Life and Times of Michael K (15 page)

There was much else he could have taken to make life easier for himself: a grid, a cooking-pot, a folding chair, slabs of foam rubber, more of the feed-sacks. He scratched among the odds and ends in the shed and there was nothing for which he could not imagine a use. But he was wary of conveying the Visagies’ rubbish to his home in the earth and setting himself on a trail that might lead to the re-enactment of their misfortunes. The worst mistake, he told himself, would be to try to found a new house, a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.

He stood leaning against the frame of the pump, feeling the tremor that passed through it each time the piston reached the bottom of its stroke, hearing the great wheel above his head cut through the dark on its greased bearings. How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called. He thought of the camp at Jakkalsdrif, of parents bringing up children behind the wire, their own children and the children of cousins and second cousins, on earth stamped so tight by the passage of their footsteps day after day, baked so hard by the sun, that nothing would ever grow there again. My mother was the one whose ashes I brought back, he thought, and my father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the
door of the dormitory, the twenty-one rules of which the first was ‘There will be silence in dormitories at all times,’ and the woodwork teacher with the missing fingers who twisted my ear when the line was not straight, and the Sunday mornings when we put on our khaki shirts and our khaki shorts and our black socks and our black shoes and marched two abreast to the church on Papegaai Street to be forgiven. They were my father, and my mother is buried and not yet risen. That is why it is a good thing that I, who have nothing to pass on, should be spending my time here where I am out of the way.

In the month since his return there had been no visitor K knew of. The only fresh footprints in the dust on the farmhouse floor were his own and those of the cat, which came and went as it pleased, he did not know how. Then, passing the house one day on a dawn walk, he was thunderstruck to see the front door, which was always closed, standing ajar. He halted not thirty paces from the open eye of the door, feeling suddenly as naked as a mole in daylight. On tiptoe he retreated to the cover of the river-bed, then stole back to his burrow.

For a week he did not go near the farmhouse but crept about in the dark tending his acre, fearful that the merest clatter of pebble against pebble would echo across the veld and give him away. The young pumpkin leaves now seemed nothing so much as vivid green flags proclaiming his occupation of the dam: he spread grass painstakingly over the vines, he even considered cutting them back. He could not sleep but lay on his bed of grass beneath the oven-heat of the roof straining his ears for the noises that would herald his discovery.

Yet there were times when his fears seemed absurd, spells of clarity in which he would recognize that, cut off from human society, he was in danger of becoming more timorous than a mouse. What grounds had he for thinking that the open door meant the return of the Visagies or the arrival of the police come to consign him to the notorious Brandvlei? In a vast country
across whose face hundreds of thousands of people were daily following their cockroach pilgrimages in flight from the war, why should he be alarmed if some refugee or other hid away in an empty farmhouse in a desolate strip of country? Surely he, or they (K had a vision of a man pushing a barrow loaded with nousehold goods, and a woman trudging behind him, and two children, one holding the woman’s hand, the other seated on top of the pile in the barrow clutching a mewling kitten, all dead died, the wind blowing dust in their faces and sending grey clouds scudding across the sky)—surely such people had more cause to fear him, a wild man all skin and bone and rags rising up out of the earth at the hour of batflight, than he had to fear them?

But then he would think: Yet what if they are of the other kind, runaway soldiers, off-duty policemen come to shoot the goats for sport, hefty men who would hold their sides laughing at my pathetic tricks, my pumpkins hidden in the grass, my burrow disguised with mud, and kick my backside and tell me to pull myself together and turn me into a servant to cut wood and carry water for them and chase the goats towards their guns so that they could eat grilled chops while I squatted behind a bush with my plate of offal? Would it not be better to hide day and night, would it not be better to bury myself in the bowels of the earth than become a creature of theirs? (And would the idea of turning me into a servant even cross their minds? Seeing a wild man making his way towards them across the veld, would they not start laying bets on who could put a bullet through the brass badge on his headgear?)

The days passed and nothing happened. The sun shone, the birds skipped from bush to bush, the great silence reverberated from horizon to horizon, and K’s confidence came back. He spent a whole day lying under cover watching the farmhouse, while the sun moved in its arc from left to right and the shadows moved across the stoep from right to left. Was the strip of deeper darkness in the centre an open doorway or the door itself? It was too far
to see. When night came and the moon rose, he approached as far as the dead orchard. There was no light in the house, no sound. He tiptoed into the open, across the yard, to the very foot of the steps, from where he could finally see that the door was open, as it must have been all the time. He climbed the steps and entered the house. In the pitch darkness of the hallway he stood listening. All was silence.

He spent the rest of the night lying on a sack in the shed, waiting. He even slept, though he was not used to sleeping by night. In the morning he re-entered the house. The floor had been freshly swept, as had the grate. A faint smell of smoke still hung in the corners. In the rubbish tip behind the shed he found six new shiny unlabelled corned-beef cans.

He went back to his burrow and spent the day in hiding, shaken by the certainty that soldiers had been on the farm and that they had come on foot. If they were hunting rebels in the mountains or tracking down deserters or simply making a tour of inspection, why had they not come in jeeps or trucks? Why were they being stealthy, why were they hiding their tracks? There might be many explanations, there might be a thousand explanations, he could not read their minds; all he knew was that it was the merest luck that had preserved him.

He did not pump water that night, hoping the sun and wind would dry out the floor of the dam. He pulled out more grass, armfuls of grass, and spread it over the telltale pumpkin vines. He lay low and breathed quietly.

