Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

by Damon Galgut

  ‘I know that. I want to help.’

  Godfrey was also looking at me, with a guarded, watchful quality. Then he smiled. ‘Have you had breakfast already?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go and eat.’

  Downstairs in the foyer, we ate a greasy breakfast at one of the tables in front of the television set. Godfrey had become businesslike and serious. ‘We go to the township after this,’ he said. ‘We put up the posters, we hand out pamphlets. We tell people about the memorial service. Okay?’

  He was looking only at me as he spoke, ignoring my mother at his elbow. I could see that she was feeling left out; her mouth tightened in a familiar way. ‘I don’t know about this,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This wasn’t what I came up here for. I came to be in Windhoek, to see you. This stuff with posters, that wasn’t part of the plan.’

  ‘It’s why we came here, Ellen. You knew what the plan was.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’

  Now he was looking at her, but with a cold glitter in his eyes. ‘You do have a choice,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to help, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean... ’

  ‘I know what you mean, Ellen. Don’t worry about it. Just do whatever you want.’

  He spoke casually, but his tone didn’t fool me, or her. She looked sharply away from him, though he wasn’t looking at her anymore either; he was putting his fork down carefully on his plate.

  I record this moment, because something happened then that only became obvious later. This is how endings begin, with insignificant gestures: a fork in a hand put down on a plate. A mutual avoiding of eyes.

  From her place in the corner, the fat lady was watching. She had a strange smirk on her face.

  So for the second time in two days I found myself in a township. This one was smaller than Katatura in Windhoek. The dirt streets were wider, and the houses were poorer. Faces watched us from doorways and windows, from behind walls and fences. I suppose we were a strange sight.

  We drove from place to place, then parked and got out and stuck the posters up, then drove on again. It was a tedious business. As Godfrey had said, we handed out the pamphlets and spoke to passers-by about what it all meant. I had expected people to be antagonistic or disinterested, but that wasn’t the feeling at all: the feeling was supportive, humorous. As the hours went by I found myself in a happy mood. It pleased me to be doing this job, and to see the face of Andrew Lovell spreading around. When the posters were all up and only a few pamphlets were left, my mother yawned and suggested we go back to the room. But Godfrey wasn’t quite finished yet.

  ‘We’re going to hand out these pamphlets to whiteys in town.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘I don’t know if this is such a good idea,’ my mother said. ‘They might not like it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if they don’t like it.’

  So we went back to the town centre and waited on a corner. The first person to come along was an elderly white woman. When I tried to give her a pamphlet she waved me away. ‘No more politics,’ she said.

  The next one was more vitriolic. He looked at the pamphlet and became instantly enraged: he lunged at me, swearing and spitting. I wasn’t hurt, but I was shaken by the violence erupting suddenly from what was ostensibly a mild, middle-aged man in innocuous spectacles.

  ‘You see,’ my mother said. ‘What’s the point?’

  But Godfrey was determined. The point, whatever it was, seemed buried beneath his expressionless face, set woodenly on some interior resolve. ‘Go back if you want to,’ he said. ‘I’m handing these out.’ We stayed, though neither of us did very much. He handed out pamphlets over the next hour. I felt my happiness of that morning diminish. A few – a very few – people accepted the pamphlets, but most weren’t interested, or reacted with rudeness and aggression. One man gave Godfrey a handbill in return, which said, ‘Only terrorists call it Namibia.’ About our feet, like a weird confetti, crushed pamphlets collected.

  Suddenly my mother couldn’t take it any more. She knocked the remaining pamphlets out of his hand, so that they fell in a serene blizzard around us. ‘I can’t stand this,’ she said. ‘No. I cannot stand this!’

  He stared at her.

  ‘Look, this is crazy,’ she said. ‘We get the point, all right? I’m hot, I’m tired, I’m going to rest. Are you coming or staying?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said stolidly. ‘Go if you want to.’

