Life and Times of Michael K

  K kept up a steady pace, stopping every half-hour to rub his cold hands and flex his aching shoulders. The moment he settled his mother in the cart in Sea Point he realized that, with all the luggage packed in the front, the axle was off centre, too far back. Now, the more his mother slid down the box trying to make herself comfortable, the greater the deadweight he found himself lifting. He kept a smiling face to hide the strain he felt. ‘We just have to get on to the open road,’ he panted, ‘then someone is bound to stop for us.’

  By noon they were passing through the ghostly industrial quarter of Paarden Eiland. A couple of workmen sitting on a wall eating their sandwiches watched them roll past in silence, CRASH-FLASH said the faded black lettering beneath their feet. K felt his arms going numb but plodded on another half-mile. Where the road passed under the Black River Parkway he helped his mother out and settled her on the grass verge beneath the bridge. They ate their lunch. He was struck by the emptiness of the roads. There was such stillness that he could hear birdsong. He lay back in the thick grass and closed his eyes.

  He was roused by a rumbling in the air. At first he thought it was faroff thunder. The noise grew louder, however, beating in waves off the base of the bridge above them. From their right, from the direction of the city, at deliberate speed, came two pairs of uniformed motorcyclists, rifles strapped across their backs, and behind them an armoured car with a gunner standing in the turret. Then followed a long and miscellaneous procession of heavy vehicles, most of them trucks empty of cargo. K crept up the verge to his mother; side by side they sat and watched in a roar of noise that seemed to turn the air solid. The convoy took minutes to pass. The rear was brought up by scores of automobiles, vans and light trucks, followed by an olive-green army truck with a canvas hood under which they glimpsed two rows of seated helmeted soldiers, and then another pair of motorcyclists.

  One of the lead motorcyclists had turned a pointed stare on K and his mother as he went past. Now the last two motorcyclists peeled off from the convoy. One waited at the roadside, the other climbed the verge. Raising his visor he addressed them: ‘No stopping along the expressway,’ he said. He glanced into the barrow. ‘Is this your vehicle?’ K nodded. ‘Where are you going?’ K whispered, cleared his throat, spoke a second time: ‘To Prince Albert. In the Karoo.’ The motorcyclist whistled, rocked the barrow lightly, called down something to his companion. He turned back to K. ‘Along the road, just around the bend, there is a checkpoint. You stop at the checkpoint and show your permit. You got a permit to leave the Peninsula?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can’t travel outside the Peninsula without a permit. Go to the checkpoint and show them your permit and your papers. And listen to me: you want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside. That’s the regulation: fifty metres either side. Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked. Understand?’

  K nodded. The motorcyclists remounted and roared off after the convoy. K could not meet his mother’s eye. ‘We should have picked a quieter road,’ he said.

  He could have turned back at once; but at the risk of a second humiliation he helped his mother back into the barrow and pushed her as far as the old hangars, where, indeed, there was a jeep parked by the roadside and three soldiers brewing tea over a camp stove. His pleas were in vain. ‘Have you got a permit, yes or no?’ demanded the corporal in command. ‘I don’t care who you are, who your mother is, if you haven’t got a permit you can’t leave the area, finished.’ K turned to his mother. From under the black canopy she gazed out expressionlessly at the young soldier. The soldier threw up his hands. ‘Don’t give me a hard time!’ he shouted. ‘Just get the permit, then I’ll let you through!’ He watched while K hoisted the shafts and wheeled the cart through an arc. One of the wheels had begun to wobble.

  Night had already fallen when they passed the traffic lights marking the start of Beach Road. The hulks that had blocked the road during the siege of the apartment blocks had been pushed on to the lawns. The key was still in the door under the stairway. The room was as they had left it, neatly swept for the next occupant. Anna K laid herself down in her coat and slippers on the bare mattress; Michael brought in their belongings. A shower of rain had soaked the cushions. ‘We’ll try again in a day or two, Ma,’ he whispered. She shook her head. ‘Ma, the permit isn’t going to come!’ he said. ‘We’ll try again, but next time we’ll go by the back roads. They can’t block every road out.’ He sat down beside her on the mattress and remained there, his hand on her arm, till she fell asleep; then he went upstairs to sleep on the Buhrmanns’ floor.

