Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  ‘Ohhh! Well the other thing is OK,’ the woman said, a broad smile crossing her pretty face, ‘but I usually wait until the lantern is out in the evening.’

  Claire, who did not consider herself a prude by any means, was taken aback by the girl’s candour. ‘No, I was just adjusting my . . .’

  ‘It didn’t look like there was anything to adjust from where I was standing!’

  Claire’s embarrassment was fast turning to indignation. She drew a deep breath to calm herself. ‘You must be Magrietta.’

  ‘What did that old cow Hilda say about me? Did she call me a hussy? You talk like a Canadian chap I met . . . but I thought they only worked for the English.’

  ‘I’m American, and no, Hilda did not call you any such thing, though she did say you were a handful.’ In spite of her irritation Claire found it impossible to be truly angry at the fresh-faced blonde girl. She had managed to find enough food to retain her dimples and these were nicely set off by blue eyes and a cheeky grin. She carried a bouquet of small yellow flowers and a bulging calico bag that clinked when she set it down.

  ‘American! How exotic. Is your husband fighting for us?’

  ‘I’m not married. But I have friends who have served with the Boers.’

  ‘Male friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there a special one?’

  Claire was surprised again at the girl’s directness. She guessed youngsters grew up quickly in such a place. ‘Not one in particular,’ she said, and found she could not hold back a smile.

  Magrietta giggled. ‘I think we are going to be the best of friends.’

  Claire took a gamble. ‘Tell me, Magrietta, do you know how to get out of this camp unnoticed?’

  ‘Of course, but it’s best done after dark. There are places along the fence where the holes in the wire are easy to get through. Some people trade with the soldiers from the camp up the road. Not the English so much, but there are others – Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders.’

  Claire thought again of the Australian sergeant. ‘Do you trade?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ She opened her cloth bag and pulled out two brown glass bottles and clinked them together. ‘Medicines. The nurse in the clinic tells me what she needs – what she can’t get by asking the English. I trade with the soldiers for the medicines, and sometimes extra milk and food for Kobie and the baby.’

  Claire was about to ask Magrietta what she had to trade with, but then thought better of it. There was no sign of obvious wealth among the meagre possessions in the tent.

  Claire also had nothing material to trade, but she needed a lot – a horse, saddle, provisions, clothes, money and a weapon and ammunition. Everything she had needed to complete her mission had been taken by the British when they captured her, except the hand-drawn map that Nathaniel had given her.

  ‘Can you show me where you go to trade?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Of course, but . . . um, you might want to wash and put some ribbons in your hair first.’

  Chapter 12

  Condor Flight DE2294, Munich to Windhoek, Namibia, the present day

  Anja set down the papers and rubbed her eyes.

  The lights were on and the flight attendants were preparing the cabin for landing. As a university history graduate, she was aware of Britain’s pioneering use of concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War, and of the scorched earth policy employed against farms, but this was the first time she had seen any primary source material relating to these tactics. It was distressing, and when she had read about Gerda’s stillborn baby being exhumed in a search for hidden weapons she had wept enough for the young flight attendant to enquire if she was all right.

  The aircraft was on its final approach and Anja looked out the window, not with the sense of excitement of the elderly couple next to her on their package safari holiday, but with the peculiar mix of love tinged with a hint of sadness.

  So much blood and so many tears had been spilled over these arid expanses, vast tracts of nothing, that it was hard to fathom how Namibia had emerged as it was today, relatively harmonious and reasonably prosperous by African standards.

  Flying into Windhoek’s Hosea Kutako International Airport aptly set the stage for any visit to her homeland. Most, if not all, airports Anja had ever flown into were hemmed in by industrial areas or cheap housing – no one wanted to live under a flight path if they could afford not too – but Namibia’s gateway was surrounded by sand and camel thorn trees as far as the eye could see.

  ‘Will we see animals here?’ the elderly woman next to her asked in German as they touched down and the purser welcomed them to Namibia over the PA system.

  ‘Maybe, on your drive to Windhoek,’ Anja replied politely. ‘Some buck, perhaps.’

  ‘No lions?’ The woman punctuated her question with a laugh, but Anja was sure there might have been a glimmer of hope.

  She smiled. ‘No. However, there are most certainly leopard living out here, especially in the rocks.’

  Her face glowed with hope. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re unlikely to see them. You’re going to Etosha National Park?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the man seated next to the woman.

  ‘Then I’m sure you’ll see lions there, and maybe leopard and cheetah.’

  They both grinned. ‘Thank you.’

  Anja couldn’t find it in her to feel contemptuous or condescending towards the tourists. She had been born here, and even though she affected the nonchalance of a local and had seen lions hundreds of times, it was still a secret thrill for her to see big cats in the wild.

  ‘Are you going on safari as well?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I’m based in the Namib Desert in the south so I guess you could say I live on safari,’ Anja said.

  ‘Super!’ she said. ‘Are you a guide?’

