Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

by Damon Galgut

  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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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.

  A word here about the desert. One’s brain will not see what is there. My eye kept registering a long ploughed field, in which rocks became houses or telephone poles. Some treacherous pocket of the inner sight tried to fill up the void with recognisable debris. It was almost painful to see – to really see – the vast, softly hissing nullity of it. The lines of houses were like a pathetic imposition of order on something beyond rules or chaos.

  If you moved inwards, away from the edge of town, the illusion of permanence was greater. Some of the buildings were beautiful, made out of wood. The streets were empty and broad, lined with palm trees like tall, tropical sentinels.

  The hotel – because no other would have taken Godfrey in – was a dirty little dwelling, mottled with damp. The rooms, though, were spacious and tidy. A television was blaring downstairs in the foyer, being watched at all times of the day or night by an assortment of tired-looking people, haunted eyes focused on the screen, drooping around dimly lit tables with checkered plastic covers. I have no idea who they were or where they came from; they were like part of the hotel. None of them talked, except for the manageress, an obese woman in a tent of a dress, who commented with her smoke-roughened voice on the action, while the rest of the audience emitted a murmurous wordless chortling in response.

  Behind this room was the bar. This, with synthetic wood on the walls and threadbare mauve carpets underfoot, was lit in an aqueous green. Congregations of young people hung about the snooker table in the corner, cigarettes pasted to the corners of their mouths, hair greased wetly down. One of them, an elderly teenager, wobbled around on a wooden leg.

  The woman behind the bar was hard-looking and bitter, her hair dyed blonde-white, her nipples permanently erect under her skimpy T-shirt. While she poured out drinks with no visible change of expression in her face, she told me in her metallic voice about how she’d been married in Johannesburg, but had headed out here two years before, to escape.

  Many of these people had fled here from elsewhere. It was that sort of place. The wooden-legged man – not a teenager after all – was also a divorced South African, who’d come here to start a new life. The sprightly black man who helped at the bar had used to fight for SWAPO in Angola. He beamed when I tipped him, and the odd possibility crossed my mind that perhaps the two of us had shot at each other.

  The new life that all these people had come here for wasn’t much in evidence. It looked like a shadowy sort of half-life to me, this twilight existence on the western edge of the continent. Perhaps because of this – because the eyes I saw around me were the eyes of refugees and orphans – I felt oddly at home here. It was Windhoek, by contrast, that had made me uneasy. But now, for the first time since arriving in the country, I felt bold enough to explore.

  Leaving my mother and Godfrey alone upstairs, I went out of the hotel and into the street. The air was heavy with salt. I walked down the road in the unquiet dark, across a small stretch of lawn, to the sea. The water was jagged and black, and a long pier jutted out.

  I set off along the road of slippery planks. It didn’t feel secure under my feet; there was an uneasy creaking. The pier was old and barnacled, full of weeds. At the very end, a long way into the water, beyond the waves, a dim bulb threw out a circle of light.

  And I wasn’t alone here. An old man was leaning against the rail. He seemed almost to be part of the jetty, rusting and raw, so that it was a shock when he suddenly turned to look at me. But his teeth were newer than the rest of him; he smiled in welcome, his mouth glinting gold. ‘Abend,’ he said with a cough.

  ‘Evening.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I can hear from your voice you are South African.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve come up from Cape Town.’

  ‘Myself, I am German.’

  ‘I can hear that too.’

  Beyond this strange, misshapen figure, far out at sea, a single ship was passing. Its light moved slowly in a line, drawing my eye, until it disappeared behind him. I noticed that the old man had a cane, with a gold-encrusted head. He flashed those teeth again.

  ‘I lived here long ago.’

  ‘Yes ..? Where do you live now?’

  ‘For thirty years now I have been in Germany. In Böckwitz. There is a cake shop there,’ he added, for no apparent reason.

  ‘You’ve been away a long time.’

  ‘Yes. When I lived here I was very happy, but it was time to go. I thought, when I left, that I would never come back. There was no reason to return, not even when I was younger. Now I am old, and I am visiting one last time.’

  ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘I have come to vote. I couldn’t let it pass.’ He came close to me suddenly, moving surprisingly fast, and laid out one claw on my arm. ‘This could have been a great country,’ he said. ‘There was hope here once. But now it’s all going down the toilet.’ I could smell his hot breath on my face, a deep foulness passing over the gold caps of his smile. ‘It is hopeless, but I have come back to vote,’ he hissed, ‘for us. For us.’

