A silence falls between the two of us; we watch the flies on the windowpane. 'But we are soft,' I suggest.
'Perhaps we are soft,' he replies. 'Perhaps we are even scheming a bit, at the back of our minds. Perhaps we think that if one day they come and put everyone on trial, someone will step forward and say, "Let those two off, they were soft." Who knows? But that isn't what I am talking about. I am talking about flow. At the moment you have got more patients flowing into your infirmary than flowing out, and my question is, are you going to do something about it?'
When we emerged from his office it was to behold a corporal raising the orange, white and blue on a flagpole in the middle of the track, a five-piece band playing 'Uit die blou, ' the cornet out of key, and six hundred sullen men standing to attention, barefoot, in their tenth-hand khakis, having their thinking set right. A year ago we were still trying to make them sing; but we have given up on that.
Felicity took Michaels outdoors for some fresh air this morning. I passed him sitting on the grass holding his face up to the sun like a lizard basking, and asked him how he liked it in the infirmary. He was unexpectedly talkative. 'I'm glad there isn't a radio,' he said. 'The other place I stayed there was a radio playing all the time.' At first I thought he was referring to another camp, but it turned out that he meant the godforsaken institution where he spent his childhood. 'There was music all afternoon and all evening, till eight o'clock. It was like oil over everything.' 'The music was to keep you calm,' I explained. 'Otherwise you might have beaten each other's faces in and thrown chairs through the windows. The music was to soothe your savage breast.' I don't know whether he understood, but he smiled his lopsided smile. 'The music made me restless,' he said, 'I used to fidget, I couldn't think my own thoughts.' 'And what were the thoughts you wanted to think?' He: 'I used to think about flying. I always wanted to fly. I used to stretch out my arms and think I was flying over the fences and between the houses. I flew low over people's heads, but they couldn't see me. When they switched on the music I became too restless to do it, to fly.' And he even named one or two of the tunes that had disturbed him most.
I have moved him to the bed by the window, away from the boy with the broken ankle who has taken a dislike to him, God knows why, and lies and hisses at him all day. When he sits up he can now at least see the sky and the top of the flagpole. 'Eat a little more and you can go for a walk,' I coax him. What he really needs, however, is physiotherapy, which we cannot provide. He is like one of those toys made of sticks held together with rubber bands. He needs a graduated diet, gentle exercise, and physiotherapy, so that one day soon he can rejoin camp life and have a chance to march back and forth across the racetrack and shout slogans and salute the flag and practise digging holes and filling them again.
Overheard in the canteen: 'The children are finding it so hard to adapt to life in a flat. They really miss the big garden and their pets. We had to evacuate just like that: three days' notice. I can cry when I think of what we left behind.' The speaker a florid-faced woman in a polka-dot dress, the wife, I think, of one of the NCO's. (In her dreams of her abandoned home a strange man sprawls on the sheets with his boots on, or opens the deep-freeze and spits into the ice-cream.) 'Don't tell me not to feel bitter,' she said. Her companion a slim little woman I did not recognize, with her hair combed back like a man's.
Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth. We also ply them with items from the brass band repertoire and show them films of young men in neat uniforms demonstrating to grizzled village elders how to eradicate mosquitoes and plough along the contour. At the end of the process we certify them cleansed and pack them off to the labour battalions to carry water and dig latrines. At the big military parades there is always a company from the labour battalions marching past the cameras among all the tanks and rockets and field artillery to prove that we can turn enemies into friends; but they march with spades on their shoulders, I notice, not guns.
3
Returning to camp after a Sunday off, I present myself at the gate feeling like a punter paying admission, enclosure a, reads the sign over the main gate, members and officials only, reads the sign over the gate to the infirmary. Why have they not taken them down? Do they believe the track will be re-opened one of these days? Are there still people training racehorses somewhere, convinced that after all the fuss the world will settle down to being as it was?
4
We are down to twelve patients. Michaels, however, makes no progress. There has obviously been degeneration of the intestinal wall. I have put him back on skim milk.
He lies looking up at the window and the sky, with his ears sticking out of his bare skull, smiling his smile. When he was brought in he had a brown paper packet which he put away under his pillow. Now he has taken to holding the packet against his chest. I asked him whether it contained his muti. No, he said, and showed me dried pumpkin seeds. I was quite affected. 'You must go back to your gardening when the war is over,' I told him. 'Will you go back to the Karoo, do you think?' He looked cagey. 'Of course there is good soil in the Peninsula too, under all the rolling lawns,' I said. 'It would be nice to see market gardening carried on in the Peninsula again.' He made no reply. I took the packet out of his hand and tucked it under the pillow 'for safety.' When I passed an hour later he was asleep, his mouth nudging the pillow like a baby's.
He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.
5
His condition is stable, the diarrhoea under control. Pulse rate low, however, blood pressure low. Last night he complained of being cold, though in fact the nights are getting warmer, and Felicity had to give him a pair of socks. This morning when I tried to be friendly he shook me off. 'Do you think if you leave me alone I am going to die?' he said. 'Why do you want to make me fat? Why fuss over me, why am I so important?' I was in no mood to argue. I tried to take his wrist; he pulled away with surprising strength, waving an arm like an insect's claw. I left him till I had done my round, then came back. I had something I wanted to say. 'You ask why you are important, Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No one is forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.'
He gazed up at the ceiling for a long while, like an old man consulting the spirits, then spoke. 'My mother worked all her life long,' he said. 'She scrubbed other people's floors, she cooked food for them, she washed their dishes. She washed their dirty clothes. She scrubbed the bath after them. She went on her knees and cleaned the toilet. But when she was old and sick they forgot her. They put her away out of sight. When she died they threw her in the fire. They gave me an old box of ash and told me, "Here is your mother, take her away, she is no good to us."
The boy with the broken ankle lay pricking his ears, pretending to be asleep.