by Damon Galgut
By contrast, everyday things could fill me with terror. I could lie on my bed, reading a book, and feel the world disassemble into separate and threatening parts. In an instant everything was odd: the blankets, the pillows, the pages. I couldn’t fit these things together, I couldn’t make them work. It was a universe and world to which I did not belong: I wanted to run from it, bawling into the bush; but I stayed, hunched over, the palms of my hands jammed into my eyes.
Somebody called the commandant again. He was in front of me, standing next to my bed, looking down at me. When I saw him I tried to stand up, but he held up a hand. ‘Don’t move, Winter. Let me look at you.’
I didn’t stir or speak. He seemed inordinately huge, and his shadow behind him, cast upwards against the canvas, seemed huger again. After a long time he said:
‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘No, Commandant.’
‘Don’t fuck with me, Winter. You can’t get out of here by acting.’
‘I’m not acting anything, Commandant.’
He went away after a while, and then he sent the chaplain to speak to me. The chaplain was a nervous, pale man, always perspiring. He said, ‘What is the matter with you, Rifleman?’
‘I don’t know. Is something the matter with me?’
‘It seems so. Do you believe in God?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you tried to believe?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.’
‘You’ve never thought about God?’
‘Not like that, I don’t think so, no.’
‘Will you pray with me, Rifleman?’
‘Yes, all right.’ I closed my eyes while he started his intoning, but I opened them soon afterwards and watched him – his fervour, his sweaty desperation. I suspected that even if I hadn’t been ill, this man and my talk with him would have seemed ridiculous to me.
Then the doctor came. He was a big, fat, bullish man, not known for his sympathetic views of national servicemen. He also sat and talked to me for a long time, hunched up in his own version of prayer. Then he went away again. I don’t know what he thought about my state, or what he reported to the commandant, but nothing happened for a while after that.
My life was receding, becoming transparent and thin. It was as if the world was wearing away around me, leaving only bright, particular patches of memory. I have a vivid impression, for example, of something I saw one day, but no idea of where I saw it: a dead elephant, shot by soldiers for cruelty or fun, lying on its side, swelling with gas and maggots. Its tail had been cut off and somebody had carved their initials into its side with a pen-knife. But I cannot explain this image, any more than I can explain what else was happening to me. By this time I was losing the power of speech. I struggled to finish sentences, ordinary words disappeared in my mouth when I needed them. And none of this felt terribly important; or not to me. It bothered the people around me, however – perhaps because their lives were placed in jeopardy. One day, when I was on guard duty, I wandered off from my companion into the grass near the gate. I squatted behind the complex pattern of a thorn tree and pressed the barrel of the rifle into my mouth. That was another distinct moment: the smoky, metallic taste of imminent death, one finger-flicker away from me. But the other soldier I was with came looking for me and let out a sudden cry of alarm. I dropped the gun and stood up, grinning, as though I’d been caught doing something naughty and embarrassing.
‘It was a joke,’ I said. ‘I was just joking.’
But he kept staring at me, his face strained and pale.
That night, maybe – or some other night completely – my mind finally tipped over. It happened slowly. I was lying on the bed, very calm and quiet, still wet from taking a shower. Other soldiers were moving around me, doing their little everyday tasks. Then time altered shape. Seconds stretched out like years; a lifetime unfolded inside me. I stood up from the bed, trying to say something, but I didn’t know what, or how.
A soldier in the next bed, looking very alarmed, said, ‘What? What?’
Life, I saw clearly, was pain. A white, molten stream, it poured without end, hardening into temporary form: the bodies around me, the beds, the tent, the ground, were the physical shape of this pain. But I was melting, I was breaking the mould. I felt my knees cracking. I sank to the ground. Then I started to cry. I beat with my fists on the ground.
‘Winter’s gone bossies,’ somebody said.
I opened my mouth and fetched up a scream from deep inside me, from all the years of my little life behind me. Then everything caved in inside. A light went out in my mind. Around a kernel of quietness, the very core of me, I felt frenzy and motion: my limbs thrashing, my teeth grinding, my head bashing in the dust. But I was safe inside, buried out of reach.
After a space of no-time a doctor was next to me, taking my pulse, prodding my back. He tried to turn my head. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please open your eyes.’
I could hear him, but he was somewhere else. I was inside my mother, suspended in space; I couldn’t talk to him or gesture to him; I could only watch from a long way off.
He took my hand. ‘Please give a squeeze if you can hear what I’m saying.’
I tried to do it, but the impulse shot off obliquely into the void.
Then footsteps, voices, a bag being opened. Then a sensation that wasn’t a pain, which I knew was a needle in my arm. Then no more sensation.
When the world resumed its business with me, it was morning, striped through with sunlight. I was lying in a narrow white cot, with similar beds around. There were people in some of them, plugged into intravenous drips. A bandaged form lay nearby. But now I wasn’t buried so deep; there was a connection between my will and my body. I heaved myself up onto my hands.
