MICHAEL K

Copyright 1983

ISBN 0140074481

War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free.

ONE

THE FIRST THING THE MIDWIFE NOTICED ABOUT MICHAEL K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail's foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.

To the mother she said: 'You should be happy, they bring luck to the household.' But from the first Anna K did not like the mouth that would not close and the living pink flesh it bared to her. She shivered to think of what had been growing in her all these months. The child could not suck from the breast and cried with hunger. She tried a bottle; when it could not suck from the bottle she fed it with a teaspoon, fretting with impatience when it coughed and spluttered and cried.

'It will close up as he grows older,' the midwife promised. However, the lip did not close, or did not close enough, nor did the nose come straight.

She took the child with her to work and continued to take it when it was no longer a baby. Because their smiles and whispers hurt her, she kept it away from other children. Year after year

Michael K sat on a blanket watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet. Because of his disfigurement and because his mind was not quick, Michael was taken out of school after a short trial and committed to the protection of Huis Norenius in Faure, where at the expense of the state he spent the rest of his childhood in the company of other variously afflicted and unfortunate children learning the elements of reading, writing, counting,-sweeping, scrubbing, bedmaking, dishwashing, basketweaving, woodwork and digging. At the age of fifteen he passed out of Huis Norenius and joined the Parks and Gardens division of the municipal services of the City of Cape Town as Gardener, grade 3(b). Three years later he left Parks and Gardens and, after a spell of unemployment which he spent lying on his bed looking at his hands, took a job as night attendant at the public lavatories on Green-market Square. On his way home from work late one Friday he was set upon in a subway by two men who beat him, took his watch, his money and his shoes, and left him lying stunned with a slash across his arm, a dislocated thumb and two broken ribs. After this incident he quit night work and returned to Parks and Gardens, where he rose slowly in the service to become Gardener, grade t. Because of his face K did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself. Both his jobs had given him a measure of solitariness, though down in the lavatories he had been oppressed by the brilliant neon light that shone off the white tiles and created a space without shadows. The parks he preferred were those with tall pine trees and dim agapanthus walks. Sometimes on Saturdays he failed to hear the boom of the noon gun and went on working by himself all through the afternoon. On Sunday mornings he slept late; on Sunday afternoons he visited his mother.

Late one morning in June, in the thirty-first year of his life, a message was brought to Michael K as he raked leaves in De Waal

Park. The message, at third hand, was from his mother: she had been discharged from hospital and wanted him to come and fetch her. K put away his tools and made his way by bus to Somerset Hospital, where he found his mother seated on a bench in a patch of sunlight outside the entrance. She was fully dressed, save that her street shoes stood beside her. When she saw her son she began to weep, holding a hand before her eyes so that other patients and visitors should not see.

For months Anna K had been suffering from gross swelling of the legs and arms; later her belly had begun to swell too. She had been admitted to hospital unable to walk and barely able to breathe. She had spent five days lying in a corridor among scores of victims of stabbings and beatings and gunshot wounds who kept her awake with their noise, neglected by nurses who had no time to spend cheering up an old woman when there were young men dying spectacular deaths all about. Revived with oxygen when she arrived, she was treated with injections and pills to bring down the swelling. When she wanted a bedpan, however, there was seldom anyone to bring it. She had no dressing-gown. Once, feeling her way along the wall to the lavatory, she had been stopped by an old man in grey pyjamas who spoke filth and exposed himself. The needs of her body became a source of torment. When the nurses asked about the pills she said she had taken them, but often she was lying. Then, though the breath-lessness abated, her legs grew so itchy that she had to lie on her hands to control the urge to scratch. By the third day she was pleading to be sent home, though evidently not pleading with the right person. The tears she wept on the sixth day were thus largely tears of relief that she was escaping this purgatory.

At the desk Michael K asked for the use of a wheelchair and was refused it. Carrying her handbag and shoes for her, he supported his mother the fifty paces to the bus stop. There was a long queue. The timetable pasted on the pole promised a bus every fifteen minutes. They waited for an hour while the shadows

lengthened and the wind grew chilly. Unable to stand, Anna K sat against a wall with her legs before her like a beggarwoman while Michael kept their place in the line. When the bus came there were no seats. Michael held on to a rail and embraced his mother to keep her from lurching. It was five o'clock before they arrived at her room in Sea Point.

For eight years Anna K had been employed as a domestic servant by a retired hosiery manufacturer and his wife living in a five-roomed flat in Sea Point overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. In terms of her contract she came in at nine in the morning and stayed till eight at night, with a three-hour break in the afternoon. She worked alternately five and six days a week. She had a fortnight's paid holiday and a room of her own in the block. The wage was fair, her employers were reasonable people, jobs were hard to come by, and Anna K was not discontented. A year ago, however, she had begun to experience dizziness and tightness of the chest when she bent down. Then the dropsy had set in. The Buhrmanns kept her on to do the cooking, cut her pay by a third, and hired a younger woman for the housework. She was allowed to stay on in her room, over which the Buhrmanns had the disposal. The dropsy grew worse. For weeks before entering hospital she had been bedridden, unable to work. She lived in dread of the end of the Buhrmanns'

charity.

Her room under the stairs of the Côte d'Azur had been intended for air-conditioning equipment, which had never been installed. On the door was a sign: a skull and crossed bones painted in red, and underneath the legend danger—gevaar—ingozi. There was no electric light and no ventilation; the air was always musty. Michael opened the door for his mother, lit a candle, and stepped outside while she prepared for bed. He spent this, the first evening of her return, and every evening for the next week, with her: he warmed soup for her on the paraffin stove, saw to her comfort as far as he was able, carried out necessary tasks, and consoled her by stroking her arms when she fell into one of her fits of

tears. One evening the buses from Sea Point did not run at all and he had to spend the night in her room sleeping on the mat with his coat on. In the middle of the night he woke chilled to the bone. Unable to sleep, unable to leave because of the curfew, he sat shivering on the chair till daylight while his mother groaned and snored.

Michael K did not like the physical intimacy that the long evenings in the tiny room forced upon the two of them. He found the sight of his mother's swollen legs disturbing and turned his eyes away when he had to help her out of bed. Her thighs and arms were covered with scratch marks (for a while she even wore gloves at night). But he did not shirk any aspect of what he saw as his duty. The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother. Nothing that her son said could calm Anna K's fear of what might happen to her if she lost her room. Her nights among the dying in the corridors of Somerset Hospital had brought it home to her how indifferent the world could be to an old woman with an unsightly illness in time of war. Unable to work, she saw herself withheld from the gutter only by the unreliable goodwill of the Buhrmanns, the dutifulness of a dull son and, in the last resort, the savings she kept in a handbag in a suitcase under her bed, the new currency in one purse, the old currency, valueless now, that she had been too suspicious to exchange, in another.

Thus when Michael arrived one evening speaking of layoffs in Parks and Gardens, she began to revolve in her mind something she had hitherto only idly dreamed of: a project of quitting a city that held little promise for her and returning to the quieter countryside of her girlhood. Anna K had been born on a farm in the district of Prince Albert. Her father was not steady; there was a problem with drinking;

and in her early years they had moved from one farm to another. Her mother had done laundry and worked in the various kitchens; Anna had helped her. Later they had moved to the town of Oudt-shoorn, where for a while Anna went to school. After the birth of her own first child she had come to Cape Town. There was a second child, from another father, then a third one who died, then Michael. In Anna's memories the years before Oudtshoorn remained the happiest of her life, a time of warmth and plenty. She remembered sitting in the dust of the chicken-run while the chickens clucked and scratched; she remembered looking for eggs under bushes. Lying in bed in her airless room through the winter afternoons with rain dripping from the steps outside, she dreamed of escaping from the careless violence, the packed buses, the food queues, arrogant shopkeepers, thieves and beggars, sirens in the night, the curfew, the cold and wet, and returning to a countryside where, if she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies.

In the plan she outlined to Michael she did not mention death or dying. She proposed that he should quit Parks and Gardens before he was laid off and accompany her by train to Prince Albert, where she would hire a room while he looked for work on a farm. If it happened that his quarters were large enough, she would stay with him and keep house; if not, he could visit her at weekends. To prove her seriousness she had him bring out the suitcase from under the bed, and before his eyes counted out the purseful of new notes which, she said, she had been putting aside for this purpose.

