by Damon Galgut
The door opened suddenly. Godfrey was a short, squat figure in a red T-shirt emblazoned with a SWAPO slogan. He looked completely impassive, but then suddenly smiled at my mother and put out a hand to squeeze her arm. Just that: the small gesture of greeting; and I remembered what she had said about how cold he was. But the effect was tender, and when he shook my hand I could feel how much soft warmth came through his big fingers.
‘Come in,’ he said.
I followed my mother, who followed him, into a small kitchen. The walls and floor were bare concrete. There was a table with a plastic cloth on it and an old woman sitting on the other side. She had a cataract in one eye, and a blue cloth tied around her head, and her expression didn’t visibly alter when my mother went to embrace her effusively. ‘This is Elizabeth, Godfrey’s mother,’ she said. ‘My son, Patrick.’ The old lady sat stiffly, her arid hands on the table playing with a small, orange pen. The colour of this object, its anomalous presence, drew my eyes down to it, but she just kept turning it in her stiff hands.
We sat, while Godfrey brewed a pot of tea on an electric plate. He performed his alchemy in silence, while my mother chattered anxiously about the long drive up here, the heat, the excitement in the air. Then, as he thumped two smoking mugs down on the table, he said abruptly, ‘Andrew Lovell’s been killed.’
‘Who? Oh, him, God. What happened?’
‘He was shot. I heard just now. Somebody in a car, they have no clues.’
‘That’s terrible. I can’t believe it.’
‘Biscuit?’ Godfrey said, holding out a tin.
‘I’ve lost my appetite. Have a biscuit, Patrick.’
‘Who’s Andrew Lovell?’ I said.
Godfrey’s eyes settled appraisingly on me. My mother said:
‘He was an activist, darling. He worked for SWAPO.’
‘Who shot him?’
‘Don’t be so ignorant, Patrick. South Africa did it, obviously. Some undercover agent, one of their hitmen.’
‘But why?’
‘How can you be so naïve?’ But she didn’t explain. She sipped her tea and looked at Godfrey, her gaze softening sentimentally. ‘Are you hungry yet?’
‘I have to go to Swakopmund,’ he said.
‘What? When? Not now... ?’
‘Not now. In the morning. Andrew was organising a rally there, I have to take over from him. And there is going to be a memorial service.’
‘God. Swakopmund. This is very sudden.’
‘Is your car okay for the trip?’
‘My car... ? We’re going in my car... ? Yes, it’ll be okay.’ She became peevish as the inconvenience of it hit her. ‘I thought we were going to stay in Windhoek. I don’t want another long drive.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But this is what’s happened. We’ll be back in time for the elections.’ He was looking at me again. ‘Maybe Patrick would like to stay here.’
‘No,’ my mother said, ‘he can’t stay on his own. He’ll come along. You’ll like Swakop, darling,’ she assured me, ‘it’s very pretty. On the coast, north of Walvis Bay.’
‘I know where it is,’ I said. ‘I was in this country before, remember?’
I’d spoken sharply, but the silence that followed was more watchful than angry. Godfrey shook the biscuit tin and said, answering her earlier question, ‘Yes, I’m hungry. Let’s go.’
On the way out the dog came running out of the darkness again. But this time its rush was friendly; Godfrey went down on one knee to pet it. And as he looked up at me, grinning, I saw that he was just a young man, not much older than me, who also, perhaps, felt a little shy and awkward in my company.
The restaurant was up a winding staircase, on a sweltering balcony, jammed with umbrellas and people. My mother had told me that it was a site famous for local revelry, that had only recently opened its doors to all races. The manager, an anaemic German with a lick of blond hair, fussed us to a table at the far edge, overlooking the street.
‘You would like wine?’ Our Aryan host smiled tightly.
‘Beer,’ Godfrey said.
My mother ordered a bottle of wine for me and her. She had recently become vegetarian again and she wanted only a salad to eat. Godfrey ordered a steak, and – after a hesitation – I followed him. Then she and Godfrey slipped into a closed conversation, whispering to each other and giggling, while I leaned on the railing and watched small events in the street. The wine went straight to my head and turned my tiredness into lightness: it felt pleasant to be here.
