Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  These pigeons, and the stories Lawrence whispered to them in depression, aroused Carstens’s nostalgia and empathy. Until the discovery of the fateful diamond, his father, William Carstens, would-be prospector, supported his family as a Port Nolloth shopkeeper and as the local Reuters correspondent, in the days when the press agency still used carrier pigeons to transmit information. As such, both father and son had personal relationships with pigeons, which they used to disseminate information about Jack’s discovery, inspiring the influx of treasure hunters, the De Beers syndicate included. In the “Protection Reports,” issued on sheets of parchment, De Beers began referring to all non-company treasure seekers as “ ‘out-of-works,’ crooks, and undesirables . . . trespassing upon the Company’s properties with the object of ‘prospecting.’ The precaution was taken of doubling the guards . . . The trifling punishment inflicted [by the police force and magistrate] in these cases is a direct incentive to further crimes of this nature.” And so they began to take matters of punishment into their own hands.

  Jack Carstens, meanwhile, fell under the spell of a charismatic Cape Town businessman who sold his diamond claims without his knowledge, forcing Carstens to work as a security guard on the very claims he had “discovered.” He dreamed of writing a book and mulled incessantly over possible titles, the one he always came back to being “A Fortune Through My Fingers.” Soon, a glut of diamonds was unearthed from the shells of fossilized Ostrea prismatica oyster beds in sites known as the Cliffs, hills known as the Twins, and a trench known as the Oyster Line, by wild-eyed, infighting men named Kennedy and Rabinowitz, Merensky and Reuning (the latter referred to diamond prospecting as his “old, true love,” and bought ad space in local magazines and newspapers which he filled with his tirades against the moral fabric, illiteracy, faulty memories, and dictatorial natures of his competitors, Merensky especially).

  Merensky had secured the largest claim among the men for a total of 17,000 pounds, and, in less than a month, he extracted 2,762 diamonds, 487 of them found beneath a single flat rock (or so he bragged). “Ah, they were all a bunch of crooks,” the purple-clad customer tells us, as the cashier frowns, “trespassing on what should have stayed in the Carstens family. A bunch of gat kruipers with the corrupt politicians.” (Gat kruipers translates as ass creepers, the equivalent of brown-nosers.)

  Desiring to protect his assets against what he called “the stampede to the Diamond Coast,” Merensky, gat kruiping, traveled to Cape Town to meet with government officials (including the prime minister), to tattle on his competitors. Ears sufficiently bent, the government, effective February 22, 1927, issued an edict prohibiting all further diamond prospecting along the Namaqualand coast. Almost immediately, after stoking governmental pocketbooks, Ernest Oppenheimer and his Diamond Syndicate intervened, convincing officials that Merensky’s distribution plans “could bring chaos to the market, with a total collapse in the value of diamonds.” Oppenheimer was permitted to buy the entire output of the Namaqualand fields, promising to maintain a stronghold on the booty and release the diamonds very slowly onto the market, in order to fictionalize the element of rarity, and thereby value.

  The newspapers, meanwhile, dubbed the Rabinowitz claim “a human story of hardship, determination, and triumph over public ridicule.” The young, destitute, itinerant Jewish trader had originally come to Namaqualand to open a general store, to unwind in the desert, as he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, having fought the British in the Anglo-Boer War. Until he could afford his modest business venture, he read books about diamonds, and explored what the newspapers incorrectly believed to be “inaccessible areas of Namaqualand, travelling on foot or by wagon . . . sleeping on the open veld.” In this way, he became intimate with the terrain. He went bankrupt. His few friends ridiculed him, nicknamed him King Solomon.

  Desperate, a mere one day after his friends saddled him with this moniker, Rabinowitz discovered his first diamond in the Buchuburg zone, which was quickly claimed by the state. All mineral rights were thereafter transferred to the Crown, and De Beers swept in and overtook the land, buying the entirety of Kleinzee for two hundred pounds sterling. Rabinowitz retreated to the settlement of Steinkopf and finally opened his store, sold bread and beans to the inpouring of De Beers officials. Due to his Jewish heritage, in spite of his discoveries, his few friends forsook him. He slept amid stock in the back of his store. In cages beneath a tarp, in the sand behind his quarters, he raised pigeons in secret, for company. He was known to mutter to his birds about faith and “the theory of diamonds.” Soon, a mob the newspapers called “a syndicate of local men,” likely working for De Beers, kicked Rabinowitz off his property and claimed it as their own, believing diamonds could be found there. His shop was demolished, his birds killed for sport. Some say he fled to Johannesburg. Most say he died there alone.

