Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (7 page)

Our camp was miles from any recognizable settlement. We lived out our lives between shades of brown: our uniforms and tents, and the colour of the landscape in every direction. For most of the
time that I spent in this camp we didn’t do very much except keep ourselves going. Most of us weren’t patriotic, but we were obedient. We were like a nomadic, inbred community, obsessed
with ourselves. Our tribe was the army, our secret rites and rituals were tribal: we made our beds, we stood inspection, occasionally we did PT under the eye of a bored corporal. For the rest we
lay around in the tents, playing cards, writing letters, telling jokes. An old scene, as old as the first village.

We thought for a while that we would never see war. But there is a certain terror in waiting. Perhaps only I felt it so acutely: the ennui and aimlessness, in which the overpowering
maleness
of the place started to suffocate me. It was the first occasion in my life that I had been in a group of men, with not a single female face. More to the point, it was the first
occasion I’d been away from my mother for any length of time. It was like being with my father and his friends in an isolated hunting lodge, deep in the swamps somewhere, for months and
months and months. Except that it was only the officers and permanent force members who were older; most of these men were my own age, just out of school. But even they – or especially they
– were inscrutable and strange to me: laughing, jostling, testosterone-swollen animals with whom, it often felt, I had nothing in common.

And I didn’t know why we were there. Some of the others were true believers, but even the rest seemed to have some clear notion of what our function was. To me the camp, and the hard,
harsh land that surrounded it, were inexplicable torments, designed exclusively for me. I don’t mean I didn’t know about the politics. I had been hearing about the border for years
already; so much so that it had become a mythical site in my head. It was like the edge of the world. Beyond it, as in ancient maps, was where monstrous and unknown things dwelled: Communists.
Terrorists. Other Ideas.

I knew all that; I mean something different. On some other level, now that I was actually
there
, my presence ceased to be a political act and turned into something else. It turned into an
existential test, a contest of endurance between my soul and the material world around me. None of it was real; the thorn trees and grass and termite hills and jackals and barbed wire and boredom
and huge, vacant sky were just a set, loaded with dangerous props and hostile extras. All of it to stage my downfall.

Four months after I arrived, there were two new arrivals in the camp. The first was a thin young man called Lappies. He was a rifleman, like me. Lappies – we knew him by
no other name – was tall with white hair. His one eye was grey, the other one blue; they made his face seem out of balance.

He was posted into our tent. He slept diagonally opposite me on the other side. We couldn’t help but see each other when we woke up in the morning or went to sleep at night, or lay on the
bed, composing letters home. I noticed him in a way I hadn’t noticed the others. I noticed the shape of his shoulders, the thin covering of almost invisible hair on his chest.

We became friends. I’m not sure how this happened: there was no particular event, no significant occurrence to connect us together. We weren’t even especially similar: he was
Afrikaans, from a farm near Potchefstroom. But somehow we sensed a certain common ground between us, though neither of us would have given it a name. It was a feeling more than anything – a
feeling of being at odds with the world we found ourselves in. Then the feeling led to small incidents of exchange or chat; I borrowed his iron from him one night; he borrowed a shoe-brush from me.
We landed up in the bathroom together one night, sharing a mirror as we shaved. It was the first normal, easy conversation I’d had since I arrived. I remember he actually made me laugh.

The companionship deepened, went further. There were no big confidences traded, no pledges made, but something had started. We took walks around the perimeter of the camp and talked about our
families, our school years. Lappies had a girlfriend back in Potch. He showed me photographs of a bland girl in plaits who worked, he told me, in some government office. As time went by he told me
other things too, stories about his family, his life before the army. We got on well.

The other arrival was more frightening. His name was Commandant Schutte. Like Lappies, he had white hair; this feature aside, he resembled, disturbingly, my brother. He had a big moustache and a
confident swagger and a scornful laugh. At certain angles, in certain lights, his resemblance to Malcolm was startling. It made a crack in my heart.

