Life and Times of Michael K Read Online Free

of faroff places: Wakkerstroom, Pietersburg, King William’s Town. Sometimes he found himself singing tonelessly along.
    Exhausting the magazines, he began paging through old newspapersfrom under the kitchen sink, so old that he remembered none of the events they told of, though he recognized some of the football players. KHAMIESKROON KILLER TRACKED DOWN said the headline in one, over a picture of a handcuffed man in a torn white shirt standing between two stiff policemen. Though the handcuffs brought his shoulders forward and down, the Khamieskroon killer looked at the camera with what seemed to K a smile of quiet achievement. Below was a second picture: a rifle with a sling photographed against a blank background and captioned ‘Killer’s weapon.’ K stuck the page with the story on the refrigerator door; for days afterwards, when he looked up from his intermittent work on the wheels, his eyes continued to meet those of the man from Khamieskroon, wherever that was.
    At a loss for things to do, he tried to dry out the Buhrmanns’ waterlogged books by hanging them over a line across the living-room; but the process took too long and he lost interest. He had never liked books, and he found nothing to engage him here in stories of military men or women with names like Lavinia, though he did spend some time unsticking the leaves of picture-books of the Ionian Islands, Moorish Spain, Finland Land of Lakes, Bali and other places in the world.
    Then one morning Michael K started up at the scrape of the front-door lock and found himself facing four men in overalls who pushed past him without a word and set about clearing the flat of its contents. Hastily he moved the pieces of his bicycle out of their way. His mother shuffled out in her housecoat and stopped one of the men on the stairs. ‘Where’s the boss? Where’s Mr Buhrmann?’ she asked. The man shrugged. K went out into the street and spoke to the driver of the van. ‘Are you from Mr Buhrmann?’ he asked. ‘What does it look like, man,’ said the driver.
    Michael helped his mother back into bed. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why they don’t let me know anything. What must I do if someone knocks on the door and says I mustclear out at once, he wants the room for his domestic? Where must I go?’ For a long while he sat beside her, stroking her arm, listening to her lament. Then he took the two bicycle wheels and the steel rod and his tools out into the alley and sat down in a patch of sunlight to confront anew the problem of how to prevent the wheels from spinning off the axle. He worked all afternoon; by evening, using a hacksaw blade, he had painstakingly incised a thread down either end of the rod, along which he could wind clumps of one-inch washers. With the wheels mounted on the rod between the washers, it was only a matter of tightening loop after loop of wire around the rod to hold the washers flush against the wheels and the problem seemed to be solved. He barely ate or slept that night, so impatient was he to get on with his work. In the morning he broke down the old barrow platform-seat and rebuilt it as a narrow three-sided box with two long handles, which he wired in place over the axle. He now had a squat rickshaw which, though hardly of sturdy build, would take his mother’s weight; and the same evening, when a cold wind from the north-west had driven all but the hardiest promenaders indoors, he was again able to take his mother, wrapped in coat and blanket, for a seafront ride that brought a smile to her lips.
    Now was the time. No sooner had they returned to the room than he came out with the plan he had been pondering ever since building the first barrow. They were wasting their time waiting for permits, he said. The permits would never come. And without permits they could not leave by train. Any day now they would be expelled from the room. Would she therefore not allow him to take her to Prince Albert in the cart? She had