A Matter of Time

by Alex Capus

  ‘With all due respect to the laws of nature,’ Governor Schnee rejoined, ‘permit me to hope that, as civilized beings, we possess the willpower to resist some of them.’

  ‘And with all due respect to Western civilization,’ retorted von Zimmer, ‘it’s the other Western powers that are envious of our growing strength. The inevitable result will be a test of strength.’

  ‘You may be right, Kapitanleutnant. In that event, I hope that we here in Africa, at least, will be spared any involvement in the war.’

  At that moment Oberleutnant Goring brought his glass crashing down on the table. ‘Is that your hope, Governor?’ he demanded hoarsely.

  ‘It is indeed, Oberleutnant,’ said Schnee. ‘Don’t you share it?’

  ‘Hope springs eternal, but it’s seldom fulfilled.’ Goring brushed the lifeless hair off his forehead, sat back in his canvas chair and shut his eyes as if unaware that everyone within earshot was hanging on his unhealthily red lips. Karl Goring’s voice carried some weight because his family was highly thought of by the colonial upper crust. His father had been German South-West Africa’s first Reich Commissioner and his elder brother Wilhelm had seen many years’ service as district commissioner for Lake Tanganyika. The men considered him ‘interesting’ because a younger brother of his, Hermann by name, was causing a stir in the air force and reputed to be sending him some most informative letters from Berlin. Among the ladies, on the other hand, Karl Goring’s precarious

  state of health earned him a reputation for being ‘intense’ and ‘profound’. At length, opening his black-encircled eyes, he looked the Governor full in the face. ‘If the balloon goes up,’ he said, ‘we, as Germans, must do our bit.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Schnee.

  ‘If the Fatherland is in peril we must hurry to its aid, Governor, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Naturally, Oberleutnant, but I would ask you to bear in mind that we’re still building up our defence force, and that it could scarcely withstand a spate of bloodletting.’

  ‘Ah yes, bloodletting!’ Goring’s hoarse voice sank to a whisper, and the more quietly he spoke the more intently his table companions listened. Many of them leant forwards, others cupped their hands to their ears. ‘You’re right, bloodletting naturally weakens the nation. On the other hand, the nation can be reinvigorated by a purifying hail of bullets, can’t it?’

  ‘Oberleutnant,’ Governor Schnee said with surprising asperity, ‘I find your flirtation with blood and thunder tedious. We’re hemmed in by enemies on three sides. On the fourth is the Indian Ocean, which also belongs to the enemy. If it comes to war, we’re done for.’

  ‘Then forgive my so-called flirtation. Governor.’ Karl Goring’s head lolled back as if the conversation had exhausted him. ‘You’re right, of course. Our few hundred men won’t decide the outcome of the war on their own.’

  ‘Thank God we’re in agreement for once,’ said the Governor. ‘Our fate will be decided in Europe. If Germany wins the war our colonies will be secured; if not, we shall lose them all.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Goring picked up his glass and looked around for a full bottle. ‘That’s why, if it comes to it, even we here in Africa must make our contribution to victory on the battlefields of Europe.’

  ‘Certainly, Oberleutnant. Nonetheless, permit me to hope that we shall be spared an international conflagration.’

  ‘As you wish. Governor. Despite that, permit me to hope that it will soon be ignited.’

  The longer the party went on and the emptier the beer barrels became, the louder the voices and the more banal the topics of conversation. The guests forgot about the possibility of war and talked of the weather, grumbled about their black servants and complained to the Governor that Dar-es-Salaam was deadly boring: it badly needed an opera house, a racecourse, a cinema. There was also an unresolved debate about which of the Kaiser s birthdays they were celebrating, his fifty-fifth or fifty-sixth.

