The Smell of Apples: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be strengthened before one of them snapped and Frikkie or I broke our necks. Or how

    Mark Behr
    embarrassing if one of our teachers should fall right through into the guest-room while Mum was showing them the house.
    Now that we are fully prepared, we are told to wait.
    After the initial alertness with which everything was brought into battle-readiness, I have to send the section leaders and platoon sergeants around with a simple command: Wait.
    While they again fall into some comfortable position - backs against the trees - the conversation invariably turns to Quito Caunavale. So much of their talk centres around that one battle three months ago. Since then everyone has become less self-assured. Slowly, with the years, I began taking notice of the changed attitudes - even before Quito. For more and more of the good ones, the option of permanently joining up no longer seemed viable; for more, a compulsion to leave the country. Even the eighteen-year-olds, those who come directly after completing high school, became more cynical. I noticed it everywhere - not only up here in the bush -even when I went back to Infantry School last year to train the cream of the crop - those selected for officers' course. Despite their commitment to getting rank, the signs of the times were there.
    The subtle change wasn V immediately conspicuous, not to the extent that the boys were fundamentally different from myself when I had arrived there for the first time. Yet, something was missing, something of the passion and gravity with which we came to the defence force just a few years ago. Back then, even the more negative amongst us accepted the two years of conscription as an inevitable reality which had to be put in the past, but one

    The Smell of Apples
    which nonetheless the best had to be made of Now, that has become the attitude of those who are most positive -a dull shadow of irony already lying across the young faces - long before the war has done its dirty job; a shadow you notice only when you know what you're looking for.
    During a recent patrol just north of the Kunene, we passed through the ruins of a village called Chitado on the Ops-map. There was nothing exceptional about Chitado - it is just one of a thousand skeletons scattered across the Southern Angolan landscape. Years ago it may have been a quaint place - a small version of Grabouw or Bonnievale or Ladysmith. But now, in the aftermath of thirteen years of war, there was little to bear witness to any earlier period of life or beauty. In the ruins of the small Catholic church, where Portuguese women with shiny hair once murmured confessions, brown elephant grass grew from crags like tufts of hair from armpits, and the sun cast long shadows across what was once a neatly tiled floor. From dongas caused by hand-grenades and mortars exploding on the town square, thorn bushes now stood waist-high. Painted against the roofless grey walls of what were once homes was the evidence of countless military patrols that had passed through over the years: We are marching to Luanda' and *My nooi is in 'n Nartjie' and beneath that, in big black letters, 'Mine is in Krugersdorp \
    Chitado repeats itself all around you - together with the tattered locals who flee the war with their scant bundles of earthly belongings. Thousands of the uprooted move in all directions, babies tied to the backs of bony mothers, bare-chested black men walking ahead and prodding the road to warn against lurking landmines which lie waiting to maim careless pedestrians in a cloud of rock

    Mark Behr
    and metal, and black girls with missing limbs who hobble along on self-devised wooden legs, their arms hooked into forked branches that serve as crutches. We see it all.
    I am at my desk adjusting the red Porsche's connector with a screwdriver when Dad's Volvo turns in at the gates. There's someone in the car with him. I get up from the desk and press my face against the window-pane to see who it is. He parks in the