Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

by Damon Galgut

  And now that we were here, so high above them – though we hadn’t come here to escape – there seemed to be no reason to go down again and join them. So we sat and watched, and it was as if we were amongst them, but also apart. I saw the faces: young and old, men and women, workers and thinkers, most of them black but a few white skins too. I saw, or I thought I saw, Andrew Lovell’s girlfriend, less solitary and sad than before. Music was pumping out through speakers now, and the crowd was like liquid filling up the hollow bowl of sand. The mood was festive and furious, and the floodlights cast huge, wavering shadows that amplified the smaller movement.

  There was no clearly defined moment when the gathering became a meeting; at some point the music was overtaken by voices. There were speakers on the podium, addressing the crowd, and the crowd answered with its own baying voice. Call and answer: it was almost religious. From above, the individual words were not distinct; it was the charge and the feeling that came through. It was angry and vital and fervent at the same time. Then somebody came to the podium, a South African man, famous enough to be familiar even to me. He was a cleric and a preacher, as well as a revolutionary; he had spent much of his life in prison. And all the fire and rhetoric of the evening seemed to be concentrated in him. The meeting was both a funeral service and a rally now; he bridged the divide easily. His voice was clear, with a hard edge, and some of the words carried up to us. He was talking about Andrew Lovell, about the future and freedom, and somehow they were all the same thing. The crowd was listening to him, not so restive now, and the responses were more focused and unified. For the first time I wanted to be down there, part of the mass, and I got up to my feet to listen.

  It was at the end of his speech that the moment came when Andrew Lovell’s ashes were poured into the hole in the ground. People were densely packed around the podium, it was impossible to see anything, but I felt that little act – the putting-away in the ground, the sealing-up of the earth – as something happening to me. I thought of the deaths that had touched my life: my brother, Malcolm, my friend, Lappies. I thought of my grandfather, lying under his little cartridge of soil on the farm. Of Jonas, the man who killed pigs. I remembered the SWAPO soldier I might or might not have killed on the border. Then I found myself thinking this:

  Did I shoot Andrew Lovell?

  Yes, I thought, I did it. But also: No, because I am him.

  I don’t know the meaning of these two answers – or even, really, of the question. But that was what came to me. And it was as if there were two selves at war in me, two different people with a past and a mind that had nothing to do with mine. The fracture ran through me, through my life, down to a place where my life joined with other lives.

  Godfrey was coming up the dune to join us. He was frowning and I thought he was cross that we had kept ourselves away, but when he got up to the top he smiled suddenly and came to stand between us. He put an arm around our shoulders. For a moment, then, the three of us were a family, held together by the hard warmth of his powerful arms.

  It was full night by now, and the stars appeared intermittently between streamers of cloud. Down below, the service, if that was what it was, had finished, and the crowd was singing. Freedom songs, songs I didn’t know, but the rhythms were stirring. Godfrey was humming along, the deep vibrations transmitting themselves from his chest, and swaying gently from side to side. For a second I saw how things could be: part of a mass, of a singing congregation, the family to which I’d never belonged... and then time fell suddenly away.

  I was back in a white hospital bed, with a doctor sitting beside me. ‘Try to describe how you feel,’ he said.

  ‘I feel dislocated,’ I told him. ‘Not part of life.’

  ‘Whose life?’

  ‘Mine. Everybody’s. Life.’

  And the familiar sensation started up in my belly, the shaking spread into my arms. I covered my face with my hands, but I couldn’t block out what I saw.

  The desert covered us all. Through the flickering bodies dancing and ululating down below, I saw the sand shining through. Under the joyous thunder of voices, I heard the thin, insidious wind. Years of war and ideology, all the laws and guns and blood: the whole huge tumult of history converged on a single point, and this was what it was for – for sand. Rocks and sand and air. Barren, omnipotent emptiness. We would all disappear, every one of us, and the only thing that would stay behind was the arid backdrop of the earth. Dry and dead and voiceless.

  I started to run. I broke out of Godfrey’s embrace and was half-falling, half-stumbling, down the back of the dune, into the dark. I heard my mother call my name. I couldn’t stop, even if I had wanted to; the pull of gravity was too strong; and then I lost my footing. It was a long, slow, violent tumble, the world sliced into panels of blackness and sky and an intermediate zone of faces, Godfrey’s and my mother’s, distorted with speed and alarm. When I got to the bottom I was somehow on my feet again and running, running without aim or destination, on a trajectory into the night. I could hear my own breath heaving and sawing in my chest, and the dim cries of pursuit. It felt for an extended moment that I was weightless and free, that I could continue skimming like this across the surface of the earth for ever, without stopping.

