by William Boyd
“No!” he bellowed. “Bastard!” He shook his head, pacing out the four walls, trying to come to terms with the disappearance of something so immutable and massy, so incontrovertibly there.
Saleh arrived timidly at the door. “Bwana,” he said apologetically. “They took it a long time ago.”
“When?” Temple said.
“After you and madam went away.”
Temple whirled round. Saleh backed off.
“I could not stop them, Bwana,” he protested. “Many men came. For five days they were working.”
“Who was it?” Temple demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Who took it?”
“Many men,” Saleh repeated. “The Germani.”
Temple swallowed. He knew who had taken it. Von Bishop. The man had tried systematically to defile his home. Erich von Bishop had stolen his Decorticator. He would have to pay. It was as simple as that.
Chapter 15
24 June 1916,
Nanda, German East Africa
Wincing slightly, Gabriel removed the grubby, worn bandages from his thigh. A pad of bloodstained lint was stuck to the scab. Gritting his teeth he pulled it away. The six-inch scab that was revealed glistened and oozed. Gabriel’s eyes watered with the stinging pain. Deppe couldn’t understand why his leg was taking so long to heal. Gabriel smiled to himself. He hopped to the doorway of the lean-to shed he lived in at the back of the hospital. A piece of blanket hung from the lintel. Pulling it to one side he should see the hospital kitchens and the dusty vegetable plots. There was no sign of Deppe or Liesl. If they ever found out what he was doing he’d be sent away at once, he was sure. Liesl might not send him away, but Deppe would. Deppe would never forgive him.
Gabriel limped back to his bed and sat down. The constant re-infection of his leg wound was easier to explain now that all the medical supplies were running out. They were washing and re-using all bandages now, most wounds got infected these days. Automatically he touched the puckered scars on his abdomen. He would always be grateful to Deppe; it was a shame he had to frustrate his best efforts with his leg.
Gingerly with his fingernail, Gabriel prised up an inch of the scab. His eyes started to water again. With his other hand he took a pinch of dirt from the floor and sprinkled the grains onto the glistening wet wound beneath, like salt on underdone meat. He pushed the scab back into place, and carefully rewound the bandage on. In a day or so, if past performances were a reliable guide, the wound would become itchy, then inflamed and putrid. Liesl would have to clean it out, use some of the dwindling supplies of disinfectants, wash the bandages and replace them. He tied the final knot. It was a risk of course. If it didn’t get treated the consequences could be most serious. But that was the advantage of working in the hospital: you were always well looked after.
He pulled the tattered hem of his shorts down over the bandage. He sat for a while staring at his thin knees. He had lost so much weight over the months of recovery. He couldn’t understand why: he ate as much as anyone else—better even than the other prisoners had. But he was just skin and bone now: skin, bone, muscle and cartilage. Deppe said that was another reason why his thigh wound was taking so long to heal.
Gabriel got to his feet and went outside. He squinted up at the sun trying to guess the time. Four o’clock, four-thirty maybe. Perhaps he should go back to the ward and see if there was anything Liesl wanted him to do. There was always work to be done. Usually it meant helping the dysentery cases. Sometimes he helped feed the very sick men, or wash them. When Liesl was on duty he did all sorts of fetching and carrying jobs. Deppe wasn’t so happy about employing him. He said that it was against regulations to compel prisoners to do menial work. But Gabriel always reminded him that he wasn’t being compelled. He wanted to help, he told Deppe; wanted to do his bit to relieve suffering. But Deppe wouldn’t listen and always frowned heavily when he saw Gabriel giving assistance.
Fortunately Deppe spent less and less time at the Nanda hospital. As the war went on and the casualty list inevitably grew, his expertise was required at other hospitals, makeshift clinics and convalescent homes. “Deppe’s just an old woman,” Liesl had said when Gabriel told her about the doctor’s reservations. “Anyway, he is never here.” It was this conspiracy against the fussy doctor that had encouraged their curious friendship, that had broken down the formal restraints that exist between nurse and patient, captor and captive.
