Life and Times of Michael K

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘Just go slow,’ said Robert. ‘They can’t make you do what you can’t do.’

  K looked at the ragged swathe he had cut.

  ‘You want to know who this is?’ murmured Robert. ‘This guy is the brother-in-law of the captain of police, Oosthuizen. His machine breaks down, so what happens? He picks up the phone, calls the police station, and first thing in the morning he has thirty pairs of hands to cut his lucerne for him. That’s how it works here, the system.’

  They finished cutting the field in near-darkness, leaving the baling for the next day. K was reeling with exhaustion. Sitting in the truck he closed his eyes and felt as if he were hurtling through endless empty space. Back in the hut he fell into a dead sleep. Then in the middle of the night he was woken by the crying of a baby. There were discontented murmurs from around him: everyone seemed to be awake. For what seemed hours they lay and listened as the baby somewhere in the tents went through cycles of whimpering, wailing, and shrieks that left it gasping for breath. Aching to sleep, K felt anger mount inside himself. He lay with his fists clenched against his breast, wishing the child annihilated.

  In the back of the truck, with the slipstream roaring on them, K mentioned the crying in the night. ‘You want to know how they shut that child up in the end?’ said Robert. ‘Brandy. Brandy and aspirin. That’s the only medicine. No doctor in the camp, no nurse.’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you what happened when they opened the camp, when they opened the new home they had built for all the homeless people, the squatters from Boontjieskraal and the Onderdorp, the beggars off the streets, the unemployed, the vagrants who sleep on the mountain, the people chased off the farms. Not a month after they opened the gates everyone was sick. Dysentery, then measles, then ’flu, one on top of the other. From being shut up like animals in a cage. The district nurse came in, and you know what she did? Ask anyone who was here, they will tell you. She stood in the middle of the camp where everyone could see, and she cried. She looked at children with the bones sticking out of their bodies and she didn’t know what to do, she just stood and cried. A big strong woman. A district nurse.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Robert, ‘they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn’t give a stuff for us. They just don’t want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said K. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t look deep enough,’ said Robert. ‘Take a good look in their hearts, then you’ll see.’

  K shrugged.

  ‘You’re a baby,’ said Robert. ‘You’ve been asleep all your life. It’s time to wake up. Why do you think they give you charity, you and the children? Because they think you are harmless, your eyes aren’t opened, you don’t see the truth around you.’

  Two days later the baby that had cried in the night was dead. Because it was an iron rule from above that under no circumstances was a graveyard to be established within or in close proximity to any camp of any type, the child was buried in the back block of the town cemetery. The mother, a girl of eighteen, returned from the burial service and refused to eat. She did not weep, merely sat beside her tent staring out in the direction of Prince Albert. The friends who came to console her she did not hear; when they touched her she pushed their hands away. Michael K spent hours standing against the fence where she could not see him, watching her. Is this my education? he wondered. Am I at last learning about life here in a camp? It seemed to him that scene after scene of life was playing itself out before him and that the scenes all cohered. He had a presentiment of a single meaning upon which they were converging or threatening to converge, though he did not know yet what that might be.

  For a night and a day the girl kept her vigil, then retired into the tent. She still would not cry, word went about, nor would she eat. K’s first thought each morning was: Will I see her today? She was short and fat; no one knew for sure who the father of the child had been, though it was rumoured that he was away in the mountains. K wondered whether he was at last in love. Then after three days the girl re-emerged and resumed her life. Seeing her in the midst of other people, K could detect no sign that she was different from them. He never spoke to her.

  One night in December, woken by excited shouts, the people of the camp stumbled from their beds to behold on the horizon in the direction of Prince Albert a vast and beautiful orange blossom unfolding itself against the murk of the sky. There were gasps and whistles of amazement. ‘What’s the bet it’s the police station!’ someone shouted. For an hour they stood and watched while the fire poured out like a fountain consuming itself and being consumed. There were moments when they were sure they could hear shouts and cries and the roar of the flames across the miles of empty veld. Then by degrees the flower grew redder and duller, the fountain lost its strength, till at last, with some of the children asleep in arms and others rubbing their eyes, and with nothing left to see but a smoky glow in the distance, it was time to go back to bed.

