Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

by Damon Galgut

  Commandant Schutte believed in sport as a way of keeping fit and building a team spirit among the men. He told us so in one or two of the morning lessons, but the idea remained abstract. Until one day when we were told to fall in, divided into groups of fifteen, and set to playing rugby on the parade ground.

  It was terrible. It was like being a boy again, hopelessly overcome by the world. And at the same time there was nothing boyish about it: the contest of knees and fists and will on the baked, cracking earth was elemental, old. I couldn’t catch the ball. As on those long-ago days on our green urban lawn, I fumbled, I dropped it, I blushed. Now, however, I couldn’t cry; grinning bravely, I endured their scorn:

  ‘Winter, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Winter, you doos!’

  Commandant Schutte stood at the side, observing from above his white teeth.

  I discovered I had a friend. Lappies, in a pale froth of sweat, dropped the ball as often as I did. As though it was a fruit, newly skinned and slippery, it burst out of his hands. His lantern face trembling, twitching with terror, Lappies danced around.

  ‘Lappies, go back to the farm!’

  ‘Lappies, jou moer!’

  The Commandant smiled.

  After the game, silver with sweat, Lappies and I stood apart. We slapped each other on the back, pretending a heartiness neither could feel.

  The next time a rugby game was announced, nobody wanted to play with us. The teams formed up quickly, and we were left alone. It was a bewildering moment, but it didn’t last long: the Commandant came quietly up to us. ‘You two,’ he whispered, smiling tightly, ‘are on guard duty.’

  So on that day, and on all the other rugby days that followed, we walked around the edge of the camp. It was a small camp, and from almost no point along the perimeter of the fence could we not see the game in progress.

  Our segregation confirmed what had always been sensed. The others kept their distance from us now. They treated us kindly, but also remotely; we weren’t part of the team. We were apart. And there was a certain relief in having been discovered. The pretence wasn’t necessary anymore, with all the toil and angst it entailed: the mask had dropped. There was a brotherhood of men, I now clearly saw, to which I would never belong. My father, my brother, the boys at school – they knew things I didn’t know. There was something in their hands that helped them to catch balls in flight. More than that: it was beyond me to participate in their rituals of kinship. I would never hunt animals in the bush, or stand around a fire with them, beer in hand, tugging at my moustache. I was pale, I was weak, my jokes made them blanch. I would never be part of their club.

  I remembered my brother, sitting on the step:

  ‘Give it up, Dad. Don’t even bother.’

  ‘Leave me,’ I whispered. ‘Leave me.’

  Soon after Commandant Schutte’s arrival, bloodshed came to the border. As though the war was somehow intimately connected to him, the violence suddenly blew up in his wake. For the first time there were SWAPO incursions into our area; for the first time there was talk of walking patrol.

  Then one night, without warning, there was a mortar attack on the camp. The conical shells hissed in out of the dark and ripped craters out of the ground. The first one landed close to our tent. I didn’t know what was happening at first; there was the rush, the sound, a rain of dirt coming down on the canvas. I found myself under the bed, pressing my face into the ground, wondering if I was already dead.

  Another explosion. Another. Then silence returned, rolling in from the bush like a different kind of concussion. Not even the insects were singing. Then the human hubbub started – voices, feet running, engines starting up. Someone – a soldier like us – had been killed by that third shell.

  So the fighting started. Our lonely camp, which had been, till then, the site of rugby and boredom, was suddenly on the front line. All the talk of patrols finally turned into action. We were formed into squads and sent out into the bush for six days at a time. Sometimes we set out from the front gate, sometimes we were taken out in a helicopter and dropped. The aim was simple and terrifying: walk as quietly as we could, looking for the enemy, and kill him. The enemy was also walking, like us, or sometimes he was hiding in the local villages. He had to be burned out, exposed, executed. He had to be cleaned out like a cancer.

  We saw this enemy soon. Some patrols brought prisoners in, their hands held over their heads. So the enemy had a face now. It was human, this face, with a black skin, and an air of fear or dejection not very different to ours. But if I felt sorry for the enemy, my compassion was quickly washed away in the flood of activity and stories that rushed over us suddenly. There was a lot of talk, now, about fights in the dark, about bullets and battles. Sometimes whole patrols didn’t come back, or came back in the form of one or two babbling, shattered survivors.

  Body bags were on perpetual order now. They were used mainly for our men, who were zipped up and flown home, to their wives or families. The enemy was usually just left in the bush, or piled up in holes and covered unceremoniously in a thin layer of soil.

  I was very afraid. I didn’t want to leave here in a black plastic sack. I didn’t want a military funeral like my brother, or a special assembly in my honour at my old school. One night, outside the tent, listlessly tossing stones, I said to Lappies:

  ‘What are we doing here?’

  He frowned and shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know anything about SWAPO,’ I said. ‘I don’t hate these people. I’m just here for two years because I have to be. It’s a law. I might have to shoot them – that’s a law too. They might shoot me, but at least that’s because they want to. But I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s got nothing to do with my life.’