Gabriel smiled to himself as he went into the hospital, not that you’d expect Liesl to pay much attention to customs or conventions. He’d never met such a strong-minded woman.
It seemed that as the war dragged on so Liesl’s attitude had become more indifferent and resigned. In his months as her patient Gabriel had been well placed to notice this transformation. She did her job as thoroughly and efficiently as the conditions allowed, but she didn’t seem particularly to care one way or another about anything. Only Deppe had the power to irritate her. She didn’t despair, but she didn’t hope either. When Gabriel put his plan into operation and made his first tentative offers of help—holding a man above an enamel basin while she attended to an emergency further down the ward—she hadn’t even said thank you. She seemed to take it as just another event in the undifferentiated flow that constituted her day. Gradually—almost without effort on his part—Gabriel’s role in the ward increased. There were servants who worked in the ward but they couldn’t be expected to do the more sensitive tasks, and also a lot of the soldiers resented any more intimate contact with them. So Gabriel bathed feverish patients, spread ointment on chafing stumps, supported the dysentery cases as they trembled and shuddered during their burning evacuations, and, sometimes, he changed the simpler dressings. Soon he was a familiar figure in the one long ward that made up Nanda hospital. He would chat to the English soldiers, he even learnt a smattering of German, enough for the rudiments of conversations with the German wounded who, steadily, came to form the largest portion of the patients.
But now there were no English prisoners in Nanda. A week ago the eighty men and their garrison had been moved near the coast. No one knew why. One theory was that the effort of guarding and feeding them was proving too costly and that they were going to be returned on parole to the advancing British. Gabriel was thankful he had discovered that after they’d left. If he’d known in advance it would have been very hard to justify his staying on. As it was his conscience, was satisfied by a plea of ignorance.
He thought of this now as he stood at the end of the long ward. The heat was stifling. Over sixty beds had been crammed into the former storeroom-cum-warehouse of the research station. The windows were open, cane blinds hanging in them to minimize the heat of the afternoon sun. An old African servant came past with two heavy slopping buckets. “Jambo Bwana,” he said. Everyone knew Gabriel.
At the other end of the ward he saw Liesl taking a pulse. She looked up, saw him and made a smoking gesture with her hand. Gabriel turned and went into the small room that served as a dispensary. He sat down at the table in the middle of the floor and set about rolling two cigarettes from the crude, locally cured tobacco and their dwindling supply of paper. They were using a copy of Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, a small, nicely bound book that Liesl said belonged to her husband. One leaf was sufficient for a single cigarette. They had reached page forty-eight.
Gabriel had become quite an expert at rolling cigarettes; it was as if, as his hands got bonier and the knuckles more evident on his fingers, they acquired a new dexterity. He took time over it, packing the tobacco tightly, rolling the paper up in a neat, even cylinder. Often he’d spend a day making a dozen or so cigarettes and offer them to Liesl as a present. She smoked a lot. Fortunately there was plenty of tobacco. Paper was the problem. If the war continued, Herr von Bishop’s small library wouldn’t last very long.
Gabriel finished the cigarettes and waited for Liesl to return. Outside the oppressive weight of the afternoon sun seemed to have stunned the world into silence. Gabriel stood up an
d looked out of the dispensary window whose view gave on to the deserted prison camp.
When the prisoners had been marched off he had kept out of their way. Had he done the right thing? He consoled himself with Major du Toit’s remarks. It had been Major du Toit who had initiated the plan. Major du Toit was the senior British officer in the POW camp; it was he who had encouraged him to try and stay within the hospital and who had urged him to give his parole, convinced that Gabriel’s injuries would debar him from ever fighting again.
