by Damon Galgut
Once he had an idea. Laying a comradely hand on my shoulder, he said: ‘I’m going hunting in Zambia next week. You want to come along?’
I mused on this for a while, then said: ‘No, I don’t think so, thanks.’
‘What do you mean? You’d enjoy it, Patrick. You should give it a try.’
I paused to savour my cruelty. ‘Killing things isn’t my idea of fun.’
He blanched with suppressed anger. ‘That’s not the point, and you know it. It’s about being outdoors, under the sky... ’ He shrugged. ‘Why am I explaining? Malcolm didn’t need it explained.’
‘I’m not Malcolm,’ I said.
We changed the subject then and talked about inconsequential things. But both of us knew that we’d skirted close to the edge of a very deep abyss. I didn’t visit as often after that and he stopped asking me about my mother for a while.
He’d kept Malcolm’s room preserved almost exactly as it was when he’d died. The bed was always made up, the curtains opened in the morning and closed at night, as though my brother was away on a short trip and might return at any moment. On the walls and table were perhaps twenty or thirty pictures of Malcolm, a whole chronology of his life, from being a fat scowling baby to the sulky young man in uniform.
Then I went to the army myself. I went reluctantly, too young and unsure to face the alternatives. I had no real idea of what lay ahead; just a sense that it was utterly at odds with my nature. But I thought that the sooner I went into it, the sooner it would be behind me. I didn’t know at that time how certain experiences are never past, even when they are behind.
My mother wrote to me, long self-obsessed letters in which she only sometimes remembered to ask me about myself. She talked about the journey she was on, the journey to discover herself. I was losing all sense of who I was by then, but I didn’t know how to give voice to the gathering absence. Instead I wrote short notes in reply, terse accounts of military life, and then stopped writing altogether. But she didn’t seem to notice. She went on with her monologue. She was trying her hand at acting again, ‘the creative life that marriage killed in me.’ But she wasn’t confident enough, or there wasn’t enough work, and she only ever landed a few little parts here and there. She was battling for money. So when an old friend, installed in a lecturing post up north in Namibia, invited her to come up to the academy to fill in for somebody else for one term, she accepted immediately. It was a change from the usual, she said, and she was a junkie for change. She went to Windhoek to teach drama, and that was how she met Godfrey. And that was why we were making this particular trip now, into the past – hers and mine.
CHAPTER THREE
I woke to the sound of a pig being killed. I sat up rigidly in bed, not moving till the noise suddenly stopped. Then I got up and dressed and went outside.
I had forgotten this about the farm. Its calendar runs on slaughter: Tuesday morning, the pig; on Wednesday, a sheep; on Friday, a goat. In between all these, at arbitrary times, any number of chickens meet their fate. All of this death to support human life: the flesh goes into our bodies, to keep us alive, to keep us going.
Animals are killed in different ways. There are specialized methods according to which each one meets its end. When I was younger, my mother had brought me up here for weekends and holidays, and I had watched many of these executions with appalled fascination. Chickens had their heads chopped clean off with an axe. Goats and sheep had their throats cut. They were led out to a patch of bare ground below the stable, where they were pinned down to the ground, their heads were pulled back and their arteries opened. What horrified me most was the mechanical indifference of the killing, the impassive face of the man who held the knife, which contrasted obscenely with the panic of the dying animal. Chickens were the most frenzied: they ran around insanely, spouting blood. The sheep were the most docile. They stood almost stupidly as they bled, watching the world fade away.
Pigs were a different matter. The pigs had their legs trussed up and were rolled onto their backs. Then a thin filament of iron was pushed into them, into the heart. It was, it is, a highly skilled task. In all the years of my childhood I had only ever seen one man doing the pigsticking: Jonas, old even then, his face all shattered with lines, who would come out of his room, bent forwards as if with the inordinate weight of his duty. He prodded a little with the tip of the metal rod, divining the exact spot, the heart. Then, like a picador, he would throw his frail weight behind it as he drove it in.