  “A real shame,” Ms. Carstens says, her purple bracelet shimmying, the cashier still frowning. “He was the only one at that time—besides Jack Carstens, of course—who knew the details of this land.”

  Soon, geologists in the employ of De Beers, combing the littoral, decided that the fossilized plant material in which diamonds were embedded dated back 17 million years to the Miocene Age, but had little idea as to how the diamonds had gotten there in the first place. They wondered, in exclusive articles for the Mining and Industrial Magazine, “Were these gems tossed from a submarine bed and cast upon the shores by the fury of Atlantic gales many centuries ago? It is ‘the riddle of the sands’ again, an enigma which perhaps man will never satisfactorily be able to answer.” Others felt that assured wealth was its own sort of answer, a solving of the mystery. “And the fabulous wealth of Namaqualand was finally revealed!” proclaims the sepia newsletter in the Kleinzee Museum, between old, laminated photographs of hired hands hoisting pickaxes and newer ones of confiscated pigeons, one of which is having her head pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a mine security guard whose head is cut off above his smiling mouth. So, the tasks with which Carstens’s Reuters pigeons were originally saddled effectively launched the diamond industry here, and, strangely, those pigeons begat this subsequent generation of pigeons who were raised by the inpouring of laborers, and used for launching the counter-industry of diamond smuggling.

  In the flickering, haunted-house light of the Kleinzee Cafè, Ms. Carstens nods, a big diamond ringing her wedded finger, diamonds studding her earlobes and strung around her neck. Even the cashier sports an enormous diamond ring, and I feel, sans adornment, as if I’m crashing a secret society. A wormy anxiety accumulates in my belly.

  “Have either of you heard of someone called Mr. Lester?” I ask. Louisa squeezes my shoulder. I’m desperate for someone beyond Johann MacDonald to humanize this man, to lend him pathos. I want someone to refer to him, simply, as “nice,” or something. Instead, Ms. Carstens and the cashier only stare at each other, refuse to look at me.

  “I’m trying to find Die Houthoop guesthouse . . . I’m hoping to meet him there tonight . . .”

  The cashier looks to Ms. Carstens as if for approval, then returns her eyes to her register. Her fingers hover over the buttons there as if they are piano keys. “Down the main road out of town,” she says, “pass through the gate, and keep driving. You’ll see a road on the left, but it won’t look like a road. Take it. Two rights after that, and then two lefts, and then the curves, and then it’s straight for a while, and then it’s right, and straight again, and soon you will see the lights.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I swallow hard, and buy our tins of viennas in brine, chicken-flavored Spookies (cousin to Cheetos), and an envelope of Grandpa’s Headache Powder. The cashier takes my coins in silence. Louisa and I step through the doorway. Ms. Carstens mutters, “Fools.”

  *

  JOHANN MACDONALD WAS RIGHT: DIE HOUTHOOP GUEST FARM IS indeed located deep into the desert, an hour’s drive from Kleinzee proper along unnamed roads that traverse the middle of nowhere. I try to hold
the cashier’s directions in my head. My palms are sweaty, and my throat dry. The early evening sun lends even the roadkill a misleading silver lining.

  Along the way, we stop on the road shoulder to get a closer look at the corpse of an albino camel that rots in the desert next to the withered chassis of a Tata Sierra. Next to this is a Jock of the Bushveld splash pool, childless, the water spoiled and evaporating, the color of Assam tea. Into this water, I toss what appears to be a Lower Paleozoic trilobite fossil, heaved up onto this sandy crust from the silicified gneissic beds of Namaqualand, for luck. It has the feel in my palm of one of those pressed pennies one passed through the decorative vises of the Midwestern carnivals of my childhood, until they emerged elongated and embossed with images of clowns and Ferris wheels and state flowers and state birds. Naturally, I make a wish—the same one I’ve been making for months—and, unnaturally, when the three-lobed arthropod hits the water, there is no splash, no sound at all, just the sinking.

