'They come to the dam at night,' said K. 'During the day they are out in the veld.' To himself he thought: A soldier without a gun. A boy on an adventure. To him the farm is just a place of adventure. He said:

'Leave the goats, I'll get you something to eat.'

So while the sound of sawing came from the house, K took his catapult and walked down to the river and in an hour had killed three sparrows and a dove. He brought the dead birds to the front door and knocked. The grandson, stripped to the waist and sweating, came to meet him. 'Very good,' he said. 'Can you clean them quickly? I would appreciate that.'

K held up the four dead birds, their feet together in a tangle of claws. There was a pearl of blood at the beak of one of the sparrows. 'So small you don't taste it as it goes down,' he said. 'You wouldn't get yourself dirty, not even your little finger.'

'What the hell does that mean?' said the Visagie grandson. 'What the fuck do you mean? If you want to say something, say it! Put those things down, I'll take care of them!' So K laid the four birds down on the stoep at the front door and departed.

The first stubby pumpkin leaves were pushing through the earth, one here, one there. K opened the sluice for the last time and watched the water wash slowly across the field, turning the earth dark. Now when I am most needed, he thought, I abandon my children. He closed the sluice and bent the stem of the ball down till the cock was jammed shut, cutting the flow to the trough from which the goats drank. He brought four jars of water back and set them on the steps.

The grandson, wearing his shirt again, stood with his hands in his pockets staring into the distance. After a long silence he spoke. 'Michael,' he said, 'I'm not the one who pays you, I can't put you off the farm just like that. But we have to work together, otherwise—' He turned his gaze on K. The words, whatever they stood for, accusation, threat, reprimand, seemed to K to smother him. It is nothing but a manner, he told himself: be calm. Nevertheless he felt stupidity creep over him like a fog again. He no longer knew what to do with his face. He rubbed his mouth and stared at the grandson's brown boots, thinking: You can't buy boots like that in the shops any more. He tried to hold to the thought to steady himself.

'I want you to go to Prince Albert for me, Michael,' said the grandson, i will give you a list of things I want, and money. I will give you something for yourself too. Just don't talk to anyone. Don't say you have seen me, don't say who you are getting the things for. Don't say you are getting them for anyone. Don't get everything at the same shop. Get half at Van Rhyn's and half at the café. Don't stop and talk—pretend you are in a hurry. Do you understand?'

Let me not lose my way, K thought. He nodded. The grandson went on.

'Michael, I am speaking to you as one human being to another. There is a war on, there are people dying. Well, I am at war with no one. I have made my peace. Do you understand? I make my peace with everyone. There is no war here on the farm. You and I can live here quietly till they make peace everywhere. No one will disturb us. Peace has got to come one of these days.

'Michael, I worked in the paymaster's office, I know what is going on. I know how many men are going eleven-63 every month, whereabouts unknown, pay stopped, docket opened. Do you know what I mean? I could give you figures that would shock you. I'm not the only one. Soon they are not going to have enough men, I'm telling you, they are not going to have enough men to

track down the men who are running away! This is a big country! Just look around you! Lots of places to go! Lots of places to hide!

'I just want to keep out of sight for a little while. They will soon give up. I'm just a little fish in a big ocean. But I need your co-operation, Michael. You must help me. Otherwise there is no future for either of us. Do you see?'

So K left the farm carrying the list of things the grandson needed and forty rand in notes. He picked up an old tin by the roadside, and at the gate of the farm buried the money in the tin under a stone. Then he cut across country, keeping the sun on his left and avoiding all habitation. In the afternoon he began to climb, till the neat white houses of the town of Prince Albert emerged below him to the west. Keeping to the slopes, he skirted the town and joined the road that led up into the Swartberg. He tramped uphill in dark shadow wearing his mother's coat against the chill.

High above the town he cast around for a place to sleep and found a cave that had evidently been used before by campers. There was a stone fireplace, and a bed of fragrant dry thymebush was spread over the floor. He made a fire and roasted a lizard he had killed with a stone. The funnel of the sky above turned a darker blue and stars emerged. He curled up, tucked his hands into his sleeves, and drifted towards sleep. Already it was hard to believe that he had known someone called the Visagie grandson who had tried to turn him into a body-servant. In a day or two, he told himself, he would forget the boy and remember only the farm.

He thought of the pumpkin leaves pushing through the earth. Tomorrow will be their last day, he thought: the day after that they will wilt, and the day after that they will die, while I am out here in the mountains. Perhaps if I started at sunrise and ran all day I would not be too late to save them, them and the other seeds that are going to die underground, though they do not know it, that are never going to see the light of day. There was

a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut. It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again. He spent a day in idleness, sitting in the mouth of his cave gazing up at the farther peaks on which there were still patches of snow. He felt hungry but did nothing about it. Instead of listening to the crying of his body he tried to listen to the great silence about him. He went to sleep easily and had a dream in which he was running as fast as the wind along an open road with the cart floating behind him on tyres that barely skimmed the ground.

The sides of the valley were so steep that the sun did not emerge till noon and had gone behind the western peaks by mid-afternoon. He was cold all the time. So he climbed higher, zigzagging up the slope till the road through the pass disappeared from sight and he was looking over the vast plain of the Karoo, with Prince Albert itself miles below. He found a new cave and cut bushes for the floor. He thought: Now surely I have come as far as a man can come; surely no one will be mad enough to cross these plains, climb these mountains, search these rocks to find me; surely now that in all the world only I know where I am, I can think of myself as lost.

Everything else was behind him. When he awoke in the morning he faced only the single huge block of the day, one day at a time. He thought of himself as a termite boring its way through a rock. There seemed nothing to do but live. He sat so still that it would not have startled him if birds had flown down and perched on his shoulders.

Straining his eyes he could sometimes make out the dot of a vehicle crawling down the main street of the toy town on the plain below; but even on the stillest of days no sound reached him save the scurrying of insects across the ground, and the buzz

of flies that had not forgotten him, and the pulse of blood in his fears. He did not know what was going to happen. The story of his life had never been an interesting one; there had usually been someone to tell him what to do next; now there was no one, and the best thing seemed to be to wait.

His thoughts went to Wynberg Park, one of the places where he had worked in the old days. He remembered the young mothers who had brought their children to play on the swings, and the couples lying together in the shade of the trees, and the green and brown mallards in the pond. Presumably the grass had not stopped growing in Wynberg Park because there was a war, and the leaves had not stopped falling. There would always be a need for people to mow the grass and sweep up the leaves. But he was no longer sure that he would choose green lawns and oak-trees to live among. When he thought of Wynberg Park he thought of an earth more vegetal than mineral, composed of last year's rotted leaves and the year before's and so on back till the beginning of time, an earth so soft that one could dig and never come to the end of the softness; one could dig to the centre of the earth from Wynberg Park, and all the way to the centre it would be cool and dark and damp and soft. I have lost my love for that kind of earth, he thought, I no longer care t feel that kind of earth between my fingers. It is no longer the green and the brown that I want but the yellow and the red; not the wet but the dry; not the dark but the light; not the soft but the hard. I am becoming a different kind of man, he thought, if there are two kinds of man. If I were cut, he thought, holding his wrists out, looking at his wrists, the blood would no longer gush from me but seep, and after a little seeping dry and heal. I am becoming smaller and harder and drier every day. If I were to die here, sitting in the mouth of my cave looking out over the plain with my knees under my chin, I would be dried out by the wind in a day, I

would be preserved whole, like someone in the desert drowned in sand.

In his first days in the mountains he went for walks, turned over stones, nibbled at roots and bulbs. Once he broke open an ant-nest and ate grubs one by one. They tasted like fish. But now he ceased to make an adventure of eating and drinking. He did not explore his new world. He did not turn his cave into a home or keep a record of the passage of the days. There was nothing to look forward to but the sight, every morning, of the shadow of the rim of the mountain chasing faster and faster towards him till all of a sudden he was bathed in sunlight. He would sit or lie in a stupor at the mouth of the cave, too tired to move or perhaps too lackadaisical. There were whole afternoons he slept through. He wondered if he were living in what was known as bliss. There was a day of dark cloud and rain, after which tiny pink flowers sprang up all over the mountainside, flowers without any leaf that he could see. He ate handfuls of flowers and his stomach hurt. As the days became hotter the streams ran faster, he could not see why. In this crisp mountain water he missed the bitter savour of water from under the earth. His gums bled; he drank the blood.

As a child K had been hungry, like all the children of Huis Norenius. Hunger had turned them into animals who stole from one another's plates and climbed the kitchen enclosure to rifle the garbage cans for bones and peelings. Then he had grown older and stopped wanting. Whatever the nature of the beast that had howled inside him, it was starved into stillness. His last years at Huis Norenius were the best, when there were no big boys to torment him, when he could slip off to his place behind the shed and be left alone. One of the teachers used to make his class sit with their hands on their heads, their lips pressed tightly together and their eyes closed, while he patrolled the rows with his long ruler. In time, to K, the posture grew to lose its meaning as punishment and became an avenue of reverie; he remembered

sitting, hands on head, through hot afternoons with doves cooing in the gum trees and the chant of the tables coming from other classrooms, struggling with a delicious drowsiness. Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing.

There were other times when his mind would return to the Visagie boy in his hiding-place, wherever that was, in darkness under the floor among the mouse-droppings, or shut up in a cupboard in the attic, or out in his grandfather's veld behind a bush. He thought of the nice pair of boots: they seemed wasted on someone who lived in a hole.

It became an effort not to shut his eyes against the glare of the sun. There was a throbbing that would not leave him; lances of light pierced his head. Then he could keep nothing down; even water made him retch. There was a day when he was too tired to get up from his bed in the cave; the black coat lost its warmth and he shivered continually. It came home to him that he might die, he or his body, it was the same thing, that he might lie here till the moss on the roof grew dark before his eyes, that his story might end with his bones growing white in this faroff place.

It took him all of a day to creep down the mountainside. His legs were weak, his head hammered, every time he looked downward he grew dizzy and had to grip the earth till the whirling stopped. When he reached the level of the road the valley was in deep shadow; the last light was fading by the time he entered the town. The smell of peach-blossom enveloped him. There was a voice too, coming from all sides, the calm even voice he had heard the first day he saw Prince Albert. He stood at the head of the High Street among the verdant gardens, unable to make out a word, though he listened hard, of the distant monotone that after a while blended with the twitter of the birds in the trees and then gave way to music. There was no one on the streets. K made his bed in the doorway

of the Volkskas office with a rubber doormat under his head. When his body had cooled he began to shiver. He slept in fits, clenching his jaws against the pain in his head. A flashlight woke him but he could not separate it from the dream in which he was involved. To the questions of the police he gave unclear answers, shouts and gasps. 'Don't! . . . Don't! . . . Don't! . . .' he said, the word coming out like a cough from his lungs. Understanding nothing, repelled by his smell, they pushed him into their van, took him back to the station, and locked him in a cell with five other men, where he resumed his shivering and his delirious sleep.

