Life and Times of Michael K (22 page)

Another thing I would like to know is what the food was that you ate in the wilderness that has made all other food tasteless to you. The only food you have ever mentioned is pumpkin. You even carry pumpkin seeds with you. Is pumpkin the only food they know in the Karoo? Am I to believe that you lived for a year on pumpkin? The human body is not capable of that, Michaels. What else did you eat? Did you hunt? Did you make yourself a bow and arrows and hunt? Did you eat roots and berries? Did you eat locusts? Your papers say that you were an
opgaarder
, a storage man, but they do not say what it was you stored. Was it manna? Did manna fall from the sky for you, and did you store it away in underground bins for your friends to
come and eat in the night? Is that why you will not eat camp food—because you have been spoiled forever by the taste of manna?

You should have hidden, Michaels. You were too careless of yourself. You should have crept away in the darkest reach of the deepest hole and possessed yourself in patience till the troubles were over. Did you think you were a spirit invisible, a visitor on our planet, a creature beyond the reach of the laws of nations? Well, the laws of nations have you in their grip now: they have pinned you down in a bed beneath the grandstand of the old Kenilworth racecourse, they will grind you in the dirt if necessary. The laws are made of iron, Michaels, I hope you are learning that. No matter how thin you make yourself, they will not relax. There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.

If you will not compromise you are going to die, Michaels. And do not think you are simply going to waste away, grow more and more insubstantial till you are all soul and can fly away into the aether. The death you have chosen is full of pain and misery and shame and regret, and there are many days to endure yet before release comes. You are going to die, and your story is going to die too, forever and ever, unless you come to your senses and listen to me. Listen to me, Michaels. I am the only one who can save you. I am the only one who sees you for the original soul you are. I am the only one who cares for you. I alone see you as neither a soft case for a soft camp nor a hard case for a hard camp but a human soul above and beneath classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history, a soul stirring its wings within that stiff sarcophagus, murmuring behind that clownish mask. You are precious, Michaels, in your way; you are the last of your kind, a creature left over from an earlier age, like the coelacanth or the last man to speak Yaqui. We have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light, biding your time in an orphanage (who would have thought of
that
as a hiding-place?),
evading the peace and the war, skulking in the open where no one dreamed of looking, have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. We ought to value you and celebrate you, we ought to put your clothes on a maquette in a museum, your clothes and your packet of pumpkin seeds too, with a label; there ought to be a plaque nailed to the racetrack wall commemorating your stay here. But that is not the way it is going to be. The truth is that you are going to perish in obscurity and be buried in a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse, transport to the acres of Woltemade being out of the question nowadays, and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels:
yield
!

After a flurry of rumours, definite word at last about this month’s intake. The main batch is held up on the line at Reddersburg waiting for transport. As for the batch from the Eastern Cape, it will not be coming at all: the staging camp at Uitenhage no longer has the staff to separate prisoners into hard and soft, and all detainees in that sector are being committed to high-security camps until further notice.

So the holiday-camp atmosphere at Kenilworth lingers on. A cricket match has been arranged for tomorrow between camp personnel and a team from the Quartermaster-General’s. Great activity out in the middle of the course, where they are mowing and rolling a pitch. Noël is to captain the team. It is thirty years since he last played, he says. He cannot find a pair of white trousers to fit him.

Maybe if tracks continue to be blown up and the transports are halted everywhere, the Castle will forget about us and leave
us to play out the duration of the war in quiet oblivion behind our walls.

Noël came over on an inspection. There were only two prisoners in the ward, Michaels and the concussion case. We spoke about Michaels, keeping our voices low though he was asleep. I could still save him if I used a tube, I told Noël, but was reluctant to force anyone to live who did not want to. The regulations are clearly behind me: No force-feeding, no artificial prolongation of life. (Also: No publicity to hunger strikes.) ‘How much longer will he last?’ asked Noël. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps as long as three, I told him. ‘At least it is a quiet end,’ he said. No, I said, it is a painful and distressing end. ‘Isn’t there some kind of injection you can give?’ he asked. ‘To put him down?’ I said. ‘No, I don’t mean to put him down,’ he said, ‘just to make the going easier for him.’ I refused. I cannot take on that responsibility while there is still a chance he might change his mind. We left it at that.