Commandant Schutte was in charge of the camp. His predecessor, a pimply captain who’d been too soft for the job, flew out the day after the commandant arrived. From that moment on nothing
was quite the same again. The lazy air of aimlessness was wiped away at one stroke. Schutte was a soldier to the core – a mean, hard, meticulous, obsessive man. For the last few months it had
been possible to forget that we were in the army at all. That illusion was now dispelled: PT became a daily occurrence again. Inspections, which had been lackadaisical and perfunctory, took on the
mad, merciless quality they’d had in basic training. Idlers and slackers were punished with detention or courts martial. An atmosphere of purpose and fear descended onto the camp.

In the mornings now, we had to assemble and stand at attention while the South African flag was raised. Then we sang the national anthem, staring rigidly in front of us. Afterwards we were put
at ease and Commandant Schutte talked to us. These daily addresses took the form of lessons. Sometimes they were religious in nature, for the commandant was a re-born, unwavering Christian. More
often, though, they were fierce homilies on the nature of the enemy ‘out there’. Because he wanted us to know, without any doubt, that the enemy was real, that he was watching us, that
he would never rest till he defeated us or was killed. That was the choice: him or us. And the idea of the enemy being victorious was unthinkable. The enemy was everything that the commandant
– and by extension, we – were not: he was communist, atheist, black. If the enemy won, our country was finished.

I did not care about the commandant or his invisible, insidious enemy; but it was hard not to be part of the new energy that took over the camp – and harder still not to feel afraid. All
the other men seemed to have been infected by it. The bush wasn’t an existential backdrop anymore; it was the cover and camouflage for forces bent on our destruction. Closer to home, though,
it was the commandant I was really afraid of. He was a far more palpable enemy than the black soldiers hiding in the grass, and far more dangerous to me personally. It became my neurotic terror
that he would find me out – find the secret weakness in me. Because my weakness was the flaw in the dam wall that held the enemy at bay; I was the tiny chink in the armour through which
defeat would come flooding in.

I had no doubt that if the commandant could see me, see me for who and what I really was, that his revenge would be swift and terrible. So I hid. I tried to blend into the ranks, do everything
that I was told, so as not to be obvious or conspicuous. I didn’t want him to notice me, not even for a moment. I kept my head down. I didn’t foresee the spotlight searching for me in
the particular way that it did, picking me out in the middle of an ordinary, arbitrary afternoon.

Commandant Schutte believed in sport as a way of keeping fit and building a team spirit among the men. He told us so in one or two of the morning lessons, but the idea remained abstract. Until
one day when we were told to fall in, divided into groups of fifteen, and set to playing rugby on the parade ground.

It was terrible. It was like being a boy again, hopelessly overcome by the world. And at the same time there was nothing boyish about it: the contest of knees and fists and will on the baked,
cracking earth was elemental, old. I couldn’t catch the ball. As on those long-ago days on our green urban lawn, I fumbled, I dropped it, I blushed. Now, however, I couldn’t cry;
grinning bravely, I endured their scorn:

‘Winter, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Winter, you
doos
!’

Commandant Schutte stood at the side, observing from above his white teeth.

I discovered I had a friend. Lappies, in a pale froth of sweat, dropped the ball as often as I did. As though it was a fruit, newly skinned and slippery, it burst out of his hands. His lantern
face trembling, twitching with terror, Lappies danced around.

‘Lappies, go back to the farm!’

‘Lappies,
jou moer
!’

The Commandant smiled.

After the game, silver with sweat, Lappies and I stood apart. We slapped each other on the back, pretending a heartiness neither could feel.

The next time a rugby game was announced, nobody wanted to play with us. The teams formed up quickly, and we were left alone. It was a bewildering moment, but it didn’t last long: the
Commandant came quietly up to us. ‘You two,’ he whispered, smiling tightly, ‘are on guard duty.’

So on that day, and on all the other rugby days that followed, we walked around the edge of the camp. It was a small camp, and from almost no point along the perimeter of the fence could we not
see the game in progress.