In the morning, when they led the prisoners out for ablutions and breakfast, K was rational but unable to stand. He apologized to the constable at the door. 'It is cramp in my legs, it will go away,' he said. The constable called tbe duty officer. For a while they watched the skeletal figure that sat with its back to the wall rubbing its exposed calves; then together they bore K bodily into the yard, where he cringed from the brilliant sunlight, and motioned to another of the prisoners to give him food. K accepted a thick slab of mealie-porridge but, even before the first spoonful had reached his mouth, had begun his retching. No one knew where he was from. He had no papers on him, not even a green card. On the charge sheet he was listed 'Michael Visagie—CM—40—NFA—Unemployed, ' and charged with leaving his magisterial district without authorization, not being in possession of an identification document, infringing the curfew, and being drunk and disorderly. Attributing his debilitation and incoherence to alcohol poisoning, they permitted him to stay in the yard while the other prisoners were returned to the cells, then at noon took him in the back of the van to the hospital. There he was stripped of his clothes and lay naked on a rubber sheet while a young nurse washed and shaved him and dressed him in a white smock. He felt no shame. 'Tell me, I have always wanted to know, who is Prince Albert?' he asked the nurse. She paid no

attention. 'And who is Prince Alfred? Isn't there a Prince Alfred too?' He waited for the soft warm rag to touch his face, closing his eyes, willing it to come.

So he lay again between clean sheets, not in the main ward but in a long wood-and-iron extension at the rear of the hospital, housing, as far as he could see, only children and old men. A row of light bulbs hung on long cords from the bare rafters, swaying out of time with one another. A tube ran out of his arm to a bottle on a rack; out of the corner of his eye he could watch the level fall hour by hour, if he wanted to. Once when he awoke there were a nurse and a policeman in the doorway looking in his direction, murmuring together. The policeman carried his cap under his arm.

The afternoon sun glared through the window. A fly settled on his mouth. He waved it away. It circled and settled again. He yielded; his lip underwent the tiny cold searching of its proboscis. An orderly came in with a trolley. Everyone got a tray except K. Smelling the food, be felt the saliva seep in his mouth. It was the first hunger he had known for a long time. He was not sure that he wanted to become a servant to hunger again; but a hospital, it seemed, was a place for bodies, where bodies asserted their rights.

Dusk fell, and then darkness. Someone switched on the lights, in two banks of three. K closed his eyes and slept. When he opened them again the lights were still on. Then as he watched they faded and went off. Moonlight fell in four silver slabs through the four windows. Somewhere nearby a diesel motor sputtered. The lights came on dimly. He fell asleep.

In the morning he ate and kept down a breakfast of baby cereal and milk. He felt strong enough to get up, but was too shy to do so till he saw an old man wrap a dressing-gown over his pyjamas and leave the room. After that he walked up and down beside his bed for a while, feeling odd in the long smock. In the next bed was a young boy with a bandaged stump of

an arm. 'What happened?' said K. The boy turned away and did not reply.

If I could find my clothes, K thought, I would leave. But the cupboard beside his bed was empty.

, He ate again at midday. 'Eat while you can,' said the orderly who brought his food, 'the great hunger is still to come.' Then he moved on, pushing the trolley of food before him. It seemed a strange thing to say. K kept an eye on him as he went his round. From the far end of the ward the orderly felt K's gaze, and gave him a mysterious smile; but when he returned to fetch the tray he would say nothing more. The sun beating down on the iron roof turned the ward into an oven. K lay with his legs spread, dozing. From one of his spells he awoke to see the same policeman and nurse standing over him. He shut his eyes; when he opened them they were gone. Night fell.

In the morning a nurse fetched him and led him to a bench in the main building, where he waited an hour till it was his turn. 'How are you feeling today?' asked the doctor. K hesitated, not knowing what to say, and the doctor stopped listening. He told K to breathe and listened to his chest. He examined him for venereal infection. In two minutes it was over. He wrote something in the brown folder on his desk. 'Have you ever seen a doctor about your mouth?' he asked while he wrote. 'No,' said K. 'You could get it corrected, you know,' said the doctor, but did not offer to correct it.

K returned to his bed and waited with his hands under his head till the nurse brought him clothes: underpants and a khaki shirt and shorts, neatly ironed. 'Put these on,' she said, and busied herself elsewhere. Sitting up in bed, K put them on. The shorts were too big. When he stood up he had to hold the waist-band to stop them from slipping down. Then he saw the policeman at the door. 'These are too big, '

he said to the nurse. 'Can't I have my own clothes?' 'You will get your own clothes back at the

desk,' she told him. The policeman led him down the corridor to the reception desk and there took charge of a brown paper parcel. No words passed. There was a blue van in the parking lot. K waited for the back to be unlocked; the tarmac was so hot under his bare soles that he had to dance where he stood. He expected to be taken back to the police station, but instead they drove all the way through the town and then five kilometres down a dirt road to a camp in the bare veld. K had seen the ochre rectangle of Jakkalsdrif from his perch in the mountains but had thought it was a construction site. Not for a moment had he guessed that it might be one of the resettlement camps, that the tents and unpainted wood-and-iron buildings might house people, that its perimeter might be a three-metre fence surmounted with a strand of barbed wire. When he climbed out of the van holding up his pants, he did so under the eyes of a hundred curious inmates, adults and children, lining the fence on either side of the gate. By the gate stood a little hut with a covered porch on which identical grey-green succulents grew out of two tubs of earth. On the porch waited a stout man in military uniform. K recognized the blue beret of the Free Corps. The policeman greeted him and they retired together into the hut. With his parcel under his arm K was left to endure the inspection of the crowd. He stared first into the distance, then at his feet; he did not know what expression to wear. 'Where did you steal those pants?' called out someone. 'Off Sarge's line!' came another voice, and there was a ripple of laughter.

Then a second Free Corps man emerged from the hut. He unlocked the camp gate and conducted K

through the crowd, crossing the bare earth of the assembly square to one of the wood-and-iron buildings. It was dark inside, there were no windows. He indicated an empty bunk. 'That's your home from now on,'

he said. 'It's the only home you've got, keep it clean. ' K clambered up and stretched out on the bare foam rubber no more than an

armslength from the iron roof. In the dim light, in the stifling heat he waited for the guard to leave. All afternoon he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds of camp life outside. Once a troop of children rushed in and chased one another noisily over and under the bunks; when they left they slammed the door shut. He tried to sleep but could not. His throat was parched. He thought of the cool of his cave up in the mountains, of the streams that never stopped running. This is like Huis Norenius, he thought: I am back in Huis Norenius a second time, only now I am too old to bear it. He took off the khaki shirt and shorts and opened the package; but the clothes whose smell used to be simply his own smell had in the space of a few days grown stale and frowzy and alien. Spreadeagled on the hot mattress in his undershorts, he waited for the afternoon to pass.

Someone opened the door and tiptoed across the floor. K pretended to be asleep. Fingers touched his bare arm. He flinched at the touch. 'Are you all right?' said a man's voice. Against the dazzle of light from the doorway he could not make out the face. 'I'm fine,' he said: the words seemed to come from far away. The stranger tiptoed off again. K thought: I needed more warning, I should have been told I was going to be sent back amongst people.

Later he put on the khaki clothes and went outside. The sun baked down, there was no breath of wind. Two women lay together on a blanket in the shade of a tent. One was asleep, the other had a sleeping child at her breast. She gave K a smile; he nodded and passed. He found the cistern and drank copiously. On his return he addressed her. 'Is there anywhere I can wash some clothes?' he asked. She pointed out the washhouse. 'Have you got soap?' she said. 'Yes,' he lied.

In the washhouse were two basins and two showers. He wanted to have a shower, but when he tried the shower tap there was

no water. He washed the white St. John's jacket, the black trousers, the yellow shirt and underpants with the sagging elastic; he found pleasure in soaking and wringing, in standing with his eyes shut and his arms plunged to the elbows in cold water. He put on his own shoes. Afterwards, when he went to drape his clothes over the washline, he saw the painted sign against the wall: jakkalsdrif RELOCATION CAMP / BATH TIMES / MALES 6-7 AM / FEMALES 7-30-8.30 am / by order / save water / be sparing. Following the line of the waterpipe from the cistern, he saw it run under the camp fence and then on to a pump on high ground some distance away. The woman with the baby stopped him as he passed. 'You leave your clothes there,' she warned, 'they'll be gone in the morning.' So he fetched the damp clothing back and spread it over his bunk. The sun was setting; there were more people about now, and children everywhere. Three old men were playing cards outside the next hut. For a while he stood and watched.

He counted thirty tents evenly spaced over the camp terrain, and seven huts besides the bathhouse and latrines. Foundations for a second row of huts had been laid, and rusty bolts jutted from the concrete. He walked over to the gate. On the guardhouse porch one of the two Free Corps sentries sat in a deckchair dozing, his shirt open to the waist. K leaned his head against the mesh, willing the guard to wake. 'Why have I been sent here?' he wanted to say. 'How long do I have to stay?' But the guard went on sleeping, and K lacked the courage to shout.

He wandered back to the hut, and from the hut to the cistern. He did not know what to do with himself. A young girl came with a bucket to fill, but stopped when she saw him and went away. He retreated to the back fence of the camp and stared out over the empty veld.

In one or two of the stone fireplaces amongst the tents there were now fires burning; there was a bustle of people coming and going; the camp was coming to life.

A blue police van arrived in a cloud of dust and pulled up at the gate, followed by an open truck with men standing packed together in the back. Every child in the camp rushed to the gate. The guard let the van through, and it drove slowly to the fourth in the row of huts, the one with the stovepipe. Two women got out and unlocked the hut; behind them followed the police driver carrying a cardboard box. From the back fence K could faintly hear the crackling of the radio in the van. Soon a first puff of black smoke came from the pipe.

Men from the truck were unloading bundles of firewood and stacking them inside the gate. The policeman returned to his van and sat in the cab combing his hair. One of the women, the large one in slacks, emerged from the hut and beat on a triangle. Before the last note had died away there was a crowd of children jostling at the door, carrying mugs or plates or tin cans, and mothers with infants. The woman cleared a space and began to let the children in two by two. K wandered over and joined the back of the crowd. When the children emerged, he saw, they had soup and slices of bread. A little boy, bumped as he came out, spilled his soup over his legs. Walking gingerly, as though he had wet himself, he rejoined the line. Some of the children sat down on the bare ground outside the hut to eat, others carried their supper back to the tents.

K approached the woman at the door. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'can I have something to eat? I haven't got a plate. I come from the hospita.'

'It's for the children only,' replied the woman, and looked away.

He went back to his hut and put on the black trousers, which were still damp. The khaki shorts he tossed under a bunk.

He spoke to the policeman in the van. 'Where do I get something to eat?' he said. 'I didn't ask to come here. Now where must I get food?'

'This isn't jail,' said the policeman, 'this is a camp, you work for your food like everyone else in the camp.'

'How can I work when I am locked up? Where is the work I must do?'

'Fuck off,' said the policeman. 'Ask your friends. Who do you think you are that I should give you a free living?'

It was better in the mountains, K thought. It was better on the farm, it was better on the road. It was better in Cape Town. He thought of the hot dark hut, of strangers lying packed about him on their bunks, of air thick with derision. It is like going back to childhood, he thought: it is like a nightmare. There were more fires burning now, and a smell of cooking, even of meat grilling. The woman in slacks beckoned him over to the kitchen and handed him a plastic bucket. 'Wash this,' she said, 'and put it inside here. Lock the door. You know how a padlock works?' K nodded. There was a layer of soup mush at the bottom of the bucket. The two women got into the van with the policeman; as they drove off, K noticed, they looked straight ahead of them as though there were nothing left to be curious about in the camp. Darkness fell. Around the fires there were groups eating and talking; later on someone began to play a guitar and there was dancing. At first K hung about in the shadows looking on; then, feeling foolish, he went and lay down on his bunk in the empty hut.

