by Katie Crouch
It was a crystalline day, the sort that only happens in those few places in the world where pure desert meets beach. The cool air filtered the reflection of the brightest sunlight, creating halos in the mist. As the waves struck the sand, puffs of water and steam rose up in tiny clouds.
Just like the last time, Mark thought. The sky and the air were exactly the same. When he stopped the car to look at the empty beach, he could feel her sitting beside him on the blanket. She had been afraid of swimming, but he had coaxed her to wade in. The water had beaded into iridescent drops on her blue-black legs.
Esther, are you asleep?
Esther?
Fucking stop it, he told himself. Stop it now.
Pulling into the street again, Mark drove past the beachside delis and restaurants and ice-cream shops trying their best to be festive and attractive, despite the sandstorms. He drove to the waterfront, where he remembered the main hotel used to be. The Strand, it was called, a large pink structure Esther’s friend said looked like a birthday cake. He remembered a fountain, and the girls’ faces when he took them into the lobby, which was musty and as tacky as a 1970s-style Holiday Inn. The carpets were smelly, and the sheets so rough Esther had a rash the next day.
As he pulled around the corner, he took a deep breath, trying to quell his nerves. What if it was torn down? Well, it was, but it wasn’t. The place had the same name, but gone was that old pink lady, and in its place a bland glass-and-steel structure that could serve as a conference center in Cincinnati. It was clean, modern, charmless, and scrubbed of her memory. When he went in, he found the prices astronomically higher than they’d been in 1997. He booked a big room anyway, because he was a lot older now, and he had money. It was one of the few nice aspects of aging, Mark thought. You can afford the things you think you want.
It was 2:30 when he arrived. Housekeeping was running late, the deskman said in that dignified, unapologetic manner Namibian service people had that drove Americans insane. Walking back into the glare of the afternoon, he decided to tackle his easiest task first: the embassy report.
Since Mark was embarrassingly badly informed on the situation he was supposed to cover, he took some time to sit on a bench to do some research. Hello, class, he imagined saying as he pulled out his phone. I am Mark Evans, professor of history, shitty PhD candidate. My bibliography today consists entirely of Wikipedia.
He got up and walked to the square to get a look at Marine Denkmal, the German monument of recent dispute. It was a hideous thing, comprised of one bad statue of a living soldier standing over the sculpted corpse of a dead one. It had been erected by the colonists in 1908 as a fuck you to the Nama and Herero rebels they’d mercilessly defeated, then rounded up and ushered into concentration camps. After independence, the sculpture had moldered in the square unnoticed, which was how most public art in this area of Africa ended up. Finally, around two years prior to this sunny day, some Nama kids had realized how utterly offensive the monument was to pretty much everyone in present-day Namibia, and, as their own overdue fuck you gesture, they’d doused the thing with red paint.
Mark took some pictures for the report. He was tempted to go back to the hotel bar and write it up, thereby putting his next awful task off another day. But being in this place—the town where he had last seen her—was too much. There was no way he could wait until tomorrow. He put his camera away and walked toward the edge of town, where the Swakopmund Hospital was marked on the map.
It was just the same building as he remembered, a lonely place listing on the outer edge of town, where the asphalt streets gave way to desert sand. He stood outside, a running stream of anxiety coursing through his body, his knees knocking together like in some sort of old cartoon.
This was where he would find out if she was alive or not. There would be no more not knowing after this. Was it stupid to do this?
Jaime had certainly thought it was. “Remember Schrödinger?” he’d asked when Mark had first hatched the plan to come back to Africa. Jaime was the only one who knew Mark was coming to find Esther, and he made his disapproval known, loudly.
“Not really.”
“Philosophy class, man. Curiosity. The cat.”
“Yeah?” He’d tried not to sound annoyed. Jaime could be so fucking obvious sometimes. “This was twenty years ago, dude. If I open the box, I kill her?”