They were busy re-connecting after their long break, smiling coyly at each other and rubbing hands. There was a lot of sexual energy in the air. He didn’t seem cold to me – there was no reserve in the way he touched the back of her neck, or draped his arm possessively over her shoulders. Their mutual absorption allowed me to study him properly for the first time. His skin was deeply and strikingly black, making his big teeth seem vividly white. His hair came down into a sharp widow’s peak in the middle of his forehead.
When the food came he transferred his attention from my mother to his plate. He ate voraciously, with single-minded attention. She was just getting warmed up to the game and was a little put out at being neglected in favour of a steak. So she turned serious:
‘What’s the mood in the country?’
‘The mood? Can’t you see?’
‘Well, we only arrived today. It’s hard to draw conclusions.’
‘People are happy,’ he said shortly, and went on chewing.
‘It’s a big moment,’ she said.
‘Sure. For us, it’s a big moment.’
‘Not just for you, Godfrey. For the whole continent. It’s the beginning of the end, we all know that. South Africa’s going to follow soon.’
He made a snorting noise that could have been agreement or dismissal, and ordered another beer. My mother was miffed and soon after went lurching off to the toilet. Godfrey and I were left alone together for the first time. We tried not to look at each other.
He gave a soft belch. ‘So,’ he said.
‘So.’ I smiled. ‘I know your voice from the telephone.’
He smiled too, but he wasn’t going to follow this line of conversation. ‘You said you’d been here before.’
‘Not to Windhoek. I was up on the border.’
‘Yes. Fighting.’
‘I wasn’t much of a fighter,’ I said.
He adjusted his T-shirt, so that I could see more clearly the image of the clenched fist, the slogan. I wasn’t sure whether I was being baited, or whether the talk was innocent. I had no desire to talk politics, much less the politics of the South African war on the border. I said:
‘I had a little crack-up there. I don’t know whether my mother told you about that.’
He was watching me, and I noticed he had a fleck of blood in the corner of one eye, such as one finds in a fertilized egg. He seemed about to answer, but then my mother came back and the conversation veered off in a safer direction.
There was a heavy storm brewing as we drove back to the hostel. Lightning fizzed high overhead, throwing the streets into sharp relief – streets usually struck into torpor by flies and dust, now full of frenzied activity. Even late at night, cars and people were moving everywhere. From remote and forgotten corners of the country, from points on the globe I could hardly pronounce, soldiers, officials, observers and voters converged in gathering droves. Bunting lined the streets. Election posters crammed onto poles and trees. YOUR VOTE IS YOUR SECRET. VOTE FOR TRUE PEACE. I THINK THEREFORE I VOTE. SWAPO flags and DTA banners, bits of graffiti, discarded leaflets. The feeling was poised somewhere between a party and a riot.
At the hostel the night guard gave us a cursory glance and let us through. But as we walked over the grass I saw somebody watching from behind a curtain. My mother was quite drunk and making a lot of noise, screaming with laughter and hanging onto Godfrey’s arm. She kept telling us to keep quiet, though we weren’t making a noise, and then going off into fits again
.
We hadn’t even got to our rooms before the bald man, the manager, was there. ‘I’m afraid we don’t allow visitors after eleven,’ he said. ‘It’s a rule, I’m sorry.’
My mother was suddenly sober. ‘He’s not a visitor,’ she said. ‘He’s staying the night.’
‘You didn’t make a booking for him.’
‘It’s my room. I made a booking for my room.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s not allowed. This is a same-sex hostel.’
‘A same-sex hostel,’ she said, ‘or a one-race hostel?’ She was icily furious and I could see there was a scene coming.
‘Mom,’ I said. ‘Just leave it. Why don’t you go and stay at Godfrey’s place tonight?’
‘This kind of thinking,’ she said, ‘will be history soon.’
The bald man was going red, but the moment – and the scene – thankfully passed. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and stay somewhere else with my boyfriend.’
