Rumours of Rain Page 31

  The day I so nearly drowned in the dam, sucked into the slimy mud, then saved by Mpilo. As the sun was setting I went up the slope behind the house; no one had noticed me. There was an urge in me somehow to offer thanks to someone for being alive still. The God of the Old Testament, who gave and who took away, who burned in thorn-bushes and consumed sacrifices in fire and brimstone. “God” was simply the name I gave to it because it was all I knew: but the urge as such had a deeper chthonic source.

  On a small, even patch in a dry stream-bed high up on the hill I built an altar and stacked some firewood on top. It wasn’t easy to decide on a sacrifice. I looked at the fox-terrier which had accompanied me, an eager little bitch with gaping mouth and an excitable stump of a tail. But I felt reluctant to give up my dog. In the end I decided on my new pocket-knife, the one I’d promised Mpilo. Opening both blades to prove to God it was no ordinary knife, I put it on the altar and fell on my knees to pray for fire from Heaven – making sure I was a good distance away in case God didn’t aim accurately.

  Every few minutes I opened my eyes briefly to examine the sky for any sign of descending fire, with no doubt in my mind at all about the imminence of the event. Then, seeing the sky still clear, I would return to prayer, more fervently than before.

  I recited everything I’d ever heard Dad or Grandpa pray – about the poor and needy, the authorities appointed over us, those near and dear to us, the dominee and his council, road-workers and servants, the preaching of the Gospel in heathen lands, the lot. But nothing happened. Was I lacking in faith then? Surely not. I started right from the beginning again until my knees were aching on the hard ground. The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, And have not love, everything I had memorised in my short life, including a few secular recitations. Still nothing. And night was beginning to fall.

  I was beginning to be plagued by memories of the priests of Mount Carmel, but I resolved to give God a fair chance, in case He was otherwise occupied at the moment. I decided to leave the knife on the altar for God to consume with fire sometime in the course of the night: perhaps He was reluctant to make it happen in front of my eyes. More or less by way of ultimatum I gave God a full and final brief on the whole situation, and then set off at a fast trot in the disquieting dusk.

  During the night one of the typical Eastern Cape storms came up, raging and thundering over the farm, uprooting trees and tearing the earth open and sending wild streams of red water gushing down the hills. By morning it had cleared up, only the wind was still blowing. I slipped out of the house to investigate. The stream-bed on the hillside was littered with rocks and stones and driftwood swept down by the sudden short-lived flood. There was no sign of either the altar or the knife.

  I was left with a disturbing uncertainty: had God heard my prayer and consumed my sacrifice, not in the manner prescribed by me but in His own inscrutable way? Or had He poured his wrath over me and my little altar as He had done with Cain’s? Or hadn’t He been involved in it in any way: had the storm wreaked its destruction blindly and on its own? (Or was wrath and love so closely related that I couldn’t yet distinguish between them?)

  One thing was certain: never again in my life would my faith be as fervent and as fierce as on that day. It was as if a source of energy had been extinguished inside me. And thinking back that night I realised: somewhere between the child I’d been and the man I was something had changed irrevocably. Somewhere I’d lost that wild innocence. What made it happen? And was it really quite inevitable?

  The first faint dawn was filtering through the stoep window. Cocks had begun to crow. In Ma’s room the baby was whining again and she tried to comfort it.

  I got up to pour myself some water from the earthenware carafe on the washing table. The glass tinkled against the neck of the carafe.

  “Are you awake too?” asked Louis.

  I turned round, but it was still too dark to see him in his bed.

  “I thought you were asleep?” I said.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “It’s a bad thing that happened, isn’t it?”

  “Wasn’t she a beautiful woman, Dad?”

  Protected by the dark it was easier to admit than otherwise: “Yes. One felt quite shaken.”

  It was very cold and I crept back into bed. In a strange way it unnerved me to find that he had also found her beautiful. It was different from the day beside the swimming pool or the day in the crowd encouraging the man to jump.

  Without being able to explore it or to explain why, I remembered a day when Louis, a small boy of five or six, had come running into the house from the garden, his blonde hair dusty and unkempt, shouting excitedly: “Dad! Dad, you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “I was standing against the tree. You know, the pear tree. And suddenly I could hear my heart throbbing inside the trunk.”

  Somewhere between that day and this early dawn he, too, had changed. He’d never wanted to talk about it. But perhaps, in this newly discovered intimacy in the dark, he might let his defences down.

  “I suppose you’ve seen more than your share of dead bodies in Angola?” I ventured, as casually as possible.

  He didn’t reply immediately. In fact, I’d already given up hope of getting an answer, when he said in the dark: “Yes. A lot. But I don’t think it makes all that much difference. Before one has seen a corpse you expect it to be something terrible. Then it happens, and you discover it’s – it’s very ordinary. So vulgar, really.” He fell quiet for a while. “That’s what I can’t understand, Dad. That everything should seem so ordinary.”