Someone entered: he turned as the dark shape approached him. 'Want a cigarette?' said a voice. K

accepted the cigarette and sat up hunched against the wall. By the light of the match he saw a man older than himself.

'Where are you from?' said the man.

'I walked around the back fence this afternoon, ' said K. 'Anyone can climb it. A child could climb it in a minute. Why do people stay here?'

'This isn't a prison,' said the man. 'Didn't you hear the policeman tell you it isn't a prison? This is Jakkalsdrif. This is a camp. Don't you know what a camp is? A camp is for people without jobs. It is for all the people who go around from farm to farm begging for work because they haven't got food, they haven't got a roof over their heads. They put all the people like that together in a camp so that they won't have to beg any more. You say why don't I run away. But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here? From soft beds like this and free wood and a man at the gate with a gun to stop the thieves from coming in the night to steal your money? Where do you come from that you don't know these things?'

K was silent. He did not understand who was being blamed.

'You climb the fence,' the man said, 'and you have left your place of abode. Jakkalsdrif is your place of abode now. Welcome. You leave your place of abode, they pick you up, you are a vagrant. No place of abode. First time, Jakkalsdrif. Second time, Brandvlei. You want to go to Brandvlei, penal servitude, hard labour, brickfields, guards with whips? You climb the fence, they pick you up, it's a second offence, you go to Brandvlei. Remember that. It's your choice. Where do you want to go anyway? He dropped his voice. 'You want to go to the mountains?

K did not know what he meant. The man slapped him on the leg. 'Come out and join the party,' he said.

'You see them searching/people at the gate? Searching for liquor. No liquor in the camp, by order. So come out and have a drink.'

Thus K allowed himself to be led out to the group gathered around the guitar-player. The music stopped.

'This is Michael,' the man said. 'He has come all the way to Jakkalsdrif for his

holiday. Let's make him welcome.' K was pressed to sit down, offered wine out of a bottle wrapped in brown paper, and besieged with questions: Where did he come from? What was he doing in Prince Albert? Where had he been picked up? No one could understand why he should have left the city and come to this lonely part of the world where there was no work and where entire families had been turned off farms they had lived on for generations.

'I was bringing my mother to live in Prince Albert,' K tried to explain. 'She was sick, her legs were giving her trouble. She wanted to live in the country, to get away from the rain. It was raining all the time where we lived. But she died on the way, in Stellenbosch, in the hospital there. So she never saw Prince Albert. She was born here.'

'Poor lady,' said a woman. 'But haven't you got Welfare in the Cape?' She did not wait for K's answer.

'There is no Welfare here. This is our Welfare.' She waved an arm to embrace the camp. K pressed on. 'Then I worked on the railways,' he said. 'I helped to clear the line when there was a blockage. Then I came here.'

There was a silence. Now I must speak about the ashes, thought K, so as to be complete, so as to have told the whole story. But he found that he could not, or could not yet. The man with the guitar began to pick out a new melody. K felt the attention of the group drift away from him to the music. 'There is no Welfare in Cape Town either,' he said. 'The Welfare stopped.' The tent next door glowed, lit from within by a candle; figures moved in silhouette against the walls larger than life. He reclined and stared up at the stars.

'We've been in for five months now,' said a voice beside him. It was the man from the hut. His name was Robert. 'My wife, my children, three girls and a boy, my sister and her children. I had work near Klaarstroom, on a farm. I'd been there a long time, twelve years. Then suddenly there was no wool market.

Then they started the quota system—only so much wool per farmer. Then they closed the one road to Oudtshoorn, then they closed the other one, then they opened them both, then they closed them for good. So one day he came to me, this farmer, and he said, "I've got to let you go. Too many mouths to feed, I can't afford it." "Where must I go?" I said: "You know there are no jobs." "Sorry," he said, "nothing personal, I just can't afford it any more." So he let me go, me with a family, and he kept on a man who had been there only a short time, a young man, single. Just one mouth to feed—he could afford that. I said to him, "I've got no work now, what can I afford?" Anyway, we packed everything and left; and on the road, I'm not lying, on the road the police picked us up, he had phoned them, they picked us up and that same night we were here in Jakkalsdrif behind the wire. "No fixed abode." I said to them, "Last night I had a fixed abode, how do you know tonight I won't have a fixed abode?" They said, "Where would you rather sleep, out in the veld under a bush like an animal or in a camp with a proper bed and running water?" I said, "Do I get a choice?" They said, "You get a choice and you choose Jakkalsdrif. Because we are not going to have people wandering around being a nuisance." But I'll tell you the real reason, I'll tell you why they were so quick to pick us up. They want to stop people from disappearing into the mountains and then coming back one night to cut their fences and drive their stock away. Do you know how many men there are in this camp—young men?' He leaned towards K and dropped his voice. 'Thirty. You are thirty-one. And how many women and children and old people? Look around, count for yourself. So I ask you, where are the men who aren't here with their families?' 'I was in the mountains,' said K. 'I didn't see anyone.' 'But you ask any of these women where their menfolk are, they will say, "He has got a job, he sends me money every month," or, "He ran away, he left me." So who knows?'

There was a long silence. A tiny light flashed across the heavens. K pointed. 'A shooting star,' he said. The next morning K went out to work. The Railways Administration had first call on the men from Jakkalsdrif, followed by the Prince Albert Divisional Council, followed by the local farmers. The truck came to fetch them at six-thirty, and by seven-thirty they were at work north of Leeu-Gamka, clearing undergrowth from the river-bed upstream and downstream from a railway bridge, digging holes and mixing cement for a security fence. The work was hard; by mid-morning K was flagging. The time in the mountains has turned me into an old man, he thought.

Robert paused beside him. 'Before you break your back, my friend,' he said, 'remember what they pay you. You get standard wage, one rand a day. I get one rand fifty because I have dependants. So don't kill yourself. Go and take a pee. You've been in hospital, you're not well.'

Later, when the midday break came, he offered K one of his sandwiches and stretched out beside him in the shade of a tree. 'Out of your five-six rand a week,' he told him, 'you have to provide your own food. The camp is just a place to sleep. The ACVV ladies—you saw them yesterday—they visit three times a week, but that is charity work for the children only. My wife has a job in the town three half-days a week as a domestic. She takes the baby with her and leaves the other children with my sister. So we bring in maybe twelve rand a week. From that we have to feed nine people, three grownups, six children. Other people have it harder. When there isn't work, too bad, we sit behind the wire and tighten our belts.

'Now the money you earn, there is only one place to spend it, that is Prince Albert. And when you go into a shop in Prince Albert, all of a sudden prices go up. Why? Because you are from the camp. They don't want a camp so near their town. They never wanted it. They ran a big campaign against the camp at the beginning. We breed disease, they said. No hygiene, no mor-

als. A nest of vice, men and women all together. The way they talked, there should be a fence down the middle of the camp, men on one side, women on the other, dogs to patrol it at night. What they would really like—this is my opinion—is for the camp to be miles away in the middle of the Koup out of sight. Then we could come on tiptoe in the middle of the night like fairies and do their work, dig their gardens, wash their pots, and be gone in the morning leaving everything nice and clean.

'So I hear you ask who is in favour of the camp? I'll tell you. First, the Railways. The Railways would like to have a Jakkalsdrif every ten miles along the line. Second, the farmers. Because from a gang from Jakkalsdrif a farmer gets a day's work blood cheap, and at the end of the day the truck fetches them and they are gone and he doesn't have to worry about them or their families, they can starve, they can be cold, he knows nothing, it's none of his business.'

A short distance away, out of earshot, sat the gang foreman on a little folding stool. K watched him pour coffee out of his vacuum flask. His long flat fingers could not all find a place on the ear of the mug. With two fingers in the air he raised it and drank. Over the rim his eyes met K's. What does he see? thought K. What am I to him? The foreman set down the mug, raised his whistle to his lips, and, still sitting, blew a long blast.

Later that afternoon, while he was chopping at the roots of a thornbush, the same foreman came and stood behind him. Glancing under his arm, he saw the two black shoes and the rattan stick tapping idly in the dust, and felt himself trembling with the old nervousness. He went on chopping, but there was no strength in his arms. Only when the foreman moved off could he begin to collect himself. In the evening he was too tired to eat. He took his mattress outside and lay watching the stairs appear one by one out of the violet sky. Then someone on the way to the latrines stumbled over him. There was a commotion, from which he retreated.

Moving the mattress back to the hut, he lay on his bunk in the dark under the roof-plates. On Saturday they were paid and the commissary lorry came. On Sunday a pastor visited the camp to conduct a prayer service, after which the gates were thrown open till curfew time. K went to the service. Standing among the women and children, he joined in the singing. Then the pastor bent his head and prayed. 'Let peace enter our hearts again, O Lord, and grant it to us to return to our homes cherishing bitterness against no man, resolved to live together in fellowship in Thy name, obeying Thy commandments. ' Afterwards he spoke to some of the old people, then climbed into the blue van that had waited for him at the gate and was driven off.

Now they were free to go to Prince Albert, or visit friends, or simply take a walk in the veld. K saw a family of eight, the man and wife in their best sober black, the girls in pink and white dresses with white hats, the boys in grey suits and ties with their feet stuffed into shiny black shoes, set off down the long road to the town. Others followed: a band of girls, laughing, arm in arm; the man with the guitar together with his sister and his girlfriend. 'Why don't we go?' suggested K to Robert. 'Let the youngsters go if they want to,' replied Robert. 'What's so special about Prince Albert on a Sunday? I've seen it before, it's nothing to me. Go with them if you want to. Buy yourself a cool drink and sit outside the café and scratch your fleabites. There is nothing else to do. I say, if we are going to be in jail, let's be in jail, let's not pretend.'

Nevertheless K left the camp. He strolled down the Jakkals-rivier till the wire and the huts and the pump were out of sight. Then he lay down in the warm grey sand with his beret over his face and fell asleep. He awoke sweating. He lifted the beret and squinted into the sun. Striking all the colours of the rainbow from his eyelashes, it filled the sky. I am like an ant that does not know where its hole is, he thought. He dug his hands into the sand and let it pour through his fingers over and over again.

The moustache they had shaved off at the hospital was beginning to cover his lip again. Still, he found it hard to relax with Robert and his family around the fire where the eyes of the children were continually upon him. There was one little boy in particular who pursued him wherever he sat, clutching at his face. The child's mother, embarrassed, would fetch him away, whereupon he would wriggle and whine to be let loose till K did not know what to do or where to look. He suspected that the older girls laughed at him behind his back. He had never known how to behave with women. The Vrouevereniging ladies, perhaps because he was so thin, perhaps because they had decided he was simple, regularly allowed him to clean the soup-bucket: three time a week this made up his meal. He gave half his wages to Robert and carried the other half about in his pocket. There was nothing he wanted to buy; he never went to town. Robert still looked after him in various ways but spared him his speeches about the camp. 'I have never seen anyone as asleep as you,' Robert said. 'Yes,' replied K, struck that Robert too had seen it. The work around the bridge was finished. For two days the men were laid off, then the Council truck came to fetch them to do road grading. K lined up at the gate with the other men, but at the last moment declined to board the truck. 'I'm sick, I can't work,' he told the guard. 'Suit yourself, but you won't be paid,' said the guard.

