Free Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut

together.
We were suddenly fumbling with buttons, slinging down our rifles. I remember his breath on my neck. Standing pressed together, the immensity of the continent spreading outwards as though we were at
the very centre of it, we took each other in hand. A few seconds of gasping and tugging and pulling, like a subtle wrestling match, and it was done. We left silver tracks on the ground. Then we
buttoned ourselves and went on our way, not able to look at each other.
    That was one year ago. Now I had returned to Namibia – to the country that I had lost myself in defending, which was being given away in a week. It would go, almost
certainly, to SWAPO, the terrible communist enemy who could never be allowed to win. But they had won, and the world was still on its axis.
    With my mother and her lover – who had been, for five years now, one of those enemies – I carried my bag out to the car. My mother travelled with a heap of suitcases and Godfrey had
to make two or three trips; meanwhile I leaned against a wall in the sun and she came to lean next to me.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ she said.
    ‘Nothing. I was just remembering somebody.’
    ‘Remembering who?’
    ‘Just somebody. Nobody you know.’
    It was another blazing hot day. As promised, my mother and Godfrey had come to get me after breakfast. They didn’t look as if they’d slept too much last night. I said to her now:
    ‘How was the historic reunion?’
    ‘Historic,’ she said with a wicked laugh. ‘Worth the drive up by itself. How was your night?’
    ‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘I slept.’ I didn’t mention the short talk with my father.
    Godfrey came out with the last luggage and loaded it up. He was wearing the same angry T-shirt from last night, as well as a pair of black shorts and slip-slops. He said to my mother, ‘Is
he coming to the SWAPO offices?’
    ‘Why shouldn’t he?’
    ‘I don’t know. I thought he might prefer to wait.’
    It took me a moment to realise that this abstract third person they were referring to was me. ‘He’ll come along wherever you’re going,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t
like being left behind.’
    ‘I have to get some posters and things. For the rally.’
    ‘Okay.’
    We drove slowly through the hot streets. There were fewer people out, and they kept to the shade. Some of them made signs as we passed: clenched fist for SWAPO, forked fingers for the DTA. We
went into town and parked in a side street not far from where we’d eaten last night. The SWAPO offices were on the second floor of a bland, brick-faced building. A security grille covered the
entrance. Godfrey spoke into an intercom and we were let through, into a foyer with a lot of aimless people waiting around. There was a SWAPO flag on the wall, with a photograph of the SWAPO
president, bearded and beaming, next to it, hung slightly askew. All this bureaucracy, with its ordinary, dusty tedium – it seemed so very at odds with the black men out in the bush
who’d wanted to kill us. This was like any government office back in Cape Town, like civil service officialdom anywhere in the world. We passed down a long passage, to a room whirring with
the commotion of printing presses and piled up with stacks of posters and leaflets. A tiny black man in a white coat was in charge. He called Godfrey comrade and looked very formal and serious for
a moment; but then he broke out in a friendly grin and the two of them had a private conversation, full of nodding and jokes.
    The posters we’d come to collect were waiting on the counter nearby. I studied them while we waited. Looking out at me, sketched in grainy black ink, was the face of Andrew Lovell. The
photograph looked like an old one, taken years ago. He was thin, with dark hair brushed forward over a high forehead. Narrow cheeks, with a big smile, an intelligent glow in the eyes. Not a
special, extraordinary face. A face not entirely unlike mine. Underneath it said, ‘Comrade Andrew Lovell, 1960