  Two days later they set off again, leaving Sea Point a full hour before dawn. The zest of the first venture was gone. K knew now that they might have to spend many nights on the road. Furthermore, his mother had lost all appetite for travel to far places. She complained of pains in her chest and sat stiff and sullen in the box under the plastic apron K pinned across her to keep out the worst of the rain. At a steady trot, with the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, he followed a new route through the centre of the city, along Sir Lowry Road and the suburban Main Road, over the Mowbray railway bridge, and past the one-time Children’s Hospital on to the old Klipfontein Road. Here, with only a trampled fence between them and the cardboard-and-iron shanties clustered on the fairways of the golf course, they made their first stop. After they had eaten, K stood at the roadside with his mother clasped to his side, trying to flag down passing vehicles. There was little traffic. Three light trucks sped past nose to tail, wire mesh over their lights and windows. Later came a neat horsecart, the bay horses wearing clusters of bells on their harness, a troop of children in the back jeering and making signs at the pair of them. Then after a long empty interval a lorry stopped, the driver offering them a lift as far as the cement works, even helping K to lift the barrow aboard. Sitting safe and dry in the cab, counting off the kilometres out of the corner of an eye, K nudged his mother and met her prim answering smile.

  That was the end of good luck for the day. For an hour they waited outside the cement works; but though there was a steady stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the only vehicles to pass were sewage department trucks. The sun was declining, the wind beginning to bite, when K hauled his cart on to the road and set off again. Perhaps, he thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people. Since the first trip he had moved the axle two inches forward; now, once he got it going, the cart was as light as a feather. At a trot he overtook a man pushing a barrow loaded with brushwood, nodding in greeting as he passed. In her dark little cabin, pinned upright between the high sides, his mother sat with her eyes closed and her head drooping forward.

  A hazy moon was coming through the clouds when, half a mile short of the arterial road, K drew up, helped his mother out, and plunged into the dense Port Jackson scrub to seek out a stopping-place for the night. In this half-world of straggling roots and damp earth and subtle rotten smells no site seemed more sheltered from the elements than any other. He returned to the roadside shivering. ‘It is not very nice,’ he told his mother, ‘but for one night we will have to put up with it.’ He concealed the cart as best he could; supporting her on one arm, carrying the suitcase, he groped his way back into the bush.

  They ate cold food and settled down on a bed of leaves through which the damp palpably seeped into their clothes. At midnight a gentle rain began to fall. They huddled together as close as they could under a scrub-tree while the rain dripped on the blanket they held over their heads. When the blanket became soaked Michael crept on hands and knees back to the cart and fetched the plastic apron. He cradled his mother’s head on his shoulder and heard the laboured shallowness of her breathing. For the first time it occurred to him that the reason she had ceased complaining might be that she was too exhausted, or no longer cared.

  His intention had been to set off so early as to reach the turnoff to Stellenbosch and Paarl before it grew light. But at dawn his mother was still
asleep against his side and he was loath to wake her. The air grew warmer, he found it harder not to nod himself. Thus it was mid-morning before he helped her out of the bush back to the road. Here, as they were packing their sodden bedding into the cart, they were accosted by a pair of passers-by who, coming upon a man of meagre build and an old woman in a lonely place, concluded that they might strip them of their possessions with impunity. As a sign of this intention one of the strangers displayed to K (allowing the blade to slip from his sleeve into his palm) a carving knife, while the other laid hands on the suitcase. In the instant of the flash of the blade, K saw before him the prospect of being humiliated again while his mother watched, of trudging back behind the cart to the room in Sea Point, of sitting on the floormat with his hands over his ears enduring day after day the burden of her silence. He reached into the cart and brought out his sole weapon, the fifteen-inch length he had sawn from the axlerod. Brandishing this, lifting his left arm to guard his face, he advanced on the youth with the knife, who circled away from him towards his companion while Anna K filled the air with shrieks. The strangers backed off. Wordlessly, still glaring, still menacing with the bar, K recovered the suitcase and helped his quaking mother into the cart with the robbers hovering not twenty paces away. Then he hauled the cart out backwards on to the road and slowly drew her away from them. For a while they trailed behind, the one with the knife miming obscenities and threats to K’s life with elaborate play of lips and tongue. Then as suddenly as they had appeared they slipped into the bush.

