Life and Times of Michael K

by J. M. Coetzee

  A police van with a flashing blue light drew up on the promenade fifty yards away. There was a burst of fire from a machine pistol, and from behind the barricade of cars answering shots. The van backed precipitately away, while amid screams and shouts the crowd retreated down Beach Road. It was another twenty minutes, and darkness had fallen, before police and riot troops arrived in force. Floor by floor they occupied the affected blocks, encountering no resistance from an enemy who fled down back alleys. One looter, a woman who did not run fast enough, was shot dead. From streets all around the police picked up abandoned goods which they stacked on the lawns. There, late into the night, the folk of the flats searched by flashlight to recover their own. At midnight, when the operation was about to be declared concluded, a rioter with a bullet through his lung was discovered huddled in an unlit angle of a passageway in a block further down the road and taken away. Guards were posted for the night and the main force retired. In the early hours of the morning the wind rose and heavy rain began to fall, beating through the broken windows of the Côte d’Azur, the Côte d’Or, the Copacabana, as well as of the Egremont and the Malibu Heights, which had hitherto offered a sheltered prospect of the east-west shipping lanes around the Cape of Good Hope, whipping the curtains, soaking the carpets, and in some cases flooding the floors.

  Throughout these events Anna K and her son huddled quiet as mice in their room beneath the stairs, not stirring even when they smelled the smoke, even when heavy boots stamped past and a hand rattled the locked door. They could not guess that the tumult, the screams, the shots and the sound of breaking glass were confined to a few adjoining blocks: as they sat side by side on the bed, barely daring to whisper, the conviction grew in them that the real war had come to Sea Point and found them out. Till long after midnight, when his mother at last dozed off, Michael sat with his ears pricked, staring at the strip of grey light under the door, breathing very quietly. When his mother began to snore he gripped her shoulder to make her stop.

  Thus, sitting upright with his back to the wall, he finally fell asleep. When he awoke the light under the door was brighter. He unlocked the door and crept out. The passage was littered with glass. At the entrance to the block two helmeted soldiers sat in deckchairs with their backs to him, gazing out at the rain and the grey sea. K slipped back into his mother’s room and went to sleep on the mat.

  Later that day, when the tenants of the Côte d’Azur had begun to return to clean up the mess or pack their belongings or simply stare at the damage and weep, and when the rain had stopped falling, K made a journey to Oliphant Road in Green Point, to St Joseph’s Mission, where in earlier times one had been able to find a cup of soup and a bed for the night, no questions asked, and where he hoped he might lodge his mother for a while away from the devastated block. But the plaster statue of St Joseph with his beard and his staff was gone, the bronze plate had been removed from the gatepost, the windows were shuttered. He knocked next door and heard a floorboard creak, but no one came.

  Crossing the city on his way to work, K rubbed shoulders every day with the army of the homeless and destitute who in the last years had taken over the streets of the central district, begging or thieving or waiting in lines at the relief agencies or simply sitting in the corridors of public buildings to keep warm, finding shelter by night in the gutted warehouses around the docks or the blocks and blocks of derelict premises above Bree Street where the police never ventured afoot. During the year before the authorities had finally imposed controls on personal movement, Greater Cape Town had been flooded with people from the countryside looking for work of any kind. There was no work, no accommodation to be had. If they fell into that sea of hungry mouths, K thought, what chance would he and his mother have? How long could he push her around the streets in a wheelbarrow begging for food? He wandered aimlessly all day, and returned to the room sunk in gloom. For supper he laid out soup and rusks and canned pilchards, shielding the stove behind a blanket in case a show of light might draw attention to them.

  Their hopes settled on the permit that would allow them to leave the city. But the Buhrmanns’ postbox, to which the police would send the permit if they ever meant to send it, was locked; and after the night of looting the Buhrmanns themselves, in a state of shock, had been taken away by friends, leaving no word of when they would be back. So Anna K sent her son up to the flat with instructions to fetch the postbox key.

  K had never been into the flat before. He found it in chaos. In a wash of water driven through the windows by high winds lay broken furniture, gutted mattresses, fragments of glass and crockery, withered pot-plants, sodden bedding and carpeting. A paste of cake flour, breakfast cereal, sugar, cat litter and earth stuck to his shoes. In the kitchen the refrigerator lay on its face, its motor still purring, a yellow scum leaking past its hinges into the half-inch of water on the tiled floor. Rows of jars had been swept off the shelves; there was a reek of wine. On the gleaming white wall someone had written in oven cleaner: TO HEL.

  Michael persuaded his mother to come and see the destruction for herself. She had not been upstairs for two months. She stood on a breadboard in the doorway of the living-room, tears in her eyes. ‘Why did they do it?’ she whispered. She did not want to go into the kitchen. ‘Such nice people!’ she said. ‘I don’t know how they are going to get over it!’ Michael helped her to her room again. She would not settle down, asking again and again where the Buhrmanns were staying, who was going to clean up, when they would be back.

  Leaving her, Michael returned to the devastated flat. He righted the refrigerator, emptied it, swept the broken glass into a corner, mopped up some of the water. He filled half a dozen garbage sacks and stacked them at the front door. Food that was still edible he put to one side. He did not try to clean the living-room, but pinned the curtains across the gaping windowframes as best he could. I do what I do, he told himself, not for the old people’s sake but for my mother’s.

  It was plain that until the windows were repaired and the carpets, already beginning to smell, were stripped away, the Buhrmanns could not live here. Nevertheless, the idea of annexing the apartment for himself did not occur to him till he saw the bathroom for the first time.

  ‘Just for a night or two,’ he pleaded with his mother, ‘so that you can have a chance to sleep by yourself. Till we know what we are going to do. I’ll move a divan into the bathroom. In the morning I’ll put everything back. I promise. They will never know.’

  He made up the divan in the bathroom with layers of sheets and tablecloths. He wedged cardboard over the window and switched on the light. There was hot water: he had a bath. In the morning he hid his traces. The postman came. There was nothing for the Buhrmanns’ box. It was raining. He went outdoors and sat in the bus shelter watching the rain fall. In the middle of the afternoon, when it was clear that again the Buhrmanns were not coming, he returned to the flat.

  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.