  Lappies looked around furtively. ‘Shhh,’ he said, ‘don’t talk like this.’ And it was true: this talk was seditious. I could be punished for this talk.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t think so much.’

  ‘How can you stop yourself from thinking?’

  He shook his head again, threw a pebble and got up. I had gone too far, I had driven him away; but after he’d started walking he came back and sat again. ‘I hope I don’t have to kill somebody,’ he said morosely.

  I walked a lot of patrols, but by luck I had only one contact with the enemy. We were going in a line through the veld, following the corporal in charge of our mission, heading back to camp. It was close to the end of the day and somehow the fading light, the proximity to safety, made it seem improbable that anything could happen. So it was a deep shock when we came around a low hill and walked into them, a group of five.

  For a moment we stared at each other – just two little bands of men who’d bumped into each other in the wilderness. They seemed as startled and astonished as us. Maybe somewhere in space light has preserved the image of that moment, suspended and infinite. But on earth the moment passed. We were suddenly fumbling with rifles, cursing and running.

  I have tried, in letters that were censored down to gibberish, to explain this encounter to my mother: how it felt to be shooting at other people, trying to kill them before they killed us. But words don’t do the job, really. Language falls short of the reality; it only gives you the surface. How I threw myself down in the grass and aimed and shot. I saw – from where did it rise up, that image? – a leopard on an island of wood. It went on for ever, or five minutes, full of smoke and noise and, from somewhere, the distinct smell of shit. Then it was over and those of us who were left got up to our feet and walked on weak, shaking legs.

  We killed four of them, and the others ran away. They killed one of ours. The bodies lay on the ground, as if they were just resting, as if they would get up in a minute and walk away. I have no idea, and I don’t want to know, whether I was responsible for any of those deaths. I was shooting into a blue void, into a screen on which action was being projected. None of it had anything to do with me.

  But I
stood over one of the bodies, the one closest to me, and stared at him with mesmerised horror. Maybe I had done this, it was possible. The face was already stiffening. He was young, younger than me. Just a boy, really. His eyes were open, but furred over with sand, which gave his stare a soft, unfocused quality. He wore his death with a kind of indifference, as though it didn’t affect him.

  ‘Well done,’ Lappies said, coming up from behind and putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘Did you get him?’

  I nodded, and then shook my head, but he didn’t say anything else. We just stood there, looking down. I could feel his hand trembling.

  The corporal cut off all the SWAPO ears and put them into a bag.

  On the next night, back at base, Lappies and I were on guard. A cuticle of moon hung over the trees. As we trudged round and round on our lonely, circular vigil, we didn’t talk. We were both heavy with what had happened to us the day before. I don’t know how it happened, how we stopped, who touched whom first – but at the darkest corner of the camp, we drew together. We were suddenly fumbling with buttons, slinging down our rifles. I remember his breath on my neck. Standing pressed together, the immensity of the continent spreading outwards as though we were at the very centre of it, we took each other in hand. A few seconds of gasping and tugging and pulling, like a subtle wrestling match, and it was done. We left silver tracks on the ground. Then we buttoned ourselves and went on our way, not able to look at each other.

  That was one year ago. Now I had returned to Namibia – to the country that I had lost myself in defending, which was being given away in a week. It would go, almost certainly, to SWAPO, the terrible communist enemy who could never be allowed to win. But they had won, and the world was still on its axis.

  With my mother and her lover – who had been, for five years now, one of those enemies – I carried my bag out to the car. My mother travelled with a heap of suitcases and Godfrey had to make two or three trips; meanwhile I leaned against a wall in the sun and she came to lean next to me.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing. I was just remembering somebody.’

  ‘Remembering who?’

  ‘Just somebody. Nobody you know.’

  It was another blazing hot day. As promised, my mother and Godfrey had come to get me after breakfast. They didn’t look as if they’d slept too much last night. I said to her now:

  ‘How was the historic reunion?’

  ‘Historic,’ she said with a wicked laugh. ‘Worth the drive up by itself. How was your night?’

  ‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘I slept.’ I didn’t mention the short talk with my father.

  Godfrey came out with the last luggage and loaded it up. He was wearing the same angry T-shirt from last night, as well as a pair of black shorts and slip-slops. He said to my mother, ‘Is he coming to the SWAPO offices?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought he might prefer to wait.’

  It took me a moment to realise that this abstract third person they were referring to was me. ‘He’ll come along wherever you’re going,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t like being left behind.’

  ‘I have to get some posters and things. For the rally.’

  ‘Okay.’

  We drove slowly through the hot streets. There were fewer people out, and they kept to the shade. Some of them made signs as we passed: clenched fist for SWAPO, forked fingers for the DTA. We went into town and parked in a side street not far from where we’d eaten last night. The SWAPO offices were on the second floor of a bland, brick-faced building. A security grille covered the entrance. Godfrey spoke into an intercom and we were let through, into a foyer with a lot of aimless people waiting around. There was a SWAPO flag on the wall, with a photograph of the SWAPO president, bearded and beaming, next to it, hung slightly askew. All this bureaucracy, with its ordinary, dusty tedium – it seemed so very at odds with the black men out in the bush who’d wanted to kill us. This was like any government office back in Cape Town, like civil service officialdom anywhere in the world. We passed down a long passage, to a room whirring with the commotion of printing presses and piled up with stacks of posters and leaflets. A tiny black man in a white coat was in charge. He called Godfrey comrade and looked very formal and serious for a moment; but then he broke out in a friendly grin and the two of them had a private conversation, full of nodding and jokes.