  For a moment I was paralysed, not understanding completely. Then I pulled away from his hand. ‘Not us,’ I said, �
�not me.’ I started to walk away and then broke, in three steps, into a run. The sound of my feet echoed on the planks, rebounding from the sea underneath. I didn’t look back. I was running from him – that gnarled, gold-toothed man – but also from that terrible us. I wanted no part in what it presumed. I wanted to leave it behind.

  Back at the hotel, as I was crossing the shadowy foyer, a voice spoke a name that I knew. I stopped and turned, mystified for a moment, until I saw the television set. Then I sat down among the rustling, peculiar figures at the tables. On the screen was an image of a pavement, on which an outline had been inscribed in chalk. The outline was of a body. Its arms were flung out at its sides. One knee was drawn up, close to the belly; the other was twisted away. Though the sketch had no substance, it managed to convey something of that terrible, final spasm. Andrew Lovell – the smiling, distracted face on the poster – was reduced to a chalk outline on grey cement.

  The image passed to a porcine police official. His brown moustache waggled as he spoke, giving comic emphasis to his plosives. ‘A team of investigators,’ he was saying, ‘has been full-time on the job. It’s too early to say for sure, but we hope to be making an arrest soon.’

  An interviewer with a microphone: ‘Are the motives for the murder any clearer than before?’

  ‘Well, you know. A person like Mr Lovell, with his history, he’s got a lot of enemies. A lot of people don’t want him around. I can’t really say for sure.’

  ‘Is it political, is that what you’re saying?’

  He shook his head. ‘I have no comment on that.’

  Further, retrospective pictures followed: the team of investigators he’d spoken about, at work on the job. What it amounted to was a bunch of bored-looking cops crawling around on the ground in a sealed-off area. There was a flash of the entrance to the office where the killing had happened. In the background, on a neighbouring shop window, I saw the name of the street; I repeated it softly to myself.

  Then we were back with a suave sports announcer; a pin in his tie caught the studio lights, twinkling out a bright signal in morse code. The death of Andrew Lovell came late in the programme, far down the list of important events of the day. I got up and crossed to the fat manageress, who was holding court in her usual place in the corner. She looked up as I approached, her tiny eyes even tinier with suspicion.

  ‘Do you have a map of Swakopmund?’ I asked her.

  She pointed with her chin at the wall behind me. The map was bright and colourful: SWAKOPMUND, JEWEL OF SOUTH-WEST. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before. As I turned to go, the fat lady clapped a webbed hand down onto my wrist and leaned in close. She pointed again with her chin, but upwards this time, to our rooms.

  ‘That lady,’ she said, ‘is she your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the man? Who is he?’

  I hesitated, but then anger, like a slow afterburn from my encounter on the jetty, flared up in me. I leaned back towards her and whispered in a voice even lower than hers: ‘He is my father.’ We stared at each other in silence for a second and then she withdrew her hand. I straightened up slowly and moved between the tables to the map on the wall, to see where Andrew Lovell had died.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A tiny star of blood. That was the only evidence I could find. Anything else had been cleaned up. The pavement looked much as it had on the television last night: grey, cracked and bland: an ordinary pavement.

  It was very early, the shop windows all shuttered and barred. I had woken up before dawn. The room, full of stale air, was warm, and I went to open the window. Then I’d stood, watching the thin light seeping into the sky, summoning up buildings, streets, doorways, out of the thick sea mist.

  When I dressed and stepped out of the hotel, all the street lamps suddenly snapped off, as if extinguished by my arrival. The air was cold and blurry with vapour. I walked slowly through the town, knowing, but not quite knowing, where I was going. It was easy to find the place. I had kept an image of the streets and the way they fitted together from the fat lady’s yellowing map.

  The SWAPO offices, like those in Windhoek, were unmarked and undecorated, except for a small plaque. A few posters were stuck near the door, but otherwise the building was blank. The chalk outline, the whole business of investigation, had gone. But something in me, an intuition, was sure. I walked slowly up the pavement, scrutinizing the grey cement, until I found the one clue that had been ignored. On the very edge of the street, that delicate red droplet.

