The Writing Class

The Writing Class A South African conscript recalls an experience during the Angolan War of the 1980s from The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories, a collection of contemporary South African short stories published by Random House Struik (Umuzi)

STEPHEN SYMONS

The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

For all those who fell...

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The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

The Writing Class STEPHEN SYMONS

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The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

He just stopped coming. Three weeks in and his chair was empty, although no one had really noticed him in the first place. He had stared his way through those writing classes, through the comments, even the readings. He had blinked rarely, with eyes that cut into the musty space between us. I had seen that look many times before. Yet when it had been his turn to read, he read like some birds sing, filling those four or five minutes with something that sounded more like music than just words. Sally, the loud one, had said he had a beautiful voice, a perfect radio voice. I thought a voice like his would simply skip the physics of speech. He had only read one of his stories in the three weeks before his disappearance. It was short but compelling and spoke of a time I had long since packed away. His story altered the colour of the room. His voice seemed to control light. Even the fluorescents had dimmed when he read to us.

I had arrived early for our fourth class. The room smelt unused and empty after the Easter break. I sat down facing a wall of forgotten books, probably all unread. There were two foolscap sheets on a chair. I picked up the sheets and placed them in the slatted light on the table. I saw his name, started reading and felt myself slipping back.

Stars ‘Ondangwa Tower, Foxtrot Two Niner, vector twee nil zero? Confirm?’ The Puma rolled away from the base like a whale, its blades slapping at the dusk air. Our section would be dropped sixty kilometres north of the last contact, deep in FAPLA territory. We had to confirm the exact co-ordinates of a suspected ammo dump so the flyboys could drop a couple of fivers right in their laps.

Our section leader, Staff Volskenk, was an ex-miner with the hands of a boxer and a heart to match. He was a fair man, and any issues were usually solved with much swearing and a slap. Typical army stuff. There were eight of us, all conscripts, excluding our Bushman tracker, Lappies. Lappies was built 4

The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

like a wire fence, but he was more wire than fence post. He glided over the veld, always ahead of us, picking at twigs and shovelling the sand with the remains of his army issue takkies. I don’t think I ever saw him eat or drink.

By the time we were dropped at our Initial Point, the sky had turned purple, with faint streaks of red cloud skimming the horizon. We hiked across nothing but flatness for almost two hours, so when we reached that pimple of rock overlooking the depression, Wilmot christened it Mount Everest. We complained our way up the koppie in the blued evening light. Badenhorst, our overweight machine gunner, did most of the complaining. He whined on about having to lug extra belts of MAG ammo and his chances of being stung by a scorpion. Staff shut him up with a muzzle jab to the kidneys.

Badenhorst’s side-kick and ammo handler, Van Tonder, slapped one of the ammo belts and cackled, ‘Ja Badie, Staff hates bladdy kak bakkers.’

We reached the summit of our Mount Everest with about ten minutes of daylight to spare. Lappies had already arrived, his eyes fixed on the sky as it roped in the first stars.

The view was breathtaking. War has a way with landscapes. It can saturate the land with a beauty or oblivion that is never encountered in peacetime.

Stars look especially different; they seem brighter, pricking away at the darkness and at our dreams. Perhaps Lappies understood this. Within minutes Staff had spread out a map in the dust and weighted the corners with four fist-sized stones. He orientated his compass and called our radio operator, Pretorius. I liked Pretorius. Unlike Badenhorst, Pretorius was someone I could talk to. He always carried a pocket-sized exercise book with a stub of pencil attached it, even on patrol. I think he wanted to be a writer.

The radio crackled static as Staff confirmed the grids.

‘Two Niner Zulu! Two Niner Zulu! This is Bravo Leader, over!’

‘Proceed, Bravo Leader.’

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The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

Once the grids had been confirmed, Staff surveyed the depression with his binoculars and that’s when we spotted them. Their skittish firelight had been hidden by the dusk, but as the darkness deepened it gave away their camp piece by piece. There must have been about thirty FAPLA down there, eating their dinner of samp and offal. We surveyed them in silence. Their laughter and the smell of bad meat were lugged up the koppie by the crisp night air.

Our Mirages would vaporise them before their morning piss. A guard was posted, and not a word was said as we tried to puff the cold from our sleeping bags in that strange space of half-sleep. Lappies sat out the night, welded to a large, flat outcrop of rock, silhouetted in an army blanket, watching his ancestors hunting across the Milky Way. At first light Staff Volskenk explained our role in the attack.

‘Okay, manne, set up a firing line on the ridge. Check your sights, and Badenhorst, no kak, hey. Use tracer, I want to see where the hell you are shooting. No shooting until I says so. Wilmot, I’m talking to you! Vok, man, listen!’

Suddenly the radio hissed, ‘Bravo Leader, Bravo Leader Victor Victor! MiGs inbound, take cover.’