  There were no vehicles on the expressway, but people, many people, walking where none had walked before, in the middle of the highway, in their Sunday best. By the roadside a tangle of weeds grew as high as a man’s chest; the road surface was cracked, and grass sprouted in the cracks. K caught up with three children, sisters dressed in identical pink frocks on their way to church. They peered into Mrs K’s little cabin and chatted to her. For the last stretch, before Michael turned off to Stellenbosch, the eldest child walked holding Mrs K’s hand. When they parted, Mrs K brought out her purse and gave each little girl a coin.

  The children had told them that no convoys ran on Sundays; but on the Stellenbosch road they were passed by a farmers’ convoy, a train of light trucks and cars preceded by a lorry armoured in heavy mesh in whose open back stood two men with automatic rifles scanning the ground ahead. K drew off the road till they had passed. The passengers gave them curious glances, the children pointing and saying things K could not hear.

  Leafless vineyards stretched before and behind. A flock of sparrows materialized out of the sky, settled for a moment on the bushes all around them, then flitted off. Across the fields they heard church bells. Memories came to K of Huis Norenius, of sitting up in bed in the infirmary, slapping his pillow and watching the play of dust in a beam of sunlight.

  It was dark when he plodded into Stellenbosch. The streets were empty, a cold wind gusted. He had not thought where they would sleep. His mother was coughing; after each spell she would gasp for breath. He stopped at a café and bought curried pasties. He ate three of them, she one. She had no appetite. ‘Mustn’t you see a doctor?’ he asked. She shook her head, patted her chest. ‘It’s just dryness in my throat,’ she said. She seemed to expect to be in Prince Albert the next day or the day after, and he did not disillusion her. ‘I forget the actual name of the farm,’ she said, ‘but we can ask, people will know. There was a chicken-run against one wall of the wagonhouse, a long chicken-run, and a pump up on the hill. We had a house on the hillside. There was prickly pear outside the back door. That is the place you must look for.’

  They slept in an alley on a bed of flattened cartons. Michael propped a long side of cardboard at a pitch over their bed, but the windblew it over. His mother coughed throughout the night, keeping him awake. Once a patrolling police van passed slowly down the street and he had to hold his hand over her mouth.

  At first light he lifted her back into the cart. Her head lolled, she did not know where she was. He stopped the first person he saw and asked the way to the hospital. Anna K could no longer sit upright; and as she slumped, Michael had to struggle to keep the cart from toppling. She was feverish, she laboured to breathe. ‘My throat is so dry,’ she whispered; but her coughing was soggy.

  In the hospital he sat supporting her till it was her turn to be taken away. When next he saw her she was lying on a trolley amid a sea of trolleys with a tube up her nose, unconscious. Not knowing what to do, he loitered in the corridor till he was sent away. He spent the afternoon in the courtyard in the thin warmth of the winter sun. Twice he sneaked back in to check whether the trolley had been moved. A third time he tiptoed up to his mother and bent over her. He could detect no sign of breathing. Fear gripping his heart, he ran to the nurse at the desk and tugged at her sleeve. ‘Please come and see, quickly!’ he said. The nurse shook herself free. ‘Who are you?’ she hissed. She followed him to the trolley and took his mother’s pulse, staring into the distance. Then without a word she returned to her desk. K stood before her like a dumb dog while she wrote. She turned to him. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said in a tight whisper. ‘Do you see all these people here?’ She gestured towards the corridor and the wards. ‘These are all people waiting to be attended to. We are working twenty-four hours a day to attend to them. When I come off duty—no, listen to me, don’t go away!’—it was she now who tugged him back, her voice was rising, her face was near to his, he could see angry tears starting in her eyes—‘When I come off duty I am so tired I can’t eat, I just fall asleep with my shoes on. I am just one person. Not two, not three—one. Do you understand that, or is it too difficult to understand?’ K looked away. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, not knowing what else to say, and returned to the yard.