She expected Michael to ask how she could believe that a small country town would take to its bosom two strangers, one of them an old woman in bad health. She had even prepared an answer. But not for an instant did Michael doubt her. Just as he had believed through all the years in Huis Norenius that his mother had left him there for a reason which, if at first dark, would in the end become clear, so now he accepted without question the

wisdom of her plan for them. He saw, not the banknotes spread out on the quilt, but in his mind's eye a whitewashed cottage in the broad veld with smoke curling from its chimney, and standing at the front door his mother, smiling and well, ready to welcome him home at the end of a long day. Michael did not report for work the next morning. With his mother's money stuffed in two wads into his socks, he made his way to the railway station and the main-line booking office. Here the clerk told him that, while he would happily sell him two tickets to Prince Albert or the nearest point to it on the line ('Prince Albert or Prince Alfred?' he asked), K should not expect to board a train without both a seat reservation and a permit to leave the proclaimed Cape Peninsula police area. The earliest reservation he could give him would be for the eighteenth of August, two months away; as for the permit, that could be obtained only from the police. K pleaded for an earlier departure, but in vain: the state of his mother's health did not constitute special grounds, the clerk told him; on the contrary, he would advise him not to mention her condition at all.

From the station K went to Caledon Square and stood for two hours in a queue behind a woman with a whimpering baby. He was given two sets of forms, one set for his mother, one for himself. 'Pin the train reservations to the blue forms, take them to room E-5,' said the policewoman at the desk. When it rained Anna K pushed an old towel against the bottom of the door to keep water from seeping in. The room smelled of Dettol and talcum powder. 'I feel like a toad under a stone living here,' she whispered. 'I can't wait till August.' She covered her face and lay in silence. After a while K found that he could not breathe. He went to the corner shop. There was no bread. 'No bread, no milk,' said the assistant—'come tomorrow.' He bought biscuits and condensed milk, then stood under the awning watching the rain fall. The next day he took the forms to room E-5. Permits would be mailed in due course, they told him, after the

applications had been seen and approved by the police in Prince Albert.

He went back to De Waal Park and was told, as he had expected, that he was to be paid off at the end of the month. 'It doesn't matter,' he told the foreman—'we are leaving anyhow, my mother and I.' He remembered his mother's visits to Huis Norenius. Sometimes she had brought marshmallows, sometimes chocolate biscuits. They had walked together on the playing-field, then gone to the hall for tea. On visiting days the boys wore their khaki best and their brown sandals. Some of the boys did not have parents, or had been forgotten. 'My father is dead, my mother is working,' he had said in respect of himself.

He made a nest of cushions and blankets in the corner of the room and spent the evenings sitting in the dark listening to his mother breathe. She was sleeping more and more. Sometimes he too fell asleep where he sat, and missed the bus. He would wake in the morning with a headache. During the day he wandered about the streets. Everything was suspended while they waited for the permits, which did not come.

Early one Sunday morning he visited De Waal Park and broke the lock on the shed where the gardeners kept their equipment. He took hand-tools and a wheelbarrow, which he trundled back to Sea Point. Working in the alley behind the flats, he broke up an old crate and knocked together a platform two feet square, with a raised back, which he lashed to the wheelbarrow with wire. Then he tried to coax his mother out for a ride. 'The air will do you good,' he said. 'No one will see, it's after five, the front is empty.' 'People can see from the flats,' she replied: 'I'm not making myself into a spectacle.' The next day she relented. Wearing her hat and coat and slippers, she shuffled out into the grey late afternoon and allowed Michael to settle her in the barrow. He wheeled her across Beach Road and on to the paved promenade along the seafront. There was no one about but an old couple walking a dog. Anna K held stiffly to the sides of the

platform, breathing in the cold sea air, while her son wheeled her a hundred yards along the promenade, stopped to allow her to watch the waves breaking on the rocks, wheeled her another hundred yards, stopped again, then wheeled her back. He was disconcerted to find how heavy she was and how unstable the barrow. There was a moment when it tipped and nearly spilled her. 'It does you good to get fresh air in your lungs,' he said. The next afternoon it was raining and they stayed indoors. He thought of building a hand-cart with a box as body mounted on a pair of bicycle wheels, but could not think where to find an axle.

Then late one afternoon in the last week of June a military jeep travelling down Beach Road at high speed struck a youth crossing the road, hurling him back among the vehicles parked at the curbside. The jeep itself swerved off and came to a halt on the overgrown lawns outside the Côte d'Azur, where its two occupants were confronted by the youth's angry companions. There was a fight, and a crowd soon gathered. Parked cars were smashed open and pushed broadside on into the street. Sirens announced the curfew and were ignored. An ambulance that arrived with a motorcycle escort turned about short of the barrier and raced off, chased by a hail of stones. Then from the balcony of a fourth-floor flat a man began to fire revolver shots. Amid screams the crowd dashed for cover, spreading into the beachfront apartment blocks, racing along the corridors, pounding upon doors, breaking windows and lights. The man with the revolver was hauled from his hiding-place, kicked into insensibility, and tossed down to the pavement. Some residents of the flats chose to cower in the dark behind locked doors, others fled into the streets. A woman, trapped at the end of a corridor, had her clothes torn from her body; someone slipped on a fire escape and broke an ankle. Doors were beaten down and flats ransacked. In the flat immediately above Anna K's room, looters tore down curtains, heaped clothing on the floor, broke furniture, and lit a fire, which, though it

did not spread, sent out dense clouds of smoke. On the lawns outside the Côte d'Azur, the Côte d'Or and the Copacabana a constantly growing mob, some with piles of stolen goods at their feet, hurled stones from the rockery gardens through the great seafront windows till not a pane was left intact. 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 hèlmeted 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 Utter 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 Buhr-manns 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 news-

papers 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 threesided 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 prome-naders 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 build-

ings 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 ghosdy 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 hel-meted 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 glar-

ing, 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 thé 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.

When he went back to his alley he found that the cardboard boxes had been cleared away. He spent the night in a doorway recessed from the street. A brass plate above his head read: le roux & haTtingh—

prokureurs. He woke when the police cruised past but soon fell asleep again. It was not as cold as on the previous night.

His mother's bed was occupied by a strange woman whose head was wrapped in bandages. K stood at the foot of the bed and stared. Perhaps I am in the wrong ward, he thought. He stopped a nurse. 'My mother—

she was here yesterday . . . ' 'Ask at the desk,' said the nurse.

'Your mother passed away during the night,' the woman doctor told him. 'We did what we could to keep her, but she was very weak. We wanted to contact you but you didn't leave a number. '

He sat down on a chair in the corner.

'Do you want to make a phone call?' said the doctor.

This was evidently a code for something, he did not know what. He shook his head. Someone brought him a cup of tea, which he drank. People hovering over him made him nervous. He clasped his hands and stared hard at his feet. Was he expected to say something? He separated his hands and clasped them, over and over.

They took him downstairs to see his mother. She lay with her arms at her sides, still wearing the smock with the legend kpa-cpa on the breast. The tube was gone. For a while he looked at her; then he no longer knew where to look.

'Are there other relatives?' asked the nurse at the desk. 'Do you want to phone them? Do you want us to phone them?' 'It doesn't matter,' said K, and went and sat again on his chair in the corner. After that he was left alone, till at midday a tray of hospital food appeared, which he ate. He was still sitting in the corner when a man in a suit and tie came to speak to him. What had been his mother's name, age, place of abode, religious denomination? What had her business been in Stellenbosch?

Did K have her travel documents? 'I was taking her home, ' replied K. 'It was cold where she lived in Cape Town, it was raining all the time, it was bad for her health. I was taking her to a place where she could get better. We did not plan to stop in Stellenbosch. ' Then he began to fear he was giving away too much, and would answer no more questions. The man gave up and went away. After a while he came back, squatted in front of K, and asked: 'Have you yourself ever spent time in an asylum or institution for the handicapped or place of shelter? Have you ever held paid employment?' K would not answer. 'Sign your name here,' said the man, and held out a paper, pointing to the space. When K shook his head the man signed the paper himself.

The shifts changed, and K wandered out into the parking lot. He walked about and looked up into the clear night sky. Then he returned to his chair against the wall. He was not told to leave.

Later, when there was no one about, he went downstairs to look for his mother. He could not find her, or else the door that led to her was locked. He climbed into a great wire cage containing soiled linen and slept there, curled up like a cat.