So K brought his mattress out and lay next to the hut in the shade with an arm over his face while the camp lived its life around him. He lay so still that the smaller children, having first kept their distance, next tried to rouse him, and, when he would not be roused, incorporated his body into their game. They clambered over him and fell upon him as if he were part of the earth. Still hiding his face, he rolled over and found that he could doze even with little bodies riding on his back. He found unexpected pleasure in these games. It felt to him that he was drawing health from the children's touch; he was sorry when men from the

Council arrived to spread lime in the latrine pits and they rushed off to watch. Through the fence K spoke to the guard: 'Can I go out?'

'I thought you were sick. This morning you told me you were sick.'

'I don't want to work. Why do I have to work? This isn't a jail.'

'You don't want to work but you want other people to feed you.'

'I don't need to eat all the time. When I need to eat, I'll work.'

The guard sat in his deckchair on the porch of the tiny guardhouse with his rifle leaning at his side against the wall. He smiled into the distance.

'So can you open the gate?' said K.

'The only way to leave is with the work party,' said the guard.

'And if I climb the fence? What will you do if I climb the fence?'

'You climb the fence and I'll shoot you, I swear to God I won't think twice, so don't try. '

K caressed the wire as if weighing the risk.

'Let me tell you something, my friend,' said the guard, 'for your own good, because you're new here. If I let you out now, in three days you'll be back pleading to be let in. I know. In three days. You'll be standing at the gate here with tears in your eyes pleading with me to let you back. Why do you want to run away? You've got a home here, you've got food, you've got a bed. You've got a job. People are having a hard time out there in the world, you've seen it, I don't need to tell you. For what do you want to join them?'

'I don't want to be in a camp, that's all,' said K. 'Let me climb the fence and go. Turn your back. Nobody will notice I'm gone. You don't even know how many people you've got here.'

'You climb the fence and I'll shoot you dead, mister. No hard feelings. I'm just telling you.'

The next morning K lay in bed while the other men went to

work. Later he walked over to the gate again. The same guard was on duty. He and K talked about football. 'I've got diabetes, ' said the guard. 'That's the reason they never sent me north. Three years now I've been on paperwork, stores, guard duties. You think it's bad in the camp, you try sitting out here twelve hours a day with nothing to do but look at the thornbushes. Still, I'll tell you one thing, my friend, and this is the truth: the day I get orders to go north I walk out. They'll never see me again. It's not my war. Let them fight it, it's their war.'

He wanted to know about K's mouth ('Just curious,' he said), and K told him. He nodded. 'I thought so. But then I thought maybe someone cut you.'

In the guardhouse he had a small paraffin-fuelled refrigerator. He brought out a lunch of cold chicken and bread and shared it with K, passing the food through the mesh. 'We live pretty well, I suppose,' he said,

'considering there's a war on.' He gave a sly smile.

He spoke about the women in the camp, about the visits he and his colleague received at night. 'They're starved for sex,' he said. Then he yawned and returned to his deckchair.

The next morning K was shaken awake by Robert. 'Get dressed, you've got to work, ' Robert said. K

pushed his arm away. 'Come on,' said Robert, 'they want everyone today, no excuses, no arguments, you've got to come. ' Ten minutes later K was standing outside the gate in the chilly early-morning wind, being counted, waiting for the truck. They were driven through the streets of Prince Albert and then out in the direction of Klaarstroom; they took a farm road past a sprawling shaded homestead and halted beside a lush field of lucerne where two police reservists with armbands and rifles stood waiting. As they climbed down they were handed sickles by a farm-worker who did not speak or meet their eyes. A tall man in freshly-pressed khaki slacks appeared. He held up a sickle. 'You all know how to use a sickle,' he called out. 'You've got two morgen to cut. So get down to it!'

Lined up three paces apart, the men began to work their way across the field, bending, gathering, cutting, taking half a step forward, in a rhythm that soon had K sweating and dizzy. 'Cut clean, cut clean!'

bellowed a voice right behind him. K turned and faced the farmer in khaki; he could smell the sweet deodorant he used. 'Where were you brought up, monkey?' shouted the farmer. 'Cut low, cut clean!' He took the sickle from K's hand, pushed him aside, gathered the next tuft of lucerne, and cut it clean and low. 'See?' he shouted. K nodded. 'Then do it, man, do it!' he shouted. K bent and sawed the next tuft off close to the earth. 'Where do they pick up rubbish like that?' he heard the farmer call to one of the reservists. 'He's half-dead! They'll be digging up corpses for us next!'

'I can't go on!' K gasped to Robert at the first break. 'My back is breaking, every time I stand straight the world spins.'

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

K looked at the ragged swathe he had cut.

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

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

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

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

'I don't know,' said K. 'I don't know.'

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

K shrugged.

'You're a baby, ' said Robert. 'You've been asleep all your life. It's time to wake up. Why do you think they give you charity,

you and the children? Because they think you are harmless, your eyes aren't opened, you don't see the truth around you."

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

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

One night in December, woken by excited shouts, the people of the camp stumbled from their beds to behold on the horizon in the direction of Prince Albert a vast and beautiful orange blossom unfolding itself against the murk of the sky. There were gasps and whistles of amazement. 'What's the bet it's the police station!' someone shouted. For an hour they stood and watched while the fire poured out like a fountain consuming itself and

being consumed. There were moments when they were sure they could hear shouts and cries and the roar of the flames across the miles of empty veld. Then by degrees the flower grew redder and duller, the fountain lost its strength, till at last, with some of the children asleep in arms and others rubbing their eyes, and with nothing left to see but a smoky glow in the distance, it was time to go back to bed. The police struck at dawn. In a squad of twenty, regular police and schoolboy reservists, with dogs and guns, with an officer standing on the roof of a van shouting commands through a megaphone, they moved down the rows pulling out the pegs, collapsing the tents, beating at the shapes struggling in the folds. They burst into the huts and beat the sleepers in their beds. A youth who dodged them and ran away was chased into a corner behind the latrines and kicked into insensibility; a small boy was knocked over by a dog and rescued screaming with fright, his scalp lacerated and bleeding. Half-dressed, some wailing, some praying, some stunned with fear, men, women and children were herded on to the open terrain before the huts and ordered to sit down. From there, under the eyes of dogs and men with cocked guns, they watched while the rest of the squad moved like a swarm of locusts through the lines of tents, turning them inside out, hurling everything they had contained into the open, emptying suitcases and boxes, till the site looked like a trash-heap, with clothes, bedding, food, cooking utensils, crockery, toiletries scattered everywhere; after a while they moved on to the huts and turned them to chaos too. Through all this K sat with his beret pulled over his ears against the early-morning wind. The woman beside him had a crying baby with a bare bottom and two little girls who clung tightly to her, one to each arm. 'Come and sit here with me, ' whispered K. to the smaller of the girls. Without taking her eyes from the destruction being visited on them, she stepped over his legs and stood within the protective circle of his arms sucking her thumb.

Her sister joined her. The two stood pressed together; K closed his eyes; the baby continued to kick and whine.

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

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

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

The captain was shouting at the guards, who had come to attention before him. At first K thought he shouted because he was used to the megaphone; but soon the rage behind the shouting became too clear to be missed. 'What are we keeping here in our back yard!' he shouted. 'A nest of criminals! Criminals and saboteurs and idlers! And you! The two of you! You eat and sleep and get fat and from one day to the next you don't know where the people are you are supposed to be guarding! What do you think you are doing here—running a holiday camp? It's a work camp, man! It's a camp to teach lazy people to work!

Work! And if they don't work we close the camp! We close it down and chase all these vagrants away!

Get out and don't come back! You've had your chance!' He turned to the group of men. 'Yes, you, you ungrateful bastards, you, I'm talking about you!' he shouted. 'You appreciate nothing! Who builds houses for you when you have nowhere to live? Who gives you tents and blankets when you are shivering with cold? Who nurses you, who takes care of you,

who comes here day after day with food? And how do you repay us? Well, from now on you can starve!'

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

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

the debris. In the huts they found caches of wine, which they emptied into the earth. They threw all the weapons they found in a pile: a kierie, an iron bar, a length of piping, a pair of sheep-shears, several folding knives. Then at midday the search was declared over. The police shepherded the inmates back in, locked the gates, and in a few minutes were gone, leaving behind two of their number, who sat all afternoon under the awning watching the people of Jakkalsdrif scratch in the mess for their belongings. From one of the new guards they later learned what had brought down Oosthuizen's wrath upon them. In the middle of the night a loud explosion had come from the welding shop on the High Street, followed by an uncontrollable fire that had spread to the building next door and thence to the town's cultural history museum. The museum, with its thatched roof and yellowwood ceilings and floors, had been gutted in an hour, though some of the antique farming equipment on display in the courtyard had been rescued. Searching by torchlight in the smoking rubble of the welding shop, the police had found evidence of forced entry; and when one of their own drivers recollected that at dusk the previous evening he had stopped three strange men on two bicycles near the Jakkalsdrif turnoff (he had warned them that they were on the point of infringing the curfew; they had pleaded, that they were hurrying back as fast as they could to the Onderdorp, where they lived; he had thought no more of it), it seemed clear that camp people were implicated in an act of arson against the town.

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

Though it was a Wednesday, the ladies with the soup did not arrive. A deputation of women went to the gate to ask permission to use the stove in the camp kitchen; but the guards claimed not

tu have the key. Someone, perhaps a child, threw a rock through the kitchen window. Nor did the truck come the next day to fetch the work gang. In mid-morning the police guards were replaced by two new men. "They are going to starve us,' said Robert, loudly enough for others to hear.

'That fire was the excuse they were looking for. Now they are going to do what they always wanted—lock us up and wait for us to die.'

Standing against the wire looking out over the veld, K brooded on Robert's words. He no longer found it so strange to think of the camp as a place where people were deposited to be forgotten. It no longer seemed an accident that the camp lay out of sight of the town on a road that led nowhere else. But he could not yet believe that the two young men on the guardhouse porch would sit and watch with equanimity, yawning, smoking, going indoors every now and again for a nap, while people were dying before their eyes. When people died they left bodies behind. Even people who died of starvation left bodies behind. Dead bodies could be as offensive as living bodies, if it was true that a living body could be offensive. If these people really wanted to be rid of us, he thought (curiously he watched the thought begin to unfold itself in his head, like a plant growing), if they really wanted to forget us forever, they would have to give us picks and spades and command us to dig; then, when we had exhausted ourselves digging, and had dug a great hole in the middle of the camp, they would have to order us to climb in and lay ourselves down; and when we were lying there, all of us, they would have to break down the huts and tents and tear down the fence and throw the huts and the fence and the tents as well as every last thing we had owned upon us, and cover us with earth, and flatten the earth. Then, perhaps, they might begin to forget about us. But who could dig a hole as big as that? Not thirty men, even with women and children and old people to help, not in our present

state, with nothing but picks and spades, here in the stone-hard veld.

It seemed more like Robert than like him, as he knew himself, to think like that. Would he have to say that the thought was Robert's and had merely found a home in him, or could he say that though the seed had come from Robert, the thought, having grown up inside him, was now his own? He did not know. Then on Monday morning the Divisional Council truck arrived as usual to take them to work. Before they climbed aboard, the guards checked their names on a list; otherwise nothing seemed to have changed. They were dropped off at various farms in the district according to a roster the driver kept. With two comrades K found himself at the job of repairing fences. The work was slow, for they were using not new wire but lengths of old wire which when joined together coiled in inconsistent directions. K liked the leisureliness of the work and its repetitiveness. Coming in the mornings and going in the evenings, they spent a week on the same farm, on some days doing no more than a few hundred metres of fencing. Once the farmer took K aside, gave him a cigarette, and commended him. 'You have a feel for wire,' he said.