  The posters we’d come to collect were waiting on the counter nearby. I studied them while we waited. Looking out at me, sketched in grainy black ink, was the face of Andrew Lovell. The photograph looked like an old one, taken years ago. He was thin, with dark hair brushed forward over a high forehead. Narrow cheeks, with a big smile, an intelligent glow in the eyes. Not a special, extraordinary face. A face not entirely unlike mine. Underneath it said, ‘Comrade Andrew Lovell, 1960 – 1989’.

  There were also piles of smaller hand-bills, printed on pinkish paper, giving a history of Andrew Lovell’s life, under the heading ‘Freedom Fighter’. The jargon was repellent and intriguing to me at the same time; I glanced through it and learned about Andrew Lovell – that he’d been born in Johannesburg and had lived there till going down to Cape Town to study law in 1979. He’d served on various councils and committees, most of them banned by now. Under the state of emergency he’d been detained and had spent several months in prison. On being released he’d gone to Namibia, where he worked underground for SWAPO. At the time of his death he was facing charges for refusing to serve in the army. His life, the pamphlet said, had been one of selfless commitment to the struggle.

  Andrew Lovell had been murdered the previous morning in Swakopmund, at about the time we’d left my grandmother’s house. He didn’t live in that town – he had been based in Windhoek – but had been visiting temporarily while he organized an election rally. As he came out of the local SWAPO offices, he’d been shot by unknown attackers in a passing car. He’d been hit by a shotgun blast in the chest and had died on the pavement before any medical help arrived.

  I didn’t learn all of this from the pamphlet; some bits and pieces came to me later, from my mother, from the newspaper, from listening and looking around. But already that morning I had a clear sense of who Andrew Lovell was, of how very different his life had been to mine. And I had a feeling, somewhere in myself, of something approaching – though I couldn’t say what.

  When Godfrey had finished with his conversation we loaded ourselves up with the posters and pamphlets and carried them down to the car. The smell of fresh ink followed us all the way.

  My mother and Godfrey were too tired to drive, so I was behind the wheel. ‘I’ll show you a different route,’ Godfrey said. ‘Let’s avoid the main road.’ Windhoek, in striations of colourless houses, fell gradually away from the car. We crossed over a highway that was still under construction – teams of black men labouring in overalls – onto a gravel road. Parched yellow grasslands opened around us, dotted with misshapen trees. The road passed through farms; we kept going over cattle grids, through big fields mapped out in wire.

  Nobody spoke. In the rear-view mirror, her image broken by a fine crack in the glass, I watched my mother doze off. Lulled by the rhythm of the car, her eyelids slipped down, her face flattened out. In a while she had slumped against the door, mouth open, a vein pulsing in her neck.

  Godfrey noticed her. He was sitting in the front seat next to me and a glance passed between us, followed by a smile of complicity. But after this little moment there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. The silence went on. The heat and the dust were oppressive. The windows were closed, but a thin grit got into the car. It furred up my teeth, blocked my pores, invaded the joints of my bones. Outside the bush had given way to mountains of silica: folded, hollowed and haunted. The land was stripped down to its bones. The road wasn’t level any more.

  ‘Is this the desert?’ I asked.

  Godfrey shook his head. ‘The real desert is still coming.’ He looked at me for a long
moment. ‘You have never been here?’

  ‘Not this part of the country. Only up north.’

  ‘You didn’t want to see this? The country you were fighting for?’

  ‘I did want to see it. I wasn’t fighting for anything. I was just... ’ It seemed pointless to go on. Instead I said, ‘Did you know him? Andrew Lovell?’

  ‘Sure. He was a friend of mine.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  He thought about this for a while, so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, ‘He was quiet.’

  ‘Quiet?’

  ‘Not shy, but quiet. Very intelligent. Good with words – a legal man. Not many jokes. A legal man,’ he repeated. ‘Do you want a cold-drink?’

  Solemnly we peeled the tabs off our tins and sipped. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that Godfrey seemed unaffected by the death of his friend. Perhaps, after all, they had never been close friends. Or perhaps this was the way of things when you were involved in a political struggle – people were killed, or people disappeared, and you had to go on. You kept your eye on the cause you were fighting for, but you didn’t get too involved in the tragedy of the other soldiers fighting with you. Not a normal war; not a war like the one I’d been caught up in.

  When we passed out of the hills, the land levelled into a flat plain, extending into a haze of heat in the distance. It was almost shocking – the vastness and emptiness of it. ‘There,’ Godfrey said, ‘that’s the desert.’ There really was nothing growing. The sand looked like cinders.

  ‘I want to stop the car,’ I said.

  ‘So stop.’