Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut Page B

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