The second day after his mother's death a nurse he had never seen appeared before him. 'Come, it is time to go now, Michael,' she said. He followed her to the desk in the hall. The suitcase was waiting for him, and two brown paper parcels. 'We have packed your late mother's clothes and personal possessions in her suitcase,' the strange nurse said: 'you may take it now.' She wore glasses; she sounded as if she were reading the words from a card. K noticed that the girl at the desk was watching them out of the corner of her eye. 'This parcel,' the nurse went on, 'contains your mother's ashes. Your mother was cremated this morning, Michael. If you choose, we can dispose of the ashes fittingly, or else you can take them with you.' With a fingernail she touched the parcel in question. Both parcels were neatly sealed with brown paper tape; this was the smaller. 'Would you like us to take charge of it?' she said. Her finger stroked it lightly. K shook his head. 'And in this parcel,' she went on, pushing the second one firmly across to him,

'we have put a few small things for you that you may find useful, clothes and toiletries.' She looked him candidly in the eye and gave him a smile. The girl at the desk turned back to her typewriter. So there is a place for burning, K thought. He imagined the old women from the ward fed one after another, eyes pinched against the heat, lips pinched, hands at their sides, into the fiery furnace. First the hair, in a halo of flame, then after a while everything else, to the last things, burning and crumbling. And it was happening all the time. 'How do I know?' he said. 'How do you know what?' the nurse said. Impatiently he indicated the box. 'How do I know?' he challenged. She refused to answer, or did not understand.

In the parking lot he tore open the bigger parcel. It contained

a safety razor, a bar of soap, a hand towel, a white jacket with maroon flashes on the shoulders, a pair of black trousers, and a black beret with a shiny metal badge reading st john ambulance. He held out the clothes to the girl at the desk. The nurse with glasses had disappeared. 'Why do you give me this?' he asked. 'Don't ask me,' said the girl. 'Maybe someone left them behind.' She would not look him in the face.

He threw the soap and razor away and thought of throwing the clothes away too, but did not. His own clothes had begun to smell.

Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital. By day he pushed the cart around the streets in the vicinity; by night he slept under culverts, behind hedges, in alleys. It seemed strange to him that children should be riding their bicycles home from school in the afternoons, ringing their bells, racing one another; it seemed strange that people should be eating and drinking as usual. For a while he went around asking for garden jobs, but grew to shrink from the distaste that householders, owing him no charity, showed as they opened their doors on him. When it rained he crawled under the cart. There were long periods when he sat staring at his hands, his mind blank. He fell into the company of men and women who slept under the railway bridge and haunted the vacant lot behind the liquor shop on Andringa Street. Sometimes he lent them his cart. In a fit of largesse he gave away the stove. Then one night someone tried to pull the suitcase from under his head while he was sleeping. There was a fight, and he moved on.

Once a police van stopped beside him in the street and two policemen got out to inspect the cart. They opened the suitcase and rummaged through its contents. They stripped the wrapping paper from the second parcel. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside that a plastic bag of dark grey ash. It was the first time K had seen it. He looked away. 'What's this?' asked the policeman.

it's my mother's ashes,' said K. The policeman tossed the packet speculatively from hand to hand and made a comment to his friend that K did not hear.

For hours at a time he stood across the street from the hospital. It was smaller than it had once seemed, merely a long low building with a red tiled roof.

He ceased to observe the curfew. He did not believe that any harm would come to him; and if it should come, it would not matter. Dressed in his new clothes, the white jacket and black pants and beret, he pushed his cart where and when he wished. Sometimes spells of airiness came over him. He felt weaker than before, but not sick. He ate once a day, buying doughnuts or pies with money from his mother's purse. There was pleasure in spending without earning: he took no heed of how fast the money went. He tore a black strip from the lining of his mother's coat and pinned it around his arm. But he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life.

With nothing to do, he slept more and more. He discovered that he could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position: on the sidewalk at noon, with people stepping over his body; standing against a wall, with the suitcase between his legs. Sleep settled inside his head like a benign fog; he had no will to resist it. He did not dream of anyone or anything.

One day the barrow disappeared. He shrugged off the loss.

It appeared that he had to stay in Stellenbosch for a certain length of time. There was no way of shortening the time. He stumbled through the days, losing his way often.

He was walking along the Banhoek road one day, as he sometimes did, with the suitcase. It was a subdued, misty morning. He heard the clip-clop of a horse's hoofs behind him; first there was a smell of fresh manure, then he was slowly overtaken by a cart, an old green municipal refuse cart without hatches, drawn by a Clydesdale and driven by an old man in black oilskins. For

a while they were moving side by side. The old man gave a little nod; and K, hesitating a moment, peering down the long straight avenue of mist, found that there was after all nothing any more to keep him. So he hoisted himself up and took his place beside the old man. 'Thank you,' he said. 'If you need help I can help.'

But the old man did not need help, nor was he in the mood for talk. He dropped K a mile past the top of the pass and turned off down a dirt track. K walked all day and slept the night in a eucalyptus grove with the wind roaring in the branches high overhead. By midday the next day he had skirted Paarl and was heading northward along the national road. He halted only within sight of the first checkpoint, and waited in a skulking-place till he was sure that no one on foot was being stopped. Several times he was passed by long convoys of vehicles with armed escorts. Each time he left the road and stood well clear, not trying to hide, keeping his hands visible, as he saw other people do. He slept at the roadside and woke wet with dew. Before him the road wound upward into the mist. Birds flitted from bush to bush, their chirping muffled. He carried the suitcase on a stick over his shoulder. He had not eaten for two days; however, there seemed no limit to his endurance. A mile up the pass a fire winked through the mist and he heard voices. As he came closer the smell of frying bacon made his stomach churn. There were men standing around a fire keeping warm. At his approach they stopped talking and stared at him. He touched his beret but no one responded. He passed them, passed a second roadside fire, passed a column of vehicles parked head to tail with their lights on, and then came upon the reason for the stoppage. Lying on its side blocking the road, its rearmost wheels hanging over the Up of the gorge, was an articulated truck painted a blank eggshell blue. The cab was burnt out, the van blackened with smoke. A lorry loaded with sacks had collided with the wreck, and bursts of white flour marked the road. Backed

up around the bend as far as K could see was the rest of the convoy. Two radios played loudly on competing stations; from up ahead came the forlorn bleating of sheep. K thought for a moment of stopping to scoop up pocketfuls of the spilled flour, but was not sure what he would do with it. He plodded past truck after truck; he passed the truckload of sheep, packed so tight that some stood on their hind legs; he passed a group of soldiers around a fire who paid no attention to him. At the rear of the convoy two beacons stood flashing, and further on a tarbucket burned in the middle of the road, tended by no one.

Once the convoy was behind him K relaxed, thinking he was free; but at the next bend in the road a soldier in camouflage uniform stepped from behind the bushes pointing an automatic rifle at his heart. K

stopped in his tracks. The soldier lowered his rifle, lit a cigarette, took a puff, and raised the rifle again. Now, K judged, it pointed at his face, or at his throat.

'So who are you?' said the soldier. 'Where do you think you are going?'

About to reply, K was cut short. 'Show me,' said the soldier. 'Come. Show me what's in there.'

They were out of sight of the convoy, though faint music still came on the air. K lifted the suitcase off his shoulder and opened it. The soldier waved him back, pinched out his cigarette, and in a single movement overturned the case. Everything lay there in the road: the blue felt slippers, the white bloomers, the pink plastic bottle of calamine lotion, the brown bottle of pills, the fawn plastic handbag, the floral scarf, the scallop-rim scarf, the black woollen coat, the jewelry box, the brown skirt, the green blouse, the shoes, the other underwear, the brown paper packets, the white plastic packet, the coffee tin that rattled, the talcum powder, handkerchiefs, letters, photographs, the box of ashes. K did not stir.

'Where did you steal all this?' said the soldier. 'You're a thief, aren't you? A thief running away over the mountains.' He prod-

ded the handbag with his boot. 'Show me,' he said. He touched the jewelry box. He touched the coffee tin. He touched the other box. 'Show me,' he said, and stepped back.

