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.