Our segregation confirmed what had always been sensed. The others kept their distance from us now. They treated us kindly, but also remotely; we weren’t part of the team. We were apart.
And there was a certain relief in having been discovered. The pretence wasn’t necessary anymore, with all the toil and angst it entailed: the mask had dropped. There was a brotherhood of men,
I now clearly saw, to which I would never belong. My father, my brother, the boys at school – they knew things I didn’t know. There was something in their hands that helped them to
catch balls in flight. More than that: it was beyond me to participate in their rituals of kinship. I would never hunt animals in the bush, or stand around a fire with them, beer in hand, tugging
at my moustache. I was pale, I was weak, my jokes made them blanch. I would never be part of their club.

I remembered my brother, sitting on the step:

Soon after Commandant Schutte’s arrival, bloodshed came to the border. As though the war was somehow intimately connected to him, the violence suddenly blew up in his
wake. For the first time there were SWAPO incursions into our area; for the first time there was talk of walking patrol.

Then one night, without warning, there was a mortar attack on the camp. The conical shells hissed in out of the dark and ripped craters out of the ground. The first one landed close to our tent.
I didn’t know what was happening at first; there was the rush, the sound, a rain of dirt coming down on the canvas. I found myself under the bed, pressing my face into the ground, wondering
if I was already dead.

Another explosion. Another. Then silence returned, rolling in from the bush like a different kind of concussion. Not even the insects were singing. Then the human hubbub started – voices,
feet running, engines starting up. Someone – a soldier like us – had been killed by that third shell.

So the fighting started. Our lonely camp, which had been, till then, the site of rugby and boredom, was suddenly on the front line. All the talk of patrols finally turned into action. We were
formed into squads and sent out into the bush for six days at a time. Sometimes we set out from the front gate, sometimes we were taken out in a helicopter and dropped. The aim was simple and
terrifying: walk as quietly as we could, looking for the enemy, and kill him. The enemy was also walking, like us, or sometimes he was hiding in the local villages. He had to be burned out,
exposed, executed. He had to be cleaned out like a cancer.

We saw this enemy soon. Some patrols brought prisoners in, their hands held over their heads. So the enemy had a face now. It was human, this face, with a black skin, and an air of fear or
dejection not very different to ours. But if I felt sorry for the enemy, my compassion was quickly washed away in the flood of activity and stories that rushed over us suddenly. There was a lot of
talk, now, about fights in the dark, about bullets and battles. Sometimes whole patrols didn’t come back, or came back in the form of one or two babbling, shattered survivors.

Body bags were on perpetual order now. They were used mainly for our men, who were zipped up and flown home, to their wives or families. The enemy was usually just left in the bush, or piled up
in holes and covered unceremoniously in a thin layer of soil.

I was very afraid. I didn’t want to leave here in a black plastic sack. I didn’t want a military funeral like my brother, or a special assembly in my honour at my old school. One
night, outside the tent, listlessly tossing stones, I said to Lappies:

‘What are we doing here?’

He frowned and shook his head.

‘I don’t know anything about SWAPO,’ I said. ‘I don’t hate these people. I’m just here for two years because I have to be. It’s a law. I might have to
shoot them – that’s a law too. They might shoot me, but at least that’s because they want to. But I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s got nothing to do with my
life.’

Lappies looked around furtively. ‘Shhh,’ he said, ‘don’t talk like this.’ And it was true: this talk was seditious. I could be punished for this talk.

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘Don’t think about it. Don’t think so much.’

‘How can you stop yourself from thinking?’

He shook his head again, threw a pebble and got up. I had gone too far, I had driven him away; but after he’d started walking he came back and sat again. ‘I hope I don’t have
to kill somebody,’ he said morosely.

I walked a lot of patrols, but by luck I had only one contact with the enemy. We were going in a line through the veld, following the corporal in charge of our mission, heading back to camp. It
was close to the end of the day and somehow the fading light, the proximity to safety, made it seem improbable that anything could happen. So it was a deep shock when we came around a low hill and
walked into them, a group of five.