K opened the coffee tin. It contained curtain rings. He held them out in the palm of his hand, then poured them back into the tin and closed it. He opened the jewelry box and held it out. His heart thundered in his chest. The soldier stirred the contents around, picked out a brooch, and stood back. He was smiling. K

closed the box. He opened the handbag and held it out. The soldier gestured. K emptied it on the road. There was a handkerchief, a comb and mirror, a powder compact, and the two purses. The soldier pointed and K handed him the purses. He slipped them into his tunic pocket.

K licked his lips. 'That's not my money, ' he said thickly. 'That's my mother's money, that she worked for.'

It was not true: his mother was dead, she had no need of money. Nevertheless. There was a silence. 'What do you think the war is for?' K said. 'For taking other people's money?'

'What do you think the war is for,' said the soldier, parodying the movements of K's mouth. 'Thief. Watch it. You could be lying in the bushes with flies all over you. Don't you tell me about war.' He pointed his gun at the box of ashes. 'Show me,' he said.

K took off the lid and held out the box. The soldier peered at the plastic bag. 'What's that stuff?' he said.

'Ash,' said K. His voice was steadier now.

'Open it,' said the soldier. K opened the bag. The soldier took a pinch and smelled it cautiously. 'Jesus,' he said. His eyes met K's.

K knelt and packed his mother's things back into the suitcase. The soldier stood aside. 'So can I go now?'

said K.

'Papers in order—you can go,' said the soldier. K hoisted the stick with the suitcase on to his shoulder.

'Just a minute,' said the soldier. 'You work for the ambulance or something?'

K shook his head.

'Just a minute, just a minute,' said the soldier. He took one of the purses from his pocket, peeled a brown ten-rand note from the roll, and flicked it in K's direction. 'Tip,' he said. 'Buy yourself an ice-cream.'

K came back and picked up the note. Then he set off again. In a minute or two the soldier had receded into the mist.

It did not seem to him that he had been a coward. Nevertheless, a little further on it struck him that there was no point in keeping the suitcase now. He clambered up a slope and left it in the bushes, retaining only the black coat, for the cold, and the box of ashes, leaving the lid open so that the rain could fall and the sun scorch and the insects gnaw, if they wanted to, without hindrance.

The convoys from up-country were evidently halted, for he had the road to himself. By late afternoon he was in sight of the tunnel through the mountain and the guard post at its south entrance. Quitting the road, he took to the slopes and pushed his way through dense, soggy bush till by nightfall he was high on the saddle overlooking the Elandsrivier and the road to the north. He heard baboons barking in the distance. He slept under an overhang wrapped in his mother's coat with a stick beside him. At dawn he was moving again, making a wide arc down into the valley to avoid the road bridge. The first convoy of the new day passed.

All day he walked, keeping off the road where that was possible. He spent the night in a bungalow in the corner of an overgrown field with rugby poles, separated from the road by a line of eucalyptus trees. The windows of the bungalow were shattered, the door broken off its hinges. The floor was covered in broken glass, old newspapers and drifting leaves; pale yellow grass grew in through cracks in the walls; snails clustered under the waterpipes; but the roof was intact. He swept a pile of leaves and paper into a corner to make a bed. He slept intermittently, woken by high winds and heavy rain.

It was still raining when he got up. Dizzy with hunger, he stood in the doorway staring out on the sodden grassland, the drenched trees, and the grey-misted hills beyond. For an hour he waited for the rain to abate; then he turned up his collar and ran into the downpour. At the far end of the field he clambered over a barbed-wire fence and entered an apple orchard overgrown with grass and weeds. Worm-eaten fruit lay everywhere underfoot; the fruit on the branches was undersized and infested. With the beret beaten flat over his ears by the rain and the -black coat clinging to his body like a pelt, he stood and ate, taking bites of good flesh here and there, chewing as quickly as a rabbit, his eyes vacant. He moved deeper into the orchard. Everywhere was evidence of neglect. Indeed, he had begun to believe he was on abandoned land when the apple-trees gave way to a stretch of cleared ground beyond which he saw brick outhouses and the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of a farmhouse. In the cleared ground were neatly tended patches of vegetables: cauliflower, carrots, potatoes. He emerged from the shelter of the trees into the downpour and on hands and knees began to pull yellow half-grown carrots out of the soft earth. It is God's earth, he thought, I am not a thief. Nevertheless he imagined a shot cracking out from the back window of the farmhouse, he imagined a huge Alsatian streaking out to attack him. When his pockets were full he stood nervously erect. Instead of taking the carrot-tops with him to scatter under the trees as he had intended, he left them where they lay.

During the night the rain stopped. In the morning he was back on the road in his damp clothes, his belly bloated with raw food. When he heard the rumble of an approaching convoy he would creep away into the bushes, though he wondered whether by now, with his fdthy clothes and his air of gaunt exhaustion, he would not be passed over as a mere footloose vagrant from the depths of the country, too benighted to know that one needed papers to be on the road, too sunk in apathy to be of harm. One

of the convoys, with an escort of motorcycle outriders, armoured cars and trucks full of helmeted boy soldiers, took a full five minutes to pass. He peered steadily out from his hiding-place; the machinegunner in the last car, muffled in scarf, goggles and woollen cap, seemed to look for an instant straight into his eyes before being borne away backwards into the Boland.

He slept under a culvert. By nine o'clock the next morning he was in sight of the chimneys and pylons of Worcester. He was no longer alone on the road but one of a straggling line of people. Three young men passed him walking briskly, their breath leaving them in white puffs.

On the outskirts of the town there was a roadblock, the first he had seen since Paarl, with police vehicles and people clustered densely around them. For a moment he wavered. To his left were houses, to his right a brickfield. The only way out was back: he pressed on.

'What do they want?' he whispered to the woman ahead of him in the line. She looked at him, looked away again, said nothing.

It was his turn. He held out his green card. From the head of the line, between the two police trucks, he could see those who had passed through the check; but also, to one side, a silent group of men, men only, guarded by a policeman with a dog. If I look very stupid, he thought, perhaps they will let me through.

'Where are you from?'

'From Prince Albert.' His mouth was dry. 'I am going home to Prince Albert.'

'Permit?'

'I lost it.'

'Right. Wait there.' The policeman pointed with his baton.

'I don't want to stop, I don't have time,' K whispered. Could they smell fear on him? Someone gripped his arm. He baulked, like a beast at the shambles. A hand behind him in the line was holding out a green card. No one was listening to him. The

policeman with the dog made an impatient gesture. Shoved forward, K walked the last paces himself and entered captivity, his fellows shuffling aside as if to avoid contamination. He clasped the box and looked back into the yellow eyes of the dog.

In the company of fifty strangers K was driven to the railway yards, fed cold porridge and tea, and herded into a lone carriage at a siding. The doors were locked and they waited, watched over by an armed guard in the brown and black uniform of the Railways Police, till another thirty prisoners arrived and were loaded aboard.

Next to K, by the window, sat an older man dressed in a suit. K touched his sleeve. 'Where are they taking us?' he asked. The stranger looked him over and shrugged. 'Why does it matter where they are taking us?'

he said. 'There are only two places, up the line and down the line. That is the nature of trains.' He brought out a roll of sweets and offered one to K.

A steam locomotive was backed up to the siding and, with whistles and jerks and clashes, coupled to the carriage. 'North,' said the stranger. 'Touws River. ' When K did not reply he seemed to lose interest in him.

They pulled away from the siding and began to move through the back yards of Worcester, where women hung out washing and children stood on fences to wave, the train gradually picking up speed. K watched the telegraph wires rise and fall, rise and fall. They passed mile after mile of bare and neglected vineyards circled over by crows; then the engine began to labour as they entered the mountains. K shivered. He could smell his own sweat through the musty odour of his clothes.

They came to a halt; a guard unlocked the doors; and the moment they stepped out the reason for stopping became clear. The train could go no further: the track ahead was covered in a mountain of rocks and red clay that had come pouring down the slope, tearing a wide gash in the hillside. Someone made a remark, and there was a burst of laughter.

From the top of the earthslide they could see another train far down the track on the other side: there were men struggling like ants to roll a mechanical shovel out of a truck and down a ramp. K found himself assigned to a gang working on the track, which was dislocated for some distance short of the obstruction. All afternoon, under the eye of an overseer and a guard, he and his fellows worked at moving the buckled rails, firming the bed of the track, and laying sleepers. By evening there was enough new track for an empty truck to advance to the foot of the slide. They broke off for a supper of bread and jam and tea. Then, in the glare of the locomotive headlight, they climbed the mound and began to shovel clay and stones. At first they were high enough to pitch a load straight into the truck; as the mound grew lower each shovelful had to be lifted over its side. When the truck was filled the locomotive hauled it back down the track, and the same men emptied it in darkness.

