Life and Times of Michael K (3 page)

Day after day it rained. There was no word from the Buhrmanns. K swept the worst of the standing water out on to the balcony and unclogged the runoff pipes. Though the wind blew through the flat, the stench of mould grew worse. He cleaned the kitchen floor and took the garbage bags downstairs.

He began to spend not only the nights but the days in the flat. In a kitchen cupboard he discovered piles of magazines. He lay in bed, or lay in the bath, paging through pictures of beautiful
women and luscious food. The food absorbed him more deeply. He showed his mother a picture of a gleaming flank of roast pork garnished with cherries and pineapple rings and set off with a bowl of raspberries and cream and a gooseberry tart. ‘People don’t eat like that any more,’ his mother said. He disagreed. ‘The pigs don’t know there is a war on,’ he said. ‘The pineapples don’t know there is a war on. Food keeps growing. Someone has to eat it.’

He went back to the hostel where he lived and paid the back rent. ‘I’ve given up my job,’ he told the warden. ‘My mother and I are going to the country to get away from things. We are just waiting for the permit.’ He took his bicycle and his suitcase. Stopping at a scrapyard he bought a metre length of steel rod. The wheelbarrow with the box seat stood where he had abandoned it in the alley behind the flats; now he returned to the project of using the wheels from his bicycle to make a cart in which to take his mother for walks. But though the wheel bearings slid smoothly over the new axlerod, he had no way of preventing the wheels from spinning off. For hours he struggled without success to make clips out of wire. Then he gave up. Something will come to me, he told himself, and left the bicycle dismantled on the Buhrmanns’ kitchen floor.

Among the debris in the front room had been a transistor radio. The needle was stuck at the end of the scale, the batteries were weak, and he had soon given up fiddling with it. Exploring the kitchen drawers, however, he found a lead that enabled him to plug the radio into the mains. So now he could lie in the bathroom in the dark listening to music from the other room. Sometimes it sent him to sleep. He would wake in the mornings with the music still playing; or there would be resonant talk in a language he understood not a word of, from which he picked out names of faroff places: Wakkerstroom, Pietersburg, King William’s Town. Sometimes he found himself singing tonelessly along.

Exhausting the magazines, he began paging through old newspapers
from under the kitchen sink, so old that he remembered none of the events they told of, though he recognized some of the football players.
KHAMIESKROON KILLER TRACKED DOWN
said the headline in one, over a picture of a handcuffed man in a torn white shirt standing between two stiff policemen. Though the handcuffs brought his shoulders forward and down, the Khamieskroon killer looked at the camera with what seemed to K a smile of quiet achievement. Below was a second picture: a rifle with a sling photographed against a blank background and captioned ‘Killer’s weapon.’ K stuck the page with the story on the refrigerator door; for days afterwards, when he looked up from his intermittent work on the wheels, his eyes continued to meet those of the man from Khamieskroon, wherever that was.

At a loss for things to do, he tried to dry out the Buhrmanns’ waterlogged books by hanging them over a line across the living-room; but the process took too long and he lost interest. He had never liked books, and he found nothing to engage him here in stories of military men or women with names like Lavinia, though he did spend some time unsticking the leaves of picture-books of the Ionian Islands, Moorish Spain, Finland Land of Lakes, Bali and other places in the world.

Then one morning Michael K started up at the scrape of the front-door lock and found himself facing four men in overalls who pushed past him without a word and set about clearing the flat of its contents. Hastily he moved the pieces of his bicycle out of their way. His mother shuffled out in her housecoat and stopped one of the men on the stairs. ‘Where’s the boss? Where’s Mr Buhrmann?’ she asked. The man shrugged. K went out into the street and spoke to the driver of the van. ‘Are you from Mr Buhrmann?’ he asked. ‘What does it look like, man,’ said the driver.

Michael helped his mother back into bed. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why they don’t let me know anything. What must I do if someone knocks on the door and says I must
clear out at once, he wants the room for his domestic? Where must I go?’ For a long while he sat beside her, stroking her arm, listening to her lament. Then he took the two bicycle wheels and the steel rod and his tools out into the alley and sat down in a patch of sunlight to confront anew the problem of how to prevent the wheels from spinning off the axle. He worked all afternoon; by evening, using a hacksaw blade, he had painstakingly incised a thread down either end of the rod, along which he could wind clumps of one-inch washers. With the wheels mounted on the rod between the washers, it was only a matter of tightening loop after loop of wire around the rod to hold the washers flush against the wheels and the problem seemed to be solved. He barely ate or slept that night, so impatient was he to get on with his work. In the morning he broke down the old barrow platform-seat and rebuilt it as a narrow three-sided box with two long handles, which he wired in place over the axle. He now had a squat rickshaw which, though hardly of sturdy build, would take his mother’s weight; and the same evening, when a cold wind from the north-west had driven all but the hardiest promenaders indoors, he was again able to take his mother, wrapped in coat and blanket, for a seafront ride that brought a smile to her lips.