'You should go into fencing. There will always be a need for good fencers in this country, no matter what. If you carry stock, you need fences: it's as simple as that.' He too loved wire, he went on. It pained him to have to use ragtag materials, but what else was there? At the end of the week he paid the three men the standard rate for their labour, but gave them in addition packets of fruit and green mealies, and used clothes. For K he had an old sweater, for the other men a carton of castoffs for their wives and children On the way back, on the truck, one of K's companions, picking around in the box, came up with a large pair of cotton panties. He held it at a distance between his fingertips, wrinkled his nose, and let it go. The slipstream caught

it and whirled it away. Then he pitched the whole box over the side.

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

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

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

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

His comrade, the other Free Corps man, pushed his way to his side, bringing a towel which he tried to tie around the wound. Someone nudged K: it was one of the men from the other huts. 'Leave them, let them look after each other,' he said. The crowd began to break up. Soon there were only children left, and K, watching the younger man bind the older man's thigh in the flickering light. K never discovered who had stabbed the guard or whether he recovered, for this was his last night in the camp. While everyone else was going to bed, K quietly bundled his belongings in the

black coat, slipped out, and settled down behind the cistern to wait till the last embers had died, till there was nothing to hear but the wind across the veld. He waited an hour longer, shivering from sitting still so long. Then he took off his shoes, hung them about his neck, tiptoed to the fence behind the latrines, tossed the bundle over, and climbed. There was a moment when, straddling the fence, his trousers hooked on a barb, he was an easy shot against the silver-blue sky; then he unpicked himself and was away, tiptoeing across ground surprisingly like the ground inside the fence.

He walked all night, feeling no fatigue, trembling sometimes with the thrill of being free. When it began to grow light he left the road and moved across open country. He saw no human being, though more than once he was startled by buck leaping from cover and racing away into the hills. The dry white grass waved in the wind; the sky was blue; his body was overflowing with vigour. Walking in great loops, he skirted first one farmhouse, then another. The landscape was so empty that it was not hard to believe at times that his was the first foot ever to tread a particular inch of earth or disturb a particular pebble. But every mile or two there was a fence to remind him that he was a trespasser as well as a runaway. Ducking through the fences, he could feel a craftsman's pleasure in wire spanned so taut that it hummed when it was plucked. Nonetheless, he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land. He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of antfeet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust. He climbed the last rise, his heart beating faster. As he reached the crest the house came into' sight below, first the roof and the broken gable, then the whitewashed walls, everything as it had been before. Surely, he thought, surely now I have outlasted the last of the Visagies; surely every day I spent living on air in the

mountains or being devoured by time in the camp was as long a day for that boy to endure, eating or starving, sleeping or waking in his hiding-hole.

The back door was unlocked. As K pushed open the top flap something leapt out nearly into his face and raced away around a corner: a cat, a huge cat with mottled black and ginger fur. He had never seen a cat on the farm before.

The house smelled of heat and dust, but also of old fat and uncured leather. The smell grew worse as he approached the kitchen. At the kitchen door he hesitated. There is still time, he thought, time to brush away my footprints and tiptoe out. Because whatever I have returned for, it is not to live as the Visagies lived, sleep where they slept, sit on their stoep looking out over their land. If this house were to be abandoned as a home for the ghosts of all the generations of the Visagies, it would not matter to me. It is not for the house that I have come.

The kitchen, into which a beam of sunlight shone from the hole in the roof, was empty; the smell came from the pantry, where, peering into shadow, K made out a side of sheep or goat hanging from a hook. Though there was little left of the carcase but bones held together by a dry grey parchment, green-bellied flies still buzzed about it.

He left the kitchen and went through the rest of the house seeking in the-gloom for signs of the Visagie boy or clues to his hiding-place. He found nothing. The floors were covered in a fresh film of dust. The attic door was padlocked on the outside. Furniture stood where it had always stood, there were no telltale marks. He stood in the middle of the dining-room and held his breath, listening for the faintest stirring from above or below; but the very heart of the grandson, if there were a grandson and he were alive, beat in time with his own.

He emerged into sunlight and took the track across the veld to the dam and the field where once he had scattered his mother's ashes. Every stone, every bush along the way he recognized. He

felt at home at the dam as he had never felt in the house. He lay down and rested with the black coat rolled under his head, watching the sky wheel above. I want to live here, he thought: I want to live here forever, where my mother and my grandmother lived. It is as simple as that. What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast. A man who wants to live cannot live in a house with lights in the windows. He must live in a hole and hide by day. A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to.

The dam itself was dry, the once lush grass around it brittle, white, dead. There was no trace of the pumpkins and mealies he had sown. Veld-grasses had taken over the patch he had dug and were growing briskly.

He released the brake of the pump. The wheel creaked and swung and shuddered and began to turn. The piston plunged and came up. Water gushed, in rust-brown gouts at first, then clear. All was as it had been before, as he had remembered it in the mountains. He held his hand in the flow and felt the force beat his fingers back; he climbed into the dam and stood under the stream, turning his face up like a flower, drinking and being bathed; he could not get enough of the water.

He slept in the open, and awoke from a dream in which the Visagie boy, crouched in a ball in the dark beneath the floorboards, with spiders walking over him and the great weight of the wardrobe pressing down above his head, mouthed words, pleas or cries or orders, he did not know, that he could not hear or understand. He sat up feeling stiff and exhausted. Let him not steal my first day from me! he groaned to himself. I did not come back to be a nursemaid! He has looked after himself all these months, let him look after himself a while longer! Wrapped in the black coat he clenched his jaw and waited for dawn, aching after the pleasures of digging and planting he had promised himself, impatient to be through with the business of making a dwelling.

All morning he tramped the veld, searching along the shallow gullies that led from the hillsides and along the faults where the rock broke in sheer lines. Three hundred yards from the dam two low hills, like plump breasts, curved towards each other. Where they met, their sides formed a sloping crevice as deep as a man's waist, three or four yards long. The bed of the crevice was of a fine dark blue gravel; the same gravel could be chipped from the sides. This was the site K settled on. From the shed beside the farmhouse he fetched his tools, a spade and chisel. From the roof of a sheep-pen he removed a five-foot sheet of corrugated iron. Laboriously he freed three fenceposts from the tangle of broken fencing below the dead orchard. All this he carried back to the dam, and set to work.

His first step was to hollow out the sides of the crevice till it was wider at the bottom than the top, and to flatten the gravel bed. The narrower end he blocked with a heap of stones. Then he laid the three fenceposts across the crevice, and upon them the iron sheet, with slabs of stone to hold it down. He now had a cave or burrow five feet deep. When he backed away towards the dam to inspect it, however, his eye at once picked out the dark hole of the entrance. So he spent the rest of the afternoon looking for ways to disguise it. When dusk fell he realized with surprise that he had spent a second day without eating. The next morning he dragged in bagfuls of river sand to spread over the floor. He split flat stones from the hillside strata and built up the front wall, leaving himself only an irregular slit through which to wriggle. He made a paste of mud and dry grass which he stuffed into the cracks between roof and walls. Over the roof he spread gravel. All day he did not eat or feel any need to eat; but he noticed that he was working more slowly, and that there were spells when he simply stood or knelt before his handiwork, his mind elsewhere.

As he was prodding mud into the cracks and smoothing it flat, it occurred to him that at the next hard rain all his careful mor-

tarwork would be washed out; indeed, rainwater would come pouring down the gully through his house. I should have laid a bed of stones beneath the sand, he thought; aqd I should have allowed myself an eave. But then he thought: I am not building a house out here by the dam to pass on to other generations. What I make ought to be careless, makeshift, a shelter to be abandoned without a tugging at the heartstrings. So that if ever they find this place or its ruins, and shake their heads and say to each other: What shiftless creatures, how little pride they took in their work!, it will not matter. In the shed there remained a last handful of pumpkin and melon seed. On the fourth day of his return K

set about planting these, clearing a spot of ground for each individual seed in the sea of veld-grass that waved over the cemetery of the earlier crop. He no longer dared to irrigate the entire acre, for the greenness of new grass would betray him. So he watered the seeds one by one, carrying water from the dam in an old paint-tin. After this labour there was nothing to do but wait for the seed to shoot, if it would. In his burrow he lay thinking of these poor second children of his beginning their struggle upward through the dark earth toward the sun. His one misgiving was that by planting them in the latter days of summer he had not provided well.

As he tended the seeds and watched and waited for the earth to bear food, his own need for food grew slighter and slighter. Hunger was a sensation he did not feel and barely remembered. If he ate, eating what he could find, it was because he had not yet shaken off the belief that bodies that do not eat die. What food he ate meant nothing to him. It had no taste, or tasted like dust.

When food comes out of this earth, he told himself, I will recover my appetite, for it will have savour. After the hardships of the mountains and the camp there was nothing but bone and muscle on his body. His clothes, tattered already, hung on him without shape. Yet as he moved about his

field he felt a deep joy in his physical being. His step was so light that he barely touched the earth. It seemed possible to fly; it seemed possible to be both body and spirit.

He returned to eating insects. Since time was poured out upon him in such an unending stream, there were whole mornings he could spend lying on his belly over an ant-nest picking out the larvae one by one with a grass-stalk and putting them in his mouth. Or he would peel the bark from dead trees looking for beetlegrubs; or knock grasshoppers out of the air with his jacket, tear off their heads and legs and wings, and pound their bodies to a pulp which he dried in the sun.

He also ate roots. He had no fear of being poisoned, for he seemed to know the difference between a benign bitterness and a malign one, as though he had once been an animal and the knowledge of good and bad plants had not died in his soul.

His retreat was little more than a mile from the track that passed through the farm and then looped back to rejoin the secondary road leading into the farther reaches of the Moordenaarsvallei. Little frequented though the track was, there was still reason to be wary. Several times, hearing the faroff drone of a motor, K had to duck and hide. Once, walking idly in the river-bed, he chanced to look up and saw a donkey-cart passing within hailing distance, driven by an old man with someone else, a woman or child, beside him. Had they seen him? Afraid to stir and draw attention to himself, he stood frozen in his tracks in full view of whoever cared to see, watching the gentle progress of the cart down the track and behind the next hill. As irksome as this incessant watchfulness was the restraint on the use of water. The vanes of the pump must never be seen to be moving, the dam must always seem to be empty; therefore it was only by moonlight, or else anxiously at dusk, that he dared release the brake, pump a few inches, and carry water to his plants.

Once or twice he came across hoofprints of buck in the damp soil, but gave no thought to them. Then one night he was woken

by snorts and a clatter of hoofs. He crawled out of his house, smelling them before he saw them: the goats he had thought fled forever when the dam dried up. Stumbling after them, shouting abuse, throwing stones, fuddled with sleep but driven by a desire to save his garden, he fell and drove a thorn deep into his palm. All night he patrolled the acre. The goats emerged in the early-morning light, dotting the hillsides in twos and threes, waiting for him to go; and all day he had to remain on guard, making sorties after them with stones.