It took her a while to pack her overnight bag. Then she came and touched my cheek and said, very seriously, ‘Patrick. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Mind what?’
‘Me going. You’ll be all right on your own.’
‘Perfectly fine,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure whether this was what she’d really wanted to ask. There was a weight to the little question that made us both feel uncomfortable.
‘We’ll come and get you in the morning,’ Godfrey said. ‘Sometime after breakfast.’
She started to say something else, but by then Godfrey was manhandling her, all angles and skin, through the door. She waved once, weakly, then I heard her renewed giggling floating up the stairs.
Abandoned in the passage, I felt suddenly desolate. That innocuous fluorescent light, those slippery tiles, were the shore of a strange foreign land. I heard the car start up below, drive off.
I went to my room and sat there for a while. I knew that I couldn’t sleep, despite my tiredness. On the floor below, some UNTAG officials were having a party; I heard music blaring. Outside, the lightning sizzled.
Then – though I hadn’t planned it – I went to phone my father. It was after midnight and I woke him up, but I could hear he was pleased that I’d called.
‘How you doing, Patrick?’
‘Fine.’
‘The drive okay?’
‘Yup.’
Then, because there was too much to say, we didn’t speak at all. In the pause, lightning flickered again; I could hear its burr on the line. I found myself saying:
‘Dad, she’s... ’
‘Is she with him?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone now.’
My father made a noise: maybe just a swallow, but it sounded like a tiny glottal cry. For an instant, joined by a thousand kilometres of umbilical line, the telephone united us both. I opened my mouth to speak, but at that moment the storm broke outside. The phone went dead in my ear.
CHAPTER SIX
I’d been posted to the border in April the previous year, along with thousands of others: a rankless, nameless number. After basic training I was flown in a Dakota to the far north of South West Africa – now Namibia – and deposited at the side of an airstrip in the bush.
Our camp was miles from any recognizable settlement. We lived out our lives between shades of brown: our uniforms and tents, and the colour of the landscape in every direction. For most of the time that I spent in this camp we didn’t do very much except keep ourselves going. Most of us weren’t patriotic, but we were obedient. We were like a nomadic, inbred community, obsessed with ourselves. Our tribe was the army, our secret rites and rituals were tribal: we made our beds, we stood inspection, occasionally we did PT under the eye of a bored corporal. For the rest we lay around in the tents, playing cards, writing letters, telling jokes. An old scene, as old as the first village.
We thought for a while that we would never see war. But there is a certain terror in waiting. Perhaps only I felt it so acutely: the ennui and aimlessness, in which the overpowering maleness of the place started to suffocate me. It was the first occasion in my life that I had been in a group of men, with not a single female face. More to the point, it was the first occasion I’d been away from my mother for any length of time. It was like being with my father and his friends in an isolated hunting lodge, deep in the swamps somewhere, for months and months and months. Except that it was only the officers and permanent force members who were older; most of these men were my own age, just out of school. But even they – or especially they – were inscrutable and strange to me: laughing, jostling, testosterone-swollen animals with whom, it often felt, I had nothing in common.
And I didn’t know why we were there. Some of the others were true believers, but even the rest seemed to have some clear notion of what our function was. To me the camp, and the hard, harsh land that surrounded it, were inexplicable torments, designed exclusively for me. I don’t mean I didn’t know about the politics. I had been hearing about the border for years already; so much so that it had become a mythical site in my head. It was like the edge of the world. Beyond it, as in ancient maps, was where monstrous and unknown things dwelled: Communists. Terrorists. Other Ideas.
I knew all that; I mean something different. On some other level, now that I was actually there, my presence ceased to be a political act and turned into something else. It turned into an existential test, a contest of endurance between my soul and the material world around me. None of it was real; the thorn trees and grass and termite hills and jackals and barbed wire and boredom and huge, vacant sky were just a set, loaded with dangerous props and hostile extras. All of it to stage my downfall.