“You open the box, you kill everyone,” Jaime had said. He thought he was so fucking smart. Well, to hell with Jaime. And to hell with Schrödinger. Schrödinger hadn’t been in love with the cat. Schrödinger hadn’t spent more than two decades thinking about the taste of the skin on the back of her knees.
When he entered the lobby, he was slapped in the face by sharp smells he remembered instantly: disinfectant, biltong, bleach, shit, rot. This was the smell of a third world public hospital, and the very thing that had scared him off from going to medical school all those years ago. Batting away the shame, he approached the front desk.
A smattering of people waited in wooden chairs, looking dusty and resigned, as if they’d been there since Christmas. The white woman sitting behind the desk refused to look up. Mark shifted from foot to foot a few times, then leaned heavily on the counter.
“Hi,” he said.
No response.
“Goeiemiddag,” he tried again, the slaying of the pronunciation earning him an upward glance. “Sorry! Hi there. I’m here for some medical records.”
The lady stared at him, waiting.
“I was in an accident.”
“Yes?” She was Afrikaans, which meant her yes sounded like yis, and to his ear, the rest of her words rolled lazily around the roof of her mouth. “Tih-dey?”
“No—no, not today. A long time ago.”
She pushed back her chair slightly and rocked back and forth. “So. You want your records, then.”
“No, not exactly,” Mark said, clawing for patience. He hadn’t been in Namibia long enough for this. Navigating bureaucracy, or any sort of business here, it took a special state of mind. Most Americans—the State Department ladies he’d met, for example—never got there. Once abroad in Africa, they would get indignant and downright abusive if, say, they didn’t get the room with the balcony they’d booked, or they were served perch instead of zebra.
The thing was, he wanted to tell these compatriots but never did, Namibia didn’t work that way. If you thought about it, Mark felt, it was a miracle that any life survived this arid graveyard of a place at all. A few mighty tribes had made a go of it—warring all the while for bits of water and shade—for thousands of years. Then the Germans had come, and, using guns, ethnic cleansing, and other classic Deutschland tactics, wrestled those good parts away. After a short while, the colonists deemed the whole venture unworthy and handed the place over to the South Africans, who, after a pitiful showing in a tiny, bloody war, had given the government back to the original Namibians, while keeping all the money and the best land.
If any commerce made it through all this, those businesses were intricate webs indeed. Favors had to be paid to keep children alive, food on the right shelves, land protected from poachers, taxes avoided, water running to your house without diversion. So when you asked the bakery counter worker at SPAR for a Dutch crunch loaf, her look of utter disinterest wasn’t because she disliked you personally. Certainly she disliked the idea of you … you who had once existed in a fairy-tale world away from this place. But the true bottom of it all was history. She didn’t give a shit about helping you because the last two hundred years had proven there was nothing you could possibly do to change her life at all.
“Let me start again, ma’am,” he said now. “My friends and I…” Jesus, just talking about her out loud made his chest constrict as if squeezed by an invisible fist. “We were in an accident. All of us. And I never found out what happened to them.”
Namibians like stories. The others in the waiting area leaned forward a bit. Even his rival behind the desk softened. She wore a green uniform an
d her pink arms were swollen as big as hams.
“Let me get my supervisor,” she said finally. “Sit down.”
Mark looked at the people in the chairs again. Two were asleep, their heads tipped against the wall and their mouths open. A few others stared at him without blinking. One lady was crocheting a blanket that reached well below her feet.
“I’ll just stand here, if that’s okay,” he said.
The woman disappeared. It was now three o’clock, dangerously near the end of the Namibian workday. He gripped the counter, wondering, if by some miracle, a polite, helpful, educated person—a librarian of sorts—speaking perfect English might appear, guide him magically to the records he was looking for, and solve his mystery forever. Finally, the ham lady returned.
“My manager says to tell you we would not have any records before 2008.”
“You mean you don’t have them here?”
