Life and Times of Michael K (18 page)

K stood by the pump and watched. When he had dug five holes
in a zigzag pattern, the soldier unrolled a long white cord to mark off the area. Two of his comrades brought a crate from the truck and began to lay the mines. As they laid each and primed it, the first soldier planted the grass and poured the earth back, handful by handful, patted the surface down, and brushed away all their prints with a hand-broom, moving backwards on hands and knees.

‘Get out of the way here,’ said someone behind K. ‘Go and wait there by the truck.’ It was the officer. Retreating, K heard the instructions he was giving: ‘Tape two inside the struts at about waist height. Put another under the platform. When they trip it, I want the whole thing to go.’

Everything was packed in, they were about to drive off, with K in the back of the truck among the soldiers, when someone pointed to the heap of pumpkins they had left by the side of the field. ‘Load them!’ shouted the officer from the jeep. They loaded the pumpkins. ‘And fix up that kennel of his so that it looks just the same!’ he ordered. They all waited while the roof was replaced. ‘Stones to hold it down, like it was! Hurry up!’

They drove off, bumping and jostling on the dirt road, following the jeep. K clutched the strap above his head; he could feel his neighbours holding their bodies stiff to avoid being thrown against him. A cloud of dust billowed up till he could see nothing of what he was leaving behind.

He leaned nearer to the young soldier facing him. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there was a boy hiding in that house.’

The soldier did not understand. K had to repeat himself.

‘What does he say?’ asked someone.

‘He says there was another boy hiding in the house.’

‘Tell him he’s dead now. Tell him he’s in paradise.’

Then after a while they reached the turnoff. The truck picked up speed, the tyres began to hum, the soldiers relaxed, and the dust blew away to reveal behind them the long straight line of the road to Prince Albert.

T
HERE IS A
new patient in the ward, a little old man who collapsed during physical training and was brought in with very low respiration and heartbeat. There is every evidence of prolonged malnutrition: cracks in his skin, sores on his hands and feet, bleeding gums. His joints protrude, he weighs less than forty kilos. The story is that he was picked up all by himself in the middle of nowhere in the Karoo, running a staging post for guerrillas operating out of the mountains, caching arms and growing food, though obviously not eating it. I asked the guards who brought him why they made someone in his condition do physical exercise. It was an oversight, they said: he came with the new intake, the processing was taking a long time, the sergeant in charge wanted to give them something to do while they waited, so he made them run on the spot. Couldn’t he see this man was incapable? I asked. The prisoner didn’t complain, they replied: he said he was fine, he had always been thin. Can’t you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton? I asked. They shrugged.

Have been struggling with the new patient Michaels. He insists there is nothing wrong with him, he only wants something for his headache. Says he is not hungry. In fact he cannot hold his food down. Am keeping him on a drip, which he fights against feebly.

Though he looks like an old man, he claims to be only thirty-two. Perhaps it is the truth. He comes from the Cape and knows the racecourse from the days when it was still a racecourse. It amused him to hear that this used to be the jockeys’ dressing-room. ‘I could become a jockey too, at my weight,’ he said. He worked for the Council as a gardener, but lost his job and went to seek his fortune in the countryside, taking his mother with him. ‘Where is your mother now?’ I asked. ‘She makes the plants grow,’ he replied, evading my eyes. ‘You mean she has passed away?’ I said (pushing up the daisies?). He shook his head. ‘They burned her,’ he said. ‘Her hair was burning round her head like a halo.’

He makes a statement like that as impassively as if talking about the weather. I am not sure he is wholly of our world. One tries to imagine him running a staging post for insurgents and one’s mind boggles. More likely someone came along and offered him a drink and asked him to look after a gun and he was too stupid or too innocent to refuse. He is locked up as an insurgent, but he barely knows there is a war on.

Now that Felicity has shaved him I have had a chance to examine his mouth. A simple incomplete cleft, with some displacement of the septum. The palate intact. I asked him whether there had ever been an attempt to correct the condition. He did not know. I pointed out that the operation is a slight one, even at his age. Would he agree to such an operation if it could be arranged? He replied (I quote): ‘I am what I am. I was never a great one for the girls.’ I felt like telling him that, never mind the girls, he
would find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else; but said nothing, not wanting to hurt him.