Within seconds of the radio’s warning, two Angolan MiG 21s cracked open the sunrise, contrails feathering off the wingtips into the dawn haze. I could see the lead pilot’s white helmet clearly beneath the reflections of the plexiglass canopy as he turned his machine on its wingtip, hoping to get a better view of the terrain. The FAPLA camp erupted in cheers. Some fool even let off a few salutary rounds.

The MiGs levelled out, waggled their wings in acknowledgment and headed home for breakfast. Badenhorst let out an almighty ‘Bladdy hell, that was close’ in relief.

Our Mirages were due shortly. We had fifteen minutes to set up our killing field. As I checked my R4, I kept looking at Lappies and the way his eyes 6

The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

took us all in, into his universe of dunes, ancestors and now-vanished Eland.

I turned to Pretorius, who was scribbling in his exercise book. ‘Hey, Johan, I wonder what Lappies’s Bushman name is? Do you reckon it’s something we could pronounce?’

Pretorius looked at me and yawned, ‘No idea, boet, but I wish I had a camera to photograph the little raisin.’

They came with no radio warning, two silent insects at the speed of sound.

They were over us in seconds, filling the sunrise with a massive sonic boom.

The Mirages pulled up as one, and lobbed four 500-pound high explosive bombs in slow motion towards the depression. Two fell short, one failed to detonate and the fourth exploded right on target in a divine flash of white phosphorus that set off the buried munitions. We all ducked instinctively. I thought of the FAPLAs who were caught in the open as I watched the shockwave whip Wilmot’s bush hat clean off his head. Lappies had nocked an arrow in his frail bow. Was this his war too?

The Mirages had vanished to a rumble in the blue. We waited for the dust to clear. Wilmot was doubled over in a coughing fit, hammering at the earth.

Staff gave him a klap on the back, shook him by his webbing and told him to focus. Not all the FAPLAs were dead. I could see at least four or five emerge from the dust cloud in a drunken stumble, some still in their underwear, hands holding their heads in place. They were all painted white in the flourfine dust of the explosion. One dragged his sleeping bag behind him in a daze, leaving a smooth trail of black ash from the blast area.

Without moving his binoculars from his eyes, Staff said, ‘Okay, on three, commence firing.’ He shuffled over to Badenhorst and tapped him on the shoulder, indicating that he should direct his fire in a sweeping arc across the oblivion of bodies and debris. The army knew that at two hundred metres a man is reduced to no more than a cardboard target. The distance sucks the brother, father and son out of the equation and makes the killing easier. The 7

The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

dust would help too.

I picked a target and waited until he filled the sights of my rifle. He looked unscathed and that made me feel better. He wore an olive drab overall, with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He looked like a gardener who was late for work. My first round threw a spurt of white grit about a metre in front of him. He dived towards what looked like a scraping in the salt pan. Beautiful arcs of tracer from Badenhorst’s MAG had ignited the skeleton of the FAPLA camp. The noise of the carnage was unimaginable.

I tried to slow my breathing and shifted my aim to about an arm’s length ahead of the green overall. I fired three shots and the steel butt kicked three times into my shoulder. I must have hit him in his lower back and foot. The gardener tried to get up to his knees, but slipped to his green elbow and then clawed at the dirt before rolling over in surrender. That was it: I had killed a man on a Monday morning and felt nothing but the taste of dust and cordite in my cracked mouth.

What followed felt like a deep bruise, a swelling of quiet that would grow in all of us. The blast area looked like a large splash of paint, with blackened men and shrubs splayed out from centre. The morning birds had resumed their singing and the sun continued rising. We turned to laughing, swearing and herding the spent shells.

Later, I was on my haunches, rolling my sleeping bag into my pack. It was the first and last time our eyes made contact. Every line on his face flowed towards two black marbles floating in bloodshot pools of yellow.

Lappies half-smiled and then spoke, ‘Yes, meneer,’ he said, pointing towards the depression, ‘Those dead men will become stars. They will be dancing around the moon tonight.’

Before I could reply he jogged off ahead of the section.

Staff clapped his hands and said, ‘In two minutes – twee minute – the train 8

The Writing Class - Stephen Symons

is leaving.’

Two weeks later, I was boarding a C130 at Grootfontein, homeward bound, just like that Simon and Garfunkel song.

I put his story down. The ruled strips of light on the table had dimmed. I looked to the window above the sink, framing a large cloud that was hiding the sun.

Sally, the loud one, arrived. She shouted a hello and started talking.

‘Did you get the group mail from what-his-name? The quiet guy with the nice voice?’

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Oh. I did. No message, but there was a photo attached.’

‘A photo of what?’

‘A photo of him standing in the bush. Looks like he’s packed up and headed north. Somewhere in Namibia, or one of those places that have Bushman paintings.’

I looked at the two foolscap pages in the fading light and felt that deep ache so many of use were left with. I thought of him, up north, watching the sky to turn to blood, and wondered if his bruise would now ease after all these years.

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A South African conscript recalls an experience during the Angolan War of the 1980s.

The Writing Class appeared in The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories, a collection of contemporary South African short stories published by Random House Struik (Umuzi)

The Writing Class

STEPHEN SYMONS