8
Yesterday I discharged Michaels. On the discharge slip I clearly specified exemption from physical exercise for a minimum of seven days. Yet when I emerged from the grandstand this morning the first thing I saw was Michaels slogging it out around the track with the rest of them, stripped to the waist, a skeleton trailing behind forty vigorous human bodies. I remonstrated with the duty officer. His reply: 'When he can't take any more, he can drop out.' I protested: 'He will drop dead. His heart will stop.' 'He has been telling you stories, ' he replied. 'You mustn't believe all the stories these buggers tell you. There's nothing wrong with him. Why are you so interested anyway? Look.' He pointed. Michaels passed us, his eyes shut, breathing deeply, his face relaxed.
Perhaps I do indeed believe too many of his stories. Perhaps the truth is simply that he needs to eat less than other people.
I was wrong. I should not have doubted. After two days he is back. Felicity went to the door, and there he was, supported between two guards, unconscious. She asked what had happened. They pretended not to know. Ask Sergeant Albrechts, they said.
His hands and feet were cold as ice, his pulse very weak. Felicity wrapped him in blankets with hot water bottles. I gave him an injection, and later fed him glucose and milk through a tube.
Albrechts sees the case as one of simple insubordination. Michaels refused to participate in prescribed activities. As punishment he was made to do exercises: squats and star-jumps. After half a dozen of these he collapsed and could not be revived.
'What was it that he was refusing to do?' I asked.
'Sing,' he said.
'Sing? He's not right in the head, man, he can't speak properly-how do you expect him to sing?'
He shrugged, it won't hurt him to try,' he said.
'And how can you punish him with physical exercise? He's as weak as a baby, you can see that.'
'It's in the book,' he replied.
10
Michaels is conscious again. His first act was to pull the tube out of his nose, Felicity coming too late to stop him. Now he lies near the door under his heap of blankets looking like a corpse, refusing to eat. With his stick-arm he pushes away the feed bottle, it's not my kind of food' is all he will say.
'What the hell is your kind of food?' I ask him. 'And why are you treating us like this? Don't you see we are trying to help you?' He gives me a serenely indifferent look that really rouses my ire. 'There are hundreds of people dying of starvation every day and you won't eat! Why? Are you fasting? Is this a protest fast? Is that what it is? What are you protesting against? Do you want your freedom? If we turned you loose, if we put you out on the street in your condition, you would be dead within twenty-four hours. You can't take care of yourself, you don't know how. Felicity and I are the only people in the world who care enough to help you. Not because you are special but because it is our job. Why can't you co-operate?'
This open row caused a great stir in the ward. Everyone listened. The boy I had suspected of meningitis (and whom I caught yesterday with his hand up Felicity's skirt) knelt on his bed craning to see, a broad smile on his face. Felicity herself dropped all pretence of pushing the broom.
'I never asked for special treatment,' croaked Michaels. I turned my back and walked out.
You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.
Later, when things had calmed down in the ward, I returned and sat down at your bedside. For a long while I waited. Then at last you opened your eyes and spoke. 'I am not going to die,' you said. 'I can't eat the food here, that's all. I can't eat camp food.'
'Why don't you write out a discharge for him,' I pressed Noël. 'I'll take him to the gate tonight and put a few rand in his pocket and chuck him out. Then he can start fending for himself like he wants to. You write a discharge and I'll make out a report for you: "Cause of decease pneumonia, consequent on chronic malnutrition predating admission." We can cross him off the list and we won't have to think about him any more.'
'I am baffled by this interest you have in him,' said Noël. 'Don't ask me to tamper with records, I am not going to do it. If he is going to die, if he is starving himself to death, let him die. It's simple enough.'
'It's not a question of dying,' I said. 'It's not that he wants to die. He just doesn't like the food here. Profoundly does not like it. He won't even take babyfood. Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom.'
An awkward silence fell between us.
'Maybe you and I wouldn't like camp food either,' I persisted.
'You saw him when they brought him in,' said Noël. 'He was a skeleton even then. He was living by himself on that farm of his free as a bird, eating the bread of freedom, yet he arrived here looking like a skeleton. He looked like someone out of Dachau.'
'Maybe he is just a very thin man,' I said.
11
The ward was in darkness, Felicity asleep in her room. I stood over Michaels' bed with a flashlight, shaking him till he woke and shielded his eyes. I spoke in a whisper, bending so close that I could smell the odour of smoke he somehow carries with him despite his ablutions.
'Michaels, there is something I want to tell you. If you don't eat, you are truly going to die. It is as simple as that. It will take time, it will not be pleasant, but in the end you will certainly die. And I am going to do nothing to stop you. It would be easy for me to tie you down and strap your head and put a tube down your throat and feed you, but I am not going to do that. I am going to treat you like a free man, not a child or an animal. If you want to throw your life away, so be it, it is your life, not mine.'
He took his hand away from his eyes and cleared his throat deeply. He seemed about to speak, then shook his head instead and smiled. In the torchlight his smile was repulsive, sharklike.
'What sort of food do you want?' I whispered. 'What sort of food would you be prepared to eat?'
Reaching out a slow hand he pushed the flashlight aside. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.
The training period for September's intake is over, and this morning the long column of barefoot men, headed by a drummer and flanked by armed guards, set out on the twelve-kilometre march to the railway yards and dispatch up-country. They leave behind half a dozen of their number classed as intractable and locked up waiting to be shipped to Muldersrus, plus three in the infirmary not fit to walk. Michaels is among the latter: nothing has passed his lips since he refused to be fed by tube.
There is a smell of carbolic soap on the breeze and a pleasant stillness. I feel lightened, almost happy. Is this how it will be when the war is over and the camp is closed down? (Or will the camp not close down even then, camps with high walls always having their uses?) Everyone save a skeleton staff is off on a weekend pass. Oh Monday the November intake is due to arrive. Rail services have deteriorated so badly, however, that we can plan ahead only day by day. There was an attack on De Aar last week, with significant damage to the yards. It did not get into the news bulletins but Noël heard of it reliably.