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 to 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.