For a night and a day the girl kept her vigil, then retired into the tent. She still would not cry, word went about, nor would she eat. K's first thought each morning was: Will I see her today? She was short and fat; no one knew for sure who the father of the child had been, though it was rumoured that he was away in the mountains. K wondered whether he was at last in love. Then after three days the girl re-emerged and resumed her life. Seeing her in the midst of other people, K could detect no sign that she was different from them. He never spoke to her.
One night in December, woken by excited shouts, the people of the camp stumbled from their beds to behold on the horizon in the direction of Prince Albert a vast and beautiful orange blossom unfolding itself against the murk of the sky. There were gasps and whistles of amazement. 'What's the bet it's the police station!' someone shouted. For an hour they stood and watched while the fire poured out like a fountain consuming itself and being consumed. There were moments when they were sure they could hear shouts and cries and the roar of the flames across the miles of empty veld. Then by degrees the flower grew redder and duller, the fountain lost its strength, till at last, with some of the children asleep in arms and others rubbing their eyes, and with nothing left to see but a smoky glow in the distance, it was time to go back to bed.
The police struck at dawn. In a squad of twenty, regular police and schoolboy reservists, with dogs and guns, with an officer standing on the roof of a van shouting commands through a megaphone, they moved down the rows pulling out the pegs, collapsing the tents, beating at the shapes struggling in the folds. They burst into the huts and beat the sleepers in their beds. A youth who dodged them and ran away was chased into a corner behind the latrines and kicked into insensibility; a small boy was knocked over by a dog and rescued screaming with fright, his scalp lacerated and bleeding. Half-dressed, some wailing, some praying, some stunned with fear, men, women and children were herded on to the open terrain before the huts and ordered to sit down. From there, under the eyes of dogs and men with cocked guns, they watched while the rest of the squad moved like a swarm of locusts through the lines of tents, turning them inside out, hurling everything they had contained into the open, emptying suitcases and boxes, till the site looked like a trash-heap, with clothes, bedding, food, cooking utensils, crockery, toiletries scattered everywhere; after a while they moved on to the huts and turned them to chaos too.
Through all this K sat with his beret pulled over his ears against the early-morning wind. The woman beside him had a crying baby with a bare bottom and two little girls who clung tightly to her, one to each arm. 'Come and sit here with me, ' whispered K. to the smaller of the girls. Without taking her eyes from the destruction being visited on them, she stepped over his legs and stood within the protective circle of his arms sucking her thumb.
Her sister joined her. The two stood pressed together; K closed his eyes; the baby continued to kick and whine.
They were made to line up at the gate and file out one by one. Everything they had with them they were forced to leave behind, even the blankets some of them wore wrapped over their night-clothes. A dog-handler plucked a little radio out of the hands of a woman in front of K: he dropped it to the earth and stamped on it. 'No radios,' he explained.
Outside the gate the men were herded left, the women and children right. The gates were locked and the camp stood empty. Then the captain, the big blond man who had shouted orders, brought the two Free Corps guards out to face the men where they stood in a row against the fence. The guards were unarmed and dishevelled: K wondered what had gone on in the guardhouse. 'Now,' said the captain, 'tell us who is missing.'
There were three missing, three men who slept in one of the other huts, with whom K had never exchanged a word.
The captain was shouting at the guards, who had come to attention before him. At first K thought he shouted because he was used to the megaphone; but soon the rage behind the shouting became too clear to be missed. 'What are we keeping here in our back yard!' he shouted. 'A nest of criminals! Criminals and saboteurs and idlers! And you! The two of you! You eat and sleep and get fat and from one day to the next you don't know where the people are you are supposed to be guarding! What do you think you are doing here-running a holiday camp? It's a work camp, man! It's a camp to teach lazy people to work! Work! And if they don't work we close the camp! We close it down and chase all these vagrants away! Get out and don't come back! You've had your chance!' He turned to the group of men. 'Yes, you, you ungrateful bastards, you, I'm talking about you!' he shouted. 'You appreciate nothing! Who builds houses for you when you have nowhere to live? Who gives you tents and blankets when you are shivering with cold? Who nurses you, who takes care of you, who comes here day after day with food? And how do you repay us? Well, from now on you can starve!'
He drew a deep breath. Over his shoulder the sun made its appearance like a ball of fire. 'Do you hear me?' he shouted. 'I want everyone to hear me! You ask for war, you get war! I'm putting my own men on guard here-fuck the Army!-I'm putting my own men on guard, and I'm locking the gates, and if my men see any of you, man, woman or child, outside the wire, they have orders to shoot, no questions asked! No one leaves the camp except on labour calls. No visits, no outings, no picnics. Roll-calls morning and evening, with everyone present to answer. We've been kind to you long enough.
'And I'm locking up these monkeys with you!' He raised an arm and pointed dramatically at the two guards, still standing to attention. 'I'm putting them in to teach them who runs things here! You! You think I haven't kept an eye on the two of you? You think I don't know about the nice life you lead? You think I don't know about all the pussy-fucking that goes on when you should be on guard?' The thought seemed to inflame him further, for suddenly he wheeled, stormed into the guardhouse, and a moment later reappeared in the doorway bearing a small white-enamelled refrigerator clutched to his belly. His face glowed with the strain; his cap, brushing against the lintel, fell off. He stepped to the edge of the porch, raised the refrigerator as high as he could, and flung it down. It hit the ground with a crash; paraffin began to seep from the motor. 'You see?' he panted. He tipped the refrigerator on to its side. The door fell open and with a clatter disgorged a one-litre bottle of ginger beer, a tub of margarine, a loop of sausage, loose peaches and onions, a plastic water-flask and five bottles of beer. 'You see!' he panted again, glaring.
All morning they sat waiting in the sun while two young policemen and a helper in a blue T-shirt with the legend san jose state on front and back searched with officious slowness through the debris. In the huts they found caches of wine, which they emptied into the earth. They threw all the weapons they found in a pile: a kierie, an iron bar, a length of piping, a pair of sheep-shears, several folding knives. Then at midday the search was declared over. The police shepherded the inmates back in, locked the gates, and in a few minutes were gone, leaving behind two of their number, who sat all afternoon under the awning watching the people of Jakkalsdrif scratch in the mess for their belongings.
From one of the new guards they later learned what had brought down Oosthuizen's wrath upon them. In the middle of the night a loud explosion had come from the welding shop on the High Street, followed by an uncontrollable fire that had spread to the building next door and thence to the town's cultural history museum. The museum, with its thatched roof and yellowwood ceilings and floors, had been gutted in an hour, though some of the antique farming equipment on display in the courtyard had been rescued. Searching by torchlight in the smoking rubble of the welding shop, the police had found evidence of forced entry; and when one of their own drivers recollected that at dusk the previous evening he had stopped three strange men on two bicycles near the Jakkalsdrif turnoff (he had warned them that they were on the point of infringing the curfew; they had pleaded, that they were hurrying back as fast as they could to the Onderdorp, where they lived; he had thought no more of it), it seemed clear that camp people were implicated in an act of arson against the town.