  I stared at it for a long time. A rich little flower, springing from the stone. Disparate, unattached to its surroundings. It had a strange life of its own. I tried to imagine this liquid, bottled up inside the body of Andrew Lovell, coursing in his veins, keeping his heart ticking over. The image opened another in my mind. I could see the small, empty street, full of early morning light, not unlike the light that was falling now. I turned and looked at the doorway. Andrew Lovell and a friend came out of the entrance. They were tired after a whole night working. They stopped on the pavement, talking together, sharing a cigarette. Their mood was happy. In a few days all the struggling and fighting would be over. What they believed in, what they had worked for, would happen: the election, with everything it meant: freedom for Namibia, the beginning of the end for white South Africa. Maybe it was this very event they were talking about as the nondescript car, which had been parked further down the street, started up and came slowly nosing down towards them. They didn’t look up, they didn’t see the faces of the men inside – not even when the note of the engine changed and the car suddenly surged towards them, revving furiously, so loud that the blast of the shotgun was drowned. Andrew Lovell’s friend said afterwards that he thought the car was out of control and that he was witnessing an accident, so that there were no words for his shock when the car suddenly took off, tyres smoking, and he turned back – in dreamy slow motion, it felt to him – to find his friend lying on his back, a pool of blood spreading under him. It didn’t seem possible. Andrew Lovell had been annulled and in his place there was already an outline in white chalk, both arms flung out, one knee drawn up, the other twisted away.

  But he wasn’t quite dead. Not yet. He died quickly, lying there on the pavement, while his friend ran inside to phone for help. I have tried to imagine what thoughts might have passed through Andrew Lovell’s darkening mind. With the pavement an inch from his eyes, what images lit up his sight? Did he know what had happened to him? Was it all unreal, or did he reflect in some unnaturally lucid way on the meaning of his tapering life – and did it seem worth it? If he could have known it would end like this, so messily, so painfully, on a patch of dirty cement stained with petrol and footmarks, would he still have done it? Or might he have wished to be me?

  I sat on that kerb. I watched the town stir.

  At first there was nothing. Then a few figures came into view. All of them, at this hour, were black workers getting the day cranked up into motion: in overalls or aprons, they went trudging slowly past, none of them especially interested in this lonely white boy sitting at the edge of the street. Then a few cars drifted past.

  Things were gathering pace now. In a few windows blinds were raised, and one or two of the shops were opening. Opposite me the shutters went up on a butchery, and it was the sight of this particular window – red carcasses hung in a row – that got me moving again. There was a pig, dangling upside down, and I thought of my grandfather’s farm. I saw the surly black man, the torrent of slimy guts. Offended by memory, by those nude, hanging bodies, I got up and walked away from the small flower of blood.

  But I wasn’t ready yet to go back to the hotel, where I knew my mother and Godfrey would still be in bed. I wandered around the streets for a while, looking at everything. There were posters everywhere. They were stuck up in windows, wrapped around poles, splattered on walls – all of them, in one way or another, begging for a vote. In between the posters were United Nations bills, explaining how to fill out a
ballot. In the main street a DTA meeting was in progress. Half of the block had been roped off with bunting, inside which a bewildered crowd was corralled like cattle. A pair of hissing speakers discharged a happy tune, which was strangely depressing – all this enforced merriment, so early in the morning. I stood for a while, trying to work out what it was that seemed so odd about these people. Then I realised: they were drunk. The liquor was being poured out, a toxic breakfast, at a table at one end of the street: oblivion in exchange for a vote.

  I wandered on, to an antique shop nearby. It was full of bizarre objects, a lot of them found after being dropped in the desert, rubbed smooth and warped by sand and wind. Then there was colonial debris: German beer mugs, old photographs, cameras and lighters and Victorian toys. Amongst all this refuse from ten decades of human existence were other, more sinister things. Embroidered swastikas. Pictures of Hitler. Dog-eared copies of Mein Kampf. Some SS dress swords, glinting wickedly. And one piece of recent memorabilia: the 1989 Third Reich double-edged weapons calendar.

  A bad-smelling German man behind the desk said angrily, ‘Can I help you?’

  I thought of the old man on the jetty. I thought of him slightly differently now.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I went back to the hotel. My mother and Godfrey had just woken up. They sat up next to each other in bed, both naked. My mother didn’t cover her breasts, which hung a little tiredly. I saw that Godfrey was in magnificent shape; his torso was sleek and toned, a piece of statuary propped against the wall. I had a mental image – disturbing, for obvious reasons – of the two of them making love.

  ‘Patrick,’ he said. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. What are we doing today?’

  ‘I have to put up posters for the memorial service.’

  ‘I want to help you,’ I said.

  My mother stared at me. ‘He’s putting up posters, darling,’ she said, as if I hadn’t understood properly.