Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (8 page)

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.’

I pulled over. When the engine stopped the silence was immense and suffocating. We opened our doors and stepped out into the sand. Heat, light, dust: I leaned against the car. There was nothing
to see, nothing to fix your eye on, unless it was the curve of the earth. Godfrey squatted down. He put one hand between his spread knees and pressed his palm flat into the ground. Just before he
got up again, wiping his hand on his leg, I thought I saw his shoulders trembling gently, as though a voltage had passed up his arm. It was a curious gesture, and somehow sad.

When we got back into the car my mother was waking up. Wiping strands of hair from her face, she yawned pinkly, like a cat. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘that was a nice sleep. Have you
boys been taking a pee? Oh, look. We’re in the desert. Isn’t it something else, Patrick? A real trip.’

Several hours down the road, the desert changed again. From stone it became sand, soft dunes undulating on either side, creeping into the road. There was a curiously liquid quality to it,
sliding and drifting and blurring. It was moving around in the wind, rearranging itself all the time, grain by grain. If you lay still it would form itself around you, take you into itself.

Just outside Walvis Bay we came to another border post. My mother sighed. ‘It’s South African territory,’ she said. ‘Show them the passports, be a sweet.’ But the
soldiers here weren’t very interested; they glanced at our passports, peered at Godfrey and waved us through. I had the same unsettling feeling I’d had at the border down south: that
the landscape itself continued without regard for the artificial lines marked out on maps. People died fervently, passionately, for their particular patch of territory, but the earth – in a
certain sense – was somewhere else.

We skirted around the edge of Walvis Bay and followed a road up the coast. We were in a flat belt between the sea on the left and the weird dunes rising on the right. Pelicans stood like crowds
of concerned citizens on the beach, staring gravely out across the water. We came to another border post - with again that same unreal quality, as though the boom, the booth, the soldiers and us
were all floating a few inches above the surface of the earth – and then we arrived in Swakopmund. The sun was going down, and in the last reddish glow the big old houses, the spare Germanic
architecture, were both elaborate and flimsy, like delicate but detailed screens that had been put up as a backdrop for some event which never quite took place. We were very tired. We drove around
aimlessly for a while, then went to a hotel near the sea and booked ourselves into two rooms.

Swakopmund was a town built on sand. It sprouted almost absurdly out of nothing, like a mirage on pale foundations. The edge of town was a disquieting sight, where the houses
ended and the desert began. The transition was sudden and curiously violent, containing some kind of force. Humanity and dust, the old opposition, locked into temporary stasis.