“We wouldn’t have them anywhere.” She looked back down at her appointment book. “He says to tell you it is Namibian hospital policy to destroy all records after ten years.”
Mark felt his previous queasiness turn to pure acid.
“But why?” His voice cracked perilously.
The ham lady shrugged. “Yah. Why do people need to know if they were sick more than ten years ago? Your body has either recovered or you are dead. This is a casualty facility. Emergency. We don’t have electronic records and we have no room for the long-ago past.”
“Only, see, I’m trying to find out information,” he explained, trying his best to be patient. “I was in an accident in 1997.”
She laughed then, unveiling a surprisingly lovely smile. “Well, you needed to know that in 1997!” A couple of idle patients behind him laughed as well.
“I’m just trying to find out what happened to the people I was with.”
The woman shrugged. “If they died, you can find that out. Do you think they died?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not sure. I was taken here and then taken away. Out of country.”
“Out of country,” she repeated a tad wistfully. Her eyes slid toward the clock. “The morgue keeps their records. They don’t throw them in the bin. But they close at four. Gurirab Ave. Try there tomorrow,” she said, dismissing any possibility of further questions.
Mark walked out into the bright mist, caught between utter relief and the familiar shroud of frustration. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back to the Strand. His room still wasn’t ready, so he walked through the reception area to the other side of the hotel that overlooked the Mole, Swakopmund’s main swimming beach. Taking a seat at the bar facing the ocean, he ordered a double gin and tonic.
For decades, the Mole had been whites-only; even when Mark had come in ’97 Blacks shied away from the beach, as if the memory of apartheid laws still tainted the place. Today, Mark was glad to see, it was clear Namibian citizens of all colors had claimed this beach as their own. A group of kids were executing Olympic-level dives off the floating dock; they fought through the waves to get back to the ladder, climbed up, then dove again. Three boys were flipping in sync with each other, their timing executed with perfect precision. As he watched their youth and grace, he could feel what was left of his own athleticism, once unquestionably epic, seep out of him, as if he were punctured and leaking sand.
“Amazing, isn’t it? How good at sport they are?” said the man sitting next to him. He was large, and a little older than Mark. Or, at least, Mark hoped he looked younger than this wrinkled old basketball. Namibia was so hard on the skin, with its relentless sun and parched air sucking every drop of moisture away, Mark often found he was speaking with someone he assumed was fifty or older, only to discover that they were barely straddling thirty. “Born for it, the Blacks are. It’s een thar blood.”
Een thar blood. Mark sighed. Still, maybe this one would be nice, despite it all. Oh, damn it. This one. He hated how Africa did that to him. How it made everyone speak in terms of they and them. As in, different, and not as good as me.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “These kids are some terrific swimmers. That much is clear.”
“Usually they can’t swim at all,” Basketball said. “Scared of the water.”
They they they.
“Sure doesn’t look like it,” Mark said, trying to control the annoyance in his voice.
“Course, these are coast boys,” Basketball went on. “Coast boys can swim sometimes. But not inland. Read the paper? They’re drowning all the time in the rivers. They hate dogs, too. I have two rottweilers. Not ’cause I’m afraid, mind you, ’cause I’m not. And I’m not a racist man, either. I’m just saying, there’s good ones, and there’s bad ones, too. I’d rather not find out in the middle of the night.”
Mark took a drink, trying to figure out how to get away from this bigot. He could walk away, but he wanted to finish his gin and tonic.
“They’re not stupid, though,” the man said. “You think they’re stupid, and you under-esh … esh … -ti-mate … now, why can’t I say that word?”
“Underestimate.”
“Right. Don’t do that, or you’ll get cheated. Or you’ll miss out.”
“Okay.” Mark took another gulp. The man smelled of cologne, tinged with old liquor. He wondered if his room was ready.
