A Single Swallow (7 page)

In four days the nearest I had come to a swallow was talking to my landlady, who said she had one tattooed on her.

The swallow tattoo is a sailor's sign, meaning the wearer has travelled 5,000 miles at sea and returned safely. Some mariners are said to have had a second swallow done after 10,000 miles. The record for swallow longevity is eleven years: not counting the miles flown on the wintering grounds in South Africa plus all those accumulated during the breeding and feeding months in the north, that record-holding bird must have covered something like 96,000 miles before it fell to earth.

‘We love them,' my landlady said. ‘They bring the summer and the rain.'

Windhoek rain brought down seed pods like black boomerangs which crashed onto the roof of my room. Catkin and Gavin, the overlanders, retreated to the dining room and worked on their laptops. They were sleeping in a tent on the roof of their vehicle, which was parked in the hostel's forecourt. I wondered if I would look like them, one day: their bodies pared down to tones of goldish brown.

I entertained myself with a brief fantasy about buying a used car from the lot over the road – it had gull-wing doors and the owner said he could fix all the paperwork. It was definitely time to go. Road-testing my kit for the first time, walking a couple of kilometres through warm rain to find a hire car, I found it all worked perfectly. It was just much too heavy.

A little pale white thing, with a sense of style which reminded me of my adolescence in Britain in the 1980s, she was unprepossessing at first, all the more so when her carer said she was going to spy on me.

‘If you crash or get caught when you're going too fast we'll know everything,' she said.

I was less than happy at her wailing when she thought I was in the wrong gear. But she was untroubled by the rain, did not distract me from finding my way out of Windhoek and kept her counsel on the motorway. Soon we were inseparable. There was nothing extraneous about her, except for her bleeped fussing over gears and revs, which afforded regular opportunities for conversation. (It is a treat to be able to shout something, every 50 kilometres or so.) She was so light and manoeuvrable that we were soon able to dodge flying bugs. (Harvesting blood and the bright splashes of butterfly wings becomes demoralising.) She reminded me of the huge family of sparrow-sized birds with crazily long tails, which cheep and twitter and seem to be everywhere, and though I sympathise with people who disdain people
who name their cars, I like company in solitude and preferred the birds' name to the car's technical specification: she became the Mousebird though she was a VW Golf.

On our three-day run north up the Trans-Caprivi Highway from Windhoek to the north-east corner of the country, I learned the rule of the Namibian road: read all signs, and take them seriously. In the flooded centre of Okahandja the first
HAVE YOU GOT A MOSQUITO NET?
appeared. I broke out the Malarone. In sudden, obliterating rain, I practised holding my nerve and the car's line. We celebrated the appearance of corners and their opportunities for steering as we learned there might not be another for an hour. In hundreds of deserted, green-yellow miles we became great fans of the lay-bys, and the momentary friendships of the road; waves and smiles and flashes of headlights.

Around us the bush flooded. The road was elevated a few feet above the water, floating the bakkies, trucks and overloaded saloon cars as if by magic over the impassable plain. Namibia's roads were made great by the South African police and military. For 1,000 kilometres we drove through battlefields, dating from before Nama and Herero conflicts to the Cold War, over a heaven of fresh standing water that was raining death and havoc across the continent. Namibia, Botswana and Zambia were all suffering, the radio news said. Appeals had been launched, rescue efforts were underway, but what are the efforts of people, compared to the brutal power of the rains, and the great spaces of Africa? All our powers are rendered as tiny as the kickings of an insect. Nowhere I have ever been in Europe has the power to put us in our true perspective in the dazing, almost chilling way Africa does. Only the sea, perhaps, has the awesome indifference of the great plains.

Hitch-hikers are the best thing about hire cars, I decided, having conquered a fear engendered by the counsel of my father and his
friends that one should not pick them up. My first was a nineteen-year-old, his cheap jeans and white shirt immaculately smart: he was as neat and clean as a boy can only be at the beginning of term. He was a student of IT. My mission, following swallows, struck him as a bemusing eccentricity. It struck me as rather peculiar, too, as I explained it. The conversation led to Angola, where he had been many times.

‘It's that easy?'

‘Yes, I can go there, no problem.'