  The police struck at dawn. In a squad of twenty, regular police and schoolboy reservists, with dogs and guns, with an officer standing on the roof of a van shouting commands through a megaphone, they moved down the rows pulling out the pegs, collapsing the tents, beating at the shapes struggling in the folds. They burst into the huts and beat the sleepers in their beds. A youth who dodged them and ran away was chased into a corner behind the latrines and kicked into insensibility; a small boy was knocked over by a dog and rescued screaming with fright, his scalp lacerated and bleeding. Half-dressed, some wailing, some praying, some stunned with fear, men, women and children were herded on to the open terrain before the huts and ordered to sit down. From there, under the eyes of dogs and men with cocked guns, they watched while the rest of the squad moved like a swarm of locusts through the lines of tents, turning them inside out, hurling everything they had contained into the open, emptying suitcases and boxes, till the site looked like a trash-heap, with clothes, bedding, food, cooking utensils, crockery, toiletries scattered everywhere; after a while they moved on to the huts and turned them to chaos too.

  Through all this K sat with his beret pulled over his ears against the early-morning wind. The woman beside him had a crying baby with a bare bottom and two little girls who clung tightly to her, one to each arm. ‘Come and sit here with me,’ whispered K to the smaller of the girls. Without taking her eyes from the destruction being visited on them, she stepped over his legs and stood within the protective circle of his arms sucking her thumb. Her sister joined her. The two stood pressed together; K closed his eyes; the baby continued to kick and whine.

  They were made to line up at the gate and file out one by one. Everything they had with them they were forced to leave behind, even the blankets some of them wore wrapped over their nightclothes. A dog-handler plucked a little radio out of the hands of a woman in front of K: he dropped it to the earth and stamped on it. ‘No radios,’ he explained.

  Outside the gate the men were herded left, the women and children right. The gates were locked and the camp stood empty. Then the captain, the big blond man who had shouted orders, brought the two Free Corps guards out to face the men where they stood in a row against the fence. The guards were unarmed and dishevelled: K wondered what had gone on in the guardhouse. ‘Now,’ said the captain, ‘tell us who is missing.’

  There were three missing, three men who slept in one of the other huts, with whom K had never exchanged a word.

  The captain was shouting at the guards, who had come to attention before him. At first K thought he shouted because he was used to the megaphone; but soon the rage behind the shouting became too clear to be missed. ‘What are we keeping here in our back yard!’ he shouted. ‘A nest of criminal
s! Criminals and saboteurs and idlers! And you! The two of you! You eat and sleep and get fat and from one day to the next you don’t know where the people are you are supposed to be guarding! What do you think you are doing here—running a holiday camp? It’s a work camp, man! It’s a camp to teach lazy people to work! Work! And if they don’t work we close the camp! We close it down and chase all these vagrants away! Get out and don’t come back! You’ve had your chance!’ He turned to the group of men. ‘Yes, you, you ungrateful bastards, you, I’m talking about you!’ he shouted. ‘You appreciate nothing! Who builds houses for you when you have nowhere to live? Who gives you tents and blankets when you are shivering with cold? Who nurses you, who takes care of you, who comes here day after day with food? And how do you repay us? Well, from now on you can starve!’

  He drew a deep breath. Over his shoulder the sun made its appearance like a ball of fire. ‘Do you hear me?’ he shouted, ‘I want everyone to hear me! You ask for war, you get war! I’m putting my own men on guard here—fuck the Army!—I’m putting my own men on guard, and I’m locking the gates, and if my men see any of you, man, woman or child, outside the wire, they have orders to shoot, no questions asked! No one leaves the camp except on labour calls. No visits, no outings, no picnics. Roll-calls morning and evening, with everyone present to answer. We’ve been kind to you long enough.