Four months after I arrived, there were two new arrivals in the camp. The first was a thin young man called Lappies. He was a rifleman, like me. Lappies – we knew him by no other name – was tall with white hair. His one eye was grey, the other one blue; they made his face seem out of balance.
He was posted into our tent. He slept diagonally opposite me on the other side. We couldn’t help but see each other when we woke up in the morning or went to sleep at night, or lay on the bed, composing letters home. I noticed him in a way I hadn’t noticed the others. I noticed the shape of his shoulders, the thin covering of almost invisible hair on his chest.
We became friends. I’m not sure how this happened: there was no particular event, no significant occurrence to connect us together. We weren’t even especially similar: he was Afrikaans, from a farm near Potchefstroom. But somehow we sensed a certain common ground between us, though neither of us would have given it a name. It was a feeling more than anything – a feeling of being at odds with the world we found ourselves in. Then the feeling led to small incidents of exchange or chat; I borrowed his iron from him one night; he borrowed a shoe-brush from me. We landed up in the bathroom together one night, sharing a mirror as we shaved. It was the first normal, easy conversation I’d had since I arrived. I remember he actually made me laugh.
The companionship deepened, went further. There were no big confidences traded, no pledges made, but something had started. We took walks around the perimeter of the camp and talked about our families, our school years. Lappies had a girlfriend back in Potch. He showed me photographs of a bland girl in plaits who worked, he told me, in some government office. As time went by he told me other things too, stories about his family, his life before the army. We got on well.
The other arrival was more frightening. His name was Commandant Schutte. Like Lappies, he had white hair; this feature aside, he resembled, disturbingly, my brother. He had a big moustache and a confident swagger and a scornful laugh. At certain angles, in certain lights, his resemblance to Malcolm was startling. It made a crack in my heart.
Commandant Schutte was in charge of the camp. His predecessor, a pimply captain who’d been too soft for the job, flew out the day after the commandant arrived. From that moment on nothing was quite the same again. The lazy air of aimlessness was wiped away at one stroke
. Schutte was a soldier to the core – a mean, hard, meticulous, obsessive man. For the last few months it had been possible to forget that we were in the army at all. That illusion was now dispelled: PT became a daily occurrence again. Inspections, which had been lackadaisical and perfunctory, took on the mad, merciless quality they’d had in basic training. Idlers and slackers were punished with detention or courts martial. An atmosphere of purpose and fear descended onto the camp.
In the mornings now, we had to assemble and stand at attention while the South African flag was raised. Then we sang the national anthem, staring rigidly in front of us. Afterwards we were put at ease and Commandant Schutte talked to us. These daily addresses took the form of lessons. Sometimes they were religious in nature, for the commandant was a re-born, unwavering Christian. More often, though, they were fierce homilies on the nature of the enemy ‘out there’. Because he wanted us to know, without any doubt, that the enemy was real, that he was watching us, that he would never rest till he defeated us or was killed. That was the choice: him or us. And the idea of the enemy being victorious was unthinkable. The enemy was everything that the commandant – and by extension, we – were not: he was communist, atheist, black. If the enemy won, our country was finished.
I did not care about the commandant or his invisible, insidious enemy; but it was hard not to be part of the new energy that took over the camp – and harder still not to feel afraid. All the other men seemed to have been infected by it. The bush wasn’t an existential backdrop anymore; it was the cover and camouflage for forces bent on our destruction. Closer to home, though, it was the commandant I was really afraid of. He was a far more palpable enemy than the black soldiers hiding in the grass, and far more dangerous to me personally. It became my neurotic terror that he would find me out – find the secret weakness in me. Because my weakness was the flaw in the dam wall that held the enemy at bay; I was the tiny chink in the armour through which defeat would come flooding in.
I had no doubt that if the commandant could see me, see me for who and what I really was, that his revenge would be swift and terrible. So I hid. I tried to blend into the ranks, do everything that I was told, so as not to be obvious or conspicuous. I didn’t want him to notice me, not even for a moment. I kept my head down. I didn’t foresee the spotlight searching for me in the particular way that it did, picking me out in the middle of an ordinary, arbitrary afternoon.