And it was only then that I sensed him. Behind me, close to my head, sitting in a chair. Watching me.
‘Winter,’ he said. ‘You’re alive.’
‘Commandant.’
‘At ease. Relax.’ His tone was neutral. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m all right. I don’t know what happened to me.’
‘You had a little freak-out.’
‘I guess so.’
He smiled, but it was a dead, cold smile. His eyes didn’t change. ‘You’re going to get better, Winter. You’re going to be a soldier again and go out and kill terrorists.’
‘Yes, Commandant.’
‘You’re not a girl. You’re a man. A white South African man. We need you with us.’
‘I know that, Commandant.’
‘Every body lying in bed in hospital is one more body on their side, Winter. I hope you know that.’
‘I do know that.’
‘Some people,’ he said, shaking his head in amazement, ‘some people want to get out of here so badly that they do things to themselves. They hurt themselves to escape. Can you imagine that? I had a soldier once, national serviceman like you, who shot himself in the leg.’
‘I’m not like that, Commandant.’
‘I know that. I’m just saying. You get people who fake cracking up, just to escape their duty. But I know you’re not like those people. You’re a man.’
‘Yes, Commandant.’
He smiled again and got up quickly to his feet. ‘Have a rest, Winter,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’
I lay for a long time after he was gone, watching motes of dust swirling like billions of tiny planets in his wake. Then the bandaged man opposite me rolled in his bed, emitting a bubbling groan. I pulled back the sheets, put my feet on the floor. I sat, staring down at my ankles.
I was naked. Someone had undressed me; my clothes were packed neatly nearby. I felt curiously fine and happy. I decided I had to do my duty – to the commandant, to my country – and return to my tent. But as I reached for my pants, a crack opened in my head and I fell through it. As on the previous night, my body slid down to the floor, and further: into oblivion and night.
I don’t rememb
er much of that second collapse. It involved doctors again, and needles, and drugs. And then I was being carried on a stretcher to a helicopter. The heat thudded down, my body was tired and sore. But I managed to lift my head up and saw him, as I knew I would: Commandant Schutte, watching from his usual place, close to the trees. He was completely upright, very still and stiff, as he observed what was surely my triumph.
But I felt no sense of victory as the metal doors closed and the great engines started up. The machine that carried me was shaking with tremendous power, but there was no power left in me; I felt empty, hollowed out.
I was taken to hospital in Pretoria. There I was treated with brusque jollity by nurses who monitored my progress with charts and graphs. I only ever saw one doctor, who came by every morning to sit next to the bed and make furtive notes while he spoke to me.
‘Can you try to describe how you feel?’
‘I can’t put it into words, really.’
‘Try.’
‘I feel far away from everything. I feel... dislocated. Not part of life.’
‘Whose life?’
‘Mine. Everybody’s. Life.’
‘Mmm. Go on.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t seem to care about anything.’
‘Mmmm.’ He was scribbling furiously.
‘That’s all, really,’ I said. ‘That’s how I am.’
My father came to see me. He sat in a chair at the head of the bed, where the psychologist also sat. My father was uneasy. He clasped his hands between his knees and shifted from buttock to buttock.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘Yup,’ I replied.
‘Do you want to talk about anything?’
‘No. Not that I can think of.’
He looked pained. He seemed to feel that something had happened to alter me, and that he couldn’t speak to me in the normal way. He sighed and cast around him and said, ‘It’s a nice room they’ve put you in.’
‘No, it isn’t. It’s a horrible room.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a nice room at all.’
A week or two later I was sent down to 2 Military Hospital in Cape Town. My mother was acting in a play at the time, which was why, she told me, she couldn’t come up to Pretoria to visit me. But now she spent every morning with me, bringing books and chocolates and tapes. She chatted without stopping, mostly about herself and her life, but the endless noise and bustle were somehow comforting to me.
It was there I was told that I’d be discharged.
It was there I was given Valium for the first time.
And it was there, on the day I was to leave, that my mother confessed about Godfrey. I had packed up my bags, and they lay on the floor. An unseasonal rain was falling outside. We were waiting for some forms to be brought to the ward, which I had to sign. My mother leaned forward, wetting her lips, her eyes shining.
‘There’s something I have to tell you. I was going to wait till you were out of here, but I just can’t hold it in any more.’
I looked warily at her. ‘What is it?’
‘I think I’m in love,’ she said. ‘His name is Godfrey.’ Then she told me the rest and sat back expectantly, her palms pressed together.
‘Right,’ I said. None of it mattered very much to me.
‘Well, is that all you can say? What do you think?’
I smiled and shrugged. I had nothing to say. I looked at my mother as she sat there on the bed, waiting for me to be amazed and awed by her life. At that moment a shaft of light, blued by the rain, fell on her face: like the actress she was, she turned towards it, finding her spot. Then she smiled, and the smile became a laugh: a round, silvery sound, like a coin, which fell from her throat and tinkled down onto the ground. She looked very beautiful in that moment.