  Then a huge weight crashed into me from behind and brought me down. It was like the dune itself collapsing on me, and it took a few startled seconds for me to understand that Godfrey had tackled me. He was still on top, pinning me down, gasping with effort. But the frenzy had gone out of me. I was limp, not moving anymore. With my face pressed sideways to the sand I watched my mother come staggering up and stop. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘oh, my God.’ Then, an actress dying badly, she collapsed forward onto her knees. ‘Take a pill,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just take a pill?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I woke up in the morning with a jolt, as if something had hit me. But the room was still and quiet, washed through with light. It was long past sunrise. I got up and dressed and went downstairs.

  The dining room was empty for once, the television silent and blank in the corner. A yellow glow came through the front windows, lighting the place like a church. My mother sat at one of the tables, a foot propped up on a chair in front of her. She was carefully, laboriously, painting her toenails, her face drawn inwards with concentration. She didn’t look up as I sat down nearby.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. She finished the nails on that foot, and picked up her hat from the table to fan her toes. Then she smiled at me. ‘I’ve told him,’ she said.

  I knew instantly what she meant. There was a certain look that came to my mother’s face when she was ending a relationship. It was as much a part of her as her hair, her smile. I sat and waited for what would follow.

  ‘Oh, Patrick. It wasn’t working. It just wasn’t going to work.’

  I had sat through these unburdenings countless times before. I knew what she wanted of me; I was supposed to murmur in agreement, nod my head, endorse by little signs the momentous decision she’d taken. I had always played my role in the past, but something was different today. Today the familiar routine depressed me.

  ‘He was so possessive. Demanding, you know. I just need to be on my own. Maybe I should never be involved with anybody. Maybe I should be on my own.’

  And on and on. I knew it all by heart. History is written by the victor, but I wasn’t listening today. Somehow the room had gone silent for me, and I was watching a picture – in a nameless hotel a woman was talking, her hands gesturing dramatically as her mouth worked, all very earnest and intense, except that she was changing feet on the chair and painting a new set of toenails a lurid green.

  ‘I don’t think you should leave him,’ I said suddenly.

  She broke off in mid-flow, staring at me in amazement. Now sound had entered the picture again, but her voice wasn’t part of it: what I was hearing was the magnified creaking of the chair under her, the bristles of the brush on her nails.

  I had never said these words
to her before.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Just that. I don’t think you should do it.’

  Somewhere behind us, in the kitchen, somebody broke a plate.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t even like him, Patrick. I can see it when you look at him.’

  ‘That isn’t true.’

  ‘Oh, you can deny it. But I know what I know. He doesn’t treat you well, he patronises you – can’t you see it?’

  ‘He’s all right to me. But that isn’t the point.’

  Her face was hardening now. ‘It’s not your business anyway, Patrick. It’s got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You were talking to me about it. I’m just telling you what I think.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to hear what you think. What do you know anyway about relationships? You know nothing about what’s involved.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But that still isn’t the point.’

  ‘What is the point then?’

  The point – although I couldn’t express it that way – was that Godfrey’s judgement of me was true. In some obscure way, I wasn’t speaking about him, but about myself. I was convoluted, involuted, bent on myself. Like the whorls of a shell, my patterns ran inward, spiralling endlessly towards a centre that didn’t exist. My individuality was isolation, my personality an absence. I didn’t connect with the world. I stood outside movements and masses and words. There was too much desert in me.

  And I saw something else: that my mother, by contrast, wanted desperately to belong, but her glamorous strivings were hollow. Like the gestures of an actress, everything she did fell into space. We were a perfect pair, and we belonged, really, to each other.

  I said, ‘I don’t want him to be right about us.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s no future for us,’ I said. ‘We’re the past. We’re finished.’

  For a second a real terror passed across her face; then it was replaced by irritation. ‘Look what you made me do,’ she said. ‘I’ve splashed nail polish on my foot. I don’t know what the matter is with you, Patrick. Sometimes I think you’re really going around the bend.’

  I got up and went out into the street. A mist was blowing in from the sea, turning the light grey. Feeling as if I was floating a little above the ground, I started to walk down the street. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I followed a line of palms that took me down to an avenue near the beach. At the end a park opened out, in which children were playing noisily. I sat down on a swing and rocked myself to and fro. In a little while, I knew, I would walk back up the road to the hotel, and we would pack our bags and go, and our usual lives would resume.

  At the edge of the park, sitting on a bench, an old man was looking at me. I didn’t recognise him at first. Then he smiled, and the dim light caught the gold in his teeth. He raised his cane, a simple, stark gesture of greeting. Before I could stop myself, I found I had waved back at him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘This is fine,’ Godfrey said.

  ‘Here?’ said my mother.

  ‘Here is fine.’

  She stopped the car. She left the engine running.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is it.’

  Godfrey was sitting in the back with me. For the last two hours of the journey, he hadn’t moved. His pose was solid and immobile, all the more so for the big pair of dark glasses he wore.

  We’d left Swakopmund after breakfast. Though we had taken the main road this time – ‘better than that donkey track,’ my mother said – and travelled fast the whole way, it was already afternoon. Windhoek was filled with a white haze of dust.

