Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (10 page)

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.

‘I know that. I want to help.’

Godfrey was also looking at me, with a guarded, watchful quality. Then he smiled. ‘Have you had breakfast already?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’m hungry. Let’s go and eat.’

Downstairs in the foyer, we ate a greasy breakfast at one of the tables in front of the television set. Godfrey had become businesslike and serious. ‘We go to the township after
this,’ he said. ‘We put up the posters, we hand out pamphlets. We tell people about the memorial service. Okay?’

He was looking only at me as he spoke, ignoring my mother at his elbow. I could see that she was feeling left out; her mouth tightened in a familiar way. ‘I don’t know about
this,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘This wasn’t what I came up here for. I came to be in Windhoek, to see you. This stuff with posters, that wasn’t part of the plan.’

‘It’s why we came here, Ellen. You knew what the plan was.’

‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’

Now he was looking at her, but with a cold glitter in his eyes. ‘You do have a choice,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to help, if you don’t want to.’

‘That’s not what I mean... ’

‘I know what you mean, Ellen. Don’t worry about it. Just do whatever you want.’

He spoke casually, but his tone didn’t fool me, or her. She looked sharply away from him, though he wasn’t looking at her anymore either; he was putting his fork down carefully on
his plate.

I record this moment, because something happened then that only became obvious later. This is how endings begin, with insignificant gestures: a fork in a hand put down on a plate. A mutual
avoiding of eyes.

From her place in the corner, the fat lady was watching. She had a strange smirk on her face.

So for the second time in two days I found myself in a township. This one was smaller than Katatura in Windhoek. The dirt streets were wider, and the houses were poorer. Faces
watched us from doorways and windows, from behind walls and fences. I suppose we were a strange sight.

We drove from place to place, then parked and got out and stuck the posters up, then drove on again. It was a tedious business. As Godfrey had said, we handed out the pamphlets and spoke to
passers-by about what it all meant. I had expected people to be antagonistic or disinterested, but that wasn’t the feeling at all: the feeling was supportive, humorous. As the hours went by I
found myself in a happy mood. It pleased me to be doing this job, and to see the face of Andrew Lovell spreading around. When the posters were all up and only a few pamphlets were left, my mother
yawned and suggested we go back to the room. But Godfrey wasn’t quite finished yet.

‘We’re going to hand out these pamphlets to whiteys in town.’

‘What, now?’

‘Why not now?’

‘I don’t know if this is such a good idea,’ my mother said. ‘They might not like it.’

‘It doesn’t matter if they don’t like it.’

So we went back to the town centre and waited on a corner. The first person to come along was an elderly white woman. When I tried to give her a pamphlet she waved me away. ‘No more
politics,’ she said.

The next one was more vitriolic. He looked at the pamphlet and became instantly enraged: he lunged at me, swearing and spitting. I wasn’t hurt, but I was shaken by the violence erupting
suddenly from what was ostensibly a mild, middle-aged man in innocuous spectacles.

‘You see,’ my mother said. ‘What’s the point?’

But Godfrey was determined. The point, whatever it was, seemed buried beneath his expressionless face, set woodenly on some interior resolve. ‘Go back if you want to,’ he said.
‘I’m handing these out.’ We stayed, though neither of us did very much. He handed out pamphlets over the next hour. I felt my happiness of that morning diminish. A few – a
very few – people accepted the pamphlets, but most weren’t interested, or reacted with rudeness and aggression. One man gave Godfrey a handbill in return, which said, ‘Only
terrorists call it Namibia.’ About our feet, like a weird confetti, crushed pamphlets collected.

Suddenly my mother couldn’t take it any more. She knocked the remaining pamphlets out of his hand, so that they fell in a serene blizzard around us. ‘I can’t stand this,’
she said. ‘No. I cannot stand this!’

He stared at her.

‘Look, this is crazy,’ she said. ‘We get the point, all right? I’m hot, I’m tired, I’m going to rest. Are you coming or staying?’

‘I told you,’ he said stolidly. ‘Go if you want to.’

‘Fine. I’m going. Patrick, come on.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here.’

She looked at me. It was another moment.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

She stalked away up the pavement. Her retreating back, stiff and furious, wasn’t unlike some of the people we’d offended with the pamphlets. Godfrey snorted as she started the car
and drove off but his heart wasn’t in it any more: not long after that he dumped the rest of the pamphlets in a bin. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

We walked back to the hotel, not speaking to each other. It was the middle of the day and very hot by now. We retreated to our separate rooms, but not long afterward I heard them arguing. It was
just a noise, two tones in conflict, till I got up and pressed my ear to the wall, and then their voices came through, dimmed slightly by brick:

‘What do you expect?’ she was saying. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘I don’t expect a lot, Ellen. Just have some respect. The people in this country have suffered.’

‘I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? What can I do about it?’

‘Don’t turn your back on it, that’s all.’

‘I also have a life, Godfrey. I also have feelings. I’ve also suffered. I’ve had a hard time.’

He laughed shortly. ‘Please. You’re funny. You don’t know what hardship means.’

‘That isn’t true. I’ve been through a painful divorce. All right, it’s not the same sort of suffering. But you can’t just push that aside. What about my son? What
about Patrick? Do you know what he’s been through?’

‘Please. Please. That’s white man’s suffering you’re talking about now. Patrick had a bad time when he was in the army. What was he doing in the army in the first place?
He didn’t have to go.’

‘He
did
have to go, actually.’