  As I pull into the red sand parking lot of Die Houthoop, the sun is low, angry. “Oh, God . . .” Louisa says. She sees him before I do. A man stands in the parking lot’s center in a welding mask and green rubber smock, the sparks of his torch catapulting from the facemask of a diamond diving suit. The suit looks as if it should be hanging in some 1940s’ superhero locker, still damp with the orris and seawater of old heroics; a collectible relic sewn when our species’ bodies were slightly larger than they are today, when our fingers and toes still bore webbing between them, when we were flippered and winged.

  “Do you think that’s him?” Louisa asks. I have no answer, but somehow, I don’t think so. I don’t think Mr. Lester would feel the need to hide his face, though—if we’re to believe all we’ve heard—he’s surely confident in his power to disappear those who behold it.

  The grounds of Die Houthoop are littered with the remains of armoires and hutches, metal dishes and cups tattered with rust, picture frames framing no pictures, all in the name of shabby chic dècor, some high-minded conservationist aesthetic—the wreck at the center of the wreck.

  The hostess, Jackie, rushes from inside the red stucco office. She wears a white lace jabot, stained by past meals, which bunches like a bib over her blouse-front. The tops of her feet burst like soufflès from blue house slippers. The waistband of her black pants is damp with sweat, and her short brown hair is dusty. She’s wearing yesterday’s red lipstick. Yesterday’s perfume. The air smells of creosote, yeast, and acetylene. The man in the welding mask seems to be looking at us through the slot of protective glass, his retinas hot, his corneas steaming. He strikes me as some sort of muscle at the gate.

  I fill out our information in the guestbook, and when Jackie briefly turns around to gather clean towels, I flip the pages, hoping to find evidence of Mr. Lester’s reservation, further proof of his status as human—an address, a phone number, a full name. Two pages back, I find an entry empty of all information save for a cursive L in the “Name” field. Jackie turns with the towels and, heart accelerating, I fumble with the guestbook, nearly drop it to the floor, as I quickly flip back to our page.

  Though I don’t invoke Mr. Lester’s name, and don’t dare use the word smuggle, Jackie narrows her eyes and asks if I have a slip of paper. From my pocket, I retrieve an old supermarket receipt, printed with reasonably priced guava fruit leather and passion fruit juice, lamb neck, and Sunlight laundry soap. On it, in carmine ink, she writes, Mr. Lester, 12-midnight.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  “Very few visit this place,” she says. “And the people who still live here—we talk.”

  Why does it have to be midnight? Why does everything have to be so liminal out here? Jackie walks us to our room, through the twisting passages of the courtyard littered with donkey sculptures fashioned from rusted barrels and coffee cans and painted bubblegum pink, tangles of barbed wire, bleached mobiles made of animal bones and mussel shells, the sound of them in the wind horrifying, tapping some coded message on the inner side of a coffin lid; smashed oxidized wagon wheels, the guts—springs and levers—of old vises and presses filling the brown inch-deep sulfur water of the putrid concrete fountains, gangrenous hope chests and wash basins, dishes, cabinetry, padlocks . . .

  Jackie opens the door to the room. The windows at the foot of the bed afford a view of the aviaries and coops—the African gray parrots, Namaqua doves, chickens, roosters, grouse and guinea fowl, yelping peacocks, cinnamon warblers, bustards, larks and babblers, sugarbirds and pigeons. It seems as if every confiscated and executed bird from every Diamond Coast mining village somehow has a living counterpart here in Die Houthoop’s courtyard. I wonder if they are real, or if they are spirits. They confer with one another across bird languages. They kick up the dust. Beyond the birds, through the wire and mesh and bars of the enclosures, stout green water tanks and an odd rusted platform bearing the corpse of a pickup truck decompose; and beyond that, the red desert stretches. Something about the room feels purgatorial, as if a holding cell. On the woven mat before the bathroom, stains that resemble blood spatter. Jackie says, seemingly from some great distance, “So this will be suitable?”

  I can hardly make out her words. Louisa looks at me. She forces a smile for Jackie. The windows are without curtains, and the layer of sand on the concrete floor is so thick I can see my footprints. Jackie leaves us. The bed’s white sheet, crispy, crunches under my weight, smells of a long-shuttered museum. Simply by lying on it, I feel as if I’m violating the rules.