In the hospital, Major du Toit had argued, he was in an ideal position to smuggle items of food and medical supplies to the men behind the wire. Also, as he soon found out, he could pick up news of the war far more easily. Nanda was a military camp. In the civilian camps prisoners who gave an oath not to try and escape were allowed to wander freely around whatever village or town the camp was set in. But for the captured soldiers such an oath also contained the undertaking not to fight against Germany or her allies for the duration of the war. Du Toit had forbidden any of his men—apart from Gabriel—to take such an oath and consequently they spent their time behind the barbed-wire stockade. As it turned out, having Gabriel on the outside proved most useful. And this was what Gabriel told himself too. He pilfered professionally from the German stores—especially from the efficient quinine substitute they had developed—and was able to pass on the news of the attack on Taveta in March, the invasion of German East and the advance down the Northern Railway to Tanga. For the last few weeks the Schutztruppe had been in constant retreat and the fall of Dar-es-Salaam was expected any day.
But then the prisoners had left, a long straggling line of tattered troops with their little bundies of personal possessions, and with them had gone the garrison of native askaris—effectively emptying Nanda of three-quarters of its population. Gabriel had watched the column go with decidedly mixed feelings. The hospital was now full exclusively of sick and wounded Germans. He was the only Englishman in Nanda.
Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair. The problem was that, now the prisoners had gone, there was really no excuse—no reasonable excuse—for his remaining in the hospital, for so selflessly re-infecting his leg wound. He rubbed his forehead. What reason could he give himself for staying on?
Liesl came into the room. Gabriel turned and smiled. She wore an old blue calico dress that had faded from navy to an uneven pale blue. She had a white cotton scarf tied over her gingery hair. She sat down heavily on the wooden seat with an audible sigh, the thump making her large breasts shiver under the material, and Gabriel felt the familiar tugging in his guts.
“Deppe is coming back tomorrow,” she said in English, lighting her cigarette. “But for only one day, thank you God. Do you want your cigarette?” She held it up.
“No.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “You have it.”
“Thank you.” She coughed. “It’s so strong, this tobacco.” She patted her chest and coughed again, pressing her breast with a forearm. Gabriel stood motionless by the window. He found it extraordinary how every movement this woman made—the slightest gesture—seemed loaded with sexual potential. He watched her now wiping her creamy freckled neck with a handkerchief, the action revealing the dark patches of perspiration in the armpits of her dress.
“Hammerstein is going,” she said matter-of-factly. “An hour or two, I think.”
“Anything I can do?” Gabriel asked.
“No,” she said. “Nothing.”
Hammerstein took longer to die than estimated, so Liesl didn’t leave the hospital until quite late. Outside it was dark and the familiar noises of the African night—the crickets, the bats, the hootings and the howlings—were everywhere about her. Gabriel watched her pause for a moment in the doorway and then set off down the main street of Nanda towards her bungalow. The street was dark, lit only by a few glimmering lanterns set outside the doorways of the mud shops and houses and the glow that spilled from some windows. Gabriel watched her go. Then he turned and went round the back of the hospital, through the kitchen gardens and into the rubber plantations beyond. He set off down an avenue between the trees. This was another, more discreet, route he had found to Liesl’s bungalow.
He knew his way instinctively now, ducking under the low branch of a mango tree, squeezing through a gap in a thorn barrier, cutting through a dark copse of cotton trees. He paused as he came in sight of Liesl’s bungalow, waiting until he saw her enter. Then he moved forward across a patch of waste ground and past the huge stand of bamboo that towered over the house at the back, the dried knife-leaves of the bamboo crackling softly under his feet. He moved more slowly now, as he entered the thicket of bushes directly behind the house, praying silently to himself that the shutters would be open. It had been a hot day, surely the maid would have opened them in the evening in an attempt to cool the house?
He heard Liesl call “Kimi!” as he took up his position. The shutters were open, an oil lamp was already lit in the room, rilling it with its damp yellow light. Gabriel stood there, breathing shallowly, his heart beginning to beat faster as he mentally rehearsed the routine he now knew so well.