‘Why? Because the law says so? The law is illegal, don’t you understand that? It’s always a choice, Ellen. He chose to go. I don’t feel sorry for him. You
chose
to
get married, you
chose
to get divorced. I’m sorry about your terrible suffering, but you chose it for yourself. White people’s pain. What happened to us here in this country is
something different. We didn’t choose it. It was forced on us.’

‘I didn’t force it on you,’ she yelled. ‘I didn’t do it to you!’

‘Yes, you did!’ He was also shouting now, his voice inflated hoarsely with anger. ‘You think you’re not the same as the other whiteys now. You think you’re so
radical and amazing. Why? Because you’re fucking a black man? Do you think you can fuck history away, Ellen? Is that what you think?’

‘Don’t talk like that. Don’t talk like that to me.’

‘Don’t you try to shut me up. I’m not your
boy
, you understand me? You listen to me for a change. Let me tell you about what happened here. Let me tell you about forced
removals. Let me tell you about Bantu education. About
Koevoet
, about what the army is doing on the border. Let me tell you –’

‘I know about that!’ she screamed.

‘Oh, yes, you know. You know because you read it in the newspaper. You go to your stupid liberal meetings and you think you’ve changed the world. But you haven’t lived these
things. You don’t know what it means, because of this.
This
.’

Here – she showed me afterwards – he leaned forward and pinched her hard. For the rest of the trip she carried a bruise, a tiny blue butterfly pinned to her neck. She let out a cry
of pain and shock, and then he burst out of the room, slamming the door behind him. His footsteps jolted away down the stairs. For a while afterwards I couldn’t move; I stayed pressed to the
wall.

When I went out into the passage the fat lady called to me from downstairs. ‘Is everything all right up there... ?’

‘Yup,’ I said. ‘We’re all fine.’

I went in to my mother. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying into a tissue. She was dressed in her underwear, her feet crossed over each other on the floor. She looked lost and somehow
very young. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders; she leaned her head on me.

‘Fucking bastard,’ she said.

‘He’s upset. He’ll calm down.’

‘He’s upset. What about me?’

‘You’re upset too.’

‘You’re right, I am. I’m very upset. This isn’t going to work out, Patrick.’

‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Let’s go out for a drive,’ she said. ‘I have to think.’

We drove eastward, out of town. The tar went on for a while, then we came to a gravel road going off on one side. We followed it, leaving the houses quickly behind, and were
engulfed again by the desert. Not much further on we came to another border post. Again, the two soldiers, guarding a wasteland of dunes. ‘Don’t you get lonely here?’ my mother
asked them.

‘
Ja, mevrou
,’ one said. He seemed a bit startled at the question, or perhaps it was at my mother’s tear-swollen face. ‘Where are you going? To the Moon
Landscape?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly where we’re going.’

As we drove on, I said, ‘What is it, this moon landscape?’

‘I don’t know, but it sounds right for this afternoon.’ She fished out her tissue again. ‘Oh, Patrick,’ she said, ‘men are such bastards.’

‘I know. I don’t like them much either.’

‘Well, we don’t have to worry about them now. We’re going to the moon.’

Half an hour later, we came to a blue-grey terrain of gorges and peaks, spilling away as far as the eye could see. There was a hissing of wind as we got out of the car and started down into the
foothills. Underneath that thin sound, the silence was immense, and neither of us felt like talking. As if by mutual consent we wandered away from each other. I followed a canyon of crumbling black
stone and in two minutes I was utterly alone. I sat down for a while on a rock. In the blasted emptiness, little threads of life followed their course. I saw a tiny cactus, wearing a single yellow
flower like a cockade. At my feet, perfectly preserved, the white carapace of a beetle. I broke it under my heel.

I walked on again. I kept to the shade at the foot of the hills, but from time to time I saw my mother off in the distance, stalking along the long spine of a ridge. She liked to be high up,
visible and dramatic, back-lit by the sun. At one point a tall cliff rose up where I was walking and I lost sight of her completely for a while. When the cliff dropped away, there she was, naked on
the top of a nearby hill. The hill was an odd conical shape, and she had dropped her clothes in bright patches as she climbed up. Now she was turning round and round, arms outspread, no doubt with
her eyes closed. A soft pink plant, twirling its tendrils, sending signals into the stratosphere. Far up above her, like a dream she was having, a tiny jet unzipped the sky.

She saw me and yelled across, her voice indistinct: ‘Hey, Patrick! Get undressed!’

I shook my head and sat down against a boulder to wait for her. After ten minutes or so, it was too hot, and the novelty had worn off, and she started to descend. The clothes went back on, item
by item, and then she was on level ground, crunching her way toward me. By the time she arrived, she was fully clothed again, and hot and burnt-looking.

‘You should try it,’ she said crossly. ‘Such absolute freedom.’ She held out her hand to show a bright little graze. ‘But I slipped on the way down.’

‘Shame,’ I said.

We started to walk back, both gone a little flat. By now we were tired and we walked without pleasure. A cold wind blew down into our faces from the direction of the road. From nowhere she
suddenly asked me, ‘Have you ever been in love?’

‘Yes. Once. I think. I’m not sure.’

‘You never told me about it.’

‘I don’t think I knew at the time.’

We got back to the hotel in the late afternoon, the shadows already long and turning blue. We both stood in the upstairs passage for a moment and then she went into her room and I went into
mine. Everything was quiet for a while and then I heard low, abrasive sounds. I thought it was them again, starting up a new argument, but the sounds got loud and guttural, and then I realised what
I was listening to.