There is no sound on earth like the sound of a pig dying. It is a shriek that tears at the primal, unconscious mind. It is the noise of babies being abandoned, of women being taken by force, of the hinges of the world tearing loose. The screaming starts from the moment the pig is seized, as if it knows what is about to happen. The pig squeals and cries, it defecates in terror, but nothing will stop its life converging to a zero on the point of that thin metal stick.
I had always, as a child, been deeply disturbed by the sound, but I could never keep away. Whenever a pig was killed I was there, among the watching black children, in the first rays of sun, with my hands over my ears. And afterwards I followed the trail of the carcass as it was dragged bloodily to the barn, to be butchered.
It was a sign of my state of mind or soul that on this particular morning the screaming of the pig sounded almost beautiful to me. It didn’t evoke violence or fear, but a train of gentle childhood memories. Soft-focus memories, moments on the farm.
But when I came down to the barn, the noise was over and the cold dawn air was crystalline with stillness. And some of those childhood memories carried over to the present: the sun was coming up and over the trees in the orchard, just as when I was young; the mist was dissolving. Near the labourers’ houses there was the same mob of black children scampering in the dusty arena; as though they were the same and I – I alone – had grown older, they went completely still and waved at me. I waved back.
There was a man standing nearby, very black, his teeth vividly white in his face. When he saw me he whipped his cap off his head and said, ‘Môre, Baas.’
I gestured abruptly, dashing away his servility, but he misunderstood and looked cowed.
‘The pig,’ I said. ‘Where is the pig?’
He pointed to the barn. Framed by the door like a painting, the glowing carcass hung upside down, suspended from hooks in its legs, dangling in a way no pig was meant to do. Strangely colossal, amplified in death. And next to it was the figure of a young black man, maybe the same age as me. He was wearing dirty overalls, blotched with maps of dried blood. On his feet, also stained, were galoshes. In his hand, a long silver knife.
I came closer. He raised his head, watching me with sullen eyes.
‘Waar is Jonas?’
He didn’t speak. He raised a long arm and pointed over my shoulder, into the charred brown veld. When I turned back in confusion he said:
‘Dood.’
The single syllable dripped from his mouth. Then he turned his back on me, and went to work on the pig. The blade punched down with delicate violence and in a moment I was watching as complicated guts, parcels of organs, came tumbling to the ground.
The stench of it – deep, bilious, foul – hit me. I took a step back and found myself in motion, stumbling away through the killing ground, where the marks of the dragged carcass showed like cryptic signs in the dirt. Down the hill, past the cramped laager of workers’ huts, to a dry field where little cartridges of earth marked the sites of numerous graves. There were no headstones, no plaques. On some of them a little cross of wood had been planted and on some of the crosses a name had been burned out in black. Here and there were wilting bunches of flowers.
It was to this dusty plot that the young man had pointed; and I found Jonas’s grave at the western edge of the area, in an exposed patch of ground. It was one of the newest. Stuck into the earth next to his tiny wooden cross, the iron pig-sticker was planted: rusting quietly, trembling gently in the breeze, an aerial sending si
gnals from the grave.
I stood there for a while, but there was no emotion, for me, in being here. I walked on, to the far side, where a wrought-iron fence marked off another cemetery – the real cemetery, the white one. It was a neat, delineated garden, screened off discreetly with trees. I opened the gate and went in, to my grandfather’s grave.
He had died a year before, while I was still in the army. I was up on the border. I received the news from my commanding officer, who told me with sibilant sympathy that my Oupa had ‘gone to the sky’. This officer had also told me, in almost the same breath, that the funeral had already taken place the day before. ‘So there’s no point in you going down.’
‘But why wasn’t I told?’
‘I only heard this morning.’
‘But why, Commandant?’
‘I don’t know, Rifleman. Messages take long in the bush.’
I reeled out in a daze from his office. I hadn’t been close to my grandfather, but I was shaken by this news – maybe because it brought back to me the memory of a world beyond this mad, hermetic one in which I was trapped. Later, on sentry duty at the gate to the camp, I suddenly started to cry. Astounding my fellow guard, who knew nothing about what had happened, I found myself saying, over and over, ‘everything goes, everything goes.’ It was this sudden insight into the transitory nature of things that unmanned me, rather than any personal affection for Oupa.
