Read Online Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee - Free Book Online Page B

up and down inside a fence baying, eager to get at him. A few houses further along the street a youngwoman was kneeling at an outside tap washing a bowl. She glanced over her shoulder at him; he touched his beret; she looked away.
    Now there were shops on both sides of the street: a bakery, a café, a clothing store, a bank agency, a welding shop, a general dealer, garages. Grids of steel mesh were locked across the front of the general dealer’s. K sat down on the stoep with his back to the mesh and closed his eyes against the sun. Now I am here, he thought. Finally.
    An hour later K was still sitting there, asleep, his mouth agape. Children, whispering and giggling, had gathered around him. One of them delicately lifted the beret from his head, put it on, and twisted his mouth in parody. His friends snorted with laughter. He dropped the beret askew on K’s head and tried to worm the box away from him; but both hands were folded over it.
    The shopkeeper arrived with his keys; the children fell back; and when he began to remove the grillework K woke up.
    The interior of the shop was dim and cluttered. Galvanized iron bathtubs and bicycle wheels hung from the ceiling alongside fan belts and radiator hoses; there were bins of nails and pyramids of plastic buckets, shelves of canned goods, patent medicines, sweets, babywear, cold drinks.
    K stepped to the counter. ‘Mr Vosloo or Mr Visser,’ he said. Those were the names his mother had remembered from the past. ‘I’m looking for a Mr Vosloo or a Mr Visser who is a farmer.’
    ‘Mrs Vosloo,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Is that who you mean? Mrs Vosloo at the hotel? There is no Mr Vosloo.’
    ‘Mr Vosloo or Mr Visser who was a farmer long ago, that is who I am looking for. I don’t know the name for sure, but if I find the farm I will recognize it.’
    ‘There is no Vosloo or Visser who farms. Visagie—is that who you mean? What do you want the Visagies for?’
    ‘I have to take something there.’ He held up the box.
    ‘Then you have come a long way for nothing. There is no oneat the Visagies’ place, it has been empty for years. Are you sure the name you want is Visagie? The Visagies left long ago.’
    K asked for a packet of ginger snaps.
    ‘Who sent you here?’ asked the shopkeeper. K looked stupid. ‘They should have got someone who knows what he is doing. Tell them that when you see them.’ K mumbled and left.
    He was walking up the street wondering where to try next when one of the children came running after him. ‘Mister, I can tell you where Visagies is!’ he called. K stopped. ‘But it’s empty, there’s no one there,’ the child said. He gave directions that would take K north along the road to Kruidfontein and then east by a farm road along the valley of the Moordenaarsrivier. ‘How far is the farm from the big road?’ asked K. ‘A long way or a short way?’ The boy was vague, nor did his companions know. ‘You turn off at the sign of the finger pointing,’ he said. ‘Visagies is before the mountains, quite a long way if you are walking.’ K gave them money for sweets.
    It was noon before he reached the pointing finger and turned off on to a track that led into desolate grey flats; the sun was going down when he climbed a crest and came in sight of a low whitewashed farmhouse beyond which the land rose from rippling flats to foothills and then to the steep dark slopes of the mountains themselves. He approached the house and circled it. The shutters were closed and a rock-pigeon flew in at a hole where one of the gables had crumbled, leaving timbers exposed and galvanized roof-plates buckled. A loose plate flapped monotonously in the wind. Behind the house was a rockery garden in which nothing was growing. There was no old wagonhouse such as he had imagined, but a wood-and-iron shed, and against it an empty chicken-run with streamers of yellow plastic blowing in the netting-wire. On the rise behind the house stood a pump whose head was