Meanwhile plans go ahead for the upgrading of Kenilworth to high-security status. March 1 is set as the changeover date. There will be major modifications, including the flattening of the grandstand, and huts to house five hundred more prisoners. Noël telephoned the Castle to protest the shortness of the notice and was told: Calm yourself. Everything is taken care of. Help us by setting your men to clearing the ground. If there is grass, burn it. If there are stones, remove them. Every stone casts a shadow. Good luck. Remember, 'n boer maak 'n plan.
I suspect that Noël is drinking more than usual. Perhaps now would be a good time, for him as for me, to quit the fortress- for that is what the Peninsula is clearly to become-leaving behind the prisoners to guard the prisoners, the sick to cure the sick. Perhaps the two of us should take a leaf out of Michaels' book and go on a trip to one of the quieter parts of the country, the obscurer reaches of the Karoo for example, and set up house there, two gentleman deserters of modest means and sober habits. How to get as far as Michaels did without being picked up is the main difficulty. Perhaps we could make a start by discarding our uniforms and getting dirt under our fingernails and walking a little closer to the earth; though I doubt we will ever look as nondescript as Michaels, or as Michaels must have looked in the days before he turned into a skeleton. With Michaels it always seemed to me that someone had scuffled together a handful of dust, spat on it, and patted it into the shape of a rudimentary man, making one or two mistakes (the mouth, and without a doubt the contents of the head), omitting one or two details (the sex), but coming up nevertheless in the end with a genuine little man of earth, the kind of little man one sees in peasant art emerging into the world from between the squat thighs of its mother-host with fingers ready hooked and back ready bent for a life of burrowing, a creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comes digs its own grave and slips quietly in and draws the heavy earth over its head like a blanket and cracks a last smile and turns over and descends into sleep, home at last, while unnoticed as ever somewhere far away the grinding of the wheels of history continues. What organ of state would play with the idea of recruiting creatures like that as its agents, and what use would they serve except to carry things and die in large numbers?
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.'