  Today was the first day of elections. Policemen stood around on the pavements. Jeeps drove through the streets. I saw people taking photographs, people making notes. It was clear we were witnessing an event.

  ‘Are you sure you want to get out here?’ my mother said. She was feeling bad at how easily she was dropping him, and trying to make up for it now by being solicitous and concerned. ‘Can’t we take you back for a shower? Drop off your bags?’

  ‘Here is fine,’ he said again.

  But he still didn’t move. He sat, immobile, as though the car hadn’t pulled over yet. But we were very stationary, at the edge of a vast, dusty square in the middle of the township. We’d come here at Godfrey’s request; when we’d arrived in Windhoek, my mother had driven straight to his house. But only when the car had come to a complete halt there did he lift one hand from his lap and point ahead down the street. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘What? Where to?’

  ‘Just keep going.’

  So my mother had driven on down the road. We’d passed in silence between rows of tin shacks and shanties, till eventually this space had opened out in front of us, and at last I realised what he wanted.

  We were at a polling station. In the centre of the square was a cluster of striped voting booths. UNTAG officials, screened from the sun by big umbrellas, sat at tables outside. And there were South African soldiers with rifles standing around nearby.

  Godfrey wanted to vote. Before going home, before dropping off his bag, before taking a shower. He was making a statement by this action, all the more poignant given my mother’s haste. The whole reason for coming up here – to watch this momentous event in the history of the country – had fallen away, and all she wanted was to get home as soon as possible.

  Now we were all staring through the dusty windows at the long queue outside. It was like something alive, irreducible to single individuals, though each face told its own story. There was a numb, silently suffering patience to this plodding millipede, which stretched right around the perimeter of the square all the way to the booths in the middle. As I watched, somebody came out from behind the curtain and the next person went in. It was a long, hot wait to make a cross on a piece of paper.

  ‘Godfrey,’ my mother said. ‘We can’t wait for ever.’

  He sighed and opened the door and put a foot out onto the road. ‘Give me the keys,’ he said.

  Only then did she turn the ignition off. He took the keys and went around to the boot, unhurried and resentful. My mother stayed behind the wheel, fanning herself with her hat, staring with an expression of faint bemusement at this spectacle of human flesh. After a moment I got out and went to the back. He didn’t need help, but I lifted one of his bags out and put it down on the ground.

  ‘So,’ he said.

  ‘So.’

  We looked at each other. Although he was expressionless, I could see he was feeling bad. He moved slowly, stiffly, as though he’d broken a bone somewhere.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said at last.

  ‘Maybe you will,’ I said, although neither of us believed it.

  He managed to come up with a thin smile. ‘You’ll come up here to live, maybe. You’ll live here in exile, till South Africa is also free.’

  ‘There are other kinds of exile,’ I told him, and only after the words were out did I realise how true they were.

  Then, because there was nothing more to say, we shook hands. He squeezed very hard.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him.

  ‘There are other women,’ he said.

  I hadn’t been referring to my mother, or not only to her, but I couldn’t explain. I went back around the car. As I was about to get in he called my name. When I turned back he gestured at the scene in front of us.

  ‘Your future,’ he said.

  I looked at what he had shown me. I saw again the hot, dusty square, the half kilometre of waiting people. I saw the booths in the middle, the uniformed officials, the armed soldiers nearby. In the background I saw the township, the listing walls, the poverty.

  A three-legged dog limped past.

  I got into the car and closed the door.

  ‘Is he finished yet?’ my mother said. ‘Can we go at last?’

  ‘We can go,’
I said.

  She put the car in gear and swung angrily onto the road, not looking back. But I turned my head as we reached the edge of the square. He was standing exactly where I’d left him, hands hanging heavily down at his sides. By some trick of refraction, he seemed larger than he was: an idol carved out of rock. But then he bent down to pick up his bags and became human again. He started to trudge across the square, to the very back of the queue.

  We went round the corner and the whole scene disappeared behind us.

  ‘I’m glad to see the last of him,’ Dirk Blaauw said.

  He was sitting next to my mother in the front, wearing his khaki clothes, his hat with the leopard-skin tied around it. I had been staring at his neck through the whole long drive from Swakopmund: a thick, bull neck, muscled and brown. He had a small wart near his collar.

  As Godfrey and I carried our bags out to the car that morning, we had seen Dirk Blaauw and my mother talking on the pavement. They were laughing at something he’d said, but they went suddenly quiet when they saw us. Then they came strolling over with studied casualness.

  ‘Mr Blaauw’s coming as far as Malmesbury with us,’ my mother said. She avoided my eyes. ‘His car’s broken down and he’s tired of waiting.’

  ‘Call me Dirk,’ he said, holding out his hand. Godfrey shook it, but he didn’t say anything in reply.

  When we put our bags into the boot, we saw that his luggage was already in there. He had three bulging, fat bags, taking up most of the space. He seemed concerned when he saw us struggling. ‘Can you fit it all in?’ he rumbled. ‘Or have I squeezed you out?’