  The suitcase was with his mother. He had no money save the change from the previous evening’s meal. He bought a doughnut and drank from a tap. He took a walk about the streets, kicking his feet in the sea of dry leaves on the pavement. Finding a park, he sat on a bench staring up through the bare branches at the pale blue sky. A squirrel chattered at him and he started. Suddenly anxious that the cart might have been stolen, he rushed back to the hospital. The cart was where he had left it in the parking lot. He removed the blankets and cushions and stove but then did not know where to hide them.

  At six he saw the nurses from the day shift leave and felt free to sneak back. His mother was not in the corridor. At the desk he asked where to find her and was sent to a remote wing of the hospital where no one knew what he was talking about. He returned to the desk and was told to come back in the morning. He asked whether he might spend the night on one of the benches in the hall and was refused.

  He slept in the alley with his head in a cardboard box. He had a dream: his mother came visiting him in Huis Norenius, bringing a parcel of food. ‘The cart is too slow,’ she said in the dream—‘Prince Albert is coming to fetch me.’ The parcel was curiously light. He awoke so cold that he could barely straighten his legs. Far away a clock tolled three or perhaps four. Stars shone on him out of a clear sky. He was surprised that the dream had not left him upset. With a blanket wrapped around him he first paced up and down the alley, then wandered out along the street peering into the dim shop windows where behind diamond grillework mannequins displayed spring fashions.

  When at last he was allowed into the hospital he found his mother in the women’s ward wearing no longer her black coat but a white hospital smock. She lay with her eyes closed and the familiar tube up her nose. Her mouth sagged, her face was pinched, even the skin of her arms seemed to have wrinkled. He squeezed her hand but met with no response. There were four rows of beds in the ward with no more than a one-foot space between them; there was nowhere to sit.

  At eleven o’clock an orderly brought tea and left a cup at his mother’s bedside with a biscuit in the saucer. Michael raised her head and held the cup to her lips but she would not drink. For a long while he waited as his stomach rumbled and the tea
grew cold. Then, with the orderly about to return, he gulped down the tea and swallowed the biscuit.

  He inspected the charts at the foot of the bed but could not make out whether they referred to his mother or someone else.

  In the corridor he stopped a man in a white coat and asked for work. ‘I don’t want money,’ he said, ‘just something to do. Sweep the floor or something like that. Clean the garden.’ ‘Go and ask at the office downstairs,’ said the man, and pushed past him. K could not find the right office.

  A man in the hospital yard fell into conversation with him. ‘You here for stitches?’ he enquired. K shook his head. The man looked critically at his face. Then he told a long story of a tractor that had toppled over on him, crushing his leg and breaking his hip, and of the pins the doctors had inserted in his bones, silver pins that would never rust. He walked with a curiously angled aluminium stick. ‘You don’t know where I could get something to eat,’ asked K. ‘I haven’t eaten since yesterday.’ ‘Man,’ said the man, ‘why don’t you go and get us both a pie,’ and passed K a one-rand coin. K went to the bakery and brought back two hot chicken pies. He sat beside his friend on the bench and ate. The pie was so delicious that tears came to his eyes. The man told him of his sister’s uncontrollable fits of shaking. K listened to the birds in the trees and tried to remember when he had known such happiness.

  He spent an hour at his mother’s bedside in the afternoon and another hour in the evening. Her face was grey, her breathing barely detectable. Once her jaw moved: fascinated, K watched the string of saliva between her withered lips shorten and lengthen. She seemed to be whispering something, but he could not make out what. The nurse who asked him to leave told him she was under sedation. ‘What for?’ asked K. He stole his mother’s tea and that of the old woman in the next bed, gulping it down like a guilty dog while the orderly’s back was turned.