Revived by the suppertime break, K soon began to flag again. Every spadeful he lifted cost him an effort; when he stood erect there was a stabbing in his back and the world spun. He laboured more and more slowly, then sat down at the trackside with his head between his knees. Time passed, he had no idea how much time. Sounds grew faint in his ears.

He was tapped on the knee. 'Get up!' said a voice. He scrambled to his feet and in the faint light faced the gang overseer in his black coat and cap.

'Why have I got to work here?' K said. His head swam; the words seemed to echo from far away. The overseer shrugged. 'Just do what you're told,' he said. He raised his stick and prodded K in the chest. K picked up his shovel.

Till midnight they toiled, moving like sleepwalkers. Herded back into the carriage at last, they slept slumped against one another on the seats or sprawled on the bare floor, the windows shut against the bitter upland cold, while outside the guards stamped

up and down and shivered and cursed and took turns to sneak into the cab to warm their hands. Tired and cold, K lay with the box of ashes in his arms. His neighbour pressed against him and embraced him in his sleep. He thinks I am his wife, thought K, the wife in whose bed he slept last night. He stared at the misty window, longing for the night to pass. Later he fell asleep; when the guards unlocked the doors in the morning his body was so stiff that he could barely stand.

Again there was porridge and tea. He found himself sitting beside the man who had spoken to him on the journey from Worcester.

'Are you feeling sick?' said the man.

K shook his head.

'You don't talk,' said the man. 'I thought you must be sick.'

'I'm not sick,' said K.

'Then don't be so miserable. This isn't jail. This isn't a life sentence. This is just labour gang. It's peanuts.'

K could not finish the lukewarm slab of mealie-porridge. The guards and the two overseers were going among them now, clapping their hands and prodding them to stand up.

'There's nothing special about, you,' said the man. 'There's nothing special about any of us.' His gesture embraced them all: prisoners, guards, foremen. K scraped the uneaten porridge out on to the earth and they stood up. The hooknosed overseer passed by, slapping the tail of his coat with his stick. 'Cheer up!'

said the man, giving K a smile, punching him lightly on the shoulder. 'Soon you'll be your own man again!'

The mechanical shovel had at last been brought up on the other side of the slide and was steadily biting the earth away. By noon a passage had been cut three metres wide, and the regular repair crew from Touws River could move in to raise and re-lay the uncovered track. The train on the north side began to get up

steam. In his filthy white ambulance jacket, carrying the coat and the box, in the company of other silent and exhausted men, K climbed aboard. No one stopped him. Slowly the train backed away, heading northward up the single track, with the two armed guards at the end of the carriage peering up the line. For all of the two-hour ride K pretended to be asleep. Once the man sitting opposite him, perhaps looking for something to eat, nudged the box out from between his feet and opened it. When he saw it held ash he closed it and pushed it back. K watched through half-closed eyes but did not interfere. They were unloaded at Touws River at five in the afternoon. K stood on the platform not knowing what was to happen next. They might discover he had boarded the wrong train and ship him back to Worcester; or they might lock him up in this strange bleak windy place for not having papers; or there might be enough emergencies along the line, enough earthslides and washaways and explosions in the night and broken tracks, to make it necessary for a gang of fifty men to be shuttled north and south from Touws River for years to come, unpaid, fed on porridge and tea to keep their strength up. But in fact the two guards, having escorted them off the platform, turned without a word and abandoned them on the cinder expanse of the marshalling yards to resume their interrupted lives.

Without waiting, K crossed the tracks, ducked through a hole in the fence, and took the path that led away from the station towards the oasis of filling stations, roadhouses and children's playgrounds on the national road. The gay paint on the rocking-horses and roundabouts was peeling and the filling stations had long been shut down, but a small shop with a Coca-Cola sign over the doorway and a crate of withered oranges in the window still seemed to be open. K had reached the door, had even stepped into the shop, when a little old woman in black scuttled forward with outstretched arms to meet him. Before he could brace himself she had forced him back bodily over the threshold and with

a rattle of bolts closed the door in his face. He peered through the glass and knocked; he held up the tenrand note to show good faith; but the old woman, without so much as a look, disappeared behind the high counter. Two other men from the train, following behind K, had seen his repulse. One of them angrily hurled a handful of gravel at the window; then they turned and left.

K stayed on. Beyond the rack of paperback books, through the sweets in the display cases, he could still see the edge of the black dress. He shielded his eyes with his hands and waited. There was nothing to hear but the wind across the veld and the creaking of the sign overhead. After a while the old woman brought her head up over the counter and met his stare. She wore glasses with thick black rims; her silver hair was drawn back tight. On shelves behind her K could make out canned food, packets of mealie-meal and sugar, detergent powders. On the floor in front of the counter was a basket of lemons. He held the banknote flat against the glass above his bead. The old woman did not budge. He tried the water-tap beside one of the petrol pumps, but it was dry. He drank from a tap at the rear of the shop. In the veld behind the filling station stood the hulks of scores of cars. He tried doors till he found one that opened. The back seat of the car had been removed, but he was too tired to search further. The sun was going down behind the mountains, the clouds were turning orange. He pulled the door to, lay down on the dusty concave floor with the box under his head, and was soon asleep. In the morning the shop was open. There was a tall man in khaki behind the counter, from whom, without any trouble, K bought three cans of beans in tomato sauce, a packet of powdered milk, and matches. He retreated behind the fdling station and made a fire; while one of the cans was warming he poured milk powder into his palm and licked at it. Having eaten, he set off, trudging along the highway with the sun on his right. He walked steadily all day. In this flat landscape of scrub and stone there was nowhere one could hide. Convoys passed in both directions, but

he ignored them. When dusk fell he broke from the road, crossed a fence, and found a place for the night in a dry river-course. He made a fire and ate the second can of beans. He slept close to the embers, oblivious of the night noises, the tiny scurryings across the pebbles, the rustle of feathers in the trees. Having once crossed the fence into the veld, he found it more restful to walk across country. He walked all day. In the fading light he was lucky enough to bring down a turtle-dove with a stone as it came to roost in a thorntree. He twisted its neck, cleaned it, roasted it on a skewer of wire, and ate it with the last can of beans.

In the morning he was woken roughly by an old countryman in a tattered brown army coat. With strange vehemence the old man warned him off the land. 'I just slept here, nothing else,' K objected. 'Don't come looking for trouble!' said the old man. 'They find you in their veld, they shoot you! You just make trouble! Now go!' K asked for directions, but the old man waved him off and began to kick dirt over the ashes of the fire. So he retreated, and for an hour trudged along the highway; then, feeling safe, he recrossed the fence.

From a feeding trough beside a dam he scooped half a tinful of crushed mealies and bonemeal, boiled it in water, and ate the gritty mush. He filled his beret with more of the feed, thinking: At last I am living off the land.

Sometimes the only sound he could hear was that of his trouser-legs whipping together. From horizon to horizon the landscape was empty. He climbed a hill and lay on his back listening to the silence, feeling the warmth of the sun soak into his bones.

Three strange creatures, little dogs with big ears, started from behind a bush and raced away. I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. Tbe anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked,

he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.

The sun was declining as he climbed the last hills outside Laingsburg; by the time he crossed the bridge and reached the wide central avenue of the town the light was a murky violet. He passed filling stations, shops, roadhouses, all closed. A dog began barking and, having begun, went on. Other dogs joined in. There were no street lights.

He was standing before a display of children's clothing in a dim shop window when someone passed behind him, halted, and came back. 'It's curfew when the bell goes,' said a voice. 'You'd better get off the street.'

K turned. He saw a man younger than himself wearing a green and gold track suit and carrying a wooden tool-chest. What the stranger saw he did not know.

'Are you all right?' said the young man.

'I don't want to stop,' said K. 'I'm going to Prince Albert and it's a long way.'

