Life and Times of Michael K Read Online Free PDF Page B

Michael turned off to Stellenbosch, the eldest child walked holding Mrs K’s hand. When they parted, Mrs K brought out her purse and gave each little girl a coin.
    The children had told them that no convoys ran on Sundays; but on the Stellenbosch road they were passed by a farmers’ convoy, a train of light trucks and cars preceded by a lorry armoured in heavy mesh in whose open back stood two men with automatic rifles scanning the ground ahead. K drew off the road till they had passed. The passengers gave them curious glances, the children pointing and saying things K could not hear.
    Leafless vineyards stretched before and behind. A flock of sparrows materialized out of the sky, settled for a moment on the bushes all around them, then flitted off. Across the fields they heard church bells. Memories came to K of Huis Norenius, of sitting up in bed in the infirmary, slapping his pillow and watching the play of dust in a beam of sunlight.
    It was dark when he plodded into Stellenbosch. The streets were empty, a cold wind gusted. He had not thought where they would sleep. His mother was coughing; after each spell she would gasp for breath. He stopped at a café and bought curried pasties.He ate three of them, she one. She had no appetite. ‘Mustn’t you see a doctor?’ he asked. She shook her head, patted her chest. ‘It’s just dryness in my throat,’ she said. She seemed to expect to be in Prince Albert the next day or the day after, and he did not disillusion her. ‘I forget the actual name of the farm,’ she said, ‘but we can ask, people will know. There was a chicken-run against one wall of the wagonhouse, a long chicken-run, and a pump up on the hill. We had a house on the hillside. There was prickly pear outside the back door. That is the place you must look for.’
    They slept in an alley on a bed of flattened cartons. Michael propped a long side of cardboard at a pitch over their bed, but the windblew it over. His mother coughed throughout the night, keeping him awake. Once a patrolling police van passed slowly down the street and he had to hold his hand over her mouth.
    At first light he lifted her back into the cart. Her head lolled, she did not know where she was. He stopped the first person he saw and asked the way to the hospital. Anna K could no longer sit upright; and as she slumped, Michael had to struggle to keep the cart from toppling. She was feverish, she laboured to breathe. ‘My throat is so dry,’ she whispered; but her coughing was soggy.
    In the hospital he sat supporting her till it was her turn to be taken away. When next he saw her she was lying on a trolley amid a sea of trolleys with a tube up her nose, unconscious. Not knowing what to do, he loitered in the corridor till he was sent away. He spent the afternoon in the courtyard in the thin warmth of the winter sun. Twice he sneaked back in to check whether the trolley had been moved. A third time he tiptoed up to his mother and bent over her. He could detect no sign of breathing. Fear gripping his heart, he ran to the nurse at the desk and tugged at her sleeve. ‘Please come and see, quickly!’ he said. The nurse shook herself free. ‘Who are you?’ she hissed. She followed him to the trolley and took his mother’s pulse, staring into the distance. Then without a word she returned to her desk. K stoodbefore her like a dumb dog while she wrote. She turned to him. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said in a tight whisper. ‘Do you see all these people here?’ She gestured towards the corridor and the wards. ‘These are all people waiting to be attended to. We are working twenty-four hours a day to attend to them. When I come off duty—no, listen to me, don’t go away!’—it was she now who tugged him back, her voice was rising, her face was near to his, he could see angry tears starting in her eyes—‘When I come off duty I am so tired I can’t eat, I just fall asleep with my shoes on. I am just one person. Not two, not