‘Ah, Africa,’ she said.
And we sat there, silently waiting.
CHAPTER TEN
It felt wrong to be listening to the sounds of love-making between my mother and her boyfriend, so I went downstairs to get away. I had no clear idea of where I was heading. I thought of a walk again, out to the long jetty, but when I got to the foyer the early news was on and I sat down to watch. One of the main items dealt with rumoured SWAPO incursions from the north, supposedly timed to sabotage the elections; and this was followed by a story about ‘the Andrew Lovell case.’
They showed a still photograph of him, which turned out to be the same image featured on Godfrey’s posters. Then they cut to an interview with the porcine police spokesman, smirking behind his moustache. ‘The South West African police,’ he told us smugly, ‘have detained somebody in connection with this murder.’ A forty-three-year-old man, an Irish national, had been taken into custody in Windhoek. The man, it was believed, belonged to an undercover white extremist group and was a former member of the IRA. He had not yet been charged, but he was ‘assisting police with their investigations.’ A second arrest was imminent.
The police official seemed pleased. He spoke of the ‘dedication and commitment’ of the security forces. ‘Round-the-clock work made this possible.’ Working with few clues and ‘in the face of anti-South African propaganda’, the results of the investigation were a ‘triumph for the impartial work of the officers concerned.’
The camera showed us the face of the suspect: a square face, with close-cropped hair, military in appearance. The nose was skew, broken perhaps; the eyes were dark and blank. The photograph was a little blurry and indistinct, like the facts surrounding the man himself: who was he, why was he being offered up like this, who was he working for? In the murky waters of South African politics, it was hard to know anything.
I was caught up in the story, its various motives and outcomes, while the news had passed on to stories further afield – ‘unrest in Soweto.’ I wasn’t listening, and it took a voice close to my ear to break my reverie. The voice said:
‘He deserved it.’
I looked up. At the next table was a meaty man in khaki, in his late thirties, with a spade-shaped beard. He gave the impression of quiet power. His eyes – set wide in a flat, furrowed face – were as blue and limpid as gas.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I think he deserved it.’
His accent was Afrikaans and his voice slightly hoarse. But it wasn’t an ugly voice; it had a measured, calm tone.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I have no time for people who turn their backs on their own kind. It’s all right for blacks who want to change the system – if I was in their place, I’d want the same thing. But whites who go joining the black side... I ask you, what do they want?’
‘Maybe he wanted justice,’ I said. The big word – ‘justice’ – sounded false in my mouth.
He repeated the word, tasting its strangeness. ‘Justice. Justice. Now that sounds funny to me. Justice for one man means a raw deal for someone else. Human nature, wouldn’t you say?’
I looked down at my shoes.
‘Or are you going to tell me,’ he went on, ‘that you believe in justice, peace, truth? Is that what you believe? You seem like an intelligent young man to me. Surely you know something about how the world works by now. Surely you know it’s dog-eat-dog, that’s the only big truth out there.’
I didn’t know what to say. In some way, he sounded reasonable and worldly to me. I didn’t want to come across as naïve and silly, though all the ideals he was mocking had seemed obvious and real till a moment ago.
‘The name’s Blaauw,’ he said, ‘Dirk Blaauw.’ He held out a big, brown hand. ‘I’ve seen you in the bar. I’ve seen you with your mother and her friend.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How did you know she’s my mother?’
He tapped his head knowingly and winked. He had a sense for things, he meant; life held no big surprises for him.
‘And what is your name?’
‘Patrick Winter.’ I shook his hand.
‘Ah, now that’s a name. A very English name. But with a lot of
history, a lot of mystery. It sounds like the name of somebody with a story to tell.’
It was hard to tell if he was mocking me or not. His voice and face seemed full of earnestness and irony at once, so that both, or either, were possible.
‘Who are you going to vote for,’ I asked him, ‘in the election?’
‘I don’t live here. I’m a South African, like you.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘West coast. Near Malmesbury. I’m a farmer.’
‘My grandmother has a farm in that area too.’
‘Ja? What is her name?’ When I told him, he made an exclamation of amazement. ‘Man, we are nearly neighbours. And you? Are you from the farm too?’
‘We’re from Cape Town,’ I said carefully.
‘And what are you doing in this part of the world?’
‘Um, we’re just here for the week. My mother has business.’
He stared at me with those blue blowtorch eyes. I felt, suddenly, as though I had told him too much – far more than I had intended to – and that an undefined danger lay concealed beneath his innocent interest. It was only later that I wondered what his business was there, at that particular time. But now, as if anticipating this very question, he said carelessly, ‘I’m doing some farm stuff up here. But my car broke down. I’ve been waiting three days for them to repair it. But they have no parts. That’s the future for us, Patrick – no spare parts.’ He laughed loudly.
I stood up. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I was about to buy you a drink.’
‘Not tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
‘Just one quick one in the bar.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘All right. Tomorrow. And tell your mother she’s welcome to join us.’