  ‘Fine. I’m going. Patrick, come on.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

  She looked at me. It was another moment.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

  She stalked away up the pavement. Her retreating back, stiff and furious, wasn’t unlike some of the people we’d offended with the pamphlets. Godfrey snorted as she started the car and drove off but his heart wasn’t in it any more: not long after that he dumped the rest of the pamphlets in a bin. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

  We walked back to the hotel, not speaking to each other. It was the middle of the day and very hot by now. We retreated to our separate rooms, but not long afterward I heard them arguing. It was just a noise, two tones in conflict, till I got up and pressed my ear to the wall, and then their voices came through, dimmed slightly by brick:

  ‘What do you expect?’ she was saying. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘I don’t expect a lot, Ellen. Just have some respect. The people in this country have suffered.’

  ‘I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? What can I do about it?’

  ‘Don’t turn your back on it, that’s all.’

  ‘I also have a life, Godfrey. I also have feelings. I’ve also suffered. I’ve had a hard time.’

  He laughed shortly. ‘Please. You’re funny. You don’t know what hardship means.’

  ‘That isn’t true. I’ve been through a painful divorce. All right, it’s not the same sort of suffering. But you can’t just push that aside. What about my son? What about Patrick? Do you know what he’s been through?’

  ‘Please. Please. That’s white man’s suffering you’re talking about now. Patrick had a bad time when he was in the army. What was he doing in the army in the first place? He didn’t have to go.’

  ‘He did have to go, actually.’

  ‘Why? Because the law says so? The law is illegal, don’t you understand that? It’s always a choice, Ellen. He chose to go. I don’t feel sorry for him. You chose to get married, you chose to get divorced. I’m sorry about your terrible suffering, but you chose it for yourself. White people’s pain. What happened to us here in this country is something different. We didn’t choose it. It was forced on us.’

  ‘I didn’t force it on you,’ she yelled. ‘I didn’t do it to you!’

  ‘Yes, you did!’ He was also shouting now, his voice inflated hoarsely with anger. ‘You think you’re not the same as the other whiteys now. You think you’re so radical and amazing. Why? Because you’re fucking a black man? Do you think you can fuck history away, Ellen? Is that what you think?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. Don’t talk like that to me.’

  ‘Don’t you try to shut me up. I’m not your boy, you understand me? You listen to me for a change. Let me tell you about what happened here. Let me tell you about forced removals. Let me tell you about Bantu education. About Koevoet, about what the army is doing on the border. Let me tell you –’

  ‘I know about that!’ she screamed.

  ‘Oh, yes, you know. You know because you read it in the newspaper. You go to your stupid liberal meetings and you think you’ve changed the world. But you haven’t lived these things. You don’t know what it means, because of this. This.’

  Here – she showed me afterwards – he leaned forward and pinched her hard. For the rest of the trip she carried a
bruise, a tiny blue butterfly pinned to her neck. She let out a cry of pain and shock, and then he burst out of the room, slamming the door behind him. His footsteps jolted away down the stairs. For a while afterwards I couldn’t move; I stayed pressed to the wall.

  When I went out into the passage the fat lady called to me from downstairs. ‘Is everything all right up there... ?’

  ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘We’re all fine.’

  I went in to my mother. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying into a tissue. She was dressed in her underwear, her feet crossed over each other on the floor. She looked lost and somehow very young. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders; she leaned her head on me.

  ‘Fucking bastard,’ she said.

  ‘He’s upset. He’ll calm down.’

  ‘He’s upset. What about me?’

  ‘You’re upset too.’

  ‘You’re right, I am. I’m very upset. This isn’t going to work out, Patrick.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Let’s go out for a drive,’ she said. ‘I have to think.’

  We drove eastward, out of town. The tar went on for a while, then we came to a gravel road going off on one side. We followed it, leaving the houses quickly behind, and were engulfed again by the desert. Not much further on we came to another border post. Again, the two soldiers, guarding a wasteland of dunes. ‘Don’t you get lonely here?’ my mother asked them.