He was a white-haired, fierce old man who made everybody around him afraid. He had been a farmer his whole life, with something of the reddish colour of his fields in his skin. He had never made a tender gesture towards me or my mother. I had seen his teeth in a glass next to his bed at night; this confirmed him as immeasurably old, an impression that was only deepened by his old-fashioned style of dressing, in khaki clothes with a waist-coat and boots, a leather whip under his arm. On Sundays he dressed up in a worn brown suit and drove into town to go to church. We were forced, when I was small, to go too. I can still smell the damp, stony fragrance of the pews, from which prayers lifted up like heat.
Now he was dead. I stood at the foot of his grave. There were thirteen or fourteen of these mounds inside the enclosure – unlike the tired hillocks on the other side of the fence, all carefully trimmed and tended. Granite headstones, gravel paths. Each grave was topped with a slab. I read the inscription on his headstone: PETRUS JOHANNES DE BRUIN 1921 – 1988. Fresh flowers leaned in a vase.
This was the family cemetery; cousins, aunts, brothers, lay nearby. Next to my grandfather, his parents were buried; on the nearer side was an open place; in time, I knew, my grandmother would lie there. It was continuity, succession, links in an ongoing chain leading out of the unknown past, all the way down to me. The thought coupled somehow with the image of the pig hanging in the barn and, feeling suddenly queasy, I went back out through the gate and carried on walking away from the house.
Through the orchard, down to the well. This was about half a kilometre from the house. It was getting on for breakfast and I could see a line of smoke rising from the chimney. By now my mother would probably have come to my room to wake me. But I didn’t want to go back. Not yet.
The well wasn’t in use anymore. But there was still a circle of dark water below, which I could see when I leaned forward over the edge. With the sun at the right angle, not reflecting off the surface, you could sometimes see frogs in the water, drifting greenly in space. And now a memory came to me, of hunting those frogs, with a little coloured girl, my playmate from my early years. Her father was one of the workers on the farm. But to me Margaret was an equal, a companion provided by the strange spaces of the farm. She wore soiled cotton dresses and men’s broken shoes. She picked her nose and the scabs on her legs. We wandered around the countryside together, finding things to amuse us, only parting at the end of the day when it was time for me to go inside the big house again. I loved her as much as my age would allow. Looking down now over the edge of the well, I saw a picture of Margaret and me, tense and trembling with excitement, eyes shining, as we lowered bread-covered hooks on lines of thread. A twitch, a pull, and in a moment we had the frog: a struggling fistful of slime.
There was a flat rock nearby – our operating table. We would lay out the frogs on their backs and cut open their bellies with a sharp piece of glass. Unzipped, exposed, their tiny hearts beat for our gaze. This innocent cruelty spun my mind around, half in shame, half in joy. Where was Margaret now? What had happened to her?
Other memories tumbled into my mind, also let loose somehow by the sight of the dead pig that morning. Nearby was a windmill, broken, lopsided, disused. And I remembered a day when a cormorant – exhausted and lost, far from the sea – had landed on one of the sails to rest. Cormorants struggle to fly, they need space in which to take off, and on this particular day a wind came up and set the windmill suddenly moving. Margaret and I, at work on our frogs, had turned to the sight of a bird dropping cleanly out of the sky. We ran to it, frightened, with our frog-bloodied hands. It died on the ground as we watched.
Another memory: this one nearer the house, on the old see-saw. Margaret and I were playing, going up and down in a regular, gentle rhythm. Near us, on the grass, two dogs were mating. They were mongrels that belonged to the workers; bony, sick-looking creatures. As they staggered around in their weird dance we paid them no attention; we had seen it before. All around on the farm, in between the death that we casually inflicted, life was making more life: cattle and chickens and pigs were all at it, a rampant, blind, voracious rutting.
All at once, from the back of the house, my grandfather came running. It must have been Sunday, because he was dressed up in that brown suit. He had his whip in his hand and for a terrified instant I thought that we were the object of his fury. But it was the dogs that he fell upon, spastic with rage, lunging and swearing in a hot vortex of dust. The dogs ran for cover while the old man still lashed about at his own shadow. Then, muttering softly, he stalked back inside, trailing the leather behind him, not looking at us.