“I’m in with one of them now. A smart one. She’s got a racket going, and I’m making good money. Not bad on the eyes, eith—”
“Mr. Ferreira.” A young woman, dressed in the same smart uniform as the others behind the front desk, stood next to the man. She put her hand lightly on his arm. “I believe your family usually expects you for dinner about this time. Might we arrange for a taxi home?”
“Might you? You getting all fancy on me?” He turned to Mark, swaying a little. “This’s the one I was saying about—”
“I’ll just call one now,” the girl said, leaning over the bar to pick up the phone.
Mark didn’t know what was going on here, exactly, but he knew he wanted none of it.
“It was nice talking to you,” he mumbled, then hurried away to the desk, where they finally gave him his key. As he waited for the elevator, he watched the girl try to herd the old man out of the bar. The scene bothered him, and not just because the old man was a dirty bigot. It was that the girl looked exactly the same age as Esther had been on their trip here. So very, very young.
The elevator came, and Mark finally retreated to his room, where he lay on his bed, ordered room service, drank more, and let himself remember.
* * *
Everyone who visited called the café a miracle. It was hidden in the back of a busy gas station, where combis crammed full of dark bodies raced in to top off with gas before the long trip south to Karibib or Windhoek. Behind the pumps was a small shop, which sold the usual African goods: biltong, cooking oil, two or three varieties of old hard candy, soap, bullets, milk in unrefrigerated boxes. It smelled the way only those shops could: of rotting meat, gasoline, and the occasional sweet drift of fresh marsh wind. If one stayed long enough for the eyes to adjust, they would see a doorway and a beaded curtain—the sort that was meant to keep out flies but never did. Press through that portal, and one would come into a new land altogether: a true oasis, loud with the chattering of birds, crowded with potted tropical plants and flowers.
In the middle of the place was a huge, magical-looking baobab tree, its branches weighed down by teardropped weaver nests. The ground was covered with meticulously swept fine gravel; the tables were refashioned out of old wooden pallets that had originally been used to ship cattle feed for the herds that roamed Ovamboland unchecked. The cook, JoJo, knew how to make entirely palatable schnitzel out of any sort of game brought in that day. The plates he served were heaped with fried kudu, zebra, or oryx, garnished with steaming potatoes and freshly made purple kraut. It wasn’t the sort of food that made sense in a place that simmered in swampy, buggy heat eleven months of the year, but Ovambos, Germans, and Afrikaners alike came from all over to eat it
.
JoJo didn’t own the café, but he ran it and presumably pocketed most of the profits. The story was he’d traded his daughter to the Boer liquor dealer for a refrigerated keg holder. Otherwise, who could explain how a shebeen like this could have such a machine, along with a thumping generator to keep it going when the rains robbed the town of power? Nor could anyone remember how JoJo’s had come to exist in the first place. But it did exist, and it was the jewel of Ondangwa, which was why it was purchased, just a few years before, by the adjacent inn.
This was where Mark first saw her. She had a tray of drinks and was making her way through the tables with efficiency and disdain. She was tall—startlingly graceful. Every moment was so fluid she might have been made of water.
Mark was twenty-two and had been with many beautiful girls by this time. He hadn’t ever given much thought to the process. They wanted to be with him, and he’d wanted the same thing, until he didn’t. But this. Her. He couldn’t stop looking. He couldn’t fucking breathe.
He didn’t try to talk to her that day, or the next. Instead he came every afternoon at two for lunch. She was brisk and heartbreakingly aloof with him when he ordered. He tried to smile, but she didn’t seem to notice, busy as she was with bringing out orders and getting customers new beers. Still, he went back.
She had friends, other girls who worked at the hotel. They liked to hang out in the café when they were off, chatting with each other and teasing her when they could. They noticed him quickly, these girls. Soon they began sitting at his table. They let him buy them drinks and called him meneer.
“What are you doing here, meneer?” one of them asked. “Shouldn’t you be in Texas?”
“Texas?”
“Texas is on the show we watch.”
“Dallas?”
“That one. With the old ladies with the nice hair.”