It was these wild goats, which not only threatened his crop but by their presence rendered the acre conspicuous, that decided him: henceforth he would rest by day and stay up at night to protect his land and till it. At first he could work only on moonlit nights: in the dense blackness when there was no moon he would stand rooted, stretching out his hands, fearful of the looming shapes he imagined about him. But as time passed he began to acquire the confidence of a blind man: with a switch held before him he would make his way along the track he had worn between his house and the field, release the brake on the pump, open the cock, fill his can, and carry water to one vine after another, folding the grass aside to find them. Gradually he lost all fear of the night. Indeed, waking sometimes in the daytime and peering outdoors, he would wince at the sharpness of the light and withdraw to his bed with a strange green glow behind his eyelids.

It had grown to be late summer, and over a month since he had left the camp at Jakkalsdrif. He had not searched for the Visagie boy, nor did it seem he would ever do so. He tried not to think of him, but sometimes found himself wondering whether the boy might not have dug a hole for himself in the veld, and somewhere else on the farm be living a life parallel to his own, eating lizards, drinking dew, waiting for the army to forget him. It seemed unlikely.

He avoided the farmhouse as a place of the dead, except when he had to visit it to hunt for necessities. He needed means of

making fire, and in the suitcase of broken toys had the good fortune to find a red plastic telescope, one of whose lenses would focus the rays of the sun sharply enough to coax smoke out of a handful of dry grass. From a buckskin he found in the shed he cut strips and used them in making a catapult to replace the one he had lost.

There was much else he could have taken to make life easier for himself: a grid, a cooking-pot, a folding chair, slabs of foam rubber, more of the feed-sacks. He scratched among the odds and ends in the shed and there was nothing for which he could not imagine a use. But he was wary of conveying the Visagies'

rubbish to his home in the earth and setting himself on a trail that might lead to the re-enactment of their misfortunes. The worst mistake, he told himself, would be to try to found a new house, a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.

He stood leaning against the frame of the pump, feeling the tremor that passed through it each time the piston reached the bottom of its stroke, hearing the great wheel above his head cut through the dark on its greased bearings. How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called. He thought of the camp at Jakkalsdrif, of parents bringing up children behind the wire, their own children and the children of cousins and second cousins, on earth stamped so tight by the passage of their footsteps day after day, baked so hard by the sun, that nothing would ever grow there again. My mother was the one whose ashes I brought back, he thought, and my father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the

door of the dormitory, the twenty-one rules of which the first was 'There will be silence in dormitories at all times,' and the woodwork teacher with the missing fingers who twisted my ear when the line was not straight, and the Sunday mornings when we put on our khaki shirts and our khaki shorts and our black socks and our black shoes and marched two abreast to the church on Papegaai Street to be forgiven. They were my father, and my mother is buried and not yet risen. That is why it is a good thing that I, who have nothing to pass on, should be spending my time here where I am out of the way. In the month since his return there had been no visitor K knew of. The only fresh footprints in the dust on the farmhouse floor were his own and those of the cat, which came and went as it pleased, he did not know how. Then, passing the house one day on a dawn walk, he was thunderstruck to see the front door, which was always closed, standing ajar. He halted not thirty paces from the open eye of the door, feeling suddenly as naked as a mole in daylight. On tiptoe he retreated to the cover of the riverbed, then stole back to his burrow.

For a week he did not go near the farmhouse but crept about in the dark tending his acre, fearful that the merest clatter of pebble against pebble would echo across the veld and give him. away. The young pumpkin leaves now seemed nothing so much as vivid green flags proclaiming his occupation of the dam: he spread grass painstakingly over the vines, he even considered cutting them back. He could not sleep but lay on his bed of grass beneath the oven-heat of the roof straining his ears for the noises that would herald his discovery.

Yet there were times when his fears seemed absurd, spells of clarity in which he would recognize that, cut off from human society, he was in danger of becoming more timorous than a mouse. What grounds had he for thinking that the open door meant the return of the Visagies or the arrival of the police come to consign him to the notorious Brandvlei? In a vast country

across whose face hundreds of thousands of people were daily following their cockroach pilgrimages in flight from the war, why should he be alarmed if some refugee or other hid away in an empty farmhouse in a desolate strip of country? Surely he, or they (K had a vision of a man pushing a barrow loaded with household goods, and a woman trudging behind him, and two children, one holding the woman's hand, the other seated on top of the pile in the barrow clutching a mewling kitten, all dead tired, the wind blowing dust in their faces and sending grey clouds scudding across the sky)—surely such people had more cause to fear him, a wild man all skin and bone and rags rising up out of the earth at the hour of batflight, than he had to fear them?

But then he would think: Yet what-if they are of the other kind, runaway soldiers, off-duty policemen come to shoot the goats for sport, hefty men who would hold their sides laughing at my pathetic tricks, my pumpkins hidden in the grass, my burrow disguised with mud, and kick my backside and tell me to pull myself together and turn me into a servant to cut wood and carry water for them and chase the goats towards their guns so that they could eat grilled chops while I squatted behind a bush with my plate of offal? Would it not be better to hide-day and night, would it not be better to bury myself in the bowels of the earth than become a creature of theirs? (And would the idea of turning me into a servant even cross their minds? Seeing a wild man making his way towards them across the veld, would they not start laying bets on who could put a bullet through the brass badge on his headgear?)

The days passed and nothing happened. The sun shone, the birds skipped from bush to bush, the great silence reverberated from horizon to horizon, and K's confidence came back. He spent a whole day lying under cover watching the farmhouse, while the sun moved in its arc from left to right and the shadows moved across the stoep from right to left. Was the strip of deeper darkness in the centre an open doorway or the door itself? It was too far

to see. When night came and the moon rose, he approached as far as the dead orchard. There was no light in the house, no sound. He tiptoed into the open, across the yard, to the very foot of the steps, from where he could finally see that the door was open, as it must have been all the time. He climbed the steps and entered the house. In the pitch darkness of the hallway he stood listening. All was silence. He spent the rest of the night lying on a sack in the shed, waiting. He even slept, though he was not used to sleeping by night. In the morning he re-entered the house. The floor had been freshly swept, as had the grate. A faint smell of smoke still hung in the corners. In the rubbish tip behind the shed he found six new shiny unlabelled corned-beef cans.

He went back to his burrow and spent the day in hiding, shaken by the certainty that soldiers had been on the farm and that they had come on foot. If they were hunting rebels in the mountains or tracking down deserters or simply making a tour of inspection, why had they not come in jeeps or trucks? Why were they being stealthy, why were they hiding their tracks? There might be many explanations, there might be a thousand explanations, he could not read their minds; all he knew was that it was the merest luck that had preserved him.

He did not pump water that night, hoping the sun and wind would dry out the floor of the dam. He pulled out more grass, armfuls of grass, and spread it over the telltale pumpkin vines. He lay low and breathed quietly.

A day passed, and another day. Then, as the sun was going down and K had emerged from his house to stretch his limbs, shapes moving across the flats caught his eye. He dropped to the earth. He had seen a man on horseback heading towards the dam, and another man on foot beside him; he had also clearly seen the barrel of the gun poking over the horseman's shoulder. Like a worm he began to slither towards his hole, thinking only: Let darkness fall soon, let the earth swallow me up and protect me.

From behind the swell of the hillock near the mouth of the hole he raised his head for a last look. It was not a horse but a donkey, a donkey so tiny that its rider's feet almost touched the ground. Further back there was a second donkey, riderless but with two bulky grey packs strapped to its sides; and between the two donkeys he counted eight men, with a ninth at the tail of the train. All of them had guns; some seemed to carry packs as well. One wore blue trousers, another yellow, but otherwise they were in camouflage uniform.

As quietly as he could K slid backwards into the hole. From the doorway he could no longer see anything of them, but on the windless air he heard them dismount at the dam, heard the rattle of the chain as they released the brake on the pump, even heard a murmur of words. Someone climbed the ladder to the platform high above the ground, then climbed down again.

It grew darker, till it was only the snorting of the donkeys that revealed how nearby the strangers were. K

heard the thud of an axe down in the river-bed; later the contour of the ridge above him began to be visible against the faint orange glow of their fire. There was a puff of wind; the rudder swung, metal groaned, the wheel of the pump turned once and stopped. 'Why no water?'— he heard the words clearly. There were more words he could not make out, followed by a burst of laughter. Then the wind stirred again, the pump groaned and turned, and through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet K heard the first boom of the piston deep in the earth. There was a muted cheer. On the wind came the smell of roasting meat.

K closed his eyes and rested his face on his hands. It was clear to him now that it was not soldiers who were camping at the dam, who had earlier camped in the house, but men from the mountains, men who blew up railway tracks and mined roads and attacked farmhouses and drove off stock and cut one town off from another, whom the radio reported exterminated in scores and the newspapers published pictures of sprawling gape-mouthed

in pools of their own blood. That was who his visitors were. Yet they seemed to him like nothing so much as a football team: eleven young men come off the field after a hard game, tired, happy, hungry. His heart was pounding. When they leave in the morning, he thought to himself, I could come out of hiding and trot along behind them like a child following a brass band. After a while they would notice me and stop to ask what I wanted. And I could say: Give me a pack to carry; let me chop wood and build the fire at the end of the day. Or I could say: Be sure to come back to the dam next time, and I will feed you. I will have pumpkins and squashes and melons by then, I will have peaches and figs and prickly pears, you will lack nothing. And they would come next time on their way to the mountains or wherever it is they go by night, and I would feed them and afterwards sit with them around the fire drinking in their words. The stories they tell will be different from the stories I heard in the camp, because the camp was for those left behind, the women and children, the old men, the blind, the crippled, the idiots, people who have nothing to tell but stories of how they have endured. Whereas these young men have hadadventures, victories and defeats and escapes. They will have stories to tell long after the war is over, stories for a lifetime, stories for their grandchildren to listen to open-mouthed.

Yet in the same instant that he reached down to check that his shoelaces were tied, K knew that he would not crawl out and stand up and cross from darkness into firelight to announce himself. He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.

Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating

him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong. He remembered Huis Norenius and the classroom. Numb with terror he stared at the problem before him while the teacher stalked the rows counting off the minutes till it should be time for them to lay down their pencils and be divided, the sheep from the goats. Twelve men eat six bags of potatoes. Each bag holds six kilograms of potatoes. What is the quotient? He saw himself write down 12, he saw himself write down 6. He did not know what to do with the numbers. He crossed both out. He stared at the word quotient. It did not change, it did not dissolve, it did not yield its mystery. I will die, he thought, still not knowing what the quotient is.

He lay awake much of the night listening to the dam slowly fill, peering out occasionally into the starlight to see whether the donkeys had settled or were still browsing on his pumpkins. Then he must have dozed, for the next thing he knew, someone was stamping heavily through the grass below him, clapping his hands, chasing the donkeys, and the mountains were already outlined blue on pink against the sky. The wind was still, on the air came faint sounds: the tinkle of a buckle, the clash of a spoon on a mug, the splash of water.

Now, he thought, waking fully, now is my last chance: now. He slid out of the burrow into the open, crept forward on hands and knees, and peered over the shoulder of the ridge.

There was a man clambering out of the dam. Out of the cold night-water he came, lifted himself on to the wall, and stood there drying himself with a white towel, the first soft light of day shining from his wet naked body.

Two men were loading a donkey, one holding the bridle, the

other settling and strapping two bulky canvas bags over its back, and a long tubular parcel also tied in canvas.