He had stumbled on it quite by chance some weeks before. Liesl had left some cigarettes he had made her in the hospital. He had taken them round to her bungalow only to be told by her maid that Frau von Bishop couldn’t see him as she was busy. Gabriel said it wasn’t important and had left the cigarettes. Going by the side of the house he had seen the light cast on to the bushes from the back window. Guiltily he’d made his way into the thicket to spy, for some reason suspecting a lover. But there he saw the sight that had proved his undoing. A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside.
He stood there now, well screened by the bushes and bidden by the darkness, peering through the leaves into her bedroom. Liesl came into view, framed for a moment by the window. Then she moved out of vision while she undressed. He heard faintly the tinny scrape of the bath being shifted into the middle of the floor and the mutter of some words she exchanged with her maid. It was only a matter of moments now.
For some reason Gabriel felt the acid bite of his guilt more strongly that night than before. He lay on his hard bed in the fetid heat of his hut unable to get to sleep, tormented and entranced by the remembered images of Liesl. Sometimes the desire he felt seemed to prove too much for him and he thought his chest would burst, his ribs springing apart like staves from an old barrel. The ache of his longing hit him with full force. He wanted desperately to bury his head in those pillowy enveloping breasts, set his forehead in the soft junction of her neck and jawbone, feel her strong arms about his body…
He turned over. It was only since he’d started spying on Liesl that the other dreams had left him. The dreams of Gleeson’s shattered face, of Bilderbeck’s shot, the steaming brain on his boot. Then the horrific race through the graveyard, the thumping feet of his pursuers. The writhing on the ground, the skewering, pronging jabs of the bayonets. He always woke up with the one that had glanced off his pelvis: when he felt the nail grating of the metal point juddering on the fresh bone, skidding off into his vitals.
He told Deppe about these dreams, how they came almost every night. Could that be why, he suggested, he was so weak and emaciated? Nonsense, Deppe replied confidently, dreams can’t have that effect.
Gabriel touched his throat, felt his bobbing, trembling Adam’s apple then trailed his fingers down his chest, touching a nipple, then through the damp chest hairs. He dragged a fingertip over the ridges of his ribcage, like rattling a stick on park railings. Then he flattened his palm over his belly, pressing down on the weals and distorted flesh of his two scars. Lower still he touched his penis, cupped and lifted his sweaty balls, feeling instantly more comfortable as he did so. It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring.
His
mind began to wander. A soldier had been brought in with bayonet wounds the other day. Much worse than his, half his intestines on show. They had turned a peculiar carroty colour. He didn’t last long, even though Deppe was up all night operating, with Liesl and two of the other nurses. He’d worked hard that night too: they had been glad of his assistance. When the man died he brought everyone hot tea, got the cooks out of bed to make some food. Where had the dead man come from? someone had asked. From Morogoro, Deppe had said. The Central Railway. There’s heavy fighting there. We’re pulling back. It was surprising, Gabriel thought, how much you learnt from the war from casual conversation in a hospital. Injured men coming in from battlefields, cured ones going to new postings. Names were always being mentioned. He had quite a clear idea of the main troop dispositions, exactly as Major du Toit had said.
He sat up, shaking his head to wake himself. He suddenly saw what he had to do. Du Toit had been right all along. His position in the hospital was valuable. It was still valuable. He still had a job to do here. He would continue to gather information. He would conduct innocent conversations with the men in the wards, piece disconnected remarks together, build up a picture of the campaign. He felt suddenly elated by this. It was a kind of authorization of his continued presence. He would stay on in his present role for as long as he could: unassuming, ubiquitous, unsuspected. He would become an ‘intelligenter’, keep notes, plot positions on a map. And then? Then he would escape.
He lay back with a smile of satisfaction, and stretched his hands out to touch the sheet of butter muslin he used as a mosquito net. He wouldn’t think about escape just at the moment, though. He would stay on a few weeks and allow his store of information to accumulate. He felt his wound itching slightly, and he scratched at it through the bandages. Good, he thought, it’s beginning to fester again. He gritted his teeth and pressed his knuckles into the bandages, feeling the pain jolt along his leg. Deppe was coming tomorrow. It should look bad enough to get him back in the ward again.
