Life and Times of Michael K (19 page)

Overheard in the canteen: ‘The children are finding it so hard to adapt to life in a flat. They really miss the big garden and their pets. We had to evacuate just like that: three days’ notice. I can cry when I think of what we left behind.’ The speaker a florid-faced woman in a polka-dot dress, the wife, I think, of one of the NCO’s. (In her dreams of her abandoned home a strange man sprawls on the sheets with his boots on, or opens the deep-freeze and spits into the ice-cream.) ‘Don’t tell me not to feel bitter,’ she said. Her companion a slim little woman I did not recognize, with her hair combed back like a man’s.

Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men’s souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth. We also ply them with items from the brass band repertoire and show them films of young men in neat uniforms demonstrating to grizzled village elders how to eradicate mosquitoes and plough along the contour. At the end of the process we certify them cleansed and pack them off to the labour battalions to carry water and dig latrines. At the big military parades there is always a company from the labour battalions marching past the cameras among all the tanks and rockets and field artillery to prove that we can turn enemies into friends; but they march with spades on their shoulders, I notice, not guns.

Returning to camp after a Sunday off, I present myself at the gate feeling like a punter paying admission,
ENCLOSURE A
, reads the sign over the main gate.
MEMBERS AND OFFICIALS ONLY
, reads the sign over the gate to the infirmary. Why have they not taken them down? Do they believe the track will be re-opened one of these days? Are there still people training racehorses somewhere, convinced that after all the fuss the world will settle down to being as it was?

We are down to twelve patients. Michaels, however, makes no progress. There has obviously been degeneration of the intestinal wall. I have put him back on skim milk.

He lies looking up at the window and the sky, with his ears sticking out of his bare skull, smiling his smile. When he was
brought in he had a brown paper packet which he put away under his pillow. Now he has taken to holding the packet against his chest. I asked him whether it contained his
muti
. No, he said, and showed me dried pumpkin seeds. I was quite affected. ‘You must go back to your gardening when the war is over,’ I told him. ‘Will you go back to the Karoo, do you think?’ He looked cagey. ‘Of course there is good soil in the Peninsula too, under all the rolling lawns,’ I said, ‘It would be nice to see market gardening carried on in the Peninsula again.’ He made no reply. I took the packet out of his hand and tucked it under the pillow ‘for safety.’ When I passed an hour later he was asleep, his mouth nudging the pillow like a baby’s.

He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.

His condition is stable, the diarrhoea under control. Pulse rate low, however, blood pressure low. Last night he complained of being cold, though in fact the nights are getting warmer, and Felicity had to give him a pair of socks. This morning when I tried to be friendly he shook me off. ‘Do you think if you leave me alone I am going to die?’ he said. ‘Why do you want to make me fat? Why fuss over me, why am I so important?’ I was in no mood to argue. I tried to take his wrist; he pulled away with surprising strength, waving an arm like an insect’s claw. I left him till I had done my round, then came back. I had something
I wanted to say. ‘You ask why you are important, Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No one is forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.’

He gazed up at the ceiling for a long while, like an old man consulting the spirits, then spoke. ‘My mother worked all her life long,’ he said. ‘She scrubbed other people’s floors, she cooked food for them, she washed their dishes. She washed their dirty clothes. She scrubbed the bath after them. She went on her knees and cleaned the toilet. But when she was old and sick they forgot her. They put her away out of sight. When she died they threw her in the fire. They gave me an old box of ash and told me, “Here is your mother, take her away, she is no good to us.”’

The boy with the broken ankle lay pricking his ears, pretending to be asleep.

I answered Michaels as abruptly as I could; there seemed no point in humouring his self-pity. ‘We do for you what we have to do,’ I told him. ‘There is nothing special about you, you can rest easy about that. When you are better there are plenty of floors waiting to be scrubbed and plenty of toilets to clean. As for your mother, I am sure you have not told the full story and I am sure you know that.’