I mentioned him to Noël. He couldn’t run a darts game, much less a staging post, I said. He is a person of feeble mind who drifted by chance into a war zone and didn’t have the sense to get out. He ought to be in a protected environment weaving baskets or stringing beads, not in a rehabilitation camp.

Noël brought out the register. ‘According to this,’ he said, ‘Michaels is an arsonist. He is also an escapee from a labour camp. He was running a flourishing garden on an abandoned farm and feeding the local guerrilla population when he was captured. That is the story of Michaels.’

I shook my head. ‘They have made a mistake,’ I said. ‘They have mixed him up with some other Michaels. This Michaels is an idiot. This Michaels doesn’t know how to strike a match. If this Michaels was running a flourishing garden, why was he starving to death?’

‘Why didn’t you eat?’ I asked Michaels back in the ward. ‘They say you had a garden. Why didn’t you feed yourself?’ His reply: ‘They woke me in the middle of my sleep.’ I must have looked blank. ‘I don’t need food in my sleep.’

He says his name is not Michaels but Michael.

Noël is putting pressure on me to speed up the turnaround. There are eight beds in the infirmary and, at the moment, sixteen patients, the other eight being housed in the old weighing room. Noël asks whether I cannot treat and release them faster. I reply that there is no point in discharging a patient with dysentery into camp life unless he wants an epidemic. Of course he doesn’t want an epidemic, he says; but in the past there have been cases of malingering, and he wants to stamp that out. His responsibility is to his programme, I reply, mine to my patients, that is what being medical officer entails. He pats me on the shoulder. ‘You
are doing a fine job, I’m not questioning that,’ he says. ‘All I ask is that they shouldn’t get the idea we are soft.’

A silence falls between the two of us; we watch the flies on the windowpane. ‘But we are soft,’ I suggest.

‘Perhaps we are soft,’ he replies. ‘Perhaps we are even scheming a bit, at the back of our minds. Perhaps we think that if one day they come and put everyone on trial, someone will step forward and say, “Let those two off, they were soft.” Who knows? But that isn’t what I am talking about. I am talking about flow. At the moment you have got more patients flowing into your infirmary than flowing out, and my question is, are you going to do something about it?’

When we emerged from his office it was to behold a corporal raising the orange, white and blue on a flagpole in the middle of the track, a five-piece band playing ‘Uit die blou,’ the cornet out of key, and six hundred sullen men standing to attention, barefoot, in their tenth-hand khakis, having their thinking set right. A year ago we were still trying to make them sing; but we have given up on that.

Felicity took Michaels outdoors for some fresh air this morning. I passed him sitting on the grass holding his face up to the sun like a lizard basking, and asked him how he liked it in the infirmary. He was unexpectedly talkative. ‘I’m glad there isn’t a radio,’ he said. ‘The other place I stayed there was a radio playing all the time.’ At first I thought he was referring to another camp, but it turned out that he meant the godforsaken institution where he spent his childhood. ‘There was music all afternoon and all evening, till eight o’clock. It was like oil over everything.’ ‘The music was to keep you calm,’ I explained. ‘Otherwise you might have beaten each other’s faces in and thrown chairs through the windows. The music was to soothe your savage breast.’ I don’t
know whether he understood, but he smiled his lopsided smile. ‘The music made me restless,’ he said, ‘I used to fidget, I couldn’t think my own thoughts.’ ‘And what were the thoughts you wanted to think?’ He: ‘I used to think about flying. I always wanted to fly. I used to stretch out my arms and think I was flying over the fences and between the houses. I flew low over people’s heads, but they couldn’t see me. When they switched on the music I became too restless to do it, to fly.’ And he even named one or two of the tunes that had disturbed him most.

I have moved him to the bed by the window, away from the boy with the broken ankle who has taken a dislike to him, God knows why, and lies and hisses at him all day. When he sits up he can now at least see the sky and the top of the flagpole. ‘Eat a little more and you can go for a walk,’ I coax him. What he really needs, however, is physiotherapy, which we cannot provide. He is like one of those toys made of sticks held together with rubber bands. He needs a graduated diet, gentle exercise, and physiotherapy, so that one day soon he can rejoin camp life and have a chance to march back and forth across the racetrack and shout slogans and salute the flag and practise digging holes and filling them again.