But he went home with the stranger after all and slept at his house, after a meal of soup and pan-bread. There were three children. All the while K ate, the youngest, a girl, sat on her mother's lap staring and, though her mother whispered in her ear, would not take her eyes off him. The two elder children kept their gaze severely on their plates. After hesitating, K spoke of his journey. 'I met a man the other day,' he said, 'who told me

they shoot people they find on their land. ' His friend shook his head. 'I've never heard of that,' he said.

'People must help each other, that's what I believe.'

K allowed this utterance to sink into his mind. Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.

When the light was switched off, K lay for a long time listening to the stirring of the children, whose bed he had taken and who now slept on a mattress on the floor. He woke once during the night with the feeling that he had been talking in his sleep; but no one seemed to have heard him. When he woke next there was a light on and the parents were getting their children off to school, trying to hush them for the sake of the guest. Mortified, he slipped on his trousers under the bedclothes and stepped outdoors. The stars were still shining; in the east there was a pink glow on the horizon. The boy came to summon him to breakfast. At the table the urge again came over him to speak. He gripped the edge of the table and sat stiffly upright. His heart was full, he wanted to utter his thanks, but finally the right words would not come. The children stared at him; a silence fell; their parents looked away.

The two elder children were instructed to walk with him as far as the turnoff to Seweweekspoort. At the turnoff, before they parted, the boy spoke. 'Are those the ashes?' he said. K nodded. 'Would you like to see?' he offered. He opened the box, unknotted the plastic bag. First the boy smelled the ashes, then his sister did the same. 'What are you going to do with them?' asked the boy. 'I am taking them back to where my mother was born long ago,' said K. 'That was what she wanted me to do.' 'Did they burn her up?'

asked the boy. K saw the burning halo. 'She didn't feel anything,' he said, 'she was already spirit by then.'

It took him three days to cover the distance from Laingsburg

to Prince Albert, following the direction of the dirt road, making wide circles around farmhouses, trying to live off the veld but for the main part going hungry. Once, in the heat of the day, he stripped off his clothes and submerged himself in the water of a lonely dam. Once he was called to the roadside by a farmer driving a light truck. The farmer wanted to know where he was going. 'To Prince Albert,' he said,

'to visit my family.' But his accent was strange and it was clear that the farmer was not satisfied. 'Jump in,'

he said. K shook his head. 'Jump in,' repeated the farmer, 'I'll give you a ride.' 'I'm OK,' said K, and walked on. The truck drove off in a cloud of dust; and at once K left the road, cut down into a river-bed, and hid till nightfall.

Remembering the farmer afterwards, he could recall only the gaberdine hat and the stubby fingers that beckoned him. On each joint of each finger there was a little feather of bronze hair. His memories all seemed to be of parts, not of wholes.

On the morning of the fourth day he was squatting on a hill watching the sun come up over what he knew at last to be Prince Albert. Cocks crowed; light blinked on the windowpanes of houses; a child was driving two donkeys down the long main street. The air was utterly still. As he descended the hillside towards the town, he began to be aware of a man's voice rising up to meet him in an even and unending monologue without visible origin. Puzzled, he stopped to listen. Is this the voice of Prince Albert? he wondered. I thought Prince Albert was dead. He tried to make out words, but though the voice pervaded the air like a mist or an aroma, the words, if there were words, if the voice were not simply lulling or chanting tones, were too faint or too smooth to hear. Then the voice ceased, giving way to a tiny faraway brass band.

K joined the road that entered the town from the south. He passed the old mill wheel; he passed fenced gardens. A pair of liver-coloured dogs galloped up and down inside a fence baying, eager to get at him. A few houses further along the street a young

woman was kneeling at an outside tap washing a bowl. She glanced over her shoulder at him; he touched his beret; she looked away.

Now there were shops on both sides of the street: a bakery, a café, a clothing store, a bank agency, a welding shop, a general dealer, garages. Grids of steel mesh were locked across the front of the general dealer's. K sat down on the stoep with his back to the mesh and closed his eyes against the sun. Now I am here, he thought. Finally.

An hour later K was still sitting there, asleep, his mouth agape. Children, whispering and giggling, had gathered around him. One of them delicately lifted the beret from his head, put it on, and twisted his mouth in parody. His friends snorted with laughter. He dropped the beret askew on K's head and tried to worm the box away from him; but both hands were folded over it.

The shopkeeper arrived with his keys; the children fell back; and when he began to remove the grillework K woke up.

The interior of the shop was dim and cluttered. Galvanized iron bathtubs and bicycle wheels hung from the ceiling alongside fan belts and radiator hoses; there were bins of nails and pyramids of plastic buckets, shelves of canned goods, patent medicines, sweets, babywear, cold drinks. K stepped to the counter. 'Mr Vosloo or Mr Visser,' he said. Those were the names his mother had remembered from the past. 'I'm looking for a Mr Vosloo or a Mr Visser who is a farmer. '

'Mrs Vosloo,' said the shopkeeper. 'Is that who you mean? Mrs Vosloo at the hotel? There is no Mr Vosloo.'

'Mr Vosloo or Mr Visser who was a farmer long ago, that is who I am looking for. I don't know the name for sure, but if I find the farm I will recognize it.'

'There is no Vosloo or Visser who farms. Visagie—is that who you mean? What do you want the Visagies for?'

'I have to take something there.' He held up the box.

'Then you have come a long way for nothing. There is no one

it the Visagies' place, it has been empty for years. Are you sure the name you want is Visagie? The Visagies left long ago. '

K asked for a packet of ginger snaps.

'Who sent you here?' asked the shopkeeper. K looked stupid. 'They should have got someone who knows what he is doing. Fell them that when you see them.' K mumbled and left.

He was walking up the street wondering where to try next when one of the children came running after him. 'Mister, I can tell you where Visagies is!' he called. K stopped. 'But it's empty, there's no one there,'

the child said. He gave directions that would take K north along the road to Kruidfontein and then east by a farm road along the valley of the Moordenaarsrivier. 'How far is the farm from the big road?' asked K.

'A long way or a short way?' The boy was vague, nor did his companions know. 'You turn off at the sign of the finger pointing,' he said. 'Visagies is before the mountains, quite a long way if you are walking.' K

gave them money for sweets.

It was noon before he reached the pointing finger and turned off on to a track that led into desolate grey flats; the sun was going down when he climbed a crest and came in sight of a low whitewashed farmhouse beyond which the land rose from rippling flats to foothills and then to the steep dark slopes of the mountains themselves. He approached the house and circled it. The shutters were closed and a rockpigeon flew in at a hole where one of the gables had crumbled, leaving timbers exposed and galvanized roof-plates buckled. A loose plate flapped monotonously in the wind. Behind the house was a rockery garden in which nothing was growing. There was no old wagonhouse such as he had imagined, but a wood-and-iron shed, and against it an empty chicken-run with streamers of yellow plastic blowing in the netting-wire. On the rise behind the house stood a pump whose head was missing. Far out in the veld the vanes of a second pump glinted.

Front and back doors were locked. He yanked at a shutter and

the restraining hook came loose. Cupping his eyes he peered through the window but could make out nothing.

As he entered the shed a pair of startled swallows flew out. A harrow covered in dust and cobwebs occupied most of the floor. Barely able to see in the gloom, breathing an odour of paraffin and wool and tar, he scratched along the walls among picks and spades, odds and ends of piping, loops of wire, cartons of empty bottles, till he came upon a pile of empty feed-sacks, which he dragged into the open, shook clean, and laid out as a bed for himself on the stoep.

He ate the last of the biscuits he had bought. He still had half of his money left but no more use for it. The light faded. There was a flutter of bats under the eaves. He lay on his bed listening to the noises on the night air, air denser than the air of day. Now I am here, he thought. Or at least I am somewhere. He went to sleep.

The first thing he discovered in the morning was that there were goats running on the farm. A flock of twelve or fourteen appeared from behind the house and crossed the yard at an amble, led by an old male with curling horns. K stood up in his bed to look, whereupon the goats started and clattered down the track to the river-bed. In a moment they had vanished from sight. He had sat down and was idly tying his shoelaces before it came home to him that these snorting long-haired beasts, or creatures like them, would have to be caught, killed, cut up and eaten if he hoped to live. Armed with nothing but his penknife he plunged off after the goats. He spent all day hunting them down. Wild at first, they later grew used to the human being trotting after them; as the sun became hotter they sometimes stopped all together and allowed him to approach to within a few paces before casually showing him their heels. At such moments, closing stealthily in on them, K felt his whole body begin to tremble. It was hard to believe that he had become this savage with the bared knife; nor could he shake off a fear that when he stabbed into the dappled

brown and white neck of the ram the blade of the penknife would fold back and cut his hand. Then the goats would trot off again, and to keep up his spirits he would have to say to himself: They have many thoughts, I have only one thought, my one thought will in the end be stronger than their many. He tried to herd the goats against a fence, but always they slipped away.