  “You’ve changed a lot,” I said.

  “Naturally.” Briefly, the bitter, defensive tone returned to his voice: “They say war makes a man of one, don’t they?”

  “What really happened, Louis?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps one just gets blunted. Or initiated. Or something.”

  “Women?”

  He laughed contemptuously. “How can you be so Victorian, Dad? Do you really think ‘initiation’ means one thing only?”

  I didn’t answer. The conversation was balancing on such a fine edge that I hesitated to prod it in either direction.

  Without warning he relented again: “It was part of it, I suppose. Women.” And after a long silence, as if he’d had to think it over first: “That day we passed Sa da Bandeira. We’d been driving for twenty hours non-stop. I was on one of the Unimogs. They’d already cleaned up before us, so there wasn’t really any danger, except for the occasional landmine or sniper. Then we reached one of the villages. Almost nothing left of it, all blown to bits. We set up our HQ in a tumbledown little municipal building. It was just papers and torn files and things all over the place. We were like zombies, we dropped down to sleep wherever we could find an open spot. Then, some time in the night, there was a rumpus. They brought in some women – the Black soldiers who were with us, the Unitas. One young Portuguese girl. I don’t think she could have been older than fourteen. I heard someone say she’d got caught when her folks were trying to escape from Luanda. There were refugees wherever we went, those days. She didn’t cry or anything. She didn’t even plead to be left alone like some of the others. Perhaps she was a bit soft in the head. Her eyes stayed wide open all the time. She never seemed to blink at all. They passed her on from the one to the other. She didn’t have any clothes left, just a bit of frayed collar round her neck where they’d ripped off her dress. And a small golden crucifix between her tits. Tiny little tits, not even the size of apples. Her legs were streaked with blood, not badly, just a bit messy, you know.”

  “And then?” I asked, when he fell silent again for a long time.

  “You know, Dad, I actually felt like taking off the top of my track-suit or something, to cover her up. But what use would it have been? If one’s been going for so long and if so much has happened to you, you no longer really think about what you’re doing.”

  “I suppose it’s inevitable if you want to survive,”
I said, as sympathetically as I could.

  “Hell,” he said, without appearing to have heard me, “there isn’t much left of a girl when she’s taken off her clothes, is there? Some of them looked so tough, but once you had the clothes off them – And that little one, Jesus!”

  I waited in silence. It took some time before he spoke again:

  “There were other occasions too. In other villages. Not often, for the PFs kept a close watch on us. But from time to time a few of us would break out. Just for the hell of it, even if we knew there was short-arm inspection coming up afterwards. We usually found liquor somewhere, and Black women.” Suddenly he sounded irritable. “But that wasn’t important at all. It wasn’t that.”

  “What was it then?”

  “I wish I knew. I don’t think it was anything in particular. No, it wasn’t as easy as that.” He sighed. “It’s just that – everything was such a bloody farce. We were cheated. Right from the first day when the PFs in the camp told us to volunteer.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean they used force on us or anything. But, hell, there’s only two things in the army: it’s either ‘in’ or it’s ‘out’. And not to go to Angola was ‘out’. You know the sort of argument: ‘If you boys got any guts, then sign here. Any bugger not signing up, is lower than the shadow of shark shit on the fucking bottom of the sea.’ You think any of us would like to be shamed in front of his pals? So we went, the lot of us, boknaaiers and pansies and cannon donkeys, the lot. I mean, Jesus, what did we know about where we were going? They just spoke about ‘the border’ all the time. It sounded like one hell of an adventure.”

  “But you liked camp life last year. The weekends you came home you couldn’t stop talking about it.”

  “What does one know about war while you’re in the training camp? You shit in the pump and they give you hell, especially while you’re still a blue-arse and some old man’s slave, but it’s the army and it’s all right, and in a way you even learn to enjoy it. But Angola —” Another pause; another unexpected start: “Do you know what one feels like in that godforsaken bush, within farting distance of Luanda, when a group of ous are sitting round the fire listening to the radio, and you hear the Minister or some other top cunt telling the public not to worry, our men are just on the border protecting our installations at Ruacana and Calueque, we’re not interested in occupying other people’s countries – Then you sit there and you think: Jesus, they’re pretending we’re not here. They’re pretending we don’t even exist. Even if we bloody well die here in the bush they’ll just pretend it didn’t happen. And that’s when you start asking yourself what the fuck you’re doing there.”