A day passed, and another day. Then, as the sun was going down and K had emerged from his house to stretch his limbs, shapes moving across the flats caught his eye. He dropped to the earth. He had seen a man on horseback heading towards the dam, and another man on foot beside him; he had also clearly seen the barrel of the gun poking over the horseman’s shoulder. Like a worm he began to slither towards his hole, thinking only: Let darkness fall soon, let the earth swallow me up and protect me.

From behind the swell of the hillock near the mouth of the hole he raised his head for a last look.

It was not a horse but a donkey, a donkey so tiny that its rider’s feet almost touched the ground. Further back there was a second donkey, riderless but with two bulky grey packs strapped to its sides; and between the two donkeys he counted eight men, with a ninth at the tail of the train. All of them had guns; some seemed to carry packs as well. One wore blue trousers, another yellow, but otherwise they were in camouflage uniform.

As quietly as he could K slid backwards into the hole. From the doorway he could no longer see anything of them, but on the windless air he heard them dismount at the dam, heard the rattle of the chain as they released the brake on the pump, even heard a murmur of words. Someone climbed the ladder to the platform high above the ground, then climbed down again.

It grew darker, till it was only the snorting of the donkeys that revealed how nearby the strangers were. K heard the thud of an axe down in the river-bed; later the contour of the ridge above him began to be visible against the faint orange glow of their fire. There was a puff of wind; the rudder swung, metal groaned, the wheel of the pump turned once and stopped. ‘Why no water?’—he heard the words clearly. There were more words he could not make out, followed by a burst of laughter. Then the wind stirred again, the pump groaned and turned, and through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet K heard the first boom of the piston deep in the earth. There was a muted cheer. On the wind came the smell of roasting meat.

K closed his eyes and rested his face on his hands. It was clear to him now that it was not soldiers who were camping at the dam, who had earlier camped in the house, but men from the mountains, men who blew up railway tracks and mined roads and attacked farmhouses and drove off stock and cut one town off from another, whom the radio reported exterminated in scores and the newspapers published pictures of sprawling gape-mouthed
in pools of their own blood. That was who his visitors were. Yet they seemed to him like nothing so much as a football team: eleven young men come off the field after a hard game, tired, happy, hungry.

His heart was pounding. When they leave in the morning, he thought to himself, I could come out of hiding and trot along behind them like a child following a brass band. After a while they would notice me and stop to ask what I wanted. And I could say: Give me a pack to carry; let me chop wood and build the fire at the end of the day. Or I could say: Be sure to come back to the dam next time, and I will feed you. I will have pumpkins and squashes and melons by then, I will have peaches and figs and prickly pears, you will lack nothing. And they would come next time on their way to the mountains or wherever it is they go by night, and I would feed them and afterwards sit with them around the fire drinking in their words. The stories they tell will be different from the stories I heard in the camp, because the camp was for those left behind, the women and children, the old men, the blind, the crippled, the idiots, people who have nothing to tell but stories of how they have endured. Whereas these young men have had adventures, victories and defeats and escapes. They will have stories to tell long after the war is over, stories for a lifetime, stories for their grandchildren to listen to open-mouthed.

Yet in the same instant that he reached down to check that his shoelaces were tied, K knew that he would not crawl out and stand up and cross from darkness into firelight to announce himself. He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.

Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating
him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.

He remembered Huis Norenius and the classroom. Numb with terror he stared at the problem before him while the teacher stalked the rows counting off the minutes till it should be time for them to lay down their pencils and be divided, the sheep from the goats. Twelve men eat six bags of potatoes. Each bag holds six kilograms of potatoes. What is the quotient? He saw himself write down 12, he saw himself write down 6. He did not know what to do with the numbers. He crossed both out. He stared at the word
quotient
. It did not change, it did not dissolve, it did not yield its mystery. I will die, he thought, still not knowing what the quotient is.

He lay awake much of the night listening to the dam slowly fill, peering out occasionally into the starlight to see whether the donkeys had settled or were still browsing on his pumpkins. Then he must have dozed, for the next thing he knew, someone was stamping heavily through the grass below him, clapping his hands, chasing the donkeys, and the mountains were already outlined blue on pink against the sky. The wind was still, on the air came faint sounds: the tinkle of a buckle, the clash of a spoon on a mug, the splash of water.

Now, he thought, waking fully, now is my last chance: now. He slid out of the burrow into the open, crept forward on hands and knees, and peered over the shoulder of the ridge.

There was a man clambering out of the dam. Out of the cold night-water he came, lifted himself on to the wall, and stood there drying himself with a white towel, the first soft light of day shining from his wet naked body.

Two men were loading a donkey, one holding the bridle, the
other settling and strapping two bulky canvas bags over its back, and a long tubular parcel also tied in canvas.

The rest of the party were behind the dam wall; sometimes K saw a head move.

The man who had stood on the wall reappeared, dressed now. He bent down and opened the cock. Water gushed out along the old furrows K had dug during his first stay, flowing into the field.

That is a mistake, thought K, that is a sign.

The same man fastened the brake on the pump.

In a long straggling line they began moving out eastward across the veld heading for the mountains, one donkey at the head of the line, the other at the tail, the sun, now over the rim of the world, catching them full in the face. K watched from behind the ridge till they were nothing but bobbing specks against the yellow of the grass, thinking: It is not too late to run after them, it is not too late yet. Then when they were finally gone he came out and made a tour of the flooded acre to see the devastation the donkeys had done.