Margaret and I stared at each other as our movement – up, down, up, down – went mindlessly on, getting slower and slower. We didn’t speak a word. But later that same day, as dark was coming down, we found ourselves at the river. There was an overhang in the bank and we squeezed in underneath it. Without consultation, as though it was planned – and I saw now that it followed on from the dogs that morning – we started to touch each other. We put our hands under clothes and explored.
It didn’t last long. On some signal again, we each retreated, pulling our hands down to our sides and sitting staring at the water sliding past. But then shame rose in me and I said to her:
‘You don’t tell. Do you hear?’
‘I won’t.’
‘Because I’ll get you into trouble. You hear me? I’ll get you into big trouble.’
She was crying now. ‘I won’t tell anybody.’
Inspiration came to me, a first intimation of power: ‘My Oupa will fire your father. I’ll tell him to throw him out.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Asseblief.’
‘Moenie sê nie. Moenie sê nie.’
‘Ek sal nie.’
‘You and your father will have to go away.’
We walked home separately then. I was ten years old. Though I came back often to the farm after that, I never played with her again.
The shame of that day, which I hadn’t felt at the time, only touched me now. The memories, that had been flowing and falling with such ease into the present, suddenly stopped. I was not a boy anymore; I was a man on a different mission. And I was late for breakfast.
They were still at the table. ‘Where have you been?’ my mother said.
‘I went for a walk.’
‘Do you want to eat?’
Without waiting for an answer, my grandmother rang her little bell. Anna came in, still without shoes, carrying a tray. I sat down to a plate of bacon and scrambled egg and toast.
‘Everything you’re eating,’ O
uma said, ‘comes from the farm. Even the bread. I baked it myself this morning. Do you want some coffee?’
‘Does that come from the farm too?’ my mother said.
I poured coffee for myself.
‘You must eat, Patrick,’ Ouma said. ‘You must put on some weight. Look at him, Elsa, how thin he is.’
‘You sound like Howard when you say that.’
‘Look at him.’
‘He’s always been like that. You just don’t remember. It’s been a long time since you saw him.’
‘Of course I remember how he looked. He’s lost weight, can’t you see that?’
It was uncomfortable for me, sitting there like a skinny object in the middle of their discussion. There was some kind of tension between them that had nothing to do with me. I said, ‘I’m eating, look at me, I’m eating,’ and they both went quiet for a while. Then my grandmother said:
‘Where did you say you’re going to in South West?’
‘Namibia, please.’
‘South West,’ Ouma repeated doggedly. ‘It’s always been South West Africa.’
My mother sighed. I wondered whether Ouma had caught wind of our real reason for going, but she would never have let an issue like Godfrey pass. There would have been a colossal drama, followed maybe by eternal silence, not just this unspoken prickliness at the breakfast table.
‘Windhoek,’ my mother said. ‘Just for a few days.’
‘I don’t know why you want to go there now. They’re having that trouble up there.’
‘Trouble? What trouble? They’re having elections now, that’s what they’re having. Democratic elections, the first. That’s not trouble.’
‘It could be dangerous, Elsa. What do you want up there?’
‘I want to see the elections. It’s a rehearsal for ours down here in a few years.’
Ouma made a clucking noise of contempt and took out her pipe. As she filled it and tamped down the tobacco, I relaxed a little. If there was going to be an explosion, the cue had just passed. My mother was always baiting Ouma with these little political hooks, and there had been some ugly scenes in the past. It didn’t get us anywhere, this vicious friction around the table; it was like a personal revenge for my mother, for the way she’d been brought up, the values that had been taught to her as normal. But she would never change my grandmother; it was too late for that, and maybe it had always been too late. Ouma was made of a different material than us city people. I looked at her now: a small, dried-up old woman, with a heart like a dark clod of earth. Since her husband had died, she had taken over the running of the farm. All the lines of power radiated outwards from her. The servants were afraid of her. The neighbours respected her. She couldn’t be separated from the land that she lived on.
