Life and Times of Michael K Read Online Free Page B

we’ll be there. Don’t move too much from side to side if you can help it.’ She nodded but continued to hide her face in her woollen gloves. He bent towards her. ‘Do you want to stay, Ma?’ he said. ‘If you want to stay we can stay.’ She shook her head. So he put on his cap, lifted the handles, and wheeled the cart out on to the misty road.
    He took the shortest route, past the devastated area around the old fuel-storage tanks where the demolition of burnt-out buildingshad only just begun, past the dock quarter and the blackened shells of the warehouses that had in the past year been taken over by the city’s street bands. They were not stopped. Indeed, few of the people they passed at this early hour spared them a glance. Stranger and stranger conveyances were emerging on the streets: shopping trolleys fitted with steering bars; tricycles with boxes over the rear axle; baskets mounted on pushcart undercarriages; crates on castors; barrows of all sizes. A donkey fetched eighty rands in new currency, a cart with tyres over a hundred.
    K kept up a steady pace, stopping every half-hour to rub his cold hands and flex his aching shoulders. The moment he settled his mother in the cart in Sea Point he realized that, with all the luggage packed in the front, the axle was off centre, too far back. Now, the more his mother slid down the box trying to make herself comfortable, the greater the deadweight he found himself lifting. He kept a smiling face to hide the strain he felt. ‘We just have to get on to the open road,’ he panted, ‘then someone is bound to stop for us.’
    By noon they were passing through the ghostly industrial quarter of Paarden Eiland. A couple of workmen sitting on a wall eating their sandwiches watched them roll past in silence, CRASH-FLASH said the faded black lettering beneath their feet. K felt his arms going numb but plodded on another half-mile. Where the road passed under the Black River Parkway he helped his mother out and settled her on the grass verge beneath the bridge. They ate their lunch. He was struck by the emptiness of the roads. There was such stillness that he could hear birdsong. He lay back in the thick grass and closed his eyes.
    He was roused by a rumbling in the air. At first he thought it was faroff thunder. The noise grew louder, however, beating in waves off the base of the bridge above them. From their right, from the direction of the city, at deliberate speed, came two pairs of uniformed motorcyclists, rifles strapped across their backs, and behind them an armoured car with a gunner standing in the turret.Then followed a long and miscellaneous procession of heavy vehicles, most of them trucks empty of cargo. K crept up the verge to his mother; side by side they sat and watched in a roar of noise that seemed to turn the air solid. The convoy took minutes to pass. The rear was brought up by scores of automobiles, vans and light trucks, followed by an olive-green army truck with a canvas hood under which they glimpsed two rows of seated helmeted soldiers, and then another pair of motorcyclists.
    One of the lead motorcyclists had turned a pointed stare on K and his mother as he went past. Now the last two motorcyclists peeled off from the convoy. One waited at the roadside, the other climbed the verge. Raising his visor he addressed them: ‘No stopping along the expressway,’ he said. He glanced into the barrow. ‘Is this your vehicle?’ K nodded. ‘Where are you going?’ K whispered, cleared his throat, spoke a second time: ‘To Prince Albert. In the Karoo.’ The motorcyclist whistled, rocked the barrow lightly, called down something to his companion. He turned back to K. ‘Along the road, just around the bend, there is a checkpoint. You stop at the checkpoint and show your permit. You got a permit to leave the Peninsula?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You can’t travel outside the Peninsula without a permit. Go to the checkpoint and show them your permit and your papers.