Free Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut Page B

jokes. A legal man,’ he repeated. ‘Do you want a cold-drink?’
    Solemnly we peeled the tabs off our tins and sipped. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that Godfrey seemed unaffected by the death of his friend. Perhaps, after all, they had never
been close friends. Or perhaps this was the way of things when you were involved in a political struggle – people were killed, or people disappeared, and you had to go on. You kept your eye
on the cause you were fighting for, but you didn’t get too involved in the tragedy of the other soldiers fighting with you. Not a normal war; not a war like the one I’d been caught up
in.
    When we passed out of the hills, the land levelled into a flat plain, extending into a haze of heat in the distance. It was almost shocking – the vastness and emptiness of it.
‘There,’ Godfrey said, ‘that’s the desert.’ There really was nothing growing. The sand looked like cinders.
    ‘I want to stop the car,’ I said.
    ‘So stop.’
    I pulled over. When the engine stopped the silence was immense and suffocating. We opened our doors and stepped out into the sand. Heat, light, dust: I leaned against the car. There was nothing
to see, nothing to fix your eye on, unless it was the curve of the earth. Godfrey squatted down. He put one hand between his spread knees and pressed his palm flat into the ground. Just before he
got up again, wiping his hand on his leg, I thought I saw his shoulders trembling gently, as though a voltage had passed up his arm. It was a curious gesture, and somehow sad.
    When we got back into the car my mother was waking up. Wiping strands of hair from her face, she yawned pinkly, like a cat. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘that was a nice sleep. Have you
boys been taking a pee? Oh, look. We’re in the desert. Isn’t it something else, Patrick? A real trip.’
    Several hours down the road, the desert changed again. From stone it became sand, soft dunes undulating on either side, creeping into the road. There was a curiously liquid quality to it,
sliding and drifting and blurring. It was moving around in the wind, rearranging itself all the time, grain by grain. If you lay still it would form itself around you, take you into itself.
    Just outside Walvis Bay we came to another border post. My mother sighed. ‘It’s South African territory,’ she said. ‘Show them the passports, be a sweet.’ But the
soldiers here weren’t very interested; they glanced at our passports, peered at Godfrey and waved us through. I had the same unsettling feeling I’d had at the border down south: that
the landscape itself continued without regard for the artificial lines marked out on maps. People died fervently, passionately, for their particular patch of territory, but the earth – in a
certain sense – was somewhere else.
    We skirted around the edge of Walvis Bay and followed a road up the coast. We were in a flat belt between the sea on the left and the weird dunes rising on the right. Pelicans stood like crowds
of concerned citizens on the beach, staring gravely out across the water. We came to another border post - with again that same unreal quality, as though the boom, the booth, the soldiers and us
were all floating a few inches above the surface of the earth – and then we arrived in Swakopmund. The sun was going down, and in the last reddish glow the big old houses, the spare Germanic
architecture, were both elaborate and flimsy, like delicate but detailed screens that had been put up as a backdrop for some event which never quite took place. We were very tired. We drove around
aimlessly for a while, then went to a hotel near the sea and booked ourselves into two rooms.

 
CHAPTER SEVEN
    Swakopmund was a town built on sand. It sprouted almost absurdly out of nothing, like a mirage on pale foundations. The edge of town was a disquieting sight, where the houses
ended and the desert began. The transition was sudden and curiously violent, containing some kind