Nevertheless, he is right: I do indeed pay too much attention to him. Who is he, after all? On the one hand we have a flood of refugees from the countryside seeking safety in the towns. On the other hand we have people tired of living five to a room and not getting enough to eat who slip out of the towns to scratch a living in the abandoned countryside. Who is Michaels but one of a multitude in the second class? A mouse who quit an overcrowded, foundering ship. Only, being a city mouse, he did not know how to live off the land and began to grow very hungry
indeed. And then was lucky enough to be sighted and hauled aboard again. What has he to be so piqued about?

Noël has had a phone call from the police at Prince Albert. There was an attack on the town’s water supply last night. The pump was blown up as well as a section of the pipe. While they wait for the engineers they will have to make do with borehole water. The overland power lines are down as well. Evidently yet another of the little ships is sinking, while the big ships plough on through the darkness, more and more lonely, groaning under their weight of human cargo. The police would like another chance to talk to Michaels about those responsible, namely his friends from the mountains. Alternatively they want us to put certain questions to him. ‘Haven’t they been over him once already?’ I protested to Noël. ‘What is the point of interrogating him a second time? He is too sick to travel, and anyhow not responsible for himself.’ ‘Is he too sick to talk to us?’ Noël asked. ‘Not too sick, but you won’t get sense out of him,’ I said. Noël brought out Michaels’ papers again and showed them to me. Under
Category
I read
Opgaarder
in neat country-policeman copperplate. ‘What is an
Opgaarder
?’ I said. Noël: ‘Like a squirrel or an ant or a bee.’ ‘Is that a new rank?’ I said. ‘Did he go to
opgaarder
school and get an
opgaarder
’s badge?’

We took Michaels in his pyjamas, with a blanket over his shoulders, to the store-room at the far end of the stand. Paint cans and cardboard boxes piled against the wall, cobwebs in every corner, dust thick on the floor, and nowhere to sit. Michaels confronted us crossly, holding the blanket tight, resolute on his two stick-feet.

‘You’re in the shit, Michaels,’ said Noël. ‘Your friends from Prince Albert have been misbehaving. They are making a nuisance of themselves. We need to catch them, have a talk to them. We
don’t think you are giving us all the help you can. So you are getting a second chance. We want you to tell us about your friends: where they hide out, how we can get to meet them.’ He lit a cigarette. Michaels did not stir or take his eyes off us.

‘Michaels,’ I said, ‘Michael—some of us are not even sure you had anything to do with the insurgents. If you can persuade us you were not working for them, you can save us a lot of trouble and save yourself a lot of unhappiness. So tell me, tell the Major: what were you actually doing on that farm when they caught you? Because all we know is what we read in these papers from the police at Prince Albert, and, frankly, what they say doesn’t make sense. Tell us the truth, tell us the whole truth, and you can go back to bed, we won’t bother you any more.’

Now he crouched perceptibly, clutching the blanket about his throat, glaring at the two of us.

‘Come on, my friend!’ I said. ‘No one is going to hurt you, just tell us what we want to know!’

The silence lengthened. Noël did not speak, passing the whole burden to me. ‘Come on, Michaels,’ I said, ‘we haven’t got all day, there is a war on!’

At last he spoke: ‘I am not in the war.’

Irritation overflowed in me. ‘You are not in the war? Of course you are in the war, man, whether you like it or not! This is a camp, not a holiday resort, not a convalescent home: it is a camp where we rehabilitate people like you and make you work! You are going to learn to fill sandbags and dig holes, my friend, till your back breaks! And if you don’t co-operate you will go to a place that is a lot worse than this! You will go to a place where you stand baking in the sun all day and eat potato-peels and mealie-cobs, and if you don’t survive, tough luck, they cross your number off the list and that is the end of you! So come on, talk, time is running out, tell us what you were doing so that we can write it down and send it to Prince Albert! The Major here is a busy man, he isn’t used to wasting time, he came out of
retirement to run this nice camp and help people like you. You must co-operate.’