  ‘And I’m locking up these monkeys with you!’ He raised an arm and pointed dramatically at the two guards, still standing to attention. ‘I’m putting them in to teach them who runs things here! You! You think I haven’t kept an eye on the two of you? You think I don’t know about the nice life you lead? You think I don’t know about all the pussy-fucking that goes on when you should be on guard?’ The thought seemed to inflame him further, for suddenly he wheeled, stormed into the guardhouse, and a moment later reappeared in the doorway bearing a small white-enamelled refrigerator clutched to his belly. His face glowed with the strain; his cap, brushing against the lintel, fell off. He stepped to the edge of the porch, raised the refrigerator as high as he could, and flung it down. It hit the ground with a crash; paraffin began to seep from the motor. ‘You see?’ he panted. He tipped the refrigerator on to its side. The door fell open and with a clatter disgorged a one-litre bottle of ginger beer, a tub of margarine, a loop of sausage, loose peaches and onions, a plastic water-flask and five bottles of beer. ‘You see!’ he panted again, glaring.

  All morning they sat waiting in the sun while two young policemen and a helper in a blue T-shirt with the legend SAN JOSE STATE on front and back searched with officious slowness through the debris. In the huts they found caches of wine, which they emptied into the earth. They threw all the weapons they found in a pile: a kierie, an iron bar, a length of piping, a pair of sheepshears, several folding knives. Then at midday the search was declared over. The police shepherded the inmates back in, locked the gates, and in a few minutes were gone, leaving behind two of their number, who sat all afternoon under the awning watching the people of Jakkalsdrif scratch in the mess for their belongings.

  From one of the new guards they later learned what had brought down Oosthuizen’s wrath upon them. In the middle of the night a loud explosion had come from the welding shop on the High Street, followed by an uncontrollable fire that had spread to the building next door and thence to the town’s cultural history museum. The museum, with its thatched roof and yellowwood ceilings and floors, had been gutted in an hour, though some of the antique farming equipment on display in the courtyard had been rescued. Searching by torchlight in the smoking rubble of the welding shop, the police had found evidence of forced entry; and when one of their own drivers recollected that at dusk the previous evening he had stopped three strange men on two bicycles near the Jakkalsdrif turnoff (he had warned them that they were on the point of infringing the curfew; they had pleaded that they were hurrying back as fast as they could to the Onderdorp, where they lived; he had thought no more of it), it seemed clear that camp people were implicated in an act of arson against the town.

  It cost K little trouble to gather his few belongings together; but other men from the huts who had had trunks or suitcases wandered moodily through the debris searching for what was theirs. A fight broke out over no more than a plastic comb. K retreated.

  Though it was a Wednesday, the ladies with the soup did not arrive. A deputation of women went to the gate to ask permission to use the stove in the camp kitchen; but the guards claimed not to have the key. Someone, perhaps a child, threw a rock through the kitchen window.

  Nor did the truck come the next day to fetch the work gang. In mid-morning the police guards were replaced by two new men. ‘They are going to starve us,’ said Robert, loudly enough for others to hear. ‘That fire was the excuse they were looking for. Now they are going to do what they always wanted—lock us up and wait for us to die.’

  Standing against the wire looking out over the veld, K brooded on Robert’s words. He no longer found it so strange to think of the camp as a place where people were deposited to be forgotten. It no longer seemed an accident that the camp lay out of sight of the town on a road that led nowhere else. But he could not yet believe that the two young men on the guardhouse porch would sit and watch with equanimity, yawning, smoking, going indoors every now and again for a nap, while people were dying before their eyes. When people died they left bodies behind. Even people who died of starvation left bodies behind. Dead bodies could be as offensive as living bodies, if it was true that a living body could be offensive. If these people really wanted to be rid of us, he thought (curiously he watched the thought begin to unfold itself in his head, like a plant growing), if they really wanted to forget us forever, they would have to give us picks and spades and command us to dig; then, when we had exhausted ourselves digging, and had dug a great hole in the middle of the camp, they would have to order us to climb in and lay ourselves down; and when we were lying there, all of us, they would have to break down the huts and tents and tear down the fence and throw the huts and the fence and the tents as well as every last thing we had owned upon us, and cover us with earth, and flatten the earth. Then, perhaps, they might begin to forget about us. But who could dig a hole as big as that? Not thirty men, even with women and children and old people to help, not in our present state, with nothing but picks and spades, here in the stone-hard veld.