  Shortly before midnight the first of the ladies rose, drew attention to the lateness of the hour and her numerous obligations on the morrow, thanked her hostess effusively, and trusted that everyone would enjoy the rest of the evening. When her husband dutifully prepared to go home as well, she gave him an indulgent pat on the shoulder and said he was welcome to stay awhile. Two minutes later a second lady took her leave, another two minutes later a third, and shortly afterwards five left together. Within half an hour the gentlemen had the place to themselves and could do justice to the pear brandy. Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann joined them. The pear brandy was excellent, having been distilled with great expertise in the monastery garden of the Catholic seminary at Tabora. The Governor offered his guests some Virginia cigarettes. They broke into German folksongs, cheered the Kaiser again and again, draped their jackets over the backs of their chairs, rolled up their shirtsleeves and removed their ties, loosened their collars and extracted their swollen feet from their hot and steamy riding boots. They congratulated one another on their past and future achievements, yelled ‘Heil und Sieg! Heil und Sieg!’ at the surrounding darkness, called for more beer and pear brandy, and improvised an uproarious game of skittles with coconuts and empty bottles from which Anton Riiter emerged the clear winner. Then they gave the Kaiser another three cheers and broke into another rendering of Hail to Thee in Victor’s Crown.

  Shortly after half past three a violent cloudburst brought the Kaiser s birthday celebrations to an end. The torches were extinguished by the downpour, the gentlemen sought shelter beneath the tables, giggling, or fled across the darkened lawn. Two or three of them, who had stretched out for a rest on garden sun loungers, simply slept on. Anton Riiter,

  Hermann Wendt and Rudolf Tellmann made for the Hotel Kaiserhof, tottering along shoulder to shoulder as thunder cracked like a bullwhip and flashes of lightning darted around like will-o’-the-wisps, bright as day. Having helped each other up the steps to the hotel entrance, where they were gratified to find the night porter awaiting them with some dry towels, they unanimously agreed to round off the evening by treating themselves to another brandy or two in the hotel bar.

  4

  An African Hangover

  less than three hours later they were meekly seated in the Governors carriage, suffering from the hangover of a lifetime. They made the interesting discovery that every heartbeat caused their eyes to protrude from their sockets and the long-closed fontanelles in their skulls to split open for seconds at a time. The road to the harbour was still damp after last nights downpour, so the carriage bowled smoothly along past the government offices and colonial servants’ residences, through the palm grove and past the five unoccupied gibbets, executions having been suspended for three days on either side of the Kaiser’s birthday. Ada Schnee charitably kept her unspoken promise and refrained from talking throughout the drive. The Governor, being indisposed himself, was shading his bleary eyes beneath the rim of his golden sun helmet. In a low voice, he offered the Papenburgers a headache remedy containing opium, which they gratefully accepted. Only then did his wife laugh with merciless gaiety and remark that the African hangover was to the European variety as felis leo to felis domestica, in other words, as the African lion to the European pussycat. This, she said, was because profuse sweating made one even more dehydrated after consuming alcohol in the tropics and caused one’s body cells - notably the brain cells - to shrink to unusual extent, leading to a reduction in the total volume of the brain. The result of this shrinkage was that the meningeal membranes became detached from the cranium, which inevitably occasioned the exceptionally violent headaches from which the four gentlemen were quite clearly suffering. The four gentlemen nodded, murmured their thanks for this information, and longed for the opiate’s anaesthetic properties to take effect.

  The wide sweep of the bay lay still in the golden morning light, but the station forecourt just inland of it was thronged with a dense, vibrant, buzzing horde of Africans. Men, women and children of all ages were talking, laughing, shouting and shuffling
around in the dust. Gesticulating hands held high above their heads, they swayed to and fro, back and forth, but remained on the spot like grain undulating in the wind. Anton Riiter, who was put in mind of an insurrection, a general strike or civil war, cast a startled, enquiring glance at the Governor’s wife.

  ‘People from the African part of town,’ she explained brightly. ‘They’ve spotted the smoke from the locomotive and are eager to earn some tips from the passengers. It’s an ordeal you’ll have to undergo.’

