Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (11 page)

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, Commandant.’ 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.

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 remember 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.