‘I so wanted to go! But we need a fax from the Angolan Ministry of Tourism or something and I don't speak Portuguese and I think the guy I was talking to was stoned . . .'

‘There are many British there – working.'

‘Oil companies?'

‘Yes.'

‘So what's it like? I wish I could go . . .'

‘The people are very poor. They have nothing but diamonds.'

‘What?'

‘If you go to Angola with a satellite dish, someone will give you a diamond for it. If you go with a car battery someone will give you a diamond for it.'

‘Wow! Have you done that?'

‘No! If they catch you on the border with a diamond you will have . . . problems.'

As we began to draw near to Tsumeb I thought I might like to live there. I had refined the tactics for melting space into time by changing my approach to road signs: I now studied everything except the distance markers, which I treated with great prejudice, concentrating only on their first figure. (Rundu 507 km is better seen as Rundu 5, as long as you then refuse to look at similar signs until they read Rundu 4, 3, 2 . . .) The problem with this is that the last 100 kilometres are less painful than the last 80, and so on, until the last 20, then the last 10, which are an agony. But coming into Tsumeb my spirits lifted
with the changing geography: hills as round and smooth as the secret heart of Wales sprouted succulent trees from fair grey rock.

Tsumeb is world-famous among mineral collectors. The head frame and winding gear of the lead mine commands the centre. Behind Main, a grid of lesser streets were streaks of red mud and black tarmac and the trees seemed full of flowers. I went for a wander, fled from the rain, burst into the sports bar, spotted the Wales–Scotland match in progress, exulted at the score and approached the bar.

‘May I have a beer please?' I asked the barman, who was so self-effacing you could hardly believe he had heard and so quick to serve that you felt embarrassed for having asked.

‘Where the fuck are you from?' demanded a white man beside me.

‘Wales!' I cried euphorically. ‘And we're winning!'

The fat, pissed farmer looked unimpressed and I did not give a damn. I would have him and all his mates, if they wanted it – or at least I would outrun them. He sniffed and shrugged. He could have squished me on the floor with a finger.

In the Tsumeb sports bar they have a stuffed baboon, a hideous thing, wearing an England rugby shirt. The television shows rugby but nobody watches it when obscure European teams are playing, unless, one imagines, England are being thrashed by a superior southern hemisphere side.

I loved Tsumeb, and I loved Namibia, and I felt only benevolent curiosity towards the other specimens clinging to the bar, who would possibly have punched me for my English accent. To hell with them and whatever they thought, we were only twenty minutes in and Wales were definitely, probably anyway, going to win again! (Thank God for Scotland.)

And hurrah for Namibia, I thought, hurrah for the black revolution. This is exactly where these white bastards should be, clinging to a bar, murdering each other's livers and lungs, with a black barman who is too clever to ever rile them; let them rot in here, let them die hard and bitter where they can do no more harm. Let the future belong to the black couple I saw outside, young and beautiful and clinging to each other, shrieking and running from the rain which
came sizzling across Tsumeb's lovely public gardens like a giant green-grey carving knife, and drove me in here in the first place. I had been on the road for a week and a day and seen 1,000 kilometres of Africa, and today was not for defeat.

Taking in the way they treated the barman, and the way they obviously felt about me, it took less than a minute for my liberal principles to dissolve in a declaration of mental race-class war on an entire section of southern Africa's natives. But then one, a wiry man with a buzz-cut head, began to talk to me. He was a few pints in when we started and I was soon downing bottles on an empty stomach: we became rapidly matched in drunkenness, and though red shirts battled blue shirts behind him on the screen at the other end of the room, we joined gazes and intimacies like old pros. He really was one.

‘Of course I fought in the war, that's the difference between you and us, we've done it, and – I know this sounds – to you – whatever – but we understand them, you know? I
know
the kaffirs' (he failed to whisper it quietly and the barman did not even flicker) ‘and we can work together, yeah! Fine! Because I know them, and they took my fucking farm – well, bought it, yes, but they didn't give me what it's worth, not a shred – what? Now? Farmer. We farm veggies now. Fucking rain, I'm telling you! Aren't we, babe? Farmers! Hey! That's my wife. Hey! This guy's all right, he's from – where are you from? What? What was it like? Nah, give a shit, I'll talk about it, they didn't give us shit. They let us get beat. They let us fucking die there. Fucking South Africa, my fucking country, I'll never go back there, it was a joke – we weren't getting petrol, we weren't getting planes, they let us die so they could pull out . . . What's that? Oh yeah, Wales, eh? Hey, are you coming back? You're coming back? Hey, Bronckie, you should meet this guy, he says he's from Wales. After the second half? Later? Where are you staying? If you need somewhere to stay you can stay with us, can't he, babe? Babe! Yeah, right, see you later, take. . .'