  The coachman lashed out with his whip a couple of times, clearing the way for them. The horses walked on, but the carriage came to a full stop after only a few metres and they had to get out. Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann had scarcely set foot on terra firma when they were mobbed. Naked children plucked at their trouser legs and begged for small change, half-naked women pulled their lower lips down with one finger and bared their teeth, muscular men, stripped to the waist, jostled for the privilege of holding the door for them, carrying a suitcase, showing them the way to the train. All were yelling and laughing and shoving and sweating and smelling of the spicy foods they must have eaten the previous day, and all combined to form a teeming human kaleidoscope: dangling limbs in every stage of decay, immodestly bobbing breasts, unabashedly bulging buttocks, shuffling bare feet, folds, furrows and wrinkles, lips and nipples, swelling muscles, sweating brows, quivering nostrils, pierced ears with wooden plugs in them, bared teeth filed to a point, weals covered with scar tissue, eyes oozing pus, suppurating tropical sores, crippled limbs.

  The Governor and his wife, who had more experience and fewer scruples about forging a path through this throng, reached the train well before the Papenburgers. They took up their positions on either side of the carriage steps and bade their guests goodbye. Governor Schnee shook hands with them, wishing them a good journey and lots of luck. Ada Schnee insisted on giving each of her proteges some tailor-made

  advice. Rudolf Tellmann she warned never to drink unboiled water or go hunting by himself. She impressed on Anton Ruter that physical exertion under the tropical sun could very quickly prove fatal to the European organism, and that native labourers must always be treated firmly but fairly. When young Wendt’s turn came, however, she merely cocked her right eyebrow, looked into his eyes for two or three seconds, and said: ‘Take good care of yourself.’

  The train pulled out punctually on the last stroke of eight by the clock on the Roman Catholic church. The askari band under the direction of Oberleutnant Goring struck up a farewell rendering of Hail to Thee in Victor’s Crown, Ada Schnee waved and revealed a last glimpse of her incomparably white teeth while the Governor stood beside her, wearily waving until the train disappeared into the coconut plantation that lay beyond the railway workshops and the power station.

  It was swelteringly hot inside the carriage, but the mosquito netting over the windows filtered the glaring sunlight into a pleasant penumbra. On the left-hand or shadier side of the carriage, Anton Ruter sank back against one of upholstered seats - they could be converted at night into comfortable beds - and focused his opium-weary gaze on the palm trees gliding past. Before long, as Governor Schnee had predicted, the palms gave way to an almost homely-looking broad-leafed forest which German colonists had christened the Sachsenwald. Then the train turned inland and climbed into the Pugu Hills not far from the coast. A black steward in a white uniform entered and silently placed glasses and carafes of water on the little tables beside Ruter, Wendt and Tellmann, all of whom were now seated on the shadier side of the carriage. The three men thanked him and poured themselves some water. The better to rehydrate their shrunken brain cells, they drained glass after glass until the carafes were empty, then tipped back their seats and proceeded to catch up on the sleep they’d missed because of the Kaiser’s birthday.

  Anton Riiter’s headache was gone when he awoke. The train had left the coastal hills behind and was traversing the endless expanse of the Mkata steppe. Ruter admired the graceful curves the track described as it crossed the hilly terrain. He put the radii of the bends at a minimum of

  two hundred metres and the trains average speed at a respectable twentyfive kilometres an hour. He also noted that the track had been well ballasted throughout, and that there was an adequate number of points, water towers and sidings. Whenever they crossed a trestle bridge a hundred or two hundred metres above a swamp or river, he calculated the cost of the materials and the size of the workforce required to construct it. And, because he himself was an experienced worker, he could sense in his own arms and legs what an inhumanly strenuous job it must have been to build this railway. When the track cut through a hill he estimated how many thousand labourers must have toiled there with pick and shovel and for how many months. The very thought caused his fingers, shoulders and back to ache. He gloomily surmised that, in this climate and devoid of medical attention, the men must have died like flies from exhaustion, cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness and blackwater fever - that the fields around their depopulated villages must have lain fallow and the old men, women and children left at home have starved to death. He could hear the crack of whips and the rattle of chains, the words of command in German and the groans of men being flogged, the grunting of oxen and the creaking of wooden wagon wheels on stony ground, the dull thud of sledgehammers and the rasping hiss of shovels, the thunderous roar of exploding dynamite and the wailing of widows. All these sounds mingled with the pounding of the locomotive and the two-four rhythm of the wheels speeding along the track as Riiter relapsed into a gratifyingly innocent sleep.