  “I feel like we’re awaiting trial,” I say.

  “We should get out of here,” Louisa says, and I know she’s right.

  “We can’t now,” I say.

  She sits down next to me on the bed. She does not touch me. “I know,” she says through her teeth.

  The birds roost in the hollow of a dead cement mixer, pace among the metal bladders—what appear to be mortar bombs from old wars. They rove among mannequin heads and dressmaker’s dummies, which Jackie hollows out with a knife, fashioning small, dirty gardens from the torsos and skulls, planting blooms and herbs, cutting stalks that burst from eyes and ears, ribcages and the swell of hips. The paint of old mannequin eyebrows and the old pins of late tailors still hold fast to their repurposed skins. I wonder if Jackie uses these “mannequin planters” as scarecrows, or if she uses them, conversely, to attract birds.

  Once the dummies are so groomed, Jackie threads a chain through the heads and bodies, and hangs these cadaver gardens from the ceiling of the long corridor that leads from Die Houthoop’s spare office into the large attached house where she cooks, watches television, and sleeps. Closest to the threshold, as a sort of welcome, is the sole pair of fiberglass arms—one cut off at the elbow, the other at the triceps—dangling just in front of a modest chandelier, and thereby hauntingly backlit, chipped white hands offering a pubic tangle of flowering lemon thyme.

  For the umpteenth and most indelible time in my life, I whistle “Hotel California.” I feel as if Mr. Lester and his team of cosmic sidekicks here may be hatching some punishment for our trailing of him to his desert lair. On the bed, Louisa’s eyes are closed, though I know she is not sleeping. I wonder if she’s envisioning what I’m envisioning—our bodies being buried out in this desert later tonight. In the courtyard, the man in the welding mask, frightening and fatherly, nurtures his sparks toward conflagration, his torch beaked with feathery flame. Beneath his helmet, surely, a skull outsized and orphic, perhaps even the decapitated head of Orpheus himself having found a new body in the heat of the Namaqua desert and its slim resource of oxy-fuel.

  *

  HERE, IN DIE HOUTHOOP’S INNER SANCTUM, IS THE IDEA OF DECENT and resurfacing made manifest, Orpheus having trailed his betrothed, Eurydice, to the underworld, after she was bitten by a poisonous snake while escaping from the clutches of Aristaeus, the lecherous, cheese-making, beekeeping Lothario-god.

  Frantic, Orpheus searches for his bride in the underworld, combing the alluvial beds of its fi
ve sleepy rivers (flowing with woe, lamentation, vow, fire, and forgetfulness), the diamond gate guarded by that three-headed dog Cerberus and the kingdom that lies beyond, the Tartarus abyss—that torture dungeon of the wicked, black hole of the Titans—its adamantine gate comprised of diamonds so hard that no soul can cut through it and flee. Orpheus survives on the cuisine of the fairies—toasted ant heads and fetid dewdrops—before moving on to the more substantial breasts of the underworld doves, which he eats in desperation, doves being in this realm the birds of eternal sorrow, thus predicting their prominent place—still today—in Greek funerary sculpture.

  As Orpheus navigates the diamonds and doves of the underworld, he keeps sane by playing his lyre, the beauty of his grieving music compelling the doomed ghosts to weep. For a brief moment, the business of the underworld ceases. Sisyphus—forever doomed to roll his boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down—is granted brief respite, as he squats on his rock and eavesdrops on the song. Even the innumerable Furies—those infernal goddesses and chthonic deities of retribution—take the time to listen and, for the only instant in their execrable existence, sob.

  This sobbing allows Orpheus not only momentary artistic satisfaction, but also a sad aural pathway, which he tracks all the way to his beloved Eurydice, who crouches against a pillar of diamonds with two pigeons of sorrow playing in her hair. Because his music is so beautiful, the underworld powers-that-be grant Orpheus permission to smuggle his bride back to the upper world, but his desire for reassurance undoes him. Just as the two lovers come to the diamond portal, daylight beginning to show itself, he turns around to make sure she’s still there with him, and as he gazes finally on her face, she extends her arms toward him in a foiled last embrace as she’s dragged back into the depths, now irretrievably dead. Their final communal act—akin to their final act before they wed—was the feeding of two would-be escapist pigeons.