I cannot even recall the second half of the match but I remember something he said: ‘We were fighting for you.'

As for Bronckie, he mostly mumbled, but the gist was clear again.
‘History' for him meant the Boers discovering South Africa, the British putting their wives and children in concentration camps (300,000 died) and stealing the country, and everything since flowing from there. The wars I was raised with did not seem to have happened; the First and the Second disappeared, the Cold was neither here nor there. He too was kind to me, in his restrained distaste, considering that I was a Nazi child to him.

Leaving Tsumeb the road to Grootfontein curled around to the south before heading north-east again, winding between pasture and hills. The pasture was high-fenced and thick with thorn. Now and then a gateway showed tracks or roads to ranches set back from the road. The world and its children were out, farming: five sweating herdsmen ran uphill after fleeing cattle.

I stopped to take in the road and the space, the birdsong and the feel of the morning. A wide tarmac strip with a broken yellow line arrowed away from my feet to the horizon. Swallows were using telephone wires as a base, hurling themselves into the rain-freshened air and zapping about in the sun. I had seen them now and then on the drive north, but only fleetingly. This was the best view of them I had had since South Africa, and it seemed a validation. There were round hills and high clouds in schools, and a great brightness in the day. The collective noun for swallows is ‘a flight', which seems a little pedestrian, compared with a murder of crows, a convocation of eagles and an unkindness of ravens. An exaltation would have suited this group, but larks have bagged that. A confirmation of swallows, I resolved, would be my private term for them.

The passing of rain bought dung beetles onto the road, and a little later, gliding low over the car, yellow-billed kites. Hundreds of yellow-billed kites! You jink for dung beetles – they are motoring too, generally at an angle to your line of travel – but you slow right down for kites. Kites are magnificent soarers, gliders and turners but when they are panicked they flap. Compared to a swallow's mastery of speed and superlative judgement of changing depths of field, kites are flying
babies. To have one come through the window at even 30 kmh would be mutually fatal. It was their moment and their road and it only lasted for half a kilometre, and they were spectacular, but I do not believe I was the only driver who swore at them.

At the first service station at Grootfontein all the newspapers were leading on the floods. Poisonous-looking expanses of brown, outbreaks of malaria, communities cut off, aid unable to follow the photographers. Travellers, loafers and all their attendants milled around the forecourt.

‘The problem with Grootfontein is nobody stops,' said a boy. ‘You are all going through.' He was about sixteen, with a quick, attentive look and a slower, philosophical smile. He wore the same cheap clothes that all those hanging about the forecourt wore. I wondered if he would simply stay there, hanging around Grootfontein, until he became one of the hunched old men sitting on the low wall by the road.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Would you like anything from the shop?'

‘Oh! I will have a Fanta. Thank you.'

I went in for a paper and drinks.

‘What do you do?'

‘I am trying to save money to continue my education.'

‘How?'

‘With my art.'

I looked down. I had thought a Fanta was a good way of buying my way out of buying something I thought I did not want. My mother and brother had visited Namibia a few years before and brought me back presents: a bracelet, made of wood and little discs of ostrich shell, and a carved Malakani nut, sometimes known as vegetable ivory. You find them all over Namibia, often decorated with animals, as this one was, and topped with a looped leather bootlace. He was doing it as he spoke to me, curling black marks onto the white and brown sphere of the nut. As I watched, in the time it took to swig a drink, a zebra was made out of stripes and a giraffe finished off with spots. The animals had an angular, electric quality. A critic might have seen echoes of cubism. Leg-scrapes had muscle and kick and line. I had decided a
while ago that I would not, could not, fill my rucksack with trophies. Art was a different matter.