The rest of the party were behind the dam wall; sometimes K saw a head move. The man who had stood on the wall reappeared, dressed now. He bent down and opened the cock. Water gushed out along the old furrows K had dug during his first stay, flowing into the field. That is a mistake, thought K, that is a sign.

The same man fastened the brake on the pump.

In a long straggling line they began moving out eastward across the veld heading for the mountains, one donkey at the head of the line, the other at the tail, the sun, now over the rim of the world, catching them full in the face. K watched from behind the ridge till they were nothing but bobbing specks against the yellow of the grass, thinking: It is not too late to run after them, it is not too late yet. Then when they were finally gone he came out and made a tour of the flooded acre to see the devastation the donkeys had done. Their marks were everywhere. They had not only cropped the vines but in many places trampled them. There "were long severed creepers winding through the grass whose leaves were already furling and drooping; the few kernels that had shot, little green nuts no bigger than marbles, were devoured. He had lost half his crop. Otherwise the strangers had left behind no trace of their passing. Over the site of the fire they had spread soil and pebbles so painstakingly that it was only by its warmth that he could detect the spot. The dam had long emptied itself; he closed the cock.

He climbed the hillside above his burrow and, lying on the crest, peered into the sun. There was nothing to be seen. They had merged into the hills.

I am like a woman whose children have left the house, he thought: all that remains is to tidy up and listen to the silence. I

would have liked to give them food, but all I fed were their donkeys, that could have eaten grass. He crept into the burrow, stretched out listlessly, and closed his eyes.

He was woken later in the morning by the clatter of a helicopter. It passed overhead, following the course of the river. Fifteen minutes later it was back, sweeping further to the north. They will see that the land has been flooded, he thought. They will see that the grass is greener. They will see the green of the pumpkins. The leaves are like flags waving to them. They can see everything from the air, everything that by its nature does not hide underground. I should be growing onions. There is still time to run away to the mountains, he thought, even if all I do is hide in a cave. But the listlessness would not leave him. Let them come, he thought, what does it matter. He went back to sleep. For a week K was more cautious than ever. He did not emerge from the burrow at all during daylight hours, and he watered the surviving vines so meagrely that the leaves drooped and the tendrils withered. The vines that had been cropped he tore out. If every flower turns to fruit, he told himself, looking at what was left, I shall not have forty pumpkins; if they bring their donkeys back this way I shall have. none. It was no longer a matter of growing a fat crop, only of growing enough for the seed not to die out. There will be another year, he consoled himself, another summer in which to try again. It was the last of summer. After days of sultriness and heavy cloudbanks there was a thunderstorm. The gully came washing down and K was flooded out of his house. He crouched in the lee of the dam wall, sodden, feeling like a snail without its shell. After an hour the rain stopped, the birds began singing, a rainbow appeared in the west. He dragged the mat of sodden grass out of his burrow and waited for the stream to stop running. Then he made mud and set about plastering the roof and walls again. The donkeys did not come back, nor did the eleven men, nor

did the helicopter. The pumpkins grew. In the night K would creep about, stroking the smooth shells. Every night they were palpably larger. As time passed he permitted the hope to grow up again in his breast that all would be well. He woke during the day and peered out over the acre; from under the camouflage of grass a shell here and there glinted quietly back at him.

Among the seeds he had sown had been a melon seed. Now two pale green melons were growing on the far side of the field. It seemed to him that he loved these two, which he thought of as two sisters, even more than the pumpkins, which he thought of as a band of brothers. Under the melons he placed pads of grass so that their skins should not bruise.

Then came the evening when the first pumpkin was ripe enough to cut. It had grown earlier and faster than the others, in the very centre of the field; K had marked it out as the first fruit, the firstborn. The shell was soft, the knife sank in without a struggle. The flesh, though still rimmed with green, was a deep orange. On the wire grid he had made he laid strips of pumpkin over a bed of coals that glowed brighter and brighter as the dark came on. The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the sky. Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' With two wire skewers he turned the strips, and in mid-act felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness. It was exactly as they had described it, like a gush of warm water. Now it is completed, he said to himself. All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating the food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil. He lifted the first strip to his mouth. Beneath the crisply charred skin the flesh was soft and juicy. He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes. The best, he thought, the very best pumpkin I have tasted. For the first time since he had arrived in the country he found pleasure in eating. The aftertaste of the first slice left his mouth aching

with sensual delight. He moved the grid off the coals and took a second slice. His teeth bit through the crust into the soft hot pulp. Such pumpkin, he thought, such pumpkin I could eat every day of my life and never want anything else. And what perfection it would be with a pinch of salt—with a pinch of salt, and a dab of butter, and a sprinkling of sugar, and a little cinnamon scattered over the top! Eating the third slice, and the fourth and fifth, till half the pumpkin was gone and his belly was full, K wallowed in the recollection of the flavours of salt, butter, sugar, cinnamon, one by one. But the ripening of the pumpkins brought a new anxiety. For while it had been possible to conceal the vines, the pumpkins themselves created hollows which even at a distance gave the field an odd look, as though a flock of lambs were sleeping in the knee-high grass. K did what he could to fold the grass back over the pumpkins but dared not cover them wholly, for it was the precious late-summer sun that was ripening them. All he could do was pick them as early as possible, before the stems withered, sometimes even when there were green flecks left on the shell, and bear them away.

The days were growing shorter, the nights colder. Sometimes K had to wear his black coat to work in the field; he slept with his feet wrapped in a bag and his hands between his thighs. He slept more and more. He no longer sat outside when his tasks were finished, looking at the stars, listening to the night, or walked about in the veld, but crept into his hole and fell into deep sleep. All morning he would sleep. At noon he would begin to emerge into an interval of languor and waking dreams, bathed in a gentle warmth that radiated down from the roof; then as the sun set he would come out, stretch himself, and go down to the river-bed to chop wood till he could no longer see his mark.

He had dug a pit for his fire so that it should not be seen at a distance, and constructed a vent-tunnel. After he had eaten he would lay two stone slabs over the pit and sprinkle them with

earth. The embers would then continue to smoulder till the next night. In the earth around the pit there grew up a multifarious insect life drawn by the benign, continuous warmth. He did not know what month it was, though he guessed it was April. He had kept no tally of the days nor recorded the changes pf the moon. He was not a prisoner or a castaway, his life by the dam was not a sentence that he had to serve out.

He had become so much a creature of twilight and night that daylight hurt his eyes. He no longer needed to keep to paths in his movements around the dam. A sense less of sight than of touch, the pressure of presences upon his eyeballs and the skin of his face, warned him of any obstacle. His eyes remained unfocussed for hours on end like those of a blind person. He had learned to rely on smell too. He breathed into his lungs the clear sweet smell of water brought up from inside the earth. It intoxicated him, he could not have enough of it. Though he knew no names he could tell one bush from another by the smell of their leaves. He could smell rain-weather in the air.

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. Once or twice the other time in which the war had

its existence reminded itself to him as the jet fighters whistled high overhead. But for the rest he was living beyond the reach of calendar and clock in a blessedly neglected corner, half awake, half asleep. Like a parasite dozing in the gut, he thought; like a lizard under a stone. Parasite was the word the police captain had used: the camp at Jakkalsdrif, a nest of parasites hanging from the neat sunlit town, eating its substance, giving no nourishment back. Yet to K lying idle in his bed, thinking without passion (What is it to me, after all? he thought), it was no longer obvious which was host and which parasite, camp or town. If the worm devoured the sheep, why did the sheep swallow the worm?

What if there were millions, more millions than anyone knew, living in camps, living on alms, living off the land, living by guile, creeping away in corners to escape the times, too canny to put out flags and draw attention to themselves and be counted? What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Could the parasites then still be called parasites? Parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed upon. Perhaps in truth whether the camp was declared a parasite on the town or the town a parasite on the camp depended on no more than on who made his voice heard loudest.

He thought of his mother. She had asked him to bring her back to her birthplace and he had done so, though perhaps only by a trick of words. But what if this farm was not her true birthplace? Where were the stone walls of the wagonhouse she had spoken of? He made himself pay a daylight visit to the farmyard and to the cottages on the hillside and the rectangle of bare earth beside them. If my mother ever lived here I will surely know, he told himself. He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by

the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end. He tried to imagine a figure standing alone at the head of the line, a woman in a shapeless grey dress who came from no mother; but when he had to think of the silence in which she lived, the silence of time before the beginning, his mind baulked.

Now that he slept so much, animals came back to prey on his field, hares and little grey steenbok. He would not have minded if they had merely nibbled the tips of the vines; but he lapsed into fits of gloomy anger when they bit through a vine and left the fruit to wither. He did not know what he would do if he lost his two beloved melons. He spent hours trying to construct a game-trap out of wire but could not get it to work. One night he made his bed in the middle of the field. The glare of the moon kept him awake, he started at every rustle, the cold numbed his feet. How much easier it would all be, he thought, if there were a fence around the dam, a fence of stout wire mesh with its bottom edge staked a foot underground to stop the burrowers.

There was a continual taste of blood in his mouth. His bowels, ran and there were moments of giddiness when he stood up. Sometimes his stomach felt like a fist clenched in the centre of his body. He forced himself to eat more of the pumpkin than he had appetite for; it relieved the tightness in his stomach but did not make him better. He tried to shoot birds but had lost his skill with the catapult as well as his old patience. He killed and ate a lizard.

The pumpkins were ripening all together, the vines turning yellow and withering. K had not thought of how he could store them. He tried cutting the flesh in strips and drying it in the sun, but it rotted and attracted ants. He piled the thirty pumpkins in a pyramid near his burrow; it looked like a beacon. They could not be buried, they needed warmth and dryness, they were creatures of the sun. Eventually he deposited them fifty paces apart up and down the river-bed in the undergrowth; to disguise them he made a paste of mud and painted each shell in a mottled pattern.

Then the melons ripened. He ate these two children on successive days, praying that they would make him well. He thought he felt better afterwards, though he was still weak. Their flesh was the colour of orange river-silt, but deeper. He had never tasted fruit so sweet. How much of that sweetness came from the seed, how much from the earth? He scraped their seeds together and spread them to dry. From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth. The first day passed when K did not come out of his burrow at all. He awoke in the afternoon feeling no hunger. There was a cold wind blowing; there was nothing that needed his attention; his work for the year was done. He turned over and went to sleep again. When next he knew, it was dawn and birds were singing.

He lost track of time. Sometimes, waking stifled under the black coat with his legs swaddled in the bag, he knew that it was day. There were long periods when he lay in a grey stupor too tired to kick himself free of sleep. He could feel the processes of his body slowing down. You are forgetting to breathe, he would say to himself, and yet lie without breathing. He raised a hand heavy as lead and put it over his heart: far away, as if in another country, he felt a languid stretching and closing. Through whole cycles of the heavens he slept. Once he dreamed that he was being shaken by an old man. The old man wore filthy tattered clothing and smelled of tobacco. He bent over K, gripping his shoulder.