  ‘Ja, mevrou,’ one said. He seemed a bit startled at the question, or perhaps it was at my mother’s tear-swollen face. ‘Where are you going? To the Moon Landscape?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly where we’re going.’

  As we drove on, I said, ‘What is it, this moon landscape?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it sounds right for this afternoon.’ She fished out her tissue again. ‘Oh, Patrick,’ she said, ‘men are such bastards.’

  ‘I know. I don’t like them much either.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about them now. We’re going to the moon.’

  Half an hour later, we came to a blue-grey terrain of gorges and peaks, spilling away as far as the eye could see. There was a hissing of wind as we got out of the car and started down into the foothills. Underneath that thin sound, the silence was immense, and neither of us felt like talking. As if by mutual consent we wandered away from each other. I followed a canyon of crumbling black stone and in two minutes I was utterly alone. I sat down for a while on a rock. In the blasted emptiness, little threads of life followed their course. I saw a tiny cactus, wearing a single yellow flower like a cockade. At my feet, perfectly preserved, the white carapace of a beetle. I broke it under my heel.

  I walked on again. I kept to the shade at the foot of the hills, but from time to time I saw my mother off in the distance, stalking along the long spine of a ridge. She liked to be high up, visible and dramatic, back-lit by the sun. At one point a tall cliff rose up where I was walking and I lost sight of her completely for a while. When the cliff dropped away, there she was, naked on the top of a nearby hill. The hill was an odd conical shape, and she had dropped her clothes in bright patches as she climbed up. Now she was turning round and round, arms outspread, no doubt with her eyes closed. A soft pink plant, twirling its tendrils, sending signals into the stratosphere. Far up above her, like a dream she was having, a tiny jet unzipped the sky.

  She saw me and yelled across, her voice indistinct: ‘Hey, Patrick! Get undressed!’

  I shook my head and sat down against a boulder to wait for her. After ten minutes or so, it was too hot, and the novelty had worn off, and she started to descend. The clothes went back on, item by item, and then she was on level ground, crunching her way toward me. By the time she arrived, she was fully clothed again, and hot and burnt-looking.

  ‘You should try it,’ she said crossly. ‘Such absolute freedom.’ She held out her hand to show a bright little graze. ‘But I slipped on the way down.’

  ‘Shame,’ I said.

  We started to walk back, both gone a little flat. By now we were tired and we walked without pleasure. A cold wind blew down into our faces from the direction of the road. From nowhere she suddenly asked me, ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘Yes. Once. I think. I’m not sure.’

  ‘You never told me about it.’

  ‘I don’t think I knew at the time.’

  We got back to the hotel in the late afternoon, the shadows already long and turning blue. We both stood in the upstairs passage for a moment and then she went into her room and I went into mine. Everything was quiet for a while and then I heard low, abrasive sounds. I thought it was them again, starting up a new argument, but the sounds got loud and guttural, and then I realised what I was listening to.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Valium comes in a variety of shapes, though it’s mostly round. The colours are variable too, but I have a penchant for blue. When I first started taking it, even weak doses knocked me out; but now my immunity has grown. Fifteen grams hardly affect me.

  I take Valium at least twice a day. I need them to sleep at night. They make sleeping easy, but dreamless. They take effect quickly, thinning the blood, releasing the tightly bunched muscles. The mind flattens out. ‘Take these whenever you feel any anxiety,’ the nurse at 2 Military Hospital told me. This was down in Cape Town, in February, almost a year after I’d left for the border. I had my own room, with a bed I never had to leave unless I wanted to. Occasionally doctors came by to see me. It was in that bed, that room, that they told me I was to be discharged.

  ‘From the hospital?’ I said, dazed.

  ‘From the army.’ The colonel was kindly; he kept squeezing my shoulder in a familiar, reassuring way. ‘It’s an honourable discharge, my boy. Don’t look upset.’