The cricket match is played and lost, with the ball shooting through off the uneven grass and batsmen jumping about to avoid being hit. Noël, playing in a white track suit with red piping that made him look like Father Christmas in thermal underwear, batted number eleven and was bowled first ball. ‘Where did you learn your cricket?’ I asked. ‘Moorreesburg, in the 1930s, in the school playground, in the lunch break,’ he replied.

He strikes me as the best kind of person we have.

Partying deep into the night after the game. A return match promised for February, at Simonstown, if we are still around.

Noël very despondent. He heard today that Uitenhage was just the beginning, that the distinction between rehabilitation camps
and internment camps is to be abolished. Baardskeerdersbos is to be closed down and the remaining three, including Kenilworth, will be converted into straight internment camps. Rehabilitation, it would seem, is an ideal that has failed to prove itself; as for the labour battalions, they can be supplied just as well from the internment camps. Noël: ‘You mean you are going to intern battle-hardened soldiers here in Kenilworth, in the heart of a residential area, behind a brick wall and two strands of barbed wire, with nothing but a handful of old men and boys and heart cases to guard them?’ The reply: The drawbacks of the Kenilworth camp have been taken note of. There will be physical modifications, including lights and guard towers, before it is re-opened.

To me Noël confides that he is thinking of resigning: he is sixty, he has given enough of his life to the service, he has a widowed daughter who is pressing him to come and live with her in Gordon’s Bay. ‘You need an iron man to run an iron camp. I am not that kind of man.’ I could not disagree. Not being iron is his greatest virtue.

Michaels is gone. He must have escaped during the night. Felicity noticed that his bed was empty when she arrived this morning, but did not report it (‘I thought he had gone to the toilet’—!). It was ten o’clock before I found out. Now, in retrospect, one can see how easy it must have been, or would be for anyone in normal health. With the camp nearly empty, the only sentries on duty were at the main gate and the gate to the personnel compound. There were no perimeter patrols and the side gate was simply locked. There was no one inside to break out, and who would want to break in? Well, we forgot about Michaels. He must have tiptoed out, climbed the wall—God knows how—and stolen away. The wire does not seem to have been cut; but then Michaels is enough of a wraith to slip through anything.

Noël is in a quandary. The specified procedure is to report the
escape and pass responsibility to the civil police. But in that case there will be an investigation, and the happy-go-lucky state of affairs here will undoubtedly emerge: half the personnel out on overnight passes, foot patrols discontinued, etc. The alternative is to concoct a death report and let Michaels go. I have been urging this course on Noël. ‘For God’s sake close the story of Michaels here and now,’ I told him. ‘The poor simpleton has gone off like a sick dog to die in a corner. Let him be, don’t haul him back and force him to die here under a spotlight with strangers looking on.’ Noël smiled. ‘You smile,’ I said, ‘but what I say is true: people like Michaels are in touch with things you and I don’t understand. They hear the call of the great good master and they obey. Haven’t you heard of elephants?

‘Michaels should never have come to this camp,’ I went on. ‘It was a mistake. In fact his life was a mistake from beginning to end. It’s a cruel thing to say, but I will say it: he is someone who should never have been born into a world like this. It would have been better if his mother had quietly suffocated him when she saw what he was, and put him in the trash can. Now at least let him go in peace. I’ll write out a death certificate, you countersign it, some clerk in the Castle will file it away without giving it a glance, and that will be the end of the story of Michaels.’

‘He is wearing camp issue khaki pyjamas,’ said Noël. ‘The police will pick him up, they will ask where he comes from, he will tell them he comes from Kenilworth, they will check and find there has been no escape reported, and there will be hell to pay.’

‘He was not wearing pyjamas,’ I replied. ‘What he found to wear I don’t yet know, but he left his pyjamas behind. As for admitting he comes from Kenilworth, he won’t do that for the simple reason that he doesn’t want to be returned to Kenilworth. He will tell them one of his other stories, for example that he comes from the Garden of Paradise. He will bring out his packet of pumpkin seeds and rattle them, and give them one of his smiles,
and they will pack him straight off to the madhouse, if the madhouses haven’t all been closed down yet. You have heard the last of Michaels, Noël, I swear it. Besides, do you know what he weighs? Thirty-five kilos, all skin and bone. For two weeks he has eaten nothing whatever. His body has lost the ability to digest ordinary foodstuffs. I am amazed he had the strength to stand up and walk; it is a miracle that he climbed the wall. How long can he possibly last? One night in the open and he will be dead of exposure. His heart will stop.’