Now was the time. No sooner had they returned to the room than he came out with the plan he had been pondering ever since building the first barrow. They were wasting their time waiting for permits, he said. The permits would never come. And without permits they could not leave by train. Any day now they would be expelled from the room. Would she therefore not allow him to take her to Prince Albert in the cart? She had seen for herself how comfortable it was. The damp weather was not good for her, nor was the unending worry about the future. Once settled in Prince Albert she would quickly recover her health. At most they would be a day or two on the road. People were decent, people would stop and give them lifts.

For hours he argued with her, surprising himself with the adroitness of his pleading. How could he expect her to sleep in the open in the middle of winter? she objected. With luck, he responded, they might even reach Prince Albert in a day—it was, after all, only five hours away by car. But what would happen if it rained? she asked. He would put a canopy over the cart, he replied. What if the police stopped them? Surely the police had better things to do, he answered, than to stop two innocent people who wanted nothing more than a chance to find their own way out of an overcrowded city. ‘Why should the police want us to spend nights hiding on other people’s stoeps and beg in the streets and make a nuisance of ourselves?’ So persuasive was he that finally Anna K yielded, though on two conditions: that he make a last visit to the police to find out about the permits that had not come, and that she ready herself for the journey without being hurried. Joyfully Michael acceded.

Next morning, instead of waiting for a bus that might never come, he jogged from Sea Point to the city along the main road, taking pleasure in the soundness of his heart, the strength of his limbs. There were already scores of people queueing under the sign
HERVESTIGING—RELOCATION
; it was an hour before he found himself at the counter facing a policewoman with wary eyes.

He held out the two train tickets. ‘I just want to ask if the permit has come through.’

She pushed the familiar forms towards him. ‘Fill in the forms and take them to E-5. Have your tickets and reservation slips with you.’ She glanced over K’s shoulder to the man behind him. ‘Yes?’

‘No,’ said K, struggling to regain her attention, ‘I already applied for the permit. All I want to know is, has the permit come?’

‘Before you can have a permit you must have a reservation! Have you got a reservation? When is it for?’

‘August eighteenth. But my mother—’

‘August eighteenth is a month away! If you applied for a permit
and the permit is granted, the permit will come, the permit will be sent to your address! Next!’

‘But that is what I want to know! Because if the permit isn’t going to come I must make other plans. My mother is sick—’

The policewoman slapped the counter to still him. ‘Don’t waste my time. I am telling you for the last time,
if the permit is granted the permit will come!
Don’t you see all these people waiting? Don’t you understand? Are you an idiot?
Next!
’ She braced herself against the counter and glared pointedly over K’s shoulder: ‘
Yes, you, next!
’

But K did not budge. He was breathing fast, his eyes stared. Reluctantly the policewoman turned back to him, to the thin moustache and the naked lip-flesh it did not hide. ‘
Next!
’ she said.

An hour before dawn the next day K roused his mother and, while she dressed, packed the cart, padding the box with blankets and cushions and lashing the suitcase across the shafts. The cart now had a hood of black plastic sheeting that made it look like a tall perambulator. When his mother saw it she stopped and shook her head, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she said. He had to coax her to get in; it took a long time. The cart was not really big enough, he realized: it bore her weight, but she had to sit hunched under the canopy, unable to move her limbs. Over her legs he spread a blanket, then piled on that a packet of food, the paraffin stove and a bottle of fuel packed in a box, odds and ends of clothing. A light winked on in the flats next door. They could hear the waves breaking on the rocks. ‘Just a day or two,’ he whispered, ‘then we’ll be there. Don’t move too much from side to side if you can help it.’ She nodded but continued to hide her face in her woollen gloves. He bent towards her. ‘Do you want to stay, Ma?’ he said. ‘If you want to stay we can stay.’ She shook her head. So he put on his cap, lifted the handles, and wheeled the cart out on to the misty road.

He took the shortest route, past the devastated area around the old fuel-storage tanks where the demolition of burnt-out buildings
had only just begun, past the dock quarter and the blackened shells of the warehouses that had in the past year been taken over by the city’s street bands. They were not stopped. Indeed, few of the people they passed at this early hour spared them a glance. Stranger and stranger conveyances were emerging on the streets: shopping trolleys fitted with steering bars; tricycles with boxes over the rear axle; baskets mounted on pushcart undercarriages; crates on castors; barrows of all sizes. A donkey fetched eighty rands in new currency, a cart with tyres over a hundred.

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.