  I restrained the impulse to scold him about his language. Perhaps he wouldn’t even have heard me, for now that he’d got started he seemed unable to restrain himself any longer:

  “One day a group of Top Brass arrived to look around the ‘operational area’. We slaved away to make everything shine and then they arrived in their helicopters. Big booze-up. All smiles, the lot of us. Oh what a lovely war and all that shit. But late that evening, when I took some more booze to the big boys, I heard one of them saying – he was rather far gone by that time: ‘Hey, listen, General, there’s one thing. I’d appreciate it if you could cut down on all the bodies you’re sending home, you know. I’m getting sick and tired of attending a bloody hero’s funeral every week.’”

  The dawn had grown lighter and I could see Louis sitting up.

  “Let me tell you, Dad, that’s when one starts feeling all sour inside. You start thinking again: ‘It’s for all you cunts down there in Pretoria we’re getting blown to pieces in this bundu. It’s your bloody war, not ours. We don’t want to have anything to do with it. But we’re getting killed while you keep your fat little hands clean.’”

  “I think I understand your feelings, Louis,” I said, uncomfortably, not really knowing how to handle his anger.

  “How can you understand?” he said. “I haven’t told you anything yet. You know nothing!”

  It was unnecessary to coax him into talking any longer. Nothing could stop him now. It was like a dam bursting inside him, and all I could do was to allow the flood to go its own cascading way.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Dad. I didn’t feel sorry that I’d gone. One always wonders, you know, especially in the training camp: ‘If it really comes to the push, if war broke out, how am I going to shape? Will I shit in my santamarias or get through to the other side?’”

  “You got through all right.”

  “Yes, I got through. I never shat in my pants. I wasn’t a coward after all. I suppose it makes some people feel good. But it did nothing to me. How can I explain it? – I mean, when I got there and the mortars started exploding and the bombs bursting and the bullets whizzing like bloody flies past my head, I found it was quite irrelevant wondering about cowardice. It’s not a matter of courage or that sort of crap at all. All that matters is whether you can switch off all right. Not that I stopped thinking – it wasn’t that. If only I could. But – well, you know, emotionally, sort of. I didn’t care about what was happening. I couldn’t feel a thing. And then, when I got on the other side, I realised that nothing could shock me any more. Nothing. Death, wounds, filth, atrocities, I couldn’t care less. I could take it all. I’d become a man, hadn’t I? And then there’s something else you discover. You find out that this whole country depends for its survival on the fact that you can shut off your conscience. Otherwise it wouldn’t last for another day. And just because I’d succeeded in being cold-blooded and fucking callous enough, I helped to keep this country going.”

  “It seems a very natural reaction to me. You’re still suffering from shock. Just give it time.”

  “Shock has nothing to do with it. It’s the opposite. Nothing shocked me and nothing can shock me. Don’t you understand?”

  “But what happened to change you so much then?” I repeated.

  And once again he said: “I told you: there was no isolated incident. It was the whole caboodle as such. Some of my pals came out all smiles on the other side. No scars on them at all. They’re the same good and solid ous they’d been before. Because they managed not to think.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Anything. Just the plain, simple act of thinking as such. I told you. I could handle the feeling bit. But thinking – Jesus, that was different. One day just after we’d passed Pereira d’Eca, right in the beginning, I killed my first enemy. One just knows it, the moment you hit him. Quite some satisfaction it gives you. After all, you’re a soldier and a soldier’s got the right to kill: and if you don’t kill him, he’ll blast your brains out. And anyway, you don’t think of him as a man. It’s the enemy. So you feel fine. You even swagger a bit and the ous pat you on the shoulder: Well done, old chap. But you can’t smother your thoughts. Soon you start asking: Why has a soldier got the right to kill? Who gives him that right? – And once it’s started you can’t stop it again. Never again.”

  The early, innocent light had grown stronger. Louis went on talking, uncontrollable. And I let him go on, waiting for – what? I couldn’t define it: I only hoped I’d recognise it if it came.

  In Ma’s room the baby began to cry, but it was soon comforted. I could hear her moving about as she got up and dressed and went to the bathroom. There were sounds in the kitchen too. Water running, wood being broken, the clanging of cups and saucers. And soon afterwards, from the dining-room, the sound of Ma’s voice in prayer, followed, like the previous day and all the mornings of my childhood, by the measured morning hymn, each note awarded more than its full value of painful sincerity. Then it was silent for a long time. I knew she was waiting for me. But I lay listening to Louis who went on talking without interruption; following him on all the tedious detours of his senseless campaign, through skirmishes and full-fledged battles, past shorter or longer halts in camps and villages along the way – moved by the violence and death of his tale, yet waiting all
the time, in vain, for that revelation which would cause all the jumbled pieces to fit together in a pattern. I knew it would remain with me all day. I would have to return to separate incidents again and again to grope for their sense; in search of Louis and perhaps of myself. Somewhere there must have been a moment, in both our lives, when the final turning-point had been reached and passed. Had we both lost something in the process – or was it a form of gain? Was it something to be sad about, or profoundly thankful? What was the real sense of this irritably recurring word, innocence?