  It seemed more like Robert than like him, as he knew himself, to think like that. Would he have to say that the thought was Robert’s and had merely found a home in him, or could he say that though the seed had come from Robert, the thought, having grown up inside him, was now his own? He did not know.

  Then on Monday morning the Divisional Council truck arrived as usual to take them to work. Before they climbed aboard, the guards checked their names on a list; otherwise nothing seemed to have changed. They were dropped off at various farms in the district according to a roster the driver kept. With two comrades K found himself at the job of repairing fences. The work was slow, for they were using not new wire but lengths of old wire which when joined together coiled in inconsistent directions. K liked the leisureliness of the work and its repetitiveness. Coming in the mornings and going in the evenings, they spent a week on the same farm, on some days doing no more than a few hundred metres of fencing. Once the farmer took K aside, gave him a cigarette, and commended him. ‘You have a feel for wire,’ he said. ‘You should go into fencing. There will always be a need for good fencers in this country, no matter what. If you carry stock, you need fences: it’s as simple as that.’ He too loved wire, he went on. It pained him to have to use ragtag materials, but what else was there? At the end of the week he paid the three men the standard rate for their labour, but gave them in addition packets of fruit and green mealies, and used clothes. For K he had an old sweater, for the other men a carton of castoffs for their wives and children On the way back, on the truck, one of K’s companions, picking around in the box, came up with a large pair of cotton panties. He held it at
a distance between his fingertips, wrinkled his nose, and let it go. The slipstream caught it and whirled it away. Then he pitched the whole box over the side.

  That night there was liquor in the camp and a fight broke out. When K looked again, one of the Free Corps men, the one who said he had diabetes, was standing in the firelight gripping his thigh and calling for help. His hands glistened with blood, his trouser-leg was wet. ‘What is going to happen to me?’ he cried, over and over. One could even see the blood oozing between his fingers, thick as oil. People came running from all quarters to stare.

  K rushed to the gate, where the two police guards stood peering in the direction of the commotion. ‘That man has been stabbed,’ he stammered—‘he is bleeding, you must take him to the hospital.’

  The guards exchanged glances. ‘Bring him over,’ said one, ‘then we’ll see.’

  K ran back. The wounded man was sitting with his trousers around his ankles, talking without cease, gripping his thigh, from which blood continued to gush. ‘We must take him to the gate!’ K shouted. It was the first time he had raised his voice in the camp, and people looked at him curiously. ‘Take him to the gate, then they will take him to hospital!’ The man on the ground nodded vigorously. ‘Take me to hospital, look how I’m bleeding!’ he cried.

  His comrade, the other Free Corps man, pushed his way to his side, bringing a towel which he tried to tie around the wound. Someone nudged K: it was one of the men from the other huts. ‘Leave them, let them look after each other,’ he said. The crowd began to break up. Soon there were only children left, and K, watching the younger man bind the older man’s thigh in the flickering light.

  K never discovered who had stabbed the guard or whether he recovered, for this was his last night in the camp. While everyone else was going to bed, K quietly bundled his belongings in the black coat, slipped out, and settled down behind the cistern to wait till the last embers had died, till there was nothing to hear but the wind across the veld. He waited an hour longer, shivering from sitting still so long. Then he took off his shoes, hung them about his neck, tiptoed to the fence behind the latrines, tossed the bundle over, and climbed. There was a moment when, straddling the fence, his trousers hooked on a barb, he was an easy shot against the silver-blue sky; then he unpicked himself and was away, tiptoeing across ground surprisingly like the ground inside the fence.