  ‘I have been, in the past, but I’m researching the wild horses of the Namib. Have you heard of them?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and we hope to see them on our tour,’ the woman said. ‘Perhaps we will see you there?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Anja busied herself changing the sim card in her phone, from her German provider to her Namibian MTC card. A few seconds after she had inserted it the phone beeped with a couple of messages. Anja checked her emails and saw one from someone she had never heard from, a Nicholas Eatwell. She opened it.

  Dear Miss Berghoff,

  You don’t know me, but I was given your name and email address by Susan Vidler . . .

  That bloody woman, Anja thought. The journalist was nosey and Anja did not trust her. It was clear she was trying to drag Anja into her stories that were designed to exert pressure on politicians in Namibia and Germany.

  Even viewed through the filter of the ‘norms’ for the time, Anja believed there was no excuse for the cruel and inhumane way the German authorities had prosecuted the war against the Nama and Herero rebels at the beginning of the twentieth century. The incarceration of innocent women and children and the working to death of them and legitimate prisoners of war who had surrendered was as abhorrent as the British policy of rounding up Boer families and the latter atrocities of the Nazis. However, Anja’s beliefs stopped short of Germany having to pay reparations for acts that had been perpetrated more than a century earlier. She was media-savvy enough to know that if she said that to Susan Vidler she would be painted as some right-wing extremist.

  There was another reason she didn’t want to talk to the journalist. The wild horses of Namibia had been the subject of some recent media controversy. The horses’ numbers had declined significantly in recent years due to a prolonged drought and predation by spotted hyenas. Opinion was divided on whether more horses were being taken because the drought had weakened them, or because hyena numbers had increased – or perhaps both. The research program Anja had volunteered for involve
d her and others monitoring the numbers of both species. The Namibian Government had weighed in on the side of the horses, initially trying to catch and relocate hyenas and, later, selectively culling them. There were passionate advocates on both sides of this natural struggle and Anja did not want to be drawn into the public conflict. She read on.

  Susan suggested I contact you as she tells me you have been researching the period of Namibia’s history that covers the colonial uprisings of the Nama and Herero people, with a focus on southern Namibia, near the border with South Africa.

  Anja could not see what this man’s interest might be and, fearing he might be another journalist, she was about to skip to the end and delete the message when a name caught her eye.

  I am a descendent of a guy called Cyril Blake, an Australian who I am told fought in South West Africa against the Germans and was assassinated by them. As I know you are researching the conflict with reference to some desert horses I was wondering if you had come across any mention of Blake as I have recently become interested in his story, for personal reasons.

  The aircraft had come to a stop and the front doors were open. People around her were jostling to collect their carry-on baggage and Anja had to put her phone away and retrieve her daypack.

  As she slowly filed through the cabin she thought about what the man had just written. She had just started reading about Blake, who had been referred to in Claire Martin’s reports to her naval spymasters. Of course, she was interested in this new connection to the story, but given that the man had been referred to her by Susan she was immediately suspicious of his motives.

  Why had he said ‘for personal reasons’? Why would he feel the need to mention that if he was, as he said, looking for information about an ancestor? No doubt the Vidler woman intended to parade this Nick Eatwell as the aggrieved descendent of a white man who had been killed by the Germans in 1906, to further sow dissent between Namibia and Germany.

  While she waited for a couple with a baby to unload their copious carry-on luggage from the overhead locker, Anja typed and sent a short reply to Nick Eatwell saying, as the English would say, ‘thanks but no thanks,’ and wished him luck in researching his ancestor.

  When she finally walked through the door onto the open-air steps leading to the tarmac, she knew she was home. The air was hot and dry, and beyond the swirling odour of jet fuel was the scent of the bush.

  Inside the terminal, after collecting her backpack and clearing customs and immigration she walked into the bear-like advance of her uncle, who was also known as Oom, or ‘uncle’ in Afrikaans, to everyone he met.

  ‘Hello, Oom Otto.’

  ‘Ag, I’ve missed you,’ he said, squeezing her harder.

  ‘Same, Oom Otto. What’s been happening while I’ve been away?’

  He took her pack, despite her protest that she could carry it, and they left the terminal. Otto put her bags in the back seat of his double cab Hilux bakkie. ‘Oh, you know, the same as always. One side of politics calling the other side corrupt, too many people getting killed in road accidents, and the Germans are sending another delegation to express regret or something for the past.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, same as always, all right.’

  ‘Your Land Rover’s ready to go – well, as ready as a Land Rover ever will be.’ He laughed.

  ‘Still a diehard Toyota man.’

  ‘Always. They are –’

  ‘Yes, Oom Otto, I know, they are very reliable.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ He stroked his moustache in a self-satisfied manner.

  ‘Reliability is overrated,’ Anja said, inwardly laughing at the way he looked at her with eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘Image is everything.’

  Otto slapped his thigh with his free hand. ‘One thing I’ll give you, they are good vehicles for fishing on the coast; all the aluminium doesn’t rust.’

  ‘You have to give the British credit for something, it is a very tough vehicle,’ Anja said.

  ‘Hah!’