  If I looked upset, it was because the mad, sad trauma I contained was spilling over. It had all unravelled quickly in the end. I’m not sure of how one event connected to another, or even whether there was a connection. But it seemed to begin when Lappies was killed. That was in November, about a month after our midnight encounter on guard duty, which neither of us ever mentioned and which we certainly never repeated. He and five others were on patrol; I was back in camp. We heard later they’d been caught in an ambush. All six of them had been blown away and left there in the bush. This news was conveyed to us by Commandant Schutte, whose ferocious impassivity was strained to the limit. It had been a bad month. He had lost twelve men already in the past two weeks. These losses reflected badly on him, even though more men were being flown in all the time.

  Afterwards I walked alone through the camp, not sure of where I was going. I felt deeply, vulnerably alone. There was a sudden, pervasive sense of unreality to everything. I remember thinking how much the camp had grown. The veld was being cleared at one point to make place for new rows of tents. There were new faces too, young faces, shiny with fear and uncertainty. I walked between the tents, the faces, as though they were very far away from me, unable to touch on my life. The sky was vibrating overhead like a white, translucent veil, concealing immanent truths behind it, on the point of revelation. But it didn’t quite tear.

  What followed on from that I’m not entirely sure. I have a vague memory of standing at the fence, my fingers hooked into the mesh, staring out. I’m told that I set out walking, or tried to, through the main gate, into the bush. But I don’t remember that part. The next clear image that I have is of being in front of the commandant, who was staring at me with eyes as hard and lethal as rifle-barrels, and him saying to me, ‘Are you well, Winter?’

  ‘Yes, Commandant.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Quite all right, Commandant.’ I was standing at attention in front of him and suddenly this scenario, and his exaggerated concern, seemed ridiculous. I had to stifle an urge to giggle.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘This place is for men, not girls. You’re not a girl, Winter.’

  ‘No, Co
mmandant.’ The giggle was almost at the level of my mouth now; I pressed my lips together to hold it in.

  Suddenly he seemed to fix me in his mind. ‘You’re the one who can’t play rugby,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes, Commandant. I mean, no, Commandant.’ But this damning truth was very sad to me, and killed the laughter instantly. Now I wanted to cry.

  He stared at me for a long time in silence. I became lucidly aware of small details and sounds, everything around me heightened to the point of being painful. Then he seemed to resolve something in his mind and took a step closer to me. Almost whispering, he said, ‘You’re all right, you say.’

  ‘Yes, Commandant.’

  ‘Good, good. Because they need some help at the choppers over there. Loading up some bodies. And I think you’re just the man to do it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can do that.’

  But I knew already that I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t the man for the job. Amongst the heavy body bags, stacked up like so many groceries next to the helicopters, was the body of Lappies, my friend. It didn’t help that I didn’t know, couldn’t see, which one was him; in some way they had all become him. So I stood in the sun, my hands slipping on the plastic, heaving the weight up and in, over and over, knowing that I couldn’t do this, couldn’t do this, even while I was busy doing it. Some vital part of myself was used up in the effort required simply to perform the mechanical actions and by the time I walked away afterwards, past the watching commandant, I had reached empty inside.

  ‘Good, Winter, good.’

  ‘Yes, Commandant.’

  I stood in the shade of a thorn tree and watched the helicopters start up. The heavy rotors, which seemed so immobile, bent over as if heavily weighted, started churning and lashing, till they were blurring around in dust and screaming wind, and then the improbable metal bodies underneath them lifted up and floated. They disappeared over the fence, over the trees, their noise and fury becoming a tiny point of sound, which then blipped out into silence. Gone.

  I kept going for a while after that. How many days exactly, what happened in those days, I don’t know. There was the same intermittent, patchy feel to my memory, in which certain random moments are clear. I remember walking at least one patrol, feeling absurdly calm. The whispering bush, seething with air, was only part of my mind. I had that same crazy desire to laugh when I saw the tension of the other men around me, fingers clenched tightly on the triggers of their rifles.