  The train entered a sparse tract of umbrella acacias just as the deliquescent red sun went down over the plain. Riiter slept on. Wendt, sitting back against his upholstered seat, swigged at a bottle of Dar-es-Salaam wheat beer the steward had brought him. Rudolf Tellmann was standing on the platform outside, sniffing the breeze and gazing out across the endless expanse of undulating savannah from which jutted isolated, sharply defined clumps of elephant grass taller than a man. Here and there the chalk-white bones of dead animals lay mouldering on the luminous, brick-red soil. Sometimes a massive baobab tree would loom above the plain, or an immensely tall, incredibly slender palmyra palm, or an occasional squat sycamore.

  Tellmann had seen a great many animals that day. The first thing he intended to do when he got to Lake Tanganyika was to write his wife a long letter about them. He had also seen a great many people, but he wouldn’t write about them for the time being. Up to date he had sighted sixty-one giraffes and more zebras than there were seagulls in Papenburg. He had seen hartebeest and ostriches, brown hyenas and Swalla antelopes, and he had been able to identify them all with great accuracy thanks to Petermann’s Afrikanisches Tierlexikon, which his wife had given him as a leaving present. He had seen Grants gazelles and crowned cranes, duikers and warthogs and countless vultures - even five marabous and an African fish eagle, and then at last, just before sunset, a first herd of elephants. But the most colourful sight of the day had been a flock of pink flamingos many hundreds strong. He would also be sure to tell his wife about the millions of fireflies that had lit up the plain since nightfall, and, possibly, about the baboons which, with glinting eyes and in weirdly human postures, threw stones at the passing train and grimaced in a way that left you uncertain whether they were amused or infuriated. He would describe all of these things to his wife to the best of his ability, to give her pleasure and prevent her from fretting about him. Other things he would pass over in silence, at least for the present. The naked women in chains, the coachmans use of the whip, the five gibbets - no, he would spare her those. Nor would he write about the Governor and his golden helmet, or the chadless Governors wife, or the pear brandy. He might tell her about them later, when he was sitting at the kitchen table back home, but he would probably keep mum about them even then. Two months gone, another ten to go. A year passed quickly, especially at his age. He would do his job and then go home; nothing else concerned him. He had to ensure that 160,000 rivets were prop
erly in place so that the ship was watertight and seaworthy. Once that was done he would politely take his leave, return home and draw the money due to him. People could use the Gotzen to transport their goods, sail the lake and earn her keep. The rest was none of his business or responsibility. He wanted no part of it.

  At bedtime the steward reappeared. He took the three hitherto unused

  seats on the right-hand side of the carriage apart, spread white sheets over them and carefully smoothed them out, plumped up the pillows and deposited a red hibiscus blossom on each. Then he suspended mosquito nets from the hooks provided and arranged them around the beds, making sure that the weights sewn into them were resting neatly on the floor. Each of the three window tables was allotted a bottle of water and a glass, a banana and a small tin of biscuits.

  Hermann Wendt stared out of the window rather than watch the steward at his work. He saw sparks spew from the locomotives funnel and go whirling off into the darkness as if keeping an assignation with the fireflies. From time to time, when the train halted to take on water or firewood, the air was filled with the endless, monotonous whine of cicadas. When they stopped abruptly, as though in response to some unspoken command, he could sometimes hear the sound of distant drums or, on one occasion, a muffled, spine-chilling roar that might have been made by a lion. Reflected in the window Wendt could see the steward pad softly to and fro, climb over sleeping Riiters outstretched legs and silently busy himself with bottles and glasses. The reflection of his swarthy face could not be seen against the darkness outside, nor could his hands and trousers, so his white tunic and cap seemed to float through the air in ghostly isolation. At length the tunic and cap approached and came to a halt. When Wendt turned to look, the steward enquired - in a heart-warming Swabian accent - whether ‘master’ would care for another bottle of beer.