'You must get off the land!' he said. K tried

to shrug him off but the claw gripped tighter. 'You will get into trouble!' the old man hissed. He also dreamed of his mother. He was walking with her in the mountains. Though her legs were heavy, she was young and beautiful. With great sweeps he was gesturing from horizon to horizon: he was happy and excited. The green lines of river-courses stood out against the fawn of the earth; there were no roads or houses anywhere; the air was still. In his wild gestur-ings, in the great windmill sweeps of his arms, he realized he was in danger of losing his footing and being carried over the edge of the rock-face into the vast airiness of space between the heavens and the earth; but he had no fear, he knew he would float. Sometimes he would emerge into wakefulness unsure whether he had slept a day or a week or a month. It occurred to him that he might not be fully in possession of himself. You must eat, he would say, and struggle to get up and look for a pumpkin. But then he would relax again, and stretch his legs and yawn in sensual pleasure so sweet that he wished for nothing but to lie and let it ripple through him. He had no appetite; eating, picking up things and forcing them down his gullet into his body, seemed a strange activity.

Then step by step his sleep grew to be lighter and the periods of wakefulness more frequent. He began to be visited by trains of images so rapid and unconnected that he could not follow them. He tossed and turned, unsatisfied by sleep but too drained of strength to rise. He began to have headaches; he gritted his teeth, wincing with every pulse of blood in his skull.

There was a thunderstorm. As long as the thunder rolled far away K barely noticed it. But then a clap burst directly over him and it began to pour. Water seeped down the sides of the burrow; streaming down the gully, it washed away the mud plaster and flooded through his sleeping-place. He sat up, head and shoulders bowed under the roof-plates. There was nowhere better to go.

Propped in a corner in the rushing water with the sodden coat pulled tight around him, he slept and woke. He emerged into daylight shivering with cold. The sky was overcast, he had no way of making a fire. One cannot live like this, he thought. He wandered about the field and past the pump. Everything was familiar, yet he felt like a stranger or a ghost. There were pools of water on the ground and water in the river for the first time, a swift brown stream yards wide. On the far side something pale stood out against the gunblue gravel. What is it, he marvelled, a great white mushroom brought out by the rain? With a start he recognized it as a pumpkin.

The shivering would not stop. He had no strength in his limbs; when he set one foot in front of the other it was tentatively, like an old man. Needing to sit all of a sudden, he sat down on the wet earth. The tasks that awaited him seemed too many and too great. I have woken too early, he thought, I have not finished my sleeping. He suspected that he ought to eat to stop the swimming in front of his eyes, but his stomach was not ready. He forced himself to imagine tea, a cup of hot tea thick with sugar; on hands and knees he drank from a puddle.

He was still sitting when they discovered him. He heard the drone of the vehicles when they were far off but thought it was distant thunder. Only when they had reached the gate below the farmhouse did he see them and realize what they were. He stood up, grew dizzy, sat down again. One of the vehicles stopped before the house; the other, a jeep, bumped across the veld towards him. It held four men; he watched them come; hopelessness settled over him.

At first they were ready to believe he was simply a vagrant, a lost soul the police would have picked up in the course of time and found a home for in Jakkalsdrif. 'I live in the veld,' he said, replying to their question; 'I live nowhere.' Then he had to rest his head on his knees: there was a hammering inside his skull and a taste of bile in his mouth. One of the soldiers picked up an arm

between two fingers and dangled it. K did not pull away. The arm felt like something alien, a stick protruding from his body. 'What do you think he lives on?' the soldier asked—'Flies? Ants? Locusts?' K

could see nothing but their boots. He closed his eyes; for a while he was absent. Then someone gave his shoulder a slap and pushed something at him: a sandwich, two thick slices of white bread with polony between them. He pulled back and shook his head. 'Eat, man!' his benefactor said. 'Get some strength into yourself!' He took the sandwich and bit into it. Before he could chew, his stomach began to retch drily. With his head between his knees he spat out the mouthful of bread and meat and handed the sandwich back. 'He's sick,' said one voice. 'He's been drinking,' said another.

But then they found his house, the stonework of the front wall nakedly visible after the rain. First they took turns on hands and knees to peer inside. Then they lifted off the roof and uncovered the neat interior, the spade and axe, the knife and spoon and plate and mug on a shelf cut into the gravel, the magnifying glass, the bed of wet grass. They brought K over to confront his handiwork, holding him upright, no longer disposed to be kindly. Tears ran down his face. 'Did you make this?' they asked. He nodded. 'Are you alone here?' He nodded. The soldier holding him brought his arm up sharply behind his back. K

hissed with pain. 'The truth!' said the soldier, it is the truth,' said K. The truck arrived too; the air was loud with voices and the squawks and rasps of the two-way radio; soldiers were crowding around to see K and the house he had built. 'Spread out!' one of them shouted: i want the whole area searched! We are looking for footpaths, we are looking for holes and tunnels, we are looking for any kind of storage site!' He dropped his voice. He was dressed in camouflage uniform like everyone else; there was no badge K could see to tell he was in charge. 'You see what kind of people they are,' he said: his eyes moved around restlessly, he did not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular.

'You think there is

nothing and all the time the ground beneath your feet is rotten with tunnels. Look around a place like this and you would swear there wasn't a living soul in miles. Then turn your back and they come crawling out of the ground. Ask him how long he's been here. ' He turned on K and raised his voice. 'You! How long have you been here?'

'Since last year,' K said, not knowing whether it was a good lie or a bad lie.

'So when are your friends coming? When are your friends coming again?'

K shrugged.

'Ask him again,' said the officer, turning away. 'Keep asking him. Ask him when his friends are coming. Ask him when they were last here. See if he's got a tongue. See if he is such an idiot as he looks. '

The soldier who was holding K gripped the nape of his neck between thumb and forefinger and guided him down till he was kneeling, till his face was touching the earth. 'You heard what the officer said,' he said, 'so tell me. Tell me your story.' He flicked the beret away and pressed K's face hard into the earth. With nose and lips squashed flat, K tasted the damp soil. He sighed. They lifted him and held him up. He did not open his eyes. 'So tell us about your friends,' the soldier said. K shook his head. He was hit a terrific blow in the pit of the stomach and fainted.

They spent the afternoon hunting for the stocks of food and arms they were convinced were hidden there. First they scoured the area around the dam, then they explored further up and down the river. There was an instrument with earphones and a black box that one of them used: K watched him move slowly along the shoulder of the river bank, where the earth was soft, prodding his rod into the earth. Many of the pumpkins, perhaps all of them, were discovered: young men kept returning bearing pumpkins, which they tossed in a heap at the edge of the field. The

pumpkins only made them more certain that there were stores hidden ('Otherwise why would they leave this monkey here?' K overheard).

They wanted to interrogate him again but he was plainly too weak. They gave him tea, which he drank, and tried to reason with him. 'You're sick, man,' they said. 'Look at you. Look at how your friends treat you. They don't care what happens to you. You want to go home? We'll take you home and give you a new start in life.'

They sat him up against a wheel of the jeep. One of them fetched the beret and dropped it in his lap. They offered him a slice of soft white bread. He swallowed a mouthful, leaned sideways, and brought it up, together with the tea. 'Leave him alone, he's finished,' someone said. K wiped his mouth on his sleeve. They stood in a circle about him; he had a feeling they did not know what to do. He spoke. 'I'm not what you think,' he said. 'I was sleeping and you woke me, that's all. ' They gave no sign of understanding.

They quartered themselves in the farmhouse. In the kitchen they set up their own stove; soon K could smell tomatoes cooking. Someone had hung a radio on a hook on the stoep; the air was full of nervous electric rhythms that unsettled him.

They put him in the bedroom at the end of the corridor, on a tarpaulin folded in four, with a blanket over him. They gave him warm milk and two pills which they said were aspirin and which he kept down. Later, after dark, a boy brought him a plate of food. 'See if you can eat just a mouthful,' he said. He shone a flashlight on the plate. K saw two sausages in a thick gravy, and mashed potato. He shook his head and turned to the wall. The boy left the plate at the bedside ('In case you change your mind'). After that they did not disturb him. He drowsed uneasily for a while, troubled by the smell of the food. At last he got up and put the plate in a corner. Some of the soldiers were on the stoep, some in the living-room. There was talk and laughter but no light.

The next morning the police arrived from Prince Albert with dogs to help in the search for tunnels and hidden supplies. Captain Oosthuizen recognized K at once. 'How could I forget a face like that?' he said.

'This joker ran away from Jakkalsdrif in December. His name is Michaels. What name did he give you?'

'Michael,' said the army officer. 'It's Michaels,' said Captain Oosthuizen. He poked K in the ribs with his boot. 'He's not sick, he always looks like this. Hey, Michaels?'

So they took K back to the dam, where he watched the dogs drag their handlers back and forth across the acre of grass and up and down the river banks, whining with eagerness, tugging at the leash, but finally able to lead them to nothing better than old porcupine burrows and hare sets. Oosthuizen gave K a cuff on the side of the head. 'So what's this about, monkey?' he said. 'You playing games with us?' The dogs were loaded back into the van. Everyone was losing interest in the search. The young soldiers stood about in the sun talking, drinking coffee.

K sat with his head between his knees. Though his mind was clear, he could not control the dizziness. A string of spittle drooled from his mouth; he did not bother to stop it. Every grain of this earth will be washed clean by the rain, he told himself, and dried by the sun and scoured by the wind, before the seasons turn again. There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass. So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers'

laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?

There was a heavy explosion, and at once a second explosion. The air shook, there was a clamour of birds, the hills rumbled

and echoed. K stared around wildly. 'Look!' said a soldier, and pointed.

Where the Visagie house had once stood there was now a cloud of grey and orange, not mist but dust, as if a whirlwind were carrying the house away. Then the cloud stopped growing, its substance thinned, and a skeleton began to emerge: part of the back wall with the chimney; three of the supports that had held up the verandah. A sheet of roofing swooped out of the air and hit the ground noiselessly. The reverberations went on, but K did not know any more if they were in the hills or in his head. Swallows flew past, so low above the ground he could have touched them had he stretched out a hand. Afterwards there were more explosions, for which he did not look up, guessing that the outbuildings had gone. He thought: No longer do the Visagies have anywhere to hide.

The jeep came bumping back across the veld. All around him they were clearing and packing up. In the acre itself, however, a lone soldier was still at work. He was digging up tufts of grass and laying them carefully to one side. With some anxiety K rose to his feet and stumbled across. 'What are you doing?' he called. The. soldier did not answer. He began to shape a shallow pit, laying the earth on a black plastic sheet. This was the third hole he had dug, K saw: both of the others had neat piles of earth on plastic sheets beside them, and tufts of grass with the earth still clinging to their roots. 'What are you doing?' he asked again. The sight of the stranger digging up his earth agitated him more than he would have guessed.

'Let me do it,' he offered—'I am used to digging:' But the soldier waved him away. Completing the third hole, he stepped off eight paces and laid down another plastic sheet. As the spade bit into the earth, K

squatted and covered the grass with his hands. 'Please, my friend!' he said. The soldier stood back, exasperated. Someone hauled K back by the scruff of his neck. 'Just keep him out of my way,' said the soldier.

K stood by the pump and watched. When he had dug five holes

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

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

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

They drove off, bumping and jostling on the dirt road, following the jeep. K clutched the strap above his head; he could feel his neighbours holding their bodies stiff to avoid being thrown against him. A cloud of dust billowed up till he could see nothing of what he was leaving behind. He leaned nearer to the young soldier facing him. 'You know,' he said, 'there was a boy hiding in that house.'

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

'What does he say?' asked someone.

'He says there was another boy hiding in the house.'

'Tell him he's dead now. Tell him he's in paradise.'

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

TWO

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

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