They were leading him in a great circle, he found, round the pump and dam he had observed from the farmhouse the previous day. From closer by he could see that the square concrete dam was in fact full to overflowing; for yards around it there was muddy water and lush marshgrass, and as he approached he could hear the plop of frogs. Only after he had drunk did it occur to him to be puzzled at this luxuriance and to ask himself who saw to it that the dam was full. Later in the afternoon, as he pursued his dogged chase, the goats now ambling ahead of him from one patch of shade to the next, he had his answer: a light wind rose, the wheel creaked and began to turn, from the pump came a dry clanking, and an intermittent trickle of water ran from the pipe.

Famished and exhausted, too deeply committed to the hunt now to give it up, fearful of losing his quarry during the night in these miles of unknown veld, he fetched his bags, made his bed on the bare earth under the full moon as near to the goats as he dared, and fell into a fitful sleep. He was woken in the middle of the night by splashing and snorting as the goats drank. Still dizzy with exhaustion, he rose and stumbled towards them. For an instant they bunched together, turning to face him, in water up to their hocks; then, as he plunged into the water after them, they scattered in all directions in an explosion of alarm. Almost under his feet one slipped and slid, kicking like a fish in the mud to regain its footing. K hurled the whole weight of his body upon it. I must be hard, the thought came to him, I must press through to the end, I must not relent. He could feel the goat's hindquarters heaving beneath him; it bleated again and again in terror; its body jerked in spasms. K straddled it, clenched his hands around its

neck, and bore down with all his strength, pressing the head under the surface of the water and into the thick ooze below. The hindquarters thrashed, but his knees were gripping the body like a vice. There was a moment when the kicking began to weaken and he almost let up. But the impulse passed. Long after the last snort and tremor he continued to press the goat's head under the mud. Only when the cold of the water had begun to numb his limbs did he rise and drag himself out.

For the rest of the night he did not sleep but stamped about in his wet clothes, his teeth chattering, while the moon traversed the sky. When dawn came and it was light enough to see, he returned to the farmhouse and without a second thought put an elbow through a windowpane. The last tinkle of the last shard died away and silence closed in as deep as ever before. He loosened the catch and opened the window wide. From room to room he wandered. But for some larger pieces of furniture—cupboards, beds, wardrobes—there was nothing. His feet left prints on the dusty floor. When he entered the kitchen there was a flurry of wings as birds flew out through the hole in the roof. Droppings lay everywhere; there was a pile of masonry against the far wall where the gable had crumbled, out of which there was even a tiny veld-plant growing.

Off the kitchen led a small pantry. K opened the window and threw back the shutters. Along one wall stood a row of wooden bins, all empty save one that contained what looked like sand and mouse droppings. On one rack were items of kitchenware, odd members of sets, plastic cups, glass jars, all covered in dust and cobwebs. On another were half-empty bottles of oil and vinegar, jars of icing-sugar and powdered milk, and three bottles of preserves. K opened one, dug away the candlewax seal, and wolfed down what tasted like apricots. The sweetness of the fruit in his mouth mingled with the smell of old slime rising from his wet clothes and made him retch. He took the bottle outside and, standing in the sunlight, ate the rest of it more slowly.

He crossed the mile of veld back to the dam. Though the air was warm he was still shivering. The mud-brown hump of the goat's flank stuck out of the water. He waded in and, using all his strength, hauled the corpse out by the hind legs. Its teeth were bared, its yellow eyes stood wide; a trickle of water ran out of its mouth. It was a ewe. The urgency of the hunger that had possessed him yesterday was gone. The thought of cutting up and devouring this ugly thing with its wet, matted hair repelled him. The rest of the goats stood on a rise some distance away, their ears pricked towards him. He found it hard to believe that he had spent a day chasing after them like a madman with a knife. He had a vision of himself riding the ewe to death under the mud by the light of the moon, and shuddered. He would have liked to bury the ewe somewhere and forget the episode; or else, best of all, to slap the creature on its haunch and see it scramble to its feet and trot off. It took him hours to drag it back across the veld to the house. There was no way of unlocking the doors: he had to lift it through a window to get it into the kitchen. Then it occurred to him that it would be stupid to butcher it indoors, if the kitchen with its plants and birds could be counted as part of the indoors. So he hauled it out again. He had a feeling that he was losing his grip on why he had come all these hundreds of miles, and had to pace about with his hands over his face before he felt better again.

He had never cleaned an animal before. There was nothing to use but the penknife. He slit the belly and pushed his arm into the slit; he expected blood-heat but inside the goat encountered again the clammy wetness of marsh-mud. He wrenched and the organs came tumbling out at his feet, blue and purple and pink; he had to drag the carcase a distance away before he could con-tinue. He peeled back as much of the skin as he was able but could not cut off the feet and head until, searching in the shed, he found a bowsaw. In the end the flayed carcase that he hung from the pantry ceiling seemed diminutive by comparison with

the mound of remains that he rolled in a sack and buried in the top tier of the rockery. His hands and sleeves were full of gore; there was no water nearby; he scoured himself with sand but was still followed by flies when he returned to the house.

He brushed the stove clean and made a fire. There was nothing to cook in. He cut off a haunch and held it over the open flame till it was charred on the outside and juices dripped. He ate without pleasure, thinking only: What will I do when the goat is consumed?

He was sure he had caught a cold. His skin felt hot and dry, his head ached, he swallowed with difficulty. He took glass jars to the dam to fill with water. On the way back his strength suddenly deserted him and he had to sit down. Sitting in the bare veld with his head between his knees he allowed himself to imagine lying in a clean bed between crisp white sheets. He coughed, and gave a little hoot like an owl, and heard the sound depart from him without trace of an echo. Though his throat hurt, he made the sound again. It was the first time he had heard his own voice since Prince Albert. He thought: Here I can make any sound I like.

By nightfall he was feverish. He dragged his bed of sacks into the front room and slept there. He had a dream in which he lay in pitch darkness in the dormitory of Huis Norenius. When he stretched out his hand he touched the head of the iron bedstead; from the coir mattress came the smell of old urine. Afraid to move lest he wake the boys sleeping all about him, he lay with his eyes open so that he would not lapse back into the perils of sleep. It is four o'clock, he said to himself, by six o'clock it will be light. No matter how wide he opened his eyes he could not make out the position of the window. His eyelids grew heavy. I am falling, he thought.

In the morning he felt stronger. He put on his shoes and wandered about the house. On top of a wardrobe he found a suitcase; but it contained only broken toys and pieces of jigsaw puzzle.

There was nothing in the house of use to him, nor anything that gave a clue to why the Visagies who had lived here before him had departed.

The kitchen and pantry were noisy with the buzzing of flies. Though he had no appetite, he lit a fire and boiled a little of the goat-meat in water in a jam tin. He found tealeaves in a jar in the pantry; he made tea and went back to bed. He had begun to cough.

The box of ashes waited in a corner of the living-room. He hoped that his mother, who was in some sense in the box and in some sense not, being released, a spirit released into the air, was more at peace now that she was nearer her natal earth.

There was a pleasure in abandoning himself to sickness. He opened all the windows and lay listening to the doves, or to the stillness. He dozed and woke throughout the day. When the afternoon sun shone straight in on him he closed the shutters.

In the evening he was delirious again. He was trying to cross an arid landscape that tilted and threatened to tip him over its edge. He lay flat, dug his fingers into the earth, and felt himself swooping through darkness.

After two days the hot and cold fits ended; after another day he began to recover. The goat in the pantry was stinking. The lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals. He cut himself a Y-shaped stick and, with the tongue of an old shoe and strips of rubber from an inner tube, made himself a catapult with which to knock birds out of the trees. He buried the remains of the goat.