  That ended the debate. Otto knew when to retreat gracefully, unlike his sister, Anja’s mother. ‘Mama sends her love.’

  He laughed out loud at their private joke. ‘I am sure she does. How is she?’

  Anja shrugged. ‘She is Mama.’

  Otto looked over at her again as he drove, too fast, towards Windhoek. ‘She loves you, Anja, that’s all. It’s why she wants the best for you, a nice man, a good job.’

  ‘I already have what’s best for me, Oom Otto.’

  He nodded. ‘I know that, and you know that; all we need to do now is convince my sister that we are right and she is wrong. And we both know . . .’

  ‘That is never going to happen.’ Anja sighed. She and her uncle could make fun of her mother, but Anja knew that her mother really did care for her and, maybe, a tiny part of Anja agreed that finding a man might not be all bad. However, while Anja might have sometimes dreamed of settling down, she knew it could never be in Germany.

  Here, in this harsh, empty, sometimes hostile land of burning deserts and desolate windswept coastline, she was home.

  North Sydney, Australia, the present day

  Nick arrived early at The Greens, an old lawn bowls club in North Sydney that had reinvented itself as a hip indoor–outdoor restaurant, bar and night spot. He had arranged to meet Susan there and had told her that his aunt had given him an old manuscript written by a Dr Peter Kohl. Susan had sounded very interested.

  Lili was making headway with her translation and Nick was excited to share the news with Susan.

  The table for two he had reserved was outside, in the shade on the edge of the bowling green, and the seating was a couch. It would be quite intimate and for a moment he considered asking for a more formal setting, then thought better of it.

  Susan arrived on time, at five on the dot. She looked good, dressed in a blue wraparound dress and matching heels. He waved as she entered the club and made her way outside. He stood and she kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘You seem a bit more upbeat than the last time I saw you,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘The truth is I wasn’t happy in that job. Meeting you . . . looking into this old story, kind of takes me back to my time as a journalist and I realised I’d missed it more than I thought. I’ll need to find another job eventually, but I’ve been thinking that I probably needed some sort of change in my life.’

  Susan smiled. ‘Well that’s a really positive way of looking at things.’

  ‘Thanks. Drink?’

  ‘Sure. A pinot gris, maybe? We don’t see a lot of that in South Africa and I’m heading home tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh.’ His disappointment was genuine. ‘I’ll get us a bottle, then.’

  Nick went to the bar, paid for the wine and returned with an ice bucket and two glasses. ‘Is it OK if I say I’ll be sorry to see you go?’

  Susan smiled. ‘That’s sweet of you. I kind of feel the same way.’

  Nick poured and they clinked glasses. ‘I thought you said you were here in Sydney for another week?’

  ‘I did, but I got an SOS from South Africa. I also do a bit of PR work, like you, on the side, and a client-slash-friend of mine in the real-estate industry has an urgent situation he needs some help with.’

  ‘How urgent can real-estate business be? Can’t you work from here?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s working on a big new residential development and there’s a lot of opposition to it from the surrounding community. Nothing I can’t smooth over.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’re leaving, though, because I’ve found some interesting stuff, courtesy of my aunt.’

  She took a sip of wine. ‘So you said. A manuscript, yes?’

  Nick leaned a little closer to her on the couch. ‘My aunt had a weighty old document, written in German. She thought it was a diary from the First World War, but
it’s actually some kind of memoir by a doctor named Peter Kohl and it already mentions my great-great-whatever-he-was-uncle’s time in the Boer War.’

  Susan sat up straight. ‘Nick, that’s really interesting. Peter Kohl was the German army officer who killed Cyril Blake.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered. It looks like Blake met an Irish-German woman –’

  ‘Claire Martin,’ Susan interrupted.

  ‘Yes, her. They met each other in South Africa and there was some kind of skulduggery going on.’

  Susan raised her eyebrows. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Yes. There’s an account in the story of the incident that happened in the report you showed me, but it gives a different version. Dr Kohl’s version of the story says that after the raid on the trading post the English officer, Walters, tortured and killed the American colonel, Belvedere. If this version is true, my ancestor was framed. He was arrested and locked up, but he escaped, and where I’m up to now, he’s trying to prove his innocence.’

  Susan looked intrigued. ‘Wow, that is an amazing find. Do you speak German?’

  Nick explained how he’d given the manuscript to Lili for translation, and that she was hoping to get it done before she went backpacking, but hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay longer in Australia so you can tell me the rest of the story in person.’

  ‘Me too, but I can email you when she’s done.’

  They looked each other in the eye, neither of them saying anything for a few long, tantalising seconds. Nick wondered if her heart had started beating faster as well. Susan bit her lower lip.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said at last. ‘If my research had taken a slightly different path I might have found your aunt instead of you. It would have been nice to meet her. Does she live far from here?’

  ‘Granville, which is on the other side of Sydney, really.’

  ‘She’s on your mom’s side, right, so she’s not an Eatwell? I would have found her if she was.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Nick said. ‘She’s a MacKenzie.’