because they haven’t got food, they haven’t got a roof over their heads. They put all the people like that together in a camp so that they won’t have to beg any more. You say why don’t I run away. But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we’ve got here? From soft beds like this and free wood and a man at the gate with a gun to stop the thieves from coming in the night to steal your money? Where do you come from that you don’t know these things?’

K was silent. He did not understand who was being blamed.

‘You climb the fence,’ the man said, ‘and you have left your place of abode. Jakkalsdrif is your place of abode now. Welcome. You leave your place of abode, they pick you up, you are a vagrant. No place of abode. First time, Jakkalsdrif. Second time, Brandvlei. You want to go to Brandvlei, penal servitude, hard labour, brickfields, guards with whips? You climb the fence, they pick you up, it’s a second offence, you go to Brandvlei. Remember that. It’s your choice. Where do you want to go anyway?’ He dropped his voice. ‘You want to go to the mountains?’

K did not know what he meant. The man slapped him on the leg. ‘Come out and join the party,’ he said. ‘You see them searching people at the gate? Searching for liquor. No liquor in the camp, by order. So come out and have a drink.’

Thus K allowed himself to be led out to the group gathered around the guitar-player. The music stopped. ‘This is Michael,’ the man said. ‘He has come all the way to Jakkalsdrif for his
holiday. Let’s make him welcome.’ K was pressed to sit down, offered wine out of a bottle wrapped in brown paper, and besieged with questions: Where did he come from? What was he doing in Prince Albert? Where had he been picked up? No one could understand why he should have left the city and come to this lonely part of the world where there was no work and where entire families had been turned off farms they had lived on for generations.

‘I was bringing my mother to live in Prince Albert,’ K tried to explain. ‘She was sick, her legs were giving her trouble. She wanted to live in the country, to get away from the rain. It was raining all the time where we lived. But she died on the way, in Stellenbosch, in the hospital there. So she never saw Prince Albert. She was born here.’

‘Poor lady,’ said a woman. ‘But haven’t you got Welfare in the Cape?’ She did not wait for K’s answer. ‘There is no Welfare here. This is our Welfare.’ She waved an arm to embrace the camp.

K pressed on. ‘Then I worked on the railways,’ he said. ‘I helped to clear the line when there was a blockage. Then I came here.’

There was a silence. Now I must speak about the ashes, thought K, so as to be complete, so as to have told the whole story. But he found that he could not, or could not yet. The man with the guitar began to pick out a new melody. K felt the attention of the group drift away from him to the music. ‘There is no Welfare in Cape Town either,’ he said. ‘The Welfare stopped.’ The tent next door glowed, lit from within by a candle; figures moved in silhouette against the walls larger than life. He reclined and stared up at the stars.

‘We’ve been in for five months now,’ said a voice beside him. It was the man from the hut. His name was Robert. ‘My wife, my children, three girls and a boy, my sister and her children. I had work near Klaarstroom, on a farm. I’d been there a long time, twelve years. Then suddenly there was no wool market.
Then they started the quota system—only so much wool per farmer. Then they closed the one road to Oudtshoorn, then they closed the other one, then they opened them both, then they closed them for good. So one day he came to me, this farmer, and he said, “I’ve got to let you go. Too many mouths to feed, I can’t afford it.” “Where must I go?” I said: “You know there are no jobs.” “Sorry,” he said, “nothing personal, I just can’t afford it any more.” So he let me go, me with a family, and he kept on a man who had been there only a short time, a young man, single. Just one mouth to feed—he could afford that. I said to him, “I’ve got no work now, what can
I
afford?” Anyway, we packed everything and left; and on the road, I’m not lying,
on the road
the police picked us up, he had phoned them, they picked us up and that same night we were here in Jakkalsdrif behind the wire. “No fixed abode.” I said to them, “Last night I had a fixed abode, how do you know tonight I won’t have a fixed abode?” They said, “Where would you rather sleep, out in the veld under a bush like an animal or in a camp with a proper bed and running water?” I said, “Do I get a choice?” They said, “You get a choice and you choose Jakkalsdrif. Because we are not going to have people wandering around being a nuisance.” But I’ll tell you the real reason, I’ll tell you why they were so quick to pick us up. They want to stop people from disappearing into the mountains and then coming back one night to cut their fences and drive their stock away. Do you know how many men there are in this camp—young men?’ He leaned towards K and dropped his voice. ‘Thirty. You are thirty-one. And how many women and children and old people? Look around, count for yourself. So I ask you, where are the men who aren’t here with their families?’

‘I was in the mountains,’ said K. ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

‘But you ask any of these women where their menfolk are, they will say, “He has got a job, he sends me money every month,” or, “He ran away, he left me.” So who knows?’

There was a long silence. A tiny light flashed across the heavens. K pointed. ‘A shooting star,’ he said.

The next morning K went out to work. The Railways Administration had first call on the men from Jakkalsdrif, followed by the Prince Albert Divisional Council, followed by the local farmers. The truck came to fetch them at six-thirty, and by seven-thirty they were at work north of Leeu-Gamka, clearing undergrowth from the river-bed upstream and downstream from a railway bridge, digging holes and mixing cement for a security fence. The work was hard; by mid-morning K was flagging. The time in the mountains has turned me into an old man, he thought.

Robert paused beside him. ‘Before you break your back, my friend,’ he said, ‘remember what they pay you. You get standard wage, one rand a day. I get one rand fifty because I have dependants. So don’t kill yourself. Go and take a pee. You’ve been in hospital, you’re not well.’

Later, when the midday break came, he offered K one of his sandwiches and stretched out beside him in the shade of a tree. ‘Out of your five–six rand a week,’ he told him, ‘you have to provide your own food. The camp is just a place to sleep. The ACVV ladies—you saw them yesterday—they visit three times a week, but that is charity work for the children only. My wife has a job in the town three half-days a week as a domestic. She takes the baby with her and leaves the other children with my sister. So we bring in maybe twelve rand a week. From that we have to feed nine people, three grownups, six children. Other people have it harder. When there isn’t work, too bad, we sit behind the wire and tighten our belts.

‘Now the money you earn, there is only one place to spend it, that is Prince Albert. And when you go into a shop in Prince Albert, all of a sudden prices go up. Why? Because you are from the camp. They don’t want a camp so near their town. They never wanted it. They ran a big campaign against the camp at the beginning. We breed disease, they said. No hygiene, no morals.
A nest of vice, men and women all together. The way they talked, there should be a fence down the middle of the camp, men on one side, women on the other, dogs to patrol it at night. What they would really like—this is my opinion—is for the camp to be miles away in the middle of the Koup out of sight. Then we could come on tiptoe in the middle of the night like fairies and do their work, dig their gardens, wash their pots, and be gone in the morning leaving everything nice and clean.