Whereas I-if one dark night I were to slip into overalls and tennis shoes and clamber over the wall (cutting the wire, since I am not made of air)-I am the kind who would be snapped up by the first patrol to pass while I yet stood dithering over which way lay salvation. The truth is that the only chance I had is gone, and gone before I knew. The night that Michaels made his break, I should have followed. It is vain to plead that I was not ready. If I had taken Michaels seriously I would always have been ready. I would have had a bundle at hand at all times, with a change of clothing and a purse full of money and a box of matches and a packet of biscuits and a can of sardines. I would never have let him out of my sight. When he slept I would have slept across the door-sill; when he woke I would have watched. And when he stole off I would have stolen off behind him. I would have dodged from shadow to shadow in his tracks, and climbed the wall in the darkest corner, and followed him down the avenue of oaks under the stars, keeping my distance, stopping when he stopped, so that he should never be forced to say to himself, 'Who is this behind me? What does he want?,' or perhaps even start running, taking me for a policeman, a plain-clothes policeman in overalls and tennis shoes carrying a bundle with a gun in it. I would have dogged him all night through the side streets till at daybreak we would have found ourselves on the fringes of the wastes of the Cape Flats, plodding fifty paces apart through sand and bush, avoiding the clusters of shanties where here and there a curl of smoke would be climbing into the sky. And here, in the light of day, you would at last have turned and looked at me, the pharmacist turned makeshift medical officer turned foot-follower who before seeing the light had dictated to you when you might sleep and when you might wake, who had pushed tubes up your nose and pills down your throat, who had stood in your hearing and made jokes about you, who above all had unrelentingly pressed food on you that you could not eat. Suspiciously, angrily even, you would have waited in the middle of the track for me to approach and explain myself.
And I would have come before you and spoken. I would have said: 'Michaels, forgive me for the way I treated you, I did not appreciate who you were till the last days. Forgive me too for following you like this. I promise not to be a burden.' ('Not to be a burden like your mother was'? That would perhaps be imprudent.) 'I am not asking you to take care of me, for example by feeding me. My need is a very simple one. Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned of life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp, not even to the catchment areas of the camps-certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way.'
Then I would have stepped closer till I was within touching distance and you could not fail to see into my eyes. 'From the moment you arrived, Michaels,' I would have said, had I been awake and followed you, 'I could see that you did not belong inside any camp. At first I thought of you, I will confess, as a figure of fun. I did indeed urge Major van Rensburg to exempt you from the camp regime, but only because I thought that putting you through the motions of rehabilitation would have been like trying to teach a rat or a mouse or (dare I say it?) a lizard to bark and beg and catch a ball. As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered. You were not a hero and did not pretend to be, not even a hero of fasting. In fact you did not resist at all. When we told you to jump, you jumped. When we told you to jump again, you jumped again. When we told you to jump a third time, however, you did not respond but collapsed in a heap; and we could all see, even the most unwilling of us, that you had failed because you had exhausted your resources in obeying us. So we picked you up, finding that you weighed no more than a sack of feathers, and set you down before food, and said: Eat, build up your strength so that you can exhaust it again obeying us. And you did not refuse. You tried sincerely, I believe, to do as you were told. You acquiesced in your will (excuse me for making these distinctions, they are the only means I possess to explain myself), your will acquiesced but your body baulked. That was how I saw it. Your body rejected the food we fed you and you grew even thinner. Why? I asked myself: why will this man not eat when he is plainly starving? Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply. Your will remained pliant but your body was crying to be fed its own food, and only that. Now I had been taught that the body contains no ambivalence. The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature. I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. It was not a principle, an idea that lay behind your decline. You did not want to die, but you were dying. You were like a bunny-rabbit sewn up in the carcase of an ox, suffocating no doubt, but starving too, amid all those basketfuls of meat, for the true food.'
Here I might have paused in my discourse on the Flats while from somewhere in the middle distance behind us came the sound of a man coughing and hawking and spitting, and the smell of woodsmoke; but my glittering eye would have held you, for the time being, rooted where you stood.
'I was the only one who saw that you were more than you seemed to be,' I would have proceeded. 'Slowly, as your persistent No, day after day, gathered weight, I began to feel that you were more than just another patient, another casualty of the war, another brick in the pyramid of sacrifice that someone would eventually climb and stand straddle-legged on top of, roaring and beating his chest and announcing himself emperor of all he surveyed. You would lie on your bed under the window with only the nightlight shining, your eyes closed, perhaps sleeping. I would stand in the doorway breathing quietly, listening to the groans and rustlings of the other sleepers, waiting; and upon me the feeling would grow stronger and stronger that around one bed among all there was a thickening of the air, a concentration of darkness, a black whirlwind roaring in utter silence above your body, pointing to you, without so much as stirring the edge of the bedclothes. I would shake my head like a man trying to shake off a dream, but the feeling would persist. "This is not my imagination," I would say to myself. "This sense of a gathering meaningfulness is not something like a ray that I project to bathe this or that bed, or a robe in which I wrap this or that patient according to whim. Michaels means something, and the meaning he has is not private to me. If it were, if the origin of this meaning were no more than a lack in myself, a lack, say, of something to believe in, since we all know how difficult it is to satisfy a hunger for belief with the vision of times to come that the war, to say nothing of the camps, presents us with, if it were a mere craving for meaning that sent me to Michaels and his story, if Michaels himself were no more than what he seems to be (what you seem to be), a skin-and-bones man with a crumpled up (pardon me, I name only the obvious), then I would have every justification for retiring to the toilets behind the jockeys' changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet through my head. Yet have I ever been more sincere than I am tonight?" And standing in the doorway I would turn my bleakest stare in upon myself, seeking by the last means I knew to detect the germ of dishonesty at the heart of the conviction-the wish, let us say, for example, to be the only one to whom the camp was not just the old Kenilworth racetrack with prefabricated huts dotted across it but a privileged site where meaning erupted into the world. But if such a germ lurked within me it would not raise its head, and if it would not what could I do to compel it? (I am dubious anyhow that one can separate the self that scrutinizes from the self that hides, setting them at odds like hawk and mouse; but let us agree to postpone that discussion for a day when we are not running away from the police.) So I would turn my gaze out again, and, yes, it would still be true, I was not deceiving myself, I was not flattering myself, I was not comforting myself, it was as it had been before, it was the truth, there was indeed a gathering, a thickening of darkness above one bed alone, and that bed was yours. ' At this stage I think you might already have turned your back on me and begun to walk off, having lost the thread of my discourse and anyhow being anxious to put more miles between yourself and the camp. Or perhaps by now, attracted by my voice, a crowd of children from the shanties would have gathered around us, some in their pyjamas, listening open-mouthed to the big passionate words and making you nervous. So now I would have had to hurry after you, keeping close at your heels so as not to have to shout. 'Forgive me, Michaels,' I would have had to say, 'there is not much more, please be patient. I only want to tell you what you mean to me, then I will be through.'