Read Life and Times of Michael K for Free Online Page B

him, and two brown paper parcels. ‘We have packed your late mother’s clothes and personal possessions in her suitcase,’ the strange nurse said: ‘you may take it now.’ She wore glasses; she sounded as if she were reading the words from a card. K noticed that the girl at the desk was watching them out of the corner of her eye. ‘This parcel,’ the nurse went on, ‘contains your mother’s ashes. Your mother was cremated this morning, Michael. If you choose, we can dispose of the ashes fittingly, or else you can take them with you.’ With a fingernail she touched the parcel in question. Both parcels were neatly sealed with brown paper tape; this was the smaller. ‘Would you like us to take charge of it?’ she said. Her finger stroked it lightly. K shook his head. ‘And in this parcel,’ she went on, pushing the second one firmly across to him, ‘we have put a few small things for you that you may find useful, clothes and toiletries.’ She looked him candidly in the eye and gave him a smile. The girl at the desk turned back to her typewriter.
    So there is a place for burning, K thought. He imagined the old women from the ward fed one after another, eyes pinched against the heat, lips pinched, hands at their sides, into the fiery furnace. First the hair, in a halo of flame, then after a while everything else, to the last things, burning and crumbling. And it was happening all the time. ‘How do I know?’ he said. ‘How do you know what?’ the nurse said. Impatiently he indicated the box. ‘How do I know?’ he challenged. She refused to answer, or did not understand.
    In the parking lot he tore open the bigger parcel. It containeda safety razor, a bar of soap, a hand towel, a white jacket with maroon flashes on the shoulders, a pair of black trousers, and a black beret with a shiny metal badge reading ST JOHN AMBULANCE .
    He held out the clothes to the girl at the desk. The nurse with glasses had disappeared. ‘Why do you give me this?’ he asked. ‘Don’t ask me,’ said the girl. ‘Maybe someone left them behind.’ She would not look him in the face.
    He threw the soap and razor away and thought of throwing the clothes away too, but did not. His own clothes had begun to smell.
    Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital. By day he pushed the cart around the streets in the vicinity; by night he slept under culverts, behind hedges, in alleys. It seemed strange to him that children should be riding their bicycles home from school in the afternoons, ringing their bells, racing one another; it seemed strange that people should be eating and drinking as usual. For a while he went around asking for garden jobs, but grew to shrink from the distaste that householders, owing him no charity, showed as they opened their doors on him. When it rained he crawled under the cart. There were long periods when he sat staring at his hands, his mind blank.
    He fell into the company of men and women who slept under the railway bridge and haunted the vacant lot behind the liquor shop on Andringa Street. Sometimes he lent them his cart. In a fit of largesse he gave away the stove. Then one night someone tried to pull the suitcase from under his head while he was sleeping. There was a fight, and he moved on.
    Once a police van stopped beside him in the street and two policemen got out to inspect the cart. They opened the suitcase and rummaged through its contents. They stripped the wrapping paper from the second parcel. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside that a plastic bag of dark grey ash. It was the first time K had seen it. He looked away. ‘What’s this?’ asked the policeman.‘It’s my mother’s ashes,’ said K. The policeman tossed the packet speculatively from hand to hand and made a comment to his friend that K did not hear.
    For hours at a time he stood across the street from the hospital. It was smaller than it had once seemed, merely a long low building