He explored the single-roomed cottages on the hillside behind the farmhouse. They were built of brick and mortar, with cement floors and iron roofs. It was not possible that they were half a century old. But a few yards away a little rectangle of weathered mudbrick stood out from the bare earth. Was this where his mother had been born, amid a garden of prickly pear? He fetched the box of ashes from the house, set it in the middle of the

rectangle, and sat down to wait. He did not know what he expected; whatever it was, it did not happen. A beetle scurried across the ground. The wind blew. There was a cardboard box standing in the sunlight on a patch of baked mud, nothing more. There was another step, apparently, that he had to take but could not yet imagine.

He followed the perimeter fence all the way around the farm without meeting any living sign of neighbours. In a trough covered with a sheet of iron he found mouldering sheep-feed; he picked out a handful of mealies and put them in his pocket. He returned to the pump and fiddled with it till he discovered how the brake mechanism worked. He rejoined the broken cable and stopped the crazy dry spinning of the wheel.

Though he continued to sleep in the house he was not at ease there. Roaming from one empty room to another he felt as insubstantial as air. He sang to himself and heard his voice echo from walls and ceiling. He shifted his bed to the kitchen, where he could at least see stars through the hole in the roof. His days he spent at the dam. One morning he took off all his clothes and washed them, standing chestdeep in the water and pounding them against the wall; for the rest of the day, while the clothes dried, he dozed in the shade of a tree.

The time came to return his mother to the earth. He tried to dig a hole on the crest of the hill west of the dam, but an inch from the surface the spade met solid rock. So he moved to the edge of what had been cultivated land below the dam and dug a hole as deep as his elbow. He laid the packet of ash in the hole and dropped the first spadeful of earth on top of it. Then he had misgivings. He closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping that a voice would speak reassuring him that what he was doing was right—his mother's voice, if she still had a voice, or a voice belonging to no one in particular, or even his own voice as it sometimes spoke telling him what to do. But no voice came. So he extracted the packet from the hole, taking the responsibility

on himself, and set about clearing a patch a few metres square in the middle of the field. There, bending low so that they would not be carried away by the wind, he distributed the fine grey flakes over the earth, afterwards turning the earth over spadeful by spadeful.

This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator. On a shelf in the shed he had found a packet of pumpkin seeds, some of which he had already idly roasted and eaten; he still had the mealie kernels; and on the pantry floor he had even picked up a solitary bean. In the space of a week he cleared the land near the dam and restored the system of furrows that irrigated it. Then he planted a small patch of pumpkins and a small patch of mealies; and some distance away on the river bank, where he would have to carry water to it, he planted his bean, so that if it grew it could climb into the thorntrees. For the most part he was living on birds that he killed with his catapult. His days were divided between this form of hunting, which he carried on nearer the farmhouse, and the tilling of the soil. His deepest pleasure came at sunset when he turned open the cock at the dam wall and watched the stream of water run down its channels to soak the earth, turning it from fawn to deep brown. It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature. He sharpened the blade of his spade on a stone, the better to savour the instant when it clove the earth. The impulse to plant had been reawoken in him; now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there.

There were times, particularly in the mornings, when a fit of exultation would pass through him at the thought that he, alone and unknown, was making this deserted farm bloom. But following upon the exultation would sometimes come a sense of pain that was obscurely connected with the future; and then it was only brisk work that could keep him from lapsing into gloominess.

The borehole, pumped dry, yielded only a weak and intermittent stream. It became K's deepest wish for the flow of water from the earth to be restored. He pumped only as much as his garden needed, allowing the level in the dam to drop to a few inches and watching without emotion as the marsh dried up, the mud caked, the grass withered, the frogs turned on their backs and died. He did not know how underground waters replenished themselves but knew it was bad to be prodigal. He could not imagine what lay beneath his feet, a lake or a running stream or a vast inner sea or a pool so deep it had no bottom. Every time he released the brake and the wheel spun and water came, it seemed to him a miracle; he hung over the dam wall, closed his eyes, and held his fingers in the stream.

He lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time. Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness.

Then one day, returning to the house at noontime, he saw the front door wide open; and while he still stood confounded a figure emerged from the interior into the sunlight, a pale plump young man in khaki uniform. 'Do you work here?' were this stranger's first words. He stood at the head of the steps as if he owned the house. There was nothing for K to do but nod. 'I have never seen you before,' said the stranger.

'Are you looking after the farm?' K nodded. 'When did the kitchen fall in like that?' he asked. Trying to bring out words, K stumbled. The stranger did not shift his gaze from K's bad mouth. Then he spoke again. 'You don't know who I am, do you?' he said. 'I am boss Visagie's grandson. '

K removed his sacks from the kitchen to one of the rooms on the hillside and yielded the house to the new Visagie. He felt the old hopeless stupidity invading him, which he tried to beat back. Perhaps he will stay only a day or two, he thought, when he sees that there is nothing good enough for him here; perhaps he will be the one to go and I will be the one to stay.

But the grandson, it emerged, was not able to go. That same evening, when K had made a fire up on the hillside and was broiling a pair of bushdoves for his supper, the grandson appeared out of the dusk and hung around so long that K felt obliged to offer him a share. He ate like a hungry boy. There was not enough for both of them. Then his story came out. 'When you go to Prince Albert, I want you to take care not to mention it to anyone that I am here,' he began. He was, it turned out, a deserter from the army. He had slipped off a troop train at Kruidfontein siding the previous evening and walked across country all night, arriving at last at the farm he remembered from his schoolboy days. 'Our family used to spend every Christmas here,' he said. 'Family would keep coming till the house was bursting at the seams. I've never seen such eating as we used to do. Day after day my grandmother would pile the table with food, good country food, and we would eat every last scrap. Karoo lamb like you never taste any more.' K sat on his heels poking the fire, barely listening, thinking: I let myself believe that this was one of those islands without an owner. Now I am learning the truth. Now I am learning my lesson. Meanwhile the more he talked the more vehement the grandson became. He was anaemic, he said, he had a weak heart, it was in his papers, no one contested it, yet here they were sending him to the front. They were reassigning clerks and sending them to the front. Did they think they could do without clerks? Did they think they could run the war without a paymaster's office? If they came looking for him, the regular police or the military police, to take him back and make an example of him, K must play dumb. He must play the idiot and reveal nothing. Meanwhile he, the grandson, would make a hiding-place for himself. He knew the farm, he would find a place where they would never dream of looking. It would be better if K

did not know the hiding-place. Could K find him a saw? He needed a saw, he wanted to begin work first thing in the morning. K agreed to look. Then

followed a long silence. 'Is this all you eat?' asked the grandson. K nodded. 'You should plant potatoes,'

said the grandson. 'Potatoes, onions, mealies—anything will grow here if you give it enough water. This is good soil. I'm surprised you don't grow a few things for yourself down by the dam.' A pang of disappointment cut through K: even the dam was known about. 'My grandparents were lucky to find you,'

the grandson went on. 'People have a hard time finding good farm servants nowadays. What is your name?' 'Michael,' answered K. It was dark now. The grandson stood up uncertainly. 'You haven't got a torch?' he asked. 'No,' said K; and watched him pick his way down the hillside in the moonlight. Morning came and there was no longer anything for him to do. He could not go to the dam without betraying his garden. He sat on his heels against the wall of the room, feeling the sun warm his body, feeling time pass, till the grandson came climbing the hill again. He is ten years younger than me, K

thought. The climb brought a flush to his skin.

'Michael, there is nothing to eat!' the grandson complained. 'Don't you ever go to the shop?' Without waiting for a reply he pushed open the door of the room and peered inside. He seemed about to pass a comment, but then stopped himself.

'How much do they pay you, Michael?' he said.

He thinks I am truly an idiot, thought K. He thinks I am an idiot who sleeps on the floor like an animal and lives on birds and lizards and does not know there is such a thing as money. He looks at the badge on my beret and asks himself what child gave it to me out of what lucky packet.

'Two rand,' said K. 'Two rand a week.'

'So what news do you have of my grandparents? Don't they ever visit?'

K was silent.

'Where do you come from? You are not from here, are you?'

'I have been all over,' said K. 'I have been in the Cape loo.'

'Aren't there sheep on the farm?' said the grandson. 'Aren't there goats? Didn't I see goats yesterday, ten or twelve goats out beyond the dam?' He looked at his watch. 'Come, let's go and find the goats.'

K remembered the goat in the mud. 'Those are goats that have gone wild,' he said. 'You will never catch them.'

'We'll catch them at the dam. The two of us will manage.'